Marvin Jonathan Rees, Baron Rees of Easton (born April 1972) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the second and final Mayor of Bristol from 2016 to 2024. He was created a life peer in February 2025.
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Early life and education
Marvin Rees was brought up in Bristol, partly in Lawrence Weston and Easton, by his British mother. He attended St George comprehensive school in Bristol and later obtained a master's degree in political theory and government at Swansea University, and a master's degree in global economic development at Eastern University in 2000. Later he completed the World Fellows Program at Yale University. During a fellowship he assisted Tony Campolo, an advisor to President Bill Clinton.
Early career
Rees has worked in diverse areas throughout his career. He was a freelance journalist and radio presenter at BBC Radio Bristol and Ujima Radio. He was the Communications and Events Manager at Black Development Agency (now Phoenix Social Enterprise), an agency devoted to empowering individuals and communities through opportunities to work abroad.
Rees was employed in the city of Bristol as the programme manager for race equality in mental health issues at Public Health, Bristol. He worked in the United States as an outreach assistant at the Sojourners Community and as a youth coordinator at Tearfund.
Political career
2012 mayoral election
In 2012, selected by an individual ballot of Labour Party members in the city to stand for Mayor of Bristol, Rees defeated four other candidates for the nomination, including the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Bristol City Council Labour group and a former Member of Parliament, Dan Norris, who would later become Mayor of the West of England. At the election, he received 25,906 votes, coming second, after George Ferguson, an independent. Rees found it difficult readjusting to normal life following his election loss.
Community involvement
In 2012, Rees was the founder and programme leader at the Bristol Leadership Programme, a two-week programme helping a dozen people annually from impoverished backgrounds to attain their aspirations. He was also a member of the Bristol Legacy Commission which dispersed its funds and ceased operating in April 2012. He is a former director of the Bristol Partnership whose goals are to make Bristol's prosperity sustainable, reduce health and wealth inequality, build stronger and safer communities, and raise the aspirations and achievements of young people and families.
Mayor of Bristol
Rees was again selected to be the Labour candidate for the 2016 mayoral election, easily defeating a sitting Labour councillor in the selection. On 5 May 2016, he was elected Mayor of Bristol. He received 56,729 votes in the first round and 12,021 transfer votes in the second round, giving him 68,750 votes overall. He then became "the UK’s first directly elected black mayor", and "the first mayor of black African heritage elected in a major European city", so "Bristol became the first major European city to have elected a mayor of black African heritage".
Rees's term of office started with a £30 million budget shortfall inherited from the previous administration and a £60 million budget deficit from government funding reductions to 2020. In August 2016, Rees instigated a voluntary severance programme aimed at reducing the size of the council's workforce from 6,970 by 1,000. Rees commissioned an independent report by former Audit Commission chief executive Steve Bundred, which criticised senior council officers, leading Rees to say a culture of concealment had previously prevailed so councillors were unaware that agreed savings had not been fully delivered.
Rees had pledged to gradually increase home building in Bristol toward a 2020 target of 2,000 per year, of which 800 would be affordable. Rees oversaw the founding of a city-owned housing company, Goram Homes, created to develop and build homes, re-investing profits to the development of affordable and social housing. From 2016/17 to 2019/20 the outcome was between 1,350 and 1,994 new homes per year, of which between only 188 and 312 per year were affordable. The affordable homes target for 2020/21 was reduced to 500 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Affordable homes had mostly been built on brownfield land. The council housing manager stated the missed target was delay rather than failure, with at least 1,028 affordable homes expected from current projects in 2022/23.
In the 2020 and 2021 Powerlists, Rees was listed in the Top 100 of the most influential people in the UK of African/African-Caribbean descent.
One matter that split public opinion was Rees's decision in September 2018 not to build the long-awaited 10,000 seat Bristol Arena near Temple Meads railway station, in the centre of Bristol. The episode brought discussion about the authority of a city mayor to make autonomous decisions in the face of opposition, after an overwhelming vote by councillors of all parties to keep it in the city centre. Concerns were raised at how businesses are able to influence those with decision-making and planning powers in cities.
Later career
In July 2023, Marvin Rees applied to become a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party, but was not selected by Bristol Labour Party members. Rees was one of three people in the running to represent the new Bristol North East constituency alongside Lewisham Mayor Damien Egan and South Gloucestershire councillor Leigh Ingham
. At the final hustings in Fishponds, around 700 party members voted on who they would like to stand for the seat at the next General Election, choosing Damien Egan. Egan went on to become the MP for Bristol North East.
In June 2024, Rees was appointed an honorary industrial professor at Bristol University, and will work at the university Cabot Institute for the Environment.
During an appearance on Newsnight in June 2024, Rees sparked controversy amid accusations he was ‘victim-shaming’ Nigel Farage by saying the Reform UK leader had helped create the kind of anger that saw someone throw a stone at him on an open top bus.
On 4 September 2024, Rees launched his memoir, Let's See What Happens (ISBN 978-1035009169), about his life and time as Mayor.
Deleted emails controversy
In December 2024, it emerged that a Freedom of Information request by a local democracy activist to uncover details of Rees's meetings could not be satisfied because Rees's email inbox 'had been deleted' just a month after he left office. Conservative and Green Bristol City Councillors rejected the argument that the emails were permanently expunged at that point. During the meeting, they described the rejection of the FOI as a "stain on [Bristol's] civic character", and "in breach of the council's statutory duty", calling Bristol City Council an "impenetrable fortress" for members of the public seeking information about decision-making. Following the controversy, Bristol City Councillors voted unanimously to implement a raft of suggested reforms to give greater accessibility and transparency of public records.
Marvin Rees had previously described himself as "Bristol's most transparent person".
Peerage
In December 2024 Rees was nominated for a life peerage to become a Labour member of the House of Lords as part of the 2024 Political Peerages. He was created Baron Rees of Easton, of Saint Pauls in the City of Bristol on 4 February 2025. He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords on 3 April 2025, during a debate on net-zero emissions.
Personal life
Marvin Rees describes himself as the mixed-race son of a British-Jamaican father and white British mother, with his mother raising him as a single parent. He was born and grew up in Bristol in financially difficult circumstances with seven siblings. According to Rees, his paternal four-times-great-grandfather was executed by the colonial Jamaican government for participating in the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. He is married to Kiersten Rees, with whom he has three children. He lived in Easton from 1978 until 2016, moving shortly after be became mayor.
In 2018 a documentary film was released with a premiere at Watershed, Bristol, about Rees's journey into politics and his two campaigns for the city's top political job. The Mayor's Race was filmed between 2011 and 2017, covering Rees's two mayoral campaigns in 2012 and 2016 as well as Bristol's historical issues of race and racism—including the 1963 bus boycott, the 1980 St Pauls riot, and the Bristol slave trade. In 2020 the BBC made a documentary around Rees and the events surrounding the felling of the Colston statue entitled "Statue Wars". The documentary was made by Uplands TV and had full behind the scenes access to Mayor Rees and his senior team.
Rees is a Christian, attending Hope Community Church in Hotwells and has spoken openly about his faith. For the first years of his career he worked for a Christian anti-poverty charity and a Christian social justice magazine.
Rees was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to local government.