By contributor August Graham, PA
A senior Reform UK politician claimed that the party “won a walloping majority on May 1, becoming the largest party with 23 seats” on Warwickshire County Council.
Evaluation
Reform won around four in 10 of the seats on the council, gaining just over 30% of the total vote – making it the biggest party by both measures, however it did not win a majority in either sense.
The facts
The council does not provide a single public webpage displaying the vote tallies of all the wards in the last local election. The PA news agency compiled the results from all the different wards into a spreadsheet.
Analysis of that data shows that there were a total of 160,300 votes cast in the election, of which somewhat over 49,000 were cast for Reform candidates. That is around 30.7% of the vote.
While it fell short of exceeding 50% of the vote to obtain a majority, the result makes Reform the largest party by vote share, ahead of the Conservatives on 24.9%.
The analysis also shows that Reform won 23 out of the 57 council seats. That is around 40% of the total seats on the council.
