The report can be downloaded from Our Publications page.

A brief news item in the Bristol Post, following on from the launch, can be found here.

The Prospects report is only the first part of our research. It found that many people in the city had high expectations of the move to Mayoral governance. One of our key aims is to follow up on the prospects study later in the year to see whether these expectations were borne out by experience.

For those who are not able to join us we will be livetweeting the launch from our twitter account -  @BrisCivLdrPrj – to the hashtag #bristolmayor.

The report will be available to download from this site from Friday.

You can find more detail of the voting and links to videos of the declaration and acceptance speeches here.

A new era begins …

Mayor of Bristol George Ferguson arrives for his first morning at Bristol City Hall (via Bristol City Council)

George Ferguson (31,321 votes), and Marvin Rees (25,896 votes) proceed to the next round of counting, while all other 13 candidates are eliminated. The top two candidates received about 63% of the vote between them. To have won without going to a second round, a candidate would have needed 45,137 votes. George Ferguson was 13,816 votes short of this figure.

The number of spoiled ballot papers was 1,117, about 1.2%. Most of these were rejected for either marking more than one candidate as first preference, or not having a first preference at all.

The overall turnout for the mayoral election in Bristol was 27.92%. This is about 4% higher than the turnout in the referendum in May on whether to have a mayor. Across Bristol, there is considerable variation in participation in the election, with 7 wards with a turnout of below 15% (St George East, Southmead, Bishopsworth, Filwood, Hartcliffe, Hengrove, and Whitchurch Park). The lowest turnout recorded was in Hartcliffe, at 11.21%. Conversely, there are eight wards with a turnout of over 30% (Henleaze, Stoke Bishop, Westbury on Trym, Southville, Ashley, Bishopston, Clifton, and Redland). The highest turnout was recorded in Henleaze, at 42.62%. These ward figures do not include votes cast by post, which accounted for 29.64% of the overall turnout.

For the Police and Crime Commissioner election in Avon and Somerset, the overall turnout was 19.59%. Bristol recorded the highest turnout of any of the local authority areas, at 27.48% (marginally lower than in the mayoral election). Sedgemoor District Council recorded the lowest turnout, at 14.35%. Votes cast by post in this election counted for 32.84% of turnout.

Bristol Fawcett has gone a step further than quizzing candidates on the day and drawn up a document which rates each of the main candidates on the positions they have taken in relation to women’s issues and supporting women’s equality.  You can find the document here.

The event was chaired by Alex Marsh. It featured presentations by Dr Catherine Durose (University of Birmingham), Professor Colin Copus (De Montfort University), Professor Gary Bridge (University of Bristol), and Dr Helen Mott (Bristol Fawcett).

You can find a useful blogpost reviewing the event over at the Bristol Democracy Project.

Robin also contributed to BBC Radio4′s World at One feature on the Bristol mayoral election (30th October). He points out the merits of making the more ambitious move to a metro mayor and notes the international trend towards elected mayors.  You can listen here starting at 28m 05s.