If there is one habit Westminster falls back into when the political weather turns, it is to draw a tighter circle around itself.

The instinct is understandable enough. When voters are angry and the council map looks hostile, the temptation is to take the difficult things back into Whitehall, run them through a competitive funding pot, hold an announcement, and call it delivery. I spent enough time at the receiving end of that habit, as a former council leader, to know it well. And I know it doesn't work.

This is the moment to resist it.

The 2026 local elections were not a realignment. They were a fragmentation. Reform UK won the most seats, but by a whisker over a quarter of the projected national vote share. The Greens had their best local election ever — winning Norwich, the Hackney mayoralty and the Lewisham mayoralty, and gaining dozens of seats in, Southwark, Sheffield, Cambridge and across inner London. The Liberal Democrats made steady progress. Labour lost more than 1,400 councillors but held councils in Manchester, Plymouth, Crawley, Camden, Hammersmith & Fulham, and Lincoln among others. The Conservatives lost ten councils but secured a significant scalp in Westminster.

The single biggest winner on the council control map, however, was No Overall Control, with the grey expanse spreading to 63 councils. More councils now returned no single party to power than did a Labour, Conservative, Reform, Lib Dem or Reform UK majority. 

Sir John Curtice has summed it up better than anyone else: Labour has lost more seats to Reform, but more of its votes to the Greens. This is a country whose voters are not moving from one bloc to another. They are moving away from the binary choice of two-party politics. The politics that follow that data has to be cross-party, place-based, patient and to build coalitions to deliver.

That is exactly the politics Whitehall finds hardest, but our town halls excel at.

I want to be careful here. There is genuine and welcome work going on across this government. The Warm Homes Plan, finally, puts £15 billion behind home energy efficiency. The Local Power Plan is the biggest public investment in community energy in British history. The English Devolution & Community Empowerment Act is on the statute book. We have welcomed and praised these wins in turn. But the muscle memory in the system runs the other way, it is so easy to snap back, and these results will test it.

We will be on the watch for four centralising reflexes. Each is gentle in isolation, ruinous in the aggregate.

The first is devolution-as-ceiling, not floor. The temptation to read the local election results as evidence that the elected mayors are the only "grown-up" tier, and to route everything else through them while quietly stripping competence from the lower-tier councils. The Devolution Act sets up strategic authorities; what it must not do is set up a smaller, neater map of "trusted" places that get all the money while everyone else gets a lottery.. No council is dispensable for delivering the government’s key missions.

The second is short-term, competitive funding pots dressed up as devolution. The Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme ended in June 2025 with no replacement. Schools and hospitals are still leaking energy. Councils still spend more on bid-writing than on installation. The government's own planning rhetoric is about "first ready, first served". Apply that logic to clean energy in homes and public buildings and we will not have to wait long to see results.

The third is Treasury control of capital wrapped in delivery language. Local Area Energy Plans cost a few hundred thousand pounds to do well, and unlock tens of millions in private investment per place, while driving down energy bills. The Welsh Government has rolled them out everywhere. England has done it in pockets. It is one of the best value, most strategic things any chancellor could do to underwrite a clean energy mission. It’s something we’ve been banging on about for years. And every six months it is talked about and not funded is six months of someone's bills not getting cheaper.

The fourth is planning centralisation. From homes to energy infrastructure, the temptation to fix slow planning by going around councils rather than through them. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is mostly the right idea. But "first ready, first served" only works if local plans are taken seriously. Substituting national consent for local plans is not a productivity gain. It is an argument that takes a decade to lose. The old adage here would be to talk up the importance of doing things with communities not to them.

As a final, critical point in the “well, you would say that wouldn’t you” bucket for a cross-party network: the councils that did most for clean power, warm homes and clean air over the last four years are not all in the same party. Oxfordshire, under a Lib Dem–Green coalition, reached the top of the county league tables. Westminster, under Labour, became the top-performing single-tier council in the UK for climate action. Conservative-led councils like Essex County Council delivered some of the biggest community energy schemes in the network. Reform-led councils have kept emissions reporting going, taken EV bus grants, and quietly carried on saving public money by upgrading buildings. UK100 has Reform members. We have Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Greens, Labour and independents in counties and in city centres. They don’t always agree on everything. But they do agree on the need to create thriving places powered by homegrown energy - with fresh air to breathe, warm homes to live in, and a healthy natural environment.

This, more than anything, is what makes me confident that we can navigate local fragmentation in the council chamber. It is real. But so is the consensus among the people who have to reduce bills, upgrade schools and hospitals, improve public health and care for the most vulnerable in our communities. The local consensus of delivery has always been broader than the national political mudslinging.

The patient, place-based, cross-party work that does not show up in the national headlines does deliver on the ground. UK100 is built for this politics, we won’t be running away from this moment, we’re looking to continue to increase the impact of the network and grow our local authority members led by parties of all stripes and none.