Chorley Council asks government to cancel local elections in 2026

Chorley Council is to ask the government to cancel the local elections due to take place in the borough next year.

The Labour-run authority will request the plug is pulled on the poll scheduled for May 2026, after concluding it would risk destabilising a forthcoming revamp of local government across Lancashire.

That redesign will see Chorley Council – and the 14 other main local authorities across the county – scrapped altogether in April 2028.  It is part of a government-ordered restructure under which just a handful of new, larger councils will be created to cover the whole of Lancashire.

Chorley leader Alistair Bradley told a meeting of the authority that the timing of the elections “would throw a huge spanner” into an already complex process – because they would come just weeks before the government is set to decide the number and shape of the authorities to replace those set to be axed.

Ministers will later this month receive five proposals from the existing councils about their various visions for what should follow them – including one from Chorley that would see the district merge with South Ribble and West Lancashire to form a new council area.

The government is expected to whittle down a shortlist early in the new year, which will then be subject to a public consultation, ahead of selecting its preferred option next summer.

Cllr Bradley said that while it was not mathematically possible for Chorley Council to change political hands at what would be the authority’s last ever elections next May – because of the strength of Labour’s majority –  that was not the case in the other six authorities also due to hold polls, meaning the way could be paved for upheaval in the midst of the overhaul.

“If you change the entire cast list a month before you are going to be having a conversation with the government, that just doesn’t make any kind of sense – because the people coming in would quite rightly say, [that they] did not agree to any of this.

“There are certain elements within Lancashire who don’t want change and do not want any kind of progression on local government.  They tend to be small interest groups…who are doing it for their own political ends – and I include the [Reform UK] county council administration [in that],” Cllr Bradley said.

While opposed in principle to scrapping the current ‘two-tier’ council system in Lancashire, the Reform group in control at County Hall have put together a proposal for just two new councils – for North and South Lancashire – if the change does go ahead.

Cllr Bradley added that it had taken “an inordinate amount of time” for Lancashire to get to the point of having a conversation with the government about reorganisation – a subject which has been visited by leaders at several points over the past decade, long before it became a ministerial demand.

However. members of the Conservative opposition group said that while they backed the proposal for a new Chorley/South Ribble/West Lancashire authority – which was also formally agreed at the meeting – they had reservations about scrapping the local elections. A third of Chorley’s 14 seats are due to be contested – one in each ward – and if the poll does not go ahead, it would mean councillors elected in 2022 having their four-year terms extended by two years to 2028.

Cllr Craige Southern said:  “The thing that we always get thrown at us on the doorstep is: ‘We don’t get a vote in Chorley’,” alluding to the fact that, at general elections, the Chorley constituency is currently uncontested by the main parties as a result of a convention for them not to stand in the seat held by the Speaker of the House of Commons.

“I am just a little bit concerned [at] the fact that we’ll be seen to be reticent to give the people a say.  My only fear is that [the reorganisation process] gets kicked down the road because something else comes up…and then we are saying there [are] going to be no elections…and people think that they’re going to be robbed of a vote,” Cllr Southern added.

The Tory group requested that the councillors’ combined vote on the issue of the elections being cancelled and the creation of a new authority to replace Chorley be decoupled – so that it was possible to oppose the former and support the latter.

However, Cllr Bradley said he could not back that move, because the two issues were “intrinsically linked”.

He also stressed that should there be any delay to the shake-up, then Chorley Council was committed – as part of the resolution on the table – to the elections then going ahead “as quickly as possible”.

Blackburn with Darwen and Hyndburn councils have made their own election cancellation requests to the government and Preston City Council will consider whether to do so next week, with its leader saying he is “minded” to support that.

Irrespective of whether the government agrees to cancel Lancashire’s scheduled district polls in May 2026, elections to ‘shadow’ versions of the new authorities will be held in May 2027 as part of a transition period.

The Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government has previously told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the “starting point is for all elections to go ahead unless there is strong justification otherwise”. However, the current and previous administrations have  cancelled local elections in other parts of the country when reorganisation has been taking place.