House of Lords
Message from the King
The Lord Chamberlain (Lord Benyon) (CB)
My Lords, I have the honour to present to your Lordships a message from His Majesty the King, signed by his own hand. The message is as follows:
“I have received with great satisfaction the dutiful and loyal expression of your thanks for the Speech with which I opened the present Session of Parliament”.
Retirement of a Member: Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, I should like to notify the House of the retirement with effect from today of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, pursuant to Section 1 of the House of Lords Reform Act 2014. On behalf of the House, I thank the noble Lord for his much-valued service to this House.
Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Hyde of Bemerton
To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to improve awareness and reduce the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, we continue to promote the advice of the Chief Medical Officers in the UK that pregnant women or those planning a pregnancy should avoid alcohol, alongside promoting the NICE quality standards on FASD. We are committed to ensuring that all pregnant women with alcohol problems are supported to reduce the risk of harm to them and the foetus. This includes providing local authorities, through the public health grant, with £3.4 billion of funding for alcohol and drug treatment and recovery over the next three years.
Baroness Hyde of Bemerton (Lab)
Labour Governments have a hugely successful track record of improving the health of the population, for example, reducing smoking in public places and the recent range of measures in the Tobacco and Vapes Act. Research evidence suggests that the impact of drinking alcohol in pregnancy—any amount of alcohol—may be comparable or greater than the risks of smoking. Therefore, would the Minister undertake to review all opportunities for enhancing prevention, such as adding foetal alcohol spectrum disorder prevention measures to the recent women’s health strategy, strategies for sexual and reproductive health and the interim mental health strategy? Will she also work with colleagues to ensure that FASD education and prevention is a policy priority for local authority health teams?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My noble friend is quite right. There are tremendous opportunities to link up work on tackling foetal alcohol spectrum disorder with other parts of our work, not least the major principle of moving from treatment of sickness to prevention. I assure my noble friend that we are working across government. We will also continue to work with all local areas so that we can address unmet need, prioritise prevention and make sure that we have improvements to alcohol treatment services. All of these will make a difference.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, according to the association for FASD, every prevented case saves over £400,000 in lifetime costs, as well as the personal tragedy. Universal antenatal alcohol history taking is recommended by NICE guidelines, but implementation remains variable. Will the Government embed NICE guidelines everywhere, alongside a national public health campaign on alcohol in pregnancy, equivalent to the effective existing smoking in pregnancy campaign?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
In addition to the ring-fenced funding I spoke of, we are going further on alcohol labels to get across the important points. In 2022, NICE produced and published a quality standard, which the noble Baroness referred to, so that the system can help diagnose but also support those affected by FASD. I am not aware of there being widespread difficulties with its adoption, because it is so fundamental to pre-pregnancy and pregnancy care, but, if the noble Baroness has particular examples, I would of course be pleased to look into them.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, the Government’s initiatives on alcohol prevention in pregnancy are to be welcomed and are very impressive, but can the Minister assure us that the industry itself will not be involved in consultations and in designing public health programmes? To date, the tiny pictograms on bottles, particularly of wine and other alcohol products, are so small that they are ineffective. We really need consistent messaging in a much broader sphere where people eat out, drink out and socialise, and in all public health measures.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I take the noble Baroness’s point, which is why I am glad that we committed in the 10-year health plan to making it a legal requirement—therefore strengthening it—that alcohol labels display health warnings and consistent nutritional information. That is something else that noble Lords have raised. As was referred to in the previous question, it is also important that we note that part of care for pregnant women is dealing with alcohol consumption.
Baroness Nargund (Lab)
My Lords, no amount of alcohol is considered to be safe in pregnancy. Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder—FASD—affects roughly one child in every classroom of 25 children, and it is a preventable neurodevelopmental disorder. A report published just two days ago by the National Organisation for FASD suggests that inaction in addressing this problem is costing the UK economy £9.2 billion annually. As most people in the UK drink alcohol, and as nearly half of pregnancies are unplanned and one-third of births are unplanned or associated with feelings of ambivalence, I ask my noble friend the Minister: do the Government have any plans to extend the public health campaign to pre-conception clinics and to advise women who are planning to get pregnant? That requires pre-conception advice, as so many pregnancies are unplanned. Will the Government also link that to school education, please?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My noble friend is quite right about the potentially lasting effects of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder on children, which is why the main priority is preventing it. There are three approaches. First, the clear advice—the safest approach, if you are pregnant or could become pregnant—is not to drink alcohol, and that will remain consistent. I have just referred to the legal requirement for alcohol labels. We will of course continue to look at how prevention messaging can best reach people pre conception. The obvious point here is that so many pregnancies are not planned, so there is no neat solution to getting to the right people. We have to get our messaging right, which is why we are taking the approach we are.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, the Department of Health and Social Care’s own health needs assessment noted that there are still no reliable prevalence studies for foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in England, despite estimates suggesting that the UK may have one of the highest rates in Europe. How can the Government effectively reduce the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder when they still do not know with confidence how many children and adults are living with the condition? What steps have the Government taken to improve diagnosis and data collection?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Lord is quite right that we are working on estimates, and there are a number of practical reasons for that. To come to the noble Lord’s real point, the first National Institute for Health and Care Research challenge funding call was launched in 2024, backed by £50 million. That tasked researchers and policymakers with finding new ways to tackle maternity disparities and poor pregnancy outcomes, and clearly that will support further research and policy. So we are looking to the future and I take on that challenge; it is one that we are meeting.
Baroness Hollins (CB)
My Lords, of course prevention is important, but does the noble Baroness agree that children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder need continuing specialist education and support throughout life, as do their families, many of whom of course are adoptive families?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness is quite right. This is one of the many reasons that I am enthusiastic, as we move towards the single patient record. We will absolutely ensure that carers and parents—however families are formed, because of course they are formed in different ways—are part of our consideration. The noble Baroness is absolutely right about that.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
As my noble friend said, this is important before people become pregnant. Many people who become pregnant are of course young women, but so much of the advertising by the alcohol industry is aimed at exactly those youngsters. Although I take the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, about not involving the industry in the solutions, I do think that the Government should talk about advertising that is not aimed at young women, because they are exactly the ones who might become pregnant.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
On the matter of advertising, particularly when we think about other areas as well, we work on the basis that we are not banning alcohol use: I absolutely know that my noble friend is not asking for that. I am sure that would not be popular in your Lordships’ House, so it is probably good that I put it on record. However, what matters is that we are all equipped to make the right health decisions and are actively supported, not just through information. Industry has a role to play in promoting responsible drinking, which is important in pregnancy and in general terms as well. It is one of the health risks that we need to tackle. As we move to create the healthiest generation ever, our work on alcohol as well as tobacco and obesity is absolutely key.
Unemployment: People with Autism
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Lord Touhig
To ask His Majesty’s Government what new initiatives they have introduced in the past year to reduce the level of unemployment of people with autism.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, and declare my interest as a vice-president of the National Autistic Society.
The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Sherlock) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government are committed to supporting autistic people into employment, including through targeted specialist support. Our £1 billion connect to work programme includes a supported employment pathway for neurodivergent people and is now live across most of England and Wales, with recent data showing encouraging early signs. We are also supporting employers to recruit and retain more neurodivergent people.
Lord Touhig (Lab)
I welcome my noble friend’s response, but can I suggest an initiative that will help more autistic people into work? Businesses across the country are employing autistic people, but if we are to get more than three in 10 autistic people into work, we need to do more. Will my noble friend consider a mentoring scheme whereby those who have employed autistic people can sign up to help others and advise them to do the same? If she would like to know how this can work, I will happily provide her with some examples.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend and will be delighted to talk to him about examples and take them back to the department. He is right to focus on the importance of supporting employers; there are many who want to do the right thing but may not know how best to do it. Business-to-business mentoring can be key, and my noble friend will perhaps be reassured to know that we are exploring the benefits of business-to-business mentoring as part of our regional Vanguard employer work as part of Keep Britain Working. In the meantime, the Disability Confident scheme encourages collaboration between employers, including peer-to-peer learning; and connect to work, our specialist voluntary supported employment programme, works directly with employers to help secure and sustain jobs. My noble friend is absolutely right to push on this area.
Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as chairman of Team Domenica. The Alan Milburn review on young people and employment states that for every £25 spent on benefits, £1 is spent on supporting employment. The Access to Work supported internship scheme, which was for 39 weeks, has been reduced to 26 weeks. This does not give people with autism and learning disabilities enough time to learn the skills they need to get into employment. Will the Minister consider reinstating the 39-week programme?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right to focus on support. Alan Milburn made the point very strongly about the need—across the system, not just in employment—to engage with support and early prevention work rather than just dealing with the outcomes of inactivity among young people. Access to Work is an incredibly valued and supported programme. We are looking at how to reform it. I can write to her with the details, but there was not a decision taken to reduce its length across the board; it was simply that what should have been an occasional extension had become more broad. We are looking to ensure that it ends up doing the right thing to support people. The work on supported internships is really well valued, and Access to Work does incredibly well in supporting people across hundreds of colleges to engage in work experience. For all young people, real work experience in a real workplace is the best way to help them get into work, and we are committed to that.
Baroness Hollins (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the individual needs of autistic people vary hugely and that individually agreed reasonable adjustments are essential to enable people to succeed in the workplace?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Baroness makes an extremely important point. One reason we have focused the nature of our support through the connect to work specialist programme, which works with people who are disabled or have a health condition, is because everyone is different. Autistic people are different from each other, and there is also significant co-occurrence of autism and other neurodivergent conditions. I realise that I am telling this to a Member of the House who knows more than I will ever know about this, but she knows of what I speak. We have set out to make sure that, in that programme, someone has a specialist jobs coach who will work with them and find out what their barriers and their goals are and what they want to be. A recent example is of a young man who got his dream job in a hobby store: he needed his job worker, who went to the interview with him, went through the induction and worked with the employer to make the right adjustments, and now the young man is a really happy and thriving member of staff. That is what we can do well.
Baroness Leaman (LD)
My Lords, in response to the Think Work First report, the Government accepted the recommendation to double the number of supported internships and to expand eligibility beyond those with an EHCP. Can the Minister tell the House what, if any, targets have been set to achieve this expansion and, therefore, when young autistic people without an EHCP will be able to access a supported internship in every part of the country?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
What I have been trying to describe is our intention to make sure we have personalised support. The noble Baroness raises an important question. She will know, from having seen the work done and from the early report from the Department of Health, which looked into questions around prevalence of autism and other neurodivergent conditions, that one challenge is that people are having to seek out diagnosis in order to get support. In fact, we need to make sure that support is not dependent on diagnosis. Let me be really clear that a diagnosis of, for example, autism is absolutely not a requirement for engaging with employment support. We are determined to make that available. A diagnosis may be the right thing and may help many people, but it is not a prerequisite for our support.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, has my noble friend the Minister seen the drama “Patience”, which traces the actions of a young woman with autism? It demonstrates that you need to have special provision for such people but that it can be very rewarding to employers if they make that provision. Children with autism do not have special needs, just different needs.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
I must confess to my noble friend that I have not seen it, but I will seek it out. His point is really important. If we can get young autistic people—indeed, any autistic people—into work, I know that many employers will find that there is a huge benefit, not just to the individual but to the organisation. Sometimes, people simply do not know what to do. Line managers are key to this. Earlier this year, for example, my department funded some ACAS-run workshops—masterclasses on neurodiversity—for employers. They were free of charge for employers and aimed particularly at smaller companies to help them understand what it would be like, how to recruit people and how to support them. We know that a lot of employers want to do the right thing, but sometimes just do not know how to do it. Our job is to make that as easy as possible.
The Lord Speaker (Lord Forsyth of Drumlean)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, is taking part remotely. I invite the noble Lord to speak.
Lord Shinkwin (Con) [V]
My Lords, I speak as the co-chair of the APPG on disability employment. One initiative that would benefit people with autism and disabled people in general, and which was in both the Labour manifesto and the 2024 King’s Speech, is an equality, ethnicity and disability Bill. Yet the Bill was pulled from the latest King’s Speech at the last minute by No. 10, despite the Bill manager, whom I met, having been appointed. Does the Minister appreciate the huge disappointment that this inexplicable decision has caused, and will she make every effort to ensure that the Government introduce the Bill in this session?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point. I reassure him that the Government are completely committed to delivering on the manifesto commitment to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for large employers. I know that my colleagues in the Cabinet Office are working hard on this and will introduce legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows. There is always competition for Bills in the Session, but I know that they are still committed to it. In March, as the noble Lord probably knows, the pay gap reporting consultation was published, showing how the proposed approach would work. Employers with 250 or more employees would have to report their workforce composition and ethnicity and disability pay gaps and take action to address that. It is very hard to solve something if we do not know the scale of the problem. I reassure him that the Government will do this as soon as possible.
Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)
My Lords, should more be done to advertise the benefits of employing autistic people? I know of one employer who employs 20% of its workforce with autistic people with appropriate management. They find them to be loyal, hard-working and capable of solving problems that, in some cases, few other people can. There are real benefits in employing autistic people.
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble and learned Lord asks an excellent question; I would love to hear after this who the employer is and see what we can learn from them. I would be especially interested to know whether that employer is a member of the Disability Confident scheme. The noble and learned Lord may know that that scheme encourages collaboration between employers, not only through peer-to-peer learning, but by specifically asking leading organisations to use their influence across their networks and supply chains. There may be things that we can learn from this employer, as well as ways that we can support them to take the message out. There is some really good news out there, and I would love to hear more about it.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, if reducing unemployment is a serious government priority, the proportion of young autistic people beginning sustained employment must be improved substantially. Can the Minister therefore explain how the Government plan to use their funding and regulatory levers to ensure, first, that colleges place autistic students on the most suitable courses for them and, secondly, that colleges connect these courses to local job opportunities in sectors and roles where young autistic people can thrive?
Baroness Sherlock (Lab)
The noble Baroness raises an excellent question about schools and education, and I reassure her that my department is working very closely with the Department for Education to address it. I am sure that she has read the interim report from Alan Milburn, so she will know that he identified problems not simply in getting young people into employment, but in making sure that schools were doing the right thing in transition and in making sure that health services were doing the right thing in engaging with prevention. We are developing plans across that piece. We are doing a lot, and I would be very happy to talk to the noble Baroness outside if she would like to pursue this.
Waste Management Carriers: Regulation
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Sheehan
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the use of available regulatory powers to take action against operators or waste carriers that divert waste from the legitimate waste management chain.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Baroness Hayman of Ullock) (Lab)
My Lords, in the last two months alone, Environment Agency investigations have led to 16 waste crime-related arrests. However, we know we must strengthen the EA’s powers, which is why this Government are committed to do so in our waste crime action plan. We are also prioritising reforms to the carriers, brokers and dealers system, updating waste exemptions and implementing digital waste tracking. These measures will improve oversight, close loopholes and meaningfully tackle criminality in the waste sector.
Baroness Sheehan (LD)
My Lords, the Makerfield by-election seems to have speeded up action on the horrendous illegal waste dump in Bickershaw, Wigan. First, can the Minister say when it will finally be gone and at what cost to the taxpayer? Secondly, surely it makes sense to turn the taps off at source so that producers pay for clean-up if due diligence is not carried out and their waste is subsequently illegally dumped. This is what my Private Member’s Bill on corporate waste responsibility seeks to do. Will the Government support it? If not, why not?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I am very happy to meet the noble Baroness to discuss her Private Member’s Bill. It is really important that we look at every aspect we can to tackle the increasing problem of waste crime. It is why we have given an extra £45 million to the Environment Agency; it is why we are carrying out some of the measures I mentioned in my initial Answer and it is why the waste crime action plan sets out the toughest crackdown to date, focusing on a number of regulatory loopholes that have allowed criminals to get away with what has been happening. As for the site that she mentioned, I will have to write to her with those details.
Lord Beamish (Lab)
My Lords, I have been talking rubbish for many years. This is not just a blight on people’s neighbourhoods but an environmental time bomb ticking away in many communities. It is also a driver of organised crime, with the money used for other nefarious activities. The last Government set up the Joint Unit for Waste Crime. My noble friend just referred to more money for the Environment Agency. Frankly, the Environment Agency is a waste of time on this. It does not have an enforcement culture, and the fact that the Joint Unit for Waste Crime has not secured any successful prosecutions so far shows that it is not working. I urge my noble friend to pull the various agencies across government together to tackle this. Without a Minister forcing this through with vigour, not just closing legislative loopholes that need to be closed but creating an effective culture of enforcement, nothing will happen.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
To reiterate, the Environment Agency has secured prosecutions. In the three years to March 2026, there were 234 prosecutions against waste criminals, resulting in more than £2.2 million in fines, 22 immediate custodial sentences and 60 suspended sentences. We are also working with the EA to enable earlier intervention. The EA has implemented a target time of 48 hours for attendance at reported illegal waste sites assessed as potentially significant and is expanding its use of restriction notices. We are taking this very seriously and we are working directly with the Environment Agency to make sure that it does what it needs to be doing.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister not accept that the dumping of illegal waste is a direct result of the quite high charges that are made for dumping legally? Should not some of the money raised from legal dumping be allocated to clearing away illegal waste?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
I am not sure that the right expression is “legal dumping”; I think it is “sending things to the correct place for it to be dealt with and managed”. The big problem is that it is now attractive for criminals to make money out of, and that is what we need to stop.
Baroness Boycott (CB)
My Lords, when are the Government going to bring in a proper extended producer responsibility? To go back into the history of waste, in 1970, when the environment movements grew up, Keep America Beautiful, followed by Keep Britain Tidy, were campaigns that came from the industry—Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, cigarette companies. They were creating a throwaway world but could not deal with it, so they made it our responsibility to dispose of waste. Fifty-six years later, they are still doing the same thing. Until we say to them, “You are responsible for the waste you are creating, the plastics and the things that do not recycle”, and only 9% of all our waste is recycled, we will carry on having exactly the same problem, certainly until I am dead but probably until all of us are dead.
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The noble Baroness raises a really important point. I have met organisations such as Coca-Cola, which I know feels that the money that it has invested should be taken into account when we look at how these things are tackled. Producer responsibility is, again, something that the Government have been looking at. My colleague, Mary Creagh, who has responsibility for these areas, is taking this matter very seriously and, I am sure, will continue to talk to producers about what they need to be doing.
Lord Roborough (Con)
My Lords, these new powers for the EA have been described by the Government as “police-style powers”. Given that this is about enforcing the law and the EA has failed to do so, has the Minister considered that the police themselves would be more effective in enforcement if they were given that responsibility?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
The key thing, as I mentioned earlier, is that the EA has made some arrests—since September last year, 22 arrests have been linked to waste crime. However, it is important to note that arrests have to be made by the police—the noble Lord made that point quite clearly—and that is done working very closely with the Environment Agency. One way to increase this is to make sure that the agencies work very well together. One issue is that police arrests are not tracked centrally, and we are continuing to work with the Home Office on how we can improve that joint working.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right when she says that the illegal disposal of waste is attractive to criminals. That is because it is lucrative, so what steps are the Government taking to make it cheaper and easier for people and businesses to dispose of waste legally?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
One thing we need to do is to work more closely with local authorities, because waste collection and disposal is the responsibility of local authorities. Much of the problem is that carriers, brokers and dealers can get away with behaving irresponsibly, which is why we are looking at the current registration system. We need to make it harder for rogue operators to find work, fundamentally: if they cannot get the work in the first place, if they cannot get the waste to begin with, they cannot dump it. It needs to be tackled from all sides.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for genuine progress that has been made; there is obviously more to do. My noble friend mentioned Bickershaw, a huge site mere metres from a school and from houses. The Government’s own record shows that there are at least 17 super-historic sites that blight their communities. Does the Minister expect that, under new leadership, more action will be taken to deal with this toxic legacy and clear up these historic sites?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
As has been mentioned, Bickershaw and other sites have been an absolute disgrace and a blight on local communities. That is why we are bringing in all the different initiatives I talked about within the waste action plan, why we are trying to give the Environment Agency more power and more ability to make arrests, and why we are looking at how to stop this at source. This is not going to be solved simply; we need to make sure that we tackle it from all sides. Whatever Administration we have going forward will be absolutely committed to do that, I am sure.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, to follow up on the Minister’s answer to the noble Lord, Lord Beamish, he perfectly properly trumpeted increased prosecution and enforcement statistics, but those are meaningful only if we know how big a proportion of the whole problem they represent. What confidence does she have that the Environment Agency has the data to properly understand the scale of this problem so that we can test whether the enforcement measures taken are dealing with the problem effectively?
Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)
That is a really good question. This is why we are also bringing in digital waste tracking, as without that we do not know how much waste we are talking about. That will create a digital record for every new consignment of hazardous and non-hazardous waste, with a few pragmatic exceptions, and enable us to track every such consignment and know exactly how much we are dealing with and what is going missing. That should make a big difference.
Puberty Blockers Trial: Consent
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Deech
To ask His Majesty’s Government at what age they consider it appropriate for an individual to be able to consent to the administration of puberty blockers on a trial basis.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, in begging leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper, I declare an interest as former chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, the PATHWAYS trial entry age was recently reviewed by the MHRA and the sponsor, resulting in a minimum age of 11 for females and 12 for males. It aims to study treatment when it is most clinically relevant while safeguarding participants. Eligibility is tightly controlled; it requires parental consent, a minimum two-year gender incongruence diagnosis, psychosocial support, and NHS and multidisciplinary team approval, as well as participant understanding of the risks and benefits, physical and mental stability, and compliance with safeguarding requirements.
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, how can the Minister justify the age of 11 for a puberty blocker trial? A child under 16 cannot consent to sex or to medical treatment if they are not Gillick competent. They cannot join the Army, smoke, take drugs or alcohol, or even watch social media soon. We condemn FGM, but here is something much more profound. I ask your Lordships to think back to when you were 11—did you understand what it meant to be a woman or a man? The children in this trial are utterly unable to give meaningful consent.
A trial of just two years will tell us nothing. We need retrospective evidence from those who have already taken these drugs. It is only when they reach middle age that those experimented-on children might reflect on whether it would have been better to have been fertile, to have had fulfilling, intimate relationships and to have been themselves. I predict litigation on the scale of infected blood. The first principle of medical ethics is, “Do no harm”. This trial cannot avoid doing harm. I think parents will join me in asking the Minister to stop it.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I appreciate that the noble Baroness has strong views—so do a number of noble Lords, as we heard on the Statement that I presented and responded to yesterday. On consent, I remind noble Lords that this is a sensitive, emotive and difficult subject, but that is why we have to be driven, as the previous Government were, by clinical evidence and experts. I recall that the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, who was rightly entrusted with an independent review, said:
“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence”.
There are always choices. We could continue with uncertainty and risks to the safety of children and young people, which I think none of us wants, or undertake a scientifically guided trial for 233 children, with all the right safeguards that I have referred to, and protect children and young people.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, am I right that these drugs are also sometimes necessarily available to quite young people who might otherwise go into premature puberty, with serious health results? With gender dysphoria, is it not better that we look into the possible use of these drugs rather than have children and young people fixate on surgery, which is much harder to stop or reverse?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
My noble friend is quite right about the use of these drugs. It is important to note that we banned their use indefinitely for gender dysphoria outside of research settings because of the immense concerns about safety. That ban has been in place since January 2025. She is also right that the issue will not go away. The right way to protect children, as I have said, is to act on clinical evidence and opinion, and to make that decision with a cool head. That is why, despite the difficulty of such a decision, the Secretary of State has made it. He is doing the best he can to protect children in this situation.
Captain of the King’s Bodyguard of the Yeomen of the Guard and Deputy Chief Whip (Baroness Wheeler) (Lab)
My Lords, we will hear from the Liberal Democrats.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, the review from the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, warned that having no formal medical routes risks driving families towards unregulated online pharmacies and private clinics abroad. Given that an indefinite pause of the trial left some highly vulnerable young people in a state of clinical limbo, does the Minister agree that getting an evidence-gathering trial under way would be an effective way to protect them from the dangers of these unregulated and unmonitored markets?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I certainly do agree. As I have said, having put a ban in place, we will take action against those who seek to transgress and benefit from it by seeking to sell drugs that are not permitted. That is a totally unacceptable route for them to follow. They risk the safety and well-being of children.
Baroness Cash (Con)
My Lords, yesterday the Minister told the House that the PATHWAYS trial would be covered by insurance. I have been unable to identify any insurance company that will cover such treatment, even in a trial setting, so can she tell us how insurance has been obtained, the information on which it is based and from which provider it has been obtained? I appreciate that this may not be possible in the Chamber due to time, but I would be grateful to see the information provided in detail and the terms of the policy.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
Although I am keen to be helpful to the noble Baroness, my comments yesterday related to trials and insurance provisions. I do not know what research has been undertaken since then. I would be pleased to write to her; I cannot promise the detail she seeks, but I will seek to be helpful.
Baroness Cass (CB)
My Lords, I have spoken to my clinical colleagues about the issue of age at enrolment and they expect enrolment at 11 or 12 to be vanishingly rare. However, I ask noble Lords to consider the case of a child I will call Jo, who was a biological male socially transitioned at two and a half by his parents. At 11, she—I say this advisedly, because the chances of her reverting to her biological gender are vanishingly remote—has been in stealth and will not go to secondary school because she is so afraid of being outed in that environment. She is now refusing to come out of her room except very rarely and has weak bones, not as a result of puberty blockers but through inactivity. Should her subsequent treatment be decided by politicians or by the clinicians looking after her?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
The noble Baroness brings her expertise to the subject and I am grateful to her. This is not a political matter. As I have said, it must be driven by clinical evidence and focus on the safety of our young people. The example she gave is deeply disturbing and is a result of not taking action that is evidenced.
Lord Cashman (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the only thing that matters in this instance is the right of the child to the best and most appropriate treatment. Therefore, does the Minister agree that puberty blockers are used for a range of conditions and that any approach must therefore be based solely on the recommendations of the multidisciplinary team, the clinicians involved and the needs of the patient?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
Yes, it is certainly the case that this is a medical matter. We need to remind ourselves, and my noble friend gives me that opportunity, that puberty blockers, as we are calling them, are used for other conditions, but the reason why we are having the trial is because we have accepted the advice and acted on the principles that my noble friend has outlined.
The Lord Bishop of Manchester
Would the Minister agree that the scientific trials are the best way to try to remove this from the culture wars that are so damning this particular topic?
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I am very glad to agree with the right reverend Prelate. As I said earlier, it is very important to have a cool head, to be evidence-based and to not politicise this. This is too important to take those risks.
Healthcare Services: Acute, Primary and Community
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Janke
That this House takes note of the relationship between (1) acute, and (2) primary and community, healthcare services.
Baroness Janke (LD)
My Lords, it is a great privilege to open today’s debate on matters that are of such concern to so many people and which lie at the heart of our local communities. As we all know, health services are severely overstretched, whether in a local context or elsewhere. The systems are simply not coping.
Anxiety and fear are facts of life for many, particularly the elderly and vulnerable, who fear they will not have proper access to healthcare—so much so that A&E has become the default destination for desperate patients unable to find care or advice through their local doctor. Some 18% of patients attending A&E did so because there was no GP appointment available to them; this amounted to 4.5 million attendances. Nearly half a million people waited 24 hours or more in A&E last year, an increase of 150,000 patients in just three years. Over 1.1 million patients were stuck in A&E, specifically waiting for an in-patient bed to become available. Even more frightening, according to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine report published in June this year, in 2025 around 15,860 patients died in NHS A&E departments in England while waiting for care that could have saved them. That is roughly 1,300 people every month, nearly 10 times the figure recorded in 2015.
However, the Government’s 10-year primary healthcare plan promises us community-based health services with a focus on illness prevention and promotion of good health. The vision of a well-resourced community-based health service is attractive and powerful. It is what we all want, patients and professionals alike, but it could not be further from everyday experience.
