Labour wins decisive victory in Greater Manchester mayoral byelection

Bev Craig succeeds Andy Burnham and wins back support in areas where Reform made gains in May

Labour has stormed to a decisive victory in the Greater Manchester mayoral byelection, seizing back areas that recently fell to Reform UK and the Greens.

Labour’s Bev Craig, the Manchester city council leader, will now succeed Andy Burnham and hold one of the most powerful political positions outside Westminster.

Labour won 47% of first-preference votes, with Reform UK way behind on 21% and the Greens in third on 12%.

The contest took place under the supplementary vote system, meaning that, as no candidate achieved more than 50%, voters’ second preferences were counted.

When voters’ second choices were counted and other parties were eliminated, Labour’s share rose to 66.3% and Reform UK’s to 33.7%.

In her victory speech at Co-op Live in Manchester, Craig urged society to “move away from divisive politics that try to pit neighbour against neighbour”.

The scale of the victory is a significant boost for the new prime minister, suggesting Labour can win back both left- and right-leaning voters who deserted the party under Keir Starmer.

It also poses troubling questions for Nigel Farage, whose party has surrendered its year-long lead in the national polls and is in a deepening crisis over questions about its funding.

A poll last month had Labour and Reform UK virtually neck and neck in the battle for the mayoralty.

In the May elections, Farage’s party won more than 100 seats across Greater Manchester, including all but one of the 25 up for grabs in Wigan – the borough of Burnham’s new constituency – and 18 out of 19 in Tameside, both once solidly Labour areas.

However, Farage scuppered the party’s mayoral campaign when he announced he was standing down as an MP in order to fight a self-imposed parliamentary byelection in Clacton after scrutiny over his funding.

Before the result was officially declared, Labour sources said it had won in every ward in boroughs including Bury, Tameside and all but one in Trafford, where both Reform UK and the Greens made inroads in May.

In Oldham, where Reform UK gained 13 councillors and ended Labour’s 15-year grip on power two months ago, Labour won 17 of the 20 wards in the mayoral contest, it is understood. Sources said Labour had won every ward in Gorton and Denton, the constituency won by the Green party’s Hannah Spencer in February.

One senior Labour source said it looked as if Reform UK had “massively underperformed” and that the result was a combination of Burnham’s prime ministership signalling “you can vote Labour again” and voters feeling confident they could vote for Craig.

The result will also worry Reform UK as its hard-right rival Restore Britain won 8.7% of the vote to beat the Conservatives into fourth place. Rupert Lowe’s anti-immigration party, which only launched six months ago, focused its campaign on child sexual abuse gangs and its approach appeared to pay off, taking a share of Reform UK’s vote while potentially galvanising lapsed voters who might otherwise have stayed at home. Its support was strongest in more deprived outer boroughs like Tameside, where Restore got 14% of the vote – almost 6,000 voters – and Rochdale and Oldham where it won 12%.

Speaking from the podium after the result was announced just after 11pm on Friday, Craig said that during the campaign she had met “fantastic people doing incredible things against the odds every single day – rejecting the politics of hate but standing with their neighbours, looking out for each other”.

For the Greens, which won 7% of the vote against Burnham when the Greater Manchester mayoralty was last contested in 2024, the result may be a disappointment after its recent electoral successes.

Geraldine Coggins, the Green party candidate, said she was pleased with its campaign and that there had been a “surge” of support for the party under Zack Polanski’s leadership.

She claimed the result was “not a ringing endorsement” of Craig, comparing her 47% vote share with Burnham who never won less than 60% of the vote in each of his three victories since 2017.

“The fact this has even gone to the second round is devastating for them,” Coggins said. “To have lost this much support in the honeymoon period of a new prime minister is not a positive sign for them.”

The contest was triggered by Burnham winning the Makerfield byelection on 18 June, meaning he had to step down as mayor of the most powerful combined authority outside London.

The byelection was the biggest contest of its kind in British political history, with more than 2 million eligible voters.

However, the turnout was down on previous Greater Manchester mayoral contests – only 25%, the third lowest of any mayoral byelection to date – due to a combination of low voter awareness and it taking place in the summer holidays.