Candidates and manifestos in the 2026 local and devolved elections

Scottish and Welsh parliamentary elections, and English local elections, will be held on 7 May 2026. We’ve collected details on all the candidates and as many manifestos as we could find to equip voters with everything they need to vote.

Find your ballot on WhoCanIVoteFor!

Find out how many candidates are standing in the English principal council and town and parish council elections.

Now we are ten

2026 is the tenth English local election Democracy Club has covered, which means we’ve now got a decade of candidate data to look back on (note that there were no local elections in 2020 due to the COVID lockdown).

As has been noted elsewhere, British politics has undergone something of a transformation in the last two years. More parties are putting up more candidates than ever before. This manifested in the 2024 general election, when no constituency had fewer than five candidates. Now, for the second year running, the number of candidates per seat in the English local elections has reached 4.9, up from 3.8 only two years ago.

Last year marked the first time in modern history that a party other than Labour or the Conservatives fielded the most candidates. This year is the first in which the Green party has fielded more candidates than the Liberal Democrats - despite the latter also increasing its candidate count when compared with the last time these seats were contested in 2022. In the May 2022 London local elections, for example, the Greens and Lib Dems fielded candidates for 47% and 72% of seats respectively; this year they are fighting 84% and 83%.

Scotland and Wales manifestos

The Scottish and Welsh parliaments are up for election this year. 30 parties are standing candidates in Scotland, and 16 in Wales. We’ve collected the details of all of them, including manifestos where published. You can view all of these details on WhoCanIVoteFor, or browse them in this sheet.

English mayoral booklets

Six local authority mayors are up for election this year. If the candidates agree, the council can produce an information booklet for voters, in which the candidates can pay for a double-page spread. This year, booklets have been produced in five London boroughs. Meanwhile in Watford the candidates have agreed to not issue a booklet. Instead the council has put their details on their website.

Croydon (not yet online)
Tower Hamlets
Lewisham
Newham
Hackney

Local parties and manifestos

As well as collecting national party details, we also attempt to provide voters with information on local party groups, so they can understand what each party is promising to do if elected to run their council. Many local parties produce manifestos. These can be essential for understanding party policies and measuring accountability, but they are also often difficult to find! For the upcoming local elections, we’ve collected manifestos and linked them to candidate profiles on WhoCanIVoteFor, to inform voters of local policies.

By 29 April, we gathered 148 manifestos through a search of local party websites and social media. These documents were published by 115 separate local party groups. You can view the full collection of manifestos in this sheet.

Across the manifestos collected, clear patterns emerge concerning the availability and accessibility of local manifestos.

There is significant regional variation in the volume of local manifestos published, with London leading at 85 manifestos, followed by the South East with 27. We were unable to find any manifestos published online for the East Midlands during our search - but then, this region has only one council up for election.

This trend is likely related to election cycles. Parties demonstrate a higher tendency to publish manifestos in councils holding ‘all-out’ elections, accounting for 113 of the manifestos collected, while councils electing seats by halves or thirds, account for six and 29 manifestos respectively. This helps to explain the greater output of local manifestos in London where the boroughs hold all-out elections every four years.

Alongside regional differences, local manifestos are also varied by format. Dedicated website pages account for 93 of the manifestos collected and range from bullet point lists to interactive slides. PDFs account for 53 of the manifestos collected and vary significantly in length from a single page image by the Sheffield Green Party, to over 30 pages from the Preston Liberal Democrats.

We could only find 2 Easy Read manifestos during our collection. These were produced by Milton Keynes Labour and the Islington Green Party. Easy read formats use simplified language, include visual aids, and are designed with accessibility needs in mind.

In addition to manifesto data, we have compiled local party website URLs, though the volume varies by party. We have observed that some parties, notably Reform, tend to prioritise social media platforms to engage voters, reflecting different strategies. This may also explain the small number of Reform manifestos we have collected. View the full list of local parties.

Common Themes

We analysed the frequency of key policies within the manifestos collected, drawing on YouGov insights to understand whether party manifestos align with public priorities.