On Thursday 30 July, the Greater Manchester electorate will be voting for a new Mayor to replace Andy Burnham.
The election will use the first-past-the-post voting system and follows Burnham's election as MP for Makerfield and appointment as Prime Minister, which required him to step down as Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Around 2.1 million registered voters across Greater Manchester's ten boroughs will be eligible to vote.
Seven candidates will be contesting the mayoralty with each of their key election priorities summarised below.
Geraldine Coggins – Green Party
Born in Dublin, Ireland, Coggins moved to England and established her family in Greater Manchester.
Before entering local politics full-time, she worked as a philosophy academic studying across the UK up to PhD level. She has spent eight years as a councillor.
Priorities
She has pledged a publicly owned provider to purchase and refurbish 10,000 existing homes alongside building 10,000 new public properties.
She calls for Westminster to grant regional powers to enforce rent controls.
She plans to introduce completely free bus travel for anyone under the age of 22.
Bev Craig – Labour Party
Craig is originally from Belfast and is both the first female and the first LGBTQ+ leader of Manchester City Council.
She graduated from the University of Manchester in 2007 with a degree in Politics and Modern History. She later gained a postgraduate degree in local government management from Warwick Business School, and a Master of Arts (MA) degree in public policy and governance.
Priorities
She is committed to completing and building out the Bee network to link buses, trams, and trains.
She has pledged to put more visible police officers on the streets to directly counter anti-social behaviour.
She is focused on putting financial investment back into local town centres and high streets.
She wants to establish free bus travel for 11- to 18-year-olds
Phil Eckersley – Conservative Party
Eckersley was born in Ashton-under-Lyne and grew up between Droylsden and Oldham. He is a councillor in Trafford where he serves as the deputy leader of the Conservative Group. He is a businessman who studied at the University of Manchester.
Priorities
He wants to make streets safer.
To restore trust in local leadership.
He opposes building on nature sites, making the strict protection of the green belt a central objective.
He is focused on housebuilding strictly onto brownfield sites to prevent swallowing up suburban green areas.
Marcus Farmer - Independent
Independent candidate Marcus Farmer is to stand in his third Greater Manchester mayoral election.
Priorities
He is critical of policies that prioritise private development over public housing.
He says he would introduce restrictions to prevent city skyscraper developments from being bought up by foreign pension funds.
Richard Kilpatrick - Liberal Democrats
Kilpatrick is a former schoolteacher who has been a councillor in the Didsbury area since 2018.
He was born and raised in Middlesbrough in the Northeast of England and attended Northumbria University.
Priorities
He aims to champion the care sector by utilizing mayoral skills budgets to fund and upskill social care workers.
He prioritises rebuilding public trust in politics by returning to community-led, local neighbourhood policing
Sian Astley - Reform UK
Astley is a television property expert and a graduate of the University of Manchester. She has been a business owner for 30 years.
Priorities
She pledges to open up the files on Greater Manchester’s historical child exploitation and grooming gang scandals.
She aims to curb the spread of Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs) being used by the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers.
She advocates for tripling the use of police stop-and-search powers to target knife crime and establishing a zero-tolerance approach to drug offences in Manchester city centre.
She pledges to cancel diversity, equity, and inclusion projects, reverse recent mayoral tax hikes, and review the costs linked to the region's Clean Air Zone
Marlon West - Restore Party
Marlon Scott West has worked as a mental health nurse in Greater Manchester for around 30 years.
He became publicly known after campaigning over the handling of his daughter's grooming and abuse case, accusing local authorities and police of failing to act despite repeated missing person reports.
On 18 July, West was handed an 18-month professional suspension by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) over social media comments concerning grooming gangs.
Priorities
He emphasises interventions to clean up high-crime hotspots like Piccadilly Gardens.
He campaigns heavily on a national platform of ‘mass deportation’ and independent grooming gang enquiries.
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