North Shropshire's Lib Dem MP tells LFF about her fight to improve local services and why the Lib Dems are pushing Labour to be more ambitious.

“We’ve been taken for granted.” This phrase stuck with Lib Dem MP Helen Morgan, who, since winning North Shropshire in 2021, has vowed to do things differently.

Her commitment to her community started when she ran as a Lib Dem ‘paper candidate’ in the 2019 general election. During the pandemic, she set up a Facebook group to help people who couldn’t go out to get shopping and prescriptions. “I enjoyed being part of a community team that helped people,” she says. This, combined with a realisation that “things don’t change unless you get involved and try and make them change yourself”, inspired her to take the next step, first becoming a parish councillor in May 2021, and by December that year, she was an MP.

In an exclusive interview with Left Foot Forward, Morgan discusses the challenges facing rural areas, her fight to improve local services, and why the Lib Dems are pushing Labour to be more ambitious.

‘I’d like to see them go further and faster’

Make no mistake: Morgan thinks the legacy the Conservatives have left Labour is “pretty appalling” and she thinks it’s reasonable for Labour to say putting things right won’t be quick or easy. However, she doesn’t think Labour is being ambitious enough.

“I think we would have been more ambitious than the current government. They seem to be taking a sort of a slowly slowly approach and I’d like to see them go further and faster,” Morgan tells Left Foot Forward.

Credit: Parliament. Helen Morgan questioning the Health Secretary Wes Streeting on measures the government is taking to tackle cancer waiting times.

As the Lib Dem health and social care spokesperson, she says being more ambitious would not just be injecting millions into the NHS ahead of the winter crisis, but preventing the crisis in the first place. 

“That [funding] needs to be put on a kind of a permanent planning basis so that the capacity is there to deal with the winter crisis and it isn’t a crisis,” she argues.

On dentistry, Morgan remains unconvinced by the government’s promises. The UK’s dental crisis continues to deepen, with 94% of those who did not have a dentist and who tried to access NHS dental care unable to do so, according to recent Office for National Statistics data.

“I’ve heard all the right noises from the government but we haven’t seen an awful lot of action,” she says. While some Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) have made efforts to improve access, she insists the real issue lies in the dental contract itself.

The NHS dental contract is a framework where dental practices agree to provide a specified amount of NHS dental care, measured in units of dental activity (UDAs), in exchange for a fixed payment.

“We need to renegotiate the dental contract because we can’t just have dentists handing back their contracts left right and centre,” Morgan remarks. 

Admittedly, during the election campaign, now health secretary Wes Streeting acknowledged that “the contract is so out of date that it just doesn’t pay what the dentistry is worth”. Yet, Morgan and the Lib Dems will not just be watching closely to see what happens next, they’ll be holding him to account.

“As a third party, we’re trying to be a constructive opposition and come up with sensible suggestions along the way, rather than just kind of cop around the edges,” she says.

“I think I hoped I would come second when I set about that process, winning was a little bit of a shock.”

North Shropshire’s first non-Tory MP in two centuries

Morgan knows the importance of challenging the political establishment, having won her seat from the Tories in a by-election in 2021, bringing an end to 200 years of Conservative representation and the stint of disgraced Tory MP Owen Paterson.

“I think I hoped I would come second when I set about that process, winning was a little bit of a shock,” she admits. Before entering politics, Morgan was a chartered accountant who held senior roles at British Gas and Centrica.

She first ran as a parliamentary candidate in the 2019 general election, believing there should be a Lib Dem on the ballot paper, so people could “vote with their hearts and not with their heads”. That year, she came third after the Tories and Labour. 

Overshadowed by not one but two political scandals, the 2021 election was a different story. Paterson had finally resigned after he was found to have lobbied the government on behalf of two firms – Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods – who were paying him over £100,000 a year. 

In a turn of events that only reinforced the sense of being taken for granted, the Partygate scandal broke just a week before polling day. Morgan won by 5,925 votes, achieving a 34.2% swing, the seventh-largest in a by-election since the Second World War. And her mandate has continued to grow. In last year’s election, she boosted the Lib Dem vote share by over 40%, receiving 26,214 votes.

Poor public transport

“It’s a bit of a no-brainer to invest in public transport because there are many, many studies that say it’s a good investment, it will generate economic growth.”

