I am not a career politician, but I love my country and care deeply about my home - Greater Manchester and the people who live here - and that is why I am standing for election as your Mayor.

Full statement

My plan for Greater Manchester is simple: safer streets, a growing economy, better connectivity, more money in your pocket and building homes for the future. As your Mayor, I will ensure that no community or place is left behind. When I look around Greater Manchester, I see untapped potential and opportunity that has just not been nurtured or developed by our current Labour Mayor or the wider Labour administration in the region. I want to change all that and I will start by reducing crime and restoring trust in Greater Manchester Police. I will lead from the front on police and crime, there will be no delegating to deputies and definitely no two-tier policing of the kind we are seeing every weekend at protests in London. I will get Greater Manchester building to deliver the affordable homes and social housing that we so desperately need for the vulnerable and our young people to help them get on the housing ladder. And I will do this with a brownfield first approach which will protect our precious greenbelt so that we and future generations can enjoy it too. There is more than enough brownfield land supply to deliver all the homes we need across GM and the good news is that these sites are closer to roads, shops, schools, doctors and workplaces so that people will want to live there. I will remove the CAZ cameras: there will be no charging zones, no pay-per-mile and no congestion charging as long as I am Mayor. I will continue the rollout of the Bee Network. My aim will be to make it self-funding as quickly as possible so that we are not dependent on central government funding and bailouts. I will look to deliver new routes and cross-city connectivity. My ambition is to see the tram network extended to every significant town or place in Greater Manchester such as Stockport, Leigh, Heywood, Bolton, Wigan and Partington. I commit to maintaining the current level of support for homeless persons and rough-sleepers; I will look at ways that the support can be improved or made more efficient once I am in office. And finally, I will offer an independence referendum for those Boroughs who want one, such as Bolton to confirm if they want to remain part of 'Greater Manchester'. So after Andy Burnham's 7 years of failure, Greater Manchester deserves better and with your support on May 2 we can make it happen.