It’s NOC – but not as we know it

One consequence of the recent local elections was that an additional 23 councils went into No Overall Control. That’s far from unusual. In fact, increasingly it’s the norm. Across England, Scotland and Wales, a little over half of all councils are now in No Overall Control. 

Nor is it new – much of the discussion before the election was about Labour’s London strongholds, but many of those Boroughs were in no overall control in the first decade of this century. That might be a lifetime in terms of British politics, but it’s not actually that long ago. Only a tiny number of councils (Haringey, for example) have never had experience of NOC.

Of course, not all NOC councils are created equal. In some, one party is by far the largest, in others there are stable coalitions, often including “rainbow coalitions” with multiple parties, others are more volatile, especially where they have elections in thirds. Local government officers across the country are used to dealing with changes in administration and are used to managing No Overall Control. For many years, one of our most popular pieces of content at LGIU has been “What does No Overall Control mean?”

So far so familiar. But I think that there are some new features emerging in the current crop of NOC councils. They’re NOC, but not as we know it.

Firstly, we see more and more councils with a larger number of parties in the mix. This is a reflection of the national picture. When we have five parties polling near enough to 20%, our first-past-the-post system becomes much more volatile. We have more parties winning, we have narrower margins of victory and we have victories on much lower vote share. 

This can lead to lots of parties from very different parts of the political spectrum, all with broadly similar numbers of seats. Take Birmingham for example, of 101 total councillors, following these elections, the largest single political group – Reform – only has 23 councillors. There are five parties with over ten seats, then 13 independents and a member of the Worker’s Party. This sort of pattern is becoming more common and it can make it harder to find workable coalitions.

Another feature of recent elections is the sheer number of new councillors that are elected. Reform gained 1452 seats, the Greens 441 seats. Some of these councillors will have served before on other councils but the vast majority will not. We’re still crunching the numbers but it looks likely that these elections have seen a historically large turnover of councillors. Our preliminary findings, using the excellent resources at Democracy Club, suggest that there are around 2750 new councillors, and 2300 who have been councillors at least once before. That’s a lot of people who aren’t institutionalised into how councils operate. 

Add to this that the big winners in these elections Reform and the Greens are new (or recently expanded) parties. They have looser approaches to manifestos and whipping than the traditional parties and their new councillors have limited shared history, indeed in some cases they barely know each other. After all, Reform did not exist when these elections were last contested.

None of this is a bad thing. It’s good to have fresh faces and new thinking in local government. New councillors bring important energy and perspectives. But it does mean that many of the tools that officers have previously used to navigate NOC – existing relationships, pre-engagement, knowledge of the manifesto and working through group leaders – are all less useful than they used to be.

Instead, officers will have to use a new framework – one which we have described as being based around rigour, resilience and relationships – to make the most of this changing landscape.

It’s the new NOC. It’s not better; it’s not worse. But it is different.