With waiting times for GP appointments at record levels, people’s fears about access to healthcare are well justified, particularly among the vulnerable and elderly. Worse still, the system can be off-putting and daunting, and not everyone is able to navigate it. For example, there is the 8 am scramble: having to phone in by 8 am and then being told you are 20th in the queue; having to explain highly personal matters to the receptionist who answers your call; or having to deal with an online system, only to find that there are no appointments left and you must phone anyway and wait in the queue. There are many questions across the board as to how we get from where we are now to the reassuring and welcoming world of the 10-year vision.
The pillars of community healthcare that so often support the ailing service we have today are the community pharmacies, which offer a local service that is practical, easily available and embedded in local communities. I will use the rest of my time today to speak about the crisis in this essential service and its impact on community healthcare.
We often hear the community pharmacy described as the front door of the National Health Service, yet we are currently watching that door being systematically bolted shut in the communities that need it most. The scale of this crisis is staggering and, frankly, a damning indictment of a decade of financial neglect. Since 2015, England has seen a net loss of 720 pharmacies. Last year, closures reached their second-highest level on record, and current data suggests that the rate of closure this year is nearly 50% higher than at the same stage in 2023. Between January and April alone, 177 pharmacies closed their doors for good.
The root cause of this is a 30% real-terms funding cut since 2015. While the costs of medicines, energy and staffing have surged, core funding has remained stagnant, leading to an annual funding gap of at least £2 billion across the sector, as reported by the NHS. The human cost of this neglect is borne by pharmacy owners, 65% of whom are now operating at a loss. Nearly half—45%—have been forced to rely on personal savings or remortgaging their own homes just to keep their doors open to the public.
Every day, pharmacies facilitate 1.6 million daily visits, providing vital triage and advice that keeps pressure off overstretched GP surgeries. However, when a local pharmacy closes, these daily visits do not simply vanish. Instead, they are forced back into the primary care system, exacerbating the crowding of emergency departments with non-urgent issues that could have been managed in the community. Acute care is designed for rapid intervention in time-sensitive, high-stakes conditions such as heart attacks or severe injuries. By removing the pharmacy buffer, we are forcing patients with minor ailments into acute settings, wasting specialised resources and jeopardising the safety of those with life-threatening needs.
Pharmacies cater for many needs, such as dispensing medicines, vaccinations, medical advice and urgent medical care, as well as provide services to promote health, such as smoking cessation and weight management—and they could do more to ease pressure on other parts of the health service. According to a 2025 Department of Health and Social Care report, 70% of people surveyed would be happy to see a pharmacist for common conditions or prescription reviews if it meant being seen sooner. The same study found that 68% of respondents are comfortable speaking to a healthcare professional in a pharmacy setting rather than a traditional GP surgery.
Pharmacies offer a range of walk-in services and can work in tandem with GPs and other primary care settings to play a greater role in long-term condition management and point-of-care testing, but this has to be with the right investment and support. Pharmacies are small businesses, and like all small businesses, they have difficult issues affecting them, such as increased national insurance charges, increases in the minimum wage and rising business rates. Incidentally, GP practices and pubs are exempt from business rates, so many local pharmacists are asking why pharmacies cannot also be exempt as an essential service. I would like the Minister to consider that in her remarks. Some 95% of pharmacies also told the National Pharmacy Association that they were not in a financial position to be able to support the Government’s ambitions to move care into the community, as outlined in the 10-year plan.
Deprived areas with high health needs saw the highest rates of pharmacy closures between 2022 and 2025, with Liverpool being the nation’s capital for pharmacy closures per head of population, followed by Blackpool, Coventry and Hull. The pharmacy network in England now stands at its smallest since 2006. Some 63% of pharmacies could close this year, with 40% unable to pay the full cost of prescription medicines for patients. The current system of reimbursement for medicines is currently failing pharmacists and patients, and it needs reform.
We are also facing a workforce crisis, where locum costs have risen by 80% in a single year and overall staffing costs have grown by nearly 70% since 2015. Pharmacies simply cannot absorb this scale of increases without a fair and sustainable funding settlement. “Lights Out” is not just a campaign slogan; it is becoming a stark reality for high streets across the country. We cannot move healthcare out of hospitals and into the community if the community infrastructure has been allowed to crumble.
Can the Minister say when the Government will deliver the urgent investment needed to close the £2 billion funding gap and stabilise this sector? What specific protections will be put in place to prevent further closures in deprived areas where health needs are greatest? How do the Government plan to prevent the withdrawal of addiction and delivery services, which will inevitably overwhelm our GPs and A&E departments? The time for warm words has long passed. We need a sustainable road map that reflects the true cost of delivering NHS pharmaceutical care. If we do not act now, the front door of the NHS will be not just bolted but gone for ever.
Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho (CB)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, for her incredibly powerful opening and the chance to speak in this important debate. I stand here with two hats on: first, as the survivor of a major trauma who has spent a disproportionate amount of time in all parts of the healthcare system, and, secondly, and far more importantly, as patron of Day One Trauma, which I shall describe later.
I will make three points. First, we must start with the patient, not with the system. Too often, it seems that, as policymakers, we think about the policy and the organisational structure rather than the experience of the patient in the system. That is particularly true for trauma victims. I start with them because trauma is perhaps the sharpest end of our healthcare services. Trauma patients have to go through so many of the different services that are offered, from intensive care to rehab and community services and then to the long-term support they may need as they live at home.
When someone is hit by a car, has a fall or experiences a major trauma, they do not think about the system that they are in—they think about surviving. They do not think, “I’ve now left acute care and I’m in the long-term recovery ward”; they think, “I want to recover”. What matters to them is whether they receive physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychological support, pain management, speech and language therapy, and practical help to return to work and life. I have met many trauma survivors through Day One, a charity that helps people when they have a severe physical trauma, with about 30,000 people entering the system every year. The charity works alongside healthcare professionals in the most intense settings to help people navigate what is happening to them. It could be help with how to get benefits while they are off work for a long period or how to work out whether or not to amputate a limb—very brutal decisions at the most difficult time of their lives, often involving working with their families alongside them. At Day One Trauma, too often we see patients bumping up against different bits of a system as opposed to being seen as a patient and one person.
That brings me to my second point, which, perhaps inevitably, is about technology. I welcome much of what is in the NHS modernisation Bill, particularly around single patient records, but this sometimes feels far removed from the reality of what is happening in the system. We must engage more deeply with people who are expert in this area and give them power within the huge networks that exist in the NHS to change the patient experience. It is not acceptable that families and individuals, at the most difficult time of their lives, have to navigate so many different systems. We have already heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, about how people will be put into an online system only then to be chucked out to the telephone. Imagine if you cannot actually move or speak: how do you navigate the system then? Too often, at the time when we most profoundly need help and we have the opportunity to use technology, it is absent, both for the people caring for the patients and for the patients themselves.
I read just this morning on a blog from OpenAI—perhaps it was PR—that 230 million people a week are now using ChatGPT for health questions. Goodness knows what the quality of that information is. It is so important that we recognise what is happening in the outside world and try to build it into the system more effectively. We must start with the patient. We must join up policy, as opposed to organisational structures, that reflects the needs of how people are actually living with and experiencing the system. We must use technology to make sure that people have a more effective journey through their recovery, and that clinicians, doctors, physiotherapists and all the people who work so hard in the system are given the best shot at delivering the care they most urgently want to deliver.
Finally, we must support charities in the system. Again and again, both in my own journey and now as proud patron of a couple of them, I have seen how difficult it still is for charities to get access to some of the parts of the NHS where they want to help and where they are providing a vital ballast to the people working in the system more directly. Day One Trauma works across multiple trauma centres in the north of England. When its members are in the care units or acute care units, they are welcomed by the staff, because they are doing much of the work that the staff have no time to do. Similarly, Horatio’s Garden, a fantastic charity that builds gardens for spinal patients, gives access to the outdoors, doing valuable work for people at those acute moments.
We must be able to answer these three questions. Are we starting with the patient in these policies? Are we using technology to the best of our advantage? Are we enabling charities to help support the system where we do not have the resources ourselves?
Baroness Leaman (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Janke for securing this important debate. I will focus my remarks on the crisis in medicine supply, the collapse of our community pharmacy network, and the impact that these failures are having on patients, particularly children with ADHD, many of whom have just finished sitting their exams without access to the medication they need.
Since September 2023, we have witnessed a sustained and debilitating shortage of ADHD medications across the UK. Medicines on which hundreds of thousands of children and adults depend have been intermittently unavailable for nearly three years. At the height of the crisis, patients were reported to be travelling over 50 miles simply to find a pharmacy with stock. The House of Lords Public Services Committee, in its February report, Medicines Security: A National Priority, made the stark assessment that medicine supply shortages represent a potential national security issue. Some 73% of pharmacy workers stated that ongoing supply issues are putting patients at risk.
Consider what it means for a child with ADHD to face their GCSEs or A-levels without their medication. For many young people, that medication is the difference between demonstrating their knowledge, ability and hard work, and sitting in an exam hall unable to engage with the paper before them. Students have reported rationing tablets, taking half doses or going without entirely during the examination period. Parents have spoken of the distress of watching children who have worked diligently throughout the year face their papers in a state of disadvantage not of their making.
This is a vivid illustration of the Motion before us. When primary and community services fail to ensure consistent supply, the fallout is immediate. We do not only jeopardise a child’s health but derail their education and shatter their well-being. In the most severe cases, this pushes vulnerable young people into acute crisis, ultimately driving up demand on the very services already at breaking point.
The causes of these shortages are complex but not mysterious. The OECD identified, as far back as 2022, that medicines shortages were increasing globally, but here in the UK we have compounded these global pressures through our own policy choices. The first is our departure from the EU. A Nuffield Trust report in March confirmed what many had long warned: Brexit has been a key factor in the worst UK medicine shortages in four years. Between 2020 and 2023, drug shortages in this country more than doubled. Leaving the European Medicines Agency, losing our place in the EU bulk-buying scheme and creating additional regulatory complexity has significantly weakened our position.
The second is our overreliance on overseas suppliers. The Lords Select Committee noted that the majority of active pharmaceutical ingredients required by the NHS are controlled by China, India or other single sources. We have allowed our domestic manufacturing capacity to wither. The Government’s commitment of up to £520 million to manufacture more medicines domestically is welcome, but it comes late and it must be accelerated.
Even when medicines are available, patients must be able to access them. As my noble friend Lady Janke highlighted, some 700 pharmacies have closed permanently since 2022, leaving England with its lowest number of pharmacies in nearly 20 years, with the National Pharmacy Association warning that 63% of pharmacies could close within the next year.
The Government have taken some steps: the Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework for 2025-26 provides £3 billion in funding, and the expansion of Pharmacy First is welcome. We need to treat medicine supply chain resilience as the national security issue it is and place it on the national risk register, as the Lords committee recommended.
We need a critical medicines list and an active pharmaceutical ingredients list to identify vulnerable supply chains, inform stockpiling and guide domestic production. We need better communication of shortages to front-line staff, so that GPs, pharmacists and hospital clinicians can take timely action. We need proper investment in community pharmacy, enough not merely to survive but to thrive and expand services as the NHS 10-year plan envisages. As a matter of urgency, we need specific measures to protect children with ADHD during examination periods: emergency supplies, priority allocation and whatever it takes to ensure that young people are not disadvantaged by failures in our supply chain.
The relationship between acute, primary and community healthcare services depends fundamentally on patients being able to access the medicines they need, when they need them and where they need them. At present, we are failing that test: children are sitting exams without medication, pharmacies are closing at an alarming rate and supply chains remain fragile and reactive. The Government have acknowledged the problem, but acknowledgement is not enough. Urgent, sustained and adequately funded action is needed. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response and I hope we will hear commitments that match the scale of the crisis.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Janke for calling for this important debate, and it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Leaman, who spoke movingly of services for children with ADHD. I support everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, said earlier. The 10-year NHS Fit for the Future plan aspires to change the NHS to make it work better in the mid-21st century. Science, medicine, demography and lifestyles have changed so much since the NHS was founded that radical change must happen. But it must be patient-centred, not organisation-convenient.
My chronic illness means that I have more interaction with the NHS than the average patient, and recently that has escalated with new auto-immune problems, so I have seen at first hand what is happening in too many different hospitals in recent months. Good A&Es, including at my local Watford General Hospital, have in place not just an effective triage system but a 72-hour emergency admissions unit to which GPs can refer patients who do not need A&E but need very short-term hospital care—perhaps to get an infection under control. This latter system has worked well for a decade.
I have experienced two emergency eye clinics in the last three months. The first, in London, was a complete nightmare to navigate. The staff were wonderful, from the receptionist to the nurses and doctors, but the building was completely inadequate and hampered an effective service for people who may not be able to see where they are going. A&E was on the first floor, with a narrow waiting room with about 60 seats and at least another 20 people standing. It was barely wheelchair accessible, noisy and chaotic.
I contrast that with Addenbrooke’s Hospital’s emergency eye clinic in Cambridge, where I still saw at least three different professionals on each of my visits. It had four different smaller and quieter waiting areas, so a patient progressed through the system, being informed at each stage about the likely wait time. That was a calming and effective process.
The pressure on GP and community services with the move to reducing pressure on acute services has considerable unintended consequences. The time many GPs have with each patient can be as short as five minutes, so a GP who does not know the patient well just cannot read the longer history. I am at high risk of serious infection, but a locum GP told me that they did not just hand out antibiotics for minor infections. I was in A&E 24 hours later on an antibiotic drip. This is not about the locum; this is about the pressure that our GP services are under. This needs to be remedied.
The Government want to divert patients in surgeries to non-GPs, so, recently, my surgery system automatically got the pharmacist to call me to discuss my medication. I asked him how my hospital medication would interact with what he was proposing. He had not read my notes, either, and he realised that I must see a doctor instead of him. It was a waste of his time and a waste of mine.
Do not get me started on the barriers to accessing community physiotherapy if you have a chronic illness. Five years ago, my local physio community trust sacked all its specialist physios to save money. If you need help, you have to navigate two 20-minute automated triage assessments, but they only triage patients on one injury. When I finally got to talk to a human on the phone, I was then given interim exercises, which caused serious pain to my other joints. I cannot get past the gatekeepers to look at me as a whole person—and there is a national shortage of physios, without whom Fit for the Future will not work.
But there is excellence happening. Last October, my sister was diagnosed at William Harvey A&E in Ashford with terminal and untreatable cancer. The one thing she wanted was to be back in her own flat with her cat. Madeleine was put on the end-of-life discharge to assess pathway, run by the Kent Community Health Foundation Trust. My other sister and I were with her for those last two months, and we saw at first hand how an excellent and complex system can work well. They helped us with the expert end-of-life care at home company, the GP and nurses at her surgery, the Pilgrims Hospice and the community nursing team. We were told by the brilliant GP surgery nurse who visited often that, if we had to call 999, we should tell them her wishes from the start, on the phone, so that, when the paramedics arrived, it was all about getting her back into bed after a fall, not into hospital.
Managing all of this were exceptionally well-trained administrators, who understood their role and how to make things happen. She was able to be at home until the last 24 hours, but there was also a reduction in need for A&E space, acute bed space, and advice on tap when needed. This service should be universal, but it is not.
To conclude, as with many of the other wonderful parts of the NHS and care sector, there is real excellence, value for money and social care. The difficulty remains that it is not consistent. As long as acute, primary and community healthcare are not focused on the patient, services will be inconsistent and probably more expensive, to the detriment of patients in the community. A plan alone will not change things, but putting the patient journey truly at the heart of these changes can and does work.
Baroness Cass (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a veteran of many health service reorganisations, through which I have consistently advocated for children and young people not to be forgotten, so it will not be a surprise that I am doing the same today. I have also spent many years making the case for better integration across primary, community and acute services, particularly increasing delivery of paediatric care in primary and community settings. The Government’s commitment to shift care from hospital to community settings is welcome, but we have heard similar aspirations before. How do we ensure that this time it becomes a reality?
I have four asks of the Government. First, I echo the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, about thinking about the patient journey. Please map child and family journeys clearly, so that people can understand where and how they access support. The 10-year health plan mentions children frequently, but, after reading it and its supporting documents, I was still unclear how neighbourhood health services will fit alongside family hubs, Young Futures hubs, community paediatric services and other existing models. Neighbourhood health services could provide the glue that joins these services together, but there is a risk of duplication and confusion.
My second ask is: build on existing good practice, rather than embarking on another cycle of pilots that are never adopted at scale. For example, the Well Centre in Lambeth—well known to my noble friend Lady Gerada—which is run by Dr Steph Lamb, a superb GP, provides integrated support for 11 to 20 year-olds, bringing together mental, sexual and physical healthcare, alongside social prescribing and community support. It already demonstrates much of what is envisaged for Young Futures hubs, yet remains partly dependent on charitable funding. We should invest in and replicate successful models such as this.
Similarly, the Children’s and Young People’s Health Partnership in south London has demonstrated that local child health clinics delivered by paediatricians and GPs and a nurse-led early intervention service can address unmet needs, reduce inequalities and reduce hospital attendance. This model has already been adopted elsewhere and provides an evidence-based example of community-based care in action.
We have another valuable community resource in the form of children’s hospices, which support children with life-limiting conditions not just at end of life but over a very extended period, as well as supporting their families. In 2025-26, their average caseload rose by 11%—a growing cohort that would otherwise fall to the NHS. Meanwhile, statutory funding has failed to keep pace, accounting for just 25% of hospice expenditure, with the rest dependent on charitable donations. If we do not fund these services properly, care will move from community to hospital rather than vice versa.
My third ask reflects concerns raised by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. As these reforms progress, how will the Government ensure that integrated care boards consistently prioritise and adequately fund children’s health? Will executive children’s leads within ICBs be protected? More broadly, how will changes to ICB membership ensure strong clinical leadership for children’s services and an appropriately planned and funded workforce? We are desperately short of community children’s nurses and school nurses. If the community workforce is not valued, incentivised and supported, there will be no meaningful shift of care into the community.
Finally, please listen directly to young people. Alex Parton, a youth intern at the Well Centre, said,
“healthy children become healthy adults, but”
young people are too often treated
“as bystanders rather than future citizens”.
He said that if, as the Secretary of State has said,
“the 10 Year Health Plan will ‘put a megaphone to the mouth of every patient’, it must make sure young people get a turn on the mic too”.
I look forward to the Minister’s response and am very happy to share my little black book—or little black iPhone—of very useful contacts of good practice.
Baroness Walmsley (LD)
My Lords, community and primary care services are at the heart of the Government’s objective in the 10-year plan to shift from sickness to prevention and from hospital to community. But the funding does not always support that.
Over the past nine years, the average increase in spend across health services has been 31% but primary care had only 24%. The patient population has grown by over 7 million since 2015, yet the number of GP practices has fallen by about 20%, leaving some rural areas without accessible cover. I heard a case only this morning of a rural GP who retired from a single-doctor practice; patients had to travel 12 miles to get to the nearest GP and there were no buses. The average list size is now 40% higher than a decade ago. Primary care, including dentists, optometrists and community pharmacists, is part of the prevention agenda yet there are major funding gaps and important aspects of the service suffer.
GPs control the patient’s health records, and their patients have in the past benefited from continuity of care, but this no longer always happens and the benefits have been lost despite evidence that continuity is beneficial and can save money. GPs are the first port of call for patients, the point of first triage or suspected diagnosis and the gateway to more specialised services. If people cannot get to see their GP, as my noble friend Lady Janke said, they eventually turn up at A&E, usually with a much more serious condition and at greater cost to the NHS.
Diet and vaccinations are key aspects of prevention. Some GPs employ dieticians, but nowadays it seems that the main response to obesity is through treatment rather than prevention. These injectable medicines are quite effective but their long-term cost-effectiveness is not yet proven. We need more dietician services in the community. Access to a healthy diet is dependent on many factors beyond the scope of primary care. The Minister will therefore not be surprised that my first question to her, again, is: what progress is being made with publishing the consultation on the healthy food standards? Has the department even established the parameters of the consultation?
GP practices also deliver the core childhood vaccination programme, mostly given by the practice nurses, and they are the most trusted people to answer patients’ questions. But some communities are hard to reach, leading to inequality of coverage. Reaching them costs a lot more time and money, but the benefit of doing so is felt not just by those patients but by the whole community when herd immunity levels can be reached. Dangerously, this is not being achieved, partly through lack of consistent funding. In transferring vaccination commissioning to ICBs, will the Government ensure consistent funding for outreach according to the need in the area?
Midwives, health visitors and school nurses have a role in advising patients about diet and vaccination, but all those services have experienced cuts. Many schools no longer have a school nurse, and newly qualified midwives are not able to find posts. The number of health visitors has reduced by 43% since 2015. This makes it difficult to ask them to do catch-up vaccinations in the home. Does the Minister have any results from the recent pilot on this? All these health professionals have a contribution to the preventive agenda and saving money.
We have all heard of dental deserts and community optometrist deserts. Both could save the NHS money given appropriate levels of funding. The main reason children go into hospital is to have rotten teeth removed. This is because they eat too much sugar and are unable to see a dentist. What is being done to avoid dental deserts?
In eye care, we have the workforce and infrastructure in the community, yet access depends on where you live, which pushes avoidable demand into hospitals. One in four people cannot access a local optometrist and there are 600,000 people on hospital waiting lists, many of whom could have been managed in the community. What steps are the Government taking to ensure equitable access to optometrists across England?
We have a wonderful range of community and primary care services and yet their full potential is not being used to prevent ill health because of underfunding or inconsistent funding. That is very unwise, to say the least.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Walmsley; I will pick up on her final theme. I thank my noble friend Lady Janke for initiating this important debate. As the vice-chair of the APPG on Pharmacy, I think the case for extra investment has been made by both her and my noble friend Lady Leaman.
When the Government took office nearly two years ago, they came with a narrative of transformation. They promised people a fundamental shift away from the expensive, reactive walls of acute hospitals and toward a proactive, preventative “neighbourhood health service”. But looking at the NHS ledger of the 2026-27 financial year, they are forced to confront a recurring theme: the Government’s policy is built on hope while the NHS is living a different reality.
The Government stated their hope that primary and community care would finally receive the financial engine required to keep people well for as long as possible at home. The reality under their watch is that the gravitational pull of the acute sector is still as strong as ever, accounting for between 75% to 80% of total NHS spend.
The data from integrated care boards for the year ahead show this. Out of a combined £139 billion allocation, the total identified for neighbourhood health transformation activity is a measly 0.25%—and this is to fund the flagship policy of the Government’s health strategy. The reality is that local efforts to invest in community, primary and preventive services have been actively crushed by top-down directives prioritising acute hospital performance.
The Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire ICB cluster tried to deliver the Government’s vision, with a £33 million fund dedicated to community transformation. Yet, within days of launching it, national performance directives forced it to withdraw the whole funding and redirect it to acute services.
The Government’s financial priorities are also written clearly in their capital budgets. They have earmarked £2 billion this year for acute emergency care, yet allocated only £200 million for their flagship neighbourhood health centres. When you contrast £2 billion for the emergency machine against the £200 million for new community infrastructure, their true priority is laid bare.
Nowhere is the gap between the Government’s rhetoric and reality more damning than in community support for learning disabilities. Over the past 24 months, we have witnessed the continuation of the systematic hollowing out of the infrastructure that keeps these people safe and alive. Evidence published only last week by the Royal College of Nursing exposes what is happening right now under this Government’s watch. In its report, Safety, Equity and Expertise, the RCN warned that the specialist learning disability nursing workforce is in absolute crisis. In autumn 2025—the first academic intake under this Government—we see a catastrophic collapse in the pipeline. Fewer than 500 student learning disability nurses enrolled across the entire UK. In the south-east, the intake was exactly zero.
The workforce is evaporating because community budgets are being raided. What is the human cost? For someone with a learning disability, there remains a shocking 20-year life expectancy gap compared with the general public. When the Government force ICBs to pull transformation funds and look the other way as the specialist nursing pipeline dries up, they engage in a false economy of the highest order. When a vulnerable young person loses their community safety net, they land, eventually, in an acute crisis bed. The taxpayer pays a premium for this systematic failure. This is not just a policy failure but a profound human failure which is all too real for my family.
Why have the Government spent the last two years forcing local health systems to continue to feed the acute vacuum? When will they finally align the reality of NHS budgets with the hope of their rhetoric?
Baroness Gerada (CB)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, for securing this debate and to the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, for saying many of the things around primary care and general practice that I want to say. I always feel that I am here defending my own profession.
The NHS was founded on a vision of care delivered close to home—in communities, general practices and by district nurses. Yet, over recent decades, a profound imbalance has appeared in resource allocation. Hospital-based care has grown in workforce, infrastructure and funding, while services that form most of the patient’s first point of contact have been left to wither, as we have heard. When I started general practice, on 17 February 1991, I had time with my patients and time to do what my patients—many noble Lords in this room—wanted.
The mantra of moving care into the community has not been associated with a simultaneous move of resources, people, infrastructure support or estate. I now do more than any other GP in any other comparable health services. General practice in this country does more and to a greater degree of complexity than in any other. I do everything except open heart surgery in my consulting room—I confirm, for Hansard, that I do not do that.
The consequences of this non-shift are evidenced across the full breadth of primary care. Millions of patients cannot register with an NHS dentist. Many resort to emergency departments for toothache—or, worse, leave decay untreated until it becomes a serious health problem. Optometrists, who are often the first to detect conditions such as glaucoma, diabetes and hypertension, are increasingly unable to sustain NHS-funded services. Continuity of care with a GP, which I will say a little bit about later, is becoming a rarity, while community nursing is stretched to breaking point.
These crises, which include physiotherapists and all the other community specialists that we have heard about, are not separate. They are symptoms of the same structural neglect: a system that has consistently prioritised acute, visible hospital care over the quieter but equally essential work happening in surgeries 360 million times per year, in consulting rooms and in communities. General practice alone receives less than 8% of the NHS budget—the lowest proportion for decades. This risks replacing continuity of care—the bedrock of my profession—with brief transactional encounters, despite clear evidence that continuity delivers better, safer and more effective care. Without continuity, the NHS becomes a maze where patients get lost.
On workforce, no system succeeds without the people to staff it: practice nurses, health visitors and district nurses. The quiet architecture of community health has been hollowed out over decades. Over the same period, the consultant workforce has increased by 120%, while the number of GP partners has fallen. Even with that fallen number, around one in five GPs cannot find full employment because we do not have the funding to employ these doctors.
When community care buckles, the consequences flow downstream. The result is a system paying premium prices for intensive care to manage problems that should never have reached that threshold. This is not simply an administrative question but a moral one. What kind of health service do we want: one that catches people only when they fall, or one that walks alongside them and, where possible, prevents the fall altogether?
What does “fair distribution” mean? It means teams without walls. It means multidisciplinary teams built around the patient rather than the disease or body part. It means shared records that follow the person rather than sitting in silos. It means social prescribing that connects people to their communities before loneliness becomes a clinical problem. We need step-down facilities that bridge the acute ward with a patient’s home.
I had all those resources 20 years ago. Noble Lords will remember the Tomlinson review in the early 1990s: integrated, step-down, community-based, multidisciplinary hospitals. Please let us stop reinventing the wheel. When community care buckles, the consequences flow directly downstream. As I said, redistribution is not simply an administrative question but a moral one. What is required is not another review or reorganisation but sustained political will, clear frailty pathways, a realistic workforce plan, training that ensures that all doctors—I mean all—spend meaningful time in community settings, and a rightful place for community practitioners on integrated care boards. When will we finally redress the balance and stop the imbalance of more and more resources going into hospitals rather than where patients receive most of their care?
Baroness Pidgeon (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, with her first-hand expertise and experience as a GP, and her description of the service that we all would like to see. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Janke for introducing this vital debate. The relationship between acute services and primary care goes to the heart of how the health service that we value can survive and function. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, rightly highlighted the need for the patient to be the focus, not the organisation, and she described the needs of serious trauma patients and the opportunities for technology. My noble friend Lady Brinton highlighted the need for patient-centred services and the whole person being at the heart of this.
