Marvin Rees officially steps down from role as Bristol mayor

After eight years in power Marvin Rees has stepped from his role as the mayor of Bristol. The Labour mayor’s time running Bristol City Council was marked with highs and lows, and with more new affordable homes now being built than in over two decades.

Since 2016, when Mr Rees was first elected, Bristol’s politics has changed dramatically. Plans for an underground mass transit system were pushed forward but ultimately vetoed last year, while a new arena will be built on the northern edge of Bristol, instead of near Temple Meads.

Millions of pounds of private sector investment will help Bristol decarbonise its energy network, in a trailblazing model now emulated by other cities. And the Colston Hall music venue was refurbished and renamed the Bristol Beacon, but at a huge cost to the taxpayer of £132 million.

Mr Rees, 52, has often mentioned his upbringing in Easton and Lawrence Weston, growing up in a poor, working class family and facing racist abuse. The son of a white British mother and a Jamaican father, he was the first black mayor to be elected in a major city across Europe.

Speaking in the Mayor’s Race, a documentary, he said: “Where I come from in Bristol, and the communities I grew up in, people were much less likely to find opportunity and more likely to be arrested or to die early. How has power been distributed in the past? Who gets to shape the world and make decisions? Who takes political leadership? It’s not people from my background.

“Growing up poor for me meant experiencing worry from a very young age. I was always worried and I always felt vulnerable. We had an electric meter that took 50 pences. You hear the clunk and all the lights go out, and you literally don’t have 50 pence to put in the meter. I get irritated even today when people don’t lights off. The environment is one thing, but taking it for granted that you can pay a bill is another.”

He studied two masters degrees, in political theory and global economic development, before working as a journalist and then in public health. He first ran for mayor in 2012, when he narrowly lost to the independent candidate George Ferguson. He then beat Mr Ferguson in 2016 in a landslide, promising 2,000 new homes built every year.

Speaking to the BBC after first being elected, he said: “My politics and my passion for Bristol come out of the way I grew up here, feeling like I was on the outside, feeling like I was being left behind. That’s what has made me aspirational, not just for me but for other people — that pain of seeing people who don’t get the opportunity to flourish in the way that they should.

“Bristol has offered me some challenges, and it’s offered me a lot of opportunities. I want to make sure those opportunities are shared with other people as they come up in Bristol as well. I hope to make sure Bristol has the right priorities, with a very inclusive style of leadership.”

One of his first major decisions was to move the planned new arena from a site near Temple Meads to Filton. He said this was to save the taxpayer money, as a private company, YTL, would fund the arena in Filton. But the decision was criticised for delaying the project by several years, and changing the location to one harder to get to using public transport. Construction has still not begun on the new arena.

Another early decision was to push for a mass transit system to solve Bristol’s terrible transport problems. This would see four metro lines, partly going underground, but costing anywhere from £8 billion to £18 billion. Last October, this plan was vetoed by the Labour West of England metro mayor Dan Norris, due to concerns about the high price tag.

Congestion remains as much of an issue as in 2017, although some new bike lanes have been built, a new train station opened last year, and another new station is due to open this year. A Clean Air Zone was introduced in 2022, charging drivers with highly polluting vehicles a daily fee, and drastically reducing air pollution in the city centre.

Since he was first elected, 14,500 homes have been built in Bristol, including 2,000 last year. The council set up its own housing company, Goram Homes, and Labour has pledged 3,000 new council homes over the next five years, if it wins the local elections on Thursday, May 2. However, record numbers of people are now in temporary accommodation or waiting for social housing.

Mr Rees has pushed for new tall apartment buildings, favouring high density over sprawling suburbs on the outskirts of the city. This drew criticism from opponents, who said many of these would harm some views of the city, including of the cranes in front of the M Shed, for example.

Austerity, Brexit and inflation have limited what the mayor could achieve, and in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic radically shifted the entire world, including Bristol. This pushed back his re-election bid to 2021, when he beat the Greens but Labour lost their majority in the council. Only appointing Labour councillors to his cabinet then led to questions about the mayoral role.

In 2022, Bristol voted in a city-wide referendum to scrap the mayoral role altogether. This year, the council will switch to a committee model of governance, with councillors on eight policy committees sharing power, instead of concentrated in one directly elected mayor.

Mr Rees denied the referendum results were about him, as he was always planning to stand down this year. But many critics said his brash and sometimes “rude” manner played a key factor.

This manner featured in rows with journalists. In 2019, the former Bristol Post editor criticised his “petty and childish” ridicule of one reporter for calling a new recycling centre a “rubbish tip”. In 2022, journalists across the city boycotted the mayor’s fortnightly press conferences, after he faced questions about flying to Vancouver to deliver a 14-minute Ted Talk on the climate crisis.

Bristol made front pages around the world when protesters toppled the statue of slave trader Edward Colston, and dumped it in the harbour. Mr Rees was criticised for failing to act on growing discontent with the statue before it was toppled — and then later said the toppling was an “exercise in middle-class white privilege”, rather than helping people in oppressed groups.

Key achievements include securing £95 million government funding for the massive Temple Quarter regeneration project, which could see 10,000 new homes built near Temple Meads. He was also praised for his “One City” approach, bringing in leaders and organisations from across Bristol into regular meetings.

Last year, Mr Rees tried to be selected as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for the new Bristol North East seat, but lost out to another candidate. This year, he was awarded an OBE for services to local government.

In his farewell speech in March, Mr Rees said: “14,500 homes will have been built since 2016 including many affordable and social. More houses and more affordable houses will be built in the city this year than in any year since 2004, when a Labour government was supporting cities to build. We have the biggest council house building programme in a generation.

“We are a city of contradictions. Among them is the way we combine being home to some of the nation’s leading talent, a thriving creative sector and a high number of business start ups — with a collective lack of self-belief that, when it’s full blown, turns into a debilitating cynicism.

“We’ve seen this clearly around mass transit. When I came in, the political debate was dominated by car parking and fun Sundays. Today, the city talks about inclusion, homes and growth, billion pound regeneration programmes, carbon reduction and the climate challenge, biodiversity, race and class, and building a future city.

“And from giving a Ted Talk at the global conference in Vancouver, to launching 3Ci, and speaking on behalf of the global Mayors Migration Council at several UN conferences on migration and refugees, we are shaping national and international agendas.”

Technically the mayor’s term ended Tuesday, May 7, when newly elected councillors are sworn in, but he was thought to have already cleared his office in City Hall and left the building earlier last week.

Mr Rees declined to be interviewed for this article, due to existing diary commitments.

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