Elderly and Vulnerable People: Loneliness and Isolation

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is an honour to serve under your guidance, Mr Sharma, and a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), who made an excellent speech. I congratulate him on securing a debate of such value and importance.

Loneliness and isolation can affect any one of us at any given time, and over periods of time. They can be caused by all sorts of things. None of us is immune to them. If we are to value the dignity of every single human being, we need to accept that, sometimes, the person affected could be us, or someone we know or come into contact with. These people are valuable, and we need to care about them. The consequences of loneliness and isolation are often physical as well as emotional, so we should care deeply. The hon. Member for St Ives is right to point out the particular susceptibility of younger people to loneliness and isolation.

Westmorland and Lonsdale is, of course, the most beautiful place in the whole of the United Kingdom, if not the planet, and definitely in north-west England. It is also the oldest place in north-west England: we have the oldest population of any constituency there. Nationwide, 19% of people are above 65. In Westmorland and Lonsdale, the figure is 28.5%. My average constituent is 10 years above the national average age—I am above that age now, but never mind. The consequences are significant. Look at what happened last weekend. It shows that while age and other forms of vulnerability can be triggers for isolation, so can rurality, as my neighbour, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Dr Hudson), and the hon. Member for St Ives have said. Isolation was massively multiplied in Cumbria over the last few days, during which there was pretty extreme weather, even by our standards.

This is the moment to pay tribute to all those across our communities in Westmorland who sought to meet people who were snowed in, often in desperate and isolated circumstances: the police, all Westmorland and Furness Council workers, and people working for Electricity North West. I also thank all those who opened the doors of schools, village centres, community buildings, and indeed their businesses for strangers in their hour of need. It is a reminder of how important community is, how difficult it is to construct, and that it is an organic thing. It is a reminder of how precious it is, and in the last few days in Cumbria, we have seen it at its best, but we remember too that community is under extreme threat, especially rural communities such as ours.

I got a call a few weeks ago from an older gentleman; he was 80. He rang my office team for advice on something fairly basic. He lives in a community of about 14 houses, not too far from Hawkshead in the Lake district. He apologised—he should not have done—for ringing us and said, “This is the sort of thing I should’ve been able to find out myself. I would’ve called my neighbours, or knocked on their doors, but I haven’t got any.” There are 14 houses, but only one of them is lived in, and it is lived in by a single widowed man. I thought that was desperately sad. Across our communities, there are so many people like that gentleman.

Second home ownership has grown to the extent that many of our communities are hollowed out. Coniston, for example, which did a brilliant job for all the people stranded there over the weekend, is a wonderful community, but 50% of its properties are not lived in all year round. We need to think about how loneliness is effected—how we create isolation by allowing the market to let rip on our housing stock, and by not having full-time residential communities.

There are things the Government can do about that. The Government have promised to do something about short-term lets. The problem is that they are taking quite a while. Perhaps when the Minister sums up, he will address the fact that the Government made a promise—the Minister at the time made a promise to me during the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill’s progress through the Commons—to change planning law so that short-term lets would become a separate category of use from long-term lets. That is important, because tenants of long-term lets are long-term community members, whereas the tenant of a short-term let will change by the week. That can have a big impact on our community as a whole, but it also reduces the sense of community and the number of people living in it.

Will the Minister say, in his remarks at the end, whether the Government will keep that promise to bring in a change to the planning law in April, so that communities like mine, right the way from Appleby to Coniston, and from Windermere to Kirkby Stephen, can have a high number of homes that are always lived in, and so that our communities can fight against isolation?

A knock-on effect of so many properties in our communities in Westmorland and the rest of Cumbria not being permanently lived in is that the workforce is hollowed out. We already have an older population, which therefore has greater care needs and vulnerability. We also have a smaller reservoir of people of working age to care for them, who can afford to live in the area and serve those needs. That adds to the sense of isolation. Tackling the housing crisis is also about tackling the care crisis and the loneliness crisis.

