Party and candidate material for the 2024 local elections

Congratulations to Salford Council, the winner of Democracy Club’s inaugural “best mayoral election booklet cover”.

We’ve collected as much information as we can about candidates and political parties standing for election on 2 May in England and Wales. This blog contains a short round-up of this information. Find out who’s on your ballot by entering your postcode below.

PCCs and Mayors

As our recent blog on voter information explained, Police and Crime Commissioner elections are served by a website, while voters in mayoral elections are each provided with an information booklet. All of these resources have now been published.

Police and Crime Commissioners

Candidate addresses for the Police and Crime Commissioner Elections have been published on ChooseMyPCC.org.uk. We’ve added these to WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk.

If you want these details in alternative formats, you can order them here.

Mayoral booklets

We are hosting copies of each mayoral election booklet on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk. You can view each PDF booklet below. Note that in order to include their address in the booklet, a candidate had to contribute towards the printing costs.¹

East Midlands
Greater Manchester
Greater London
Liverpool City Region
North East
Salford Council
South Yorkshire
Tees Valley
West Midlands
West Yorkshire
York and North Yorkshire

On the telly

The big four parties have each published a party election broadcast for the 2 May polls:

Conservative
Green
Labour
Liberal Democrats

Who publishes a local manifesto?

With a relatively small number of council areas holding elections this year, we set ourselves the task of finding every single local manifesto we could. We attach these to candidate profiles on WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk, to give voters as much information as possible.

While all the major parties will hold a local election campaign launch with some eye-catching announcements, none of the ‘big four’ have published a national manifesto for these local elections. This they leave to their local party organisations, with mixed results (‘manifesto’ is surprisingly difficult to define. While some council groups produce a full multi-page document, many only post general bullet-point ‘plans’ - we’ve collected both types).

For the 107 council areas holding elections on 2 May, we’ve found 31 local manifestos from Labour, 20 from the Green party, 19 from the Liberal Democrats, and 10 from the Conservatives. Voters in two councils are privileged to have manifestos from all four main parties: Cambridge and Tunbridge Wells. This search only covers council-wide manifestos published online - it’s likely there are others which have not been added to the internet.

Of the smaller parties, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition has published a policy platform for the elections, while Reform UK has not. We’ve also found 17 other manifesto/ policy documents from among the 95 other parties standing candidates in these elections.

On the other hand, many local parties don’t update their website for the elections. Most maintain some social media channels, but of course these aren’t accessible to everyone. This is a constant source of frustration to voters, as our feedback shows.

You can view our sheet of all the local party details we’ve collected here (and please let us know if you spot any errors!).

Header image copyright Salford Council.
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