Liberal Democrats MP for South Cotswolds since (elected). An MP continuously since .
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
214
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
12
As currently published
Declared while sitting for Lib Dem
£17,266.23
10 of 12 entries state an amount
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lib Dem | MP | South Cotswolds | – present | elected | — | Party history |
Parliament's party history for this member: Liberal Democrat ( – present).
Every entry the member has in the Register of Members' Financial Interests, as Parliament currently publishes it. The wording and values are the member's own declarations; nothing here has been assessed by this site.
Totals add only the entries that declare an amount received: payments for work, donations, gifts, and funded visits (register categories 1.1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). Ongoing employment is listed but not added, because its figure is a rate rather than a sum received. Each entry is dated by when the benefit happened, not when it was registered, and placed under the party the member sat for on that date. A member who changed party therefore has a separate total for each.
| Date | Category | Entry | Declared value | Sitting for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.1. Payment for work | Payment received on 14 October 2026 - £850.00Leading Minds Worldwide Ltd | £850 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | Simon Ruddick - £948.00 | £948 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| date registered | 1. Employment and earnings | Speaking Engagement - Leading Minds Worldwide Ltd | — | Lib Dem | Register record |
| 1.1. Payment for work | Payment received on 02 June 2026 - £4,000.00Leading Minds Worldwide Ltd | £4,000 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 1.1. Payment for work | Payment received on 02 June 2026 - £4,000.00Leading Minds Worldwide Ltd | £4,000 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 4. Visits outside the UK | International visit to Indonesia between 26 March 2026 and 10 April 2026BOS-UK Borneo Orangutan Survival UK | £3,152.85 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 1.1. Payment for work | Payment received on 11 February 2026 - £4,000.00Leading Minds Worldwide Ltd | £4,000 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | NFU - £92.12 | £92.12 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | NFU - £111.42 | £111.42 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 8. Miscellaneous | Vice Chair of the Climate and Nature Crisis Caucus. This is an unpaid role. | — | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | NFU - £41.63 | £41.63 | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 3. Gifts, UK sources | National Farmers' Union - £70.21 | £70.21 | Lib Dem | Register record |
Does the right hon. Lady agree that it cannot be right that farmers in the South Cotswolds, who have had no say in this, now face the compulsory acquisition of rights over their land purely because the developer has chosen to locate a solar farm 13 miles away from the nearest grid connection?
For a young person in a South Cotswolds village, the barrier to an apprenticeship is often just getting there. Buses are rare or non-existent, and the cost of running a car is out of reach on an apprentice’s pay. Will the Chancellor work with the Transport Secretary to cap bus fares at £1 and to fund more rural bus routes?
<Question HRSContentId="{98EC34E4-8698-4EA0-9B75-A0D372708B72}">Q13. <QuestionText HRSContentId="{CD53B9AA-ED8E-4596-A074-E14B34EA0A5C}"></QuestionText>After months of terrible drought, the UK has endured a battering from two named storms in two days. Last week I hosted a flood summit in the South Cotswolds and heard from farmers how on-farm water storage would help to alleviate both drought and flooding. Will the Prime Minister update the House on the £15 million Government fund promised for on-farm water storage and on when farmers can expect to see the expansion of development rights?</Question>
I left party conference when that SFI window had just opened. I went straight home to speak to my Wiltshire farmers, but by the time I got to the meeting, the window had closed. That is not acceptable, and what happened last year is also not acceptable. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government need to give our farmers some certainty, so that they can plan accordingly around when that window will be open next year and how much money will be in it?