For many vulnerable people—not just older people, but people living with long-term chronic conditions or learning difficulties, and all sorts of people in vulnerable circumstances—the presence of overnight NHS care is of great significance. I raise this for a reason: at Westmorland General Hospital, Cumbria Health on Call, which covers our out-of-ours service, has chosen in the last two months to end overnight doctor cover on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, so those living in our communities can expect nobody from Kendal to come and help them, and for there to be fewer doctors available across the whole of Cumbria. If they could find a doctor to travel at 4 o’clock in the morning to someone with palliative care needs, or someone with a learning difficulty who has some kind of illness, they would have to come from Barrow or Penrith, and would probably only come to the south lakes—to Grasmere, Grange or Kendal—having already dealt with their local patients. That is deeply troubling, and puts the most vulnerable people in our community at risk.

Immobility and ill health obviously make it harder for people to get out and engage with others in and around their community, and make them more isolated. I am sure fellow hon. Members here could say the same, but I know from local statistics that one in nine human beings in my constituency is on a hospital waiting list. Not every single one of those people is housebound as a result, but a very significant number of people are significantly less mobile because of the length of time it takes them to get treated and made well, and to be able to function in our society.

I want to talk about farmers quickly—I hope it is not too jarring. My hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Sarah Dyke) asked an excellent question in the main Chamber the other day about the mental health of farmers, who are, by definition, an often isolated group of people. They tend to be older, although we would love to get more young people into farming and are desperately trying to do that. The transition from the old farm payments scheme to the new one is leaving the average hill farmer in my constituency over 40% poorer than they were three or four years ago. That is intolerable.

Just imagine a gentleman in his 60s who has farmed for 40 years and is the fifth or sixth generation of farmer to look after the farm. Because of the transition, he sees his business disappearing and feels that he will be the one who loses the family farm. What does that do to his mental health? What does it make him feel like? The sense of isolation and of having no one to talk to is critical, and we need to challenge that. We need to get the public policy right, so that we do not put people in those positions, but we also need to reach out to people in the most isolated situations.

The hon. Member for St Ives made a really important point about ticket offices. I will not reiterate everything he said, but because it was a railway-related issue, it made me think about the Beeching cuts in the 1960s. What we learn from that mistake is that we can be too quick to dispense with the old when we have been beguiled by the new. The new in the 1960s was the bright, new, shiny motorways, and the old was these useless old railway lines. We were wrong. What is the new and the old today? The new is obviously digital connectivity and all that. There is nothing wrong with that; in fact, it is super good, or capable of being so for many people. The old is human interaction, and the danger is that we are losing that. As we have heard, switching to digital voice and digital-only communication leaves people completely and utterly isolated when the electricity goes off in a snowstorm. I would like BT, Openreach and the Government as a whole to think carefully about how to ensure resilience.

Post offices in communities are enormously important, and I am delighted that we are making progress. The Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), has very kindly helped on this matter. In Shap and Hawkshead, we have been able to reopen post offices that were under threat of closure or had closed. That is a reminder that we should invest in post offices as community hubs, and revise the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency’s withdrawal from them. Post offices will have a mosaic of sources of funding, and the DVLA will be one of them.

High street banks have withdrawn from all but two of the communities in my vast constituency. Banks have saved, as a conservative estimate, £2.5 billion a year by closing down their high street networks. Why is not more than a tiny fraction of that being ploughed back into post offices, so that they can become community hubs in every single village and community? That would hopefully tackle isolation.

Bus services are obviously vital too. Post pandemic, pretty much 100% of under-65s have gone back to using buses, but there is only a 70% return for those over 65. That means that 30% of older people who were using the bus network before the pandemic are not doing so now. We need to encourage people back on to buses, and we need the buses to be there in the first place. What use is a £2 bus fare or a bus pass if there is no bus? The fact that we have not devolved to councils such as Cumberland and Westmorland and Furness the power and resources to deliver their own bus services keeps those communities isolated.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about bus services, but does he agree that one of the challenges for bus companies right across the UK is that it is very difficult to recruit and retain bus drivers? That has a real impact on services, which have not yet quite returned to pre-pandemic levels, and will never do so with this constant pressure on staffing. Of course, the Government are not addressing that with their new work visa rules.

