Who is the Green Party’s Manchester Mayoral Candidate Geraldine Coggins and what would she do as mayor?

The leader of Trafford Greens, Irish-born Geraldine Coggins, is now running for the biggest job in Manchester politics, the role of Greater Manchester mayor. But when she started out in 2010, she was trying to get the climate crisis to be taken more seriously and to elect Caroline Lucas as the Greens’ first MP.

She says she didn’t want to vote for any of the three parties running in the 2010 General Election. She also says she felt Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives “weren’t taking climate change seriously”. 

Convinced that the climate crisis was going to be “the biggest issue affecting our lives”, she joined the Green Party. 

Fifteen years later, as she launches her Green mayoral manifesto in the third heatwave of the summer so far, her point is proven right. 

‘Climate change isn’t being taken seriously’

Coggins tells Left Foot Forward she doesn’t think politicians are taking the climate crisis seriously now, either. When she became a Green councillor in Trafford in 2018, she tabled a motion declaring a climate emergency, making Trafford one of the first councils in the country to do so.

During her speech, she quoted Greta Thunberg, but had to explain to councillors who the then 15-year-old environmental activist was. Coggins says that before the pandemic “It felt like things were going in the right direction and all the attention was on the climate crisis, and then I think since Covid all of that has just been lost.”

The focus has shifted to the cost-of-living crisis instead, she argues. “But what we need to know is that these are the same problem and the solutions to one are the solutions to the other. Climate justice is social justice,” she says.

What are Coggins’ policies?

As mayor, Coggins says she would build a focus on climate and social justice into all of her policies. She has pledged to deliver 20,000 social homes that are cheap to heat. Coggins went hard on Burnham’s record of allocating £1.2 billion in loans to property developers, who delivered very little affordable housing.

She says that as mayor, she would not do what she claimed Burnham has done, which is “pour huge amounts of taxpayer money into the pockets of developers who are not giving us the social and affordable housing we need”. 

Coggins would also give free bus passes to all under 22s, to help “change the school run chaos where people are dependent on using their cars”. She will also create an orbital bus network to cut journey times by allowing buses to travel across Greater Manchester without having to pass through the city centre.

She also says that Greater Manchester needs a Green mayor to hold the Labour government to account. “We know that this is one of the biggest jobs in the country outside Westminster, and if Labour loses Greater Manchester to the Green Party, they will absolutely have to listen to that strong Green voice,” she says. 

Can the Greens win?

Coggins has her vision for a greener, more affordable city region, and insists her manifesto is fully costed, but can she actually win? A FocalData poll carried out on behalf of Hope Not Hate found that Labour is polling on 33%, Reform is on 30%, and put the Green Party far behind on 12.5%.

Coggins has a well-versed answer to this. She says that the poll puts Labour on half the share of the vote that Burnham won with in 2024 (63.4%). She also argues that the Greens faced the same questions from journalists in the run-up to the Gorton and Denton by-election, which Hannah Spencer won with over 40% of the vote. 

She also feels that the use of the supplementary voting system in the mayoral election will benefit the Green Party, as it means “people know that they can vote with their head and heart for the mayor that they really want”. 

Coggins is no stranger to election campaigns, having stood as the Green Party’s parliamentary candidate at every general election since 2015 and as a Green candidate in the 2019 European Parliament elections.

She couldn’t share any internal polling data on the level of support for the Greens in this election, but said “I’m knocking doors all the time and we’ve got some really good responses”.

She added that Greater Manchester is having a second mayoral election because of Labour’s “leadership failure”.

“With 400 MPs, they couldn’t find one fit to be prime minister because they never considered any women,” she said. 

“I think putting in a shiny new person who is a bit more slick at communication in front of the same MPs and the same manifesto… I don’t think people are going to buy into that.”

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward