Local Government Finance

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 17th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison McGovern]

My hon. Friend is extremely experienced in these matters and remembers, as I do, the impossible situation that councils, particularly in the poorest areas, were put in under the Tory Government. He is right to point out that the Lib Dems did play a small role in that, too. On his questions, I always read in detail the Select Committee’s reports, and I will do that with the ones he mentions. The Government have set out the pathway, making the immediate change that I said on social care and asking Baroness Casey to drive us towards that long-term vision that he points out. That is exactly what we need to do; we need to fix this for the long term.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

Westmorland and Furness is an extremely well-run council and an extremely unusual one as well. It is England’s most rural council. It is the council that accepts the highest number of visitors—non-resident population—as we support everybody else’s constituents, who make up the 15 million who come to our district every year. The council has some of the poorest wards in the country. It is the host of Barrow, which is the centre of the UK’s defence industry, and it has the highest percentage of people in social care. This formula will leave us unusually crippled. We think it will mean a 13% cut to our budgets over the next three years. Given that we are so unusual, will the Minister unusually agree to meet me, her hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham) and local council leaders, so we can work out an unusual solution to this wonderful but unusual council’s problems?

[Alison McGovern]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question and his description of his unusual and wonderful area. I do not recognise the figures he mentioned just then, but I will happily meet him and any colleagues he wants to bring, and we will go through the numbers together in detail.