[Tim Farron]

The big problem in areas such as mine is that the workforce is too small. There are various reasons for that, but the two principal ones are the lack of affordable homes for local people to live in and the silly visa rules, which prevent the economy from working properly. If we are going to control our borders, why do we not control them in our interests, rather than just make silly points? I absolutely agree with the hon. Lady’s point, which is not silly but very important. If we are to staff rural services, we need a workforce big enough to do that.

Digital connectivity is vital for maintaining face-to-face human contact, which can mitigate loneliness and isolation and build resilience. Digital connectivity is so important. As the Government move towards Project Gigabit, which is a good thing, we should not think that one size fits all. There are communities that would be better served by switching back to the voucher system that we used before, and by our allowing community providers such as B4RN in Cumbria to deliver services. I was at a public meeting on Saturday in Murton about the communities in Murton, Hilton, Ormside and Warcop. How can we connect those communities? We can wait years for Project Gigabit to catch up, because they are in the deferred scope, or we can invest now and use the voucher system and B4RN.

Finally, we have heard a lot of talk about Margaret Thatcher in recent days and weeks, for all sorts of reasons. She once famously said that there was no such thing as society. Much as I admired the lady, I disagreed with her, but sometimes things can become self-fulfilling prophesies. Over the last 40 years—I certainly do not blame just the late Prime Minister for this at all; it is something we all bear responsibility for—there has been a privatisation not so much of our economy but of ourselves, an atomisation and a loss of community that is deeply troubling.

Places like mine are very beautiful, but are therefore expensive to live in. Another former Prime Minister, Lord Cameron, talked about the big society. The problem is that if we do not intervene in our communities and our housing market, they are available only to people from high society, and not to the big society. I want a community that is accessible and available to all. Particularly at this time of year, if we believe in the innate dignity of every single human being, we need to think practically about how we include people. We need a public policy that builds community, rather than knocking it down, and that intervenes when the market builds the opposite of what we want.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

Rural Postal Services: Sustainability

Tim Farron Excerpts

Wednesday 25th October 2023 Westminster Hall

[Jamie Stone]

Indeed, the hon. Gentleman makes a wise point. A final point on Maureen Ross: she has protected a fundamental pillar of that community. It is no surprise that a few weeks ago she was elected as a member of the Highland Council. She recognised that a network of local post offices is integral to the social fabric of our nation.

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

It is worth bearing in mind that our banks have pretty much vacated our towns, villages, high streets and communities over the past few years. They must have saved themselves hundreds of millions of pounds in salaries, upkeep and all the rest of it. Does my hon. Friend agree that the banks should be forced by the Government to pay a far higher fee to post offices, so they can be sustainable in the long run, perhaps even becoming a front for all Government activity in their communities?

[Jamie Stone]

My hon. Friend is correct. He represents a remote constituency, as I do. When I talk about the social fabric of the nation, it is important to have a network of post offices in those remote areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Hollinrake]

Drop and go branches perform an important service, as do mobile post offices, of course. However, there is no doubt that there are challenges in maintaining the size of the network, which I will come to shortly. Of course this is public money that we are spending, so we must ensure that it is spent well, while being appropriate to the need locally, particularly in rural areas.

The percentage of the network serving rural communities has remained steady at 53% since 2016. We appreciate that it is very challenging for communities that lose their post office service and the Post Office endeavours to restore services as quickly as possible.

[Tim Farron]

The Minister is a good man; I am very grateful to him for being so generous, indeed super-generous, to my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) earlier.

The thing about individual post offices is that I can think of a couple of villages in Westmorland and Furness —Hawkshead and Shap—that have lost their post office and where Post Office Ltd. is working hard to restore them. Will he pay particular attention to those communities to make sure that we get those replacements over the line, because we are all but done with getting them back on the street and back open?

