Liberal Democrats MP for Orkney and Shetland since (elected). An MP continuously since .
Parliament recordVoting recordWritten questionsEarly day motions
Entries on this tracker
306
Each filed under the party they sat for that day
Register entries
5
As currently published
Declared while sitting for Lib Dem
£0
0 of 5 entries state an amount
| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lib Dem | MP | Orkney and Shetland | – 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| date registered | 7. Shareholdings | Shares in Coillabus Farms | — | Lib Dem | Register record |
| 6. Land and property | Property in Islay, Argyll | — | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 8. Miscellaneous | An unpaid partner in Coillabus Farms. | — | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 1. Employment and earnings | Member of the Advisory Board of the House MagazineDods Group Ltd | — | Lib Dem | Register record | |
| 8. Miscellaneous | Unremunerated Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding. | — | Lib Dem | Register record |
The decision in July to abandon plans for changes to the remuneration of coastguards was widely welcomed, but that was over three months ago. Coastguards around the coastline tell me that there has been radio silence in the Maritime and Coastguard Agency since then. There are a number of whistleblowing complaints about the senior executive team that have simply not been addressed. When will we hear what the Government will do to fix our coastguards?
The Minister saw for herself this summer the opportunities being developed around marine renewables in my constituency at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney. Next month we will hopefully get the report from the taskforce commissioned by other Government Departments. Will the Minister engage with that and ensure that we get marine energy across the line and, as a consequence, win a home-grown supply chain in Scotland for her reindustrialisation policies?
Laying in three days’ supplies in the Northern Isles is what we do if we are confident that we are having a mild winter. Just four years ago, parts of Shetland were without electricity for six days, so resilience looks different in different parts of the country. To take the Minister back to his answer to the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty), the Government recently launched a consultation on critical undersea infrastructure, security and resilience, in which they seemed to see the answer as one of regulation and legislation. As the hon. Gentleman told the Minister, we need the capacity to effect repairs to undersea cables, and to do so without long delays, as currently occur. Will he take away that need and the experience of my constituents in recent years, who have suffered a number of digital outages as a consequence?
I thank the right hon. Lady and her Committee for the report. She will be aware that many agricultural sectors rely heavily on migrant labour, and that the Home Office is telling us that we need to upskill our own workforce to take the place of those workers. I draw to her attention the situation concerning foreign sheepshearers, who come to this country for a short period of time—three to four months every year. They come here, they shear the largest flocks—we reckon they do an excess of a million sheep in that short period of time—and then they move on and shear in other parts of the world. They take a number of our local shearers with them, which is a great opportunity for young people from farming communities. Nobody is going to train to the level that those people need to operate for work that is only going to last three or four months of the year. Can I encourage the right hon. Lady to bring some pressure to bear on the Home Office to take a more realistic view on the position of sheepshearers?
As the Government start redesigning the sustainable farming incentive, can I draw their attention to an initiative launched today by Aldi and ABP, “Grounded in Goodness”, which is paying a premium to their beef producers? It is only £4.5 million and one supermarket, so it is not a panacea, but it is a good start, rooted in the principles of simplicity, accessibility and food production. As the Secretary of State redesigns the SFI, would that not be a good model to follow?
<em>rose</em><em>—</em>
I am grateful to my former colleague on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee—these links are important. Can she tell the House how many applications the Department expected? It was modelled by some that there would be somewhere in the region of 40,000. In fact, there was money available for 12,000. Did it come as a total surprise to the Department that it got as many applications as it did?
The hon. Member will be aware that the carbon border adjustment mechanism was started under the last Government. The consultation was launched in 2023. With the benefit of hindsight, does he think it might have been a good idea at that stage to take fertiliser out of it?
