It’s Conservative carnage in Sutton, and Labour losses in Wandsworth and Westminster, while the Tories cling on against Reform in Bexley. Meanwhile, Croydon’s count is just getting under way at the Fairfield Halls
Welcome to Inside Croydon’s unmatched coverage of the 2026 local election count in Croydon, and across south London.
We have reporters at the count at the Fairfield Halls today, for Croydon’s second mayoral election, which will determine our cash-strapped borough’s direction for the next four years, at least.
Have Croydon residents opted to stick with Conservative Jason Perry? Has the social media campaign run by Rowenna Davis been enough for Labour to take back control of the Town Hall? Has Reform Ltd’s Ben Flook made in-roads into the traditional duopoly?
All will become clear with the mayoral election declaration expected sometime later this afternoon, with the votes for Croydon’s 70 councillors across 28 wards delayed until tomorrow, Saturday, May 9, when we’ll be back and do this all over again….
Bookmark this page and keep returning and refreshing the page for our live coverage, with updates on events nationally throughout the night.
Each new post will be timestamped, with the most recent postings being right here at the top of the page.
We welcome your election-day pictures and news, your comments and your observations, which you can send to us (confidentially if you prefer) by email at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
Our reporting team includes Ken Towl and Gabriel MacArthur at the Fairfield Halls, plus Dave Burton and links to Darryl Chamberlain’s mighty GreenwichWire.
Midday: Reform candidate ‘looked like he was going to deck me’
There’s no pleasing some people.
Scott Holman, the Reform Ltd grifter who was on ballot papers in New Addington and in Essex at the same time yesterday, apparently doesn’t like being in the public eye. Which seems a little odd for someone who wants to be elected. Twice.
Inside Croydon’s officially accredited reporter Ken Towl was doing his job at the Fairfield Halls, which includes gathering images of people, and candidates, attending the count. He took a photograph of Holman. Who is a candidate.
Holman then approached Towl (who is 6ft 2in tall) and “demanded that I delete the photograph”.
Towl said: “He stood in front of me like he was going to deck me.
“Staff whisked me away because it looked like it was about to get violent.”
So here’s a picture of Scott Holman.
Holman is able to try to represent two different areas, in different parts of the country, because he has residential qualifications in Croydon – 4 Redstart Close, CR0 0EU – and a business registered in Essex.
Holman will have to wait until tomorrow – or maybe even Sunday – to discover if he is elected as a Croydon councillor for New Addington South. His fate in Essex is not determined yet, either, although his party has won control of the formerly Tory-run county council.
Reform has won 40 seats, securing it a majority. Holman’s Colchester Abbey ward is among 23 seats to be determined (as at midday).
At the Fairfield Halls, the votes in Croydon’s mayoral election might start to be counted at 12.30pm.
11.45am: Lunch break
Lunchtime at the Fairfield Halls: nearly 14 hours since the polls closed, and Croydon’s election counters have stopped for lunch, with not a single vote counted
That’s it. Down tools. Or council-issued pocket calculators. Time for lunch.
They have not yet finished verifying the ballots. Not a vote has been counted.
Council staff will return to work at 12.30pm, the Fairfield Halls is told.
“Quite the hiatus,” reports Ken Towl.
11.40am: Was there an improved turnout this time round?
In the absence of any official figures from Croydon yet, Inside Croydon’s team of citizen journalists were checking the borough’s polling stations yesterday to try to get a sense of whether the public were turning out to vote in greater numbers than in 2022.
In nearby boroughs where the counts were conducted overnight, Sutton had a respectable 46.8% turnout. In Merton, it was 45.5%. In Reform target borough Bexley, it was 45.7%.
Our entirely unscientific method was to visit polling stations and read the numbers posted on a register sheet posted by the entrance by council staff, just to gauge voter engagement.
There was a clear up-tick in voters checking in after work, after 6pm.
One council official told iC that turnout at his polling station in the leafy south of the borough was much higher than expected, and more than for the General Election in 2024. The expectation was, with a high number of postal ballots already cast, turnout could be more than 50% in that one area.
Big turnouts in the south of the borough is good news for the Tories, and probably Reform, though not such good news for Labour’s Rowenna Davis, whose party has struggled to get its supporters, mostly in the north of the borough, to actually cast their votes.
Our information from other polling stations might not have indicated 50%+ turnouts, which are unusual for local elections, but they seemed healthy enough. If, as a rule of thumb, each polling station is assigned 2,000 voters, then these figures could be troubling for Labour:
- 821 at Greenvale School, in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale with an hour before the polls closed.
