Exeter Observer’s view of the ON/OFF May election fiasco:
Secretary of State Steve Reed withdraws decision following legal advice in face of Reform UK High Court challenge, leaving city council leader Phil Bialyk facing electoral oblivion.
Monday 16 February 2026
Martin Redfern exeterobserver.org/
Exeter’s local elections are to go ahead as originally planned on Thursday 7 May after the government reversed their cancellation in the face of a High Court challenge brought by Reform UK.
Secretary of State Steve Reed has written to the leaders of the 30 affected councils – which were told their May elections would be cancelled three weeks ago – to tell them that he has instead “decided to withdraw his decision” following “recent legal advice”.
A High Court hearing had been due to take place on Thursday in response to a judicial review claim brought by Reform UK against Steve Reed’s decision. The government has now said it will pay Reform UK’s costs in bringing the claim.
Two-thirds of the affected local authorities – which Steve Reed had labelled “zombie councils” in an opinion piece for The Times just before cancelling their elections – are Labour-led.
Exeter City Council leader Phil Bialyk, who told last July’s city council meeting that he had no intention of asking to postpone democracy this year, then told January’s meeting that he would do so after all.
He subsequently sought to insist that the council would not be “suspending democracy” before green-lighting the elections cancellation the following day. He now claims that he welcomes the news the elections will go ahead.
The cancellation would have meant Labour retaining power in Exeter for two more years until the city council is dissolved in April 2028.
Eight Labour councillors, among them deputy leader Laura Wright, would have kept their seats in May instead of standing for re-election – and been paid £145,924 in allowances they would otherwise not have received had they lost their seats.
Phil Bialyk would also have carried on as council leader – a role in which he received more than £32,000 in allowances and expenses during 2024-25 – with the support of his local party.
Instead, now that the city council elections will take place as planned, Labour will have to defend these eight seats in May. As it currently has a majority of three, it has to win six or more of the thirteen seats which are up for election to stay in control of the council.
It looked very vulnerable in most of these seats before the elections were cancelled, after losing more than half of its support across Devon in the May 2025 county council elections and all the county hall seats it previously held in Exeter.
Its popularity had subsequently fallen further before it showed Exeter’s electors that it could not be trusted with democracy. Now it has to convince them that it can be trusted with their votes.
The Exeter Observer has written at length on the events and briefings leading up to the decision taken by the City Council to request cancellation of the May elections. (See above reference)
Here are extracts describing the briefing given to Councillors
….These “reasons” are followed by a table summarising “the costs and resources required to deliver a local election”.
This shows that while Exeter’s May 2026 elections might have cost around £265,000 to deliver, almost all the costs involved would have been for services provided not by council officers but by external venues, temporary staff, logistics contractors, printers and the postal service.
So what this section of the report shows is that running local elections actually limits the council’s in-house capacity – the criterion for cancellation specified by the minister and repeated by the council monitoring officer in the report – to the tune of half a dozen council employees, none of whom are senior directors, for a few weeks each year.
The list of anticipated reorganisation tasks that follows – apparently intended to exaggerate their extent – fails to mention either that their substantive progression depends on the government’s decision on what form Devon’s new unitaries will take, which is months away, or that the staff of all eleven existing Devon councils will bear the brunt of the work when it comes.
The aggrandising report instead reads as if Exeter City Council expects to deliver local government reorganisation across all of Devon – yet also admits that a meeting with MHCLG in which “expectations will be clarified” has not yet taken place.
It only touches on the adverse impact of cancelling the elections on local democracy once, when it says: “Postponing elections could result in residents feeling disenfranchised by not being able to vote”.
Rather than seeing this as a decisive reason not to cancel, the report instead considers it a “risk” which it says, incoherently, “should be mitigated by clear communication to residents outlining if that is the view to be expressed to government, the reasons for the postponement and identified savings to be repurposed [sic].”
The chief executive simply does not seem to grasp that Exeter’s electors won’t only be “feeling” disenfranchised when they cannot vote in May – they will actually be disenfranchised.
When the city council convened on Tuesday 13 January, no-one present could have been in any doubt about the meeting’s real purpose. Yet Labour council members had remarkably little to say about the report’s flimsy claims – although Ruth Williams said she found it “completely balanced and fair”…..
This is then followed by a detailed account of the meeting in a similar vein [an entertaining read – Owl]
East Devon Watch 