Green Party of England and Wales

The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW; Welsh: Plaid Werdd Lloegr a Chymru), often known simply as the Green Party or the Greens, is a green and left-wing political party in England and Wales. Since September 2025, Zack Polanski has served as the party's leader. The party has five representatives in the House of Commons and two in the House of Lords, in addition to over 1,300 councillors at the local government level and three members of the London Assembly. The party's ideology combines environmentalism with left-wing economic policies, including well-funded and locally controlled public services. It supports proportional representation, LGBTQ rights, drug policy reform, and is pro-immigration. It is split into various regional divisions, including the semi-autonomous Wales Green Party and is internationally affiliated with the Global Greens and the European Green Party. In 1990, what was then the UK-wide Green Party – which had initially been established as the PEOPLE Party in 1973 – divided into the Green Party of England and Wales, the Scottish Greens and the Green Party Northern Ireland. Since 1990, they have been three completely separate and unique political parties, with their own separate leaders, memberships and policies. The Green Party of England and Wales went through centralising reforms spearheaded by the Green 2000 group in early 1991; they also sought to emphasise growth in local governance, doing so throughout 1990. In 2010, the party gained its first member of Parliament in its then-leader Caroline Lucas, although Plaid Cymru's Cynog Dafis was elected as a joint Plaid Cymru-Green Party candidate in the 1990s. As the party's support is spread out across England and Wales and has rarely been found in electorally significant clusters, the party held only one seat in the House of Commons from 2010 to 2019, before reaching four seats in 2024. The Green Party supports replacing the UK's first-past-the-post voting system with proportional representation, which would grant all parties a share of seats in Parliament based on their national vote share. Since 2025, and in particular since Polanski's election as leader, the party's membership has more than tripled; it has seen a significant increase of support in polling, notably from voters dissatisfied with the abandonment of policies and changes in direction by the Labour Party. Their youth wing, the Young Greens of England and Wales, has risen in membership to 50,000, becoming Europe's largest youth wing. Since November 2025, the Greens have surpassed both Labour and the Conservatives in varying polls for the first time, gaining a significant lead on them by March 2026. By around late March to early April 2026, the Greens overtook both Labour and the Conservatives in the aggregate of national polls for the first time, this was also the first time ever that the top 2 parties in the poll of polls were neither the governing nor official opposition party. The Green Party have not yet led a national poll outright with rounded percentages but were in joint first with Reform and the Conservatives in a poll from late March 2026 with rounded percentages and led outright with nonrounded percentages for the first time.