Simon Opher

Dr Simon Opher MBE MP
Official portrait, 2024
Member of Parliament for Stroud
Incumbent
Assumed office 4 July 2024
Preceded by	Siobhan Baillie
Majority	11,388 (20.6%)
Personal details
Born	1964 (age 61–62) Oxfordshire, England
Party	Labour
Spouse	Rachel Opher
Children	3
Education	St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now Imperial College School of Medicine)
Alma mater	University of London
Occupation	Member of Parliament
Profession	General practitioner
Website	simonopher.org

Simon Joseph Opher¹ MBE is a British Labour Party politician and general practitioner who has served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Stroud since the 2024 general election.

Opher, originally from Oxfordshire, attended a comprehensive school before studying medicine at St Mary's Hospital Medical School (now part of Imperial College School of Medicine) in London.²

Prior to becoming an MP, Opher worked as a full-time GP and GP trainer at May Lane Surgery, Dursley, for almost thirty years with his wife Rachel, and their three children.³⁴ He was clinical director of his primary care network and chair of the integrated locality partnership for Stroud.⁵ His clinical special interests were in mental health and ophthalmology.

Beginning in 2000, Opher began placing an artist-in-residence (initially a ceramicist) at his surgery in Dursley, referring patients with anxiety or stress-related conditions to creative activities. He noted that patients became happier and reduced their GP attendance, while also producing creative work of a quality that surprised them and improved their self-esteem.⁶ From the outset he also promoted "green prescribing" — referring patients to allotments, gardening and outdoor activities — treating exposure to nature as a therapeutic intervention equivalent to creative arts.⁷

Some of his early forms of social prescribing were funded by the Arts Council and Gloucestershire County Council. The scheme was later formalised as Artlift, which Opher founded in 2006, and which placed artists in fifteen GP, hospital and mental health settings across Gloucestershire. Evaluation found that participants' GP attendance rates fell by 37% and A&E admissions by 27%.⁸⁹ By 2012, Gloucestershire County Council commissioned a county-wide social prescribing service on the back of this work, established well before the national rollout of the scheme between 2017 and 2019. Social prescribers are now present by law in every Primary Care Network in England.¹⁰

Opher was awarded an MBE in 2016 for introducing and advocating social prescribing. He also led the building of the Vale Community Hospital, a 20-bed community hospital in Dursley, completed in 2012.¹¹ As chair of Stroud Locality NHS, Opher headed the local COVID-19 vaccination programme. Following his election to Parliament, Opher committed to continuing as a part-time GP at May Lane Surgery, delivering one surgery per week, with a replacement doctor covering the remainder of the week.¹²

In July 2022, Opher replaced former Labour MP David Drew as the Labour prospective parliamentary candidate for Stroud. He has served as the Member of Parliament for Stroud since the 2024 general election, where he defeated the Conservative incumbent Siobhan Baillie.¹³ Opher polled 25,607 votes to Baillie's 14,219.¹⁴

Opher made his maiden speech on 5 September 2024 in a debate on renewable energy. He speaks regularly in Parliament on a range of issues, particularly around health, poverty, climate change and the environment.¹⁵ Opher regards himself as a Labour traditionalist and is a founding member of Mainstream, describing itself as the home of Labour's "radical realists" on the soft left, a network co-founded by Compass and Open Labour in September 2025.¹⁶

Opher holds officer positions in six All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs): he chairs the Health APPG, the Beyond Pills APPG (which promotes alternatives to overmedication), the Creative Health APPG, the Archaeology APPG, and the House of Lords Reform APPG, which he founded; and he is vice-chair of the Net Zero APPG.¹⁷ He is also vice-chair of the cross-party Climate and Nature Crisis Caucus,¹⁸ and a member of the APPG for Fair Elections, which has called for a national commission to examine replacing first past the post with a proportional voting system. Opher has publicly backed such a commission, arguing it would be "the right thing to do" both politically and morally, and noting that Labour's 2024 landslide was won on 33% of the vote.¹⁹ He is a former officer of the Opera APPG.

In November 2024, Opher co-ordinated a cross-party group of MPs who are also medics, in support of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill introduced by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, stating that Parliament should be "brave enough to change the law in this difficult area for the benefit of patients". At the second reading on 29 November 2024, Opher was one of only two sitting GPs in the Commons to vote in favour — alongside Conservative MP Luke Evans — as the bill passed 330 votes to 275. In his speech, he disclosed that two of his patients had travelled to Dignitas unaccompanied because their families feared arrest on return to the UK, and that a patient with a terminal diagnosis had died by suicide — events he described as failures of the medical and legislative system.²⁰

Opher was subsequently selected as one of 23 MPs on the Public Bill Committee that scrutinised the bill clause by clause across more than 25 sittings between January and March 2025. He proposed and debated amendments on mental capacity assessment, pharmaceutical regulation of end-of-life medications, data collection on clinical complications, and the bill's financial implications.²¹

Alongside Craic Health, Opher supported the launch of a scheme called Comedy on Prescription. Aimed at tackling social isolation and poor mental health, Opher said in Parliament that "making people laugh can avoid the need for medication”.²² Alongside Craic founder, Lu Jackson, Opher chaired a panel discussion at the inaugural SXSW London with comedian Jonathon Pie to discuss the benefits of the scheme.²³

