Liberal Democrats become biggest Wiltshire party

The Liberal Democrats have become the biggest party on Wiltshire Council, but have not won enough seats to take overall control.

The local elections, which took place on 1 May, saw the Conservatives lose control of Wiltshire after 25 years of power, having won 37 seats overall.

The Liberal Democrats won 43 seats in the election, saying the future is "golden".

Half of the total of 98 seats needed to be acquired in order to be a majority, meaning that no one council has overall control.

"I think the future is golden," said Brian Mathew, the Liberal Democrat MP for Melksham and Devizes.

"Often people often vote against a party rather than for a party if I'm being totally honest," continued Mr Mathew.

"The Tories have got tired. There's a lot of angry people out there too who are fed up with things generally and I think that's part of the reason."

Only 36.19% of people voted on Thursday to decide who should run the local authority which is responsible for roads, bins and adult social care.

The former Wiltshire Council leader, Conservative Richard Clewer, who has been re-elected, said: "It's really frustrating to be going from controlling the council that was under control.

"That was delivering outstanding children's services, all the rest of it. We were performing on every level.

"It's some cold comfort that if you look at the results across the country we seem to have done better than most other Conservative councils. But that really isn't saying anything at the scale of what's happened.

"It creates some very significant questions Wiltshire needs to answer over the next few days."

Ian Thorne, the council's Lib Dem leader, said several key issues keep coming up when he talks to people in the county.

"We have to find more money to deal with the potholes," he said.

"This council is actually under-invested in terms of it's borrowing.

"We need to look at whether we can take any money from CIL - the Community Infrastructure Levy - and we need to look at other sources.

"That's a huge challenge and none of this is easy, otherwise it would have happened already.

"The second big issue is around stopping unwanted development - that may mean a new local plan."

Mr Thorne is due to announce his new cabinet at the weekend.

Ten Reform UK councillors have been elected along with seven Independents.

Labour's only remaining councillor in Wiltshire is Ricky Rogers who has been representing Fisherton and Bemerton Village for 35 years and counting.

"I can't thank people enough for supporting me individually," he said.

"There was a lot of resentment against the government, who they feel are not doing things correctly and not doing things quick enough.

"And that reflected in their protest."

The makeup of Wiltshire Council is now 43 Liberal Democrats, 37 Conservatives, 7 Independents, 1 Labour, and 10 Reform UK.

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