Labour minority administration confirmed for Preston City Council

Preston City Council will be run by a minority Labour administration after the authority’s leader was re-elected to his post.

Matthew Brown retained the top job after a meeting on Thursday which saw him fend off a challenge for the role from Liberal Democrat opposition group leader John Potter.

Labour lost overall control of the authority – for the first time in 15 years – following the local elections earlier this month.  The result left the party still as the largest at the town hall, but minus its familiar majority – with only 21 out of the total 48 seats.

It means the group will always now need the backing or abstention of four non-Labour councillors to be sure of being able to pursue its policies – as it did to re-elect Cllr Brown.

In that leadership vote, the veteran politician – who has been at the helm of the city council for the past eight years – easily secured enough explicit and tacit support.  He was backed by the authority’s two newly-elected Green Party councillors and its three independent members, two of whom used to sit on the Labour benches. The other – Cllr Freddie Bailey – is currently suspended from the party, but is hoping to return pending the outcome of an investigation into a matter which has not been made public.

Meanwhile, the enlarged Reform UK and shrunken Conservative groups both abstained, making Cllr Brown’s victory a comfortable one – with 25 votes in favour, the council’s 14 Liberal Democrat members against and eight abstentions.  He also won support for his all-Labour cabinet.

Following the vote, Cllr Brown said:  “Rumours of my political death have been greatly exaggerated – so here I am again.”

He also declared that there had been “absolutely no deals with anyone here” – prompting jeers and laughter from the Liberal Democrat contingent.  That wry mirth came in the wake of earlier votes for the chairs of the authority’s two scrutiny committees.

Those contests saw Green Party councillor Veronica Balmer take control of the audit committee and former Conservative group leader – and last year’s mayor – Sue Whittam put in charge of the overview and scrutiny management committee, a post previously held by Cllr Potter and for which he had again put himself forward.

Cllr Brown said the scrutiny function at the city council had “traditionally always gone to opposition politicians, [but] we just think there’s better opposition politicians to do it”.

In nominating him as leader for the next municipal year, the authority’s new deputy leader, Cllr Valerie Wise – who was also one of Cllr Brown’s distant predecessors, having had the top job herself back in the mid-1990s – said Labour “still has lots of ideas and we want…the opportunity to continue what we’ve started”.

She claimed the city was seeing the benefits of the so-called ‘Preston Model’ of community wealth building – policies intended to make the local economy work for city residents.

“While national policy remains decisive, local choices on housing, work, ownership, land, procurement and public leadership still matter,” Cllr Wise said.

However, making his pitch to take charge of the authority, Cllr Potter said that while there had been no dissent in the chamber over some of the ruling Labour group’s biggest schemes in recent years – including the Animate cinema and leisure development and upgrades to the city’s parks – there was disquiet over its “pet projects”, such as a £1m investment in the creation of a new regional bank.

Addressing all the other opposition politicians, he quizzed them as to whether they wanted “the status quo or a change to something better”.

“The Lib Dems.. have been the success party [at local] elections over the last few years – [and] we have earned the right to be the challenge to Matthew today,” Cllr Potter said.

He also told his fellow opposition groups that if they abstained, they were “basically saying you are happy with the status quo”.

The other opposition parties did not speak on the leadership vote during the meeting, but talked to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) on the subject in the days beforehand,

Reform UK group leader Stephen Thompson – who went from being the sole representative of his party on the existing city authority to part of a five-strong entity after the elections – said he had no problem abstaining on the leadership vote, because “Labour have the most seats”.

He added that while Reform had plenty of Labour policies “to go at” from their newly-strengthened position as the third-largest group, he believed that the Liberal Democrats were the most “anti-Reform” party in Preston – making it difficult to work with them.

Conservative group leader Harry Landless, whose party withered to just three seats after the polls – having been the main opposition until just two years ago – said it would be “pointless” voting against Cllr Brown’s re-election.

