02 Jan 2024
It’s fair to say that St Albans MP Daisy Cooper is a regular at Victoria Street café Baked Nation. I’ve personally met her there on several previous occasions, and she greets the staff by name when stepping out of the chill December morning into the warmth of its cosy environs.
Every table is full to bursting, and we seek refuge in the light and airy conservatory, an overhead heater switched on to keep us warm while we await hot drinks. We have the place to ourselves, so it’s easy to fall into small-talk about her recent invitation to the launch screening of the Doctor Who Christmas special before focusing on the topics at hand: a retrospective of the year we have left behind and a look ahead to the one just started.
She is very open about her experiences these past 12 months, her third full year as MP, from the highs to the lows: “The thing that I’ve noticed is that it’s been a very difficult year for a lot of people. Everyone talks about the cost of living crisis, but it has really impacted a lot of people, some maybe for the first time ever.
“It’s the fallout of [Liz Truss’] mini-budget and its impact on mortgages, it’s the fact people are nervous about spending money and it hits everybody, right? It’s families, it’s small businesses, independent businesses in particular. The number of people who are either getting benefits or going to the food bank or getting other support has gone up a lot in St Albans.
“I’m very mindful that we live in a place that’s seen on paper as very well off, but actually what I see as the MP is that there are people you see day-in day-out, who are running our local businesses and working in our local area, and I know from talking to them that they’re really, really struggling.”
She leans forward to emphasise her point: “It is really hard, and I think people feel very ground down. I see that a lot, and it makes you really sad.
“I came into politics because I wanted to make a difference. You want to improve services, you want to enable people to live their lives as they choose. And at the moment it just feels like everything’s broken.
“I’m always knocking on doors, and I say to people ‘Hello I’m Daisy, I’m your MP, is there anything I can help you with?’ And people just say, ‘Well everything’. You know, that’s what you get.
“There’s normally one or two things, but at the moment, everyone’s saying nothing works.
“It just takes one small thing to happen that you haven’t planned for, like an older parent falling down the stairs, or a child suddenly falling ill, or something going wrong at work, and suddenly everything falls apart.
“It feels to me like people’s lives are quite fragile at the moment, and held together in quite a tricky kind of way.
Unlike her predecessor, Daisy prides herself on being a very visible, very approachable Member of Parliament, which of course means she can’t avoid people speaking to her in the street, on the train, or even down the pub.
“I commute to London three or four days a week and people stop me on the train almost every single day to say something. It’s actually really nice when they say, ‘Thanks for what you’re doing’, or just recently someone stopped me on the train to say, ‘Oh, thanks for voting against the Rwanda bill’, for example.
“But sometimes, someone is so pent up, and either they’re looking for help, or they want to tell me about something that’s happened to them because they just want me to know. So it’s a real mixture.
“But I don’t mind it at all. If I’m in a hurry on the way to a meeting, I’ll just say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve got to run for this thing, but drop me a line’, or I’ll get their details and contact them.
“But what really strikes me is that sometimes people don’t actively contact their MP until they’re in a complete point of crisis. So sometimes I’ll say, ‘You know you can just drop me an email about that and I can do this’. ‘Oh really? I didn’t know you could do that’.
“I think it’s because there isn’t a job description for being an MP. People do the job very differently, depending on where they are in the country and what the issues are.
“Some MPs pride themselves on the number of times they speak in Parliament, but actually don’t really do much on the ground in their own area. Others pride themselves on doing tons of casework but do nothing in Parliament. So every MP does their job differently depending on how they want to do it and also what their constituents need.
“The largest part of my job is doing casework, but you can’t really talk about because it’s confidential.
“This year, my team and I hit the milestone of helping people with 30,000 different cases since I was elected, and it was actually really nice as we sat in the office and discussed some of the cases where we’ve made a difference.”
Three of Daisy’s team work exclusively on casework, with another in Westminster looking after the policy side of this, as she explains: “For example, someone’s bike had been stolen from St Albans City Station, so we wrote to Thameslink about it and I met them on site and said, ‘Look, this isn’t secure because you can lean over and take the bike out of the secure bike lock. Where’s your policy for fixing that?’ And they didn’t have one.
“So the biggest portion of my staff budget and my staff time goes on doing casework locally, and it’s definitely the most rewarding part.
“Sometimes you meet somebody in a state of crisis and you can see that they’re in a really terrible state, and then occasionally you see them in a very different setting where they are now thriving. Because obviously once you’ve helped somebody, they get on with their lives and don’t really get back in touch.