The consequences of the deep imbalance between acute, primary and community health services are starkly visible in the data. NHS England discharge data from 2025 shows that patients who were medically fit to leave hospital spent the equivalent of 4.34 million days stuck in beds. They were there not because they needed acute care but because the community and social care that was needed to support them simply did not exist. My noble friend Lord Scriven provided the clear financial reality of acute services being prioritised, community services being reduced and the hollowing out of services for people with learning disabilities.
Let us look at dentistry. NHS England statistics published in 2025 show that four in 10 children—over 5 million in total—had not seen an NHS dentist in over a year. The Darzi review in 2024 found that only around 30% to 40% of NHS dental practices were accepting new child or adult registrations respectively. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley mentioned, official data from NHS England and the Royal College of Surgeons confirms that tooth decay remains one of the most common reasons for hospital admissions among young children in this country. The reality is that preventable dental disease generates acute demand. A child admitted to hospital with rotting teeth is a child whose primary care failed, not their acute care.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cass, brought her expertise in children and young people and questioned how the Government’s plans will really serve families better and bring the change that is needed.
We should look at some other trends in primary care. As we have heard, general practice is under extraordinary and unsustainable strain. Our GPs are the front line of defence, positioned precisely where they need to be to detect health issues early. They are the front door through which the public interact with our health service, and they need investment. If accessing a GP feels impossible, then public faith in the wider health service collapses entirely. My noble friend Lady Walmsley highlighted that the funding of primary care is not keeping up with demand, population and key areas of prevention work. The noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, talked passionately and rightly about how GP services have been left to wither and now have less than 8% of the budget.
As we have heard, according to the Association of Optometrists, access to community eye care services varies significantly across England. As a result, one in four people cannot access these services locally. Patients with common eye conditions are frequently directed to GPs, A&E or hospital eye services, even though they could be safely managed by community optometrists. At the same time, more than 600,000 people are waiting for hospital ophthalmology appointments, adding extra pressure to acute services. This just makes no sense, and it is patients who suffer.
In mental health, the picture is equally distressing. Thousands of children and adults are waiting months, sometimes years, to receive the support that they need. The previous Government left mental health services in a state, but the consequences of mental health being underresourced, and only triaged at the point of crisis, flow directly into acute services. Psychiatric presentations in A&Es, lengthy detentions under the Mental Health Act and ambulance callouts could have been avoided with earlier community intervention. They are the heavy downstream costs of failing to invest upstream.
Emergency departments are already bearing that cost. Department of Health and Social Care figures show that the Government have announced an average of £376 million in emergency winter funding annually, over the past seven years. This is patching up the system, year after year. That is not a sustainable health policy; it has become a bad habit.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has long called for staffed hospital beds, social care capacity and community step-down services. The Liberal Democrats have proposed a £1.5 billion plan to deliver 6,000 more beds daily, boost step-down care and enshrine in law the right to be seen in A&E within 12 hours. But let me be clear: beds alone will not solve this. Beds will fill up again, unless what lies beyond the hospital in home care, community services and general practice is also fit for purpose.
Social care sits at the very heart of this problem. Local Government Association figures for 2025 show that total local authority spending on social care reached a record £29.3 billion in 2024-25, up by £12.4 billion since 2015-16. Social care now accounts for up to 80% of many council budgets, putting immense strain on other services, yet the commission tasked with recommending long-term reform is not scheduled to complete its work for a further two years, with implementation potentially delayed until 2036. Those waiting for care, and those stranded in hospital beds for want of it, simply cannot wait that long.
My noble friend Lady Janke described powerfully the role of community pharmacies, which are a key part of primary care, and my noble friend Lady Leaman described the real impact of medicine shortages on children and young people, continuing into acute services. She also referenced the excellent report on medicines security from the Public Services Committee, which I recommend to the House.
This debate has not even touched on ambulance services, the key role that paramedics can play and the potential that they have, with a shift in resources, to help ensure that people are treated in the right place and at the right time, rather than at the critical point we have today. I recommend that noble Lords also read the latest publication from the Public Services Committee on this very topic.
The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, commented in his review of the NHS:
“Since at least 2006, and arguably for much longer, successive governments have promised to shift care away from hospitals and into the community. In practice, the reverse has happened. Both hospital expenditure and hospital staffing numbers have grown faster than the other parts of the NHS, while numbers in some of the key out-of-hospital components have declined”.
The King’s Fund also commented:
“When trying to envision the future of the health and care system in England, the difficult question to answer is not ‘What do we do?’—the vision for care has been outlined by multiple governments in countless policy documents—but ‘How do we actually make it happen?’”
I welcomed the commitment in the Government’s 10-year health plan to shift from hospital to community. It is the pace of change and the resources needed to support the rhetoric that will actually make it happen. Rebalancing an entire national health service requires rewiring funding, stabilising the workforce and completely integrating local services. If we all agree on the diagnosis, we need to work together to implement the long-term, radical changes needed to fix this. I look forward to the Minister’s response to this timely debate.
Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, for securing this important debate. There is broad agreement across the House on one central point: if we are to build an NHS that is sustainable for the future, we cannot rely solely on treating people once they arrive at hospital. We need strong primary care and early intervention that prevents illness escalating in the first instance.
That principle is not new. Successive Governments, including the Conservatives, have spoken about shifting care closer to home. The current Government have made it one of the central pillars of their health strategy through the proposed neighbourhood health service and the commitment to move from hospital- to community-based care. The question, however, is not whether we support that ambition, but whether the Government are delivering it.
The figures set out in the House of Commons Library briefing are striking. Between 2015-16 and 2023-24, spending on acute services increased by £14.3 billion, while primary medical care increased by only £1.7 billion and community services by £3.1 billion. Those figures illustrate the scale of the challenge in rebalancing the system; they also demonstrate why simply announcing a shift is not enough. Resources must genuinely follow patients into community settings if the policy is to succeed.
These Benches welcome the Government’s stated commitment to shift care out of hospitals into communities. We also recognise the potential benefits of neighbourhood health centres in bringing diagnostics, rehabilitation, mental health services and primary care together and closer to where people live.
However, there are legitimate questions to be asked about pace and delivery. Before the election, Ministers spoke about increasing the proportion of NHS funding allocated to primary and community care by 2029. That objective has now been pushed further back to 2035. For many patients and practitioners, that will feel like a significant delay.
These Benches also have concerns about whether primary care is being given the tools it needs to succeed. The Opposition have consistently raised concerns regarding changes to the GP funding formula and the expectations placed on GPs through the advice and guidance system. Community care cannot become simply a mechanism for managing demand that would previously have gone elsewhere in the system. If primary care is expected to do more, it must be properly resourced to do so.
I turn briefly to mental health, where the relationship between acute and community services is particularly important. Community support and accessible treatment can prevent deterioration early and reduce hospital admissions. It is therefore concerning that the share of NHS spending devoted to mental health has fallen in each of the last three years—from 9% in 2023-24 to a projected 8.4% in 2026-27. At the same time, local systems are no longer required to increase mental health spending in line with overall NHS spending. These developments appear difficult to reconcile with the principle of parity between mental and physical health.
In closing, I therefore have four questions for the Minister. What specific milestones will the Government use to demonstrate that the promised shift from hospital to community care is taking place? What assessment has been made of the impact that recent GP contract changes will have on primary care capacity? How do the Government intend to ensure that mental health services do not lose out as NHS resources are distributed across the system? In the case of eye care, there is already a workforce and infrastructure in the community to treat patients effectively, yet access depends on where you live, which pushes avoidable demand into hospitals. What steps are the Government taking to ensure equitable access across England?
Strong hospitals will always be essential, but an NHS fit for the future also requires strong community services and effective early intervention. The challenge for the Government is not setting out that vision but delivering on it. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, on securing a very important debate. I am also grateful to all noble Lords for their contributions. I recognise many of the challenges raised, which is exactly why we are taking the action that we are. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Evans, in particular welcomed the direction of movement, as have so many noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon.
It is important that we look at where we started, because I think it reminds us of the scale of the challenge. It was the noble Lord, Lord Darzi, who made the point that we inherited an NHS facing the worst crisis in its history. We all know of people stuck on waiting lists for many years, staff who have felt let down by bureaucracy and little support, and patients who have had to navigate a system that all too often felt complex, disjointed and fragmented—the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, spoke about literal navigation, which I thought was a key point. Not only was that the situation but we recognise that, while we are making improvements, there is some way to go, and I want to set that out at the outset.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, for talking of her own personal experience, and I can say to her that, yes, the patient is at the centre of all the reforms that we are making.
The noble Lord, Lord Darzi, found that society is getting sicker. People are living longer but in poorer health and with more complex needs. I should emphasise that that burden is not shared equally. The gap in healthy life expectancy has grown between the richest and poorest areas, and the model of care that was in place, which we are still seeking to change, while making progress, is working least well for those with greatest disadvantage, who are most likely to have complex needs. I agree that the system we inherited and are changing has been too hospital-centric, too detached from communities and too organised into silos. To the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, I say, yes, modern technology has transformed everyday life, and the scale of change certainly had not reached the National Health Service. We had a stark choice, as noble Lords know, and our response is reform
We also heard from staff and patients that they do not want the status quo. To agree with the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, people said that they wanted radical reform, and we have embraced that. I believe that the 10-year health plan responds to that, setting out the three fundamental shifts—hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention—with neighbourhood health at its very core. Our neighbourhood health framework, which was published in March, gives partners the clarity to develop locally led plans.
What is at the core of this debate is how to make that shift real. For the first time, the medium-term planning framework sets a target to reduce long waits in community health services, with at least 80% of activity to take place within 18 weeks by 2028-29. We are restoring GP access; to some of the points made about the important role, which we acknowledge, of the GP, more than 76% of people are now saying that it is easy to contact their GP, which is up from 61% when we came into office.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Brinton and Lady Gerada, and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, all spoke of the importance of GPs. We are training thousands more GPs, and we are boosting capacity. From July 2024 to April 2026, we had more than 2,000 additional GPs; in total, we now have over 30,000, which is the highest number since 2015. This has meant that we have delivered 12.7 million additional GP appointments this year compared with last year, and I am grateful to GPs.
We are investing directly in the services that will make neighbourhood health possible, which was raised, quite rightly, by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass. I totally agree with her about young people having that voice, and we ensure that that is the case, but I know where to come should we need further assistance.
We have invested an additional £601 million in general practice, taking total GP contract investment to nearly £14 billion in 2026-27. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Janke and Lady Leaman, spoke about the importance of community pharmacy, which I totally align myself with. That is why, to recognise that key role, we have given a 10% uplift, which translates to £340 million. Further on funding, as a number of noble Lords have raised, including the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, over £9 billion is being invested through the better care fund, and there is a commitment to deliver 250 neighbourhood health centres, for which the first 27 sites have already been selected.
This is not just a vision, but vision is important: one of continuous, accessible and integrated care, centred around the patient, which prevents ill health, intervenes earlier and gives people more control, by 2035. I understand the wish for pace, and I share it, but we also have to be realistic. There is a reason it is a 10-year health plan: it is not so we wait but so we have a plan that will transform the model of elective care.
Many interactions will no longer take place in a hospital building, but they will be able to take place. The noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, asked whether we are using technology to the best advantage; the NHS was certainly way behind where it should have been, but we are moving towards that, because interactions will be able to take place virtually or through neighbourhood services closer to home. We will see the first NHS online hospital, the development of the NHS app—which has already greatly improved, as many of us know, as patients access care, information and appointments more responsively through their phones—and, by 2035, two-thirds of out-patient care will take place digitally or in the community. Central to that will be the single patient record, which I look forward to coming to when we receive the Health Bill.
General practice will remain at the heart of neighbourhood health. I heard what the noble Baroness, Lady Gerada, said. We are introducing two new at-scale contracts—the single neighbourhood provider and the multi-neighbourhood provider—to support GPs and partners to work against larger geographies. I recognise the pressure on GPs. We are working with GPs to assist them in their effectiveness and in the way in which they serve patients. Integrated health organisations will take responsibility for local population budgets. They will support integration and move resources to where they have the greatest impact.
Key within this debate, and raised in particular by the noble Baronesses, Lady Pidgeon and Lady Gerada, the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and other noble Lords, is funding. We know the importance of ensuring that investment supports the shift from hospitals to communities—and I say to the noble Lord, Lord Evans, that that will include mental health as well as primary care and neighbourhood care. The 10-year health plan sets out an operating model that shifts power from the centre to local commissioners and providers. As I mentioned, ICBs and providers are developing medium-term and multiyear plans through the medium-term planning framework to show how they will use funding in line with the priorities.
I assure noble Lords that ICB allocations give greater growth to community rather than acute services to support the community transformation that noble Lords and I seek and to support neighbourhood health. We will continue to set those national expectations, and we will support that by changes to system incentives, such as financial flows. I hear the call for ring-fences, which is often made. It is a legitimate challenge, but they do not by themselves guarantee better outcomes. Our approach is to set national priorities and accountability, as well as enabling ICBs to use funding flexibly, because they are best placed, as we know, to meet local need and secure best value.
Lord Scriven (LD)
My point was that flexibility is taken away when national directives come down, forcing ICBs to spend money on acute and emergency care.
Baroness Merron (Lab)
I always appreciate the expertise of the noble Lord, but I have set out our approach. We are focusing on outcomes and the best way to achieve them. We keep them constantly under review and discussion, so it is not top-down but how we are going to get to the place that all noble Lords want us to get to.
I know that I will be able to refer to only a limited number of questions, and I hope noble Lords will forgive me. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, raised dental deserts. We are offering incentives to attract dentists under the golden hello scheme, which is what it says on the tin. Importantly, we are also increasing the supply of dentists. We have just announced the first sustained expansion of dental school places since 2007. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, also asked about progress being made on publishing health food standards and the consultation. I acknowledge her particular interest and expertise. We will soon be consulting on the proposals for healthier foods targets and reporting. Importantly, we remain on track for delivering on this 10-year health plan commitment in this Parliament. If the noble Baroness would like further information, I would be very happy to obtain it for her.
The noble Lord, Lord Evans, asked about milestones that will be used to ensure that the shift from hospital to community is taking place, which is important. That is why we have published the Neighbourhood Health Framework, which will ensure that accountability. I am very alive to the points he made about mental health services, and I am sure that he welcomes the mental health strategy that will bring together all the points. I am very enthusiastic about the fact that we are piloting community-based mental health centres. I was glad to visit the one in Birmingham, which totally persuaded me of their value, but we must of course wait for the evidence.
I know that noble Lords know that the NHS that we inherited was under intolerable pressure. We have chosen reform, we have invested, we are rebuilding access, we are enhancing digital tools and we will deliver an NHS closer to home that is more preventive, joined-up and equal. That is the way we will take the NHS into the future.
Baroness Janke (LD)
I thank the Minister for her remarks and her explanation. She is obviously very committed to her plan. I think it is fair to say from what we heard during the debate, which had strong contributions from both professional and patient experience, that people in this Chamber are not convinced and that there is a lot of work to be done to convince people that the plan is going to succeed—not least the people who are working in it.
I draw the attention of the Minister to the morale and the sense of crisis that there is in many communities. On my point about local pharmacies, there is a crisis, and if we are not careful there will be none left to help to deliver the plan, and I am sure the situation is similar in other parts of primary care. So, while I recognise that the Minister has tried to be helpful, I think there is still a lot of work to be done and I—and, I know, others in this Chamber—will be pursuing the plan, in the hope that we will see it succeed in the future. It will need a lot of commitment and, as we have said, a lot of resource focused on primary care in communities and making sure that that focus is kept and that we remain committed to it.
Motion agreed.
Places of Worship Renewal Fund
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Baroness Prentis of Banbury
To ask His Majesty’s Government how the places of worship renewal fund will differ from the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme.
Baroness Prentis of Banbury (Con)
My Lords, the church of St James the Apostle has towered over the small village of Somerton, Oxfordshire, for almost 1,000 years. Last Saturday, our daughter Matilda and her new husband James were married there. The bells rang, the bridesmaids looked beautiful and the church was immaculate. It was a perfect setting for a happy day.
Our church plays an important part in village life. We have no shop or pub and precious little public transport. Around half the adult population, 87 of us, choose to sign up to be on the electoral roll. Most are not regular churchgoers, but every couple of months many of us attend events which range from traditional services to holiday clubs for children, from talks and fêtes to the annual Orthodox Theophany service in the week of Christian unity. Our nativity play, with a real baby, ponies, sheep and alpacas dressed as camels, is the talk of the valley and frankly makes “The Vicar of Dibley” look rather low-key.
This large church is a huge responsibility for a small village. It is grade 1 listed: 45% of grade 1 listed buildings in the country are places of worship. Every five years, we are given a list of repairs that must be carried out. We are currently worrying about how to pay for a repair to the roof, and we are not alone in that. Cleaning the church in the run-up to the wedding, I felt the care that had been lavished on our building for generations. I am very concerned that the actions of this Government mean that on our watch we may fail to preserve these buildings as we should.
The vast majority of the money needed for upkeep comes from individuals in the village. Apparently 89% of the population are unaware that, for most ordinary parish churches, there is no central fund for repairs. Our church relies mainly on a very few people giving monthly direct debits. Of course, in order to function as a church, we must also fund the contribution that pays our share of clergy costs, which in our case is £11,500 a year. All this from a congregation, on a normal Sunday, of around 10.
Money for mission rightly should come from churchgoers—I have no quarrel with that—but this debate is about how we support our most important listed buildings. The Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme allowed us to apply to reclaim the VAT costs on the cost of repairs, with a fairly straightforward application process. About 60% of all listed places of worship in the UK have used the scheme in the last 10 years. That is why previous Governments funded it with a stable budget of about £42 million. With that, we were not only preserving beautiful and important buildings but recognising the real value that churches provide to community life in the UK. Recent research by the National Churches Trust, using proper Treasury methodology, estimates that for every £1 spent on a church the benefit to the community is £16. It is worth remembering that the Church of England has to provide marriages and burials, and that there is historical value as well as civic value in these buildings. We are also, for example, the largest provider of art exhibition space in the country.
Despite all that, the Government decided drastically to cut the funding available to a fund of £23 million a year, which will not rise with inflation, and there is a new cap on all grants of £25,000. They announced that the scheme would end in April this year only for it to close early, meaning that eligible applicants lost out. After some time, when we were all in the lurch, with no information at all, we now, sadly, have details of the places of worship renewal fund. It is a very complex competitive grant scheme, with two application windows a year. Historic England, which has once again been put in charge of administering the scheme, has already warned of delays just for the earliest stage of the application. The scheme is limited to England only, with no provision for listed places of worship in the rest of the UK. To put the differences into perspective, it is estimated that the new scheme will probably support 100 to 150 listed places of worship a year. The previous scheme supported around 5,000.
The complexity of the application process is a real barrier. The fund is explicitly designed to target support in the most deprived areas of England, where need is highest. Consideration will also be given to communities with the least ability to raise funds locally. The scoring matrix has not been published, and I ask the Minister to give us further details on how rural deprivation in particular will be assessed. If necessary, I ask her to write to me about this, because details are really needed by the poor individuals in parishes around the country who are going to have to make the applications for the scheme.
I ask the Minister to think again. There is an argument that we should have a scheme such as this one for areas of highest deprivation, but please could we do it in conjunction with the previous scheme, which allowed us to claim back VAT costs? I am really pleased that the Conservative Party has committed to reinstate the much more generous scheme as it was before.
I thank noble Lords for their interest in this debate. I am sure that, in turn, they will all join me in thanking those who care for our listed places of worship: the Churches Conservation Trust, the Friends of Friendless Churches and, most of all, the individuals of all faiths and none who give their time and money to keep the roof on. The Government should not tax this worthy work, which is done on behalf of us all.
Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)
My Lords, if we get this right, we will do far more than preserve historic buildings; we will protect the civic infrastructure that quietly sustains our communities every single day. If we get it wrong, we risk allowing that infrastructure to erode slowly. So I welcome the Government’s intention, and I thank the Minister for bringing this measure forward. However, intentions alone will not sustain these places. What matters now is delivery and that this proposal truly matches the scale of the reality on the ground.
This is not really about buildings. It is about whether we recognise, and are prepared to properly support, the role that these places now play as front-line providers of community support. In my own city of Newport, these are not abstract heritage assets. They are places where people go when the system is under pressure. They are where families turn to when times are hard. Increasingly, they are stepping in when others no longer can, and they are doing so largely through volunteers, through faith communities, and through people who give their time and energy without expectations of recognition.
My own church, St Woolos Cathedral in Newport—the seat of the Archbishop of Wales, the inspirational and welcoming most reverend Cherry Vann—is a place of history, a place that holds the memory and remains of the Chartists, who died in the struggle for democracy, but its significance does not end there. St Woolos is not simply a monument to our past. It is a working part of our present. It is a place of worship, certainly, but it is a place where people gather, where support is distributed, where community is built and sustained. In every meaningful sense, it is a civic asset. This coming Sunday, I shall be honoured to once again attend Newport’s Civic Sunday service, held to welcome the city’s new mayor, who this municipal year is my very good friend, Councillor Deb Harvey—the epitome of a community champion—together with the deputy mayor, Councillor Debbie Jenkins, who I know has an excellent grade in GCSE English as she is one of my former pupils.
When we talk about funding these buildings, we do not mean that they are passive structures to be preserved; they are active institutions. The Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme has recognised that, at least in part, and has succeeded because of that recognition. It has worked because it has been straightforward, predictable and accessible. It has trusted communities to get on with the job of serving others rather than tying them up in bureaucracy.
I welcome the proposal for a places of worship renewal fund, but I say with caution to the Minister that this must not just be a rebranding exercise. It must be a real step forward. The reality is stark. The demands on these buildings are increasing, not decreasing. The question before us is simple: does this fund rise to meet that reality? Will it support not just emergency repairs but essential adaptations to make these buildings usable in the modern world—accessibility, energy efficiency and the ability to remain open as genuine community hubs? I hope it will maintain that simplicity. Most importantly, will it be funded at a level that reflects what is happening in communities like mine in Newport, where these buildings are shouldering an ever greater sense of social responsibility?
I support the direction the Government are taking. This is the moment for realism and ambition. If we are serious about strengthening communities, we must be serious about strengthening the institutions that hold them together; if we are serious about resilience, we must invest in the places that deliver it daily; and, if we are serious about fairness, we must recognise that these communities cannot continue to do more with less. I urge my noble friend the Minister to ensure that the fund does not merely continue what exists but strengthens it, to ensure that it reflects not just aspiration but the reality faced on the ground, and to ensure that places like St Woolos are not simply preserved for their past but properly supported for the indispensable role that they play today. These buildings are not just part of our heritage; they are part of our response to the challenges that we face now, and we cannot afford to let them fall in that pursuit.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, for securing this debate and, indeed, for her wider service to the Church. I congratulate her daughter and son-in-law as well. I thank the many thousands of people across our country who play a part in caring for our wonderful churches and churchyards.
My fellow Lords spiritual regret that they are not able to join this debate; many are with their candidates for ordination services taking place this weekend. I know, however, that they share my support for the places of worship renewal fund and the recognition from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport that places of worship are
“part of who we are as a nation”.
As the Second Church Estates Commissioner put it when this scheme was raised in Questions in the other place, churches are cornerstones of our communities. It is hard to overstate the significance they hold to people up and down the country, irrespective of faith. They are not only places of worship but vital community assets contributing to heritage, to social cohesion and to local economies. I am pleased, therefore, that the Government recognise this through the fund.
I am also aware that there have been collaborative campaigns for long-term sustainable support for the fabric of church buildings. The places of worship renewal fund will help unlock other funding for capital works which would have been unavailable under the previous scheme. In my diocese, for example, there are a number of major parish churches in areas of high deprivation which simply could not have raised the necessary funds needed for repairs, even with the VAT rebate.
There are, however, shortcomings to this new fund; some have already been mentioned by noble Lords, but I think it is important that I state them for the record. First, far fewer churches overall will be supported through this new fund than they were by the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. The latter provided around £40 million a year and supported around 5,000 listed places of worship per year. By contrast, the places of worship renewal fund works out at £23 million annually for four years and is expected to benefit around 100 to 150 listed places of worship each year.
Secondly, this fund applies only to England. Church buildings play as important a part in the heritage and community infrastructure of the devolved nations. I ask the Minister to explain how the Government plan to support churches in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
Thirdly, although I appreciate the focus on areas of high deprivation, where churches can struggle to raise funds, the index of multiple deprivation does not reliably capture the challenges that more rural areas face in this respect and, indeed, more broadly. Very rural areas have smaller communities to draw on for fundraising, yet churches there can play an even more important role in bringing people together, often as the only public building for miles. Again, I ask the Minister whether any support will be extended to these more rural churches in future years of the fund.
The financial challenges facing cathedrals and church buildings, and those who care for them, are growing. Recent funding pressures highlight a widening gap between the cost of maintaining historic places of worship and the resources available to support them. Many congregations are now small and the burden of upkeep increasingly falls on communities with limited resources. A strategic long-term funding approach is needed—one which recognises that greater stability enables greater planning, better outcomes and, ultimately, better value for money. Can the Minister indicate whether that is the Government’s long-term ambition?
Lord Scriven (LD)
My Lords, it is a genuine pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester. I enjoyed his contribution, although I have a nagging feeling that what I am about to say may make him wish that he had been scheduled to speak after me rather than before.
I may be a minority of one in this debate, with these views, but I am definitely not a minority of one in the House nor in the country. We are living in an increasingly secular Britain, where less than half the population identifies with any religious faith and a mere fraction regularly attends services. Yet this capital fund ring-fences millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money a year for the exclusive benefit of active religious buildings across the country. This is not a natural exercise in heritage conservation. It is an exercise in state patronage, filtering public tax revenue from citizens of all beliefs and none to subsidise the operational footprints of religious institutions.
Look at the gross unfairness baked into the eligibility criteria: the historic grade 2 listed village hall, an old miners’ welfare hall or an independent community theatre facing structural collapse cannot touch a single penny of this fund. They are forced to battle for oversubscribed general grants. The irony is that religious organisations are fully entitled to apply for some of these pots too, but an active place of worship now receives a dedicated, exclusive, multimillion-pound safety net.
Crucially, the Government have confirmed that the financial assets of religious bodies are not routinely considered when determining how this new support will be distributed. Why? Let us look, for example, at the Church of England. The Church Commissioners manage a massive, diversified endowment fund that is now valued at an astonishing £11.6 billion. They hold vast stakes in global equities and, despite scaling back their retail exposure, they retain a 10% stake in the Metrocentre in Gateshead, which is now being put up for sale for an estimated £500 million. This demonstrates just how highly commercialised these holdings are.
Nowhere is the commercial wealth clearer than in the heart of London, where the Church owns the prestigious 90-acre Hyde Park Estate. The estate consists of 2,300 high-end properties, luxury residential lets and the boutique commercial quarter of Connaught Village. It raises a staggering £45 million to £60 million in rental income annually for the fund. Let us be clear about what is missing from this premier estate: despite the Church’s public rhetoric on housing, there is virtually no social nor affordable housing on this site. It is treated explicitly as a high-yield cash generator.
We will no doubt hear the argument that the £11.6 billion fund cannot legally be used to maintain local parish churches because its statutory duty is restricted to pensions and clergy salaries. Although restructuring the endowment fund to local church properties might be difficult, it is not impossible if the leadership of the Church of England decides it wishes to do so. It is a question of choice. Instead, this cash-rich institution hoards its wealth centrally and does not use it for the upkeep of private religious buildings.
The Church of England spent £35 million on school evangelism projects alone last year. At a time when it can devote more money in a single year to school mission than the total annual budget of this entire new tax-funded building fund, why should taxpayers be expected to meet the cost of repairs that the Church is entirely capable of funding from its own vast resources?