As an MP representing a rural area — and having grown up in rural Staffordshire and Nottinghamshire — Morgan knows all too well that rural public transport is inadequate. In response, she has introduced her own Private Members’ Bill (PMB) to Parliament, the Bus Services Bill.

PMBs rarely become law, as they are scheduled on Fridays, a day when many MPs are absent—and they are prone to filibustering, where opponents make long speeches to exhaust the allotted debate time. However, if successful, the bill would be transformative — requiring the government to ensure a seven-day-a-week bus service in every town with a population over 10,000.

In North Shropshire, she says poor transport is “a real problem and we’re in this sort of cycle of decline where the bus service is infrequent and unreliable. 

“So people don’t use it. And then the bus company says, well it’s not viable because no one uses it and they cut it a little bit more and then even less people use it.”

She argues that the current system—where private operators run only the profitable routes, leaving councils to cover the cost of loss-making ones—has failed. Morgan supports giving councils the power to franchise bus services, allowing local authorities to oversee how routes are planned and operated, as in areas like Greater Manchester where mayor Andy Burnham has brought buses back under public control.  

However, she says she doesn’t think Shropshire Council has enough money to franchise local bus services, and that they’d need additional funding from government.

Despite these funding challenges, Morgan is clear things can’t go on as they are, as the lack of reliable bus services is holding people and businesses back. 

“You want to know that if you start work at 9am you can catch a bus that is going to turn up every single day and get you there at quarter to nine,” she says. Her bill aims to guarantee that. 

She adds: “It’s a bit of a no-brainer to invest in public transport because there are many, many studies that say it’s a good investment, it will generate economic growth.”

With growth at the heart of this government’s agenda, it may be an issue they can’t afford to ignore.

Deteriorating public services

A photo of Helen Morgan outside Whitchurch Hospital in Shropshire

Another key issue first raised by constituents during Morgan’s by-election campaign in 2021 was the deterioration in local public services. Constituents reported being unable to get GP appointments, and waiting times for ambulances and in A&E were long. Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust was in special measures between 2018 and May 2024, while its Care Quality Commission rating is now ‘Requires Improvement’.

It’s no secret that public services in rural areas face distinct challenges. They are less well funded, harder to access, and in some cases, non-existent. Funding disparities between rural and urban areas exacerbate this issue.

Data from the Rural Services Network highlights the scale of this funding gap, revealing that in 2025/26, rural areas will receive 41% less government-funded spending power per capita than urban areas.

Not only that, but government funding formulas don’t take into account the demographics of the local population.

“We’re one of the most sparsely spread councils in the country and there’s a cost to delivering services for those people,” Morgan says. Shropshire has a higher proportion of residents aged 65 and over. By 2029, 41.6% of its population is projected to be over 65. 

Currently, the way funding is calculated is by looking at the number of GPs per head, but as Morgan points out, “if you’ve got a very young population those people will be visiting their GP much less frequently”.

“I think we maybe need to look at some of those statistics and weight them for the demographics of the population you’ve got,” she says.

Pushing for change

“If you go about things the right way you can start to make a difference”.

Morgan acknowledges that she can’t directly solve these issues as an MP, but she holds the Integrated Care Board and government to account, and has made sure there’s focus on services locally so they start to improve.

“We’re starting to see some green shoots of recovery,” she says, emphasising the importance of continuing to put pressure on NHS England and the Department for Health to ensure services continue to improve.

Another example of the North Shropshire MP improving access to healthcare was last winter. The government created a pot of money for 11 hospital trusts that were struggling with winter pressures. Local hospitals in Morgan’s area, the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital Trusts, got nearly 30% of the extra funding.

“Obviously, they [the NHS Trusts] had asked for a chunk of money to relieve the pressure, but I’d been campaigning on it too,” Morgan explains. 

“I think that becomes very compelling for the decision makers, when there’s political will and pressure being applied from a local MP as well as a request from a trust and some cross-party support,” she says.

From her fight for reliable public transport to holding the government accountable for local healthcare, Morgan has shown that even in a traditionally Conservative stronghold, change is possible.

She admits that change isn’t fast, and is constrained by how much money the government has and what its priorities are. However, with her accountant’s eye for detail and analytical skills, and her optimistic approach, she firmly believes: “If you go about things the right way you can start to make a difference”.

Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward

Comments are closed.