Following the local elections on Thursday (07/05), Labour now holds 17 seats overall on Cambridge City Council, while the Green Party hold 12 and the Liberal Democrats hold 11. The Conservatives and Your Party hold one seat each.

The results mean that no party has overall control of the council.

Before Thursday’s elections, Cambridge City Council had been run by Labour since 2014, having won 23 seats out of 42 at the 2024 elections.

This outcome represents a six seat loss for Labour, while the Green Party gained six seats. The Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, and Your Party retained the same number of seats as before the election.

Of the 15 seats contested, 13 wards elected one representative each, while Trumpington Ward elected two representatives, following the resignation of serving councillor Nadya Lokhmotova.

Cambridge City Council is responsible for services including maintaining green spaces, waste collection, and council housing.

Green candidates received 32.6% of the overall vote share, followed by Labour, with 25.3%. The Lib Dems received 24.1% of all votes, Reform received 9.2%, and the Conservatives 7.8%. Voter turnout was 46.2%.

This comes after Varsity reported that a survey conducted among Cambridge students in March highlighted a dramatic shift in voting intentions, with the Green Party surging to a dominant lead, while Labour support collapsed sharply.

Cameron Holloway, who studied German and Russian at Cambridge and has been the Labour leader of Cambridge City Council for the last year, lost his seat to Green Party candidate Kathryn Fisher.

Eleanor Toye Scott, who is a Cambridge University researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, was elected a Green councillor for Newnham Ward, winning the seat from Labour. Scott received 1,046 votes to Labour candidate Sabina Harris-Hercules’ 308.

Scott told Varsity last month that she hopes to apply her research on “environmental decision-making” to local politics. She added that she is focused on “practical issues that affect daily life” such as “housing affordability, access to green space, sustainable transport, and the quality of local services”.

Amanda Taylor, who works at Cambridge University Press, was re-elected in Queen Edith’s Ward as a Liberal Democrat councillor. She said that her key goals included improving “provision for sustainable travel such as walking, cycling and public transport,” giving greater “attention to anti-social behaviour,” and ensuring social housing is “better maintained, with prompt repairs and attention to issues such as damp and mould”.

Olaf Hauk was also re-elected as a Lib Dem councillor for Trumpington. Hauk works in Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

Third year PBS student Alex Sage was elected as a Green councillor for Castle Ward, gaining the seat from Labour by 158 votes. Sage told Varsity he hopes to bridge the ‘town and gown’ divide to create “a more united and fairer Cambridge”.

This is the final election to Cambridge City Council before it is abolished and replaced by a unitary authority. Elections to the successor authority are set to take place in 2027.

In this year’s local elections, Reform UK won 1,453 council seats nationwide, gaining 1,451 seats. Labour won 1,068 seats, losing 1,496 overall, while the Conservatives secured 801 seats, down 563. The Lib Dems and the Greens also made significant gains, gaining 155 and 411 additional seats respectively.

Labour lost control of 38 councils following the elections. Reform UK gained control of 14 councils, while the Conservatives lost control of six. The Lib Dems gained control of one council and the Greens gained four. 24 councils shifted into a state of no overall control, with no single political party securing a majority.

Responding to the results, the University of Cambridge Left Society released a statement on Instagram on Saturday (09/05), which said: “This collapse of the Government’s support cannot be blamed on circumstance, or fluctuating public mood, but can only be understood as the necessary result of a party which has abandoned the working class to the interests of capital folding in on itself”.

The statement continued: “The manner of Labour’s defeat, however, offers us no cause of celebration […] and the character of the [Reform] candidates entering public office should alarm us all.”

The society added: “For us in Cambridge, hope in the future is not lost. We specifically welcome the return of seven Green Party councillors announced over previous days.”