Local election results: Relief for Sunak as Tory mayor to cling on amid historic election losses (2024)

Lord Ben Houchen has won the Tees Valley mayoral contest for the Conservatives.

It keeps him in the job he's held since 2017, and his victory is a relief for Rishi Sunak amid what has been a rough set of election results.

The full result is:

• Lord Ben Houchen (Con): 81,930 votes (53.6%)
• Chris McEwan (Lab)63,141 votes (41.3%)
• Simon Thorley (Lib Dem): 7,679 votes (5%)

This means Lord Houchen's majority is massively reduced from 2021, when he took 72.8% of the vote.

Lord Ben Houchen, the incumbent mayor of Tees Valley, has denied Rishi Sunak was a problem on the doorsteps during the election campaign.

Sky News correspondent Shingi Mararike asked him: "Your [campaign] literature very rarely mentioned Rishi Sunak or the Conservative Party.

"Is Rishi Sunak a hindrance - a problem?"

Lord Houchen said he did not "shy away from that at all", adding that Mr Sunak had been a "close friend of mine since he was first elected in 2015".

He continued: "He's been up during the campaign, and I've always said Rishi's been a great friend to the people of Teesside, Darlington and Hartlepool."

The mayor continued: "He helped me secure the Treasury for Darlington.

"He's helped me set up the UK's first and largest freeport in Redcar.

"He's actually been a huge champion for this area and there's a lot of things that we wouldn't have been able to achieve without his support."

As we report below, Labour has conceded in the Tees Valley mayoral race.

Lord Houchen claimed Labour had run an "extremely negative campaign" and had "nothing positive to offer local people".

He also said he had a "record of delivery over the last seven years" on jobs and investment, increasing the employment rate by 5.4%.

We've just heard from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who is at a military base in North Yorkshire.

Asked for his reaction to the apparently disastrous local election results so far, the PM said: "Obviously it's disappointing to lose good, hard-working Conservative councillors, and I'm grateful to them for all their service in local government."

He went on to say that there are still "lots of results to come", and pointed to the Tories retaining Harlow as an example of somewhere Labour needed to win to show it was on course to win the next general election, and described the Tees Valley mayoralty as a "very important test".

Asked if he needs to convince his party that he needs to do better in order to win the general election, Mr Sunak again pointed to the Tories retaining Harlow.

He went on: "I'm focused completely on the job at hand - that's delivering for people across the country."

He hit out at Labour for, for example, saying it would scrap the Rwanda deportation scheme, and claimed the opposition would "offer amnesty to illegal migrants".

Our political editor Beth Rigby has been giving her take on the local elections results we've had so far.

She reckons the Tories could end up losing half their council seats, with plenty more declarations to come today and tomorrow.

We're expecting a flurry of results to start arriving later this hour.

You can watch Beth's full analysis below:

As counts are continuing across the country, we are beginning to get indications of results.

Sky News can confirm that Labour will hold Swindon council in this set of elections.

Not all seats have been declared yet, so we cannot bring you the full results, but it is now mathematically certain that Labour will hold the council.

We are expecting the formal declaration in the mid-afternoon.

Our political correspondent Serena Barker-Singh is in Bradford, one of the councils still to declare today.

She says the result could show "where the weaknesses lie within the Labour Party", both in these local elections and in the general to come.

And that's the divisions in the party over the Israel-Gaza conflict.

"It's no secret it has been a divisive issue within the party nationally," explains Serena.

"But in Bradford there have been two motions supported by the council on an immediate ceasefire - and much earlier than the party nationally.

"There was some sentiment within some communities that Labour had moved to a humanitarian ceasefire - their current position - too slowly."

The leadership's stance saw Naz Shah, Labour's MP for Bradford West, resign her front bench position earlier this year.

"It's (still) a live issue here," says Serena, and while Labour is likely to hold the council, there could be independents that eat into the vote share.

One of the most hotly-contested races in this set of local elections has been the Tees Valley mayoralty.

Incumbent Tory mayor Lord Ben Houchen won in 2021 with a vast majority, taking 72.8% of the vote.

Labour had been hoping to win the seat, with a victory there a huge prize for the party and a sign of progress.

But in a hint of sunshine for Rishi Sunak amid a terrible set of election results, a Labour source has conceded defeat.

Labour sources more broadly are saying they never really expected to win, given the personal popularity of Lord Houchen.

They are saying he had been effectively running as an independent candidate, rather than a Tory, and that if Labour achieves a swing of 12.5%, it would be enough to win every parliamentary seat in the region.

We are expecting the formal declaration of the results shortly - watch live on Sky News, in the stream above, and follow updates here in the Politics Hub.

We've just been speaking with health minister Dame Andrea Leadsom, and we started by asking for her reaction to what appears to have been a pretty terrible night for the Conservative Party.

She admitted it had been a "tough night", with results that are "devastating" for both candidates and communities.

But she added: "It is absolutely understandable that in the wake of this once in a hundred years global pandemic and Putin's aggression in Ukraine, that we have now seen the devastation, the cost of living crisis, has resulted from that."

Challenged by Sophy Ridge, she said the Tories "completely accept responsibility" for the results, and said the public has "not yet seen the turnaround that is on its way".

Dame Andrea said removing Rishi Sunak as PM in a last-ditch effort to turn things around before the general election would be "a very big mistake", insisting that the "seeds of recovery" are visible.

'We need to keep doing what we're doing'

But the minister continued to blame "the hangover from the COVID pandemic and from the energy crisis and the cost of living crisis" for the party's fortunes.

"What we need to do is to keep on with what we're doing," she said.

She pointed to the result in Harlow as evidence not all is lost for the Tory party yet, and said low turnout of the party's voters is a "wake-up call".

The Tories hung on to the council there, despite several visits by the Labour leader during the campaign.

It'll be around lunchtime that we start getting more results from the elections that took place across England and Wales yesterday.

One of the most eye-catching will be the Tees Valley mayoral contest, which should be declared at 12.30pm.

Tory Ben Houchen is defending the seat, having won more than 70% of the vote last time.

He's up against Chris McEwan from Labour and Lib Dem Simon Thorley.

Mr Houchen's campaign was notable for distancing itself from the Conservative government and Rishi Sunak.

The race on a knife-edge between the two main parties, and should the Tories lose the seat, it would be a devastating blow.

The count is under way - and our North of England correspondentShingi Mararike says polling suggests it won't be a "shoo-in" for Mr Houchen.

Expect "a tightly-fought race", he says, though defeat for the Tories "would signal disaster for Rishi Sunak".

Mr Houchen has been "a poster child of the levelling-up agenda", whose previous wins "represented the high watermark" of Boris Johnson's success during his time as Tory leader.

We'll bring you the result when we get it.

Away from the local elections for a moment - the government's plan to meet climate targets and green the economy has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.

The campaigning groups that brought the challenge had argued it relied too much on risky technologies and glossed over the risk of missing targets.

But the government said it had met all of its three previous "carbon budget" targets to cut emissions and was on track to meet future targets - though other assessments warn otherwise.

This is the second time the three groups - Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project - have taken the government to court over its climate plans.

In July 2022 the High Court ruled in their favour that the government's last climate plan - the Net Zero Strategy - was ​​unlawful because it didn't explain how targets would be met.

That case forced officials to draw up a second version - the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) - which campaigners argued was still "a complete pipe dream".

It was published in March 2023, before the government began to tinker with some climate targets, saying it was taking a more "pragmatic" approach.

Read more from our climate reporter Victoria Seabrook here: