England’s green transition is becoming a postcode lottery between Green urban centres and Reform-controlled councils
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In the week after the May 2026 local elections, councillors in Waltham Forest began working through plans for a borough-wide retrofit programme, expanded biodiversity corridors along the Lea Valley, and solar panels on school buildings – a continuation of commitments that have already delivered warmer homes and lower energy bills for dozens of east London families.
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In Durham, the Reform-controlled council had already abandoned a plan to install solar panels across its public buildings, a scheme projected to save the council £1.5 million.
Two councils, two decisions, two futures. And after 7 May, that divide runs across a map of England so cleanly you could almost draw it with a ruler.
What Reform councils actually do
The behaviour of newly elected Reform councils is following a documented path. By March 2026, researchers at the LSE’s Grantham Research Institute had already documented what Reform-controlled councils, elected in 2025, had done with their climate inheritance. Seven of the nine councils studied had removed their emissions targets within months of gaining control. Three had formally rescinded Climate Emergency Declarations, commitments that, in some cases, had been voted through with cross-party support.
In five councils, formal statements in committee meetings were categorised by the researchers as outright climate denial, including references to anthropogenic climate change as an ‘unproven view’ and characterisations of CO₂ as ‘some gas that has little impact’.
Analysis by Carbon Brief calculated that across the ten Reform councils elected in 2025 alone, some 6GW of proposed solar and battery storage capacity was sitting in the planning pipeline, projects whose delivery now faces uncertainty ranging from administrative obstruction to active legal challenge. After May 2026, the councils in question are considerably more numerous, and even more climate progress is under threat.
The Green tide
Elsewhere in the country, a different approach is taking shape. The Green Party’s May 2026 results were the best in the party’s history: 587 new councillors elected, bringing the national total to 1,319, with outright council control in Waltham Forest, Hackney, Lewisham, and others, and plurality status in Lambeth. In Sheffield, Manchester, and Leeds, Green gains reshaped councils Labour had taken for granted for decades.
These are dense, young, highly-renting inner boroughs, places where the climate crisis is not an abstraction but a lived experience: black mould in damp flats, polluted school-run streets, energy bills that dwarf wages in cramped, uninsulated Victorian terraces. Lewisham, now with its first Green councillors, had already ranked joint ninth out of 382 English councils in the 2025 Climate Emergency UK scorecards, running a major housing retrofit programme, planting 24,000 trees, switching all council buildings and schools to 100 per cent renewable electricity.
Waltham Forest had committed to net zero by 2030 and was mid-programme on an Energy Empowered Schools initiative and household retrofit fund. Under new Green administrations, these ambitions carry explicit, fresh electoral legitimacy.
The cruelest irony
In Clacton-on-Sea, a town that Nigel Farage helped make a Reform citadel, climate change is both a lived reality and denied by the town’s leadership. Substantial parts of Clacton, Jaywick, Seawick, the stretch between Holland-on-Sea and Frinton, will be at risk of yearly flooding by 2030.
The Tendring area, which encompasses Clacton, faces measurable sea level rise affecting hundreds of homes, according to published research in Oceans and Coastal Management. Essex County Council’s own 2021–25 Climate Action Plan, in operation until Reform’s election victory, acknowledged that the county faces ‘increasing risks of coastal erosion, flooding, overheating, water scarcity and soil degradation’.
And yet Essex County Council, now under Reform control, took office in a party whose leader has described net zero as ‘net stupid zero’ and which, in its previous councils, has systematically dismantled the planning frameworks and investment programmes that manage exactly these risks. The communities most acutely threatened by a warming climate have, in significant numbers, elected councils whose political identity is defined by treating that warming as either fictional or irrelevant.
A governance crisis in waiting
Local government is not peripheral to Britain’s national climate ambitions, it is load-bearing. Planning consent for onshore renewables, housing retrofit standards, active travel infrastructure, flood resilience investment, and green space designation, all pass through council chambers. A significant portion of English councils systematically obstructing or delaying these functions does not merely inconvenience central government; it creates direct tension with the UK’s legally binding targets under the Climate Change Act.
The Climate Emergency UK statutory duty report, published in March 2026, recommended making climate action a legal requirement for all English councils, precisely to prevent this kind of postcode lottery from developing. The government has not yet acted on that recommendation. In the meantime, the lottery has grown considerably larger.
The Council Climate Action Scorecards, which rate every English local authority across 93 criteria, from renewable energy planning to biodiversity net gain, will update in the coming months to reflect the policy decisions of newly elected administrations. When they do, they will produce a map divided by ballot box, into places that are preparing for the future and places that have decided, for now, to look away.
