House of Lords Appointments Commission

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 6th December 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

On this occasion I am very glad to agree with my noble friend.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that the situation of hereditary Peers is sexually discriminatory? Titles still go first to a son, and if there is no son they go to a collateral branch. That is in itself sexually discriminatory and I cannot see how she can possibly argue against that.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I return to the point that the hereditary element, which plays a great part in this House—we should not decry that—has a by-election process that was part of a House of Lords reform package. There will no doubt be reform in the future, and the nature of hereditary Peers may or may not be considered. We had one Private Member’s Bill last Session on this very issue, but I see it as a slightly separate point from the work of HOLAC.

Standards in Public Life

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I understand the tenor of the right reverend Prelate’s question. I repeat what was said in the Statement: it is for us all in public life to choose for ourselves how to respond. The context of this is not only the allegations that have been made; there is also a wider political process intended to denigrate the Prime Minister. Those are both aspects of this situation. In saying that, I do not underestimate the importance of any of the matters that people raise. They should all be properly investigated.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister really believe that the Prime Minister forgot a meeting with the noble Lord, Lord McDonald, the head of the Foreign Office? Does he really believe that the Prime Minister forgot such an important meeting over such a crucial matter when he denied that anybody had given him notice of the alleged activities going on?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I do not know the circumstances of the alleged meeting. I saw the press release from the noble Lord, Lord McDonald, but I do not think it referred to a personal meeting he had had with the Prime Minister. If the noble Baroness is aware of that, obviously I will stand corrected. She will know from her great experience in public affairs that in the course of life in No. 10—I had the privilege of working there for four years under Prime Minister Major—events crowd in on every individual in that place. That is the reality of the matter.

Ministerial Code

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I fear I say too often in this House that allegations do not constitute proof. I remind noble Lords that whatever the context of this particular circumstance, a truly outstanding operation was conducted to remove people from Afghanistan safely. I repeat that statements have been made by the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, No. 10 Downing Street and the Defence Secretary which repudiate the allegations being made.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord not accept that it is the duty of the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, to come to this House and correct or explain the statement, or misstatement, that he made—not to make statements generally? He owes a duty to this House.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure my noble friend will read and hear what the noble Baroness has said. I said in my original Answer that Ministers are personally responsible for deciding how to justify their actions and conduct to Parliament and the public.

Future Relationship with the EU

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord McNicol of West Kilbride) (Lab)]

I call the next speaker, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. Bishop? We will move on to the next speaker and come back. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that, as the Government have agreed to extend the deadline for negotiation and agreement, genuine compromise on both sides is needed? Does he also agree that there must be further genuine compromise by the European Union and, equally importantly, by Her Majesty’s Government?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the aspiration of the Government has been and remains to get a free trade deal with our friends and former partners in Europe. As the noble Baroness said—and I agree—an enormous number of areas of ground in the negotiations have been carried positively. But specific and deep differences remain on the well-known points that have been discussed, including the so-called level playing field and fisheries. Those are matters of intensive negotiations. The chief negotiators began to negotiate again at 10 am this morning. I will not prejudge what might be going on in those negotiations, but I can assure the House that the intention of the Government is positive. As the Prime Minister said, while there is life, there is hope.

EU Trade Agreement

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Tuesday 8th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the first two sets of proposals will be in primary legislation. That will give Parliament full opportunity to debate them.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as set out in the register, as chair of the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce.

I have chaired a number of webinars with colleagues and friends in the Arab Middle East about what is going to happen by 15 October, and there is a great deal of concern. With the greatest respect to the Minister, he appears to have come to answer this Question with very little information about why Sir Jonathan Jones has resigned. He says he has not read the letter of resignation. That is going to increase the anxiety. There is a real sense of urgency among our trading colleagues across the Arab Middle East regarding what will happen. Do we now tell them that they must expect to trade under the WTO rules?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I can only repeat what the Prime Minister said yesterday. We continue to seek a deal but, ideally, it will have to be in place with the European Council on 15 October.

Spending Review: Intergenerational Fairness and Well-being

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 20th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I commend the noble Baroness and her colleagues on the Select Committee on Intergenerational Fairness and Provision for its report. It has just come out and I read it over the weekend. I like the sentence in paragraph 3:

“Policy based on the expectation that future generations will disproportionately pay for present or past consumption cannot be considered just or sustainable”.


