Local Elections 2023: Is there an election in my area?

This May sees the biggest round of local council elections in England and Northern Ireland since 2019, with 40 million people able to choose new councillors.

In England, 230 councils will be electing some or all of their councillors on Thursday 4 May.

About 8,000 councillors are being elected in all.

Bedford, Leicester, Mansfield and Middlesbrough will also elect mayors.

In Northern Ireland, 462 council seats are being contested across all 11 councils on Thursday 18 May.

Use our lookup to see if there is an election in your area, who is standing and where you can vote.

Most of the seats up this year were last contested in May 2019.

Back then, Theresa May was the Conservative Prime Minister and she was struggling to find a Brexit deal that would get through the House of Commons. Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the opposition Labour Party.

The Conservatives lost more than 1,000 council seats in that election. Labour slipped back slightly, losing 84 councillors, and UKIP lost most of the seats they had gained in the run-up to Brexit.

The Liberal Democrats, the Greens, independent councillors and local parties all increased their representation.

The 2023 elections are mostly taking place in rural areas where the Conservatives still hold many councils. They are defending more than 3,300 seats.

There are also elections in urban areas in the north of England where Labour are more dominant. They are defending more than 2,000 seats.

After their gains in 2019, Liberal Democrats won more than 1,200 seats and the Green Party are defending 240.

Most of the councils up for election in May are district councils. They look after services including bin collections, parks, public housing and local planning applications.

Other services in these areas such as highways, schools, social and care services are managed by county councils which are elected at a different time.

The rest of the councils are a mixture of metropolitan and unitary councils. These areas have a single local authority that deals with all local services.

Bedford, Leicester, Mansfield and Middlesbrough will all be electing mayors, the directly elected leaders of the council.

They are responsible for all of the services controlled by the council from leisure services to social care, and appoint members of the cabinet who each have responsibility for specific council services.

In Northern Ireland there is only one layer of local government. Councils here have responsibility for services such as bin collections, planning, street cleaning, sport and leisure centres, parks and open spaces.

Northern Ireland uses a type of proportional representation to choose councillors called the single transferable vote.

The effect of this system is that no one party controls a council and most work by forming a series of cross-party decision making committees.

Eleven parties and independents won seats at the last election in 2019. The Democratic Unionist Party are defending the most seats, followed by Sinn Féin, the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP and the Alliance Party.

Produced by: Wesley Stephenson, Jana Tauschinski, Marcos Gurgel, Steven Connor, Liana Bravo, John Walton, Jerina Jacob, Mark Oludimu and Rahat Anayat