Upcoming City Council elections in Cambridge will go ahead in May despite local government reorganisation in Cambridgeshire.

The decision was taken last Tuesday (07/01) by a group of Labour councillors, whose party currently controls the City Council with a majority of seats.

This comes after the government permitted 63 council areas undergoing reorganisation into unitary authorities, including Cambridge, to choose to delay their elections. Elections for new mayors in four parts of England are already being postponed.

The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and Reform UK have all referred to this move as an “affront to democracy,” with Conservative shadow local government minister Paul Holmes claiming, on Thursday 18 December, that the decision was taken because the Labour Party were worried about seat losses in local elections. The government has denied this, and claimed that the delays are a response to administrative difficulties surrounding local government reorganisation.

While it was feared that Cambridge might choose to delay its elections, the leader of Cambridge City Council, Cameron Holloway, said: “We want to go ahead with elections as planned in May. […] We feel that we have the capacity to go ahead with elections this year while also making a success of local government reorganisation.”

Responding to the news, the leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition on Cambridge City Council, Tim Bick, said: “As the winners of last year’s local elections in Cambridge, we’re delighted that city people won’t be denied their verdict on another year of Labour in power. […] We are confident of further Lib Dem gains as Labour continues to disappoint, looking increasingly tired and directionless at both at [sic] the Guildhall and Westminster.”

The Cambridge University Liberal Society also welcomed the decision, while criticising the central government’s moves to delay elections elsewhere. It said: “This reflects a wider pattern of a labour party increasingly unwilling to face the electorate. Keir Starmer appears to be running scared of voters, of his own backbenchers, and of actually running the country.”

Oscar Lingwood, the chairman of the Cambridge University Conservative Association, said that “engagement in local democracy is a rewarding and important experience, and it’s good that many students will be able to engage in the process this year, many for the first time”.

He continued: “It is obviously in our interests as voters to push local governments to allow us to vote. This makes pressuring local governments to allow elections important, especially with councils controlled by parties, such as Labour, that may have an interest to delay elections due to their deserved collapsing popularity with the public.”

The Green Party spokesperson for Democracy and Citizen Engagement said that he was “extremely pleased to hear that local elections will be going ahead this May,” but that “residents’ right to have a say in how their council tax is being spent should never have been up for debate in the first place”.

The Greens’ Council Group Leader, Naomi Bennet, added that she was “deeply unenthusiastic about Local Government Reorganisation, and extremely worried about the impact on council finances and services”.

Local Government Reorganisation in Cambridge would see its current two-tier council, where some services are provided by the County Council and others by the City Council, replaced by a single unitary body covering Cambridge, East Cambridgeshire, and South Cambridgeshire. Estimates suggest that the reforms will cost nearly £60 million.