We've just heard from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who is at a military base in North Yorkshire.

Asked for his reaction to the apparently disastrous local election results so far, the PM said: "Obviously it's disappointing to lose good, hard-working Conservative councillors, and I'm grateful to them for all their service in local government."

He went on to say that there are still "lots of results to come", and pointed to the Tories retaining Harlow as an example of somewhere Labour needed to win to show it was on course to win the next general election, and described the Tees Valley mayoralty as a "very important test".

Asked if he needs to convince his party that he needs to do better in order to win the general election, Mr Sunak again pointed to the Tories retaining Harlow.

He went on: "I'm focused completely on the job at hand - that's delivering for people across the country."

He hit out at Labour for, for example, saying it would scrap the Rwanda deportation scheme, and claimed the opposition would "offer amnesty to illegal migrants".

Our political editor Beth Rigby has been giving her take on the local elections results we've had so far.

She reckons the Tories could end up losing half their council seats, with plenty more declarations to come today and tomorrow.

We're expecting a flurry of results to start arriving later this hour.

You can watch Beth's full analysis below:

As counts are continuing across the country, we are beginning to get indications of results.

Sky News can confirm that Labour will hold Swindon council in this set of elections.

Not all seats have been declared yet, so we cannot bring you the full results, but it is now mathematically certain that Labour will hold the council.

We are expecting the formal declaration in the mid-afternoon.

Our political correspondent Serena Barker-Singh is in Bradford, one of the councils still to declare today.

She says the result could show "where the weaknesses lie within the Labour Party", both in these local elections and in the general to come.

And that's the divisions in the party over the Israel-Gaza conflict.

"It's no secret it has been a divisive issue within the party nationally," explains Serena.

"But in Bradford there have been two motions supported by the council on an immediate ceasefire - and much earlier than the party nationally.

"There was some sentiment within some communities that Labour had moved to a humanitarian ceasefire - their current position - too slowly."

The leadership's stance saw Naz Shah, Labour's MP for Bradford West, resign her front bench position earlier this year.

"It's (still) a live issue here," says Serena, and while Labour is likely to hold the council, there could be independents that eat into the vote share.

We've just been speaking with health minister Dame Andrea Leadsom, and we started by asking for her reaction to what appears to have been a pretty terrible night for the Conservative Party.

She admitted it had been a "tough night", with results that are "devastating" for both candidates and communities.

But she added: "It is absolutely understandable that in the wake of this once in a hundred years global pandemic and Putin's aggression in Ukraine, that we have now seen the devastation, the cost of living crisis, has resulted from that."

Challenged by Sophy Ridge, she said the Tories "completely accept responsibility" for the results, and said the public has "not yet seen the turnaround that is on its way".

Dame Andrea said removing Rishi Sunak as PM in a last-ditch effort to turn things around before the general election would be "a very big mistake", insisting that the "seeds of recovery" are visible.

'We need to keep doing what we're doing'

But the minister continued to blame "the hangover from the COVID pandemic and from the energy crisis and the cost of living crisis" for the party's fortunes.

"What we need to do is to keep on with what we're doing," she said.

She pointed to the result in Harlow as evidence not all is lost for the Tory party yet, and said low turnout of the party's voters is a "wake-up call".

The Tories hung on to the council there, despite several visits by the Labour leader during the campaign.

It'll be around lunchtime that we start getting more results from the elections that took place across England and Wales yesterday.

One of the most eye-catching will be the Tees Valley mayoral contest, which should be declared at 12.30pm.

Tory Ben Houchen is defending the seat, having won more than 70% of the vote last time.

He's up against Chris McEwan from Labour and Lib Dem Simon Thorley.

Mr Houchen's campaign was notable for distancing itself from the Conservative government and Rishi Sunak.

The race on a knife-edge between the two main parties, and should the Tories lose the seat, it would be a devastating blow.

The count is under way - and our North of England correspondent Shingi Mararike says polling suggests it won't be a "shoo-in" for Mr Houchen.

Expect "a tightly-fought race", he says, though defeat for the Tories "would signal disaster for Rishi Sunak".

Mr Houchen has been "a poster child of the levelling-up agenda", whose previous wins "represented the high watermark" of Boris Johnson's success during his time as Tory leader.

We'll bring you the result when we get it.

Away from the local elections for a moment - the government's plan to meet climate targets and green the economy has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.

The campaigning groups that brought the challenge had argued it relied too much on risky technologies and glossed over the risk of missing targets.

But the government said it had met all of its three previous "carbon budget" targets to cut emissions and was on track to meet future targets - though other assessments warn otherwise.

This is the second time the three groups - Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and the Good Law Project - have taken the government to court over its climate plans.

In July 2022 the High Court ruled in their favour that the government's last climate plan - the Net Zero Strategy - was ​​unlawful because it didn't explain how targets would be met.

That case forced officials to draw up a second version - the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan (CBDP) - which campaigners argued was still "a complete pipe dream".

It was published in March 2023, before the government began to tinker with some climate targets, saying it was taking a more "pragmatic" approach.

Read more from our climate reporter Victoria Seabrook here:

One of the key questions of these local elections has been how the war in the Middle East has affected Labour's vote.

The party's position has been controversial among many Muslim voters, who have wanted Sir Keir Starmer to be much more forceful in his condemnation of Israel's conduct of the war with Hamas, and to have been calling for a ceasefire far earlier.

Results from the overnight by-election results show that Labour's vote share has fallen in areas with larger Muslim populations since the last set of elections in 2023.

Sir Keir Starmer conceded this morning that his party's stance did cost them votes.

The Labour leader told Sky News: "There are some places where that's a very strong factor, and I understand that and respect that."

But he said that where they have lost votes, they will "earn them back".

By Prof Will Jennings, Sky News election analyst, and the Sky News data unit

The main story so far is a Conservative collapse.

They have lost the Blackpool South by-election and more than half of the council seats they were defending.

If results continue like this, it could be the party's worst-ever local elections.

It's still early though. We have votes from about a third of councils but are still waiting for figures from London and the nine metro mayor areas.

Labour has made gains, although there have also been losses in some areas, and many Conservative losses are falling to smaller parties and independents.

See the story of the local elections so far in charts here: