To understand why Marlon West is standing to become Greater Manchester mayor, you first have to understand what happened to his daughter.

"Scarlett was groomed from the age of 14," he says as we sit down to talk in Stockport.

"Prior to that, a good kid, owned her own horse, loved her horse, spent all weekend with it and after school. And then she was groomed." Scarlett, now 21, spoke to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) alongside her father in 2024, waiving her right to anonymity to tell her story.

Since then, both have spoken publicly about what happened.

Her case featured in the Baird Inquiry, which examined the experiences of women and girls arrested and taken into police custody in Greater Manchester. The inquiry found Scarlett "went missing and was raped" in 2019 by a man referred to as Adult 4. It also found another man, known as Adult 5, groomed her, with Scarlett describing being driven to hotels to take drugs and have sex.

It found she was made to strip to her underwear at Bury police station after being arrested on suspicion of involvement in a car robbery in August 2019. She did not have an appropriate adult with her.

The report also concluded Scarlett "didn't feel believed" by Greater Manchester Police after the grooming and that the force "did not effectively protect her" from frightening late-night visits by men to her home. The experience has shaped almost everything Marlon West has done since.

Last year he was approached by Restore Britain and asked whether he would help with the party's own rape gang inquiry. He agreed.

After Andy Burnham's victory in the Makerfield by-election, attention quickly turned to the race to replace him as Greater Manchester mayor. The LDRS first revealed West was expected to become Restore Britain's candidate before the party confirmed his selection days later.

The experience of fighting for his daughter, he says, is the reason he entered politics.

"The experience I had as a parent was horrific, so you can imagine what Scarlett went through, it was on a completely different level.

"She was trafficked, raped, tortured, and when I say trafficked, not just Greater Manchester, across the country. People might be surprised to hear she's not the only teenage girl from Manchester this has happened to, it is happening to hundreds.

"What I quickly realised afterwards, I wasn't getting anywhere with local authorities or Greater Manchester Police, and then I started my campaign.

"My experience, and many other parents, obviously I speak to parents all over the country and survivors, my experience with that was they didn't care. I got no support whatsoever, in fact, local authority social workers actually made it worse for me."

He says there were nights when Scarlett would leave the house at 11pm and he would spend hours driving around looking for her, knocking on doors until the early hours before getting up for work the next morning as a clinical lead in nursing.

He remembers social workers telling Scarlett, in front of him, that her father could not stop her leaving the house if she wanted to.

"It went on for at least 18 months, two years, until Scarlett confirmed that [she was being groomed], and that made me really poorly, because it just confirmed my deepest fears.

"I had constant anxiety, butterflies, feeling sick, I lost a lot of weight, I wasn't eating, just worrying. At the time I was the clinical lead of nursing, and trying to safeguard other patients and support staff, I don't know how I got through it if I'm honest with you."

We met outside a pub in Stockport town centre after Restore Britain's media team had spent the morning filming around Greater Manchester.

The interview had originally been due to be recorded on video. On the day, that changed. Eventually a compromise was reached. Marlon's comments on child sexual exploitation could be filmed, but the rest of the interview would not.

When we arrived just after 1pm, pints were already on the table and cigarettes were lit. Members of the Restore team had just returned from Piccadilly Gardens, which more than one described as somewhere they had "never seen anything like" in London.

They had planned to catch a train back to the capital later that afternoon, but decided to stay another day to film more campaign footage.

Once the cameras stopped rolling, West opened a folder containing the key points of his mayoral campaign. Child sexual exploitation came first. It sits at the heart of West's campaign.

If elected, he wants to create a dedicated taskforce within Greater Manchester Police to investigate historic cases and present its findings to Parliament.

Andy Burnham commissioned reports into historic child sexual exploitation in Manchester, Oldham and Rochdale during his time as mayor. Those inquiries exposed serious failings in the way authorities responded to victims. So what would another taskforce achieve?

"More money invested, more police on the street," West replies.

"We'll have summits for women, in every borough on a regular basis, and we'll actually listen to what the women and girls are saying, and take that forward.

"We need the public to also support this with evidence if I'm honest with you.

"A lot of the women and girls that I'm speaking to don't have any trust in the mayor's office, in the GMCA, or GMP, we need to gain that quickly.

"Because I'm not a career politician, we will gain that trust more quickly than any other party."

Andy Burnham told the Manchester Evening News during the Makerfield by-election that he wished he could have ordered a stronger inquiry but simply did not have the powers to do so. How, then, could West go any further if he became mayor?

