The comments made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, on 22 June 2026.
Starmer’s been a poor PM, but the vitriol and hatred towards him is just weird. It comes from both the far left and far right. It’s contrived by people whose motives are deeply suspect. Part of me wants him to survive just to spite them.
The speech made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for the Environment, in the House of Commons on 16 June 2026.
I start by associating myself closely with the Secretary of State’s remarks about Jo Cox. It was a privilege to serve alongside her in this place, and we still miss her deeply.
I am grateful to the Secretary of State for advance sight of the statement and for the helpful briefing that I received earlier. Since Conservative privatisation more than 35 years ago, some £85 billion of billpayers’ money has flowed out like a torrent into the pockets of mostly overseas shareholders and executives paying themselves unearned bonuses. That money could and should have gone into cleaning up our waterways and modernising infrastructure. Instead, sewage was released into our lakes, rivers and seas for 1.8 million hours last year, and more than 100,000 of those were in the Thames region alone. Some 20% of our water leaks out of its pipes before it even reaches our homes. For Thames Water, the figure is even worse, with 25% of that water wasted.
Now Thames Water’s investors are asking for more time for more opportunity to take money before they inevitably run. The Secretary of State is right, then, that the creditors’ offer is a disgrace. They get to keep making money, and Thames Water billpayers get to pay even more to keep them going, while getting the privilege of seeing long-overdue infrastructure improvements delayed for yet another decade. Thames Water is taking the mickey. The Liberal Democrats say, “No more, and no thanks.”
It is clear that Thames Water has failed in its basic performance as a water company, and that gives the Secretary of State all the reason she needs to place it into special administration, so why is she not doing that instead? Her letter to Ofwat is, I am afraid, a sign of dreadful weakness. She has to beg an equally weak Ofwat to show a resolve that it institutionally lacks. Thames has failed in its performance, so just put it into special administration and migrate the company to a mutually owned model, where the billpayers own the company and call the shots. That way, investment will be made, sewage spills will stop and water leaks will cease. By doing that, she could begin the process whereby all our water companies are owned not by private equity, overseas investors or the sluggish state, but by the people. If she did that, she would win the favour of people from Witney to Windermere. Why does she not stop faffing about and do that instead?
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Gentleman, I think, for his support for my statement today, although it was slightly half-hearted. He is right to say that there have been serious pollution incidents in different water companies, but especially in the Thames, and that is of grave concern to the public and to Thames Water’s customers in particular. I point out to him that there are two types of special administration regime. An insolvency SAR is an insolvency process and is for the company directors to determine. A performance SAR would be triggered if a company was in serious breach of its statutory duties or if the company breaches an enforcement order in a way that is so serious that it is inappropriate for the company to retain its licence. The Government stand ready for all eventualities, including a SAR.
The speech made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, in the House of Commons on 29 November 2024.
The motives of those proposing the Bill are grounded in compassion—in the heat of this debate, I want to seriously acknowledge that—particularly the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater), who has conducted herself with great dignity throughout. Neither side has a monopoly on compassion—I will always be affected by watching my mum suffer at her death at the age I am now—so let us not think badly of one another’s motives; let us instead be courteous and let us be curious.
My opposition to the Bill is grounded in compassion. To legalise assisted dying would be to create the space for coercion that would undoubtedly see people die who would not otherwise have chosen to do so. There are no safeguards in the Bill that would prevent that.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
Will the hon. Member give way?
Tim Farron
I had better not.
To be fair, no safeguards would be possible, even if we were not going through this hasty process. First, there is the risk of self-coercion. Many of us will have heard older relatives utter words similar to, “I am a burden to you. You would be better off without me.” We all know reasonably instinctively that people will present it as making a sovereign choice, but it will be a choice born out of coercion. Unless there is a clause in the Bill that I have missed to employ mind readers, no amount of doctors, safeguards or bureaucratic mechanisms will prevent those who self-coerce from opting to die simply because they assume that no matter what their loved ones say, everyone would be better off if they were dead.
