Local elections this week will give England its greatest ever opportunity to vote for co-operation in their local communities.

The Co-operative Party’s 99 year old pact with Labour to stand joint Labour and Co-operative Party candidates has culminated in the Co-op Party fielding 1,100 candidates for election on Thursday.

This is a record high for our party, surpassing our previous highs of 1,000 candidates and reaching a new high of contesting 22% of seats across the English local elections landscape.

As a party, we are moving from contesting one in every five seats towards contesting one in every four seats, and we will continue on this road next year as we celebrate 100 years of our electoral pact and 110 years as a party.

Co-operators are standing for election in 119 councils, almost 90% of all councils electing this year, including in three council mayoral races in Croydon, Hackney and Lewisham.

Each candidate will be offering co-operative values, principles, ideas and solutions to their local electorate – from renewable energy to local ownership, from pride in place to community wealth building – real, tangible and proven successful policies.

Beyond our radical and deliverable policy offer, our candidates are representative of our communities and the country. Measured against the most recent demographic data available (credit: Fawcett Society, April 2024), the Co-operative Party is leading the way on gender balance, with 44% of Co-op candidates being women.

This measures against Labour and Greens at 41%, with other parties trailing on 33% (Lib Dems), 29% (Conservative) and 22% (Reform UK).

The party has long called for more diversity in local government and launched its Diverse Councils Declaration a number of years ago, and we hope this is contributing to diversifying our candidate base.

We can now report that our BAME representation has increased by 16 percentage points from 2025 to 2026 now making up a third of our candidate base, our LGBTQ+ has increased by 4%, though disappointingly our Disabled representation has fallen by 2% year on year with over a fifth of our candidates declared as such.

Representative local government makes for better decision-making for everyone in society and we are delighted to be fielding our largest and one of our most diverse field of candidates the party has ever produced, and we thank each and every co-operator who is putting themselves forward for election.