A sit-down with Laura Evans, Conservative candidate for Greater Manchester Mayor
By Local Democracy Reporting Service
22nd Apr 2024 | Local Features
By Ethan Davies
"Andy Burnham has levelled up city centre Manchester, but he hasn't levelled up the rest," Conservative mayoral candidate Laura Evans says pointedly.
She's speaking from her favourite Starbucks on Quay Street in the city centre. It's a patch she knows well from running IT firm Fathom with her husband Nathan, who is the Conservative leader in the borough of Trafford, where the pair live.
Evans chose the location because she's also meeting a Spinningfields resident who's unhappy with the way that Manchester council have put restrictions on motorists on Deansgate and Bridge Street, which he says is causing congestion outside his front door. Earlier in the day, she'd been in Castleton to speak to residents unhappy with the new cycle lanes.
Disparities from borough-to-borough in Greater Manchester and the 'war on motorists' are two of the issues she hopes will resonate with voters in her bid to take the role former Leigh MP and Health Secretary Burnham has held since 2017.
Laura Evans carries out this campaigning duty while donning some exclusive merchandise — a navy blue windcheater with 'BACK LAURA EVANS' emblazoned on her back. It also features a smaller Conservative party logo, and there are only three such garments in the world — a long coat, mid-length raincoat, and a shorter jacket.
The Tory candidates knows what the campaign trail entails. She was previously a councillor for the Village ward, covering Timperley from 2011 to 2018. To take that seat, she defeated a Liberal Democrat – something that hadn't been done there since 1994 – by just 61 votes. When she stood again, she won by a margin 10 times larger of 682 votes. Evans chose to stand down for the 2019 local elections.
That being said, she's on less supportive ground in Manchester itself, as it's about as anti-Tory as it gets, with the party last having a councillor here in 2010.
Indeed, you have to go back to 1990 to find more than 10 Conservatives on Manchester council, and 1983 to find a Tory winning a Parliamentary seat in the city, when Fred Silvester won his final term as Manchester Withington MP. He was defeated by Labour in 1987.
A mother of grown-up children, Laura Evans wasn't supposed to be the Tory candidate. Initially, the party selected Dan Barker to be their man — but he defected to Reform after complaining about the amount of funding grandees would grant him.
That left the door open for Evans, who didn't take part in the selection process initially due to 'ill health'. In many ways, she's a safe bet for the party: she stood for the Greater Manchester mayoralty in 2021 and picked up one in five votes, has experience of local government in Trafford, and she was part of the 'ReThink GM' campaign which railed against the original Clean Air Zone plan put forward – which was then abandoned.
In more recent years, she's questioned the new Places for Everyone plan — the controversial development blueprint that was approved by nine boroughs in March, 10 years after it started — over how much of the green belt it was eating up. Laura Evans is also fervently pro-business.
That's why she says wants 'entice business here' in order to 'increase the supply and share we can spend on people in Greater Manchester and deliver better results'. She adds that her Greater Manchester would be safer, more self-sufficient so the mayor doesn't have to go to the government for cash to keep the buses cheap, and benefit from more transparency on how section 106 money — funds developers pay directly to council – is spent.
There are also promises to review the aforementioned Places for Everyone plan and intervene in the homeless-prison 'revolving door' cycle, as she calls it. But the day one goal is to 'take down the cameras and close down Labour's Clean Air Zone'.
After that, there will be a 'halt the half-baked Low Traffic Neighbourhoods scheme' to 'end this war on motorists', followed by a full review of the accounts.
How achievable her policies will be remains unclear. Some — like the section 106 pledge — would require intervention in an authority the mayor doesn't have formal jurisdiction over. Others — like cleaning up the streets — don't appear fully fleshed out. And a third category— like 'diggers in the ground finishing Metro links' — are a matter of finishing off work started by Labour incumbent Andy Burnham.
And speaking of the current mayor, it becomes apparent that Laura Evans' flagship line is that she's firmly anti-Andy.
Referring to what she claims is Burnham's failure to ensure prosperity and opportunity is more evenly spread across Greater Manchester, she adds: "We've got no-one to challenge what is a bit of a cabal around Greater Manchester of Labour marking Labour's homework."
That's why his flagship policy, the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate (aka MBacc) would be scrapped by Evans 'for creating another layer of problems' where someone 'can take an exam that is not as recognised' in other parts of the country. Mr Burnham's office would argue that the MBacc doesn't involve its own exams, it's a programme designed to prime teenagers into a specific career path with a combination of GCSEs.
A week later, Laura Evans appeared at the Manchester Evening News hustings and again spoke passionately about her belief to level up the entire city-region, not pockets near Manchester city centre. "All of [our boroughs] need investment," she said in her closing statement.
"I am telling you we have had 57 percent of the housing investment fund go into city centre Manchester. That cannot be right. So we have seven years of evidence of how it has been working – or we have the opportunity for change. That's why I am asking you to vote for me on May 2."
For all her criticism of Mr Burnham, overhauling his lead is a daunting task. He won 67.3 percent of the vote in 2021. Evans won 19.6 percent.
She thinks that was because Burnham 'didn't engage enough people' in that election, explaining why turnout was only 34.7 percent. But when it's suggested to Evans that she was part of the 2021 race and shares responsibility for engaging the public, she admits she has an uphill task again.
"I think it's very difficult because people are tired of broken promises, so therefore if you do have somebody like myself who's very dedicated, you get tarnished as another politician," she says, before pointing out that 2024 independent candidate Nick Buckley stood for Reform three years ago and citing her record on challenging Places for Everyone and the Clean Air Zone.
In some ways, her answer is an admission of the challenge Evans faces. She knows she faces an incumbent with a significant lead.
She knows her ability to chip into it could be hampered by the views of voters that opinion polls suggest find the Conservative government unpopular. She also knows she must do all that in a Labour-dominated city-region.
It all points to her best hope being Laura vs Andy contest, rather than Labour vs Tory.
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