“But sometimes there are really nice little moments where someone will come over and say, ‘Oh by the way, since I last saw you, this is what’s happened in my life’. And it’s really lovely. Your heart just feels very warm and snugly.”
As the national Liberal Democrat spokesperson for health and social care, her role involves holding the government to account, and also being the party lead on these issues.
“At the very start of 2023, I was out there calling for Parliament to be recalled early because we had those horrific scenes of people stuck in the back of ambulances and the indignity of being treated in corridors. It was genuinely a winter crisis like no other. It forced the government to hold a summit with big NHS organisations and the rest of it and fingers crossed, hopefully, it won’t be as bad this year, but we won’t know probably until the middle of January.”
She also gets to look at the issues people raise with her locally, such as GP waiting times or being unable to register with a dentist, as obviously if it is happening on a small scale, nine times out of ten it’s probably a national issue as well.
“I can take up a lot of local issues and then try and raise them on the national stage.”
Her national work this year has also been focused on the party’s General Election pledges, which has involved meeting with various organisations and listening to their priorities, speaking with patients’ groups and developing what the Lib Dems’ priorities should be.
“Obviously the manifesto will get published once the election is called, but we’ve already announced a number of pledges around having guaranteed access to a GP within seven days, improving access to urgent and emergency care for dentistry, giving a guaranteed two month limit on getting urgent cancer treatment and things like that.
“It’s been really rewarding to work on these policies, and NHS and social care will be the most ambitious part of our policy offering at the next election. You can think of individual people that you’ve helped who would have benefited from these things being in place and it’s really great to have that kind of connection.”
As party deputy leader, she deputises and supports Ed Davey with national issues, including supporting candidates in recent by-elections, with a view to the inevitable General Election in 2024.
“I think a number of candidates around the country looked to St Albans as an example of how we won here in 2019 against the trend, so I’ve been working with other candidates around the country, including Victoria Collins in Harpenden and Berkhamsted, to help show them what the path is to winning, with the hope that at the next General Election we can win as many seats as possible.
“I think we’re very conscious that as a party we have always overstretched and under-delivered, and that’s not going to happen again.
“So we’re being incredibly disciplined about making sure that in the areas we’re particularly targeting, we give candidates the support they need to win. The task for us is to win as many seats from as the Conservatives as possible, but also making sure that we don’t miss out on constituencies by a few hundred votes because we’ve been putting our focus in the wrong way.
“In Surrey, we’ve got the big beasts, Jeremy Hunt and Michael Gove, and both their seats are under threat from the Liberal Democrats. We’ve had a revival in the south-west after winning two by-election victories, and it’s exciting to see green shoots in other areas.”
So does she see any signs of how the political wind could be blowing in 2024? “There will be those people who will see the difference that a hard-working Lib Dem MP can make. They’ll look at the difference that local Lib Dem councillors are making and they’ll see that we’re proactive, we communicate, we’re visible, and that’s how we do our politics. And I think people really like that and that’s why they voted for us.
“But at the same time, there will be a lot of people who want to vote against this Conservative government. There are always people like that in every election and every political party plays on it. But I think particularly in the next General Election, there are scores of lifelong Conservative voters who are internationalists, they’re environmentalists, they’re pro-business, but they’re also pro-public sector.
“The current Conservative Party has moved so far away from them and their values and their priorities. I think a lot of them are appalled at the state of the country and they just can’t believe how a party which they used to vote for has managed to get us into such a flipping mess.
“What’s interesting is that the future of the Conservative Party is far more uncertain than, for example, the future of the Labour Party was when Jeremy Corbyn was in charge, as most of the Blairites, who I guess now would be Starmerites, remained in the party so they could grow back and realign the party back to a more centrist position.
“In the Conservative Party, all of their activists now are incredibly right-wing. They’ve got very, very few one-nation party members and they’ve got very few one-nation MPs and their voices are almost completely silenced.
“That’s in part why Liberal Democrats are doing so well, because lifelong Conservative voters look at us and think that their values are closer to ours than they are to the current Conservative party, which has effectively become an incredibly right-wing party.”
While it’s tempting to discuss the current state of UK politics for the next few hours, Daisy has a scheduled engagement she cannot miss, so we bring the conversation back to local issues and the coming 12 months.
“There have been a number of campaigns that I’ve been fighting for some time now. Some of them we’ve had a degree of success, others are still really hard work”
She is honest about one major defeat in particular: “The Strategic Rail Freight Interchange, that was so frustrating. We fought tooth and nail at the start of this year to expose the approach the county council was taking to show that there was actually a legal route by which they could refuse to sell the land if they wanted to, but ultimately we lost that campaign.
