Local elections are taking place next week, Crawley Observer Column, Wednesday 29th April 2026

Next week, elections will be taking place for Crawley Borough Council and West Sussex County Council. All-too-often these elections go ignored or are treated as an opinion poll for national government, but local elections are important in their own right.

Councils oversee roughly a quarter of the country’s public spending and have more control over day-to-day life in our community than any other part of the public sector. Roads and pavements, schools and fire services, leisure and cultural facilities, economic development, planning and housing, libraries and environmental health, these are just some of the things local councils control and why the question of who runs them matters to us all.

Polling shows that for most seats in Crawley, these elections are now between Reform and Labour, in some cases by very narrow margins. Crawley has a history of close results, where councillors are often elected by less than a dozen votes. The Conservatives gained control of the council in 2006 on little more than a coin toss. Here more than almost anywhere else, the claim your vote doesn’t make a difference is comprehensively wrong.

While lots of people may choose to ‘give it a go’ at election time, ultimately only a few parties ever have a realistic chance of winning the seat that year. Those parties have a responsibility to ensure the people they put up for office are suitable to take on the role and have a credible plan for what they will do if elected.

It’s not enough to want to do something, you have a duty to know how you might deliver it. From 2012 to 2014, I spent two years as opposition leader on the council, getting my hands on every report and dataset on the town I could find, meeting with local stakeholders and engaging with local government nationally to ensure that at the election where Labour would take control, we could present Crawley with a financially-viable manifesto which addressed the community’s needs and was deliverable. Ultimately, it’s a matter of respect for local residents, parties must produce achievable policies and not just sell soundbites.