- 659 at Shirley Hall (Shirley North) 9pm
- 590 at Shirley Methodist Church (Shirley North) 8pm
- 445 Brigstock Road (West Thornton) 8pm
- 320 Poplar Walk 8pm
- 404 Broad Green 7pm
- 363 Broad Green (different polling station) 8pm
- 468 Homefield Road (Old Coulsdon) 6pm
- 537 Bramley Hill (Waddon) 7pm (94 people between 6 and 7pm)
- 345 St Andrew’s (Fairfield) 7pm
11am: The latest national update
So this was the latest number of council seats won and lost just before 11am, according to the BBC, with 46 of 136 councils across England having declared.
Latest suggestions are that Croydon’s mayoral result won’t be declared until “this evening”.
10.15am: The wait continues
Fenced off: the Fairfield Halls security for the election count has been placed in the hands of Conways, who normally are in charge of fixing the borough’s pot holes
At the Fairfield Halls, where verification of the ballot papers was supposed to begin at 8am, counting actual votes has yet to happen.
It’s mayoral voting being counted today. We will have to wait until tomorrow for the ward-by-ward results.
But the elected Mayor is really all that matters in Croydon now – although someone needs to tell Professor Tony Travers that, after he advised BBC London that Croydon has been under No Overall Control for the last four years.
Or maybe that is an accurate description of Jason Perry’s time in office as Mayor.
The Croydon count: it has been more than 20 years since Croydon used its council-owned arts centre – the obvious choice for a count venue – as its venue for the count. It all looks like a strange avant-garde orchestra
Ken Towl has caught up with Nicholas Burman-Vince, the Greens’ campaign manager who seems “very buoyant”, and says he expects his party will “make a few gains”.
Labour are being “tight-lipped”.
Veteran Conservative councillor Margaret Bird (Old Coulsdon) arrives for the mayoral vote count and says that she is confident she will hold her seat despite a challenge from the LibDems. “They were so rude to people,” says Councillor Bird, who once opposed 20mph speed limits in Croydon because she thought she would not be able to drive up Coulsdon’s steep hills so slowly…
Labour MP Sarah Jones and Stuart King, leader of Labour’s Town Hall group, have arrived for the mayoral count, too. “Too early to say,” they say, in a tight-lipped sort of way.
“It does all feel very unpredictable,” Ken Towl reports.
10am: The latest state of the nation
9.45am: John Curtice has spoken
Political guru John Curtice, the man who taught Walter Cronxite all he knows, has delivered his interim verdict.
Now what could that mean if applied in Croydon?
9am: Farage’s grifters busted in Bexley
So here’s a turn-up.
The narrative for months has been that Farage’s grifters, tax-dodgers and racists in Reform Ltd were going to “doughnut” London, taking some key outer London boroughs, such as Havering, Bexley and Bromley.
Bexley, being next door to Kent, where Reform won control of the county council in 2025 – with predictably chaotic results – was reckoned to become the first London borough under Farage control.
Well, that didn’t happen.
The Conservatives clung on to control in Bexley, where Reform’s challenge somewhat fizzled out. Hmmm.
Indeed, in decidedly conservative (small “c”) Bexley, Labour has as many council seats as the Faragists.
Cons 26 (-4)
Lab 7 (-3)
Reform 7 (+7)
9am: Memories
For reference, this was London’s political map after the 2022 local elections
8.50am: Happy 100th birthday Sir David Attenborough
Centenary: will David Attenborough discover intelligent life in Croydon Town Hall?
So while we wait for the count in Croydon to get underway – a mere 11 hours after the polling stations closed – let us try to be positive.
Happy birthday Sir David, the man who invented Life On Earth.
But could even Attenborough find intelligent life in Croydon Town Hall?
Certainly, we all know very well what he would make of the Faragists’ pro-motoring, pro-oil policies that have done so much damage to our planet.
8.30am: Carnage for Tories in Sutton
Here’s a sentence we never thought we would write: Labour has more council seats in Sutton than the Conservatives.
Labour has one council seat, after the Tories were wiped out in yesterday’s elections.
Barry “Basher” Lewis’s Liberal Democrats retain control of Sutton Council after winning 51 of the borough’s 55 council seats, up by 22.
LibDem 51
Reform 2
Lab 1
Ind 1
The Tory demise was largely at the hands of Reform Ltd, who took enough votes off the Conservatives to hand many wards to the LibDems.
Labour’s Dave Tchil in Hackbridge and Nick Mattey, the independent councillor in Beddington, both retained their seats.
In Beddington, Mattey’s independent colleague, Tim Foster, lost his seat by just 12 votes.
