Following a meeting of the parliamentary party on 12 June 2017, nominations for the deputy leader role were opened.

Kate Parminter and Navnit Dholakia were elected deputy leaders of the party's House of Lords group in June 2015.

Both candidates in the 2015 leadership election called for a change in the rules for choosing a Deputy Leader to make it possible for a woman to be elected to the role, on the grounds that requiring the Deputy Leader to be an MP would exclude any woman from candidacy as, at the time, all eight of the party's MPs were men.

"[5] On 5 June 2015, Tim Farron, the subsequent winner of the leadership contest, told The Guardian that he wanted the Deputy Leader to be a woman and that he wanted 50% of the Liberal Democrat front bench team to be women; the paper reported that this "would require a change to the Party's constitution".

[6] In August 2015, a proposed amendment to the Liberal Democrats' party constitution was published on the agenda of the 2015 Autumn Conference held in Bournemouth.

[9] The Governance Review, presented to the 2016 Autumn Conference held in Brighton, reported the following to Conference: After the General Election some members proposed that the party should elect a Deputy Leader from the wider membership, rather than the parliamentary party in the Commons.