There’s a lot going on next Thursday

As the Guardian points out, it’s going to be a busy time for candidates and counting staff next week.

Here in Wales, the main attention is upon the Assembly elections with the AV referendum almost relegated to 'add-on' status. Journalists and commentators have been complaining that campaigning over both issues has been “a bit flat”.

Maybe so, but this appears not to be the case in England where a total of 30,983,233 people will be voting in local council elections on 5 May. Some 9,396 of the country's 18,225 council seats are up for grabs in 279 local authorities.

A total of 30 unitary authorities and 124 district authorities, including Blackpool, Leicester, Nottingham and York, will be electing all their members for the first time since 2007.

Attention is focused on cities such as Sheffield, where Labour need just three seats to gain a council majority and Newcastle where Labour need only six more seats to take control of a territory where the Lib Dems have previously enjoyed strong support.

A parliamentary by-election will also be held in the constituency of Leicester South after the Labour MP, Peter Soulsby, stood down to run for the first-ever mayoral contest in the city. Labour will be defending a majority of 8,808.

As well as Leicester, mayoral elections are happening in Middlesbrough, Mansfield, Bedford and Torbay.

In Scotland, 129 MSPs will be elected to the Holyrood parliament - 73 through the constituency-based first-past-the-post system and 56 through a separate party list system in eight electoral regions. The shape of the parliamentary map is significantly different this time with the boundaries of more than half of the constituencies re-drawn since 2007 and one in six voters are now in a different seat.

Voters go to the polls in Northern Ireland to elect 108 members to the new Stormont Assembly. They will also be electing 582 councillors to 26 councils in the first local elections for six years.

Both Assembly and local government elections are conducted using the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.

Update: For what it’s worth YouGov is quoting the latest Rallings and Thrasher’s local government projections based on their by-election model. This has Conservatives on 35%(down 5 from 2007), Labour on 38% (up 12 from 2007) and the Lib Dems on 17% (down 7 from 2007). This would equate to a Labour gain of around 1300 council seats, with the Conservatives losing just shy of 1000 and the Lib Dems losing around 400.