"I think we've already done it if I'm honest with you," he says. "We've got the rape gang inquiry which has been published under Restore Britain."

It is a bold claim about a 200-page report which, as West himself acknowledges, has no statutory powers.

Child sexual exploitation may be the issue that brought him into politics, but it is not the only one he wants to campaign on.

"We need to come back to common sense," he says, summing up the approach he would take as mayor.

"It's no hidden story, I'm far from a career politician, but I care about Manchester, I've worked in Manchester all my career, I was a community mental health nurse, and I've done that for 30 years around Manchester, I genuinely care."

He believes too much attention has been focused on Manchester city centre while towns across Greater Manchester have been left behind.

Traffic congestion is one example. West argues that roads in parts of the city region are already at a standstill and fears further housebuilding on green belt land will only make the problem worse.

Transport is another issue he returns to repeatedly.

He says too many journeys between the boroughs remain slow and unreliable, pointing to routes such as Tameside to Stockport. He also wants greater scrutiny of whether the Bee Network is delivering what it promised.

Housing is another priority.

Rather than focusing solely on building new homes, West believes more should be done to bring empty properties back into use.

"One of the things we need to start looking at is [empty] properties, the number of properties which are either housing association or council-run, and start utilising them.

"We are looking at the moment at what the exact numbers of them are across Greater Manchester.

"There's a reason why a lot of these people are homeless. It's not just they choose to be homeless, mental health is a big one, but also debt and being unable to manage the money.

"So it's not just about sticking them in a room and saying, your homelessness. There has to be a package that goes into that, and then intervention. What I'd call that is a recovery model. What I mean by that is teaching them, but also teaching them to take responsibility to maintain homes."

Asked about the cost of living, West avoids making promises he says are beyond the powers of a mayor.

"I am not going to make any false promises. There is a much bigger picture there. Cost of fuel, national trade. What I would do, and I think any politician would do this to be fair, would still put the government under pressure to address this more economically, because it seems to me it's always the working class who are losing out.

"Doing a big shop now, you need a second mortgage. You dread your gas and electric bill coming in, car insurance. We all, everybody is experiencing this."

West's background in nursing is never far from his politics.

Born in Gee Cross, he studied fashion design at Tameside College before his father, a builder, encouraged him to take up an apprenticeship in woodwork instead.

He eventually found his way into mental health nursing, spending more than 30 years working across Greater Manchester.

The experience still shapes how he talks about public services, particularly the NHS.

He believes scrapping bursaries for student nurses under the previous Conservative government damaged recruitment, even though the policy was later reversed.

"Even in Greater Manchester, we could look at making it more palatable to become a nurse or a doctor and reasons for staying."

Policing is another area where he says he would act quickly if elected.

"If I became mayor, then there'd be a thorough assessment of all Greater Manchester Police.

"And, you know, obviously there's a team behind you with GMCA, and then I would make that decision with a team when we had the data."

That assessment, he says, would include the future of Chief Constable Sir Stephen Watson.

"I wouldn't rule out sacking him. But I also wouldn't rule out keeping him."

He continues: "I've got massive concerns. And it's not just, not just about grooming, it's Piccadilly Gardens, anti-social behaviour.

"The behaviour of the police officers and their attitude of the police officers towards the public.

"But again, there would definitely be a full assessment. That would be my first day in there, and looking at that in detail."

After around half an hour, Restore Britain's press team brought the interview to a close.

They headed back out to continue filming campaign material around Greater Manchester.

West's own political journey has not followed a straightforward path.

He says he voted Labour before later backing the Conservatives. Last year he became campaign manager for Restore Britain's candidate Rebecca Shepherd in the Makerfield by-election, where she finished third behind Labour and Reform UK with more than 3,000 votes.

Restore Britain itself was founded by former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe as a political movement before becoming a party in February this year. Among its headline policies are scrapping diversity initiatives across government departments and arguing that mass migration has been a disaster for Britain.

Much of that broader political message barely surfaced during our conversation.

Instead, West repeatedly returned to the experiences of his daughter, his years working as a mental health nurse and what he sees as the failures of public services in Greater Manchester. Whether that is enough to convince voters remains to be seen.

The election on July 30 is expected to be the closest contest Greater Manchester has seen for the mayoralty, with polling suggesting Labour and Reform UK are the frontrunners.

For Restore Britain, West's campaign will be another test of whether the party can turn national attention into local votes.

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