To add to the stats we just heard from the hon. Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward), we know that in Canada more than one in three people opting for assisted dying gave as their reason for choosing to die that they felt they were a burden on others. Honestly, I do not see how we need any further discussion to push us into the No Lobby than that clear evidence from where it is legal.
Secondly, there is coercive control. In the last Parliament, we passed groundbreaking and long-overdue legislation on domestic violence. As society’s understanding of that often hidden evil has developed, our eyes have been opened to one horrific factor in particular: that of insidious, manipulative coercive control. Thousands of people have been—and are today—victims of those who seek to manipulate their will, take over their lives and coerce them into believing that their perpetrator’s will is actually their will. We all know through our constituency casework of people who have been victims. One common theme is that victims often did not realise that they were being controlled until long afterwards. It can take years for the penny to drop. I do not need to spell it out, then—do I?—that for those coerced into choosing assisted dying, that penny will never drop. They will no longer be with us.
Thirdly, people will choose assisted dying because of their pain when they would not do if that pain was properly managed. Here is where the evidence from other countries becomes truly disturbing—in fact, terrifying. In the last decade, the countries in Europe without assisted dying increased palliative care investment by over three times more than those that had legalised it. In the United States, those states without assisted dying saw an increase in the size of their palliative care teams that was also three times greater than that in states that had legalised it. That is clearly no accident and no coincidence. Indeed, the group that have contacted me who are most vociferously against the Bill are palliative care doctors.
Sorcha Eastwood (Lagan Valley) (Alliance)
The discussion we are having—and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Spen Valley (Kim Leadbeater) for the way that she has conducted it—almost implies that palliative care is of the same excellent standard across the UK. I have to inform the House that it is not, which is a matter of deep regret. I cannot stand by the Bill because many vulnerable, marginalised people will be impacted by it. I want to support and affirm life, and I want that to be with dignity.
Tim Farron
I thank the hon. Lady for her important and powerful intervention. Those palliative care doctors who have been in touch with me know that to opt for legalised assisted dying is to opt, inevitably, to divert resources away from palliative care—that is the evidence. I spoke to one of those palliative care doctors this week, who works in a hospice. She said:
“The only patients I care for, are those who are dying”.
We all know what is coming. Assisted dying means a shift in focus away from helping people to live in dignity and comfort, towards simply helping people to die. Then, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let us not kid ourselves: palliative care is a postcode lottery in this country, especially for the poor and the old. If the motivation of those who choose assisted dying is to end their pain, we can be absolutely certain that those NHS trusts with the weakest palliative care offer will be those with the highest incidence of people choosing to die. In other words, it will not really be their choice at all.
An observation made to me by a senior oncologist just last week was that there are fewer more stressful situations in a person’s life than to be given a terminal diagnosis—I remember being with my mum as she was given hers—and to be told you are going to die. The oncologist then explained that among terminally ill people there is a vast amount of severe but undiagnosed depression and psychological illness. Similar but distinct from the danger of self-coercion, there is nothing in the Bill to safeguard against people who suffer like that from choosing to die before their time, yet in so many cases it will be people’s mental health that leads them to choose to die, not their physical condition. We simply cannot be all right with that.
Here we are, on the precipice of agreeing to sanction and support the deaths of people in despair. Our society has chosen a dystopian and contagious path if it chooses to facilitate the death of those who have a terminal illness rather than standing with them, weeping with them, valuing them and loving them against the desolation that any of us would feel if we were given a diagnosis of that sort. It is no wonder that the Government’s own suicide prevention adviser is strongly opposed to the Bill.
I totally respect that many of my colleagues in our corner of the House—my fellow liberals—will take a different view. I am opposed to the Bill because I am a liberal. Libertarians believe that personal liberty is so important that there can be no fetters on it. But I am liberal, not a libertarian. I believe that freedom is essential and that the rights of the individual underpin a decent society, but my rights must be held in check if they nullify your rights.