I agree with that. One of the ways of reducing intergenerational unfairness is to take further steps to reduce the deficit, and the report explains exactly why it is unfair for any Government to go on borrowing and borrowing and load on to subsequent generations ever higher debt. I hope that that part of the report will encourage support for the difficult decisions that the Government may have to take on public spending.

On the specific question about publishing a distributional analysis of the impact, I understand that that is quite difficult to do. If, for example, the Government decide to spend more money on high-quality childcare, would that score as an advantage for the child, who is getting the benefit of the childcare, or as a benefit for the parent, who would then be able to go out to work or who would not have to pay for that childcare? There are some real issues about definition before we can go too far down the road of identifying a solution along the lines suggested by the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that one of the most important problems here is the enormous debts that young people are building up through university charges? Our generation did not face such huge debts but the next generation does. As far as I can see that is one of the most important issues. I wonder what the noble Lord thinks about that point.

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Steps were taken last year to raise the threshold at which debt starts to be repaid. However, as I said in my original reply, one of the report’s recommendations is to take this issue into account in the spending review. However, we have seen a huge reduction in unemployment among young people, with the rate among 16 to 24 year-olds having halved since 2010, which is a good record.

European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, in opening the debate this morning, the noble Baroness the Leader of the House said that the Bill is not about our future relationship with the EU, but about process. As my noble friend Lord Foulkes said, the Bill paves the way to our leaving the EU while setting aside a series of treaties that this country, this Parliament and, in particular, this House, spent hours and hours debating in the 40 years of our membership. As other noble Lords have emphasised, the Bill also has real constitutional consequences for us here at home, and in this Parliament—notably regarding the powers of Ministers, but also regarding our relationship with the devolved Administrations.

My noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton spoke of the disappointment of the Constitution Committee that the Government have totally failed to address the concerns published some time ago in her committee’s interim report. Its latest report, published only yesterday, reiterates the serious issues that the Bill still raises about Northern Ireland. The Good Friday agreement took years of patient negotiation, first by the Major Government and then by the Blair Government. This is now a matter of critical concern; the relationship between Northern Ireland, as part of a United Kingdom that has withdrawn from the EU, and a southern Ireland that remains as part of the EU, is a very important issue, as my noble friend Lord Hain and others have emphasised.

In answering the debate tomorrow, I hope that the Minister will respond to the Constitution Committee’s recommendation that, before the completion of the Bill’s passage through this House, the Government publish an assessment of the effect of the Bill, and of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, on the Good Friday agreement. This is a specific recommendation from one of the most highly respected committees of this House, and it deserves an answer from the Minister.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds said, in what I thought was a very powerful intervention, too much of the debate on our relationship with, and withdrawal from, the EU has descended to a level that undermines all intelligent democratic argument. This Bill does nothing to retrieve the balance necessary to inform decision-taking.

In June 2016, the British people voted—not overwhelmingly, as some have tried to imply, but certainly decisively—to leave the European Union. The Government accepted that decision, and so did Parliament. The decisions ahead now must lie with a Parliament that is well informed and has real powers and rights to advise and amend government policy, as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer emphasised.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said in his tremendously spirited address, the essence of democracy is that people can change their minds when they have more information or real experience of how a Government are performing. We had an election in May 2015 and another one in June 2017, the second one called by a Prime Minister expressly and explicitly to strengthen her negotiating hand in Europe. The British people voted in such a way that her negotiating hand was not strengthened; it was badly damaged and weakened. So surely the British people may well need to be consulted again at the conclusion of the negotiations—consulted on whether the Government have delivered a satisfactory result in terms of our leaving the EU. This Bill may not be the right vehicle for legislating on that point but, as a democracy, when those negotiations are at an end, the British people should be consulted as to whether what they voted for is what this Government have been able to deliver.

Voter Registration

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

That goes way beyond my negotiating brief and takes us into very difficult territory about the future of the common travel area in Northern Ireland. I repeat that we have had a debate about ID cards and the Government have made their position clear. We are not minded to introduce them in the UK.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, have the Government done any calculations about the demographics of the electorate in coming years? Can the Government give any idea of the number of people aged 18 who will be joining the electoral register and the rate of attrition among older people who will be leaving the electoral register?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The short answer is no. But the noble Baroness will be pleased to hear that, since IER was introduced, 5.7 million people between the ages of 16 and 24 have joined the register, so we have had some success in getting that end of the register backfilled. So far as the other half of her question is concerned, I will have to write to her.

