House of Lords
Introduction: The Lord Bishop of Rochester
Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: AI Sector
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Ranger of Northwood
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of current business confidence among small and medium-sized enterprises in the AI sector and what actions they are taking to encourage investment.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business and Trade (Lord Leong) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government’s core evidence is the AI sector study. The 2024 study found that SMEs make up 96% of UK AI firms, and nearly 90% of firms surveyed expected revenue growth within a year. To encourage investment, the sovereign AI fund, backed by up to £500 million, invests directly in British AI start-ups, alongside free compute through the AI research resource, Innovate UK’s £130 million growth catalyst, and a £100 million R&D procurement scheme.
Lord Ranger of Northwood (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Answer and welcome the announcements in yesterday’s Budget in support of AI. Across a kaleidoscope of initiatives, the Government announced a total of about £600 million. To put that into context, JP Morgan advises that US hyperscalers driven by AI investment this year alone will invest $697 billion. There is a fundamental difference between investing in AI technology and enabling British businesses to benefit from it. That is where we need to focus. I declare my interest as a co-founder of the Business AI Alliance, a grouping of over 300 British AI tech SMEs that are searching for support from the Government. With the new programme for local funding on AI adoption worth £30 million and focused on Yorkshire, does the Minister recognise the risk of creating a two-tier AI economy where larger businesses and those in selected regions benefit while others fail?
Lord Leong (Lab)
My Lords, yesterday’s Budget announcement demonstrates our commitment to turning AI ambition into practical outcomes. Alongside the £700 million in wider AI investment, we are providing, as the noble Lord has mentioned, £30 million for locally led AI adoption partnerships, starting in Yorkshire, and £60 million for an AI pathway fund. These initiatives will help businesses overcome adoption barriers, build skills and improve productivity. Working alongside local leaders in the industry will ensure that funding delivers measurable benefits for British businesses across the country.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I declare an interest as an adviser to DLA Piper on AI policy and regulation. The Government talk of sovereign AI but continue to award their biggest data and tech contracts to US hyperscalers. What share of public AI procurement is intended to go to British SMEs under the new UK supplier definition?
Lord Leong (Lab)
I hear what the noble Lord, says but I say again that our £100 million R&D procurement scheme will help British start-ups develop innovative solutions to government challenges. We are making government a smarter, more accessible customer and creating procurement opportunities for smaller firms instead of favouring established suppliers. Through the sovereign AI fund, we are also supporting early start-up procurement, enabling innovative businesses to demonstrate that technologies generate revenue and attract private investment.
I encourage noble Lords to visit local university science and technology hubs and see innovative AI companies. I was up in Manchester yesterday and there I saw young people and exciting projects. Perhaps noble Lords could go out to university science parks and be encouraged by what is being developed in this country.
Lord Walney (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the Government’s support for, and adoption of, an open source AI framework could greatly reduce the barriers to entry for smaller firms and accelerate investment, particularly if this could be done in partnership with allied nations across the world?
Lord Leong (Lab)
I agree with the noble Lord. That is why the British Business Bank has £25.6 billion in financial capacity to support smarter and smaller businesses, including £4 billion in growth capital specifically for innovative research-intensive companies. The sovereign AI fund works alongside the bank, including co-investing in a company called Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based artificial intelligence research lab. Meanwhile, the National Wealth Fund, with £27.8 billion to deploy, is mobilising private investment in AI infrastructure, including a guaranteed £202 million to support various AI companies.
Baroness Nargund (Lab)
My Lords, I draw the House’s attention to my interests as set out in the register. I too welcome the investment in AI in yesterday’s Budget. AI presents a significant opportunity for businesses to innovate, attract investment and grow our economy. However, it also risks widening the existing gender gap in skills, pay, innovation, leadership and investment. Our own research found that 43% of young women entering the workforce are concerned that AI will replace them. We also know that only 2% of funding from venture capitalists has gone to all-female founding teams. Can the Minister say what steps the Government are taking, in partnership with businesses, to ensure that women have equal access to AI skills, AI-enabled employment, and opportunities for innovation, leadership and investment?
