Representation of the People Bill

Lord Markham Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

There have been over four hours of debate at this stage, with many views, and I shall speak briefly on what I think are two larger, overriding points to consider. First, this Bill is central to the legitimacy of our democracy and, as such, any rules that we set under the Bill must be fair, unbiased and consistent.

I accept that that the acronym FUC is probably not the wisest acronym I have ever come up with, but I hope we can all agree that fairness, unbias and consistency need to be the bedrock of everything we consider here. Otherwise, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Paul, said, we are in danger of seeing the Americanisation of our politics. I think anyone who has seen, in the American example, the way that states and districts have been gerrymandered, or the way that politically aligned district attorneys and judges from one party or another subvert the law in favour of one party or another, will accept that that is not a path any of us would want to go down, or the kind of democracy I believe any of us want.

The second overriding point I want us to think about in our democracy is that we must not feed the narrative that this is an establishment stitch-up to somehow disadvantage Reform. We need only look at the recent AfD vote in east Germany or National Rally in France to see the inherent dangers of something being seen as an establishment stitch-up. We need to make sure that this is not an opportunity for Reform to cast this as somehow the establishment versus the people. That will only be to our detriment and we need to make sure that the Bill does not add fuel to that fire. With that in mind and with the principles of fairness, unbias and consistency, I will talk about some of the inconsistencies and the things that I think that the Bill sets against these.

My noble friend Lord Jamieson set this out very clearly when he asked: why would we have a proposal that seeks to decrease voter security by moving away from voter ID, unless we were trying to make it easier for a certain segment of the population to vote than another, perhaps to disproportionately favour one party?

Around the electoral age, I would say that, if we believe that 16 year-olds should be allowed to vote, we must give them the ability to inform themselves properly as well, and, like it or not, social media is the platform that is now the major forum for political views and exchanges. Yet at the same time we are restricting social media feeds and personalisation, which is the main way that 16 and 17 year-olds will receive political information. Surely, if we consider a 16 year-old old enough to choose a Government, we must accept that they are old enough to hear the arguments on all the media platforms without government restrictions.

The second principle that I will take to Committee is that any rules on donations are fair and unbiased. Anything that we do which specifically rules in or out particular groups to the benefit of one party or another, such as the rules on union funding mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, will again put this Bill under the spotlight. If rules are seen to enable unfettered large union donations to Labour, while at the same time restricting large individual donations to Reform, including even retrospectively, I am afraid that there is a danger that we will feed the Reform narrative that this is an anti-establishment stitch-up, which will do much greater damage to our democracy. I believe and worry that this will give much more succour to their argument.

I will finish by saying that as we go through Committee, the criteria I will be looking to test each measure on are fairness, unbias and consistency. I will probably try to come up with a better acronym, as I say, but those are the rules that I will be applying in Committee.

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Markham Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 29th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

I speak to my Amendment 132 and fully support the intention of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which is trying not to add another layer to what we would all hope would be a streamlined process. With my amendment, I am trying to make a very simple point on proportionality: where there is an environmental assessment, there should be some sort of indication on how reasonable the cost within it is.

We all know about the very famous £100 million High Speed 2 bat tunnel story. What we do not know is the cost per bat saved. As a former Health Minister, I am very familiar with being asked these questions in the health space all the time: which medicines should we approve? We have a process for this called NICE. It very explicitly puts the value of a human life at somewhere between £20,000 to £30,000 per year in terms of a quality adjusted life year. It will approve medicines if they cost less than that and will explicitly say that we cannot afford a medicine on the NHS if it is above that. It explicitly puts a value on a year of a human’s life, which leads to difficult discussions, conversations and analysis. You end up saying to people that, unfortunately, the state will not pay for a type of medicine even though it might be life-saving. We have put a value on a human life in that and we have made that open to public debate.

We should have a similar reference point when talking about the environmental impact of the life of a bat or some other species, with reference to the value that we put on a human life. I am interested in the Minister’s views on what we can learn from the NICE debate in terms of proportionality, to make sure that we are not valuing the life of a bat, say, much more highly than the life of a human.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 130 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown. It is supported by those champions of nature, the noble Lord, Lord Roborough, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Young and Lady Grender. I only wish I could have signed it myself.

I am not particularly interested in making things easier for developers—streamlining their processes is not my primary aim—but I strongly agree with the issues listed in Amendment 130: nutrient neutrality, water quality, water resource and air quality. Humans need these things for health. All our concerns about Part 3 have been supported by quite a lot of organisations, such as the Wildlife and Countryside Link, the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, the Bat Conservation Trust, the Better Planning Coalition, the Wildlife Trusts and the Royal Society, which have all raised concerns just as we in your Lordships’ House have done.

Our concerns and our amendments to Part 3 are a demonstration of how much we do not trust this Government to care about the countryside, nature, wildlife and human well-being. I trusted some in the previous Government to protect the countryside because they owned so much of it—they probably had its interests at heart and in their wallets—but many in this Government clearly prefer bulldozers to bats and beavers. To me, that immediately signals that we have a problem with this Government. Labour has been disappointing on nature, the environment and climate change. It occasionally talks about those things but does not understand them, and that is a source of real anxiety to me.

I have no trust in this Government doing the right thing to protect nature. They are opposing a series of very moderate, sensible suggestions to make our planning system more nature friendly. When I say that, I mean human friendly as well. We are nothing without nature—we need it very badly—but Labour has rejected the most minor of measures, for example over swift bricks in new buildings. It has said no to the most basic protections for our precious and rare chalk streams and fails to do the most obvious things, such as stopping developers attaching new buildings to already overloaded sewage systems.

If the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, decides to put this amendment to a vote, we on the Green Benches will support her very strongly.