Lords
Debate
24 March 2026
3 contributions
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, democracy starts with local engagement. As the saying goes, all politics is local, and people start by worrying about their own local community.
We talk about pride of place in government policy, but place is not usually the whole of Yorkshire, for example, or even the whole of North York…
My Lords, I am not at all sure that the Government understand that decentralisation and devolution are fundamentally different things. What we have here is a Bill for continued central control of the governance of England, subject to allowing mayors rather more powers. I therefore strongly support t…
+1 more contribution in this session
Lords
Debate
17 March 2026
Lord Mandelson: Response to Humble Address Motion
My Lords, we on these Benches hesitate to criticise the due diligence process by the security services and the Civil Service; it seems to have been effectively and efficiently done but disregarded by the Prime Minister’s political advisers and overridden by the Prime Minister. Presumably he thought …
Lords
Oral Questions
11 March 2026
Iranian State-sponsored Cyber Attacks: Mitigation and Preparation
My Lords, I am disappointed that not everybody looks at the NCSC’s website in the same way that I do to ensure that they are updated. The noble Lord is right that we need to make sure that people are aware. It was one of the reasons why it was so important in the run-up to the national alerts we had…
Lords
Oral Questions
9 March 2026
Iran and the Middle East
That is absolutely not the language that we are using. The actions that we are taking are defensive, as I have explained, and it is vital that we all take extreme care with the language we use around this conflict, not least because it can, and often does, find itself repeated and played out on the …
Lords
Committee Stage
5 March 2026
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, this is not the first time I have found myself getting in the way of the last part of a Bill, usually in talking about territorial extent. The last train that would get me to Saltaire tonight leaves King’s Cross just after 7 pm, so I will try my best to be brief.
This is about terminology…
Lords
Proceedings
4 March 2026
Security Update
My Lords, we also thank the Minister for repeating this Statement, and appreciate the subtleties of where we are now and the limits as to what we can say about this specific case. I declare an interest: I went to China for the first time in 1982 and have been many times since. I was, professionally,…
Lords
Oral Questions
4 March 2026
Ballot Secrecy Act: Breaches
It is an offence to accompany a voter into the polling booth with the intention of influencing how they vote. That was brought forward by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, as part of the Ballot Secrecy Act, and it put that matter beyond doubt. Elections are run by independent returning officers, who wil…
Lords
Proceedings
26 February 2026
Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)
My Lords, as I look back over the last decade in Brexit Britain, I am ever more convinced that the arguments for Britain’s wholehearted engagement with mainland Europe are as strong now as they were when I first, in the late 1960s, became a supporter of this country joining the European Economic Com…
Lords
Proceedings
24 February 2026
Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address
My Lords, we all now recognise that it was a massive misjudgment to appoint Lord Mandelson to the post of ambassador in Washington. The Prime Minister has already apologised for that. He is not the first Prime Minister to have made such a serious error, and opposition parties should avoid pretending…
Lords
Proceedings
24 February 2026
Labour Together and APCO Worldwide: Cabinet Office Review
My Lords, the serious questions about the behaviour of Josh Simons, who is now a Minister, and the inappropriateness of his pursuit of particular journalists are now under investigation, and we support that investigation. I want to ask a wider question about the transparency of funding for third-par…
Lords
Oral Questions
23 February 2026
US Tariffs
I am not aware that that is part of the negotiations.
Lords
Debate
12 February 2026
Lord Mandelson: Government Response to Humble Address Motion
My Lords, we on these Benches welcome the degree of transparency that is happening over the Mandelson appointment. We stress as strongly as we can that the maximum amount of transparency is now needed to restore public confidence and trust. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, mentioned that events ha…
Lords
Oral Questions
12 February 2026
Security of Candidates, MPs and Elections
There are two important responses to that question. We are taking forward legislation to extend disqualification orders to protect electoral staff and ensure that those who abuse them can be disqualified from standing for or holding elected office, and we are empowering courts to hand out tougher se…
Lords
Oral Questions
12 February 2026
Donations to Political Parties
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for bringing forward this debate but I cannot, in any way, agree with his solutions, either the ideas for all-party use of a donations pot—I am not sure how big that pot would be—or the endgame of state funding.