Lord Leong (Lab)
I am very proud to co-chair a women in industry taskforce. I work with women leaders every day to encourage them to start their businesses, especially in tech. I am sure my noble friend will appreciate and welcome yesterday’s Budget, in which the Chancellor said that he will work with the Women in Tech Taskforce to find ways that women founders can access available finance. If we empowered women in tech in the same way as men, it would generate £300 billion for the economy. We must support women tech founders.
Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I have a nice, short question: AI investors have told the Government that energy costs are the barrier to investment here, so can the Minister say why yesterday’s Budget found room to cut tariffs on gherkins but not cut the energy costs holding back our AI capacity?
Lord Leong (Lab)
Perhaps the noble Lord should read the entire Red Book. We are supporting AI companies in many ways. As far as data centres are concerned, we are ensuring that our national grid is linked up to them. At the same time, we are supporting the entire AI ecosystem, in every aspect of a company within that system. There is a lot more to do, and we are doing it.
Lord Fox (LD)
My Lords, back in 2017, the Made Smarter Review identified that a major impediment to SMEs adopting the then-available technology was the management’s expertise and knowledge, particularly around digital issues. Putting his Small Business Minister hat on, can the Minister tell your Lordships’ House what the Government are doing to enable those small businesses that could grow using AI to get the expertise they need to do so?
Lord Leong (Lab)
As Minister for Small Businesses, I spend every day talking to businesses of all sizes, including small AI start-ups. We must ensure that small companies have access to finance to start their business. At the same time, we need to encourage young people to take up AI skills. We are committed to training 10 million young people in AI skills and, so far, 2.2 million have completed programmes.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, I commend the Government for their investment in Isambard 1 computing at Bristol University, which I gather has now had approaches from several hundred SMEs to use its computing power, which is one of the fastest processors globally. What plans do the Government now have to install Isambard 2, which I understand Bristol University would welcome and would increase even further the United Kingdom’s compute power?
Lord Leong (Lab)
The noble Lord is right. We have to invest not only in compute power but in quantum. The Government have set up their programme whereby they will mobilise investment through the sovereign AI fund to invest in some of the supercomputers across the country.
Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)
My Lords, it is not just a matter of government resources. Many enterprising businesses are now coming into this field. I welcome the work going on in Yorkshire at present, to which the Minister referred. Surely, though, this is to do with even greater encouragement by government of those who are investing, to try to make that sure academia is heavily involved and that all the businesses that are raring to go to develop and innovate in AI are able to do so with full government encouragement.
Lord Leong (Lab)
The Government are absolutely encouraging universities and academics to support the Government’s programme on AI. As I said in answer to an earlier question, I have spent the last couple of weeks visiting various universities and science and technology hubs. All of us should really welcome the exciting start-ups being set up at these university science parks. The UK is not short of innovators and we have a pipeline. We will likely see some of our innovators be unicorn companies.
Gwyndod Project
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the Gwyndod Project on civil nuclear employment in Wales.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (Baroness Curran) (Lab)
Great British Energy-Nuclear is continuing to drive forward Gwyndod, the UK’s first small modular reactor project. Great British Energy-Nuclear and Rolls-Royce SMR entered contract earlier this year and are now undertaking design work to progress the Gwyndod SMR project on Anglesey in north Wales. The project, which represents the most significant industrial investment in north Wales for a generation, will support up to 3,000 skilled jobs on site at peak construction, and thousands more across the supply chain.
Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)
I thank the Minister for her Answer. Project Gwyndod indeed presents a unique opportunity to create thousands of skilled jobs, to transform local communities and to help Wales become a world leader in nuclear technology and its supply chain, but to achieve that ambition, we must also invest in the infrastructure and connectivity of that region, including an upgrade to the A55. What steps are the Government planning to take to ensure that this project is not held back by the current deficiencies in infrastructure?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
Of course infrastructure is vital, and I recognise the point the noble Baroness makes about Wales becoming a world leader and her commitment to Wales. This Government support the development of infrastructure very strongly, as has been evidenced on many occasions. The Government will work in partnership with the Welsh Government to deliver better transport in north Wales. This was demonstrated by Transport for Wales increasing the number of trains on the north Wales coastline by about half in May. In its planning for the delivery of the Gwyndod project, Great British Energy-Nuclear will consider the infrastructure required.
