This guidance aims to provide practical advice for candidates and parties who want to stand at the Greater London Authority elections and anyone who wants to be an agent. Standing for election can be complicated, but we hope that our guidance will make it as straightforward as possible. You do not have to follow this guidance, but if you do, you will normally be doing enough to comply with the law.
Greater London Authority elections involve three contests and this guidance covers what you need to do as:
a Mayor of London candidate
a Constituency Assembly Member candidate or,
an individual or party list candidate at the London-wide Assembly election
The guidance also covers what parties need to do to submit London-wide party lists.
We have included relevant factual material as well as links to sources of further information. Each section includes a number of forms and resources, which can be directly accessed via links in the text. You can find out more in How to use our guidance.
Election timetable
For scheduled polls we will publish a specific timetable which will be made available on our website.
If a by-election has been called, you will be able to obtain a copy of the specific timetable for that election from the relevant Returning Officer.
Data protection
Please note that data protection legislation applies to the processing of all personal data. Please contact the Information Commissioner's Office for further information about how the current data protection legislation affects you.
We are here to help, so please contact us if you have any questions. Please see Contacting us for contact details.
Terms and expressions we use
We use ‘must’ when we refer to a specific requirement. We use ‘should’ for items we consider to be minimum good practice, but which are not legal or regulatory requirements.
Throughout this guidance we are using the following abbreviations in respect of each Schedule from The Greater London Authority Elections 2007 Rules:
CMER - Schedule 1 (Constituency Assembly Member elections) LMER - Schedule 2 (London-wide Assembly Member elections) MER - Schedule 3 (Mayor of London election)
We use ‘you’ to cover all types of candidates and their agents in this guidance. We refer to candidates who are not included on a party list at the London-wide Assembly Member election as ‘individual candidates at the London-wide Assembly election’.
When we talk about donations, we use ‘you’ to refer to the person who is responsible at the time for dealing with donations.