[Kevin Hollinrake]

We are very happy to take up any particular issue that Members raise, as we do regularly through correspondence and other measures. Where there are closures of post offices, we will endeavour to reopen them, but that can be challenging. However, if there is a particular issue, I am very happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss it.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Nigel Huddleston]

I thank my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for the work he does as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to Ethiopia and many other countries. I was also in Ethiopia recently, and many people were praising my hon. Friend and his work. He is right that the developing countries trading scheme will reduce tariffs, which is a win-win both for developing countries, making it easier and cheaper for them to export to the UK, and for UK consumers because it will reduce prices. It is not just a matter of having the deal; we are laser-focused on making sure the benefits of the deal are realised, with more than 100 Department for Business and Trade officials working in Africa to make sure we get the full benefit of these deals.

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

As the Government rightly consider new trade deals with other countries, what lessons will they learn from the hideous mistakes made in the New Zealand and Australia trade deals? The right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), a former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, rightly said that they are bad deals for Britain. Given that British farmers are so angry with this Government, having been thrown under the bus on animal welfare and on environmental and cost issues, will he learn lessons from those mistakes and make sure British farmers are protected, and that environmental and animal welfare standards are protected, too?

[Nigel Huddleston]

I am, quite frankly, astounded by the hon. Gentleman’s comments. He is well aware, as I have said repeatedly and is widely acknowledged, that the trade deals we have developed, including with Australia and New Zealand, are economically beneficial right across the UK, including in his constituency. If he does not wish to support policies that are in the best economic interests of his constituency, that is something his constituents probably need to recognise come the next election.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kemi Badenoch]

I do not think we need an audit. China is our fourth largest export market, and we are aware of the economic challenge that it poses across the world. We work with countries across the world, but we have a pragmatic relationship with China. We need to use our influence to help them get to a better place, but I take the hon. Gentleman’s point.

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

How does it help UK Steel to decarbonise, or help the UK to reclaim its position of global leadership in reducing climate emissions, to support the opening of a sure-to-be-doomed new coalmine in west Cumbria?

[Ms Ghani]

I do not think the hon. Gentleman has ever had a positive story to tell about his region, let alone his constituency. We have a positive story on steel, and we have the same challenges as most countries in trying to deal with decarbonisation. We have issues around energy costs that we have been providing all our advanced manufacturing sectors with, and we want to ensure that we diversify our access to different forms of energy.

Heritage Sites: Sustainability

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your guidance this afternoon, Mr Dowd. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), who I am delighted to follow, and my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone), who secured this debate and made a wonderful opening speech. I commend the other speeches made in this debate.

UNESCO granted world heritage site status to the 1,000 square mile English Lake District in 2017. The document that UNESCO released on that proud announcement gave as much credit to the farmers and land managers as to the glaciers that first shaped its environment. World heritage site status was hard won by the Lake District National Park Authority and the many communities within it. The status is richly deserved and precious, but it is not without being at some risk.

I will identify a handful of the risks to the world heritage site status that we enjoy in the Lake district, starting with the environmental risks. The great risk we face at the moment relates to the transition from the old farm payments scheme we had under the European Union, the common agriculture policy, to the new environmental land management scheme being designed by this Government. In theory and principle, I am fully in favour of the scheme; in practice, the Government are botching the transition and risking our landscape.

Why is that the case? This year, all my farmers will lose at least a third of their basic payments. Last time I checked, not very long ago, a grand total of 27 of the 1,000 farmers in my constituency alone—there are many more in the broader Lake district—had signed up to the new sustainable farming incentive. What will the farmers outside the new environmental schemes do? I suggest they will either go broke or go backwards. Many will go out of farming altogether, which means our landscape will rapidly change, damaging both the environment and our tourism economy, or they will go backwards. I have talked to many farmers who are desperate to work out how on earth they will make ends meet. What are they going to do? They are already increasing their livestock numbers, over-intensifying their farming and undoing the good environmental work they have done over the past few decades.

