Katie White: meet the influential climate campaigner that's now the MP for Leeds North West

“I’m very focused on outcomes,” she tells the Yorkshire Post. “In all my jobs, people say I keep saying: ‘What’s the impact?’”

Katie, the Labour MP for Leeds North West, is one of the only people in the 2024 intake who has helped craft impactful legislation.

After leaving the University of Glasgow, she worked for Friends of the Earth in Leeds and London - and co-led the charity’s campaign for the Climate Change Act.

She says: “I remember telling my parents and they were like as if you could do a law?”

She remembers telling her now husband about it and he said: “Nice idea, but it’s never going to work.”

Katie says she was “convinced it was a good idea” and so it proved.

The Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 by Ed Miliband, who is once again the Energy Secretary, and put in place legally binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“It was really thoughtful policy making and it was really creative campaigning,” Katie explains.

“Even under austerity, it meant they [the Tories] couldn’t go back.”

It led to Katie being awarded an OBE, and now she hopes as an MP she can help the climate transition level up the North.

“Climate is the issue that I’m passionate about, scientifically, economically and the inequality between North and South,” she says. 

“Although I’m really terrified of what’s happening, the opportunities genuinely excite me.”

She thinks that “we’re really well placed in the North to harness those skills”, particularly with  “our can-do attitude in Yorkshire”.