“All I can say is that we managed to expose the fact that the county council basically wanted to sell this land to get the money from the sale and their claims that they were reluctant sellers were nonsense. I think if they’d just been up front and straight with everybody in the first place, it wouldn’t have got so messy. We would have still campaigned against it, but at least it would have been done in a transparent way. I think people just felt really betrayed and lied to.”
Away from rail freight, there are other campaigns she has run in Parliament, including care home visiting, which she says means a lot to her personally.
“A constituent came to me with her experiences of visiting a parent in a care home during lockdown. It was clear that right across the country there were many people in care homes who had died during the pandemic, not because of Covid, but because they were isolated, and care workers didn’t have enough contact with vulnerable individuals to recognise that their conditions were deteriorating very quickly.
“I wrote letters to the Government, I led a cross-party campaign, I was writing articles in national media, the Daily Express took it on as a campaign, then so did the Daily Mail, you know, ‘a hug granny for Christmas’ kind of thing, and then we had another lockdown.
“Eventually, just a couple of weeks ago, the Government agreed they were going to change visiting rules in hospitals and care homes, and although it doesn’t create a legal right to have a carer with you, it is going to change guidance, so it’s a really significant step forward.
“When I think back to when I first got that email, I remember reading it thinking, there’s no way the Government’s going to change these rules. I remember having a Zoom surgery with that particular constituent, and I bump into her in town sometimes.
“But I know that now, by working with other MPs and other parties, we’ve managed to change the situation, so that’s very rewarding.”
Looking forwards, there are two major challenges which she has been personally campaigning on.
“One is obviously NHS services, we’re one of those areas where we were promised new hospitals at the last General Election and I can’t see any way in which there’s going to be a spade in the ground before the next one, and so I just continue to be incredibly persistent on that issue. I’ve asked a few times for the government to release the funding to our local hospital trust as I get so many emails from people saying the disrepair of our hospitals is outrageous.
“The buildings at Watford Hospital are life expired, they’re not in a good condition, and some parts are not safe, so we have got to get the money out of the government.
“The other is a campaign that I’ve been running for two years about SEND – special educational needs and disabilities – the funding of which is absolutely scandalous. I feel like I’m sort of stuck between a sort of blue-on-blue kind of fight between the county council and the Government.
“The county council has been asleep at the wheel for years now and done nothing about this, and the government equally have set up this ridiculous funding formula which deprives Hertfordshire children of the funding that they should be getting, because they look at historical spend rather than current needs.
“SEND affects lots of different types of families. If you imagine a typical couple in St Albans where maybe they’ve both got degrees, they’re working in the city, they’ve got money, they’re articulate, they’re used to advocating for themselves and their children – even people like that who are equipped with all the resources they need often end up in tears and feel completely broken.
“When I talk to those kind of parents, they always say to me, what must it be like for those families who have busy complicated lives where actually they can’t fill out forms every single week, they haven’t got the time and capacity to be sending emails every week to chase things up, they can’t afford to employ a solicitor to advise them of a tribunal hearing.
“I’m helping constituents like that as well and so I know what it’s like for them and it’s unbelievably tough, it’s unbelievably tough. So I do feel as though we’ve been let down there and I’ve been basically bashing heads together, you know, trying to force the county council to take this seriously and to actually advocate properly for our children in Hertfordshire and at the same time say to the Government, don’t you realise what a big issue this is?
“Children have got one shot at their education and their childhood and to be told by the Department for Education that Hertfordshire’s funding will catch up with Buckinghamshire in 15 years means a child who is three today will finish all of their formal education by the time that funding is available. I mean that’s criminal. It really is.
“So I feel very passionately about that particular campaign and I’m throwing everything at it a broader debate I think in January which I hope to take part in, and that’s one of those areas where I’m desperate to see some progress before a General Election is called.”
But what about Daisy? What has she enjoyed doing away from politics? She can’t be working all the time?
“I do work quite hard and I find it hard to switch off. I do believe in work-life balance, I think it’s really important and I do enforce it amongst my team, but I’ve never been very good at switching off myself so I do tend to go at 100 miles an hour most of the time.
“My job is so consuming. It’s very hard to switch off unless you’re completely absorbed by the other thing that you’re doing, but my husband Rob and I have done some fun things. We had a holiday this year, which was lovely, and we had an afternoon at London Zoo for my birthday.
“You know, we get the occasional night out, we try and have a date night every once and a fortnight. So that can either just be a takeaway or a meal at home, or going out somewhere for a few drinks, just to make sure that we always have time for us. That’s always in the diary. The night can change, but it always has to happen. Date night at least once every fortnight.”
