The political landscape of the East of England for the local elections in May

• ITV Anglia Political Producer David Hughes looks at the political landscape of the Anglia region ahead of the local elections on Thursday 5 May 2022

Be it the cost of living crisis, the level of council tax rates, parties in Downing Street or merely the number of potholes in your street, the local elections each year are the chance for voters to have their say on the state of the nation.

In the Anglia region more than 400 local councillors are after your vote to be elected to councils which look after local schools, planning issues, highways and bin collections among other things.

But given it is a once-a-year opportunity to vent against the politicians, local elections are usually impacted by the wider political landscape at a national level.

Local elections in some form are held in May every year in the United Kingdom but not every area gets to vote every year. It works on a four-year election cycle with different councils in the East of England having elections at different times.

Some areas elect the whole council at once and in other places only one-third of the council seats are up for election.

There are no widespread elections being held in May 2022 in Bedfordshire or Northamptonshire.

Interactive map of the local councils areas in the ITV Anglia region

The Conservatives hold the most council seats in the Anglia region and control the largest number of councils. They will be defending places such as Basildon and Harlow in Essex and Welwyn Hatfield in Hertfordshire where they secured overall majorities in 2021.

There are places such as Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Colchester which are hung councils where no one party has enough seats to outvote all the other parties but usually come to some arrangement between the parties to run the council.

Labour is usually stronger in the bigger towns and cities such as Norwich, Cambridge and Ipswich. The party has held power Stevenage in Hertfordshire since 1973 but came very close to losing its overall majority on the council in the May 2021 local elections.

The Liberal Democrats are seeing something of a comeback in local council by-elections and will be defending majority-held councils in South Cambridgeshire and St Albans.

This particular set of council wards up for election in May was last contested in 2018 when the Conservatives lost 10 seats and had a total of 184 councillors in the Anglia region.

Labour made 21 gains with 113 councillors and the Liberal Democrats were up 23 to 82 councillors. The Green Party took three council seats in 2018 while Independents and other parties won 32 seats.

In terms of the share of the vote in 2018, the Conservatives were on 39% in the Anglia region, Labour on 29%, the Liberal Democrats on 17% with the Greens on 5%. The remaining 10% went to UKIP, Independents and other parties.

In May 2021 there was a mammoth set of local elections after the May 2020 elections were postponed because of the Covid pandemic and the two were combined.

Since the local elections in May last year, there have been 32 local council by-elections in the Anglia region. The results suggest a resurgence of Liberal Democrat support compared with the previous election in the same wards.

The number of people turning out to vote in local elections is usually below half and can be as low as 20-25%.

Election day is Thursday 5 May 2022 and polling station in areas with elections will be open from 7am until 10pm. The results will be known on Friday 6 May.