Furthermore, we must scrutinise the strict mandate that these buildings must remain in active religious use to qualify. This goes far beyond preserving architecture. If this were purely a rescue mission for historic bricks and mortar then the theological utility of the building would be completely irrelevant. By tying public millions to active worship, the state is directly intervening to support religious practice itself. By funding active worship, the taxpayer is being forced to bankroll institutions that frequently hold exclusionary positions. Many of the religious bodies owning these buildings discriminate in their hiring practices, refuse to perform same-sex marriages or bar women from leadership roles. Why should an LGBT+, atheist or woman taxpayer see their hard-earned money used to prop up the roof of an establishment that rejects their rights?
If we are to spend £92 million of public capital on heritage, let us do so through a strictly neutral secular framework, which these buildings and institutions can bid against. Let us build an exclusive fund for public space, not fund the structural fabric of private faith. I urge the Government to rethink this fund and use it to deliver and protect truly secular and inclusive buildings for a 2026 Britain.
Baroness Gill (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate this important topic, and sincerely thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis of Banbury.
I recognise that places of worship are an important part of the UK’s heritage and architecture. It is fair to say that my opinion differs greatly from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, who spoke before me. I have taken a particular great interest in them since I was a board member of English Churches Housing. Places of worship have held a special fascination for me, regardless of the faith—not just for their spirituality, serenity and intimacy, but because they give real insights into the history of the locality. Over the last years, post Brexit, I have regularly visited my local churches for art lessons, musical performances and local fêtes. From the number of activities posted on the boards, you can see they are a real centre of the community—a hub for community cafés, parent and toddler groups, food banks and for addressing many other welfare concerns.
Likewise, sacred places of other faiths provide similar support for their congregations. My own experience of Sikh gurdwaras is that many of them provide a daily hot meal to everyone in the community, not just to the practitioners of that faith. Therefore, I believe the renewal fund of £92 million of capital funding over four years announced earlier this year will address the challenging state of repairs of some of our oldest buildings in disrepair. The fact that the funding priority will be to those areas of high deprivation is a positive factor, given it is harder for those places of worship to raise funds in their localities.
I appreciate that many of the oldest buildings are churches and cathedrals. Nevertheless, there are notable older buildings belonging to other faiths that will qualify, including 27 synagogues, 15 mosques, seven Sikh gurdwaras and five Buddhist temples. I am particularly pleased that many of them are in my old constituency in the West Midlands.
However, I have had a lot of feedback about the loss of universal VAT refunds. This will be felt as a real cut by many places of worship, which will no longer have access to VAT-free repairs. I recognise that many of these are new, but they are iconic landmarks, such as Guru Nanak Road Gurdwara in Southall, Neasden Hindu Mandir Temple and Birmingham Central Mosque. They are not listed, but they are very important centres for long-established communities. I recognise that they have recourse to National Lottery funding, but there are real dilemmas faced by the committees of those organisations about accessing funds from gambling. Regardless, I welcome that this Government are safeguarding our heritage for future generations to enjoy—believers and non-believers.
Could I finally ask the Minister whether any additional support in navigating complex application processes will be given to deprived neighbourhoods which lack dedicated heritage staff?
Baroness Seccombe (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble and learned friend Lady Prentis for bringing this important debate before the House. Parish churches are so often the centre of local communities, including for people of all faiths and none. Nothing can compensate when a centuries-old church closes its doors. Over the past half century, approximately 8,500 churches of all denominations have closed. This is a profound tragedy.
During the pandemic, the doors of all our church buildings were suddenly shut, and 75% of the respondents to the National Churches Trust survey said that this had a negative effect on their community. Priests were forbidden by their own bishops from entering the churches that they are called to love and serve—even from ringing the bells to let people know that they were being prayed for. May those decisions never be repeated. As I live alone, I found lockdown particularly difficult. I discovered that the only way I could see other people was when I was shopping. Shopping and embroidery kept me going. I was greatly relieved when I was able to join my son’s bubble, and so in my Toyota hybrid I travelled to and fro—but thankfully very economically.
Of course, the established Church has much to answer for. But it appears that the Government are misunderstanding the role of our church buildings once again. It is shameful that the funding was cut by almost half for the listed places of worship scheme in its last year, and now the new places of worship renewal fund will see drastically fewer churches receive any government support.
Repair works can be expensive, and increasingly so, but they are essential to maintaining our heritage—not just England’s but Wales’s, Scotland’s and Northern Ireland’s. I agree with the right reverend Prelate that the new places of worship renewal fund should be accessible to listed places of worship across our whole country.
Church communities and their volunteers are the custodians of this heritage, yet they are under attack. The Countryside Alliance estimated that 10 crimes were committed every day on church property in 2025, and the true figure may well be higher. What is the government action to tackle this? The damage caused to our altars and stained-glass windows traumatises congregations and tears apart communities. It causes the need for yet more repairs, beyond the usual day-to-day maintenance of these magnificent buildings. They need our help.
It seems that all these volunteers are asking for is that their fundraising efforts for repairs are not taxed further with the addition of VAT. I would be grateful if the Minister can tell us why the Government insist on doing so.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Prentis of Banbury, on securing this important debate. It is a pleasure to see her in her place leading it. She eloquently set out the problems and issues facing churches that have ancient buildings to care for, and I agree with all her comments. I have spent the majority of my adult years attending, organising and contributing to events designed to help raise money for much-needed repairs to leaking roofs, rotten floorboards and new heating systems. This extended to altering the layout of pews so that a community space could be created where worshippers could enjoy a chat and a cup of coffee at the end of a service.
The listed places of worship grant was well respected by parishes and provided much-needed funding for both small and larger projects. The new fund, the places of worship renewal fund, is competitive rather than against criteria. Possibly 100 to 150 churches will get a grant, whereas in the past 5,000 gained from the VAT refund. At 20%, this is not to be brushed aside as irrelevant. Added to that, a church will need competent people to put together the application. The overall amount set aside is now less, as has already been said—£23 million a year versus £92 million for four years—but not inflation-proof. Submissions to the fund can be made only twice a year, whereas previously it was rolling.
Although I can see many benefits in the renewal fund, I fear it will mean that smaller rural parishes will miss out, especially as the fund is competitive. The ethos of the fund to reach out to disadvantaged communities is excellent. However, I suspect that this will mean that urban and city churches—where the expectation will be that the grant will renovate a dilapidated church, leading to increased congregations—will be paramount. I support this, but the other side of this coin is that rural areas where the local church, when built, had a thriving congregation that has now dwindled to a handful of faithful will not score highly enough to get a share of the fund.
For over 30 years, I worshipped in a Somerset village church where the congregation was small—perhaps 15 to 20 on a good day. It was very plain on the outside but had spectacular stained-glass windows, given by the family of a young German airman shot down and sent to work on the local farm. He and his family were so grateful for the kind treatment he received that they replaced all the plain glass windows with beautiful stained glass. This church was not listed then and is not now.
Having moved to Hampshire, I now worship in a church that is generally full. It is a much wealthier area compared with the small Somerset village. There are many different activities, including a group for mums, babies and toddlers on a Monday morning. This church is also not listed. Neither of these churches will have qualified for access to the listed places of worship grant scheme, but both, along with all churches, had to go through the laborious process of getting a faculty if they wanted to do any sort of repair, however small—even if the members of the congregation were to do the repair or updating themselves.
Architectural heritage is important. When entering a cathedral, a sense of wonder descends on the visitor, whether in Rochester, which has existed in various forms since the seventh century, or Coventry Cathedral, which has literally risen from the ashes of the Second World War. Even a modern cathedral will need some repairs to keep the weather out, as demonstrated by the Catholic Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, which had problems with its roof.
When scoring for the places of worship renewal fund, is it likely that a small parish church in a rural area looking to create a community space where outreach can take place—for young people, mums with babies or socialising for the elderly—will not score against the larger town and city churches which serve a large disadvantaged community that needs a sense of community and purpose?
The ending of the listed places of worship grant scheme and its replacement with the places of worship renewal fund has caused widespread concern among many church communities. It is not only regular worshippers who value their church: there are those within a village or community who may rarely attend services but often support fundraising events. These community members want the church to be there for them: for weddings, funerals or the occasional baptism. If a church seems likely to close, there is general outcry among the population it serves. Churches are an important part of the fabric of society and should not be left to crumble into decay.
I support the comments of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester and the noble Baronesses, Lady Wilcox, Lady Seccombe and Lady Gill—and I will have words with my noble friend Lord Scriven. I look forward to the Minister’s response and reassurance that we are not about to see the demise of the village parish church due to a leaking roof or dry rot.
Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble and learned friend Lady Prentis of Banbury, for securing this debate and congratulate her for the way she set it out. I also congratulate Matilda and James on what sounds like a splendid wedding. As their example shows, we are discussing places that record some of the most important moments in people’s lives and link us, in many cases, to 1,000 years of history of those who have also been through such moments. They are, in urban and rural areas, often the last community venues, providing not just religious services but support to the community in so many ways. As the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, said, they are part of our civic infrastructure. The survey by the National Churches Trust has tried to put a figure on this, showing that £55 billion of social value is delivered just through churches, let alone the other places of worship of all faiths and denominations to which these schemes apply.
I am grateful to all noble Lords for speaking, and we of course send our best wishes to all the ordinands this Petertide. Liturgically, this is perhaps not the best timing for the debate, but it is a timely one to be having. These buildings, of all faiths and none, are looked after by volunteers; they are not rewarded—in this life anyway—for their service. Not every parish can rely on a former Attorney-General to help them get their head round new schemes. The old scheme had many advantages, and we have heard chiefly about its simplicity and reliability. When I was a Minister, though, I was always open to ideas. The scheme was good for those who had the money to carry out the work, but lots of churches said they wanted something that would enable them to carry out the work in the first place. I am therefore open to ideas that allow that, as the new fund does.
As others have said, however, the way that the change has been brought about is regrettable, in many ways. Initially, there was the halving of the amount available and a bit of uncertainty about whether it would continue and when, which led to a very tight window for people to be applying, certainly in this first tranche of the scheme. That of course puts further burdens on volunteers, particularly those without the resources or the professional background that would help them get their head around it. There was also a bit of a lack of consultation among the users of the scheme, which is an important point. Debates such as this are a great way for feedback to be received by the Minister and her officials in relation to those who are using the scheme to deliver that public good. However, we recognise that we are where we are, and the Government have provided clarity about the scheme for the rest of this Parliament.
I will focus, therefore, on how we can make the new scheme work best. As we have heard, it is competitive. Perhaps the Minister can say how the Government will ensure that we do not have winners and losers. Previously, there was a scheme to which everyone could apply. The cap in the old scheme was only ever met once—last year, when the amount was halved. Before that, people applying knew that they were very likely to get the money back. How do we make sure there is that reliability and dependability in the new scheme? How do we make it as user-friendly as possible, through generous deadlines, clear guidance and simple forms for the volunteers to fill in?
The new scheme focuses on areas of deprivation. There has been a lot of interest, but also a lot of head-scratching among those who are trying to work it out around the country. How can we make sure that the datasets that the scheme is based on are reliable? In particular, the Community Needs Index scores an area as more affluent if it has an asset such as a church, so how do we make sure that the methodology does not count against the places with a church that are in most need? Will the Minister work with Historic England to make sure that feedback from these early tranches is fed into the user experience?
The new system is England-only, whereas the old one was UK-wide. Will the Government work with the devolved authorities to make sure that there is support in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where, because of the different denominations, particularly of churches, there are a greater number of religious buildings needing to be looked after and saved? Will the Minister recognise that not everyone can avail themselves of the National Lottery Heritage Fund? Some faith groups and denominations do not like to apply to that particular heritage fund because it involves an element of gambling. That is why this scheme is so important.
Will this scheme be evaluated? In talking about the reasons for this scheme previously, the Minister said that eight out of 10 churches said that they would have carried on the work anyway. Of course they would, because, if the roof is falling down, you have to fix it, whether you get the tax back or not. The evaluation and the analysis are really important here. Can the evaluation of this scheme be done in conversation and consultation with users to understand some of the nuances which I think might have been lost in drawing up the current one? There might be a blend of the two schemes that would help give the grants and the tax back.
I should declare an interest: I am a trustee of the Churches Conservation Trust. In fact, I have just come from a meeting of the trustees of that secular charity that looks after 350 churches across the country. It was the biggest user of the old scheme. In effect, the ending of the tax arrangements now means a tax bill in the region of £300,000 for a charity that is funded by both church and state to look after these buildings for the good of the community. I know the Minister has been generous with her time with the chairman and chief exec of the charity, and has visited a CCT church in Rugby: I hope she will continue with the open-door approach that she has.
As we have a bit of time in hand before the hour is done, I shall draw out a bit more on the point that noble Lords have made about the work that these churches do for people of all faiths and none. The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, is very welcome to visit a CCT church to see the range of things that we do there: art exhibitions, recording studios, model railway exhibitions, CAMRA beer festivals, and even medieval jousting. I note that his party wants a network of cold spaces in this period of heat. There are not many places colder than a church, I can tell him. We have this network that can be used by people of all faiths and none. And of course, they are engines of training for the heritage skills that we need to repair buildings, including the one we are sitting in at the moment. I hope that the Minister will take the feedback that has been given by users of the scheme to the department to make sure that we have a scheme that really thanks and understands the custodians of these buildings who are delivering such a social good.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Twycross) (Lab)
My Lords, I am pleased to answer this Question for Short Debate and, like others, I thank the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis of Banbury, for securing the debate. I thank all other noble Lords and the right reverend Prelate, who, despite the weather, stayed to speak in the debate. I congratulate the noble and learned Baroness, or rather her daughter and son-in-law, on their marriage. I will aim, in the time allowed, to answer as many questions as possible, but I will review Hansard and follow up in writing where I do not.
In May, as noble Lords are aware, I announced the opening of applications for the places of worship renewal fund. The fund will provide upfront capital grants to restore listed places of worship, with funding targeted towards the places that need it most. I was pleased to be able to secure this funding of £92 million for churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other places of worship, in recognition of the valuable role they play in the hearts of their communities. In many cases, they provide services well beyond their congregations. The example that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, gave in her opening remarks of her local church, St James the Apostle, highlighted this, as did the examples from the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lady Seccombe, my noble friend Lady Wilcox and the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, who highlighted the effective monetary value of the social value that is provided.
Since I became Heritage Minister, I have visited places of worship up and down the country, including St Michael le Belfrey in York, Salisbury Cathedral, Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, Grimsby Minster and the Sir Moses Montefiore Synagogue in Grimsby. I have spoken regularly to stakeholders, including the Church of England and the National Churches Trust. I know that wonderful buildings such as these rely on dedicated volunteers to keep the doors open and the lights on. While some larger places of worship may have dedicated fundraising staff, I know that, for the vast majority, it is those same volunteers—including, I have no doubt, many Members of your Lordships’ House, clearly including a number of those who spoke today—who will fundraise with their community and apply for funding for repairs and essential improvements. This scheme is designed with them in mind.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, highlighted the previous Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. I recognise how much this scheme was valued by those caring for our historic places of worship and I know it supported many transformational projects. However, in the current fiscal environment, we need to look carefully at how funding is targeted to ensure it is delivering against our ambitions. As the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester said, many churches have not benefited as they could not raise the capital funds up front.
Our evaluation of the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme showed that 80% of those who benefited said they would have completed the works anyway, though in some cases to a different timetable or scope. Our internal analysis on past payments in the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme data also shows that it disproportionately favoured places with less disadvantage, illustrating the point that it was almost impossible for some areas to get the funding to make the essential repairs.
To reassure my noble friend Lady Wilcox, this is not a rebranding exercise. The places of worship renewal fund will target places facing double disadvantage—the highest levels of deprivation and the greatest need for investment. When assessing claims, Historic England, which will manage the fund for the Government, will prioritise eligible applications in these places of greatest need.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, and other noble Lords raised rural churches. Any listed place of worship can apply and applications will be prioritised on the basis of need, as set out on the Historic England website. In areas not served by standard measures of deprivation, additional consideration can be given to those that serve isolated or rural communities or provide the primary or only shared community space in that locality.
My noble friend Lady Wilcox referenced the incredible church in Newport, Wales. In relation to devolution, the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme was a UK-wide VAT rebate scheme. The places of worship renewal fund is for England only, because heritage is devolved. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Administrations receive Barnett consequentials at the spending review, taking into account any changes to the overall DCMS settlement. We have made them aware that it covers this scheme. It is now for the devolved Administrations to consider whether to set up new arrangements, should they wish to. They have not yet done so, but we have offered to share how DCMS is approaching this. Lottery funding is also available in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and we anticipate that, over the next three years, about £100 million will be distributed for churches across the nations. I appreciate the point made by my noble friend Lady Gill and the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, that some places of worship are reluctant to take lottery money.
It is only when all eligible projects in or serving the places that face double disadvantage have been funded that other projects will be considered. Second priority will be given to areas with the greatest need, as measured by the index of multiple deprivation. Once eligible projects in these areas have been funded, projects with the greatest need in terms of financial need, urgency of repair or community benefit will be considered.
The places of worship renewal fund will move funding from a retrospective VAT reclaim, as noble Lords have noted, which funded projects that could already raise the money to carry out capital repairs, to a targeted, upfront capital grant. Funding will no longer be awarded on a first come, first served basis. It will go to places that need it most. By enabling applicants to secure funding before major works begin, the places of worship renewal fund will give congregations the confidence and certainty to carry out works.
The noble Lord, Lord Scriven, questioned the point around active places of worship. An active place of worship is categorised either as one used for worship at least six times a year or as one owned by a charity that cares specifically for historic places of worship that are open to the public a minimum of six times a year. Like the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, I would recommend a visit to the Churches Conservation Trust, which is eligible for the new scheme.
My noble friend Lady Wilcox asked whether funding would be sufficient. The places of worship renewal fund will invest £92 million, as I have said. There is also a wider landscape of government funding for the Churches Conservation Trust. The National Lottery is expected to spend over £100 million between 2024 and 2027, and the vital work of parishes and congregations is also key.
This is not the only new funding I have launched. The £60 million heritage at risk capital fund is now open, ready to conserve and repair assets delivering community benefit. The £42 million heritage revival fund is also open, supporting communities themselves to take on the regeneration of historic buildings, getting them back into community use. This sits alongside lottery funding to heritage of around £300 million per annum.
In relation to the points made about whether the Church would fund this and the sustainability of funding, I will allude to different points made by both the right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Scriven. Care of our places of worship is a significant challenge, and in the Government’s view it needs to be a shared endeavour. I will talk to the Church of England about how we, the Church, the lottery and others can work together to support these buildings. My conversations with Church officials, however, suggest that they are willing to have this conversation.
In response to the wider point of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, there is a balance to be struck. These are not simply religious buildings; they are also historic buildings. As the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, said, they make up almost half of grade 1 listed buildings. Through the places of worship renewal fund, smaller grants will be available for minor targeted interventions.
The noble and learned Baroness, Lady Prentis, my noble friend Lady Wilcox and others, including the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, and my noble friend Lady Gill have highlighted that simplicity was a feature of the previous scheme. In designing the new competitive application process, we have worked hard with Historic England to take into account the needs of volunteers up and down the country who care for our places of worship.
In response to the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, in designing the scheme we met with a range of stakeholders, as did Historic England, which also ran a working group to design it. Historic England will have dedicated project officers to guide smaller congregations and faith groups through the grant application process. When I was on a recent visit to Grimsby, I met a congregation who were availing themselves of that advice. We feel that means that groups which need extra support will receive it, above all in areas of double disadvantage.
This is the first round of a new scheme. We are monitoring feedback carefully using Historic England intelligence, reviewing social media and listening to our stakeholders to understand whether improvements to the process can be made. I will meet with Historic England to discuss this, and I am happy to meet with any interested Members of your Lordships’ House as well to hear noble Lords’ direct experience. Like all speakers in today’s debate, I recognise how our historic places of worship provide many valuable services to our communities, like food banks, playgroups, and spaces for music, dance and culture. The best way to protect our heritage is to use it, and this is exactly what the funding aims to do. I will write to other noble Lords, including to the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, around crime and crime against churches.
The scheme will ensure that heritage buildings, including listed places of worship, stand proud at the centre of our communities and continue to serve their needs for many years to come.
Democratic Institutions: Threats
(1 week, 1 day ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
That this House takes note of the threats to democratic institutions in the United Kingdom, including disinformation, foreign interference, and levels of public trust in politics.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I am sure we are all grateful for how cool the Chamber is today. I want to talk about the interconnection between domestic and foreign threats to British democracy.
Philip Rycroft, in his report this spring, warned that
“there is a long-term and worrying loss of trust in our democratic system and processes”.
He further warned that the problem of public disillusion makes it easier for hostile foreign actors to interfere in British politics, seeking
“to sow distrust and exacerbate divisions in UK society, with the ultimate aim of undermining confidence in our democracy”.
Later in the year, the Chamber will consider the Representation of the People Bill, which addresses the issue of foreign interference but only touches on the alienation of a substantial proportion of Britain’s citizens from Westminster politics. The Rycroft report recommends that we amend the Bill to strengthen its protections against foreign finance and disinformation, which, as he rightly points out, are deepening public mistrust. However, the UK was already an outlier among democratic countries for public disengagement from national politics, before financial globalisation made it easy to disguise where political donations came from and social media made deliberate disinformation campaigns a regular part of our political life.
All of us involved in politics should be concerned about the depth of public disengagement from political life and of disillusion with our democratic institutions. Some 50 years ago, several million British citizens belonged to political parties; now, that figure has sunk to less than 1 million. In the first general election I was aware of, 80% of registered voters turned out. In 2024, turnout was down to less than 60%, while the number of eligible voters not on the register is estimated to have risen to between 6 million and 8 million. That means that the massive Commons majority of Labour MPs, on whom our current Government rest, received the support of not much more than one-quarter of adult British citizens. Registration and turnout were lowest among young people.
Opinion surveys confirm deepening public mistrust of “Westminster politics”. Similar trends in declining confidence are observable in other democratic states, but disillusion with democratic institutions has fallen further in the UK than in most other comparable countries. The Electoral Commission has recently reported that public trust in politicians has marginally improved, rising to 14%—we are down there with bankers and worse than estate agents.
We may disagree on the underlying causes for what a recent report from Demos described as a democratic emergency, but I hope we all agree that we face a major problem which will require co-operation across our parties to resolve. I have been involved in politics in West Yorkshire for most of my career, and I am painfully aware of the reality of feeling “left behind” in what were once council estates, where sold-off council houses have been sold on to distant landlords and converted into houses in multiple occupation; where the shrinking and outsourcing of local services means that public service workers are rarely seen; where local companies have given way to distant private equity owners; and where local government is distant and too close to bankruptcy to provide much assistance. I understand why many of them feel abandoned and inclined to vote against any established party.
Some 350 years ago, John Locke wrote about the state as resting on a social contract between government and citizens. Our left-behind do not see much of a social contract; for many of them their only contact with government is with the DWP. If we are to rebuild trust between citizens, political institutions and government, we need to treat the people of the United Kingdom as citizens rather than as consumers or as people who sit at home and wait for public services to be delivered. We need to inform them about political choices and engage them as far as we can in local public life.
The overcentralisation of government and politics in Britain has left us with what a Commons inquiry into voter engagement a decade ago called
“broad negative stereotypes about Parliament and Government … which go beyond healthy and necessary scepticism”.
We will not regain public trust until we reform and modernise both Houses of Parliament.
Our Chamber provides essential scrutiny of legislation, but the accusation I heard the other day that we are “just a bunch of failed politicians” is not entirely untrue. Labour’s manifesto promise to establish a Modernisation Committee in the Commons has so far achieved little more than improving accessibility for disabled Members. On one of the Bills I was concerned with in the last Session, the Commons spent less time debating the Report and Third Reading stages than in voting down amendments to the Bill. The style of the leader of the Opposition’s intervention in yesterday’s Prime Minister’s Questions fed into the worst stereotypes of partisan Westminster politics.
A healthy democratic country is one in which citizens are all engaged in public life, to one degree or another. The Thatcherite revolution, replacing public services with private provision and reducing the role of local government, reduced the visibility of state action and the opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate. David Cameron, as Prime Minister, wanted to limit the anti-social effects of our market society by building a voluntary “big society”, but that never progressed much further than the modest experiment with “citizen service” for a small number of young people. Labour’s English devolution Act completed the Conservative destruction of district councils and gave most power in devolving government to 30 or so elected mayors. There is little local democracy in that, with no chance of meeting your councillor to discuss politics in the street or the pub.
The strategic defence review, published 12 months ago, set out a vision of a national society remobilised to meet the new threats that our country faces—a “whole-of-society” approach, as it called it, with volunteer reserves for civil emergencies and
“the development of a new force that is modelled on the Reserves and connects local communities with Defence: recruited and employed locally”.
Alongside this, it welcomed the Prime Minister’s launch of a
“national conversation on defence and security”
to persuade citizens to take their share of the responsibilities involved. We are still waiting to be persuaded. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, told us last week that he has been designated the Minister of the national conversation. I think the SDR intended that it should be the Prime Minister who led it.
The public need to be informed. Last week, I read a published report from the French equivalent of our Government’s Defending Democracy Taskforce. I find it extraordinary that the British taskforce does so little to inform Parliament or public more fully about the work it does and the threats it counters. British citizens are unlikely to respond to the SDR’s call for active engagement in ensuring our security, unless they regain greater trust in our political institutions, both national and local. That is a challenge for all of us who believe in liberal democracy.
Foreign interference is much more likely to gain traction in British politics when public trust is so low. Foreign state interference was a challenge before social media achieved its current dominant role in political communication: Russian money flowed into the Conservative Party and the Brexit campaign, as the ISC’s Russia report described. Russian assassinations on British soil go back to Soviet times. We have since seen examples of Chinese and Iranian state interference. We just learned that an Israeli company attempted to influence the Scottish elections. American corporations, foundations and extremely wealthy individuals have interfered, most prominently Elon Musk, who has been beamed into a Tommy Robinson rally in Trafalgar Square and used X algorithms to spread disinformation and attempt to shape election campaigns.
Others from these Benches will talk further about disinformation and social media, and about tightening controls on donations to political parties and campaigning bodies from abroad. I want to talk about how we should strengthen our domestic defences against these malign influences by informing and educating our citizens on how to discriminate between evidence and fictions, and engaging them again in addressing the difficult choices that national and local government have to make.
Some may disagree that foreign interference constitutes a threat. On Tuesday, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, who is in his seat, defended Elon Musk’s use—and misuse—of X to promote a political party. I am surprised that someone who campaigned so vigorously to defend national sovereignty from the European rules that our Government had participated in shaping should be so relaxed about interference from the United States. He knows well the rising flow of finance across the Atlantic to support third-party bodies and partisan think tanks in Britain that promote everything from climate change denial to the banning of abortion to the shrinking of the state, and he appears entirely relaxed about it. I look forward to hearing his definition of a healthy democracy, which I hope might be a little familiar to traditional Conservatives from Burke to Macmillan, and to learning how he considers it possible to reconcile that vision with the libertarian, minimum-state approach that neoliberals on both sides of the Atlantic want to create and attempted, under Mrs Thatcher, to create in Britain. I also look forward to the definition by the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, of what the Conservative Party now considers a healthy democracy, which I suspect is somewhat more constructive than the noble Lord’s.
Multiple reports from both government and Parliament have advised us that better political education is what we need, particularly so now that the cacophony of social media is making it more difficult for readers to distinguish fact from fiction. The move to votes at 16 adds new weight to education about the responsibilities of citizenship. I have visited several secondary schools, both state and independent, in recent months to discuss how they will adjust their curriculum to meet the demands of citizens preparing to vote. What struck me most, in every school, was the response from teachers that they are already overloaded with topics to cover on social, economic, political and personal life, and cannot persuade their colleagues to spare more time in form for this. A lot more work is needed on this aspect of the curriculum review.