Lord Patel (CB)
My Lords, we have in the NHS a network of cyclotrons, which produce loaded medical isotopes. What we do not have is reactor-based production of isotopes, so we import 80% to 90% of those isotopes from abroad, with supply chains often precarious. This means that our patients, particularly cancer patients, have delays in getting their treatment. The Welsh Government produced a good business plan for reactor-based production of isotopes in Wales, at a cost of £400 million and lasting 70 years. If Wales is not an ideal place, maybe the Government will consider Scotland—but when are we going to have such reactor-based production?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
The noble Lord has raised a very important point. I would always support the performance of devolved Governments in the UK, and I note the point he makes. I understand there have been discussions on the Project ARTHUR proposal with the Department of Health and Social Care, though there has not been any formal commitment to a specific project. I assure the noble Lord that the Government are committed to ensuring resilient medical radioisotope supplies and making use of diverse international supply chains, alongside greater UK manufacturing capability. Wider funding, including through the £520 million life sciences innovative manufacturing fund, has been made available to support UK manufacturing. However, I note the point he has made about Scotland and his other points, and I will ensure they are communicated to the relevant departments, because if it is raised in Parliament in this manner, it matters to departments and they should pay attention to it.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, in Scotland, as my noble friend knows, Hunterston and Torness are coming to the end of their lives shortly, yet new nuclear in Scotland is opposed by the Scottish Government. I know that the UK Government do not want to upset the Scottish Government. However, since energy is a reserved area, is this not exactly an area in which we should use our sovereign powers and overrule the Scottish Government?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
That was interesting and challenging, as ever, from the noble Lord. I do not know how well people know this, but I am not really on record as being frightened to upset the Scottish Government—I do not think they would have that view, either.
The noble Lord raises a very serious point. There have been discussions about nuclear power in Scotland. The Green Party had a debate at their conference, and it has resisted it, unfortunately, and the SNP has stood against it. They have missed huge opportunities to contribute to the development of clean energy in Scotland and across the UK. They are also turning their back on huge opportunities for investment and infrastructure development, and the development of skills. Of course, we have high standards of safety and security, overseen by independent regulators, and we have made enormous progress on this. The SNP has been very backward in its attitude, so I will use every opportunity I can to pursue this issue with the SNP Government—and I am not frightened to do so.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, on these Benches, we very much welcome the progress that has been made on this important project at Gwyndod. I ask the Minister to give some further information on the skills pipeline needed. We recognise that there is the opportunity of 300 apprenticeships and 3,000 jobs, but what action are the Government taking to ensure that local Welsh residents, including Welsh speakers, are able and empowered to apply for these jobs and that they turn into long-lasting opportunities?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
It is really important to make the point, too, that Wales must be part of this. Often, we have seen projects in the past that have not emphasised that connection to the local community, and we must take those opportunities to do that—so I agree with noble Earl’s emphasis on that. Also, as the Chancellor, John Healey, said yesterday, we must make investment work twice, and we need to make sure we do that in the energy department too, so we get a skills bonus as well as a delivery bonus. We agree that it must represent the most significant industrial investment in the region in Wales for a generation. As I have said, it will support 3,000 jobs. There is a nuclear skills plan, focused not simply on growing the nuclear workforce but on creating a strong, sustainable pipeline of skills, and it is something we will keep under close attention.
Lord Gove (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is absolutely right that the Scottish Nationalist Government have been a blocker of nuclear power—but they are not the only Luddites in our political system. It was of course Nick Clegg, as Deputy Prime Minister, who stood in the way of new nuclear, and this Government face opposition from regulators who use legacy EU rules to stop new nuclear power. Fish protection measures have already cost more than £700 million in the development of Hinkley Point. The government-commissioned Fingleton review pointed out how we could deal with these measures, but the Government have refused to implement—
Baroness Curran (Lab)
My goodness, there was a lot in that, and I am not sure I heard it all with some of the demands for a question out of it, but I can assure the noble Lord that I would never deny that there have been challenges in delivering our nuclear policy. We have had challenges in planning. It has been far too slow, which is why the Fingleton review was undertaken. We have committed to implementing the 47 recommendations of the Fingleton review and we are implementing some of them already. There will be lots of opportunities to discuss this matter further, when perhaps we can have a more detailed discussion as we take forward the legislation. I suspect the notion of Brexit and the EU will be a continuing matter for discussion in this House.
