Good evening and welcome to the Pompey Politics Podcast. You join us for the first of our

2026 local election husting special. I'm Ian Tiny Morris. And I'm Simon Sandsbury. Good evening,

everybody. Good evening, Ian. Yes, we finally got there. After weeks, possibly even months of trying to corral candidates into one space.

We have finally got three good folks to come and make their pitch to the electorate of Portsmouth, which is fantastic news.

So thank you for joining us all.

We have indeed and we'll introduce them in a second.

Just quickly before I do, I'll put some

comments in the chat. If you want to watch it, watch the screen, the stream vertically and

you're not currently doing so. There's a link there for you to be able to do so, vice versa,

if you want to watch it horizontally. So let's talk quickly about

our, actually, our hustings and how they work. So I'll quickly do those and then we'll introduce

our fantastic guests and our candidates for this evening. So we've held Ward hustings for

ports with local elections since 2022. This year,

for logistical reasons, we decided to invite candidates that are standing for parties which

achieved at least 1% of the citywide vote share in either the local or the general elections in

2024. So if you check those figures from the Portsmouth City Council's website,

that would be the Conservative Party, the Green Party, Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats,

and, sorry, and Portsmouth Independence Party and Reform. About two weeks before the close of

nominations, we contacted all of the incumbents that were standing, the parties themselves,

and any candidates that we were already aware of. And then after close of nominations, when the candidates were

confirmed and published, we then also repeated that process in an attempt to get hold of as many

of them as we could, and for all of the candidates we could find contact details.

...