09 Aug 2024
Now that the general election is over and MPs are taking office, it’s the best time to secure meetings with them. It’s important that your MP sees your local action group and your local partners as key stakeholders in your community. By securing a meeting with them early you’ll be able to build a strong relationship with them and ensure they prioritise action to tackle the climate, nature and cost of living crises. If you spoke to them before the election, either at a meeting, a hustings or over email, you’ll also be able to follow up on any commitments they made.
To support your campaigning, Friends of the Earth will also be sending all MPs a welcome letter which sets out our campaign demands and a gift of a Friends of the Earth calendar to welcome them in to office.
You may also want to consider reaching out to unsuccessful election candidates, particularly if they're influential in your local community. All of the advice in this guide can be used for meetings with unsuccessful candidates too.
Work alongside others
As politicians and others seek to divide us by spreading myths about climate action, it’s important that we work together within our communities to be united in our demand for climate justice. We recommend you work with others to secure a meeting with your new or returning MP. At a local level, this could include other community groups, organisations and businesses.
The more diverse and representative the people and groups you collaborate with are, the more likely your MP will listen, and the more successful you’ll be.
Before organising a meeting with your MP, you could start by reaching out to other groups, so you can jointly approach them. If you’ve already planned the meeting, there’s still time to let others know about it and invite them to join. Find out more about working with local allies.
Invite your candidates to meet
We've drafted a template email you can use to ask your MP to meet. We’ve left space for you to tailor the email so you can focus on the environmental concerns most important to your group and local partners. As you’d expect, MPs are very busy, so try to remain flexible on dates.
We’ve also put together a template social media post which you can use to welcome your MP to office. This will help put your group on their radar ahead of your meeting.
Let us know when you have a meeting secured and we can give you advice on how best to tailor your arguments for the specific MP or political party you’re meeting with.
Venues
MPs will have an office which will act as a natural venue for your meeting. However you might want to suggest inviting to them to a space in your local community such as a local cafe (if it’s not too busy) or even your local library. If there’s a particular location that’s relevant to your campaign demands, such as a river in need of cleaning up or a community energy project, you might want to invite your MP there. You could also consider holding your meting online. This may mean more people can attend and your MP will be able to hear from a diverse range of voices. Take a look at our guide to using Zoom to help you prepare.
Preparing a welcome gift
To make sure your group and partners are memorable to your MP, we recommend you bring them a welcome gift of a houseplant in a pot decorated by your group.
Order our Friends of the Earth stencils to help decorate your pot and get creative with images that help represent your group and your local community. That way your MP will have something in their office that serves as a reminder of the importance of working with local groups like yours.
Ahead of your MP meeting, why not organise a craftivism event to decorate your pot. At the event you could also encourage people to write postcards to your MP which you could take along to the meeting. We have postcards for the United for Warm Homes campaign and the Planet over Profit campaign which you can order and downloadable postcards for our Environmental Rights Campaign.
Don’t forget you can apply to the local action group fund to cover the cost of the plant, plant pot and any other materials you may need.
Before your meeting
Decide who's going. A minimum of 2 people from the group should attend to ensure that one person can take notes while the other speaks. Ask representatives from other local groups you’ve worked with before to join the meeting. This is helpful for demonstrating the breadth of support for the issues in your community. It’s a good idea to agree roles in advance. Decide who’ll speak to which agenda point and who’ll be responsible for timekeeping.
Research the MP beforehand to check if they have made any previous statements on climate breakdown or have themes they’re particularly interested in that you could use to get their attention. You can use websites like They Work For You to help. For example, if they seem particularly concerned about the economy, you could focus on employment and the benefits that green jobs will have. Or if they have spoken out about health, you could highlight the health benefits of taking action on air pollution and home insulation.
If you need help with gathering local data about your area, check out our State of the Environment tool which shows you data on how your local area is performing on various climate issues.
Agenda for the meeting
During the meeting you can use our main campaign demands to structure the discussion. These demands set out the urgent actions needed to be taken on climate and nature by all political parties.
You may want to run through the list systematically in your meeting, or if you’re worried about running out of time, why not prioritise the checklist and choose the environmental issues that most align with the concerns you have for your area?
As well as amplifying these demands locally we know you may also have other local, national or international issues that you want to focus on. Whether that’s opposing a fossil fuel extraction site or, stopping airport expansion where you live. No matter what your focus you can use this opportunity to fight for a more just and fairer world.
Securing commitments
During the meeting it’s key to get commitments from your MP. Depending on the topics you focused on and the questions you asked before the election you may already have commitments to hold your MP to account over.
Making sure you’ve got a good record of what they’ve said about each campaign demand is important. You can also ask them to agree to another meeting in 3 months time to ensure you can follow up.
Other ways you can ask your MP to show support for the topics you’ve discussed:
- Take a photo with the group holding a placard.
- Share support on social media.
- Record a short video of your MP sharing their support or ask for a quote you can use in the media and social media.
Structure of the meeting
- Introduce yourself and the group to the MP if you haven’t met before. Don’t expect them to remember who you are and why you’re meeting them.
- If appropriate, establish as early as you can how much time you have.
- Go through your campaign demands and ask them what they will do now they're elected. Aim to have different people, including local partners, speak to each of the campaign demands. This’ll help the MP hear a range of voices and understand that the issues you’re campaigning on are felt by a broad range of people across the community. It’s useful to take note of what they share, so you can follow up with them and hold them to account on the issues.
- Try to get to commitments and next steps. Try and secure another meeting with them in 3 months time to follow up on any discussions you’ve had.
- Take a photo together and agree to be in touch.
- Close the meeting with thanks and a run-through of any action points agreed.
After your meeting
Let us know what your MP said during the meeting and if they made any specific commitments. This way, we’ll be able to build a national picture of what politicians are saying, and help you hold them to account for any pledges they made to you.
Send them an email to follow up on your agreed next steps.
Post your photos on social media and tag @friends_earth