I was also told by teachers and students alike that teenagers now rely on social media—most of all TikTok—for their political information, which raises questions about the wisdom of a full ban on social media for under 16 year-olds when that birthday will give them the right to vote. The Minister to whom I posed this dilemma some days ago replied that the BBC would be asked to provide more news and discussion suitable for teenagers. The following day the BBC announced substantial cuts in its news services, which cuts across any hope that it can somehow lay on more for new voters.
MAGA Republicans in the United States are doing their best to dismantle public service broadcasting, along with so many other aspects of public services. We need the BBC to hold the balance and struggle to verify the facts in our often-contentious political debates. The BBC, for all its flaws, provides a shared platform for our public debates.
Discontent with democracy increases when economies hit recession or rapid technological change, both of which now face us. Our democracy is challenged when hostile states or malign foreign actors threaten our prosperity or our way of life. The chaos of British government over the past decade has intensified popular discontent with our political institutions, opening the door for wealthy populists, here at home and from abroad, to exploit ethnic grievances to undermine democracy further. Across all democratic parties, we need to rebuild public trust in order to defend our weakened democracy.
Lord Cryer (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I thank him for securing this debate. Democracy is certainly under threat. Some 87% of Britons have either not very much or no trust at all in politicians and 33% sympathise with the view of British political institutions that they should “just let them all burn”. One in five voters—21%—say that political violence is acceptable in some conditions. When you think that we live in the aftermath of two MPs being murdered for doing their job, that is a staggering figure.
Some of this is due to direct political interference by hostile states, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, talked about. Last year, the director of MI5, Ken McCallum, pointed to a 35% rise in state threat activity and warned that Russian intelligence has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem” on British streets. We constantly see the generation of stories from various corners of the world. An example that is still notorious is that, after the terrible murder of three girls in Southport two years ago, an entirely false claim appeared online that the murderer was a Muslim immigrant. This is entirely false, but that claim was viewed more than 4 million times in Britain and across the globe.
Iran’s record is even worse than that of Russia or China. A report earlier this year by the noble Lord, Lord Walney, who is in his place, detailed how Tehran is making a systematic effort to build a soft power structure through the use of charitable organisations—registered charities which are being subverted or even created by proxies. As we have discussed many times, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is regularly using proxies. Its use of proxies is getting worse because less obvious proxies are now being used. Criminal gangs are doing its dirty work. We have just seen a court case in which two men were prosecuted and convicted for the near murder of an Iranian journalist working in London.
The All-Party Group on Counter Extremism, which I am a member of, has recommended steps, including a new directorate across Whitehall aimed at preventing democratic decline. There are other recommendations in the report by the All-Party Group that I have not got time to cover but which are all well worth looking at. I add that the Charity Commission should be far quicker and far sharper at investigating dodgy charities with links to Tehran in particular, and to China, Russia and other states. A list should also be established of charities found to have links to hostile states or their proxies. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, has presented this idea a number of times in this Chamber. It is well worth thinking about.
I have raised again and again—I used to raise in the other place when I was a Member of Parliament—that we should have the full proscription of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Government after Government, going back to 1979, have failed to act on it. Many of us have seen Ministers here and in the other place come to the Dispatch Box very sympathetic towards an outright ban of the IRGC. Somehow, that sympathy gets lost in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ban gets blocked. We have legislation going through both Houses of Parliament to create the legal framework allowing this Government or a future Government to proscribe the IRGC. However, it would then take the political will of a serving Minister to say, “We’re going to take action and proscribe the IRGC”.
I have talked almost entirely about the influence of hostile states and their proxies. However, I will also say something about the threat to our democratic institutions from within democratic institutions. Many of us heard Lord Hennessy’s valedictory speech a few weeks ago in this Chamber. He was the first person to present, in the language of a few decades ago, the “good chaps” theory of the British constitution—that politicians, civil servants and others are largely men and women of good will, intelligence and capability. Largely, that theory still holds true.
However, we are now seeing the rise of elements in the British constitution and politics that were not there when Peter Hennessy wrote his outstanding books about the British constitution. For example, at the other end of the Corridor, in the other place, we have a group of five Gaza independents—for want of a better phrase—who were elected on a purely sectarian basis. Their appeal is purely sectarian. We have not had that in living memory and, in my view, that is a threat to democracy. One of them led a campaign, which he has boasted about, that aimed to make Britain’s second city a no-go zone for Jews when Maccabi Tel Aviv was playing a football match in Birmingham. Sadly, that campaign was successful, and that is a tragedy.
We have always had scandals in British politics—Suez, Marconi and Profumo spring to mind. What seems to have changed is that the scandals come thicker and faster, these days. At the moment, we are still living through the Mandelson and McSweeney scandal, which still has some way to run. Before that, a previous Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, insisted on staying in Downing Street when the Government had, in effect, ceased to function, because so many Ministers, including some in the Cabinet, had resigned. Before then, we had a period when the leader of the Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, refused to leave, despite an overwhelming vote of no confidence, which, in effect, meant that the Opposition ceased to function.
Having taken all that in the balance, I suspect that the British constitution will prevail because the checks and balances are there. But it is not a foregone conclusion.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this debate and bringing out into the open so many issues that we ought to discuss much more than we do. I will fill my seven minutes or less with one observation and one question to the Minister.
My observation is this. It is one that does not seem to be made in the media or general political talk very much, but the public and the voters of today—the electorates, in all except the police states where there are no electorates, but everywhere else where democracy tries to have a go—are now equipped with more information than ever before in history. There are layers and layers of information—avalanches of it—good and bad. There is misinformation, disinformation, fake information, distorted information, deliberately maligned information and malinformation. By far, not just by a little, there has never been such a flood of comment and view.
As one newspaperman put it to me, “The trouble with our press is that every reader has become an author”. There are at least 18 billion mobiles out there in the UK alone, let alone in the wider world. There are billions of iPads out there—every time a person uses one, they feel that they have a right to challenge everything. What is more, they are equipped with a thousand and one briefs from social media upwards, or downwards, to challenge everything that any government puts out or attempts to do.
The chip has really reshaped the world, but on a scale that is not fully appreciated. In the 1960s, Fairchild put four transistors on a chip, but now it is putting 11 billion transistors on a chip—it is not Fairchild, of course, but TSMC in Taiwan and some American companies. This is a different world from anything that any democracy has ever faced or tried to face in its history.
Further—this is more the issue of the hour—rotating Governments and, dare I say it, Prime Ministers are not the answer to this. In the 1990s, I used to take delegations to Japan, and every time we went they had arranged, very politely, for us to see the Prime Minister, but I remember that it was always a different Prime Minister. Their rotating of Prime Ministers was part of their effort to stabilise their economy and get out of stagnation. It worked in the end, but only in the end.
The truth is that the problems facing us now are far deeper than can be solved by changing personnel at the top, and certainly by switching Prime Ministers. They cannot be reached, because the biggest problems—energy, inflation, climate, environment, defence and security—are all accessible only by collections of nations and not by one nation state. We cannot blame our Government for all the things that are clearly happening on a global scale and have to have a global resort. I know Labour had some fun blaming the outgoing Conservative Government—we apparently were responsible for Covid, Russia invading Ukraine and many other things. This makes for good politics in the very short term but is, of course, nonsense, because the solutions lie well beyond the powers and capacities of one Government, and certainly a one-party Government.
We are now in a crisis not of policy, which might be helped by changing personnel, but of ideology. It is a crisis of wrong-headed thinking about what politics should be doing to serve the people. It imagines that we can go on talking about the state versus the market, what Marx taught or did not teach, whether there is a will of the people and how it should be translated, how collectivism is better or worse than individualism, and whether the state and the market are against each other or working with each other. If we go on with that language, we will lose the interest of all those who wish our country to prosper. That will lead us in a downward spiral to worse and worse difficulties ahead.
What we need now is to drop this kind of language and the old ideology of the 20th century. We need now to get rid of the last vestiges of Marxian collectivism which, I am afraid, linger in British politics. We need now to marry private funds, of which there are masses in the world, to public needs, with new techniques and new methods, as many industrial countries are now doing. At least eight leading industrial countries—I could name them but there is not time—are employing new methods of financing their public projects by private finance and sharing the risks in new ways. None of that seems to be going on here at all. There is some thinking, but it certainly does not get into the media, the public press or the Government’s discussions. That marriage is needed.
I would like to know from the Minister what is being done behind the scenes, or anywhere, to expand the sort of ideas that existed with the old PFI—private finance initiative—which we tried in the 1980s and 1990s and at the beginning of this century but then discarded. Other countries have taken up the idea and expanded and developed it in ingenious ways. Unless we do the same, we will be trapped in the old traps of the state versus the individual, with more money to the state being available only from tax, which puts everybody off, or from borrowing, which we cannot do because we are already underwater on our borrowing and any more will raise debt and increase rather than decrease the pressures.
That is our problem, and we have to face it honestly and clearly. With whom as leader? It does not really matter at this point. It is simply that we have to understand that the world has changed beyond all recognition. Human relationships have changed, and relationships between the electorate, the voter, and those who they trust to govern them—the citizens and the state—have changed fundamentally. Until that is grasped by politicians trying to push here and there with policy changes, we will continue to have enormous and, I think, worsening difficulties.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)
My Lords, in speaking in this debate, I declare my long-standing association with the National Secular Society. I will be drawing on material from the think tank Policy Exchange, where I am a distinguished fellow.
As time is so limited, I will make only two broad points: first, that the effective exercise of multi-party democracy in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country such as the United Kingdom depends on the preservation and defence of a secular public space; and, secondly, that the guardrails of that exercise, as seen by voting at elections, are increasingly broken, and unless we move to improve them public trust in the institutions and in politics itself is likely to erode, with worrying consequences.
Earlier this year, the National Secular Society published a report based on polling by More in Common called Britons and Secularism. Using More in Common’s well-known segmentation of groups into seven categories—for brevity, I will not detail them now—it found that 50% of the population is either unhappy with the social contract such that they have lost faith in traditional institutions or feel abandoned and overlooked by political elites—of course, by that we mean the political parties represented here—or, alternatively, they are highly distrustful of institutions and feel entirely disconnected from society.
While there is a clear consensus in the public mind that religious expression should be tolerated, this is accompanied by unease when religion seeks to impose itself where it is not wanted or is used to obstruct the rights and freedoms of others. The public are deeply uneasy when religious groups receive special privileges from the state, such as the IHRA or Islamophobia definitions. This latter point is extremely important to social cohesion, as the public holds a settled liberal instinct that faith belongs in the personal sphere and that the public space should be governed by shared civic values such as equality, the rule of law and the right to criticise ideas, including religious ones.
A further feature of public scepticism is the role of religious charities, and here I pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, where,
“the public draws a clear red line against any blurring of charity work … and believe that the promotion of religion should not automatically grant charitable status”.
In questioning support for the legal activities of religious charities, including the ideas, for example, that being gay is a sin or that women should obey men, around three-quarters of those polled were against either idea. They fly flagrantly against the law in this country on discrimination, and it is something for the Charity Commission to tackle more vigorously than it has done to date.
This brings me to my second theme: the rise of Muslim sectarianism in elections. Much is known of far-right populism, but we do not worry enough about the rise of Muslim sectarianism with loyalty to one’s own religious and ethnic group trumping all other public policy offers from the mainstream parties. The two groups most associated with this are The Muslim Vote, which I will refer to as TMV, and Vote Palestine, which have successfully carved out certain constituencies into bloc votes to win elections. Policy Exchange’s second report into this trend, Islamopopulism Part 2, highlights how both groups have positioned themselves to direct Muslim voters towards candidates best able, in their words, to “punish” principally the Labour Party but also the Conservatives.
We know that all mainstream political parties face pressure groups that want them to move in a certain direction, but when real intimidation is employed against prospective parliamentary candidates going about their normal duties in election campaigning, and when this remains unprosecuted in law, we are in real danger. One only has to look at the treatment suffered by defeated MPs Jon Ashworth or Kate Hollern, or those recently elected such as Jess Phillips, Shabana Mahmood, Naz Shah, Roshanara Ali or Wes Streeting, who faced unusually toxic levels of abuse from some Muslim voters. What discussions are the Government having with the Electoral Commission on forthcoming legislation regarding criminal offences for the harassment of or hatred directed at candidates in elections?
I ask this as we have seen an increase in custom-made electoral literature, both print and digital, in non-English—not a translation of leaflets from the languages of our country, English, Welsh or Gaelic, into others, but leaflets containing entirely different messages in languages that a neighbour does not receive or that an opponent cannot read without specialist translation. We saw ample demonstrations of this in the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, with videos carrying inflammatory material in Urdu, which if said in English would have encountered a vigorous response from the majority of the voting public. I do not have time today to go into what those different dog whistles contained, but suffice it to say they were not run-of-the-mill political opposition messages.
Part of the problem lies with the Electoral Commission itself, which publishes its information in a multitude of languages as the norm. This works against efforts at integration and social cohesion. Why, when it takes several years to become a citizen and to vote, is the assumption from our independent Electoral Commission that voters will not understand English? Once the commission sends a signal that our citizens can never expect to form the mainstream of the voting public, what hope is there for integration or incentives towards active citizenship? It is time that we ensure that electoral and printed campaign materials must only be produced in English, Welsh or other UK languages. The Electoral Commission cannot be expected to chase around checking compliance in material in potentially dozens of different languages.
I conclude by coming back to where I began: the British public, who do not want this. The More in Common research is clear that shared civic values, equality and the rule of law take precedence over unrestrained religious strictures in the public mind. They are deeply uneasy when religion imposes itself in the public sphere. The public understand this. I hope that in time the political parties will too.
The Lord Bishop of Leicester
My Lords, I too am hugely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner. Our belief systems may differ, but we share much in common still.
I speak as chair of a new Church of England working group on promoting unity in our nation, a role that has made me think hard about the three threats before us today and what they mean for our common life, indeed for the Church and for other faith groups. I believe that the three threats that the noble Lord has highlighted—our susceptibility to disinformation, foreign interference and falling trust in our democratic institutions—share a primary underlying cause: the slow loss of the institutions in which people once learned to trust one another and act together.
In decades past, people found recognition and a sense of agency and belonging in the institutions closest to them: the parish and the chapel, the union, the club—the bodies that stood between the individual and the distant powers of state and market. In the past 50 years, both the membership of such bodies and their numbers have fallen dramatically. Without them, we have fewer spaces that bring people together across difference in search of a common aim, fewer ways to learn and practise the habits of democracy and fewer chances to trace the arc from discussion to decision to impact—the very things that give people a sense of participation and, with it, trust in our institutions.
Trust, though, has not disappeared; it has migrated, to online influencers, with whom people form parasocial relationships, and to new in-groups built on shared identity, often mobilised against a particular other. That is where foreign interference and disinformation thrive, because online we make ourselves far more open to manipulation by distant actors. As Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, put it, anger and hatred are the easiest way to grow the online platform.
In line with that, a recent BBC “Panorama” investigation traced a network of “patriotic” British anti-immigration accounts—pages with names like “Great British People”—that claim to be based in Yorkshire but actually operate from south Asia and the Gulf. Many of these had posted on entirely different subjects before pivoting to anti-immigration content because it drew more engagement and so more advertising revenue. People with no stake in our common life are profiting from deepening its fractures. Such content can give people a sense of common cause, but it is an ersatz belonging, one that depends entirely on the construction of a shared enemy.
I will go further still. It is not merely that populist movements benefit from the decline of our civic infrastructure; they have an interest in dismantling it. A thick, local, plural civil society does three things that this kind of politics cannot abide. First, a plural civil society meets the very hungers for recognition and purpose on which the populist movement feeds. Secondly, a plural civil society mixes the very people a populist movement would prefer to keep sorted into “us” and “them”. Thirdly, particularly where faith-based institutions are concerned, civil society offers a cultivated conscience, a reason to say no to manipulation or controlling behaviour, and to insist on the dignity of those whom a populist movement may wish to exclude. A people bound together by real and overlapping loyalties is far more resistant to fearmongering and far harder to divide, and so these loyalties must be loosened accordingly.
We see where this road leads. In Germany, the churches have declared ethnic nationalism incompatible with the Christian faith and the main far-right party, the AfD, unelectable for Christians. The response from the party, which claims to value Christianity, has been a move to cut the churches’ public funding. I am fearful of people who wish to wear the costume of Christianity with little care for its creeds and doctrines—those who parade the cross of Christ in anything but the name of love, and who speak of Christian values but are careless of the places in which they are learned and practised. Someone not given to overstatement recently spoke to me of what he called the existential threat—for us as a Church, but indeed for us as a democracy.
I am sorry to say that I am not persuaded that the measures taken so far—through the Online Safety Act, the Representation of the People Bill, the Pride in Place programme, and so on—come anywhere near meeting the scale of the threat that we face. I therefore make this plea to the Government: treat these threats, and the causes behind them, with the seriousness they demand. Rebuild the places where, across our differences, we still learn to trust one another. For a people who have somewhere to belong are far harder to set against each other, and that is the surest defence that we have.
Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for giving us this opportunity, and I have enjoyed listening to the speeches so far. As has already been said, we have a real crisis of trust in politics and our institutions. I want to talk about why, and what I think we must do about it.
I turn first to disinformation, which I agree is a real problem. Foreign state actors clearly engage in it; social media and AI make the spread of disinformation easier and cheaper than ever before. The Government must reflect this threat in their defence and the security of the United Kingdom. As real and problematic as disinformation is, and indeed is other foreign state activity described by noble Lords today, it is not why we are experiencing such low levels of public trust in Parliament, politicians, traditional media and many of our other institutions. Disinformation is not pulling people away, as I think we might sometimes find easier to believe. If we are to earn people’s trust again, we must understand that what we are doing is pushing them away from us to look for something new, whether that is different sources of information, political parties or places of solace.
When we are talking about public trust, it is important to understand that levels vary between different demographic groups. One of my bugbears with the BBC, when it talks about being the most trusted news provider, is its failure to acknowledge, at least publicly, that, among a certain group, levels of trust in it are very low. I think if it did that, it would find life so much easier. It should be no surprise that the demographic group most distrusting of the political and media classes are people who were leave voters and live in the post-industrial and coastal towns and in rural areas—the people who have consistently voted for and demanded change for at least the last 10 years and whose demands have not yet been met.
Worse than that, they have observed politicians battle among ourselves to stop Brexit and to not reduce immigration, never mind to not stop illegal immigration. These are the same people who have watched as the law-abiding and taxpaying are subject to more taxes, rules and regulations, while lawbreakers get away with whatever they choose to do.
The expectations and demands of these people are legitimate. They deserve to be taken seriously and shown respect. Indeed, what they want would create better conditions for far more people than just them, but they are the people, who we have already heard about, who have lost out most over the last 30 years or so. It is that we ignore or wilfully misunderstand them—sometimes even abuse them for their views and demands of us—that is making them give up on us.
Mainstream political parties and traditional broadcast media—it is the broadcast media and the BBC in particular which have the biggest responsibility in this area—have a choice. We either acknowledge where we have gone wrong or been too slow when it was obvious we needed to change course, or we continue to see the rise of alternatives who are very good at showing that they understand people’s legitimate frustrations, even though it is fair to question whether they can or will deliver the solutions they promise.
My own party does not escape blame. I backed Kemi Badenoch to lead the Conservatives because I believe she has what it takes to meet the challenge that I described. For example, she has admitted where we went wrong on net zero and our failings on immigration and is showing how we have learned from that in the plan she is coming forward with. That is why I think she is making some headway. But I know, even though she is making some headway, that my party still has a lot of work to do.
However, if we all really care about restoring trust in political institutions, the whole political class—by that I mean all parliamentarians, including the Cross-Benchers and the Bishops, because do not think for one moment that they are not as much a part of the problem as everyone else—have to start showing that we know where we have been going wrong and start putting it right. While, of course, we have policy differences, as we should in democratic politics, it is our disregard of and disrespect for what the majority has been voting for that is the common cause of their disrespect and distrust in us.
Time is running out. Our institutions, whether political, media or others, should be the solution to our divided society that represents a real threat to our future and is being exploited by our enemies. But we are losing our moral authority to lead these institutions because we are denying our part in creating the problem that our institutions were previously trusted to be the solution to. Blaming disinformation, or voters for wanting simple solutions to complex problems—by the way, I think that is such a disrespectful thing to ever claim, because I just do not believe that is what people want; what they want from us is a demonstration that we understand the problems that they are facing from their perspective—is displacement activity. If we do not show that we understand how we are the problem and that it is us, not the public, who need to change, we will be powerless to stop our institutions from being demolished, or they will crash.
Baroness Gill (Lab)
My Lords, I join the chorus of congratulations and thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing this debate on a crucial subject. The United Kingdom has stood as a global beacon of democratic values, the rule of law and peaceful transfer of power for centuries. I was often told in the European Parliament that I was representing the mother of all democracies, so it is good that we are having this debate. But what concerns me is that those foundations are under severe threat. Those threats are not just from marching armies but from poisoning our collective minds and sowing the seeds of mistrust. It is now easier, quicker and cheaper to do this than to attack us physically. So it is good that we have a recognition of these issues and are having this debate.
I will add my own experience. When I was elected, the level of vile social media comments I got—going back to the early days of the internet, early websites and social media—was unimaginable. I did not mind them attacking me on my politics—we are there to have those debates—but I did mind that it was about my race and my sex. That was a problem, and it is why so many women parliamentarians have these issues. I have stopped doing social media as a result. It is important that we educate the general public about how to react to and interact with politicians. I associate myself with the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about yesterday’s PMQs. I was embarrassed and shocked at how low our democratic debate had fallen when I watched that.
Moving back to the subject, I welcome that the Government instigated the Rycroft review, which reported in March this year. I am sure that everybody is familiar with the fact that it noted that our political and financial systems are increasingly targeted by hostile foreign actors—it named Russia, China and Iran mainly—that try to covertly manipulate our political discourse. Their goal is to inject discord, poison our core values and polarise our society. They are infiltrating the digital space where we communicate and debate. This is not simple propaganda but lies on an industrial scale.
With algorithms, malign forces can now spread deepfakes, bot networks and false narratives at an unbelievable speed and on a global scale. On the doorstep prior to the 2024 election campaign, I recall hearing arguments worded in the same way about our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. One woman in Bromsgrove said to me, “Why don’t they just leave him alone? I get these all day long”. She showed me her phone notifications page, full of anti-Keir notifications from Facebook. I heard exactly the same arguments elsewhere in the West Midlands when I was campaigning in that general election. I have friends in India who sometimes receive exactly the same messages about our politicians as we do here. Clearly, the bots cannot tell the difference between people being in the UK or elsewhere. I often have to defend our democracy to them and say that it is not that bad, because they are getting all this misinformation.
So it is hardly surprising that trust in politicians is at an all-time low. Much has been said in the last few days, and the media are wondering why we are about to have the seventh Prime Minister in 10 years. Maybe we need to look at how these algorithms have been manipulated to demonise individuals. I suspect that, as long as our future PMs remain committed to supporting Ukraine, they will continue to be targeted in the same way.
With the indulgence of the House, I will reiterate some points that I made in a debate earlier this week about subversion of our democracy. It is not new; it has been systematically grinding away in our society since well before the Brexit referendum. I remember scrolling through my own feeds years ago, receiving highly targeted anti-EU questionnaires on social media. Platforms such as Facebook were not just places to connect; they were being actively weaponised to push an anti-EU narrative. Their sole aim was to manufacture chaos and shatter public trust in our core institutions.
What we see today is simply an escalation of that same campaign, but there is no longer just a quiet wall of digital propaganda. The line between foreign espionage and domestic terror has evaporated. We need to modernise our financial frameworks and have the means to regulate cryptocurrencies and Russian bots. The Government must apply the same urgency to countering state-sponsored information warfare as they do to traditional national security. Perhaps we need to look at our near neighbours such as France and Sweden, which have set up departments to tackle disinformation. It is also important that we have transparency in political financing, close loopholes that allow opaque funding to influence our elections and treat foreign interference as the severe state threat that it is.
Baroness Featherstone (LD)
My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this important debate. He and others have already hit the nail on the head by referring to the loss of trust. However, we speak of disinformation, foreign interference and declining trust in politics as though they form a straightforward chain of cause and effect. We assume that disinformation leads to declining trust. It does, of course, but that is not the whole story. The reason disinformation has become so potent is that trust had already ebbed away. Once trust has gone, foreign actors can exploit distrust. They can amplify and weaponise it, but can they really create it from nothing? I do not think so.
Across much of the democratic world, we have witnessed the rise of populist parties and anti-establishment movements. Many of us disagree with their solutions and some of us are alarmed by their rhetoric. Yet we must face the fact that millions of people have turned to them because they felt that the established order was no longer working for them. In some respects, perhaps the status quo did need a rocket up its backside, because too many people felt ignored, too many communities felt left behind and too many citizens came to believe that decisions affecting their lives were being taken by people who neither understood nor cared about their concerns—I am beginning to sound like Andy Burnham; I apologise. That sense of disconnection did not arrive with social media. It has been building for years.
Politicians must not imagine that we stand outside this story. Indeed, I sometimes think that we are far too quick to diagnose the public’s loss of faith and far too slow to ask what role we ourselves might have played in creating it. Over-promising and under-delivering is not a recent phenomenon: nor is the temptation to prefer the short-term headline to the long-term solution. Politics appears now to be far more about messaging than actual delivery. Trust is not restored by demanding respect; it can be restored only by demonstrating integrity.
This issue is not just around politics. Everything we used to believe in—pillars of integrity and truth—is indicted. Over recent decades, the public have watched a succession of scandals unfold. What conclusions should they have been expected to draw? Churches have moved abusive clergy rather than confronting that abuse. The Post Office has prosecuted innocent people while insisting its systems could not be wrong. The families of Hillsborough victims have had to spend years fighting for the truth. Victims of the contaminated blood scandal—I always have to declare an interest as my nephew was a victim, killed, in my view, by the state—have spent decades seeking recognition and justice. Meanwhile, institutions have defended themselves, withheld information, covered things up and resisted accountability. Only today, we are learning about the horrors of the Nottingham hospital maternity and baby unit scandal.
I sometimes wonder why we are surprised by a loss of trust that should not, in truth, surprise us at all, because the issue is not that institutions make mistakes—every institution made up of human beings will make mistakes—but what happens next. Do they tell the truth? Do they admit their errors? Apparently not. Do they place truth above their reputation? No. Do they close ranks? Yes, they do.
Nor can we ignore the role of the media in our decline and fall. For generations, newspapers and broadcasters acted as intermediaries between events and public understanding, but no longer. Many people regard the media as just another institution whose motives they question and, sadly, quite rightly. The relentless pressure of the 24-hour news cycle, the race to be first, the search for attention in an increasingly crowded marketplace and the tendency to frame issues as conflicts rather than problems to be solved have all played their part. Outrage attracts attention; nuance does not. If citizens lose confidence not only in politicians and institutions but in those whose role it is, or was, to hold them to account, where do they turn for reliable information?
Internationally, we are seeing similar contradictions. Citizens see institutions that were established to uphold human rights apparently unable to prevent atrocities, while countries with deeply troubling human rights records sit on, and sometimes even lead, bodies charged with defending those same human rights. This is a world gone mad.
Healthy scepticism is a virtue in a democracy, but scepticism can curdle into cynicism, and cynicism creates a fertile ground for conspiracy theories, disinformation and those who seek to divide us. If we wish to defend our democracy against disinformation and foreign interference then of course we must challenge falsehoods wherever they arise, expose hostile actors and protect the integrity of our democratic processes, but we also absolutely must rebuild trust—not through slogans, public relations, lines to take or demanding respect, but by ensuring that our institutions, our politics, our media, online and off, and our public life are worthy of it. For, once trust is lost, everything else becomes much harder to sustain against the malign influences that seek to destroy our democracy.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for enabling this debate because it gives us an opportunity to puncture the hysteria and moral panic that seem to have overwhelmed most of the British political class in recent years about disinformation, misinformation, foreign interference and all that. The noble Lord said something like, “I hope we all agree we have a problem”. It depends what he means by that. I agree that there is certainly a problem in disdain for politics and politicians. I do not agree that foreign interference, disinformation and all those sort of things are at the root of it. For after all, there has always been disinformation and foreign interference. It is not new; only the panic is new. There have always been people who want to harm us in this country.
