How out-dated voting system distorts Brent Council election results

 Brent Civic Centre

 

Guest post by The SupervoteProject. Most voting reform campaigns concentrate on Westminster.  The Supervote Project works on how the voting system distorts representation at the local borough level and had some interesting findings about Brent ahead of the May 2026 local election:   

 

The last time  Brent council elections were held in 2022:-

• ·  Labour took 86% of the seats with only 52.6% of the vote;
• ·  The Conservatives were under-represented, taking just 5 (8.8%) of the seats for 22.7% of the vote;
• ·  The LibDems had only 3 (5.2%) of the seats to show for their 13.7% of the vote;
• ·  The Greens had nothing at all to show for their 9.7% of the vote;
• ·  Nearly 7 out of 10 registered voters did not bother to vote at all.

Not much of a democracy is it?

...and it’s our dodgy voting system that is to blame!

To elect the Borough’s Councillors in 2022, residents were obliged to use an inefficient Victorian voting system known as First-past-the-post, which wasted many of the votes cast and produced a distorted result with the remainder. These are the party percentages in the Borough of Brent for 2022:- 

 

 

There is something very wrong with a voting system that has the ability to award over 8 out of 10 seats to a party that has won just over 5 out of 10 votes. While Labour won a majority of votes and so should rightly take a majority of the seats, those who voted for other parties should have fair representation as well. 

 

Moreover, drilling down to ward level reveals poor levels of representation. Brent has 22 wards each returning 2 or 3 councillors but, the way our outdated voting system works, 19 wards were monopolised by one party, no matter how people had voted. In 2 of these wards, the dominant party took all the seats on a minority of the vote, resulting in the ridiculous situation such as in Kenton Ward for example, where a minority of voters (48%) enjoyed 3 councillors of their political persuasion, while the majority of ward voters (52%) had none. 

 

And then there is the abysmal turnout, just 31%, with Wembley Park Ward taking the wooden spoon with just 21%. Evidently, nearly 7 out of 10 Brent voters felt so disconnected with the democratic process that they chose not to vote. It doesn’t bode well for the forthcoming Borough elections in 2026; declining public interest and participation in local elections spell disaster for our democracy unless something is done. 

 

The extent of the disparities between votes won and seats taken in English local government can be seen by visiting the 2024 edition of the “Awful A-Z of Local Election Disasters”,   accessible on the home page of www.supervote.org.uk, where it is estimated that, thanks to the First-past-the-post voting system, over 4 out of 10 councils have disparities between votes won and seats taken of over 20%. On the same page, a “Top 10” of the most undemocratic local election results in May 2025 shows that there was no Reform UK landslide as the media claimed, with that party taking a majority of seats, but with a minority of the vote in all cases. 

 

First-past-the-post is past it and continued use of this Victorian museum piece makes about as much sense as using Stephenson’s Rocket to haul trains on the HS2. The London Boroughs need to have their voting system brought up to date so that results reflect votes cast, transforming the Boroughs’ elections into a vibrant, diverse and inclusive event where there is everything for everyone everywhere to play for, whether they be voters, local party organisations or candidates. 

 

To achieve this, the Borough needs to conduct its elections using a system of proportional representation, a type of voting system which shares out seats in proportion to votes cast. So, if Labour were to poll 6 out of 10 votes, they would be awarded 6 out of 10 seats. Our current outdated Victorian voting system does not do this. 

 

The Supervote: the most powerful and democratic vote on Earth. 

 

The Single Transferable Vote (STV) is the British system of proportional representation. While Continental list systems of PR are designed simply to deliver proportionality of parties, STV allows voters to cast preferences for candidates in multi-member wards, which gives them more choice of candidates and an ability to vote according to what is important to them, whether it be according to party affiliation, independence of thought, gender, culture or position on an issue. Wasted votes are minimised because in the counting, the votes are distributed among the candidates according to the expressed preferences of each individual voter, allowing votes for a no-hoper or those surplus to a candidate’s requirements to be recycled. The way the votes are counted ensures that the corporate will of the voters in the ward is reflected in the result and that seats are awarded in proportion to votes cast. STV is the most powerful vote you can bequeath to an electorate and has justifiably been described as “the Supervote”. 

 

The Irish Republic has used STV since the 1920s. In the UK, Conservative and Labour Governments have supported STV’s use in Northern Ireland for local council, Assembly and European elections over a 50 year period. In 2007, STV was successfully introduced for local elections in Scotland, and the Welsh Senedd has passed legislation that allows local councils in Wales to use it if they so resolve. English Councils need to catch up. 

 

Introducing STV should be straightforward even though English local governance is currently a hotchpotch of single and multi-member representation. While STV operates best in 4-6 member wards, the system can still function at a reduced level of efficiency in 1,2 and 3 member situations. This would allow for the system to be introduced immediately for all local elections pending boundary reviews for each council by the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. It would also enable all local elections to be held in one hit on the same day every 4 years, thereby saving considerable amounts of money.A new dawn for UK democracy and an end to “King of the Castle” Politics. 

 

According to a YouGov poll last July, only 19% of respondents believed the British political system was working, while 74% believed the system to be wholly or partly broken. Maybe the problem is that all the adversarial party political punch-ups alienate most voters whose adult lives are spent trying to get along with family, neighbours and work colleagues, even those they don’t particularly like. Ordinary folk look askance at ”King of the Castle” politics, all the hate, all the posturing and the name-calling. Our politics seems to have degenerated into a round-the-clock combative sport rather than a means of considered decision-making and so we need to reform the way we go about the governance of our country. The introduction of STV should help by increasing voter participation, by breathing new life into local party politics and thereby strengthen our democracy at the grassroots. Hopefully this will in turn open the door to a new dawn for our representative democracy, leading to more consensual and less adversarial “King of the Castle” politics, with more input from people with different ideas and a better quality of decision-making as a result.