Meanwhile, badly put-together schemes are effectively giving landlords vast sums of money. What are they being compensated for? For evicting their tenants and creating valleys that are completely lost to farming and wildlife protection, which many of us have termed a Lakeland clearance. The landscape will look very different in a few years’ time if the Government continue on this trajectory. We have a tourism economy worth £3.5 billion a year in places like Bo’ness, Windermere, Ambleside, Grasmere, Grizedale, Langdale, Coniston, Hawkshead, Staveley, Glenridding, Patterdale and all the lakes and fells that people come to visit.

The tourism economy from which we hugely benefit will be damaged if we do not have the protection for which I am calling. We have 20 million visitors to our community, underpinning 60,000 jobs. It is important that we recognise how precious it is to the life of our community that we protect our world heritage site status. The national parks were originally founded on the Sandford principle, the idea that, all other things being the same, priority must be given to the conservation of the national parks.

We need to conserve our landscape, as I have already set out, but we also need to conserve our communities. The massive unrestricted growth of second home ownership in many of our communities means that I can name many villages where almost 90% of the housing stock is not lived in all year round. So you lose your school, you lose your bus service, you lose your pub. You lose everything there is that held the community together. We also see a growth in the ownership of the landscape falling into private hands. I trudged my way around Windermere lake a few weeks ago, when I ran the Windermere marathon. Apart from the fact that it was very uncomfortable and quite hot, it struck me how much of the frontage of the lake is privately owned. At the moment we are campaigning to stop YMCA Lakeside North Camp being sold off to a private owner who would permit no direct public access to the lake. I want the Lake district to be available to everybody, not just those of us who live there—I am so lucky to do so—but the country as a whole.

Our environment, our tourism economy and the communities that make up our national park—these things are hugely important. World heritage site status was tragically and sadly lost by Liverpool just two years ago, a reminder that all of us can lose this precious status. I ask the Government to take the action needed to protect world heritage site status for our wonderful communities in the Lake district.

Volunteer Groups in Rural Settings

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Anthony Mangnall]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for continuing his record of intervening in nearly every one of my Westminster Hall debates. He does so with absolute accuracy and a commitment to raise important issues such as that. The National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association are fantastic organisations, but we need to look at how we can help within communities, such as in agriculture and fisheries in my community. During the pandemic, I saw fisheries groups, farming groups and young farmers band together to help in the community. It is right to use such a debate to discuss and contemplate how we can support those groups in turn, how we can reassess the structures that keep them going and ensure that we can tackle loneliness and, indeed, suicide, which is all too prevalent in the agricultural sector.

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

I wondered whether it might be helpful to intervene after another intervention, but the hon. Gentleman is being very generous. I congratulate him on all that he has said; he is making really important points and delivering them well. B4RN—Broadband for the Rural North—is a wonderful community interest company that has connected thousands of homes in rural Cumbria and north Lancashire to the internet, ensuring that there is connectivity. It is basically run by volunteers on the ground. The volunteer groups in Warcop, Sandford, Coupland Beck, Bleatarn and Ormside have done brilliant work alongside B4RN to bring hyper-fast broadband to their communities, but at the eleventh hour, the Government pulled the rug from under them by saying that their communities are no longer a priority area. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government should rethink and back these volunteers and their communities?

[Anthony Mangnall]

I am always concerned about any platform that might help the hon. Gentleman to get his message out to his constituents. In this instance, however, he is absolutely right. When living in a rural constituency, as I do in south Devon, internet connectivity is absolutely essential. We have upgraded our internet in south Devon through volunteer groups working together with state and private enterprise—something I will touch on later—and we absolutely need to look at how we can find the balance between private, public and charitable to ensure that people are getting the services they need, especially in the new working environment post pandemic. I thank him for his intervention.

