Part of the joys of researching and maintaining data around the UK political landscape is being able to watch the changes across the political parties.

In order to try and share and 'see' this in a meaningful way and in particular to track changes over time, we started a monthly archive of some of the key political data points in April 2022.

This means we are now able to display the number of seats held by political parties over time. Elections have - of course - the largest effect on seat numbers (especially local elections) but with resignations and more general churn between the election cycles, it's still possible to glean a picture of the trends across the parties outside of elections.

The following changes seem to stand out across the period currently analysed:

- It's interesting to note the number of Independent members has fallen by over 12%

- The Conservative Party share of seats have dropped from 37.95% to 30.10% - a fall of nearly 8%

- The Green Party share of seats has increased from 2.44% to 3.92% - or put another way, a rise of 60% in 15 months

- Conversely, the period has seen - perhaps unsurprisingly given their primary purpose - the demise of UKIP - having 8 seats in April '22 to no seats post the May '23 local elections.

- It is perhaps worth noting that - at the time of typing - the other 2 main national parties - Labout and Lib Dems, now hold 48.45% of all political seats.

We will be updating our data vis monthly and you can gain free access here at any time

A few notes on the data and sources are as follows:

The data for the report is taken from the live Oscar political database.

The monthly extracts for analysis were started in April 2022.

The counts are members of political parties holding seats across all National, Devolved and Local Governments representing Constituencies, Devolved Regions and Constituencies, Electoral Divisions and Wards.

Updates to this table are made monthly and the total number of members will vary according to boundary changes, council changes, by-elections, general and local elections.

Significant events that may have a notable effect on the data (both volume of seats and political change) are highlighted in red at the top - namely local and national elections and Council changes.

The first table shows a count of members by month across each political party.

To better reflect the true picture with the fluctuating number of members/seats each month, the second table provides a percentage view of the total seats for each party each month and highlights if the proportion of seats has increased or decreased.

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