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.

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.

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.