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Based on a set of interviews with 15 MPs, and a focus group with civil society representatives, new research – based on the findings of a collaboration between the Climate Citizens research group at Lancaster University, The Climate Coalition and the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, and supported by Green Alliance – shows how the climate opinions of MPs have changed since 2018 when a previous round of research was carried out. The report states that:
MPs are now much more concerned about climate; for them, it’s become a mainstream issue, but they have specific concerns that were not so evident before, particularly around how to manage the complex process of change.
All the MPs interviewed stressed the importance of protecting people from potential negative impacts, such as higher costs or job losses in high carbon industries. They also fear a political backlash if climate action is seen as unfair.
The report shows how the political agenda has shifted over five years, from the need to ‘do something’ to the pace of change.
The mainstreaming of climate change in the political discourse over the past five years is important to recognise. But significant challenges remain in closing the gap between the political and the social mandate, with Climate Barometer tracker data showing that MPs continue to underestimate the salience of the environment among voters, to misjudge support for onshore wind, and to underestimate support for Net Zero (which outweighs opposition across society).
The government’s newly published Local Power Plan points the country in a direction that the British public support: clean energy that’s transparent, affordable, and delivers real benefits to communities and their local environments.
When we asked about the three most important factors for involving local communities on infrastructure proposals, both the public and MPs were most likely to select “clear, plain language information about the project and its impacts” and “being asked for views early, before decisions are made”. These were followed by “a clear explanation of how views influenced the final decision” for MPs and “independent or trusted organisations running the process” for the public.
When we asked which 3 factors people felt were most important in terms of influencing their support or opposition for local infrastructure projects, they picked: the project’s impact on the local environment, on energy bills and on the local community as the top considerations.
These three priorities are consistently the highest for all groups across age, gender, region, social grade, housing tenure, political support, education level, ethnicity, and whether they live in urban or rural areas; a rare point of alignment between these different subgroups of the public.
Strikingly, what made much less of a difference were people’s views about climate change and net zero.
This doesn’t mean that belief in (or concern about) climate change isn’t a critical foundation on which to build engagement around clean energy in general (this is the core idea behind linking the ‘how and the why’ on net zero, as we argued in our recent message testing work with Public First).
But when it comes to specific clean energy projects, the local impacts and financial considerations loom larger: as the transition becomes ever more place-based, this trend is only likely to accelerate.
Commentary & Analysis
27th January 2026
Signal in the Noise is Climate Barometer’s annual publication that monitors and makes sense of patterns and trends in opinion on climate change
Has the Green Party really stopped talking about the environment?