Volunteer groups are the fabric of our society in rural settings, and we must do all we can to sustain, encourage and learn from them. In 2020, I visited Hope Cove lifeboat station, and I was made aware of the UK’s 54 independent lifeboat stations. These non-Royal National Lifeboat Institution stations operate at a local level, staffed by volunteers and funded by local donations. They do not benefit from being part of a wider system, at least until now. From seeing the vital work of Hope Cove’s independent lifeboat station and speaking with volunteers, I was energised into action. I am pleased to inform the Minister—and you, Mr Sharma—that since that meeting with Hope Cove lifeboat station, my colleague Rachel Roberts in south Devon and I have worked extremely hard to create the National Independent Lifeboat Association, known as NILA. I am grateful to some Members here who helped me in that process.

NILA seeks not to take away the independence of independent lifeboat stations, but to promote and highlight their work while ensuring that the machinery of state is taking notice of its work and using these vital stations to keep people safe on our waterways. Since its establishment, a board has been appointed, with myself as president—that is, until I am usurped by someone important. The Charity Commission has registered it as a national charity, and just last month, United Kingdom Search and Rescue admitted it to its ranks. Once again, this is an example of where local organisations and volunteer-led services can provide a national service without huge costs and bureaucratic rigmarole to deliver an important and necessary service.

Beyond LandWorks and NILA, I will mention one group in detail, I believe for the first time in the House of Commons: the Rapid Relief Team. I am grateful that some of them are in the Gallery today. The RRT was born out of the work of the Plymouth Brethren, and I confidently suggest that it has helped people in nearly every constituency across the country. I had my own dealings with the RRT a few weeks ago, when a constituent was in dire need of medical equipment. I did not know where to turn; I asked integrated care boards and local healthcare groups, but I found myself being continually rebuffed—that is, until I spoke to the RRT. Within a day of contacting it about my constituent’s concerns, my constituent was greeted and given the medical equipment he needed. He is now living a life where he can even get out and about, and I am particularly grateful to the RRT for its efforts in that case.

Across the UK, the RRT has 3,302 approved volunteers, and its most recent impact report shows how it has effectively set about helping in the community. It has supported more than 366 events, served 95,027 meals and gifted 22,571 volunteer hours. In south Devon and across the country, the RRT has helped to deliver incident and training exercise support to emergency services, and relief at home and abroad. It is a flexible organisation that can meet the need from unexpected events.

The work of the RRT takes it across Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand, as well as the UK. It has effectively harnessed the power of teamwork by working with the private sector to encourage philanthropy and volunteering. It is even more remarkable to consider that its work has focused on emergency and disaster relief, homelessness, poverty and hardship, youth, and health and disability, and that it has been able to effectively move the dial in those areas without a single penny of Government funding.

We owe those organisations, and all the ones that I have not mentioned, a huge debt of thanks and gratitude for their work. The three examples I have given remind us how to solve local problems from a grassroots perspective, as well as how to empower communities and encourage greater private sector involvement. They also remind us that the state does not have all the answers, nor does it always need to be involved. However, although fantastic organisations such as the RRT, LandWorks and NILA all depend on volunteers, the statistics since the pandemic have shown a concerning decline in the number of people willing to volunteer. We need to consider how we can encourage a return to volunteering. Failure to do so will irreparably impact the fabric of rural and, indeed, urban communities, and only cost the Government more in the future.

Several funds have been made available through national and local government. For instance, the £5 million platinum jubilee village hall fund was announced, and the bidding in for the funding process ended in January this year. May I ask the Minister how much of that money has been allocated to date, and whether any extension is being considered? The UK search and rescue volunteer training fund helps organisations such as NILA and the RRT to train their volunteers to go out and be as effective as possible. It would be interesting to have the statistics on how many people are being trained every year, and to know how the bidding process can be streamlined to ensure that it is as effective as possible.

The Minister’s Department has also announced the volunteering futures fund; I believe that £7 million has been made available to volunteering funds across the country. May I ask the Minister how much of that money has been allocated, whether the funding will be continued over the next few years, and whether we can provide certainty to local organisations, where necessary, that it will be available in the next five and 10 years? Of course, other methods can be used, such as local authority funding, section 106 funding and allowances within councils to be able to talk about these issues.