Many of your Lordships, like me, lived through at least the end of the Cold War. Have we forgotten that the Soviet Union spent 40 years trying to undermine British politics and British society? Then, there really was a real threat, and it even recruited a few Labour MPs to help it, if I remember correctly, but we did not clamp down on free speech to deal with that. Free speech was much freer then than it is now. We allowed people to advocate all sorts of terrible ideologies because we had confidence in the British people’s ability not to take them seriously. Now, seemingly, all that has changed.
I expect a few noble Lords are familiar with Google Ngram, which allows you to track when words suddenly started to be used in public debate. These words all took off in around the middle of the last decade: misinformation suddenly shoots up from the middle of 2015; disinformation, even though many of us think of it as a Cold War concept, was hardly used, but now it has shot up as a concept and a usage; nobody had heard of “fake news” until it shot up as an idea in the middle of the last decade.
Was there some new external threat in the middle of the last decade—something new and dramatic that we had never faced before? I do not think there was. What we had was the election of President Trump and the Brexit referendum. A tide of hysteria was unleashed on the back of that—a fear of voters and a belief that they could not be trusted to make good decisions. There was endless worrying about malign actors, foreign agents, bot farms, weaponised Facebook and all that sort of thing. Politicians were forced to confront that many people did not agree with them. Rather than deal with that, they decided to blame the voters and take the view that, in the social media world, the ill-informed populace was easy prey to false beliefs, conspiracies, malign state interference and all the rest of it. Too many people, I am afraid, seem to believe that ordinary voters are too stupid to make their minds up about things or to distinguish between the true and the false. They think it is the Government’s job to do it for them instead.
We have a case in point in the absurd and dangerous Rycroft review, referred to earlier, which was written not to identify problems but to justify unnecessary and authoritarian solutions. Mr Rycroft worries about the
“coarsening of the political debate in a toxic online environment”
and that
“even marginal impacts could have a disproportionate bearing on … democratic discourse … confidence in our democracy”
and so on. He then uses this to justify an entirely illiberal clampdown on political party financing. Unfortunately, the Government seem to be taking this seriously. If implemented, this approach will do much more harm to our ability to run a democracy than any number of distasteful posts on X or Bluesky.
The problem with all this is that the worst and most difficult to correct disinformation and misinformation comes not from the general public but from the Government. That is the problem with government-based solutions. The list is long: the 45-minute dossier; the hoax around supposed collusion with Russia; the prediction that an economic crash was inevitable if we left the EU; the Hunter Biden laptop; the refusal to countenance the lab leak theory about Covid; the belief that wearing a flimsy mask could protect you from the disease; the reluctance, for a long time, to drop the belief that the Covid vaccine stopped the transmission of the virus; and, most recently, the reluctance to acknowledge the background of Axel Rudakubana and the fact that he was in possession of an al-Qaeda manual and tried to make ricin.
Governments are not to be trusted on this stuff. They promote contested issues as facts all the time and expect people simply to fall in line. This is why their seeming plans to require social media to promote only trusted sources are so dangerous. The BBC may, for some reason, still be the most trusted news provider in the country, but look at its record—the fabrications on Israel/Gaza, its obsession with trans issues and its fabrications of elements of the famous Trump documentary. No single organisation is to be trusted.
If there is a lack of confidence in our democracy and institutions, and I am sure there is, it is because they do not deserve it. Governments do not listen to voters’ clear messages. They block clear votes. Your Lordships’ House—dare I say it—and many others might have had a role to play during the Brexit era in undermining that confidence. Politicians and Governments have not delivered. The responsibility for the problem rests with politicians and institutions. It will not be made better by concealing things from voters and clamping down on social media.
The only solution to the problem we have is taking people seriously, allowing debate, being honest about things, letting voters make their own minds up and having confidence that they will be able to sift true from false, as they always have done. Freedom, free speech, a free society—those are the tools. Say no to the platonic guardians—it is the only sound basis. Trust the people.
Lord Risby (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on initiating this most timely debate.
The health of our precious democracy cannot be measured solely by a single transactional event at the ballot box. It is a continuous long-term process of how we shape our shared future. Our democratic institutions are the hard-won inheritance of our history, the bedrock of our freedom, and the foundations on which we face a synchronised, asymmetric challenge from foreign actors who wish to subvert our sovereignty from within.
This brings us directly to foreign interference, a growing assault on our country. By utilising clandestine networks, cyber operations and illicit funding, hostile regimes ruthlessly attempt to influence British policy, disrupt critical infrastructure and manipulate democratic outcomes. This meddling seeks to ensure that policy decisions serve foreign interests rather than the common good of the British people, reared on free speech and opinion, by stifling open debate in our universities and establishing structures to intimidate minority communities who live here. To maintain a strong and secure nation, Britain absolutely has to protect its borders, institutions and political processes from any external manipulation.
Foreign technological disruption targets our citizens so as to fragment our society into polarised, adversarial echo chambers. To counter this, we must look not just at the source of disinformation but its actual channels. The younger generation is increasingly turning away from conventional news, relying instead on platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Hostile foreign states hold significant opaque sway over the very algorithms that act to promote the information that our youth consumes.
We are an increasingly diverse society. When citizens can no longer distinguish between verifiable facts and deliberate fabrications, the state loses its capacity to forge a unified national consensus on vital strategic interests. Political warfare deliberately leverages social cleavages, such as economic disparities or cultural anxieties, in extreme cases leading to violence, so shockingly manifested recently. Declining trust in political institutions poses a severe threat to the stability and governance of our country. When the public perceive that the political and legal system serves a particular ideology or specific groups, the foundational bond between the citizen and the national state dissolves.
This alienation leads to voter apathy, civic disengagement and the rise in populist movements. This in turn has consequences for Britain’s global position, as a state perceived increasingly in some respects as lacking internal legitimacy and as fundamentally weak and unstable. If this trust collapses, hostile foreign intelligence agencies can then exploit domestic cynicism or disconnection to sow discord, reducing our overall power on the world stage.
We have suffered, regrettably, unacceptable security failings which have arisen out of hostile sources. It is critical that our digital resilience is treated as a core pillar of national defence, reinforced by robust trilateral security partnerships such as AUKUS. The decline in public trust in politics is our greatest structural vulnerability. The legitimacy of our state rests upon a basic social contract that our political and legal systems operate fairly and transparently. When the public perceive these as remote or choked by excessive Whitehall control, disconnection takes root.
We must also ensure that we do not lose sight of the strategic dangers within our political finance framework. Having spent more than 20 years in the financial sector, I know how easily complex corporate accounting can be weaponised, with cryptocurrency exchanges being but one example. If we allow opaque shell networks with no genuine domestic footprint to route wealth into our political system, we are, in effect, leaving a back door open for hostile foreign interference.
The United Kingdom has unique, complicated and often separate constitutional structures. Our vulnerability is enhanced by greater cultural differences. From time to time, I receive deeply and grotesquely unpleasant emails seeking to exploit and magnify those differences. We are threatened by those, abroad or living here, who despise our history and our open and free way of life. The sacred duty of the state is the defence of the realm and the preservation of our national independence. We are currently struggling to find the resources to pay for increased defence expenditure, but defence spending has to encompass sufficient resources, so that we have the capability to deal assertively with the way that hostile countries and organisations seek to infiltrate our country.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this debate—there could hardly be a more important one. It might surprise noble Lords to hear me say that. In this unprecedented heatwave, with the people and infrastructure of these islands melting around us, noble Lords might expect me to say that we should talk about the climate emergency and particularly climate adaptation. I often do just that, especially having just come off the number 390 bus. I am speaking about political resilience today precisely because it is a crucial part of climate adaptation.
Whatever the specifications of our rail lines, the designs of our school buildings or the nature of our food system, the single most important thing for the coming difficult decades—this age of shocks, in which climate is just one of the seven planetary boundaries we have burst through, to which geopolitical and health shocks, for starters, can be added to the tally of threats—is the resilience of our politics. That includes the trust and empowerment of individuals and organisations to make decisions under life and death pressures as well as during the daily grind. The ability to prioritise and make the right survival choices is crucial. That means a functional politics, starting from the smallest village and progressing up to the giant, fragile city of London and the national scale. That means a functioning democracy, in which everyone can contribute, have a say and share their knowledge, skills and energy.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, gave us a starter list of subjects for today on the growing threats to democratic institutions. The first was disinformation. We have already heard—and no doubt will hear a lot more—about social media and the terrible lies and slurs to be found on it. That is all true, of course, and the people who profit from it—the handful of Silicon Valley billionaires and their friends, with whom our Government are all too often cosying up, inviting them in closer with lucrative contracts, giving them effective control over vital public infrastructure—present a problem of political trust. But that disinformation is widely spread across traditional legacy media as well. This week I heard a noble Lord suggest that we should put “mainstream newspapers” into schools to inform the pupils. Well, no thanks: we do not want the racism, sexism, transphobia and other prejudices found in many of them—directed by the handful of right-wing media tycoons who own them—to be fed to our pupils, at least not without far better critical thinking and media literacy education than we have now.
Another subject is foreign interference. We get the politics that the few pay for—and it is no wonder the people do not trust that, wherever on the planet the money comes from. There is no doubt that we are in a grey-zone information conflict with states that have one interest: destabilising us. Those tech bros are again providing convenient tools for that form of warfare and profiting from it. But we are creating fertile conditions for those seeds to sprout and grow. After all, we read the reliably reported news today that the current Chancellor is asking big business and its representatives to lobby the person presumed to be our future Prime Minister to keep her job.
The final subject on the list of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is declining trust in politics, which is what I want to mostly focus on. I do not think I have yet mentioned in the Chamber that a have a new book out, titled Green Thinking. Its subtitle begins with a word that needs to be inserted into all our dialogues and thought: unlearning. It is the systems of thought and approaches to life, from anthropocentrism to reductionism and neocolonialism to growthism—the ideology of a cancer cell—that got us into this state, and we need very different thinking to get out of it.
One thought pattern—and I will not single anyone out, but we have heard a great deal of it today—is that we were on the right path around the 1990s and we have strayed from it, and that we had democratic institutions and, somehow, lost them. The suggestion is that we need to get back on the path. That is a profound fault in thinking. Thia overheated, globally unstable and unhealthy planet is the product of the 20th century, the result of 40 years of extractivism, toxic growth obsession and trickle-down theories of well-being. The profound mistrust is the result of our political institutions and structures.
Francis Fukuyama was only reflecting the general thought pattern of the 1990s in saying that we had reached the end of history and the peak of human achievement in our political and economic systems—what we were always meant to get to. That thesis looks pretty silly now, but at the core of it was liberal democracy and the electoral politics of majoritarianism—the people of these islands and the world being told that they had only one role in politics: to decide who ran the system, to turn up and vote between two choices occasionally. They were not to even think about having the agency, the power or the right to change the system to make different economic and social choices collectively in their communities.
So, what to do? I look around the Chamber and I see many noble Lords who were not here at the start of the Covid pandemic. As the Covid inquiry has shown, there were huge failures of leadership then and a deadly lack of seriousness in our Government. There was also a demonstration that in an emergency there are existing tools for the Government to act fast. We are, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, in a democratic emergency, so we need to tackle the threat to the political systems by making them far more democratic.
I have heard people say that we cannot change the voting system or the constitutional arrangements now—that we have to wait years for an election for a mandate from voters. There is no alternative, they say. Oh, yes there is. We hear from the man who we assume will be the next Prime Minister about the plans to devolve power out to the regions. That would be great, but what we most need to do—the single key step in this democratic emergency—is to ensure that in the next election the people’s voice and views are represented in Parliament and that we have a fair, proportional voting system. As the brilliant organisation Make Votes Matter says, make votes match seats.
In the May council elections in Birmingham, a first past the post election, a Green was elected with 20.5% of the vote. Of course, I am glad the Green won, but I feel for the other people in that ward. Let us fast-forward to the next general election and imagine similar results up and down the country. Democracy would be a good idea, and having a genuine democracy would create a far more resilient society for this very difficult age.
Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)
My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for procuring this important debate. I will focus my comments on the acceleration of the dissemination of disinformation which we are seeing in our media. I believe that is having an effect on public trust, and I would like to think about what can be done about it.
This week, I read with great interest the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, which looked at news consumption in 45 markets globally. All the markets showed a huge increase in consumption of news from social media and AI chatbots and, with it, a massive increase in distrust about news from these sources, caused by myths, disinformation and deepfakes. The search found that the US, which has seen the biggest increase in social media news consumption, has only 25% of audiences saying they trust news from all sources.
What I found interesting was what is happening in Germany, France and the UK, where there is high trust in news from public service broadcasters. In the UK, while the trust in social media was low, trust in the PSBs and the Financial Times was at nearly 60%, although I take the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, that there are large groups who do not trust the BBC and our other public service media.
It is therefore not surprising that a study by the European Broadcasting Union found that AI news summaries misrepresented the news 45% of the time, stating opinion as fact and producing what the tech bros call “hallucinations”, and what I imagine noble Lords would call lies.
Inevitably, AI is used increasingly by all news services, including our own public service broadcasters such as the BBC. However, unlike commercial AI, which is driven by profit and engagement, the BBC has a set of AI principles that are driven by editorial values, upholding trust, respect and inclusivity, and, most importantly, its AI output is checked by a human before it is published.
As other noble Lords have said, this is happening in the midst of a propaganda war fought by many bad actors, but the main players are Russia and China, which are estimated to spend up £8 billion annually on public disinformation, which is fed into social media and video-sharing platforms.
The best way of fighting back is not just for users to be educated in how to treat disinformation critically but to explain how the disinformation is generated. It is important not only that the BBC and other trusted news sources correct stories which are misinformation but that they show users how to spot this misinformation. For instance, the Southport riots last year were instigated in large part by a huge uptick in social media falsely claiming that the attacker was an asylum seeker. As part of the BBC’s Bitesize series, “Other Side of the Story” explained where the false posts had come from and how they had been amplified by the manosphere’s Andrew Tate. By linking in search the keywords “Southport”, “Muslim” and “asylum”, these posts were given emotional charge and a much higher online engagement.
These explainers are generated by the BBC’s unique Verify service of 60 digital journalists who use forensic digital technology to build audience trust by fact checking, verifying images and countering disinformation using advanced data analysis such as tracing the source of an image and looking at similarities in an account’s store of images. They are also looking for tiny inconsistencies. I was shown the image of an AI-generated man; if you looked carefully, you could see that he had six fingers—some clue there. They can also spot digital AI signifiers, which are invisible to the naked eye. Ofcom found Verify to be the most used fact checker in the country. These Bitesize videos were originally aimed at young digital users but are now a crucial weapon for combating disinformation.
The BBC has made a valiant attempt to counter disinformation, but more resources and political drive need to be made available to both it and other public service media to support these efforts. That is why I welcome the Government’s new policy paper Watch this Space, which recognises the role played by the BBC in providing a healthy information environment. It is encouraging to read in the paper that audiences are more likely to engage with media literacy programmes delivered by organisations they trust. Can the Minister confirm that she agrees with the suggestion in the paper of a duty which requires public service media to set out their plans for media literacy strategy, and can she say whether she supports the public service media taking the lead in this literacy campaign?
At the same time, the BBC is putting forward its response to the charter review Green Paper on whether media literacy across the country should become one of its public purposes. This, combined with the media literacy action plan, is crucial if digital users are going effectively to confront the new world of disinformation online.
At the same time, the Online Safety Act could be revisited to bring it more in line with the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to conduct a risk assessment of how their services affect civic discourse. The OSA asks, “Is this piece of content harmful to this user?”, whereas the DSA has a much further reach, asking the platform, “Is your system design generating societal-level harms regardless of any individual post?”
Unfortunately, the DSA has left too much responsibility up to the platforms. They are allowed to carry out their own audit of their own systemic risk assessment and often conclude their systems are fine. If Parliament looks again at the Online Safety Act, it will have to assess the societal threats posed by many platforms. Ofcom needs to set the parameters of the risk assessments and audit their compliance. I believe that is what Parliament intended when the OSA was discussed in this Chamber in 2023.
The fight against disinformation is so important to maintaining our democracy and our way of life, but I believe that, with determined government action, it is a battle we can fight, and fight successfully.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is right to raise the important issue of threats to democratic institutions. He has asked us to consider disinformation, foreign interference and levels of distrust in politics. Disinformation as a weapon used by hostile states is a serious threat that needs to be tackled vigorously. However, we must be honest and admit that, sometimes, blaming foreign interference can itself be a form of disinformation. Everything from 17.4 million people voting to leave the EU 10 years ago—happy Brexit week, by the way—to the proposition that Covid originated in a Wuhan lab were falsely blamed on Russian bots. We should interrogate whether an overzealous focus on foreign interference and disinformation and misinformation is being too easily weaponised by hostile forces closer to home: domestic politicians.
This bad habit has partly contributed to a collapse of trust, based on hypocrisy. One of the final legacy policies bequeathed by Keir Starmer as Prime Minister has been the proposal that the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, has just mentioned, forcing major platforms such as Facebook and YouTube to algorithmically boost content from “trusted” public service broadcasters, especially the BBC. The stated reason is fighting disinformation. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, pointed out, how grotesque is that, when public trust in the state broadcaster has taken a battering lately due to documented scandals of fabrication? Where were the BBC fact-checkers when the BBC spliced together two separate parts of a Donald Trump speech to make it appear that he told his supporters to march on the Capitol and fight while cutting the part where he told them to protest peacefully? Rather than a mistake in editing, that appears to have been produced to create a false impression.
What is more, the BBC’s own internal memo prompted by the scandal admitted egregious distortion of coverage of the war in Gaza, such as uncritical airtime regularly given to Hamas propaganda and personnel on BBC Arabic. It also acknowledged a unit of activist reporters distorting coverage of the gender/sex debate to fit a pro-trans ideology agenda. You cannot get a more obvious example of disinformation than BBC journalists stating as fact that trans women are women, in defiance of biology, truth and now the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, while illiberal regulations are justified as necessary to protect the public from being manipulated by disinformation, lots of solutions involve official manipulation—but for the greater good, so that is okay. That takes an insidious form of nudge units or Orwellian narrative control techniques. The recent revelations about the role of the Research, Information and Communications Unit based in the Home Office is a chilling case in point. Examples include advice to the police on how to present a wide range of protesters as unsympathetic thugs or helping to shape statements from victims’ families to keep the lid on any public rage, however deserved, over horrendous crimes.
What about narrative control NGOs, which receive millions of pounds in public support to influence public opinion through the media? One example is the recent revelation that a racial injustice influencer—whatever that means—was employed to write pro-migration storylines for EastEnders. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy stressed that TV is a cornerstone of democracy and, as such, a key tool in “supporting social cohesion”. Well, that is one way to describe the embedding of partisan political viewpoints in broadcasting cultural artefacts; another might be propaganda.
Despite such examples, when politicians discuss disinformation their target is rarely such dodgy interventions or state misdemeanours and untruths. Instead, the debate often takes the form of self-righteous campaigns against foreign actors manipulating the easily duped masses. As a consequence, it seems that there is no problem that allegedly threatens the democratic institutions that cannot be solved by controlling what ordinary people can see and read, or by limiting the information that the public have access to, often deploying tactics which betray civil liberties and democratic norms, such as censorship or surveillance.
This seems as though it is driven by the management of voters’ increasing refusal to unquestioningly accept PR about policies as though it is truth. Popular scepticism about, for example, the hidden economic costs of net-zero targets or fury at years of deception by the state about the statistics on mass migration are met with incredulity. Warwick University’s professor of philosophy, Quassim Cassam, has written insightfully on this issue, locating the start of this trend back to 2016, as has already been mentioned. The establishment’s shock and surprise at the election results that year led to a despairing question: why and how on earth did millions vote for Brexit or for Trump? Rather than digging deeper, the standard liberal answer, Professor Cassam argues, was that those voters voted the wrong way because they were either irrational or victims of misinformation. He argues that this conclusion by elites
“allows them to explain supposedly ‘deviant’ conduct in a way that doesn’t require them to interrogate their own assumptions”,
while promoting
“the idea that their own political views are not just true, but self-evidently true, so that only some kind of cognitive failure can explain someone else’s failure to share them”.
Such top-down condescension and complacency have led, disastrously, to politicians smearing reasonable popular scepticism about official truths. Over recent years, everything from concerns about two-tier policing, farmers’ fury at inheritance tax hikes and public outrage at the horrors of the rape grooming gangs, through to local opposition to low-traffic neighbourhoods or ULEZ-style anti-car measures, or protests at asylum hotels and much more have been mischaracterised in this House and the other place as having been incited by far-right misinformation or populism—terrible—whipped up by the goateed bogeymen of tech bros, especially Elon Musk. This approach not only avoids the real reason for declining trust but exacerbates it further.
Lord Moraes (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow such excellent speeches. I warmly welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has done, which is to have this profound and overlapping debate at the same time that we are dealing with sensitive legislation. I am sure that my noble friend the Minister will make the connections between some of the speeches earlier this week and today’s debate.
This debate is important because we really need to calibrate what is going on. We need to provide that context and there is still some ambiguity about what we are doing and whether we are doing the right thing. I will be talking about the national security part of this overlapping debate.
As the noble Lord, Lord Frost, implored us not to have a moral panic, I inexplicably started to panic. I am not sure why, but I have calmed down now and maybe I can offer this perspective. The noble Lord talked about the Cold War and what the intelligence services have to do. Some years ago, I had the experience of, first, writing the report on the mass surveillance inquiry after Snowden, and then I chaired the debate on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and political interference. It was an embryonic time, as many of these ideas were being explored.
I am not going to bore your Lordships about European Parliament committees, but will say that we had unprecedented access to serving and retired senior intelligence officers throughout that period, some of whom have kept in touch. What is instructive about those people is that they are not having a moral panic. Their duty and task, whether they are at the DGSE in France, or at GCHQ, SIS or MI6, is to calibrate the threats of foreign interference. What effect is it having on our democracy and do we need to do something about it? There is no fear or favour; they have to represent the current political settlement. I found it fascinating that all these people, across the Five Eyes, DGSE and our own intelligence services, were quite exercised, even then, about what the effect of foreign interference would be.
We have heard eloquent speeches about what the Iranian state is doing to touch on open wounds in this country and antisemitism, and we have heard something of other state actors. I will give the example that they always give, of how the Russian state operates. The common denominator for them is not that the Russian state took a view on National Rally, as it is now, or the Front National, and Brexit. No, their view was that the Russian state was doing exactly what was in the interests of the Russian state, economically and politically. That is exactly what the Iranian state is doing. When they do it, they are targeting us because we are not doing what they want us, as their enemy, to do.
The point is that the people at DGSE, when they were dealing with far-right conspiracies and so on, did not think that the Russian state favoured the Front National, as it was then, or National Rally. If there is a President Bardella and he does not do what the Russian state, the FSB and all their proxies want him to do, they will react. That is the point. They are going for the status quo and gaining advantage economically and politically for their state as a state actor. That is what they are doing.
Why should we believe that? First, there is a kind of uniformity of view across intelligence services, and not just in the European Union space or the European space. Secondly, they make a very clear distinction—and this is what I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Frost. There is a big difference between open and transparent influence activities. You can say what you like from one state to another; the President of the United States had an opinion on the Member for Makerfield this morning. Fine: that is not a problem in the social media world and the world of machine learning. That will happen, minute by minute. That is not the issue. These are open and transparent influence activities, one state to another. What they are concerned about are covert and malign political activities that have an effect. They calibrate them as having an effect; they believe there is an effect of this combined kind of activity.
I will give noble Lords the example of what one of them said. If you take out the different elements of what, say, the Russian state is doing in relation to this country—let us be specific—they will talk about online approaches, financial donations and inducements, cyber compromises and exploiting overseas travel, and exploiting conspiracy theories as fact.
If you take all these things apart, you can dismiss them. You can say, “Well, it happens, intelligence services themselves do bad things”. I was reminded of our beloved and late colleague, Baroness Ramsay, who famously said, “As a young intelligence officer, I often did bad things to bad people for my country”. That is fine—it is what they do—but this has nothing to do with that. This is about bad things happening to states that are just trying to ease along with a liberal democracy and all the imperfections and difficulties that you have in one. Liberal democracies are not perfect: they are full of problems. What our intelligence services believe—and it is the same in France and the Five Eyes—is that this stuff is having an effect. If it is, we need to legislate, regulate and react against it. If it is not and the noble Lord, Lord Frost, is right, it is fine and “fair comment”. “Fair comment” is what the Iranian state is saying—but it is not, is it? What is happening is the perpetration of falsehoods. This is the dividing line. You make stuff up, you create conspiracy theories not based on fact, you perpetrate them and there is an effect.
I am grateful to the Library, which is at last bringing together lots of evidence that there is a causal link between some of the negative things that are happening and the actions of those foreign actors. That is crucial. Without that, it is what the intelligence officers say: “Look, you can dismiss a lot of this, because we do stuff to them and they do stuff to us”. But what we are doing to them—retaliatory measures—is not the core of the problem. The core of the problem is what they did to us when we were not inviting it to be done.
It is the same with the Iranian state. We are not inviting the Iranian state to have a view about the open sores in our communities. People who serve on the front line for us are saying that the common denominator is doing harm to us when it is uninvited. What do we do? Do we stand back and say, “We had the Cold War: it’s fine”. No, it is not fine. This is a serious problem. It deserves serious respect. I look forward to hearing what we are going to do legislatively from the Minister and I apologise for going on too long.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, whom I have considered a friend for some 30 years. He was a great champion for those in the European Parliament who had no voice but his—often overlooked and marginalised groups—and was always in the best Labour tradition of trying to build people up rather than trying to drag others down.
“But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it”.
So wrote JS Mill in On Liberty, which I think is still presented to the president of the Liberal Democrat Party as a kind of badge of office when elected. If noble Lords heard a clanking noise as we opened our debate, I suggest that was the shade of JS Mill hearing the opinions from the Front Bench of the party he served and loved, as expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, because he used the argument that every censorial and authoritarian Government begin with: he started talking about Russia and then he elided into talking about Elon Musk. This is how it always happens. We are presented with some terrorist threat, some terrible foreign actor, and then very quickly it turns into “someone whose opinions I happen not to like”. We, the nation that came through the great wars and travails of the 20th century upholding the principle of free expression, are now expected to throw it all in the air because we do not like someone who is expressing legitimate opinions that are rude about politicians.
Let us consider the JS Mill argument about the importance of the solitary opinion. JS Mill does not argue that free speech matters only for the heretic. He argues that it matters for the rest of us, because how will we know when a consensus is mistaken if we repress challenging or different views? During the pandemic, it was very difficult to express in public the opinion that the virus had originated from a lab leak. If we now look at the evidence, particularly well expressed by our former colleague Viscount Ridley and Alina Chan in their book on the subject, we see that it is very clear that that is the likeliest origin story—yet you would be silenced and forbidden to express that opinion.
Who is to say what is the currently correct but repressed opinion? If you think about it, almost everything, when it is a new idea, begins with one or two heretics: everything from the female franchise to religious toleration. Who are we to say that we should stamp out views that we happen to find difficult? As John Milton put it,
“opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making”.
In other words, as long as you have a free market of ideas, the true ones over time will drive out the false ones.
This is always a difficult argument to make, because we are a tribal species and we are driven by our DNA towards vendetta and feud. We are all in favour of free speech on our side, but we struggle when it is on the other side. I agree very much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, said about why there should not be a state definition of Islamophobia. I think we should all be protected by the same laws. How many people will argue, as I would, that exactly the same must hold true about a state definition of antisemitism, and for the same reason? We should all be defended by the same laws. The people who got very angry and upset about, let us say, the arrest of Graham Linehan over a slightly off-colour joke about trans women or the incarceration of Lucy Connolly after the Southport riots are very rarely equally vocal in their defence of the free speech rights of, let us say, Kneecap when they say that the only good Tory is a dead Tory, or of Bobby Vylan saying, “Death, death to the IDF”.
