Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolest.

With much of the country set to go to the polls next week, we're previewing a crucial set of local elections this episode.

With more than 1,600 council seats up for grabs, as well as six mayoral contests and a high-profile parliamentary by-election

in Runcorn and Helsby.

On the panel to discuss the government's potential electoral struggles, reforms, reforms high

hopes, whether the Tories will take another pasting, and why nobody's really talking up the Lib Dems,

and we'd like to be joined by Jonathan Ashworth, Chief Executive of the Think Tank Labor Together and a former shadow cabinet minister. Max Wilkinson, Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham and his party's

culture spokesman, as well as Scarlett Maguire, pollster and founder of Merlin Strategies,

and Jack Sellers, a former Conservative Special Advisor who worked for Isius Sunak in number 10.

So I'll start with you, Scott.

Just talk us through about where these elections are taking place and kind of interestingly,

where they aren't after some changes to how local authorities are going to be run, had an

effect on where they were going to be held.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we've got local elections coming up next week.

We're going to have 23 councils, six mayors and a by-election,

all happening on Thursday the 1st of May, all in England.

And there are about 1,600 council seats up for grabs.

We're absolutely right to say that not all local elections initially planned are going ahead.

So we're not going to see local elections this time around in East Sussex, West Sussex,

Thurrock, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey.

Now, that list is actually pretty significant, especially when we think about how reforms

...