I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Terry Jermy). I can endorse his asks to the Chancellor and I could probably add a few of my own. Like him, I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Jenny Riddell-Carpenter), to her place. She has maybe had a slightly rocky start at some moments, but I know from her time on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that she has knowledge about and a concern for the industry. It is in everybody’s interests that the Government should be successful, so we wish her and her colleagues well.<span id="1202" class="column-number" data-column-number="1202"></span> I am not going to say a great deal about the sustainable farming incentive. The Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), is coming to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee next week and we will doubtless spend some time on it then. It would be worth him and others reflecting on the full extent of the damage and the nature of the damage that has been done by that particular episode, because we are already seeing an unpicking of land that has been managed in a way that was beneficial for nature, sometimes for decades. Farmers have found themselves overnight with massive holes in their budgets. When they ask, “Well, what is going to happen next?”, it is simply not tenable for any of us to turn around and say, “Well, it is okay—just trust DEFRA. They will come up with something in the next financial year.” I am pretty sure what most farmers would say if we turned around to them and said that. The real impact is another nail in the coffin of financial investor confidence in the industry, at a time when there is a perfect storm for British farming. We have seen a price spike in input costs from earlier in the year, as a consequence of what happened in the strait of Hormuz, particularly in relation to urea for the production of fertiliser and diesel. The Food and Drink Federation told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee in May that that would take another 10 months to feed through into price inflation, so we still have the worst of that to come in the new year. Since then, we have had a long, hot summer, in which many arable farmers have been through the third bad harvest in succession, with yields down. Let us not forget that many of them chose not to plant in the spring in the first place, because it made more economic sense just to sell the fertiliser and not plant the seed. The usual sources of replacements, at the time of a bad harvest in continental Europe, are going through exactly the same things that we are going through. Our livestock farms are already feeding winter forage, because they have not had the grass available for their cattle and sheep. Parenthetically, let me say that that is not the case in Orkney, where the problem we have with our winter forage is getting it off the fields after a long, wet summer. In the red meat sector, our livestock numbers continue to decline in a way that risks threatening the critical mass of the industry. If that were to fall over, it would have a massive ripple effect through the rural economy—through the marts, hauliers, abattoirs, vets and merchants of all sorts. The chicken and pork sectors are under serious pressure. I had a conversation just last week with Cranswick, one of the biggest operators, which told me that between it and 2 Sisters, something in the region of £1.5 billion of planned investment is held up in the planning system. In many ways, that sums up the frustration of the situation in which we find ourselves. Despite this perfect storm, there are people in every sector of this brilliant industry who continue to want to farm and invest. We have spoken about all the different agricultural policies that have an impact on the sector, but there are policies across nearly every Department of Government, especially in relation to the planning system, that could free up investment opportunities that would generate growth. The Prime Minister speaks about growth in every postcode, and a lot of postcodes are in farming <span id="1203" class="column-number" data-column-number="1203"></span>communities. The rural economy presents a real opportunity to generate the economic growth that we all know we need. For all the downsides that there are in the industry at the moment, I remain optimistic for one reason only, which has nothing to do with anybody in this Chamber or in government: despite everything that happens to our farmers, they continue to want to produce food to feed our nation, and they are better than almost anybody else in the world at doing that.
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Held . Recorded result: LD Hold. Majority 7,807. 20,688 votes cast from an electorate of 34,236. Parties are as each candidate stood at the time.
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alistair Carmichael | Liberal Democrat | 11,392 | 55.1% |
| Robert Leslie | Scottish National Party | 3,585 | 17.3% |
| Alex Armitage | Scottish Green Party | 2,046 | 9.9% |
| Robert Smith | Reform UK | 1,586 | 7.7% |
| Conor Savage | Labour | 1,493 | 7.2% |
| Shane Painter | Conservative | 586 | 2.8% |
| Seat | Dates |
|---|---|
| Orkney and ShetlandElected 1 time | – present |
| Orkney and ShetlandElected 5 times | – |
| Orkney and ShetlandElected 1 time | – |
| Post | Dates |
|---|---|
| Secretary of State for ScotlandScotland Office | – |
| Comptroller (HM Household) (Deputy Chief Whip, House of Commons)HM Household | – |
| Post | Dates |
|---|---|
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Justice)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Cabinet Office)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Home Affairs)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Northern Ireland)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Exiting the European Union)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Chief WhipOpposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Northern Ireland)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Home Affairs)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Scotland)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Northern Ireland)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Transport)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Home Affairs)Opposition Department | – |
| Liberal Democrat Spokesperson (Energy and Climate Change)Opposition Department | – |
| Committee | Dates |
|---|---|
| Liaison Sub-Committee on Core Tasks of Select Committees | – present |
| Liaison Sub-Committee on National Policy Statements | – present |
| Liaison Committee (Commons) | – present |
| Environment, Food and Rural Affairs CommitteeChair | – present |
| Prison Media Bill | – |
| Taxis and Private Hire Vehicles (Disabled Persons) Bill | – |
| Local Government (Disqualification) Bill | – |
| Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union | – |
| Energy and Climate Change Committee | – |
| Members' Allowances | – |
| Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill (Joint Committee) | – |
| Consolidation etc. Bills (Joint Committee) | – |
| Scottish Affairs Committee | – |
| Public Accounts Committee | – |
| International Development Committee | – |
| Scottish Affairs Committee | – |
| Constituency | Date |
|---|---|
| Paisley South |
Website
X (formerly Twitter)
Only the details Parliament publishes for this member. Contact page on Parliament's site
Profile data retrieved from Parliament on .