RAF Fairford is in my constituency. On the night of the incident, the residents of Whelford, a nearby village, were woken in the wee small hours by police hammering at the door and were given just a few minutes to leave their home, in <span id="71" class="column-number" data-column-number="71"></span>many cases, leaving behind pets and medication. That was obviously a very unsettling experience, and many of them still feel quite deep anxiety. What assessment has been made of the ongoing risks? Will the Home Secretary meet me and local parish councils to discuss lessons learned, and to ensure that residents’ concerns are addressed before US bombers return to RAF Fairford?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Jeremy. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Paul Davies) for opening this debate and for his patient and gracious fielding of so many interventions. I express my thanks to Ash Smith and the phenomenal team at Windrush Against Sewage Pollution for bringing this petition before Parliament and for their dedication and commitment to protecting our rivers. I also thank the other campaigners who are in the Gallery; they are passionate and perseverant in their pursuit of cleaner water across our country. More than 208,000 people signed the petition, including over 600 of my South Cotswolds constituents, which is the ninth most sewage-polluted constituency in the country. Last Saturday, I stood beside the River Coln at Fairford in my constituency with residents who are sick and tired of seeing their river used as a sewer. I spoke with Debbie Campbell, who is in the Gallery and who was most charmingly dressed as a poo emoji. Debbie became a campaigner after swallowing polluted water while open water swimming and ending up doubled over in pain. Her experience is shocking, but sadly the pollution that caused it is no longer exceptional; it has become the norm. Behind the sewage scandal lies another scandal—what has happened to customers’ money? The promise of privatisation was that private capital would bring investments and efficiency, but research from the University of Greenwich estimates that between 1991 and 2023, shareholders extracted around £85 billion more from English water and sewerage companies than they actually contributed in new equity.
I absolutely agree that we need to get upstream of the problem, and I assure her that I always try to step out of pubs carefully. The supposed justification for private ownership was that investors would bring money into our water system. Instead, over those three decades, vastly more money has flowed out to shareholders than shareholders put in. Money went out, infrastructure deteriorated and debt piled up, and now customers are being told that they must pay to put it right. That is what makes the British public and me so furious. The water companies need to come clean and so does the Government.
I absolutely agree—much like our water supply, these arrangements need to be more transparent and stink less. Ministers have been talking about the forthcoming £104 billion investment programme as though the private sector has suddenly reached into its pockets and found that £104 billion to rescue our crumbling water infrastructure, but it has not. Ofwat has confirmed that that money will come through a mixture of customer bills and yet more borrowing and shareholder equity.
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely good point that I totally agree with. This is not private enterprise riding to the rescue; it is customers being made to pay yet again for the consequences of corporate failure, and we cannot take our business elsewhere. If I do not like my supermarket, bank or mobile phone provider, I can take my custom elsewhere, but I cannot change from one water company to another unless I physically move house. We are captive customers of a monopoly, which gives water companies an extraordinary responsibility, but they are not living up to it. Too often, we see risks pushed onto customers while the rewards go to investors. Going back to Fairford, we can see exactly how that plays out in the real world. Fairford sewage treatment works was among the approximately 120 deferred Thames Water investment schemes. Thames Water’s former chair told the EFRA Committee that more than £1 billion was removed from its capital programme to preserve liquidity. In other words, the investment that was needed to protect communities, rivers and nature was postponed because the company needed to shore up its financial position. Now my constituents are living with the consequences. The analysis of Professor Peter Hammond at WASP records that, at Fairford alone, more than 8,100 hours of sewage spills have flowed into the River Coln since the beginning of 2024. Under the Environment Agency’s “heavy rainfall” methodology, only 347 of those hours—just 4.3%—were assessed as compliant. That means that more than 95% of that outflow was not compliant. This is not an occasional emergency measure; it is sustained pollution on an industrial scale. It is not only an assault on people: rivers are living ecosystems that sustain fish, birds, insects and plants. Pollution strips oxygen from the water and destroys habitats, but nature has no seat in the boardroom and no voice with the regulator. Nature depends on us to speak for it today, and I am doing what I can, as many colleagues have, to speak up on behalf