Four Combined Authority mayors will be elected on 1 May 2025, but changes to the rules could see mayors taking power with little public support locally.
Voters are going to the polls in the following areas: Cambridgeshire & Peterborough; West of England (covering Bristol; South Gloucestershire; Bath & North East Somerset); Hull & East Yorkshire; Greater Lincolnshire. The first two areas will be electing mayors for a third time, whilst the latter two areas will be voting for newly created positions.
After May’s elections there will be 13 Combined Authority mayors across England, with the other nine mayors representing the following areas: North East; Tees Valley; York & North Yorkshire; West Yorkshire; South Yorkshire; Greater Manchester; Liverpool City Region; East Midlands; West Midlands. In addition, there is an elected mayor of Greater London, who heads the Greater London Authority, of which the directly elected London Assembly is also a part.
Combined Authorities are formed by combining a number of local authority areas. For example, the North East Combined Authority mayor is elected by voters from across seven local council areas: Northumberland; Durham; Gateshead; Newcastle-upon-Tyne; North Tyneside; South Tyneside; Sunderland.
More Mayors are coming
The UK government has made it clear that is sees Combined Authority mayors, with strengthened powers, as a key part of their plans for devolution within England. Indeed, the English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, indicates the government’s wish to ‘complete the map’ of English devolution with a ‘strong preference that in filling the map, places do so with a Mayor over a strategic geography’. Alongside this, the white paper indicates that ‘we will give Mayors strong new powers over housing, planning, transport, energy, skills, employment support and more, backed up with integrated and consolidated funding’.
It is clear that many more of these increasingly powerful mayors will be created over the next few years, with plans for six more to be elected as soon as May 2026 in the government’s ‘devolution priority’ areas: Cumbria; Cheshire & Warrington; Norfolk & Suffolk; Essex; Sussex & Brighton; Hampshire & Solent.
Given that these directly elected figures look like becoming an increasingly important part of how England is governed, it is crucial that they come to power with as much democratic legitimacy as possible, something that can be facilitated by the voting system used to elect them.
They changed the way we elect the Mayors
Between 2000-2022, Combined Authority mayors, along with the Mayor of London, were elected via the Supplementary Vote (SV) system, where voters are able to give a first preference and second preference vote. If no candidate reached 50% of first preference votes, then the top two candidates would go through to a second round, where the second preference votes of eliminated candidates were examined and any cast in favour of either of the top two candidates distributed accordingly.
In 21 Combined Authority mayoral contests (including Mayor of London elections) conducted under SV, only once did the combined first and second preference votes of the winning candidate fall below 40% of all voters. Indeed, apart from that one exception in a particularly fragmented contest, the lowest combined first and second preference vote share of a winning candidate was received by the Conservative candidate in the 2017 Cambridgeshire & Peterborough mayoral election. They got the backing of 44.3% of all voters across first and second preferences.
First Past the Post means Mayors can sneak in on low support
Unfortunately, the previous UK government’s Elections Act 2022 changed the way mayors are elected, moving from the Supplementary Vote to First Past The Post (FPTP).
The first Combined Authority mayoral elections held under FPTP took place in 2024 and the consequences in terms of democratic legitimacy became immediately obvious. Five of the ten mayors up for election won power with vote shares lower than the Conservative candidate in the 2017 Cambridgeshire & Peterborough contest. Indeed, two mayors were elected with the support of fewer than 40% of all voters, including the Labour candidate in York & North Yorkshire, who was elected with the support of 35.1% of voters, the lowest support of any Combined Authority mayor to date.
As both Professor Rob Ford and Peter Kellner have noted, the highly fractured nature of current party support in Britain and the fact that multiple parties have a genuine chance of winning in each of the four Combined Authority mayoral elections that take place next week, makes it highly likely that a mayor well be elected with less public backing than the Labour candidate in York & North Yorkshire in 2024. It is even possible that mayors could be elected with the backing of fewer than 30% of voters.
We will keep a close eye on the results of the Combined Authority mayoral elections and use them as evidence to urge the government that these should be the last mayors elected under FPTP. A return to the Supplementary Vote is a minimum requirement, but ideally, the government should legislate for mayors to be elected via the Alternative Vote (AV). This would give voters the option to preference as many candidates as they wish, reduce wasted votes and ensure the winning candidate has the widest possible public backing.
Add your name to demand this government repair the damage and return to a fairer voting system
First Past the Post has no place in our town halls