Janey Gould and Alison Long became Reform Ltd’s first Sutton councillors, winning two of the three seats in St Helier West in what was otherwise an orangewash of the borough.
- Click here for our full report on the Sutton result, and how BBC London called the result all wrong…
Orangewash: Reform took enough votes off the Conservatives to give the LibDems absolute control of Sutton Council, and access to all the lucrative allowances attached to committee roles
8.05am: Fisher’s early take
Inside Croydon’s columnist and TV and radio politics pundit Andrew Fisher has made this assessment from the results in so far, with the Reform tidal wave expected in places like Bexley not quite as dominant as some predicted:
“Early indications in London councils – Westminster, Wandsworth, Bexley – appear to show the Labour/Tory duopoly holding up,” Fisher notes.
“And it is in terms of seats won, but look at share of the vote and the picture is much more mixed.
“No breakthrough yet (bigger Green targets to come), but votes splintering.”
8am Overnight results
Here’s the first result from across south London that’s in:
Crystal Palace 2 Shakhtar Donetsk 1
Euro delight: Palace players, exhausted and relieved, must now prepare for the club’s first European final in three weeks’ time
Palace win 5-2 on aggregate and are in the UEFA Conference League final in Leipzig on May 27, where they will play Rayo Vallecano in what will be Oliver Glasner’s final game as Palace manager.
Meanwhile, here’s the BBC’s chart of council seats won and lost across the country in declared results so far at 7,45am.
8am… Meanwhile in Merton
First signs: the result in Merton offered slim hopes for Labour
Might there be some hope to be taken for Labour in Croydon from the results from neighbouring Merton?
We had been told that this was the Liberal Democrats’ No1 target council in London, yet on a night of electoral carnage for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party elsewhere, they retained control with an increased majority.
The number of council seats determines control of Merton won:
Lab 32
LibDems 19
Cons 4
Residents 2
8am Westminster and Wandsworth losses
Labour lost control of two London councils it won from the Tories in 2022, Westminster and Wandsworth.
The Conservatives are back in charge in Westminster, while Wandsworth becomes NOC – no overall control – with an independent councillor holding the balance of power.
The Tories had held Wandsworth for 44 years until 2022. Labour lost seven seats, leaving it with 28, while the Conservatives gained seven to reach 29.
In Richmond, the LibDems swept the board, winning all 54 seats.
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2026, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for an EIGHTH time in nine years, in Private Eye magazine’s annual round-up of civic cock-ups
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Just a quick “thank you” for this and I hope you are well suppled with coffee and snacks to sustain you over the next couple of days!
Looking foreword to your updates.
I’d like to endorse all this. Thanks IC
Posting your live election coverage message at 8am means you have gone too soon. The counting staff from the 9am to 5pm (if you’re lucky) petty bureaucrats at Croydon Council aren’t starting the count until 9am. Hopefully, they will get the mayoral election counted by lunchtime, because after an hour having a liquid lunch in the Spreadeagle, they may not be much good in the afternoon ?!
If they can get the mayoral count done by lunchtime today, they may be persuaded not to go to the pub for lunch, so that they can get the council election done in the afternoon and avoid the need to come in at all on Saturday ?!
Jim it will take the morning for the verification process to be completed.
The council has already said the Mayoral count won’t be until this afternoon and the councillors count tomorrow (starting at 09.00)
And they were due to start at 8.00
Why does ti take so long for Croydon Council to count a few votes, Chris? Surely they have done enough election counts by now to get it to a simple operation, not passing round the “How to do your first election count” books and getting all staff to read it before they begin ?!
I basically answered this the other day when yiu asked a similar question but I’ll still respond.
In 2022 there were just shy of 100,000 ballot papers for Mayor and that takes time to sort into individual candidates and then sort into bundles and count.
Similar total number of papers for councillors but split over 20 odd wards most with 2 or 3 councillors to be elected with multiple candidates so the papers need careful sorting because people don’t always vote for all the candidates for the same party and spread them about.
Westminster’s beleaguered staff will be relieved if this result brings an end to ‘white privilige’ tests and the departure of their bonkers South African CEO
Don’t be silly. Political change of control hardly ever results in the departure of the people who really run our councils, the civic bureaucrats
Did you vote Reform Chris?
Rowenna might single handedly save the failing Labour Party by the look of things lol because as you can see Reform have mopped everything up nationwide. As for the general election, the only threat to Reform is Restore by stealing their right wing voters. Labour and Conservatives only have their own selves to blame for their lies , back trackings and mis management of the country.