Trade Union Bill

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maude of Horsham]

It is an interesting idea that a voluntary agreement to move in a particular direction is then the responsibility of others to enforce. In order to avoid legislation on this in 1984, the leadership of the trade union movement at that stage said, “We will reform ourselves”. The reality is that they did not reform themselves because the opting-out possibility is not visible to most union members when they join or, indeed, afterwards. Even if you manage to find out how to do it and exercise that option, in most cases you get no reduction in your union subscription. The sense that this is in any sense a voluntary contribution is pretty absurd.

My view is that this is a long-overdue reform. The idea that this is breakneck progress is not to be taken seriously. This has been a steady, measured process, tested at a general election through a manifesto, and I hope that the Government will stick to their guns.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I put to him the point that the noble Lord, Lord Burns, made in putting this amendment before the House. The argument is not about the principle of the opt-in process—it was clearly put in the governing party’s manifesto. The argument is about whether it is being done fairly. The noble Lord simply argued about the principle but the amendment is about the fairness of applying the principle. I am afraid that he did not listen to the clear argument put by the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and I am sorry that he did not.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, had the great privilege of serving on the Select Committee of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. We were much heartened on the morning of 11 February, when Nick Boles, the Minister of State at BIS, came to give evidence. Amid that evidence he said:

“I know that Baroness Neville-Rolfe indicated yesterday in the debate that on questions of timing for transition and methods by which an opt-in could be declared she was very much open to arguments and would be reflecting on them before Report”.

Your Lordships can imagine that that was very heartening when we were struggling with precisely some of those issues in contemplating Clauses 10 and 11. I will take some transition period points first—I refer of course to the transition periods contained within the amendments and not to what would be included if paragraph 142(b) of our report had been taken up.

Three things made us feel that three months after the commencement date was not nearly enough. First, there were the union rules themselves. Here I am grateful to the noble Baronesses, Lady Dean and Lady Drake, and to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for educating us with great tact and patience on exactly how trade unions work and therefore how difficult it would be for unions to make changes to their rule books in a hurry without exceptional and unreasonable cost. Secondly, it was raised with the committee that each of the unions concerned would need to make changes to its IT systems. I can see a number of Members groaning at the thought of that. It was felt that each one would have to make changes to two IT systems, the membership system and the accounting system, and all of that would have to be done, no doubt, with considerable expense. Of course, such expense did not appear in the impact assessment.

Finally, the actual process of mail-out was assumed to be just a simple letter out and in. In fact, I know from experience that mail-out processes are considerably more complex than that. You have to answer questions from people who get letters, send out replacement letters and chase people up. That is why we came to feel that the absolute minimum period was 12 months and that the Government should certainly settle down with the unions and the Certification Officer to get that period right.

On the second bit, the methodology of the opt-in, the amendments include the Certification Officer so we could get the proportionality right where one is talking about an average political contribution of £4.84 a year. We felt that the Certification Officer, who was most impressive in evidence, would be able to find a way through so that opting in could be done on a basis that was not cripplingly expensive for the unions concerned.

Finally, on the point which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, raised on the manifesto, I will not repeat what he said. However, one of the interesting things which we considered as a committee in trying to strike that balance between fairness and the manifestos was what would happen to the percentage of trade union members who, at the next election, were still on an opt-out basis. Basically, we took evidence from USDAW, which said that its turnover was about 20% of its membership per year. Therefore, even if the average was 10% for the whole of the union movement, at least 40% of that membership would have turned over by the next election. So in many ways the Government would already have achieved substantial progress toward their target, even if they go on the basis which we have recommended. As I said, I feel we have achieved a balance of fairness and manifesto commitments in the committee report.

Tehran: British Embassy

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As the noble Lord probably knows, discussions are already under way about the possibility of reopening the British Council operation in Tehran. I declare an interest in that my wife is an officer of the British Academy and the British Institute of Persian Studies also had to close. We have to recognise that there are some delicate issues at stake. There is the protection of British nationals when they are there and there is the problem with the human rights situation in Iran which we should not ignore.

[Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean (Lab)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord has raised the question of human rights in Iran, will he undertake that the Government, if they do reopen the embassy, will start a discussion again on human rights in Iran and, very particularly, the hanging of underage young people?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am happy, on behalf of the Government, to give that complete assurance. The treatment of journalists, the number of executions and the treatment of women are all very substantial issues on which we will wish to maintain an active dialogue with the Iranian authorities.