The Green party has said it is confident that its candidates will hold a record number of seats after next month’s local elections in England, but also opened up the possibility of cooperating with other parties during the general election and with Labour if it wins power in Westminster. Launching its local election campaign in Bristol on Thursday, the party said it believed it would add to the 760 councillors it had in place in England and Wales. Areas where the party hopes to do well include traditional heartlands such as Bristol, where it could win control of the city council, Stroud in Gloucestershire, Worcester, and Hastings in East Sussex. It said it also hoped to make gains in areas not so closely associated with the Green party such as Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Welwyn Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Co-leader Carla Denyer said winning power in Bristol would be historic. She said: “Bristol feels like a Green city that should have a Green council. Voters say this is overdue. But we are seeing substantial Green growth well outside what you may think of as the typical heartlands.”
She said Green councillors would cooperate with other parties in Bristol and elsewhere at a local level. Asked if the party would also make arrangements with other parties at the general election to give each other a better chance of winning by stepping aside in some places, she said: “I don’t know about arrangements but as a Green party we’ve always been clear that we are prepared to co-operate with other parties in areas where we agree. We’ve made that clear over several successive general elections.” Denyer said there had been no sign that other parties wanted to cooperate, but added: “If the other parties change their mind they know where to find me, my door is always open. If after the [general] election we get a situation where Labour do have the largest party but not quite a majority, we would be open to discussing working together.” Denyer is standing for the constituency of Bristol Central at the general election and the party is also targeting Brighton Pavilion, North Herefordshire and Waveney Valley in East Anglia. There was little mention of traditional Green policies such as the climate emergency at the local election campaign launch. Instead the focus was housing. The party said it wanted to make sure at least 150,000 extra council houses were built every year, to scrap the Margaret Thatcher government’s right to buy policy and replacing it with a “community right to buy” scheme, giving councils, housing associations and community housing groups first refusal to buy certain properties that come on to the market, such as former social housing and homes left empty for a long time. The Greens also said they wanted to “tame” the private rental market through rent controls in places where the rental market was overheated as well as ending no-fault evictions. Asked why there had been so little mention of the environment, Denyer said: “The Green party is obviously the party with the strongest policies on climate and the environment. Our particular focus in this launch is the housing crisis because local councils have a huge opportunity to help people who are at the sharp end of the cost of living crisis.”