Time, job constraints and now costs are putting off volunteers. We need to think about how we can encourage more people to take up the worthy work of volunteering, not necessarily through regulation, but through encouragement and co-operation with fantastic organisations such as those represented by the people who are attending the debate. We need to think carefully about how we support volunteer groups across this country. I suggest that by encouraging private sector involvement, as well as Government adoption of local solutions, we can empower local communities and deliver across the country. Finding the balance between state, private and charitable sectors is the answer to addressing many of the challenges we face.

If Members will forgive me for recommending a book, this is well presented in “The Third Pillar: How the State and Markets are leaving Communities Behind” by Raghuram Rajan, the former Indian central bank leader. The case is made about ensuring that the balance is found between each of the three core structures in our society and ensuring that we can get the resources to where they need to go. We need to reset the balance and make the case for better co-operation between the three pillars so that we can meaningfully ensure that our volunteer groups can effectively deliver on their objectives, and support our rural communities.

There is, as ever, more work to be done in this field, but I conclude by saying that I owe a debt of gratitude to the extraordinary volunteers who have done so much in my constituency and across south Devon, and to all the volunteer groups who have done so much across all of our respective constituencies and, indeed, the country. Whether they worked during the pandemic, work abroad or work in the United Kingdom, they do so because they have pride in the work that they do and because they feel a need to take a part and a hand in society. As politicians, as Government and as officials watching this debate, we must do all we can to encourage that work and action. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.

Oral Answers to Questions

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 7th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

I met the SNP’s public health lead last week and had an excellent conversation with her. As well as the sugar tax, we have introduced calorie labelling; volume and location restrictions on high fat, salt and sugar products, which come in from October; the advertising watershed from 2025; and all those other measures, such as school sport and the youth investment fund. We have done all that because we share exactly those concerns about obesity and we are driving forward work to tackle it.

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

9. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of waiting times for cancer referrals, diagnosis and treatment.

[The Minister for Social Care (Helen Whately)]

More people are coming forward to get checked for cancer. Last year, more than 10,000 urgent GP referrals were made per working day and more than 100,000 patients were diagnosed with cancer at an earlier stage, when it is easier to treat.

[Tim Farron]

I thank the Minister for her answer. In south Cumbria, 27% of people diagnosed with cancer wait more than two months for their first treatment, and in north Cumbria that figure is 44%. Let us imagine how terrifying it is for someone to be told that they have a dangerous disease, but that they may need to wait two months for the first intervention—people are dying needlessly. I draw her attention to the campaign run jointly by the all-party parliamentary group for radiotherapy and the Express, which seeks a £1 billion boost to increase capacity and update technology in radiotherapy. Will she meet me to specifically consider the bid for a radiotherapy satellite unit at the Westmorland General Hospital in Kendal, so that we can cut waiting times and save lives?

[Helen Whately]

As the hon. Gentleman said, if someone suspects that they have cancer, it is extremely worrying for them to have to wait for a diagnosis—or for the all-clear, as happens for the majority of people—or, if they have had their diagnosis, for treatment. That is why we are working hard to speed up access to cancer diagnosis and treatment, and we are looking at all the options to do that. To give him some examples: NHS England is driving ahead to open new community diagnostic centres, 92 of which are already operational; rolling out faecal immunochemical testing for people with possible lower gastrointestinal tract cancer; and rolling out teledermatology to speed up the diagnosis of skin cancer. We are also seeing backlogs coming down.

Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your guidance this morning, Ms Harris. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on securing this debate, which she has led very well. It has been a helpful debate, and I associate myself with the comments that everyone has made. I also add my thanks to Beat, Hope Virgo and all the others leading the campaign to increase awareness and improve provision for people suffering with eating disorders.

