South Yorkshire PCC election could be the last as powers transfer to mayor

The Home Secretary laid the order on 7 February 2024 to transfer South Yorkshire police and crime commissioner powers to the mayor from the May 2024 elections, setting the separate PCC role on course to be abolished when the current term ended. That shift matters because the mayor, not a standalone commissioner, now carries responsibility for securing and maintaining an efficient and effective police force and for holding the chief constable to account.

Oliver Coppard, first elected mayor in May 2022, was re-elected on 2 May 2024 with 138,611 votes, about 51% of ballots cast. South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority has already built the transfer into its governance documents and its 2025-29 police and crime plan, extending mayoral control across Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield rather than leaving policing in a separate elected post.

The old PCC office was created by the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 and first elected in 2012. In the 2024 PCC elections, 37 commissioners were elected in England and four in Wales, but South Yorkshire was among the areas where the job was being absorbed into a wider mayoral structure. South Yorkshire Police is based at Snig Hill in Sheffield, and chief constable Stephen Watson, appointed in 2016, remains the officer the elected authority must keep under scrutiny.

That is why a Reform UK breakthrough in policing looks less like a single local win than a test of whether protest politics can become operational power. Rupert Matthews gave the party its first police and crime commissioner when he defected from the Conservatives in Leicestershire and Rutland, a reminder that taking a policing post can deliver a real office, not just a vote tally. But in South Yorkshire, the prize is already shrinking: much of the authority once attached to the PCC has moved to the mayor, leaving less room for a surprise victory to reshape day-to-day policing on its own.

The last full PCC contest in South Yorkshire underlines how firmly the area had already leaned into established party politics. In 2021, Labour’s Dr Alan Billings won a third term with 165,442 first preference votes, comfortably ahead of Conservative David Chinchen on 98,851. If South Yorkshire does not elect another standalone commissioner, the role will become part of the mayor’s machinery, and the real contest will be over who controls that broader office rather than who occupies the old PCC chair.