Never mind the ballots | Will local election results silence net zero sceptics?  

Green policies have been surprisingly influential on by-election results in recent memory. So what can we gauge from the voting patterns displayed in last week’s England-wide local elections?

The big takeaway from last week’s local and mayoral elections for Jacob Rees-Mogg was that the Conservative Party should be “on the side of voters”.

On the face of it there seems to be little to argue with in the former energy secretary’s stance. But, as he set out to his GB News audience, Rees-Mogg believes this support for the electorate means an end to the “war on the motorist” and delaying the implementation of the UK’s net-zero targets.

It’s language familiar from prime minister Rishi Sunak’s attempt to capitalise on discontent with London’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) last September. More recently, Rees-Mogg’s successor-but-one as energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, warned of a world where “a Net Zero Leviathan of central planning crushes our brilliant enterprise economy”.

However, the results of last week’s poll show little evidence that voters see back-pedalling on green policies as a priority for their representatives in Parliament.

The rise of Reform UK in the opinion polls has spooked the Conservatives. In last Thursday’s sole parliamentary by-election, in Blackpool South, the net-zero sceptic challenger party came within 200 votes of overtaking the Tories in second place.

However, in the council elections, Reform’s impact was a lot smaller. The party won just two council seats – as former energy minister Chris Skidmore, who recently stepped down as a Tory MP over the government’s move to award new North Sea gas and oil drilling licences, gleefully pointed out.

Admittedly, Reform is reckoned to have only contested one-sixth of the roughly 2,500 council seats up for grabs last week, inevitably limiting the scale of gains it could achieve. Nevertheless, two seats represent slim pickings for the would-be right wing insurgent movement and compares poorly with how Reform predecessors in UKIP were performing in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

By contrast, last week was the latest in a series of good local elections for the Green Party, which gained 74 council seats, increasing its total number of elected members to nearly 800, making it the fourth biggest voice in local government.

The most eye-catching of these results was in Bristol, where the Greens came within a whisker of winning a majority of councillors and gaining control of their first big city authority.

Of course, the Greens’ advance isn’t just rooted in their climate stance. The party has picked up voters in Labour areas over the latter’s stance on the Gaza conflict, while in traditionally Tory areas the Greens have painted themselves as champions of efforts to resist green field development.

However, the scale of the Green wins, combined with the Labour and Liberal Democrat successes last week, suggests that adopting a net-zero sceptical stance isn’t the sure fire route to harvesting those “voters” Rees-Mogg has in mind.

The most graphic illustration that Rees Mogg’s preferred strategy may be a blind alley was provided by the race for the London mayoralty. The capital’s contest saw the Conservative candidate, Susan Hall, seize on the expansion of ULEZ by Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan as the centrepiece of her campaign.

This ploy was informed by the Conservatives’ unexpected by-election success holding on to Boris Johnson’s outer London constituency of Hillingdon last summer on the back of hostility to the ULEZ extension.

ULEZ bans older and more polluting vehicles, and while many people loathe it with a vengeance, Hall’s stance backfired. Khan increased his majority compared to the last London mayoral election three years ago, including in those outer London boroughs that Hall’s campaign was clearly targeted at.

This matters more generally because the Conservatives’ success retaining Hillingdon appears to have convinced Sunak to row back last autumn on a swathe of net-zero heating and transport policies.

The London election verdict, together with the strong Green showing, will no doubt embolden those in charge of town halls to pursue bolder action on the climate, such as drawing up local area energy plans. Many of the new metro mayors elected last week have put green jobs at the heart of their election platforms.

They include the one Tory success story from last Thursday, Ben Houchen, who won a fresh mandate as Tees Valley mayor.

Overall the Tories’ attempt to backtrack on delivery of net zero appears to have gone down like a “lead balloon with the British public”, observes Ed Matthew, campaigns director at the E3G environmental thinktank.

More broadly, Sunak’s environmental demarche has undermined broader progress on climate action domestically as well as the UK’s hard won leadership role on the issue, he says.

Christopher Hammond, chief executive of the UK100 collective of climate conscious councils, agrees. He points to the twin triggers of the local election results and the successful legal challenge to the government’s net-zero plan (see 5 things we learnt this week) as an opportunity for ministers to “call time” on their “retreat from climate leadership”.

He says: “The High Court’s decision and the emerging local election results send a clear message: watering down the UK’s climate ambitions is not the panacea to the government’s electoral challenges nor are they legal. It’s not what people want, nor what the planet needs.”

While many of Rees-Mogg’s viewers may see a retreat from net zero as a supportive act from politicians last week’s election results appear to show they are in the minority.

Representatives from UK local authorities and net zero hubs will be sharing their innovations and decarbonisation plans with a particular focus on their Local Area Energy Plans at Utility Week Live later this month. Click here for more information.