Nigel Farage has said the Tories will “never recover” and Reform UK has “supplanted” them as the opposition to Labour after his party made sweeping gains in local elections. Both Sir Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch are under pressure to reverse their parties’ fortunes after Reform picked up 10 councils and more than 600 seats in Thursday’s poll. The Prime Minister has said he will go “further and faster” with his plans in response to the poor result, while Mrs Badenoch apologised to defeated Conservative councillors and pledged to get the party back to being a “credible alternative to Labour”. Writing in The Telegraph, Mr Farage said two-party politics had “died” at a local and national level. “The party that I lead is expanding. As we march on, the Conservatives are in retreat. In my opinion, they will never recover,” the Clacton MP said. Sir Keir has faced calls to change tack after Reform UK gained an MP in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, winning by six votes, and took control of the previously Labour-run Doncaster Council. Labour backbencher Emma Lewell said there the Government has made unnecessary choices that have cost the party at the ballot box, and that the party needs a “change of plan” rather than a “plan for change”. “The Labour Party doesn’t need to lurch right or left, we need to do what we say we will do and do it in line with our core values and principles of social justice and fairness,” she wrote in The Mirror. Clive Efford, Labour MP for Eltham and Chislehurst, said it was “madness” to keep doing the same thing. “The idea that the public have given us such a kicking because they think we’re not going fast enough and they want more of the same, it’s just nonsense,” he told Times Radio. South Yorkshire mayor Oliver Coppard warned that patience is “in short supply” in his region and urged Sir Keir to have those voters in mind when they make spending decisions in the summer. While Doncaster’s Labour mayor Ros Jones was narrowly re-elected, the councillors are now majority Reform. Labour MP Rachael Maskell called on the Government to scrap winter fuel and welfare policies that she said are pushing voters away, telling BBC Breakfast the party needs to be driven by “a framework of values, which is about protecting people”. Jo White, the chair of the Red Wall group of Labour MPs, urged Sir Keir to stop “pussyfooting around” and introduce digital ID cards to stop illegal immigration. “He should take a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book by following his instincts and issuing some executive orders,” she wrote in The Telegraph. Sir Keir is expected to set out a proposed crackdown on immigration in a white paper due to be released in the coming weeks, according to reports. Mr Farage has pledged to “resist” asylum seekers being housed in the counties now under his party’s control. It is unclear whether Reform councils could block asylum seekers being housed in their areas, as the system is managed by the Home Office. The party is also drawing up plans for how it would deport all illegal immigrants within five years if Mr Farage were prime minister, its chairman said. Zia Yusuf told The Times this would involve leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and striking out other international treaties and articles so “no matter how activist the judge, there is no room for interpretation about preventing these people from getting deported”. “Let me be really clear, we’re putting people here in the country illegally on notice: a Reform government with Nigel as our leader will deport every single one of them within five years.” Mr Yusuf said he is “sceptical” about Reform UK accepting defecting Tory or Labour MPs whose seats might be under threat at the next election, but that he has been talking to former Tory donors about switching their support to Reform. Conservative figures have meanwhile sought to deny that the results were “existential” for the party. Squeezed between Reform and the Liberal Democrats, the Tories lost more than 600 councillors and all 15 of the councils it controlled going into the election, among the worst results in the party’s history. Shadow chief Treasury secretary Richard Fuller said Reform UK would soon find out there are “no simple answers” to local public finances and have to make “difficult choices”. The public will then “hold them to account for the decisions they make,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.