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The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) commissioned survey data in support of a linked call for the UK to ‘reimagine’ its net zero targets. The survey (of 15,000 people) was conducted across seven European member states, as well as the UK.
Many of the findings support well-established patterns of climate change/net zero perceptions among the UK public, including:
Focusing on the lack of belief in the feasibility of net zero goals based on current government programmes (what they call the ‘delivery deficit’), the TBI argues that the UK’s net zero targets should be relaxed, on the grounds that they are out of step with public opinion, and have been made without paying sufficient attention to public concerns on cost and affordability.
The latter point is important: net zero policies will indeed be difficult to achieve without broad based public support.
But wider research is clear that across the political spectrum, people want to see more leadership on climate, not less. The ‘delivery deficit’ that the TBI identifies could just as easily be used as an argument to bring the public in, and go faster on net zero.
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
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