Just one party in the city is campaigning to keep the elected mayor in the referendum next month.
The Labour Party will be campaigning for the mayoral system, with all the other main parties in the city calling to scrap it. The city will be going to the polls on Thursday, May 5, to decide whether to scrap the mayoral system after opposition councillors had a victory in City Hall in December 2021.
A majority of elected members of Bristol City Council backed a motion to hold a legally-binding second referendum to decide how the council should be run from 2024 onwards. The vote will take place 10 years after the first referendum, which created the post of Mayor of Bristol in 2012.
The referendum in May 2022 will offer Bristolians the choice of keeping an elected mayor or going back to the committee system of governance, which was in place prior to 2000.
Read more: Key dates for Bristol Mayoral referendum
Here is what the city's main parties had to say on their position ahead of the referendum:
Labour Party
Bristol is being asked to choose its leadership model for the next decade. The choice is between a mayoral system or a series of committees making decisions for Bristol.
The Labour Party will be campaigning for the mayoral system. Having a mayor means there is an elected, accountable, visible figurehead for the city that Bristolians can hire and fire. Under a committee system, you lose your vote – you would have no way of choosing your council’s leader and no way of removing them.
Having a mayor has allowed us to break the political deadlock that held Bristol back. The 2020s are a crucial decade for Bristol.
The climate and housing crises need urgent action – action we won’t get if even the most minor of policies have to be accepted by all five political parties in cross-party committees of squabbling councillors. We can’t risk our city returning to the days of the failed committee system, becoming a city with constant leadership changes and political deadlock.
Green Party
The Green Party supports changing the Mayoral system for one that’s more democratic, accountable and transparent. Bristol’s current system gives one person almost total control.
It lets them bulldoze ahead while ignoring public opinion and scrutiny. Opposition voices are excluded, and different views are ignored.
This model works very well for those who have the Mayor’s ear, but not for the rest of us. One person shouldn’t be allowed to decide what is best for everyone else.
We believe in consensus politics. All votes matter, not just those cast for a single person or party. Power must be shared.
Decisions should be made with communities, because they’re the ones who live with the consequences. Changing to a committee system will bring more community voices to the table, and allow us to plan a better future, together as a city.
Liberal Democrats
Bristol’s Lib Dems fought hard for the city to have a right to hold a referendum to review the system, and for the referendum to happen. We believe that a committee system will deliver a better Bristol.
10 years of the mayoral system in practice have exposed its flaws and failed to deliver the benefits that advocates of the system promised. In addition, there have been a number of changes since that decision was made, not least the move to “all up” elections and the change to first-past-the-post for any future mayoral elections.
Continuing to elect a single individual – most likely with a minority of the vote - to exercise executive power at a time when Bristol’s politics have become more plural will lead to councillors and the public becoming ever more alienated and disenfranchised. A committee system will allow more voices, from across the city, to be heard.
Conservative Party
This May, Bristolians will finally get the opportunity to cast their own verdict on a system of rule which was introduced nearly ten years ago and has led to some very controversial decisions. Suffice to say many of the supposed positives did not translate or survive long once they met political reality. For example, there have been no financial savings arising from this reform.
The political landscape has also shifted considerably since 2012 following the move to more stable all-out elections every four years and creation of the Regional Mayor. The creation of this body has rendered the role of a City Mayor largely superfluous.
However, by far the greatest weakness in this model – which paradoxically is also said to be its biggest strength – is an almost complete absence of any checks and balances on the executive powers of the Mayor. Here the most obvious example was the unilateral decision to move the planned Bristol Arena away from its dedicated and preferred central location to the outskirts of the city. But we also had the disastrous investment in Bristol Energy.
We hope Bristol voters will choose to bring an end to this radical but fatally flawed experiment in local democracy.
The Knowle Community Party
The Knowle Community Party are campaigning strongly to rid the city of the Mayor system. We are using our own material, which explains why things have gone wrong, and also material from the its our city cross party campaign which we are involved with.
We have been involved right from the beginning with the amendment to the parliamentary legislation that has made this vote possible. The council’s own quality of life survey shows 50.5% for change and 23.5% for the mayor system in our ward.
This is not surprising given, amongst other matters, the attack upon our swimming pool, the new attempt to grab our local parks funds and the arena . The crucial matter will be persuading enough people to actually come out and vote.
