Contact your councillors

This year saw the biggest ever local elections take place across the UK.

With thousands of new local councillors in post across England, now is a prime opportunity to build support for divestment within your local council and ensure the climate is a top priority.

How to get in touch with your newly elected councillors

1. Find your councillors

The easiest way to find out who has been elected to your council is simply to search the name of your council and “local election results 2021”. Once there, you will be able to see which councillors won in each ward, access their contact details and see which party they are from.

Over the next few weeks, councils should be updating their webpages, so the standard page featuring all of the elected councillors should also be up-to-date shortly.

2. Choose who to contact

Whether you are coordinating this activity alone or within a local group, decide which councillors will be the best for you to prioritise based on your campaign’s strategy and your own capacity.

Some councillors who may be useful to target include:

  • Ward councillors (you can quickly find these here)
  • The leader of the council
  • Those elected to climate or sustainability committees/positions
  • Those who are new councillors (i.e. they haven’t been re-elected to the role)
  • Those from the council’s ruling party, or alternatively, from an opposition party – including party group leaders
  • Those who have signed up to the UK Divest pledge

3. Email your councillors

Councillors receive endless, generic emails about a whole host of issues, so it’s vital that we tailor and personalise each email to ensure that our issue is listened to.

We’ve created a template letter that you can adapt, along with some ideas of how to research your councillor and what to include to make your email stand out.

Make sure to download and attach a copy of our latest councillor briefing to your email.

4. Keep up the conversation!

An ideal outcome from your initial conversation is a meeting or videocall but if the councillor isn’t keen to meet, find ways to keep the conversation going by asking open questions about what they want to accomplish in their role or if they see a role for the council as a climate leader locally.

Get in touch if you’d like some support by emailing us at ukdivest@gmail.com.