I would set a very high standard for incitement since I would not consider any of those to be actually likely to incite people—I do not think a stoned theatregoer at Glastonbury is going to jump on the next flight to Ben Gurion Airport and launch himself at the first Israeli soldier he sees because of that call from the stage—but, wherever you set that boundary, you have to apply it consistently. I see that people have great difficulty doing so, not least when it comes to Twitter, which was, I think, the essence of the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace.
When Twitter was banning Donald Trump, we heard from the Washington Post, Vox Media and most Democrats that it was a private company, so it was allowed to do whatever it wanted. The left-wing economist Robert Reich said that the first amendment did not apply to private corporations, and he was absolutely right. However, now that it is owned by Elon Musk, the same Robert Reich says, “Oh, no, it’s an oligarchy. It’s nothing to do with free speech”, and the people who were all in favour of it—when, by the way, it was practising censorship—are now suddenly very upset about it because it is not practising censorship. As I say, we are a tribal species and we find it difficult to apply these standards consistently.
When I say “we”, I think I especially mean “we politicians” because we are sensitive to the attacks that we get. This is not new. A hundred years ago we could have been having a very analogous debate about the power of the press barons—the Rothermeres, the Northcliffes and the Beaverbrooks. Indeed, we were, and people in this Chamber and at the other end suggested various ways of silencing their opinions on exactly the grounds that we just heard. Yet, people were sensible. The British public were not a bunch of dupes. They were able to make up their minds and we came through the 20th century as a country that upheld freedom.
That is the real solution to disinformation and misinformation: not repression, but truth. The best way to defeat a bad idea is to present people with better ideas.
“Let her and Falsehood grapple. Who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
So wrote John Milton in 1644. Ours is the country that gave the world Wycliffe, Wilkes, Milton, Mill, Lilburne and Locke—and that is only the Johns. What country has done more for free expression? How extraordinary that we should be hearing the sentiments that we have just heard in this of all places. Milton, addressing Parliament, said:
“Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governors”.
We defeated the Nazi and Soviet tyrannies but never lost our belief that freedom and free expression made our society better. How extraordinary, after that achievement, now to be seriously talking about ripping it all up because we do not like what is being said about us on Twitter. Lords and Commons of England, consider what nation it is whereof ye are.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to take part in this excellent debate, and I commend the noble Lord Wallace. I even agreed with the first two or three minutes of his speech.
I do not suppose many in your Lordships’ House have read the Pope’s magisterial first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, published on 25 May, but it touches on some of the issues raised in today’s debate. The letter focuses on human dignity in the age of AI. Pope Leo XIV references “disinformation”, which he describes as the “manipulation of information”. His central thesis is that, despite the power of technology, which he calls the “culture of power”, it is possible to preserve humanity through “truth, work and freedom”. Human beings are quite capable of avoiding seeing themselves as projects to be optimised or commodified, rather than valuing themselves and others with inherent humanity and dignity. In short, we must and we can trust the interested electorate to have the common sense they were born with.
It is in that wider context that we should critique calls by liberals, authoritarians, humanists and others to mediate and modulate political, social and cultural discourse online, supposedly for the common good. That reduces consumers of social media platforms, despite historically high levels of information, as my noble friend Lord Howell said, to the status of helpless supplicants needing the paternalistic protections of their social and cultural superiors to adjudicate the new platforms and contentious and challenging ideas that are considered heretical—odd, really, as the liberal mindset usually extols the virtues of radical personal autonomy.
If we assume that social media platforms are to be literally policed, the question is, “Cui bono?”—for whose advantage? A narrative that promulgates the idea that some concepts are beyond the pale self-evidently favours the establishment, its collective views, culture, power and infrastructure. “Populist” is used as a pejorative term by elites to invalidate and negate the views of others, challenging their power structures and policies. An example has been given: the whole narrative of disinformation around Brexit was built up in 2016 by its opponents when, fundamentally, the failure to make an alternative, positive and compelling case for the EU was much more likely as a causal factor.
We risk creating a gatekeeping oligopoly of big government, big tech and the permanent state. Social media, of course, is different now from previous media as a platform for political debate. Britain has a long history of ribald, raucous, robust, dishonest and exaggerated debates and elections. The public have never not been cynical about their political leaders. It is why hundreds of people stood on Lambeth embankment and cheered on the blaze that devoured the Palace of Westminster in October 1834; they did not check with X before they did it. Partisan newspapers, rowdy public meetings, the coruscating cartoons of Gillray, Low and Steve Bell, party-political broadcasts: they are all part of our rumbustious political heritage. Do voters today need extra-special protection? Do they need safe spaces? Do they lack the critical faculties of their forebears who were less well-educated, less well-travelled and cultured? Of course not.
There is little or no evidence of a substantial threat to democracy. This debate, frankly, is a diversion and a displacement exercise for the underlying failures of British government and politics. I have read the Rycroft review and I worked with Philip Rycroft at DExEU. He is right to highlight the collapse in public trust, but your Lordships’ House would be wrong to confuse causation with correlation. Social media reflects Britain’s cynicism and profound unhappiness with a failed economic, political and demographic model: overcentralisation; Treasury dominance; unsustainable debt; failing public services; rising unemployment; spiralling taxes, business rates, regulation and bureaucracy; ossified social mobility; stagnant real wages; and betrayal of the social contract by politicians who lie to get elected and then renege on their promises. We have an activist, unaccountable judiciary and a quango state that thwarts organisational change, intercedes between electors and Ministers, and stifles innovation. We also have two-tier policing, rampant welfare spending and the deification of woke shibboleths, fads and obsessions, such as DEI and net zero and, of course, endemic regional economic disparities.
What really is a threat to democracy? I will give three examples. The first is trade union legislation that is written by trade unions for trade unions. That is a threat to democracy and undermines faith and trust in our system. The second is the shadowy research, information and communication unit in the Home Office—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley—coaching, manipulating and threatening bereaved families to stay on message in the media. The third is the stigmatising and criminalising of Christians who have sincere opposition to abortion—for “silent prayer”, read “thought crime”. This was contained in the Public Order Act 2023, shamefully under a so-called Conservative Government.
Railing against Elon Musk and X is otiose and pointless. Social media will continue to be febrile, fractious and angry until the establishment elite in this country focuses not on the messenger but on the message. Of course, I concede that there are bad actors that externally, from abroad, seek to interfere in our elections; it would be naive to think otherwise. But the seeds of discord, atomisation and civil disorder have already been sown by neglect and short-termist policies from a plutocratic elite. In conclusion, it will take a new generation of leaders and a new Government to address the societal ailments and afflictions which are very much closer to home.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire for securing this debate and for his excellent introduction, which was both forensic and alarming. He has certainly elicited a range of views in today’s debate. My view is that we are at a critical point for our democratic institutions, facing threats that have grown exponentially in sophistication and scale, and which successive Governments have been far too slow to address. I am grateful for the opportunity to disagree with the view of the noble Lords, Lord Hannan, Lord Frost and Lord Jackson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the right to freedom of expression gives some sort of licence to spread disinformation with impunity.
My noble friend reported that the Electoral Commission’s most recent survey found that only 14% of people trust politicians. The National Centre for Social Research reports record low levels of trust in how Britain is governed, with only 12% of the public trusting Governments to put the country’s interests before their party’s. That collapse does not exist in a vacuum. It is being actively engineered, and technology has become the primary instrument of that engineering.
In 2020, Lord Puttnam’s Select Committee described a “pandemic of misinformation” and disinformation that would result in the collapse of public trust. Six years on, the failure of successive Governments to act on the bulk of those 45 recommendations has had predictable consequences. The World Economic Forum now ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe short-term risk facing the world, ahead of extreme weather events and state-based armed conflict.
That pandemic has been supercharged by AI. The Rycroft report, referred to by my noble friend and sadly derided by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, concluded that
“our defences are worryingly weak”
and we are
“already experiencing ‘information warfare’”.
The Rycroft review was triggered by the sentencing of Nathan Gill, a former MEP, for accepting bribes linked to the Russian state. His case is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of the systematic campaign. Transparency International’s research finds that one in 10 political donations already originates from unknown or dubious sources, a vulnerability made worse by the complete absence of any cap on political donations in the UK. His case is one that the strategic defence review characterises as a sub-threshold attack, falling beneath the threshold of war but an act of aggression none the less.
The Alan Turing Institute’s Centre for Emerging Technology and Security has monitored AI disinformation across more than 100 national elections. Domestic political actors created significant portions of misleading AI content. Threat actors embedded features of verified news sources to make fabrication harder to debunk. The tools get cheaper and faster with every cycle. Full Fact Report 2026 identifies the most insidious development: confusion has become the strategy—not one false claim, but sufficient uncertainty that trust in all information breaks down and citizens disengage from the ballot box entirely.
In this environment, the value of the BBC has never been clearer, as my noble friend Lord Wallace and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, have said. It remains one of the most trusted news sources in the world, precisely because it is subject to obligations of impartiality and public accountability that no social media algorithm is required to meet. Contrary to what has been said in the debate today, it can be held to account to deliver on that duty. Undermining it, whether through funding pressure or through interference with board appointments, would hand a significant victory to those seeking to diminish or subvert our democracy. The charter renewal process gives us a direct opportunity to support it.
The Government’s own media Green Paper, published just this week, acknowledges that fewer than half of adults now feel confident judging whether a news source is truthful. It proposes new BBC responsibilities to counter disinformation and requiring platforms to make public service media news content prominent during elections and crises. I welcome both proposals.
The Social Market Foundation’s new report, No News is Bad News, quantifies what we have long feared. Over 4 million people now live in what is called a news desert, with 320 local publications closed since 2009. Areas with no local news have nearly three times the level of misinformation as those with a healthy press. These are not abstract statistics; they describe the conditions in which the next general election will be fought.
Briefly, what do we need? We need statutory cross-sector AI regulation, including mandatory AI watermarking of synthetic content. Voters cannot exercise informed judgment if they cannot distinguish real from fabricated. We need comprehensive electoral reform. Although the Elections Act 2022 introduced digital imprints, we still lack statutory advert libraries, and there are no rules whatever on deepfakes in political campaigning. The Representation of the People Bill must fill those gaps.
We must invest seriously in digital and media literacy. Internet Matters tells us that only half of young people feel confident assessing whether political information online is true. Over 60% simply ignore what politicians say online because they cannot trust what they see. That is not apathy but a rational response to a systematically untrustworthy environment. With the voting age set to fall to 16 and curriculum reforms not reaching classrooms until September 2028, the next general election will arrive before a single child benefits. We need interim support for schools now.
Shoshana Zuboff captured it precisely, and Lord Puttnam’s committee cited her in 2020:
“It’s down to lawmakers to protect democracy in an age of surveillance … That is the work of the next decade”.
That decade is now. The collapse of public trust we are debating is not a mystery but the predictable consequence of allowing technology to run ahead of accountability, and allowing foreign states to exploit that gap with impunity. We must treat our democratic information environment as the critical infrastructure it is and legislate accordingly. The time for voluntary codes and piecemeal adjustments has definitively passed.
Lord Norton of Louth (Con)
My Lords, I too commend the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for securing this debate. I also commend the Library briefing prepared for it.
I wish to make one key point. Committing legal and electronic resources to tackling disinformation is necessary, but it is not sufficient to bolster trust in our political system. As has been mentioned, disinformation is exacerbating popular distrust, but it is not the cause of it. Countering disinformation is essentially a reactive process, but we need to be proactive if we are to build popular trust. Those who peddle disinformation exploit a lack of understanding of our political system—not only of how it operates but of the benefits it delivers to citizens. We have a political system characterised by accountability, effectiveness, flexibility and coherence. Yet, as has been mentioned, trust is low both in absolute terms and in international comparison. People do not trust either House of Parliament, the Executive or, especially, political parties.
The noble Lord, Lord Cryer, referred to the “good chaps” theory of government. Our system of government derives its strength not from an elite of good chaps but from everyone being good chaps. Core to political stability is having a culture of constitutionalism. We tend to focus on form, but it is values that matter. There are changes that can and should be made to how our politics operate, both at the level of the individual politician, through a tightening of standards, and systemically in terms of how political parties operate. But what matters most in terms of trust is enabling people to feel that they have some involvement.
A necessary starting point is embedding citizenship in our educational system. That is the route to building an informed electorate, and indeed the route to ensuring that citizens appreciate voting and have an incentive to vote. We had a debate in this House in 2018 on citizenship and civic engagement in which I spoke, as did the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I quoted the research of James Weinberg of the University of Sheffield, who said:
“We have evidence … that citizenship education, where it is done effectively and consistently, can predict political efficacy, participation and levels of knowledge”.
Yet we have still not grasped the sheer importance of producing a politically literate population. Citizenship is formally part of the curriculum, but schools do not have the capacity to teach it effectively and lack the incentive to commit resources to it. Fewer than 5% of pupils opt for GCSE citizenship studies. If citizenship contributed to league tables, schools would take it seriously. There are not enough trained citizenship teachers. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review emphasised the importance of enhancing media literacy, as well as knowledge of democracy and government, through citizenship teaching. It recommended that citizenship become statutory from key stage 1.
Ensuring that we have the resources to tackle disinformation is crucial, but so too is building a politically informed citizenry. The two should be seen as inextricably linked. Treating citizenship as a silo in the Department for Education is unwittingly to assist those who spread disinformation. A more politically savvy population would be better able to spot disinformation. As it is, and as we have heard, people are too susceptible to claims posted online. Enhancing citizenship education is not part of the Rycroft recommendations, but it is a logical extension of what is proposed. It should be core to the work of the Government’s Defending Democracy Taskforce. Building an informed and supportive body of citizens, especially young citizens, is a way of erecting a powerful barrier against those who would seek to undermine our democracy. The barriers need to be human, not simply legal and electronic.
Lord Gascoigne (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow my former politics lecturer at Hull University; I hope that I do not let him down too much with what I am about to say. Like a few others, I wish to move away from external factors and talk about our own faith in our democracy. Now is the time, especially with a new Government incoming, to ask ourselves some seriously hard questions.
For background, I come from a working-class family. I was brought up in a terraced house in east Lancashire in one of the most deprived constituencies in the land. My first proper job, back in 2004, was a couple of years in a credit union up there. The aim was to tackle loan sharks and financial exclusion, as well as provide a service to the community. While there, I saw people really struggling. I distinctly remember a conversation I had with one lady. She did not complain at all, but made it very clear that she was working as much as she possibly could, even though, fundamentally, she would have been financially better off not working. She chose to work for the sheer principle of it. So, long before Brexit—before anyone makes that claim—people were feeling left behind and that London and the south-east are an entirely separate part of the country.
I read two interesting pieces on the recent Makerfield by-election. The first was in the Times, where Quentin Letts commented that when he visited the patch and sought to speak to 20 voters, seven did not know there was an election. More starkly, in the New Statesman, Will Lloyd wrote:
“I was tired of writing and speaking about the country like it was a ‘normal’ place full of happy ‘normal’ communities and cheeky ‘normal’ Brits. Nothing I saw or heard seemed ‘normal’. Everything was changing”.
I may not agree with everything he then goes on to say, but I hope that in those comments, we recognise that there is a deeper point being made: Westminster is not at the top of everyone’s mind and there is a growing unease.
There has been some commentary, I think, about the Electoral Commission and its public attitudes survey. There is another part that has not been noted, which I have referenced before, which is that in last year’s survey, most people believed that we need a strong leader willing to break the rules, with almost 40% of Labour supporters agreeing. There has also been recent analysis from UCL Policy Lab and More In Common that shows that just over half of Brits say that hard work does not pay, and only 19% think the Government respect people like them. But it is not just about communications. I speak personally but we need to remember that most people do not comprehend what billions of pounds being spent here and there means when they are worried about holding down their own job. I have been there when people who should know better lambaste “buy one, get one free” deals and advocate for meat-free days and eating healthily. Of course, but people just try their best to feed their family in what little time and with what little money they have.
Fundamentally, though, for me this is about leadership, delivery and showing clearly that we are on their side. Whether or not the system is broken, surely we can all agree that we are not at our best. We need more reliable energy and want to reduce energy bills, yet Hinkley Point C is the most expensive nuclear power plant and has been delayed by years. The country that invented the railway cannot make it work when the weather is hot, or even expand it with HS2, with that being delayed by over a decade, at a cost of over £100 billion. Whether there is two-tier policing or not, there is a feeling that the state is sometimes harsher on some cases, yet too lenient on others. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the Minister will know all too well and remember fondly how we debated the so-called devolution Bill, yet days later, Parliament and this House cheerfully passed a Bill to increase the number of paid Ministers. When we combine that with the growing size of Whitehall, which is it—centralisation or devolution?
I read last night that the King of the North is suggesting that he will shove bits of No. 10 into the north. Our Conservative Government tried to move bits of Whitehall around as well, but—as a northerner, I can say this—it is tokenistic. It says nothing about more powers to local councils or more money. In the end, people just want things fixed, not more politicians pontificating. We say we are going to smash the gangs, yet on Monday last week, 700 illegal migrants arrived. We say that children cannot be trusted to watch YouTube, but we are perfectly fine allowing them to consent to irreversible medical procedures from the age of 11. Whether or not those—now infamous—ponies on Dartmoor are to be culled, it speaks volumes about a broader issue about who is in charge on what is a simple issue. The noble Lord, Lord Katz, answered questions on that.
We cannot have a Prime Minister complain to Parliament that whenever he pulls levers, he is hit by the state. To paraphrase Louis XIV, he is the state, or he certainly was up until recently. Unless we really revolutionise the state to focus on delivery, make it leaner and more effective, use AI, sort out our laws, streamline them and make our systems deliver, we will keep hitting the same roadblocks. As my noble friend Lady Stowell was saying earlier, we cannot keep asking the electorate whether they want change, only to not step up to the task.
As America marks its 250th anniversary as an incredible nation, a new nation born out of what was incredible nerve, I remind the House of what one of its founding fathers and its second President, John Adams, said:
“Remember, democracy never lasts long … There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide”.
That may be stark, but the warning is real. We cannot blame others for our own failings. Of course, this has not happened overnight or under this Government, and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, when he talked about a convenient mixing and muddling between hostile states and the commercially driven US tech companies. But we need to heed those growing voices that feel ignored and recognise that we need to step up to the task, because the warnings are real. We need to trust the people more, give them the credit they deserve, focus on them and deliver for them. This is not impossible. We perhaps need to invoke some of the revolutionary zeal that we left on the shores of America. We can do it, and I hope we will do it.
Lord Doyle (Non-Afl)
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for making today’s debate possible. We have already heard some very interesting contributions. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, who has set out a compelling case around the challenges of the politics we face today. We have both had the privilege of spending time working in No. 10, and I think I know where some of his frustration comes from.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell of Beeston and Lady Featherstone, rightly challenged us to make sure that we do not look at this debate through just one end of the telescope. We can do two things at once; there is more we need to do to put our own house in order while recognising what I will focus on—the legitimate concerns around misinformation and disinformation in our politics today. This is not to absolve ourselves but to ensure that we can get across to citizens the information they need to make informed choices at elections.
Two things are happening at the same time: the rise of misinformation and the collapse we have seen in local media as it has moved more online, with the rise of Facebook groups and similar platforms for local news. This has been highlighted in the report by the Social Market Foundation No News is Bad News: The Hidden Threat of Unchecked Local Misinformation, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. Some of its key findings were that nearly half of Britons seek out local news through social media—more than any other source except television—and that more than a third use local social media groups as their main news source.
The problem is that we face an epidemic of misinformation online. The SMF’s analysis showed that nearly one in 26 news-related posts on Facebook was misinformation. On X, that figure jumps to an alarming one in four. This matters even more because there is not that balance of respectable journalism for people to compare and contrast the information with. The local media landscape is completely different—and in places non-existent—from the one I started working in 25 years ago. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Frost, I very much welcome the Government’s announcement this week that trustworthy information will be more visible, but what do we do where there are not local news sources to boost? We need to make sure that there is a national focus on maintaining vibrant local media.
It should come as no surprise that elections are a ripe target for those at home and abroad who trade in this misinformation. Recent council elections and parliamentary by-elections have shown just how intense this can be. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not prosecuting this argument motivated by single-party interest. Misinformation has been tracked as being directed across the board at a range of individuals, parties and issues. In the Makerfield by-election, misinformation quadrupled as a share of news posts. The Social Market Foundation report found that one in six items shared in groups contained information that was false. This cuts through to voters. Luke Tryl from More in Common confirmed that misinformation about the candidates, such as Andy Burnham,
“has come up unprompted consistently in focus groups we’ve run in Makerfield, seemingly largely from Facebook: some believe it others don’t, but no doubt this stuff has a real impact”.
We have rightly spent a lot of time in this House debating the impact of social media on children, but I humbly suggest that we need to spend more time looking at educating adults too. I do not mean a ban, obviously, but a recognition of the need to increase digital literacy and awareness to build more resilient citizens in our democracy. Can the Minister set out what the Government are doing to increase digital literacy? Is the Defending Democracy Taskforce looking at this, given the overlap with ensuring that we have free and fair elections?
Of course, this proliferation of mis and disinformation has done great harm outside of election time, too. We see it with conspiracy theories as they relate to international events or to domestic tragedies that we have seen—the noble Lord, Lord Cryer, spoke of the Southport tragedy. Can my noble friend the Minister update the House on the Government’s experience of working with platforms at times of crisis and their level of responsiveness? Would the Government consider a clear duty requiring platforms to respond rapidly when local authorities, police and the NHS identify false content during a crisis?
As we have said, not all this misinformation is with an explicit desire for a political outcome. Plenty is driven by opportunists attempting to use AI-generated content to simply profit from political division in the UK. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester spoke very eloquently on this and the challenges there are, and I am sure many in your Lordships’ House will have seen some of the recent content involving the leader of Reform UK and the Governor of the Bank of England, which has been designed simply to promote financial investment schemes.
There can be no doubt that platforms need to be made less fertile for misinformation. I believe Ofcom should test platforms’ ability to tackle misinformation and fake accounts, publish the results and take action against poor performers. The tech companies must set out their plans, such as surge moderation and boosting of trusted information. Social media platforms should be mandated to heighten vigilance towards deceptive, synthetic content, and ensure any media relevant to the election that is manipulated by AI is labelled as such.
I do not see this debate as a counsel of despair but a wake-up call that we need to look at the forces ranged against us in our democracy. I believe there is still time to ensure we can preserve the values we all cherish and to ensure we can move forward, confident in our democracy and the way it operates.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest as the co-chair of the new All-Party Parliamentary Group for Defending Democracy, which I urge all noble Lords who have made such compelling contributions today to join. That group has a remit in part following the Defending Democracy Taskforce. I agree wholeheartedly with what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said at the beginning: that it is regrettable that there is not more prominence from that taskforce in communicating and engaging with parliamentarians—and indeed anyone else, as far as I can see. That is one of the things the APPG wants to do.
It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Doyle. I am not sure whether it was by coincidence or mischievous design that the final three of our Back-Bench contributions have been from people who in the past have had senior roles in Downing Street—which many people would say has contributed over recent decades to decline in faith in democracy, but we will leave that for others to judge.
I commend the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, for what I thought was an excellent speech. I thought he was a bit too harsh on the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and a bit too lenient on Kneecap, but his central point, that democracies need controversy and freedom of speech to be able to evolve, and if they cannot evolve they will ultimately die, is fundamentally important and not sufficiently understood in the current political discourse. I spent close to five years, in the end, as the last Government’s—and for a while, this Government’s—independent adviser on political violence and disruption. It is one of the reasons why I recommended in my 2024 report, Protecting our Democracy from Coercion, that we should be very careful in the way in which we seek to restrict freedom of speech through noble objectives such as online safety and cutting out misinformation.
Nevertheless, it is incumbent on us to accept how big a problem this can be. The explosion in artificial intelligence can genuinely warp people’s perceptions. So much of our understanding of the world, the country and the community around us now comes from a screen. While misinformation and disinformation have always been used as a tactic to disrupt people, it is qualitatively different now, as it has become so difficult to tell reality from fabrication, which is fundamental to a functioning democracy. My noble friend Lord Doyle’s suggestion for increased responsibilities on social media companies to detect fakes—which artificial intelligence can also help to do—is important.
Another of my recommendations from the 2024 review was that, while it was always going to be difficult to draw where the boundaries ought to be on freedom of speech, and while we should not be quite as gung ho as we often are in restricting topics for debate, there should be a much broader consensus on saying that foreign state manipulation is wrong. When talking to the intelligence services during the making of that report, they were clear that they lacked a level of resource to shut down some of the sources of this misinformation, having identified them. That has been acted on somewhat since then, but we clearly have a significant way to go.
While this is not a new venture, there is a sustained attempt by hostile states—particularly Russia and Iran, and I would count China in that—to use the freedoms in our democracy to undermine that democracy from within. The noble Baroness, Falkner, made a very important point about manipulation: while the manipulation from Islamist actors who want ultimately to replace democracy may not be state based, that is an organised activity for which there ought to be more resource, focus and recognition in this country.
In my final two minutes, I will make two more points. The first is an issue that I have spoken about at some length in the Chamber: the way in which extreme illegal disruptive protests are used as a tool to undermine democracies. Many noble Lords who are generally on the right side of things in this place should be more hard-nosed and clear-sighted on what organised groups are trying to do here—often funded or supported in some way by foreign states—ultimately to twist the sense of a right to protest into a threat to our democracy. We should do better at standing up for our parliamentary democracy. If we always think that the right and the nobility is on the side of those outside who are shouting at, abusing and intimidating us then we cede too much ground and contribute to our own undermining of democracy.
I turn to my final point. Important as all of that is, the biggest threat to democratic institutions may soon be the speed at which AI is developing. There has been a lot of discussion about AI’s role in misinformation, which is important, but there has not been enough discussion about the potential for the incredible national and global economic upheaval that may be inflicted on us by the replacing of jobs with AI. That will need to be very skilfully managed so as not to create enormous levels of disruption.
Finally, if the Front Bench will forgive me, my eyes were opened by a documentary called “Chasing Utopia”, which noble Lords should go and watch, by the same people who put together the Al Gore documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”. It pointed out that if AI reaches parity in intelligence with people by the end of the decade and comes to grow exponentially beyond that then that will have fundamental consequences for who we are as human beings, where we are in the world and how our democracies will function. We need to think a lot more about that potential danger.
Lord Pack (LD)
As other noble Lords have done, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing the debate. It is good to see him continuing to be so active in this Chamber, even after stepping down from his role shadowing the Cabinet Office. The timing of the debate is particularly opportune as we are in the middle of a change of Prime Minister, because, traditionally, it is the early days of a premiership that have often been the most fruitful for taking steps to improve and strengthen our democratic systems.
As we heard from multiple contributors in the debate, there are many important challenges that we need to face. Several people made reference to the figures from the Electoral Commission, showing that only 14% of people trust politicians. I am tempted to point out that it was 10% the year before, so we have had a rise of 40% in the number of people who trust, but perhaps one should not overegg that rise too much.
As has been a regular theme through the debate, there is the significant danger of foreign interference. Given some of the comments that were made, let me give the example, which was also mentioned in this House earlier this week, of what happened when the internet was shut down in Iran: a whole load of very active social media accounts passing themselves off as UK citizens with very vocal views on Scottish independence suddenly disappeared. Those accounts were not the rumbustious exercise of freedom of speech by genuine Scots or other people in the UK; they were fakery by a foreign Government, deliberately intended to stifle the expression of free speech in this country. That is why it is so important that we take such dangers seriously.