Since we know—we really do—that to legalise assisted dying is to permit people to die who will self-coerce, as a consequence of manipulative coercive control, outrageously not because of a real, sovereign choice but because of a heartbreaking Hobson’s choice due to inadequate palliative care, I have no right to impose that ultimate and most appalling constraint on the freedom of the most vulnerable in our society. I urge all of us to stand in defence of those most vulnerable people, to defiantly defend their liberty, to make a renewed commitment to world-class palliative care and to human dignity, and to reject the Bill.
The comments made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, on 22 May 2024.
It’s on!
Rishi Sunak has just called a General Election for Thursday 4th July.
Serving our communities as our MP is an absolute privilege. Together we have achieved so much, whether it’s saving local vital health services or even running our train service on the Lakes Line!
In just a few weeks time, you get to decide who will be your MP for the next 5 years – me or a Conservative.
I would be honoured if you would put your faith in me to carry on serving you as we make our own luck and get things done.
The comments made by Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, on Facebook on 15 March 2023.
It absolutely beggars belief that the Conservatives’ budget had next to nothing in it to address the NHS crisis in Cumbria and across the country.
People are waiting for hours in A&E, weeks to see a GP, months for cancer treatment, and an eternity for mental health care.
And what did the Chancellor announce to tackle this disastrous situation? Barely a word, barely a penny.
Meanwhile the Conservatives have once again shown they don’t care about our rural communities. There was nothing to support us on the big issues we face whether it’s the crisis in farming or on the scandal of sewage being dumped in our lakes and rivers.
Cumbrians are being taken for granted by this Conservative Government.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Farron on 2015-11-10.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, when he plans to publish the review of national radiotherapy capacity commissioned by NHS England.
Jane Ellison
HS England has not commissioned a national capacity review of radiotherapy. Earlier this year, NHS England provided local commissioning teams with a tool to assist planning of radiotherapy services with their local providers in order to assess a different set of planning assumptions developed by the Radiotherapy Clinical Reference Group in line with rapidly changing clinical practice.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Farron on 2016-02-01.
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, how much his Department spent on advertising the Right to Buy scheme for council and housing association tenants in each month from October 2015 to January 2016.
Brandon Lewis
I refer the hon. Member to the answer given to him on 2 December 2015, PQ 18460.
At that time, Right to Buy campaign spend figures for October and November were provisional as the campaign was still running. Confirmed monthly expenditure from October to December 2015 is as follows:
October – £155,001
November – £171,066
December – £142,656
Figures for January 2016 are still be finalised so are not yet available.
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Farron on 2016-04-08.
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many convictions have been secured under the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act since its introduction in 2004.
Mr Shailesh Vara
The number of offenders found guilty at all courts of offences under the Gangmasters Licensing Act 2004, in England and Wales, from 2004 to 2014 (the latest available) can be viewed at the following link:
http://www.gla.gov.uk/our-impact/conviction-totals/
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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Farron on 2016-05-23.
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of proposed changes to the disabled students allowances on the number of disabled students accessing higher education.
Joseph Johnson
The reform of Disabled Students’ Allowances is intended to ensure higher education institutions are consistently meeting their duties to disabled students under the Equality Act, and is not expected to impact on the number of disabled students accessing higher education.
The Government carried out an Equality Analysis as part of the recent consultation on reforms to Disabled Students’ Allowances. This is available online at https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/481527/bis-15-658-disabled-students-allowances-equality-analysis.pdf
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The below Parliamentary question was asked by Tim Farron on 2016-06-13.
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, when he expects his Department to submit a final estimate of the damage caused by flooding in the South Lakes area to the European Commission as part of the UK’s application to the EU Solidarity Fund.
James Wharton
The Government submitted an initial UK application to the European Union Solidary Fund on Friday 26 February. The application included an estimate of eligible costs of direct damage incurred by the storms in December and early January. Since making this initial application we have continued to refine our cost estimates. I will update Parliament once the European Commission’s final assessment has been made.