Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion Siân Berry. Image by Kelly Hill, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0.
Responding to the government’s new Road Safety Strategy, which was announced on 7th January, Green MP, Siân Berry, said
“The only target for the number of people killed on the road should be zero. With this strategy, the Government has massively overlooked key actions to cut traffic and achieve safer and slower vehicle speeds, which are truly effective at saving lives and essential to reaching this goal.
“The Government should follow the example of Wales, where the national default 20mph limit reduced road casualties on 20mph and 30mph roads by 26 per cent in the first 12 months of its introduction. That represents 630 people in Wales who made it home safely.”
Siân Berry has a long history in politics and success was sweet when she took the Brighton seat. Photograph: Ian West/PA
Since Zack Polanski took over as leader, the party has doubled its membership and its four MPs want to take on Reform’s anger and build community spirit
“Someone has to be out there making the narrative for social security. Someone has to fight the corrosive attitudes to people on benefits,” says Siân Berry, who has just finished her first year as a Green MP in the House of Commons.
She is speaking to the Guardian in her Brighton constituency office, formerly occupied by the legendary Caroline Lucas who flew a lone flag as the only member of parliament for the Green party for 14 years.
Now, however, there are four MPs including Berry, battling together, she says, to hold the space for the left at a moment when it feels the far right has hypnotised the entire political body. “Often Adrian [Ramsay, MP for Waveney Valley] is the only one bringing up animal welfare in Defra questions, or Carla [Denyer, MP for Bristol Central] will be the only person arguing for a refugee’s right to work to the Home Office.” They have all, at different times, been the only party to raise the need for taxes on extreme wealth.
“Caroline was a lone voice in parliament,” she says. ‘But there are four of us so we can share responsibilities. We each shadow six government departments.” Berry’s portfolio covers crime and policing, justice, transport, work and pensions, culture, media and sport and democratic standards. “We absolutely have to be ready if an issue comes up. There are some issues where if a Green isn’t in the chamber asking a question, that question won’t be asked.
‘There are four of us so we can share responsibilities’: from left, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer, Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns. Photograph: Ian West/PA
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Most of all, Berry longs to see strong action on climate. “The climate situation is awful. A two degree rise is within sight. We are on a knife-edge of whether we can protect this ecosystem. It’s our only home.”
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
Rather, recent governments have combined significant relaxation of the rules with systematic underfunding of supervising agencies: the Health & Safety Executive has lost 45 per cent of its budget since 2010, the Environment Agency 50 per cent.
The result is corporate impunity. Companies that break the rules — whether on safety, workers’ rights, pollution or anything else — are unlikely to be caught.
When they are — and the privatised water sector is one of the few where fines have risen in 2024-25 — the nature of corporate investment incentivises continued rule-breaking. This year we’ve seen international creditors threaten to collapse Thames Water if their money is used to pay fines it received for breaking the law.
Good Jobs First has exposed how prevalent non-enforcement of the rules is across the entire economy.
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Unrestricted corporate profiteering is making Britain an ever dirtier, more dangerous and more expensive place to live.
Significant expansion of public ownership and investment in regulatory agencies to give them the means to punish bad actors is the only solution: it requires a radical change of direction from the next PM.
A general view of the Houses of Parliament in London
Report shows enforcement hits new lows under Labour
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The data showed a steep drop in regulatory penalties for abusive employers in workplace safety, consumer protection, as well as financial and environmental offences.
This steep decline follows a government request earlier this year, asking regulators to ease actions against businesses in the hopes of stimulating economic growth.
PM Sir Keir Starmer’s government sent out letters to 17 regulators telling them to relax rules for companies across several key sectors.
In response, environmental agency enforcement continued its decades-long decline in 2025, while the Financial Conduct Authority saw a drop of nearly £600 million in penalties compared with 2024.
The report also showed that successful outcomes at employment tribunals went down this year, while the number of cases waiting to be heard have increased dramatically, with many being scheduled for 2027 or 2028.
Levels of enforcement from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) also dropped, the think tank found.
Reacting to the report, Green MP Sian Berry told the Star: “This report lays bare a catastrophic weakening of the rules that protect people and the planet.
“When environmental enforcement collapses, polluters get a green light to poison our rivers, trash our air and destroy habitats with impunity.
“The decades-long decline in Environment Agency enforcement, alongside falling financial penalties, is not an accident; it is the result of political choices.
“This is a clear failure of the Labour government to stand up to corporate power.
Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion Siân Berry. Image by Kelly Hill, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0.
Responding to the announcement from the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, that jury trials in England and Wales for crimes that carry a likely sentence of less than three years are set to be scrapped, Green Party MP, Siân Berry, said:
“The focus on victims’ rights is appreciated, but this Labour Government is taking the wrong steps to try to serve us better, and laying the groundwork for further crackdowns on dissent, whistleblowing and protest if it removes juries from so many charges that have state or corporate victims.
“Juries are also a safeguard against creeping bias and discrimination. Judges are not currently representative of our wider communities and, under these plans, individual decisions will be at risk of damaging politicisation, while individual judges who are women or from minoritised communities risk attacks from the far right.
“More than fifteen years of continuing austerity has caused a backlog in the courts, not juries. Instead of dismantling a centuries-old fundamental legal right, the Government must reverse the neglect and cuts that created this mess in the first place.”
UK Justice Secretary and formerly Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion Siân Berry. Image by Kelly Hill, Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0.
“This is yet another assault on our rights from an increasingly authoritarian government. This proposal would scrap a fundamental cornerstone of our justice system which has been in place for 800 years.
“For David Lammy to describe the right to trial by jury as ‘not a right’ is a disgrace. The Government must fund our justice system properly – not make people pay for Labour and Conservative austerity with their fundamental rights. The Green Party will fight these proposals all the way.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves takes part in a townhall session at the Calthorpe Community Gardens in London, December 18, 2025