The statutory framework governin…
Lords
Committee Stage
11 February 2026
7 contributions
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, I feel bound to remind the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, that the Bill is a Labour continuation of a local government reorganisation started under the Conservatives. This is very much the Michael Gove—now the noble Lord, Lord Gove—view of how England should be governed, with mayors as the key e…
My Lords, my amendment and the others in this group all stem from a degree of unease, in particular about Clause 60 but also generally about the ethos of this Bill towards local democracy, local representation and local participation. Clause 60 talks about
“appropriate arrangements to secure the ef…
+5 more contributions in this session
Lords
Proceedings
10 February 2026
Standards in Public Life
My Lords, I must apologise for being a little late; the annunciator was not operating properly in my room. I must also apologise that I am speaking and not my noble friend Lord Purvis. He has been at the funeral of my namesake in Kirkwall today.
I wish to talk about the broader issues in the Statem…
Lords
Oral Questions
10 February 2026
Ambassadors: Vetting Process
Government policy as regards the narrow issue that the noble Lord raised has not changed. That is not to say it cannot or will not ever change as a consequence of the considerations being made now. It is possible for the Foreign Affairs Committee to summon an ambassador and to want to hear from them…
Lords
Committee Stage
9 February 2026
8 contributions
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, I apologise that I was unable to be here at the previous sittings—I had clashes of different obligations in the Lords last week.
I want to pick up from what my noble friend Lady Pinnock called the structural consistency issue. In preparing for the speech that I am going to make on Amendme…
Have the implications of the strategic defence review been taken into account in all this? Chapter 6 of the defence review talks about the need to mobilise a “whole-of-society approach” in response to the threats we now face, in which there will be more volunteer firemen and police, and civilian res…
+6 more contributions in this session
Lords
Proceedings
5 February 2026
US Department of Justice Release of Files
My Lords, I note the Minister’s mention of the desperate need to re-establish political trust. I think all of us, on all Benches, need to understand how much Westminster politics is distrusted at the present moment and how we all, on all Benches, need to work together to restore that. Can she say a …
Lords
Oral Questions
4 February 2026
Think Tanks: Funding
The noble Lord will be aware that last year, we published our anti-corruption strategy, which outlined the risks posed by corrupt actors who are seeking to influence UK institutions or launder their reputations by engaging in some organisations. As I have said before from this Dispatch Box, we have …
Lords
Proceedings
29 January 2026
UK-EU Customs Union
My Lords, we have had four excellent maiden speeches today, and this is my first speech on Britain’s relationship with the European Union, so I should begin by declaring an interest—my previous position as chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign, and therefore perhaps as the person most responsib…
Lords
Oral Questions
29 January 2026
2 contributions
Public Trust in National Politics
The Government are committed to restoring public confidence in our politics. On entering office, the Prime Minister issued a new Ministerial Code strengthening the powers of his Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards, increasing transparency on ministerial gifts and hospitality, as well as est…
The noble Lord raises a genuinely important point about trust and politics. We spend a number of hours, in your Lordships’ House and the other place, discussing things that have an impact on people’s lives every day. There is a responsibility on us to make sure that they know what we are doing and t…
Lords
Committee Stage
29 January 2026
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, I speak to Amendment 102. Before I start, I must tell the Minister that, when I went home from the last session of this Committee, I found my wife watching an old episode of “Yes, Prime Minister”. The Prime Minister’s Cabinet Secretary and Treasury Secretary were discussing the threat of r…
Lords
Committee Stage
20 January 2026
3 contributions
English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill
My Lords, I have no interests to declare. Like the noble Lord, Lord Norton, I am an academic and am interested in clear language, among other things. I was horrified when I first read the Bill by the looseness of its language. Devolution has already been mentioned. The PACAC report some three years …
My Lords, we have been talking about public safety under Amendment 5. I want to check with the Minister how far the Bill is linked to some of the issues with which other departments in Whitehall are dealing. We all know that all the complicated policy problems are cross-departmental. Chapter 6 of th…
+1 more contribution in this session
Lords
Oral Questions
19 January 2026
Public Inquiries: Costs
I absolutely agree. We have seen, whether in the infected blood scandal or the Horizon scandal, that people who genuinely wanted answers had to wait years before we even got to the point of a public inquiry. The Government have an opportunity to help rebuild trust in the institutions that should mat…