I welcome the words of the Lord Privy Seal about the need to engage all of civil society in the issue of what a dangerous world we live in. How does she reconcile that with the fact that, time after time, the heads of our armed services are saying that our Armed Forces have been cut to the bone and …
My Lords, this is beginning to sound more like something out of “Mission Impossible”, with telephone messages destructing themselves after 30 seconds and other telephones being stolen in strange circumstances. This is getting to be a bit of a saga of excuses. We have here a decision about Peter Mand…
My Lords, every week I pass by that wonderful statue of the Windrush generation at Waterloo station. It is an inspiration, showing people who were invited here to come and be part of our community, and they have served this community incredibly well. We have lived the Martin Luther King dream in thi…
My Lords, a little while ago, I became aware of the case of a young man charged with multiple counts of rape. He was arrested late at night in front of his weeping parents and taken away in a police van. It was five years before he came to trial.
The trial itself lasted five days. When it finished,…
My Lords, a little while ago, I became aware of the case of a young man charged with multiple counts of rape. He was arrested late at night in front of his weeping parents and taken away in a police van. It was five years before he came to trial.
The trial itself lasted five days. When it finished,…
My point is that the change to the Bill was introduced after 62 hours. No evidence was taken on the new process. On Report, of the 77 amendments tabled by Members other than the sponsor, only seven were selected for a separate decision.
I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. I can only go by what the OBR says, and it says it will be 2026. The OBR said that unemployment will peak later this year before falling for the remainder of the forecast period, ending the Parliament lower than the rate we inherited at the election.…
Let us reflect on the effect of the continuous dispute with train drivers, which cost £700 million or £800 million in revenue; on the fact that the pay increase was about 2% more than the previous Government intended to pay; and, particularly, on the fact that there were no productivity proposals on…
I will just follow up my noble friend’s remarks. He is a noble friend; I campaigned for him several times in his constituency when he was an MP, and I will remain a friend of his, I hope. I want very quickly to follow up on his remarks about what we might call the “Pannick paradox” between the decis…
My Lords, as one of the younger Members of your Lordships’ House, I start by thanking the hundreds of citizens of this nation who have taken time out to write to us or email us. I have read some of the very personal letters that have been sent to us, and I want to thank them all, regardless of wheth…
The Lord is absolutely correct. It was not much fun, was it? I speak as someone who is recovering from prostate cancer. Nearly two years on—so far, so good—I am under active surveillance. I was treated early because of my wise and gentle GP, Dr Nazeer, who has just entered his 60th year in the Natio…
Perhaps I should be formal and say that the Companion is very clear about asking supplementary questions that do not engage the main Question. However, I will say on this occasion in good will that I spent 10 minutes with the Yeoman Usher this morning looking at the door, ensuring that noble Lords a…
My Lords, I have attended all stages of this Bill and collected a strong sense that the Government have seen it as something which it is not. They have regarded it as a tidying-up exercise, but it is a constitutional reform and therefore serious. I try to imagine how future historians may look upon …
I am afraid I am a little less sanguine about some of this than others. This catastrophic cock-up—and it was a cock-up, not a criminal event—is a direct consequence of us getting involved in a war in which we should never have got involved in the first place, which we did not have the political will…
I thank the noble Lord for his Question, and I know that this is not the first time he has raised this very important issue before your Lordships’ House. The Home Office began collating data on a mandatory basis in April 2019. Since then, there have been 350 FGM offences recorded by the police. We h…
I can reassure the noble Lord that I am determined to work with the Crown Prosecution Service, which I superintend, to increase the rate of prosecutions. I am determined we do that in a joined-up way, together with other parts of government and arm’s-length bodies, to ensure there is a whole-system …
A working person is someone who goes out to work. The Government have pledged not to increase taxes on working people. We stand by that, which is why we are not increasing their income tax, national insurance contributions or VAT.
My Lords, I shall make a very brief comment on the points of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, about the image of the House.
We know and accept that hereditary Peers are anomalous, but what about most of the rest of us? Let us be clear about this: we are here—the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, an…
I had finished my remarks but will respond to say that I would love that to be the case.
My Lords, I think the House takes that in the spirit and the manner in which the noble Lord made those remarks. Both, in their way, are serious. Obviously, the tragedy of what happened in Grenfell Tower remains with us always, but clearly the security imperative of protecting everyone in this Palace…
My Lords, they are both very serious matters which go back to the independent report on security and the need to enhance the security of the West Front following the death of PC Palmer. The backdrop is a security imperative. I will say next Wednesday that what has happened to our front door is entir…
My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. We should all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for the very gracious way he introduced his amendment, particularly given the history of this inter-House discussion.
Whether it is betrayal, di…
My Lords, the Government are committed to giving the police the resourcing and staffing they need to tackle crime. As set out in the police funding settlement, overall funding for policing will total £19.6 billion in 2025-26, an increase of up to £1.2 billion compared to the 2024-25 settlement under…
I am grateful to the noble Lord. There are always challenges in the police service, but I do not recognise the word crisis, which has been put to us after nine months in office. A crisis is when 20,000 police officers were cut from the budget after 2010. A crisis is when a halving of PCSOs took plac…
Yesterday, in another place, Conservative MPs voted proudly for the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, including my fellow members of the shadow DCMS team, and they stand ready, I am sure, to do the same again, if necessary. I understand the reticence of many noble Lords for p…
I am sorry to interrupt these exchanges, which are of great interest. I have not been able to participate in ping-pong for some time, but the House will be aware that I am very keen on the issues being discussed and have been involved in a number of Bills on which issues of a similar nature have ari…
My Lords, may I also trespass on your patience? I, like my noble friend Lord Dobbs, live on my royalties. The AI companies have—very irritatingly—bought only one of my 20 books; they paid about £3,000, and so, as you can imagine, I am very keen that they should buy the other 19.
It strikes me that …
My Lords, I shall be brief. We are in a pickle. This is an important Bill that needs to gain Royal Assent quickly, for EU data adequacy reasons if nothing else. Incidentally, I do not believe that the Bill does active harm to the creative sector as it is written, but, since the copyright consultatio…
My Lords, what is a pet? That is a central question to everything that we are discussing. Some noble Lords will remember that there once was a parrot—a Norwegian Blue, to be precise—that was very sick. In fact, he was so sick, he was a deceased parrot—at least, that is how his new owner perceived it…