Eating disorders are, of course, a range of mental health conditions that have a physical consequence, with maybe two thirds of those suffering from them having a physical illness as a consequence of their mental health condition. It is a privilege, and deeply moving, to work alongside, support and serve sufferers and their families in my communities in Cumbria. I feel deeply affected by not just their struggle with their condition but, sometimes, their struggle to access the services they need.

As has been mentioned, covid has had an impact on the prevalence of eating disorders, with something like a 55% increase in referrals during that period, and an increase of more than 80% in the number of hospital admissions, and I want to remark on what we do in response to those admissions. In our communities in Westmorland, anybody needing tier 4 hospitalisation for an eating disorder will be placed in a bed in Manchester, Edinburgh or Darlington if they are lucky and there are sufficient beds in those places. In many cases, as the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake) mentioned, people—often young people—end up hospitalised on the wrong kind of wards, where they are supported by lovely, wonderful people who are just not trained to support them. Therefore, the experience not just of that person in their suffering, but of the people caring for them and the other people—often young people—on those wards, is harrowing, deeply distressing and inappropriate.

As has also been noted, it is worth mentioning that the use of BMI as a measure to decide whether someone can access services is dangerous and foolish. We would not say to a person with cancer, “Come back when you have more cancer”—we would treat them.

[Caroline Nokes]

This will be a very brief intervention. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about BMI—we really have to move away from it. It gives a misleading impression of wellbeing. Can we please remember that it is designed for a Caucasian male’s body type? We know that the majority of sufferers of eating disorders are women.

[Tim Farron]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for a helpful intervention. That is absolutely true. We would not say to a person who presented with cancer, “Come back when your tumours have spread.” If someone is presenting with an eating disorder, we need to believe them and allow them to access the right support immediately. That needs to be changed urgently.

At the other end of the spectrum, at tier 1, and particularly for young people, what are we doing to build resilience so that people do not develop eating disorders in the first place? In Cumbria, there is nearly nothing in terms of provision for adults, while we spend a grand total, through our public health, of 75p per child and young person on tier 1 resilience support, and that is for all mental health conditions, not just eating disorders. We need to prevent people from getting into these circumstances in the first place—for their sake and for everyone else’s.

Let us be positive: it is important to welcome the access waiting time standards. They are a good thing. However, they are mostly not being met. In north Cumbria, 26% of routine referrals of young people and 11% of urgent referrals of young people are not being treated in that timescale. In south Cumbria, 23% of routine referrals are not being seen within the four-week standard. While there is better news for those meeting the standards for urgent referrals, the total declared for Morecambe Bay hospitals trust is 12 individuals with an urgent eating disorder need. That is baloney. I personally know more people than that who are struggling, which tells us either that the data is faulty or that it is hard to get into the system because BMI is used as a gateway to access those services.

More generally, this speaks of a lack of parity when it comes to care, treatment and taking seriously issues relating to mental health, particularly where young people and eating disorders are concerned. If one of our young people were to break their leg on a football pitch on a Saturday afternoon, they would be straight into hospital and the healing process would begin that day. If something invisible in them breaks, it could be weeks or months before they get support, or it could never come. It may come dangerously, or even fatally, too late, and that is wrong.

What are our collective asks? We need increased awareness. It is right that we focus on men, who are less likely to come forward and yet make up a huge proportion of those in need, but help should be there for everyone, and I urge people to come forward and access it. We also need more support for families, who are massively hit by the consequences of eating disorders for their loved ones.

We mentioned the waiting time standards for young people and children—I am glad we have them, although I wish we met them—but there are no standards for adults, and it is about time that there were. Research funding needs to be increased so that we can understand the causes and cures and tackle this range of diseases head on. We need to be utterly intolerant of dangerous images and things that lead people into this dangerous area and cause such ill health.

Medical training needs to be improved so that we can refer our referred accurately. We need to tackle the BMI gateway. When tackling obesity, for example, we need to remember that there is a danger of things such as like calorie references being well-intentioned but counter- productive. We need to ensure that money allocated to integrated care boards for eating disorder support is actually spent on that. Finally, services must be commissioned adequately and close to home.