2021 United Kingdom local elections

The 2021 United Kingdom local elections were held on Thursday 6 May 2021. More than 145 English local councils, around 5,000 councillor seats (including by-elections), thirteen directly elected mayors in England, and 39 police and crime commissioners in England and Wales were contested. On the same day, the 2021 Hartlepool by-election took place, and there were also elections to the Scottish Parliament (129 seats), Senedd (Welsh Parliament) (60 seats) and London Assembly (25 seats), the last in conjunction with the London mayoral election.

In March 2020, the government announced that the elections scheduled for 7 May 2020 would be delayed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They were now held at the same time as the elections previously scheduled for 2021. The seats up for election were those last contested in 2016 and 2017. New unitary authorities to replace the county and district councils in Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire held their inaugural elections this year.

The Conservative Party made significant gains in the elections; despite initial predictions that the party would perform better in the seats last contested in 2016, but worse in the ones contested in 2017 (when the party benefited from the then-exceptionally high approval ratings of Theresa May's government in the run-up to that year's general election), they in fact performed even better in both sets of seats. Many observers attributed their performance to the successful rollout of the country's COVID-19 vaccination programme. By contrast, Labour's poor performance was generally ascribed to the party still being viewed by much of the working class as having been discredited by its prior opposition to Brexit, as well as party leader Keir Starmer's perceived opportunism in attacking Prime Minister Boris Johnson over the Downing Street refurbishment controversy. The Liberal Democrats made some minor gains despite a loss in their popular vote share, while the Green Party made more substantial gains.

Due to the cancellation of the 2020 local elections, these were the first local elections the three main parties contested under the leaderships of Johnson, Starmer, and Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats.