03 Mar 2026
This guide is here to help you engage candidates in the May 2026 local elections. Read on to find information about:
- Where local elections are happening.
- Ways to engage candidates.
- How to find contact details for candidates.
- A template email to write to candidates.
- Political impartiality guidelines.
Ways to engage candidates
Asking your community to reach out to candidates
Candidates are more likely to support your Charter of Hope if they are asked about it by lots of different people in the community. When reaching out to your community ask them to:
- Ask a question about one of the key local priorities if a candidate knocks on the door.
- Attend a hustings and ask a question about one of the key priorities.
- Share the Charter for Hope on social media and tag their local candidates.
What’s the call-to action for council candidates?
When you communicate with candidates either in-person or by email, you can ask them to publicly support your community’s Charter of Hope. The candidate can do this at an event like a hustings, or by providing a supportive comment on social media or a local newspaper. You can also invite candidates to an event that you’re organising.
Keep a track of which candidates have promoted your Charter of Hope so that you can use it to ask more candidates to support it. For example, it can be persuasive to tell a candidate “X number of candidates have supported our Charter of Hope, will you support it too?".
Organise an event and invite council candidates
You can organise an event, like a hustings, and invite a council candidates from each political party. It's important for ensuring political impartiality to offer all the main political parties the opportunity to send a candidate. Read our political impartiality toolkit for more detailed guidance on this.
Each party will have many candidates running for election in the council so it’s worth inviting council candidates who have responsibility over the issues you’re campaigning on. To do this, you can email all the main local political parties and ask them to invite a candidate who leads on environmental and climate issues for the party.
Here's some advice if you want to identify which candidates to invite to your event:
- The political party that runs your council likely has a councillor who leads on climate or nature issues, so it’s worth getting them to attend the event if they’re a candidate (note that in some councils, only a third/half of councillors are up for election). Most English councils use a cabinet model, in which environment leads are usually called cabinet members or portfolio holders. In committee system councils, they’re typically committee chairs.
- Political parties in opposition can also have a councillor who leads on environmental issues. Look on the council website to see if they list shadow cabinet members or opposition spokespeople. You can also check out the website for the local political party to see if shadow portfolios are listed there.
For more information about organising a hustings, check out our guide. If you have any questions, email [email protected].
Emailing council candidates
Once you’ve listened to your community and created a Charter of Hope with your policy demands for the local election, you can share them with council candidates. The simplest way to do that is to email them (see sections below on finding candidates’ contact details and a template email).
The official candidate lists will be published around 9 April but many candidates will be announced beforehand. The Electoral Commission has published a timetable for the local government elections.
Meeting council candidates
Many councils will have hundreds of councillors up for election in May 2026, so it would be impractical to meet them all individually. That’s why we recommend emailing your Charter of Hope to candidates, and inviting a candidate from each party to attend an event you’re organising.
If you decide to meet candidates in a specific council ward, you can use the Who Can I Vote For tool to find the candidates in that ward. If you do meet them, here are a few tips:
Before the meeting
Decide who from your group will be attending. It’s helpful to ask representatives from other local groups to join you as this helps demonstrate breadth of support for the issues in your community.
Print off your Charter of Hope and share it with the candidate.
During the meeting
Make it clear who you are and which group/s you represent at the start of the meeting, and outline any listening activities that have shaped the Charter of Hope.
Focus on what you want the candidate to do afterwards e.g. publicly support the Charter of Hope.
Take a photo with the candidate and share it on your social media. You can also as the candidate to share it on their socials with support for your Charter of Hope.
After the meeting
After the meeting, email the candidate to thank them for their time, re-state what they committed to during the meeting, and attach any further information about the Charter of Hope.
How to find candidates’ contact details
To find contact details for council candidates, you can use the Who Can I Vote For tool. Enter a postcode and it will list candidates in that council ward. If you click on the candidate, it shows their contact details. Sometimes the email address for the candidate is just the generic email address for the local party.
It could be time consuming to email all the candidates in a council individually. To save time, you could email each local political party after the official candidate lists have been announced, and ask them to send your email with the Charter of Hope to all the party’s candidates in that council area. However, some of the candidates in your council may be independents, so contact them individually rather than via political parties.
Template email to local candidates
The email you send to council candidates will depend on what you want them to do. In emails to politicians, it’s good practice to start and end with your call-to-action so they hear loud and clear what you want from them!
Please feel free to edit the template below to fit the needs of your community. The more tailored it is to your local area, the better.
Dear [Council Candidate’s name]
I am emailing on behalf of [group name] to ask you to publicly support our community’s Charter of Hope, and to attend our [event] on [date].
After listening to people in our community, including [list any listening activities your group did], we’ve created a Charter of Hope. Here are the policy demands that we collectively want the council to implement:
[List policy demands in your charter of hope].
It’s more important than ever that councillors speak up in support of environmental and social justice. That’s why we’re calling on you to publicly support our Charter of Hope, for example by posting on social media or making a supportive statement to local media [If you’ve published post about the Charter of Hope on social media, list them here].
Also, on [date and time] at [location], we’ll be hosting [event name]. [More details about what the candidate can expect to do at the event]. Please let us know if you can join us.
Kind regards,
[Name of local group]
Political impartiality
Friends of the Earth complies with all electoral law and regulations, and we're committed to conducting our activity in a way that's politically impartial. During elections, groups can't endorse or campaign for any party or candidate in their constituency, but they can comment on manifesto pledges and promises by the candidates. To find out more about how to stay impartial, read our political impartiality guide. For any questions, please email [email protected].