I am incredibly privileged to represent the most beautiful constituency in the United Kingdom. Westmorland and Lonsdale is home to the Lake District National Park, the Yorkshire Dales National Park, the Arnside and Silverdale area of outstanding natural beauty, the Cartmel peninsula and the rolling hills of south Cumbria.

But I’m very sad to say that wonderful and iconic towns and villages here face an existential crisis — a housing catastrophe, which means fewer and fewer homes for people to live in.

There are three principal causes: a lack of genuinely affordable homes being built; excessive numbers of second homes displacing full-time residential accommodation; and a short-term rented sector that has gobbled up the long-term private rented sector.

On the first, I have been proud to support affordable housing developments in every corner of my constituency, but we desperately need more of them.

On the second, this has been an issue I’ve been campaigning on since I became an MP in 2005. People are of course entitled to own a second home — and in many ways you certainly can’t blame them from wanting to own a home somewhere as stunning as here — but it means so many streets and hamlets stand empty for so much of the year.

On the third, this has been a more recent and startling development. Just after the pandemic, we saw a 32 per cent rise in holiday lets in just one year, and that is in the Lake District where there were already a huge number of them.

Those new holiday lets were until recently the homes of local people, who were evicted so their landlord can go to a short-term let, normally an Airbnb, and therefore cash in. There are no other places for those people to go and live so their kids are uprooted from the local school, and they have to give up their jobs and move many miles away, robbing our communities of life and of a workforce. We saw this largely because the government failed to scrap section 21 evictions at the time they said they would.

The consequences are huge and human. I think of the couple with two small children in Ambleside, she a teaching assistant and he a chef. They were evicted from their flat because the landlord wanted to go to Airbnb. They had literally nowhere else to go, so the children were taken out of school, a teaching assistant was lost to the local primary school and a chef lost to a local hotel. They had to move 25 miles away and out of the area.

I think of a mum and her 15-year-old son, who lived their entire lives in a village just outside Grange-over-Sands before they were evicted. Again, there was nowhere they could remain within the community. When people are evicted in communities like ours, there is nowhere else to go.

The holiday lets boom in places like Windermere in the Lake District means that many employees in the tourism industry can’t find anywhere affordable to live, Tim Farron says

Holiday lets obviously bring huge economic benefits to the tourism hotspots like the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. However, it’s gone too far. So many bars, cafés, restaurants and shops in that industry are struggling to recruit the staff they need to operate largely because their potential employees can’t find anywhere affordable to live.

It is not just the tourism economy that is affected, but the care sector and other professions. At one stage, earlier this year, 32 per cent of hospital beds in my local NHS Trust were blocked. Why? The bottom line is that we cannot get people out of hospital because there are not enough carers, because there is nowhere for them to live.

This week a consultation closed on the government’s plans to introduce a separate category of planning use for short-term lets. This is a move I have long been campaigning for and I remember putting it to Rishi Sunak in a debate I led in parliament back in 2019 when he was junior housing minister.

By doing this, we can give local planning authorities the power to put a lid on new short-term lets and instead ensure those homes remain for local people who can raise a family here and contribute to the economy and community life.

I really hope the government don’t waste any more time, crack on and put this into action, so we can start to turn the tide on Britain’s housing catastrophe.

Tim Farron is Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland, Furness and Eden www.thetimes.co.uk