Local MP Tim Farron has reacted today to the announcement from Post Office Limited detailing the plans for branch closures in his constituency. The local campaign to save post offices in Westmorland and Lonsdale has clearly had a real effect as the area sees a lower-than-average number of branches earmarked for closure. The plans for the areas include five closures and four earmarked for so-called 'outreach' arrangements.
Local MP Tim Farron used the opposition day debate in the House of Commons today to challenge his neighbour and Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton on using the Sustainable Communities Act to save local post offices.
Local Liberal Democrats received a huge boost last week after winning the Highgate by-election with a massive 67% share of the vote. The winning candidate, Andy Kaye will now take up his position on the town council. The Conservative candidate was relegated to third place, with only 12% of the vote. This result leaves the Conservatives in South Lakeland in further disarray.
Local MP Tim Farron today signed a parliamentary motion, EDM 693. The motion, entitled black, minority ethnic and refugee women and domestic violence, draws attention to the plight of immigrants who come to marry in this country, but are later subject to domestic violence, as well as women trafficked into the country. These women often have no access to support, benefits or protection, effectively trapping women in either destitution or violence.
Local MP Tim Farron has criticised the Government ahead of the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces in March 2003 over the increasingly perilous humanitarian situation in the country. According to recent estimates, as many as 150,000 civilians were killed in the first three years of the war alone and there are signs at present that the provision of clean water and working sewage systems is getting more scarce.
Liberal Democrat MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Hill Farming Tim Farron is today writing to Farming Minister Lord Rooker, in order to ask him to explain his uncorrected comments given to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee meeting on 3rd March. The minister admitted that there would have to be a "reordering of priorities and abandonment of some work streams," noted that the animal welfare arm of DEFRA would lose a third of its resources and, perhaps most damningly, that DEFRA had "no resources to do anything" with regards to the Veterinary Surgeons Act, which the department had claimed in the past was "in urgent need of updating."
