Lords
Proceedings
8 July 2026
Police Leadership Commission Report
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for making this Statement. As he is in his place, I must also mention my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who brings experience and common sense to pretty much everything he does. There is a “but” coming, and it is this: I get slightly worried when I see phrases in a Sta…
Lords
Proceedings
3 June 2026
2 contributions
Cabinet Manual: Guidelines for Government Formation
My Lords—
Can my noble friend cheer us all up by reminding us, in the election following five years of coalition government, when the public were asked to give their judgment on it, how many Liberal MPs were left?
Lords
Oral Questions
20 January 2026
Railways: East Coast Main Line
My noble friend makes an excellent point. I pay tribute to everyone who is working on the trans-Pennine upgrade. That project is phenomenal and demonstrates that we can deliver on time and on budget when all the key people pull together and work together. As my noble friend says, the performance tha…
Lords
Proceedings
19 January 2026
Northern Powerhouse Rail
My Lords, there is a great deal in this Statement that I warmly welcome: in particular, the bit the Minister has just referred to about what was HS2, the link from Crewe to Manchester. He has repeated, and it is clear in the Statement, that
“we will retain land … already purchased between the west …
Lords
Debate
5 January 2026
Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill
My Lords, I particularly want to speak today because I am on the IRDC. I am proud that we completed a near-impossible task given to us by Parliament, which was to try to summarise the feelings of the Chagossian community on the UK-Mauritius agreement. I do not know precisely, but we had about 10 day…
Lords
Proceedings
18 December 2025
UK-EU Common Understanding Negotiations
My Lords, on Erasmus, I remind my noble friend that, as I am sure she knows, we are talking about very large sums of money. It was £570 million in the first year alone, and that is with a terrific 30% discount. When large sums of money are involved, I am interested in who the beneficiaries are going…
Lords
Debate
18 November 2025
2 contributions
Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill
How far back is the noble Lord going to go in his historic examination of British Governments? Is his position that the British Government should never ever cede sovereignty to any former colony? I am thinking of Australia, South Africa or Canada. How far is he going back in saying that it is absolu…
My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 1 by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. I take it that he was not entirely serious when he dreamt up this particular innovation, which is right at the start of the Bill, whereby the purpose of the Bill should be presented in the way that the opponents of the …
Lords
Proceedings
18 November 2025
Police Reform
My Lords, I strongly support the Statement to which my noble friend the Minister is responding. He was right to remind us of the history, which is that the Labour Party opposed the creation of these positions. We were 100% right in doing so, because they failed in their central objective to make pol…
Lords
Proceedings
3 November 2025
Gaza and Hamas
My Lords, amid all the other things that have been going on in Israel and Palestine in the past few weeks, would my noble friend the Minister like to comment on the vote in the Israeli Parliament—which passed by 71 to 13—to annex the West Bank and incorporate it into the State of Israel? Can she imp…
Lords
Oral Questions
22 October 2025
3 contributions
Rules on Duty-Free Goods
We will hear from the Lib Dems next and then my noble friend Lord Grocott.
Oh!
+1 more contribution in this session
Lords
Oral Questions
21 October 2025
Great British Railways: Rolling Stock
The abrupt cancellation of phase 2a of HS2 necessitates thinking through again the rolling stock strategy for the whole of HS2. It is one of a number of really enormous issues that the new chief executive and new chair of the board of HS2 are grappling with, because it is about time that both the Go…
Lords
Proceedings
14 October 2025
2 contributions
Business of the House
I am sorry; I apologise to the Lib Dems. It is an error I have made frequently in life.
It is not uncommon at all to have such numbers of people in the House scrutinising. It is beyond argument that, if we are looking at the detail of a Bill at a sensible time, at midday or 1 pm, more people will b…
My Lords, I thank those who contributed to this debate. The first thing I would say is that it shows a desire from all across the House to scrutinise legislation properly and effectively. The noble Baroness said that extra time is needed. This is why the proposal was brought forward, to provide some…
Lords
Oral Questions
13 October 2025
Chinese Espionage: Parliament
I very much thank my noble friend for his question. Let me be clear about some of the interesting comments in terms of where the Opposition have been. When he was Foreign Secretary, the right honourable James Cleverly, MP, who I have a huge amount of time for, called the decision to sum up China in …
Lords
Oral Questions
18 September 2025
4 contributions
Gaza: UN Commission of Inquiry Report
My Lords, we will hear from the Conservative Benches next and then the Liberal Democrat Benches.
