Elections and campaigning

All the local elections which had been due to take place in England and Wales on 7th May 2020 have been put back a year and will now take place on 6th May 2021.

This will include Police and Crime Commissioners, Metro Mayors of the West Midlands and Greater Manchester, and a host of other elections for directly elected mayors and for councillors.

Existing office-bearers will have their terms extended.

This is obviously going to be incredibly frustrating for a lot of people. - I spoke on the phone this evening to one constituency Conservative chairman who with his team had put out a vast amount of literature for the May elections and had already printed a lot more with specific dates on it, all of which is now useless, and who agreed vigorously when I suggested he must be feeling as sick as a parrot. The same will apply to members of all the other parties and to independent candidates, some of whom will have had large sums of their own money wasted.

There was a suggestion to defer the May 2020 elections until August: however it is entirely possible that the Coronavirus situation will not be resolved by then, and the last thing that candidates need is to have the elections postponed a second time and a lot of money and effort wasted twice. Putting them back a year to coincide with the 2021 elections such as those for County Councils is the least disruptive option.

There are a number of by-elections due, and where these have not already been called I imagine that officials will be looking hard at whether they can be postponed or avoided. Hint - if you live in an area where a local councillor has resigned or died, it would be a really good idea not to sign any requests to call a by-election until the Coronavirus situation is over.

Local-by-elections in March which have already been called are, however, going ahead. The electoral commission has directed that the by-election for the Whitehaven Central ward on Copeland Borough council, triggered when a Labour councillor elected only last May was automatically sacked for failing to attend a single council meeting for six months, will go ahead on 26th March.

Obviously campaigning in these times presents unique challenges. Copeland Conservatives had stopped canvassing after last Thursday's announcements: the Conservative party has now announced this evening that all doorstep campaigning including leaflet delivery will be suspended until further notice. We will continue to campaign online.

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