of our waterways. I feel like I have spoken time and time again in this House about sewage, failing infrastructure and Thames <span id="497WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="497WH"></span>Water, yet the sewage keeps flowing, the debts keep mounting and customers keep being asked to pay more. Frankly, they have had enough, and so have I. I share the petitioners’ diagnosis that the present model has failed, but the Lib Dems differ from others on what we believe should happen next. We do not believe, as a number of colleagues have mentioned, that we need to spend a long time waiting for a national referendum to tell us something we already know. The Liberal Democrat answer is mutually owned public benefit water companies that are professionally managed but owned by and accountable to the customers who depend on them, with profits reinvested into the water system rather than extracted for shareholders. For Thames Water in particular, that journey should begin with special administration now. Take on the creditors, restructure the company and bring it out the other side under a fundamentally different ownership model. Ownership change alone is not enough. The new Clean Water Authority must have the teeth that Ofwat so conspicuously lacked. It must inspect assets, publish open data and require companies to measure what they actually put into our rivers—not just the duration, but the volume and toxicity. I want to see citizen scientists and environmental experts formally represented in water company governance so that somebody is at the table to speak for the river itself. I would like to ask the Minister for three further commitments: ban bonuses until spills end and leaks are fixed; introduce a three-year cooling-off period before the new regulator can employ people from the industry it regulates; and create a single social tariff so that nobody is priced out of the precious water that they cannot do without. The River Coln flows into the Thames, and the Thames flows past this Parliament. The evidence of the failure of privatisation is literally on our doorstep. The petitioners are right to demand fundamental change: the question at the heart of the debate is not simply whether ownership should be public or private, but who is the water system here to serve? For too long, customers have paid the bills, carried the risk and lived with the pollution while money flowed elsewhere. Our water system should serve customers, communities and the environment, not shareholders, creditors and bottom lines. I do not want to have to come back to this Chamber to again state the obvious: we have to get upstream of the sewage crisis and change the ownership of the water companies, and change it now.
The threat is real. The assessment makes three judgments with high confidence: that global ecosystem collapse threatens UK national security and prosperity, that every critical ecosystem on earth is on a pathway to collapse and that those ecosystems include those that underpin global food production. Yet the accountability is non-existent. The assessment does not live within the climate change risk assessment, so no Minister has a legal duty to do anything about it. Under the previous national risk assessment, the Government named an owner for each of the 61 identified risks, but this one has none. Instead, everything the Government have offered in response to the national security assessment is discretionary. The gaping hole in ownership is matched by one in funding. The Government’s own assessment places the annual value of ecosystem services to the UK at £87 billion, yet for every £100 of annual value that nature provides to us, public biodiversity spending is barely £1.20. We would not fund railways, hospitals or defence in this way. The choice is not between spending money on nature or <span id="199WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="199WH"></span>saving money by ignoring the assessment, but between investing in resilience for our grandchildren or passing the considerable cost down to them when the consequences manifest. Yet it feels as if ignoring it is precisely what the Government intend to do. The report was published on the final day of a freedom of information internal review, after an initial refusal. It was pulled from a launch event. We still do not have the unredacted version. I have three asks of the Minister. Who in Government owns this risk? When will the Government publish a cross-Government action plan in response to it? Will Ministers reconsider publication of the full assessment?
Held . Recorded result: LD Gain. Majority 4,973. 52,287 votes cast from an electorate of 71,971. Parties are as each candidate stood at the time.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roz Savage | Liberal Democrat | 22,961 | 43.9% |
| James Gray | Conservative | 17,988 | 34.4% |
| Desi Latimer | Reform UK | 5,146 | 9.8% |
| Zoë Billingham | Labour | 3,942 | 7.5% |
| Bob Eastoe | Green Party | 1,564 | 3.0% |
| Chris Twells | Liberal | 225 | 0.4% |
| Sandy Steel | Independent | 183 | 0.4% |
| Martin Broomfield | Social Democratic Party | 156 | 0.3% |
| Owen Humphrys | Independent | 122 | 0.2% |
| Seat | Dates |
|---|---|
| South CotswoldsElected 1 time | – present |
| Committee | Dates |
|---|---|
| Environmental Audit Committee | – present |
| Petitions Committee | – present |
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