In July 2025, Opher co-designed a further social prescribing scheme, Football on Prescription, with Dale Vince, owner of Forest Green Rovers. The pilot, the first of its kind in the UK, distributed free match tickets and walking football referrals via twelve GP surgeries across Stroud, targeting patients aged over 50 experiencing mild or moderate depression and social isolation.²⁴²⁵ The scheme was subsequently featured on The One Show (BBC One).²⁶

Opher has linked environmental concerns explicitly to his medical background, framing climate change and pollution as public health crises. He has stated that in Stroud, the wealthiest residents live on average more than nine years longer than the poorest, and has cited this health inequality — rooted in environmental and social factors — as the principal reason he moved from medicine to politics.²⁷

On 2 December 2025, Opher introduced the Domestic Energy Efficiency (Call for Evidence) Bill under the Ten Minute Rule, which would require the Secretary of State to issue a call for evidence on how domestic energy efficiency measures should be promoted and funded, and to publish a formal response to the evidence received.²⁸ He also co-sponsored the Community Energy (Review) Bill 2024–26, introduced by Labour MP Joe Morris. Separately, he also co-sponsored the Perinatal Mental Health Assessments Bill 2024–26, introduced by Labour MP Laura Kyrke-Smith.²⁹

In November 2024, Opher secured and opened a Westminster Hall debate on the Global Plastics Treaty, timed ahead of the fifth round of UN negotiations in Busan, South Korea. He argued that plastic production's global warming impact was already four times that of the aviation industry, that production was on course to triple by 2050, and that without mandatory cuts to production it would be "impossible" to reach net zero.³⁰ The Busan talks ended without agreement in December 2024.

Opher co-sponsored the Climate and Nature Bill 2024–26, a private member's bill introduced by Roz Savage, a Liberal Democrat MP from the neighbouring South Cotswolds constituency, which would require the UK to adopt integrated, legally binding targets for both climate and nature recovery. At the bill's second reading on 24 January 2025, Opher spoke in support, praising the cross-party dialogue that had brought it forward.³¹

In July 2025, Opher contributed to a Westminster Hall debate on banning fossil fuel advertising, triggered by a petition from naturalist Chris Packham that gathered over 110,000 signatures. Speaking from his medical experience, he cited air pollution — primarily from burning fossil fuels — as responsible for an estimated 43,000 premature deaths annually in the UK, and argued that a ban would be "a low-cost, high-impact intervention that will save lives, reduce pressure on the NHS and help to build a healthy and more sustainable future".³²³³

Opher advocates for the safety and protection of healthcare workers in Gaza. He has spoken in Parliament about the deliberate targeting of healthcare workers by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza war.³⁴ In September 2025, Opher and fellow Labour MP Peter Prinsley were denied entry into Israel during a trip to the occupied West Bank organised by the Council for Arab-British Understanding. The pair were part of a parliamentary delegation observing medical and humanitarian work being undertaken by Medical Aid for Palestinians and others.³⁵ The Foreign Office described the denial as "totally unacceptable and deeply concerning".³⁵ Opher told the BBC that the pair had been detained in a passport office at the Jordan–Israel border crossing, handed a legal order to leave immediately, and "escorted to a bus" back to Jordan, with the denial issued on "public order" grounds despite the intervention of the Foreign Office.³⁶ Health Secretary Wes Streeting described the treatment as "shameful, but no longer surprising".³⁷

In September 2025, Opher used Prime Minister's Questions to urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to condemn political parties "that give a platform to people who spread false rumours about vaccination", noting that his constituency includes Berkeley, where Edward Jenner first trialled vaccination against smallpox in 1796, and that he had personally administered "literally thousands" of jabs during his medical career. Starmer responded by criticising Reform UK's health policy, stating that those behind it had made "shocking and baseless claims that vaccines are linked to cancer".³⁸³⁹

He has voted overwhelmingly for the government since being elected, the notable exception being over reductions to welfare payments: he voted against the government on multiple occasions during the passage of the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill in July 2025, joining 47 other Labour MPs in opposition.⁴⁰ He has also rebelled against the government on public order legislation: in January 2026 he voted against the Draft Public Order Act 2023 (Interference With Use or Operation of Key National Infrastructure) Regulations 2025, one of 26 Labour MPs to do so.⁴¹ Overall, records his voting alignment with other Labour MPs at 96% across more than 500 divisions.⁴²

In early 2026, Opher became a prominent campaigner for the preservation of Stratford Park lido in Stroud, a spring-fed outdoor swimming pool built in 1937 and featuring one of only four surviving inter-war concrete diving boards in England, awarded Grade II listed status. Following the pool's closure for structural reasons and an estimated repair bill of £5.1 million, Opher raised the issue in Parliament in March 2026, warning that closure would lead young people to swim in nearby rivers and lakes where deaths had already occurred, and called on the government to establish a national lido fund.⁴³⁴⁴

Opher is married to Rachel Opher. The couple have three children, all of whom attended Rednock School in Dursley. He is also a grandfather.⁴⁵ He cycles to work, plays cricket — which he has described as playing "badly" — and is president of Uley Cricket Club. Opher is a director of Prema Arts Centre, Uley (an unpaid role), and vice-president of Cotswold Canals Trust.