“We’ve got to get on with it – we’ve got a very tricky couple of years ahead [before the council’s abolition], so a bit of stability will help,” said Cllr Landless.

However, he stressed his group was still “very far apart” from Labour and would be seizing the opportunity presented by a no overall control scenario to “hold them to account much more than we were able to in the past”.

The Green Party – which secured a presence on the city council for the first time at the elections – told the LDRS that its councillors will not be subject to a party whipping system, leaving them free to determine their own individual positions on any subject – including their decision to support the Labour leader to stay in power.

Preston Green Party chair Avery Greatorex added:  “We agree more with the Preston Labour platform than we do [that of] the Lib Dems when it comes to the economy and community wealth building.

“[However, on] social issues, we definitely lean more to the Lib Dems – and that’s why we’re not entering any formal agreement [with Labour], because we can see ourselves working with either side.”

Under a government-ordered shake-up Preston City Council is set to be abolished in April 2028 and replaced with a yet-to-be-determined, standalone authority covering a much broader area.  Unless there is a change of timetable or policy at a national level, this month’s elections will have been the last to the city council in its current form – meaning a Labour-led authority in no overall control is set to be the story of the final two years of the council’s existence.

‘We’ve got much more we want to do’ says Labour, as Lib Dems warn against ‘daft’ policies

Speaking to the LDRS shortly after his re-election, Cllr Brown insisted that Preston Labour had the answer to the city’s problems – notwithstanding the verdict of voters at the ballot box on 7th May, when the party lost six of the 10 seats it was defending from the last comparable election in 2022.

“We do believe that there are too many inequalities in Preston [and] – as Andy Burnham said…that we have suffered from deindustrialisation, privatisation and a lot of policies that have really affected communities through austerity.

“So we’re trying to do something about it [by] trying to regenerate publicly, bring[ing] back council housing…establishing a banking alternative that’s owned by people, and promoting real living wage jobs and affordable homes for everyone.

“There’s so much we want to do…[including to] end austerity.  We’re going to invest tens of millions, including [in] cheaper bus travel for children and young people,” added Cllr Brown, who has sat on the city authority since 2002.

He said that while there had been no deals done with the Greens or the independents, Labour would align with what he described as “progressive forces”.

“They aren’t going to agree with us on everything, but they’re going to agree with us on most things,” the Labour leader predicted.

Meanwhile, Cllr Potter defended his attempt to wrest the leadership away from the party with the most seats – and condemned those who helped Labour remain in office.

“Seventy-nine percent of the electorate said no to Labour, so as the largest opposition party, [it] is our job to have an alternative.  But unfortunately, what we saw was Reform, Greens, independents and Tories either sitting on their hands or actively voting to keep Labour in power – which I’m sure their voters will be really disappointed in,” Cllr Potter said.

Reflecting on the limited shelf life of the city council, he added:  “Even though they’ve got a short period of time, [Labour] can do a lot of damage, they can do a lot of daft things – and what all those opposition parties…have given Labour is a chance to continue doing those daft things.

“We stood on a platform of stopping that and that’s what we’re going to try and do even if we haven’t quite got control today.”

Preston City Council cabinet

This is the largely unchanged cabinet line-up for 2026/27:

Council leader – Cllr Matthew Brown

Deputy leader and community wealth building – Cllr Valerie Wise (replacing Cllr Martyn Rawlinson who did not stand for deputy leadership again after five years in post)

Resources – Cllr Martyn Rawlinson

Planning and regulation – Cllr Amber Afzal

Parks and community safety – Cllr Connor Dwyer (replacing Cllr Freddie Bailey who is currently suspended from the Labour Party pending the outcome of an investigation)

Health and wellbeing and neighbourhood services – Cllr Zafar Coupland

Climate change – Cllr Suleman Sarwar

Culture and arts – Cllr Anna Hindle

Communities, social justice and night-time economy – Cllr Peter Kelly

Service transformation – Salim Desai