My Lords—
+2 more contributions in this session
Lords
Oral Questions
16 September 2025
Undocumented Migrants
I am grateful to my noble friend for reminding me that, when I was last a Minister in the Home Office, we had an identity card scheme in place that was scrapped by the then-incoming Coalition Government of 2010-2015. It is an expensive business to re-jig ID cards, but all options are always being ex…
Lords
Debate
21 July 2025
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I feel impelled to make just a very brief point. I very much support the idea of a Select Committee to look at the future of the House but, before any steps are taken to look at voting and the right to elect Peers, will the Select Committee discuss with the Commons how the Commons sees it …
Lords
Oral Questions
21 July 2025
NHS England: Staff Costs
I can only say that the ongoing forensic work will uncover what has happened over the past few years, but I think we all know that, at the moment, the NHS is not fit for purpose; there needs to be radical change. This Government are absolutely committed to that, and we will make sure that it happens…
Lords
Debate
9 July 2025
2 contributions
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I will risk the possibility of being called risible by the noble Lord, Lord True, for disagreeing with him, but I think he has failed to spell out precisely one point that he should have done. He prayed in aid various people, including my noble friend Lord Foulkes as someone who thought we…
If the noble Lord, Lord True, cannot see the difference in category between a life Peer who can sit in here and legislate and a life Peer who cannot, then we are going to have considerable difficulty in having a sensible discussion. They are obviously fundamentally different, just as there is a fund…
Lords
Oral Questions
8 July 2025
ARIA: Scoping Our Planet Programme
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I do not carry that figure in my head. I can tell my noble friend that ARIA has spent 300 hours over the past few months dealing with requests under the Environmental Information Regulations alone, so he can imagine the scale of requests that can come through other things. I …
Lords
Debate
2 July 2025
4 contributions
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I am finding it difficult to compute exactly what is going on today, because Friday after Friday, Bill after Bill, to a three-quarters empty House, which is characteristic on a Friday, I have been faced with substantial opposition, not just from individual Members—not exclusively from the …
As far as I know, although I do not know the intricacies of the mechanism that brought me here, there were probably more than three people who thought that it was okay.
I would be dishonest to the House if I did not admit to being flattered that it seems to be universally described as the “Grocott …
+2 more contributions in this session
Lords
Proceedings
30 June 2025
UK-Mauritius Agreement on the Chagos Archipelago
My Lords, I add my formal warm welcome to my noble and learned friend Lady Prentis and congratulate her on an excellent maiden speech. The poignancy of the moment was made even greater by the speech of my noble friend Lord Boswell, who we shall miss not only for his contributions to your Lordships’ …
Lords
Proceedings
24 June 2025
Middle East
My Lords, I welcome and admire the way my noble friend the Minister has presented the case for the Government today, in his calm and measured way—in stark contrast to the belligerence of the Opposition spokesman. I am glad that my noble friend is in charge of these things and not the Opposition spok…
Lords
Proceedings
19 June 2025
HS2 Reset
My Lords, this is a necessary but pretty depressing Statement announcing, as it effectively is, that when it comes to major infrastructure projects, whether they are railways or power stations or airports, this country does them very badly indeed. I hope we learn some lessons from that. I ask my nob…
Lords
Oral Questions
12 June 2025
Political Parties and Elections Act 2009
My Lords, my noble friend makes an interesting point. Just to reassure him, part of our strategy in the summer will reflect on the very issues that he is talking about, and in it we will set out our strategy on wider electoral reform, including donations and the source of donations.
Lords
Proceedings
9 June 2025
Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories
My Lords, for as long as most of us can remember, Ministers such as my noble friend have been talking about the two-state solution as the holy grail that gets us all out of the difficulties. But is it not now time to recognise that the simple truth—which I ask him to confirm—is that the present Gove…