Mike Wright, Head of Communications
“It has been busy year for the ERS, as we’ve won a lot of media attention on our issues across 2025. Our team have worked with journalists across national and local media to provide in-depth analysis, opinion pieces and interviews, to make the case for electoral reform and push vital democratic issues higher up the news agenda to increase public support.”
The end of last year saw a sharp focus on electoral reform with coverage of our report on the 2024 general election, quickly followed by the Lib Dems’ Private Member’s Bill passing its first parliamentary vote, both of which saw the ERS quoted in the national press. Jess Garland later appeared on the Politics Home podcast to discuss whether PR can fix our broken politics. There was growing interest in the bill to remove the hereditary peers as well as political finance, with ERS being quoted in a Guardian investigation into dark money flowing into our politics. The ERS was also prominent in the debate over yet more peers being added to the House of Lords in the New Year’s list, with Darren highlighting its already ‘ludicrous size’ in the Mirror.
We garnered national press attention with our analysis of the local elections showing that Reform had received the ‘winner’s bonus’ under FPTP for the first time, which the Mirror and Guardian covered. Politico also wrote a long-read on how the electoral system was struggling to cope with multiparty politics, quoting Jess Garland on how FPTP is now ‘failing on its own terms’. Jess was quoted again in Politico on how the hereditary peers were ‘abusing their position’ to delay the bill to remove them. In Scotland, we laid the ground for the Dunfermline citizens’ assembly, with Willie writing an oped in the Herald on the lack of democracy in the new school fiasco on the Isle of Mull and in a front page piece in the Herald on how Scots trust political institutions that are closer to home. In Wales, Jess Blair led the charge on warnings that the next Senedd could the least representative of women ever, with coverage in Nation Cymru and the Pembrokeshire Herald. There was also growing interest over this period in votes at 16, with Darren going on LBC with Iain Dale and then Nick Ferrari to debate its merits.
The ERS was prominent in the coverage on the government’s announcement in the summer that it would be expanding the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds in the Elections Bill, with Darren quote in the BBC, FT and Mirror, among other outlets. Jess Blair and Jess Garland also did a host of broadcast outlets on the day, including BBC News, Nicky Campbell and LBC. In this period Darren was also profiled in the New Statesman as the ‘Kiwi who wants to fix Britain’s electoral system’. In Scotland, the successful government grant to lunch the Dunfermline citizens’ assembly was covered nationally and locally.
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