Sarah Teather

Sarah Teather is the Liberal Democrat MP for Brent Central. She was appointed a Minister of State at the UK Department of Education in May 2010.

Teather left the Government in September 2012. A year later, she announced that she had decided to quit Parliament at the next election, because she could no longer pretend to support the Coalition or Nick Clegg’s leadership.

For various reasons, to do with some aspects of Government policy and the very particular issues that brought me to politics in the first place, I now feel that come the next general election, it will be the right time for me to step aside.

Teather cited Coalition policies that she believed were harming the most vulnerable members of society, such as the benefits cap and plans for making some immigrants pay a financial “bond” before entering Britain.

As with most party members, there have always been a few issues where I have disagreed with party policy. But over the last three years, what has been difficult is that policy has moved in some of the issues that ground my own personal sense of political vocation – that of working with and serving the most vulnerable members of society. I have disagreed with both Government and official party lines on a whole range of welfare and immigration policies, and those differences have been getting larger rather than smaller.