I am afraid some noble Lords may be disappointed, but I will also mention Elon Musk, not because he has views that I disagree with but because of the way his platform deliberately, repeatedly and persistently sets out to amplify and spread violent threats against individuals. The fact that it is, sadly, now a common experience for many politicians to receive large volumes of images featuring nooses, for example, directed at them, and for X to be so slow in responding, is a genuine threat to freedom of expression and free participation in our democracy.
Of course, one should not forget the record of Vladimir Putin and Russia. There is not only a track record that has been established over many years of the Russian state being involved in violence being carried out within Britain; we also, as we saw all too recently, now have the connections between the Russian state and the direct incitement of violence involving the Prime Minister. It is right to respond to that situation. It is not a panic but a wise, careful evaluation of the evidence to think, when there are connections between the Russian state and violence directly involving the Prime Minister, that that is something we need to respond to. That, indeed, is very different from what the Russian state got up to in the Cold War. It goes beyond that.
We should recognise that there are some positives that we can build on. There has been the recent rise in turnout in elections. We may not always be happy about who people have chosen to vote for, but we are, at the moment, in a period of rising turnout, as we saw most dramatically in the most recent parliamentary by-election, with the exceedingly rare occurrence of turnout being higher than in that seat at the previous general election. According to the Electoral Commission’s data, there are high, and maybe even slightly rising, levels of satisfaction with the processes of registering to vote and voting, and, indeed, of confidence that elections here are run well. That is a very precious commodity.
However, as many have mentioned in this debate, we must not be complacent. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester rightly highlighted some of the wider social trends that are the backdrop to many of these issues. As the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and many others mentioned, there are broader issues around trust that simply making some improvements to our democratic system on their own will not be sufficient to deal with.
However, there is good news: there are many reviews and reports, several of which have been mentioned in this debate, which give a rich menu of policy suggestions for the Government and others to pick from. There are also many legislative opportunities. All too often, we hear that something will be done “when legislative time allows”. Courtesy of the Representation of the People Bill, and indeed the commitment in the King’s Speech to legislation around the removal of peerages, we have legislative time coming up later this year in this House.
I want to concentrate for the moment on just one particular issue specific to today’s debate and to the Government’s legislative plans, which is the role of money, especially foreign money, in buying undue influence in our democracy. We are now in a new era of exceptionally highly concentrated donations. In the first quarter of this year, just two people were responsible for one-third of all the declared political donations made in the UK. Even though those sums were quite large and highly concentrated, they were still quite small compared with what a foreign Government or a billionaire could decide to spend.
For example, in the 2024 general election, Labour’s total declared national expenditure was £30 million. To those of us who have been involved in various ways with party fundraising, that feels like a lot of money: it takes a lot of raffle tickets to get to £30 million. But, in a different context, £30 million does not even buy you one F-35 aeroplane. Or, if you want to go for a slightly cheaper, slightly inferior model—I am not an expert in these things, so my pricing may not be absolutely correct—I believe the typical export price for a Su-57 modern Russian stealth fighter is around £30 million. So, if you are sat there in the Kremlin, just one plane costs the same as a complete national general election campaign by a party that won a landslide. So we should be worried about the possibilities of abuse.
I therefore very much welcome the Rycroft review and the implementation of its recommendations, so far as we have seen them, by the Government. However, they still leave a very significant set of loopholes. One I might call the “Trump loophole”. Although the Representation of the People Bill as it currently stands introduces some controls on the level of foreign ownership there can be of companies that donate to UK politics, all Donald Trump would need to do is split his ownership of a company with his children, and all of them would fall below the threshold. That is not an adequate threshold. Indeed, we recently approved in Parliament much tougher foreign ownership regulations for newspapers. It is a shame that the Government have not, so far at least, decided to drop the newspaper threshold for political finance.
There is also the donor cap in the Representation of the People Bill, which is welcome as a step forward from where we are, but, as it currently stands, is only a limit on what can be given to any one person or party in a year. If a political party has 650 candidates in the run-up to a general election, that means you can give 650 times the cap, giving a donation to each candidate and making a complete nonsense of the cap. Indeed, given that most political parties have local councillors as well, one could quite easily, and completely legitimately, give thousands of times the cap every year. It becomes not really any sort of cap at all.
I hope the Minister will be able to address four questions when she responds. One is to update us on progress in implementing the rest of the Rycroft review beyond the two measures that, to give credit to the Government, they have moved very quickly on. I know that she would not want me to disappoint her by not taking the opportunity to mention the importance of the consolidation of election law. It is very welcome to see the Rycroft review rightly highlight the need for us to have a robust and clear legislative framework for our elections. However, I hope the Minister can also explain, given that the newspaper ownership threshold was set so much lower for foreign interference in our media, why the Government have chosen not to set that threshold but instead to set a much more generous one when it comes to donations into our democratic system.
More generally, the narrow remit of the Rycroft review is specifically around finance, which is not the only form of foreign interference in our politics. What plans do the Government have to go beyond that in their further work? Our democracy requires nurturing and protecting. We need to be free to hold our own debates and make our own decisions free from foreign interference, so that we can exercise our own freedom.
Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for tabling this Motion.
Within living memory, almost every public telephone call in this country travelled across a network owned by a state monopoly. Almost every letter was carried by another. Almost all televisual information reached the public through four channels. Even the printed press was concentrated in the hands of a small club of proprietors. Public opinion was essentially managed by a small, controlling class, mainly appointed by, licensed by or dependent on the state.
Fortunately, as my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford made clear, technology has broken that arrangement. Satellite television, mobile telephony, the internet, podcasts, independent publishers and social media have loosened the state’s grip on the flow of news and opinion. That development has brought dangers, which this debate is right to consider, but it has also brought freedom. As my noble friend Lord Hannan of Kingsclere so brilliantly argued, we should be very careful that, in the name of fighting disinformation, we do not accidentally rebuild the old machinery of control.
Public trust is essential to democratic government, but trust cannot be restored by merely commanding the public to trust state institutions. It must be earned by conduct: by honesty, competence, impartiality and accountability. That applies not only to elected bodies but to all the institutions whose decisions shape public life: broadcasters and newspapers, the permanent Civil Service, the law and the judiciary, regulators, the Bank of England and indeed your Lordships’ House.
That is why the Mandelson affair has done such damage. When a Prime Minister appoints a Labour grandee to one of the most sensitive diplomatic posts, despite obvious and widely known reputational risks, the public are entitled to ask: who was protecting the national interest? The papers released after the humble Address have not calmed those concerns. They have deepened them. We have seen redactions, missing messages, disappearing communications and a Government who are apparently more interested in limiting embarrassment than in giving Parliament a complete account. It is not enough for Ministers to say that officials followed a process if the process produces an indefensible result. Can the Minister explain why a complete schedule of documents has not been provided in a form that Parliament can scrutinise? Can she tell us whether the incoming Labour Administration will commit to ending the casual use of private channels for serious government business?
This problem is not confined to Ministers. The permanent Civil Service is supposed to be one of the great stabilising institutions of the constitution. It is permanent precisely because it is meant to be impartial. Yet too often the public see a Civil Service that speaks the language of neutrality while indulging the instincts of activism. The Civil Service Code is not a decorative plaque. It is a condition of public confidence. Officials cannot be neutral between political parties in the office and partisan campaigners outside it if the public are not reasonably to conclude that the same instincts are shaping advice, implementation and enforcement.
There are also the problems of delivery, so ably articulated by my noble friend Lord Gascoigne. Most voters are not driven by ideology. They want to go to work, raise their family, send their children to good schools and take home as much as possible of what they work hard to earn. In return, they expect their public services to be decent, effective and accessible.
There is now a wider problem, as the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, made so clear, of institutional self-protection. In too many public bodies, failures are met with reviews. Reviews are met with action plans. Action plans are met with yet another layer of training, and nobody is ever plainly accountable. The British public can see the pattern. They are asked to pay more tax for worse services while being lectured by institutions that seem very good at protecting themselves and very bad at serving the country.
The same standard must apply to our broadcasters, especially the BBC. As my noble friend Lady Stowell of Beeston made very clear, the BBC is not just another media outlet; it is a compulsorily funded national institution with a privileged place in the life of the country. That privilege carries duties. Too often, the corporation behaves as though criticism is evidence of bad faith, rather than a warning that it has lost contact with large parts of the public who it claims to serve. We have had the resignation of senior BBC leaders and, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, pointed out, serious questions about the handling of contested issues from Gaza to sex and gender. The BBC Arabic concerns, including the comparative handling of Hamas hostages, have only reinforced the suspicion that impartiality can vary by service, audience and internal culture.
The BBC must not merely avoid bias; it must avoid the appearance of belonging to a class, a faction, a world-view or a cause. At present, it too often fails that test. Editorial decisions rightly fall beyond the ambit of Ministers, but public trust in the BBC is a constitutional matter as well as a broadcasting matter. Will the Government support the strongest transparency on corrections, complaints, commissioning decisions and conflicts of interest? Will Ministers accept that the licence fee settlement cannot be discussed as though the BBC has a divine right to public money regardless of public confidence?
None of this means that we should be naive about the online world. The promise of greater freedom brought by social media has never been uncomplicated. The harms to children are real. My noble friends Lord Nash and Lady Barran showed great leadership in this House on child protection, and the leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, has been clear that social media is not for children. The Government, as usual, arrived late, copied the Conservative homework and then tried to claim the idea as their own. Whatever the route, we need serious protection for children.
At the same time, adults in a free society must be allowed to argue, offend, persuade and be wrong. The answer to disinformation cannot be a truth ministry staffed by the same institutions that have helped to lose trust in the first place. The state should be very strong against fraud, hostile state interference, impersonation and threats. It should also be very cautious before deciding that robust dissent is a harm to be managed.
Foreign interference, as mentioned by many noble Lords, is a real and growing threat. Reports of Iranian-linked social media activity amplifying Scottish separatism show the kind of low-cost, deniable operation that hostile states now use to inflame division inside democratic countries. Russia, Iran and China do not need to invent every argument; as my noble friend Lord Risby argued, they simply find our sore points and press on them.
What assessment have the Government made of the number of foreign-operated bot or sock puppet accounts targeting UK audiences? What work is being done with Ofcom, the Electoral Commission and the intelligence agencies to identify co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour before election campaigns are polluted by it? Are Ministers examining how artificial intelligence can be used not to censor legitimate opinion but to detect networks, trace amplification patterns and expose foreign direction?
The previous Conservative Government created the foreign influence registration scheme, which came into force last year. Russia and Iran are rightly included in the enhanced tier, but China is not. If the enhanced tier is for serious state threats, why is China absent? Can the Minister set out what lessons have been learned from including Russia and Iran, and what test China has failed to meet or, more accurately, what political courage the Government have failed to find?
It would not be right for this House to debate trust without looking to ourselves. Those in the media, the Civil Service and public bodies could fairly tell politicians, “Physician, heal thyself”. Your Lordships’ House is at its best when it is serious, courteous, expert and independent minded. Our debates on defence, security and constitutional matters show this House doing what it exists to do: testing government, improving legislation and bringing experience to bear. But breaches of our own standards damage the whole institution. We cannot demand accountability elsewhere while excusing it here.
We should therefore recommit ourselves to the disciplines that make this House valuable: courtesy, restraint, accuracy and scrutiny without grandstanding. We should also resist any attempt to use civility as a muzzle. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, democracy is noisy. The public are entitled to be angry when institutions fail. It is our job to give them institutions worthy of respect.
The old world of controlled communication has gone, and we should be grateful for that. The public no longer need permission from a Minister, a mandarin, a BBC editor or a newspaper proprietor to hear an argument, and that is a democratic gain. The task now is not to rebuild the gatekeepers under the modern language of safety and resilience; it is to make our institutions trustworthy enough to survive scrutiny. That means Ministers who keep records and tell the truth, civil servants who remember that impartiality in delivery is their constitutional bargain, a BBC that serves the whole country rather than its own internal culture, platforms that protect children and expose foreign manipulation, and a Government with the courage to name hostile states, including China, when the evidence requires it. Public trust will not be restored by controlling what people may know; it will be restored when those in power stop behaving as though they have something to hide.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, I am here today because my noble friend Lady Anderson had a minor accident and has been incapacitated for a couple of days. That is why noble Lords have me instead of her, I am afraid. I am sure the House would want me to wish her well and a speedy recovery from her injury.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing this very important and—as the noble Lord, Lord Pack, said—timely debate, and I thank all noble Lords who have taken part this afternoon for the excellent quality of the debate. It has been an incredibly valuable discussion to listen to.
I hope I speak on behalf of the whole of your Lordships’ House when I say that these matters require us to put the protection of our precious democracy at the front of our minds. Parliamentary debates on these issues offer a unique opportunity to raise awareness of the threats to the public and signal our unyielding resolve across the nation to confront foreign threat actors.
This Government’s first duty, as is the duty of all Governments, is to keep our country safe. We are absolutely committed to taking all measures necessary to expose and disrupt attempts to interfere with our sovereign affairs. That is why the Government’s counter political interference and espionage action plan was announced in November to ensure that our national politics will remain a significant challenge for any foreign actors who try to target us.
This plan is structured around three core pillars: delivering an enduring campaign to strengthen awareness of the threat; strengthening our legislative levers to increase transparency and impose costs on threat actors; and making it harder for foreign states to operate through proxies. Through this plan we are equipping everyone, such as brilliant local councillors, MPs and hard-working parliamentary staff, with the tools they need to help recognise, report and resist foreign espionage activity wherever they find it.
The guidance that the National Protective Security Authority published in October last year specifically highlighted the full range of vectors and tactics that foreign states, including Russia and China, are using to target people involved in our politics. Since then, we have brought together the director-general of MI5 and the CEO of the National Cyber Security Centre to brief the chief executives of UK political parties on the developing threat picture.
We continue to expose the evolving tradecraft that foreign states are using, and we are strengthening UK resilience: earlier this month, MI5, alongside our Five Eyes allies, issued an intelligence bulletin to warn about the ways in which China’s military intelligence is targeting Five Eyes Governments and military personnel to gain access to sensitive or privileged information.
The next stage of the counter political interference and espionage action plan is focused on developing a programme of work to make it harder for foreign actors to use think tanks and lobby groups as channels to interfere with policy-making and our political discourse. We intend to work with them to strengthen their resilience, ensuring that their hard-won reputations and networks are not exploited by our adversaries. I thank my noble friend Lord Moraes for his insights into this from his EU experience.
We are committed to ensuring that we have robust systems in place to defend the UK from foreign interference in UK democratic processes. The Government have renewed the mandate of the Defending Democracy Taskforce, which brings together Ministers, representatives from law enforcement and the intelligence community to co-ordinate work to protect UK political parties, elected officials and electoral infrastructure from threats, including foreign interference. The taskforce is focused on ensuring the safety and security of electoral processes and ensuring that democratic institutions are safe and secure by combating interference and building resilience to threats. I was pleased to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Walney, about the APPG that is associated with this taskforce.
Recent progress to protect our democratic institutions and those working in our democracy includes new legislation restricting protests outside the private homes of public office holders, the delivery of personal cyber security advice in devolved nations for Members and staff in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the rollout of the new National Protective Security Authority security guidance to protect democratic institutions from espionage and foreign interference.
In the light of the deeply concerning evidence of Russia’s attempts to interfere in UK democracy, the Government commissioned Philip Rycroft to lead an independent review into foreign financial interference in UK politics. It examined recent cases of attempted interference by a range of foreign actors, including events surrounding the conviction of Reform UK’s former Wales leader, Nathan Gill, for accepting bribes to promote pro-Russian views. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Frost, that it was a very specific review for a very specific purpose, and it was definitely evidence-led. The review rigorously tested the financial safeguards we currently have in place and recommended areas for improving mitigations. Ministers were presented with the findings in March and will provide a comprehensive line-by-line response to its recommendations—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Pack, who asked about the rest of the Rycroft recommendations—ahead of the Commons Report stage of the Representation of the People Bill. That will provide a further opportunity for scrutiny and debate. We are already taking immediate steps to implement the review’s recommendations for a cap on donations made by overseas electors and for a moratorium on donations made via cryptocurrency, which we will make into law through the Representation of the People Bill.
This Government’s clear commitments to upholding and restoring trust, standards and integrity in public life are not merely pledges to be made in your Lordships’ House but a vital line of defence. We will do what it takes to ensure that our country is not a permissive environment for foreign interference and to safeguard our democracy. The Prime Minister has been clear from day one that public service is a privilege, and this Government are committed to showing how politics can be a force for good. The Prime Minister has strengthened the Ministerial Code, putting the importance of public service at its heart and strengthening the role of the independent adviser on ministerial standards, as we promised in our manifesto. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, that processes have already been tightened up in relation to proposed entrance to your Lordships’ House, and the Ministerial Code will be looked at to see whether there is anything more that needs to be done.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Finn and Lady Featherstone, referred to the scandals around the Post Office, infected blood and Hillsborough, and to the Nottingham maternity scandal—a horrific tale that we heard just yesterday. The Public Office (Accountability) Bill will place a new legal duty on public servants to act truthfully and to assist fully in investigations and inquiries. We must also speed up our response to such issues. Ten years on from Grenfell, those affected still feel that too little has been done.
While I maintain that this Government have taken steps to improve standards, I truly believe that if we are to rebuild the faith that politics can be a force for good, we need to work together. This work must transcend differences in political parties and will require us all to come together. I will actively seek to work with Members of your Lordships’ House on where we believe the gaps are, what we can realistically fix and how we can rebuild trust.
Language and tone in political debate are important too. It does not help to have a political leader in the other place making comparisons between a United Kingdom Secretary of State and the Gestapo just because she disagrees with her policies. I think the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, referred to this. We need to change.
I am afraid that, in local government too, we are seeing a deterioration in the tone of debate that is actively discouraging able local community representatives from standing for councils. In the debate led by my noble friend Lord Forbes of Newcastle and the debate on the Jo Cox Civility Commission that was led by my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon, we heard hair-raising examples of violence and intimidation experienced by councillors, and just last week there was another excruciating example of incivility in the council chamber in Basildon. I thank the Local Government Association for its survey work on this. Worryingly, it shows that 70% of councillors report experiencing abuse or intimidation in the previous year, and that rises to 84% for women and ethnic minority councillors. We have an urgent job to do as a Government to get some legislative weight behind codes of conduct and their enforcement.
Noble Lords have also rightly focused on the severe threat of online disinformation, which threatens democracies around the world and poses clear risks to our national security. The Government continue to work tirelessly alongside our allies to expose Russian cyber threats and information operations targeting democracy in the UK and worldwide. For example, since October 2024 the Government have exposed and sanctioned 38 organisations and individuals responsible for delivering Russia’s information warfare to undermine global democracies.
The Government are implementing the National Security Act and the Online Safety Act to ensure that foreign information operations face the strongest possible safeguards that our country is capable of. The foreign interference offence under the Online Safety Act 2023 compels platforms to take action to prevent users from encountering state-sponsored disinformation and interference online and to minimise how long any such content is present on their services. Countering disinformation is not about stopping individuals from expressing their views; it is about preventing foreign states from misleading people through deception and deceit. Ofcom has robust enforcement powers against platforms that fail to comply, including fines of up to £80 million or 10% of their global revenue. From the comprehensive powers of the National Security Act to the protective work of the Defending Democracy Taskforce, we are deploying a whole of government approach to make the UK a harder target.
I will try to get through some of the individual points made by noble Lords, but if I do not get to them all, I will respond in writing. Nearly all noble Lords spoke about the issues about trust in politics. The noble Lords, Lord Wallace, Lord Risby, Lord Norton, Lord Gascoigne and Lord Walney, the noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell, Lady Featherstone and Lady Bennett, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester and my noble friends Lady Gill and Lord Cryer—probably nearly everyone who spoke in the debate—referred to this. We need to restore trust in politics, and that starts at school. A number of noble Lords have reflected on the breakdown of key institutions that dominated the last century. To quote the former Defence Minister, we have to fight on the territory that exists now, not the territory that existed in the last century. That is really important, and it involves education. That restoring of trust in politics starts at school. The Government recognise the role that citizenship education can play in supporting young people to understand how to engage positively with politicians and the political system. That is fundamental to the successful implementation of the Government’s manifesto commitment to extend the right to vote to 16 and 17 year-olds.
The importance of political literacy was highlighted in the Jo Cox Foundation report. That is why the Government are committed to looking for the earliest opportunity to make citizenship a new requirement for key stages 1 and 2, focused on the most essential content. That includes democracy and government as well as media literacy, law and rights, financial literacy and climate education. The points made about the funding of that education were well made. I am afraid I am going to have to refer those to my noble friend the Education Minister, and I will respond in due course.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, made some key points about the overcentralisation of things leading to a lack of trust. That is why I am such a strong believer in the devolution agenda. Listening to voters and putting decision-making and funding close to those who are affected by the decisions, and in the hands of those who have skin in the game, is really important. I understand that the new MP for Makerfield has quite a strong take on devolution, so—having first said that I congratulate him on winning his election—I look forward to working with him.
Many noble Lords—the noble Lords, Lord Doyle, Lord Norton, Lord Howell, Lord Frost and Lord Gascoigne, the noble Baronesses, Lady Stowell, Lady Gill and Lady Fox, and the noble Viscount, Lord Colville—have raised the issue of tackling misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation and disinformation pose an ongoing challenge to our democracy. New technologies, such as artificially generated video and audio content, pose a specific risk. Protecting our democratic process is and always will be an absolute priority for the Government. The current legal framework to tackle electoral mis- and disinformation means that in-scope services must also tackle illegal content where it amounts to existing election offences. This includes incitement to violence, undue influence, foreign interference and false statements about a candidate’s character.
The Government continue to identify and take action against Russian information operations that threaten the UK’s security and democracy. That includes ongoing campaigns with our allies to dismantle the online ecosystem of networks that are being used by Russia to manipulate the global public discourse. As I said earlier, the Government are implementing the Online Safety Act and the foreign interference offence under that Act compels platforms to take action.
In this context, a number of noble Lords have rightly talked about freedom of speech. It is very important that we are conscious of that as we go through this process. The noble Lords, Lord Frost, Lord Risby, Lord Jackson and Lord Pack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, all referred to this. Freedom of expression and the right to protest are fundamental parts of a healthy democracy, and these are protected under law. Although we are determined to ensure that people are not put off from campaigning and standing for public office, we continue to safeguard strong legal protections on freedom of speech. Strengthening participation through informed discussion and open debate helps to build confidence in democratic institutions, supporting long-term trust and resilience in our democracy. That is why we have launched the democratic engagement fund to help more people to participate in our democracy.
There was much discussion during the debate about foreign interference, through both funding and think tanks. We recognise the risk posed by malign actors who seek to interfere with and undermine our democratic processes. That is why we are strengthening the rules around donations to political parties. These changes will mean greater transparency in political funding, strong protections against foreign or illicit influence and increased public confidence in the integrity of our democratic institutions.
The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, mentioned the foreign influence registration scheme. It requires those being directed by the Russian state to register with the scheme if they carry out, or arrange for others to carry out, any activities in the UK, including political influence activities. The specification of Russia on the enhanced tier of FIRS is about protecting UK domestic security and demonstrates how seriously we take the threat of its interference. If the noble Baroness will allow me, I will come to China in a moment. Officials are also focused on developing a programme of work to make it harder for state threat actors to use think tanks and lobby groups as channels through which to interfere with UK policy-making. We intend to work with them to strengthen their resilience.
My noble friend Lord Cryer raised Iran, and the noble Lord, Lord Pack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, also referred to Iran. We know that it poses an increasing threat to the UK, both through its destabilising actions in the region but also through its direct actions against organisations and individuals in the UK. The Iranian regime has become increasingly emboldened, asserting itself more aggressively to advance its objectives and undermine ours. This is evidenced by the fact that direct action against UK targets has substantially increased over the years. There is a long-standing pattern of targeting Jewish and Israeli people internationally by the Iranian intelligence service, and it is clear that these plots are a conscious strategy to stifle criticism through intimidation and fear. The Government are absolutely committed to ensuring that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies have the tools they need to disrupt and degrade Iran’s malign activity on UK soil.
We recognise the strength of feeling on the question of proscription and fully understand the malign threat posed by the IRGC. Noble Lords will be aware, however, that we do not comment on whether organisations or entities are being considered for proscription. This is a long-standing precedent.
In relation to China, the Government fully recognise that China poses a series of threats to UK national security, from cyber attacks, foreign interference and espionage targeting our democratic institutions to the transnational repression of Hong Kongers. Yet we are also alive to the fact that China presents the UK with opportunities as the world’s second largest economy and the UK’s third largest trading partner. Not engaging is not a choice at all. That is why the Prime Minister discussed a series of the UK’s national security concerns with President Xi during his recent visit and agreed a new joint law enforcement pact to disrupt the supply of equipment used by people-smuggling gangs operating in the English Channel. We continue to develop a consistent and pragmatic approach to economic engagement without compromising our national security.
Many noble Lords have raised media literacy and the social media ban. Media literacy is central to helping young people critically engage with online information and the media literacy action plan sets out how the Government are strengthening these skills so that young people can continue to access reliable political information from a wide range of trusted online sources beyond social media and participate safely in democratic life alongside the wider protections for under-16s.
I realise I am running out of time, but I want to briefly cover some more information on the Rycroft review. We have taken immediate steps to implement the cap on donations and the moratorium on cryptocurrencies. The review sits against wider cross-government efforts to deliver counter political interference and the espionage action plan, which is being co-ordinated through the Defending Democracy Taskforce. I realise I have not covered everybody’s points, but I will write on those I have not reached.
On this Government’s watch, we will continue to do whatever is required to disrupt and degrade foreign interference, protect our democratic institutions and keep the British public safe. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for such an important debate.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for that very thoughtful reply. I am very sorry to hear about the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson. We all hope we will see her again soon.
We will be continuing this debate in a range of other contexts over the next year—on the Representation of the People Bill and in many more discussions about online safety, and so on. We have not agreed how to resolve the problem of public trust, but I think we do all now accept that we have a serious problem of public trust, which will be tested, as the noble Lord, Lord Walney, was suggesting, as we go through the economic disruption of AI and other factors. We well know how, in periods of economic disruption, democracy is challenged, so we will continue to have some real problems.
We could perhaps have spent a little more time on the question of local community and the loss of the sense of localness. I thought the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester’s speech was extremely interesting in that respect. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, who suggested that we used to have a concentrated media scene, that we had local media. The first time I fought a parliamentary campaign in Huddersfield, the Huddersfield Daily Examiner was the thing which everyone read to keep in touch with local politics. We have lost a lot of the network of local media, as we have lost the network of nonconformist churches and others which held local communities together. Moving to the virtual online world is part of what has torn our society, to some extent, apart.
I would love to have taken further the role of think tanks and foreign Governments. I spent 12 years at Chatham House in the last period of the Cold War. We had delicate relations with the Soviet Union and others, and the Sunday Times attacked us for having a relationship with think tanks in Moscow. Certainly, there are delicate roads one has to tread, and it is very easy to fall off on one side or the other.
I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan—as always. He is one of the most wonderful pamphleteers I have ever come across. He can make a plausible argument about almost any subject you wish. We have not discussed money enough—not just state money but private money. Among the threats to democracy are extremes of wealth and poverty. What we see going on in the United States at present is how extremes of wealth pouring through American politics are biasing what would otherwise be a free flow. The noble Lord quoted John Stuart Mill, who said that truth always beats falsehood in a free and fair fight. Extremes of money prevent a free and fair fight, so I will end by quoting Francis Bacon to the noble Lord:
“Money is like manure, of very little use except it be spread”.
I would add that money, when put together in piles that are too large, begins to stink.
Let us continue this argument. I look forward to the many arguments, on Bills and other things, that we will have over the next year—before I retire from this place—discussing how we maintain the quality of our democracy and do our best to ensure, through education and everything else, that not only do we have good chaps in the elites but, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested, we help to build more good chaps among the public as well.