Votes were being counted across Sussex and Surrey on the day of the west surrey elections 2026, with 162 seats on two brand new councils in East Surrey and West Surrey among the contests. All 120 seats on the East and West Sussex county councils were also up for election, alongside partial votes in Hastings, Crawley, Adur and Worthing.
Ed Davey has been campaigning across Sussex and Surrey as the Liberal Democrats look to turn a 2024 breakthrough into control or plurality in several councils. The party is particularly confident about the new West Surrey authority, while also hoping to become at least the largest party on East Surrey, East Sussex and West Sussex.
West Surrey and East Surrey
The scale of the count makes West Surrey the clearest test in the region. The Liberal Democrats won several historically Tory seats in East and West Sussex for the first time at the General Election in 2024, and now want to build on that result in the new authority.
Reform UK is also in the picture. Nigel Farage's party won 57 of the 81 seats in Kent County Council in 2025, and it expects to do very well in East and West Sussex. That adds another contest for seats that sit in a region where Conservatives have long dominated local politics.
Sussex council counts
East and West Sussex are counting every one of their 120 county council seats, giving a full readout of how voters have moved across the area. Places to watch include Crawley, Worthing, Bognor Regis, Littlehampton and Hastings, where separate borough and district contests are also being counted.
Those local counts matter because the Greens already run some councils in the South East, including Hastings, and have previously run Brighton & Hove. In Surrey, Independents and Residents' Associations also have a long history of winning seats, which can complicate any clean party-by-party tally in the new councils.
What the count will show
By the end of the count, the main question is whether the Liberal Democrats can convert their 2024 gains into the kind of numbers that put them first in West Surrey and competitive across the wider Sussex map. For voters, the immediate result is a set of new councils and full county totals that will show which parties can actually govern the next stage of local politics.
