The House | Lib Dem MP Pippa Heylings: “Reform Wants People To Go Down The Mines Again”

Pippa Heylings MP (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

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As Nigel Farage kindly undertakes a thorough “spring cleaning” for the Conservatives, with the offer of a home for unhappy MPs, Kemi Badenoch’s right flank is falling away. She has not, however, changed tack to lean into her more centrist base.

With the Tories now opposed to their own 2050 net-zero target, the Liberal Democrats believe Badenoch is making a mistake – one they are happy to exploit.

Ed Davey’s party gained 60 seats from the Tories at the last election, mostly in rural and suburban areas across the south of England, and at the heart of their campaign was anger over sewage being discharged by water companies into rivers and seas.

According to Pippa Heylings, the Lib Dems’ energy spokesperson, turning the Conservatives further away from net-zero action will help her party “solidify” its grip on those formerly Conservative seats.

The 61-year-old MP for South Cambridgeshire points to polling from More in Common, which last year showed that around 25 per cent of those who voted Lib Dem consider ‘climate change and the environment’ to be one of the top issues facing the country – almost twice the proportion of the public as a whole.

“At the moment, you’ve got Reform, who are weaponising concerns around net-zero”, she says, and “the Conservatives recklessly rowing back on the very infrastructure they created to tackle climate change, which is the Climate Change Act”.

Many of the Tory MPs who now claim that the UK’s 2050 net-zero target is causing damage to the economy – like shadow cabinet member Andrew Bowie – were the same people who helped enshrine the goal into law in 2019.

“Andrew Bowie was Theresa May’s private secretary when that happened,” Heylings points out. “I can’t understand the cognitive dissonance of that – except pure politics.”

Badenoch and Farage, she says, are fighting over a relatively small minority of voters who are opposed to the net-zero target. 

The result? Lib Dems will find it easier to hold and gain seats.

“I think they’re underestimating the appetite for more on climate change,” she says of the Conservatives and Reform. “Our polling, consistently, is showing that. Energy companies are doing this polling as well, and they’re finding exactly the same.”

Voters in her constituency, she insists, “really worry” about global warming, and tell her so on the doorstep.

“What they say is: ‘I really want to know that we’re handing on a better world, because it’s a scary world now, and I want to hand on a better world to the next generation’.”

Speaking at last year’s Lib Dem conference, Heylings pledged that her party would take on “the myths being peddled” about net-zero by parties on the right. But are they doing that forcefully enough?

“We can always do better,” she admits. “We’ve got to find the cut-through in the media to hear us, but in the Chamber, time after time – if you just look at what the Lib Dems are doing – we are constantly challenging that.”

When Richard Tice chucks out his “net-stupid zero” phrase, Heylings counters it with “fracking stupid Reform”.

“Reform wants people to go down the pits again,” she argues. “They want them to go down the mines again. This is not going forwards.”

What does Heylings make of Energy Secretary Ed Miliband?

“I think he’s doing very well,” she says, particularly delighted by news that the UK has joined nine other European countries in accelerating the rollout of windfarms in the North Sea, which will be internationally linked via interconnector cables.

“We are actually looking at a collective offshore wind target that will power millions and millions of homes and will drive the costs down. To me, this is just absolutely brilliant.”

Her “one concern” is that amid such heavy focus on energy security, Miliband and his department are not paying anywhere near enough attention to the net-zero half of his brief.

“That’s why we brought forward the Climate and Nature Bill,” she says, referring to a Private Members’ Bill that the government refused to back. “We have to be looking at adaptation and resilience as well. How communities – and the environment that we’re in – can be resilient to the climate shocks we can no longer avoid.”

For Heylings, Labour’s most damaging move since taking office has been its decision to put nature against growth. Ministers have suggested there is a binary choice between, for example, protecting newts and getting homes built.

It is a “lazy” approach, she says. “You can do both growth and nature recovery. We’ve proven it. It’s what I’m dedicating my life to – that balance.”

The MP, a previous planning committee chair on her local council, adds: “I’ve worked with developers, and I know that if you get the rules clear, you’ve got policy certainty, they will absorb that need.”

Prior to her involvement in politics, Heylings worked internationally with NGOs, governments and charities, including eight years in East Africa and 15 years in Latin America and the Caribbean. In that time, she served as a policy adviser to the UK’s international climate policy programme, supported governments at global COP summits and played a key role in the creation of the Galapagos Islands Marine Reserve.

“It completely changed my outlook on the world,” she recalls. “On the interdependency of society, prosperity and natural resources. That was because I was seeing it at levels where people were living on the edge – literally, in terms of poverty.

“Climate change was already impacting those communities, so you could see immediately the impact of resource scarcity throwing whole communities into desperate situations.”

When she returned to the UK in 2012, she joined the Green Party, having been inspired by their manifesto for youth. After a couple of years, she found herself put off by the party’s anti-markets stance.

“I know that we need disruption, entrepreneurialism, innovation – we need the markets, in a regulated way. That’s what I found with the Lib Dems. I found governable policy.”

Since Zack Polanski’s election as leader, the Greens have overtaken the Lib Dems in national opinion polls, leaving her party trailing in fifth place. Does Heylings see Polanski as a threat to the Lib Dems’ ability to attract environmentally minded voters?

“What is needed right now is for the voices across all parties to be as strong as possible, to bring us back to the need to tackle the climate and environment crisis,” she replies. “So it’s good, for me, that there are loud Green Party voices as well and that they’re getting airtime.”

She appears similarly relaxed when asked why the Lib Dems are failing to make more progress of their own in the polls.

“Last year we had our best local elections and we beat – for the first time ever – both Conservatives and Labour in terms of the number of seats we won,” she says, adding that the party has continued to score impressively in council by-elections since then. “When you actually put ballots in boxes, people are choosing us.”

Yet there is clearly debate amongst the party’s MPs as to whether a wider policy prospectus and stronger messaging is needed.

One of Heylings’ disgruntled colleagues recently told The Guardian that Davey and his team must “move with significant pace towards the development of a national story for the party to tell”. Are they right about that?

“I don’t support anybody talking outside the party in that way,” says Heylings. “I think, like every party, we are internally working on that. There may be colleagues who want to work at a faster pace, but we are working on it.”

While she sees anonymous briefings to the media as unhelpful, Heylings insists she is “absolutely” in favour of an internal debate about what the national narrative should be, adding: “I want that to be as live and robust as possible – and we’re having it.”

Another reported complaint among her colleagues is that the Lib Dems lack a “big retail offer on the economy”. Does the party have one of those?

“It’s coming,” she whispers. “You will see the beginnings of that at the spring conference.”

She tells The House that this offer will “help define and differentiate us”, while also relating to her brief around climate and energy costs.

With that work under way, the MP goes so far as to claim it is possible that the Lib Dems could become Britain’s next official opposition.

“I’m very ambitious. I’m ambitious in terms of: we want to be the next official opposition. Absolutely.”

Some might say, given how the Lib Dems are currently polling, she sounds worryingly similar here to 2019-era Jo “next PM” Swinson. Does Heylings really believe that is doable? “Yes,” she replies.

“We are listening very hard right now. You can’t just go in and say, ‘This is what we’ll do’. We’re listening very hard to know, in the seats that we want to win, what else do we need to be offering, and how do we need to be offering it. You will be hearing from us.”