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Media enquiries
Communications and Marketing is open for enquiries from 8:45am to 5pm Monday to Thursday, and 8:45am to 4:30pm on Fridays. We’re closed on bank holidays.
If you’re not a journalist from an accredited media agency and have a general enquiry about council services, find out how to contact us.
We advise our employees and elected members who are directly approached by a member of the media, to not answer questions themselves. They should refer you to the Communications and Marketing team who will manage the response.
We won't normally comment on leaks, anonymous allegations or allegations about individual employees.
We’re open and accountable and will explain if there’s a reason why we can't answer a specific enquiry.
We need a minimum of 24 hours to respond to an enquiry. In the interest of fair play, we ask that you give us this time. Anything we send to you has to be signed off, which may be difficult to achieve in short time frames.
Media information for local elections on Thursday 7 May 2026
Local elections will be taking place on Thursday 7 May 2026.
All 63 council seats will be up for election. This follows the decision made in May 2025 to change Barnsley’s election cycle to a whole council election every four years.
Currently, the political composition of the council is 46 Labour seats, 12 Liberal Democrat, 3 Independent, 1 Conservative seat and 1 vacant seat. The current council leader is Cllr Sir Steve Houghton CBE.
Find out more about local councillors in Barnsley.
Count details
Verification is estimated to start at 9am on Friday 8 May, with counting estimated to start at 12pm.
We estimate that the first ward declaration will be made at around 2.30pm, and the full council declaration at around 4.30pm.
Results will be posted on our election results webpage as each ward is declared.
If you are from an accredited media agency and would like to register to attend the count in Barnsley, please email communications@barnsley.gov.uk.
How we can help each other
- Please don’t reuse any wording from online sources and attribute it as a quote from the council or the boards that we're part of. This information might not give you the context or full picture for your article. Please contact the Communications and Marketing team so we can provide you with a quote.
- Simple, factual queries will be dealt with by the Communications and Marketing team. This is without reference to other officers or Cabinet members. Our website has a lot of information on it. Please check it before you send in your enquiry.
- Provide us with as much detail as possible as early as possible and let us know what questions you want us to answer. This gives us the best chance to deal effectively with your query. The more complex or time-consuming the request, the longer we need. (If in doubt, call us at an early stage.)
- Tell us if your story changes as early as possible so we can deal with that in our response. It may be difficult to adapt to last-minute shifts in the story angle, especially late in the day or if colleagues have already dropped other pressing work to deal with the original response.
- Tell us if your story is held or dropped. Otherwise our team could be prioritising that over other work they could be doing.
How to contact us
You can contact us for media enquiries by emailing communications@barnsley.gov.uk or by calling 01226 773443.
Contacting us out of hours
We operate an emergency out of hours service for major or critical incidents only. If you contact us out of hours, your email or call will be redirected to our on-call officer. The on-call officer isn't on regular duty or based at work, and won't handle regular enquiries which are submitted outside our normal office hours. If you submit a regular enquiry out of hours, this may not be answered until the next working day at 8:45am.