Draft Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (Amendment) Order 2026

MPs voted on 9 June 2026 to approve the Draft Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) (Amendment) Order 2026, a piece of secondary legislation (a statutory instrument, meaning a law made under powers granted by an earlier Act of Parliament) updating the election rules for combined authority mayors in England. The order passed by 356 votes to 86. The vote's practical purpose is to implement the supplementary vote (SV) system for combined authority and combined county authority mayoral elections. Under SV, voters express a first and second preference, and candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated with their second preferences redistributed until one candidate holds a majority. The order makes the technical changes to election conduct rules necessary to put SV into operation following the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, which received Royal Assent in April and provided the primary legislative basis for the change. The division fell almost entirely along party lines. All 283 Labour and Labour and Co-operative MPs who voted supported the order, as did all 64 Liberal Democrats and all 5 Green MPs who voted. Eighty-one of the Conservatives who voted opposed it, along with 2 Democratic Unionist Party MPs, 1 Traditional Unionist Voice MP, and 1 Reform UK MP. The Conservative position, set out in committee by David Simmonds, was explicit opposition to reversing the first past the post system that the previous government had introduced. The Liberal Democrats backed the change but said they would have preferred the government to go further and adopt the alternative vote system.