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
As someone who grew up on Ynys Môn, many of my friends had to leave the island to get a job. After 15 years of a Conservative Government in London and many years of a Labour Government in Cardiff, that has been an economic disaster for Wales. So, can the Minister commit to recruiting locally for this project, so we do not have another generation that has to leave the island just for a job?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
Again, that is a very serious question and a matter that demands close attention. I would need to look at the details of the particular island rather than give the noble Baroness guarantees, but I can assure her that the principle of local employment, ensuring local communities benefit from infrastructure development, is at the centre of what we do. We will keep it closely monitored and ensure there is a skills pipeline coming through, because a range of jobs are associated with nuclear projects, from the very highly skilled through to apprenticeships, which are vital. Overall, our commitment is to growth in every postcode: economic regeneration for all the UK. It was a model between the Plaid Cymru Government and the UK Government to develop this project. Michael Shanks was there last week with the Welsh Government Minister, and they were seen delivering together. That is a constructive approach. We have our differences, but on employment regeneration, we can work together.
Lord Forbes of Newcastle (Lab)
My Lords, while I welcome the employment opportunities expected from the Gwyndod project, does my noble friend the Minister agree that success should be measured not simply by the number of jobs created but by whether they are secure, high-paid, union-recognised jobs, filled by local people? What steps are the Government taking to ensure that this ambitious project creates a sustainable pipeline of engineers, technicians and skilled tradespeople, not just in north Wales but nationwide, supporting both this initiative and the UK’s future nuclear programme as a whole?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
That is another vital dimension of this. I should have said earlier that the nuclear skills hubs include the Wales hub. They are a UK-wide approach that brings employers, training providers and partners together to address local skills needs and strengthen that pipeline of talent needed to support the sector’s future. The plan is also to strengthen apprenticeships, graduate programmes, doctoral research and technical career paths, to develop the engineers, technicians and skilled workforce needed to support the UK’s current and future nuclear ambitions. We all know that, economically, that has a read-across to other industries and skills, as well as knock-on effects for suppliers. We want to release this money, to make it work twice and to make sure we have high-level, well-paid jobs that, of course, are unionised too.
Online Safety Act 2023: Platform Categorisation
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Morgan of Cotes
To ask His Majesty’s Government why Ofcom’s register of categorised services contains no platform categorised by reference to risk or functionality alone, when the Online Safety Act 2023 permits it; and why small, high-harm platforms, including those hosting antisemitic and suicide-related content, remain outside Category 1.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Lloyd of Effra) (Lab)
My Lords, Ofcom assessed and designated services on the register, in line with the regulations passed by Parliament, in February 2025. These set category 1 threshold conditions, combining user numbers and functionalities. Category 1 is intended for platforms with a minimum of 7 million monthly UK users, reflecting their reach and influence. Smaller services are required to tackle illegal content, including suicide, self-harm and antisemitic content, that meets the legal threshold and to protect children from harmful content.
Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)
I thank the Minister very much for her Answer, but the real reason is that, in 2025, then Ministers chose to accept Ofcom’s advice to categorise online platforms on the basis of user numbers alone. Do current Ministers now accept that Ofcom would have been better able, for example, to block a notorious suicide forum, to tackle platforms promoting hate-filled antisemitic content, or those recruiting people for activities hostile to the United Kingdom, if it had followed what this House legislated for in 2023? If Ministers had pushed back on Ofcom’s advice and instead required it to categorise platforms on the basis of functionality or size, as the House wanted, would that have given Ministers that flexibility?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
Categorisation, as the noble Baroness knows, does not determine whether a service is regulated or subject to enforcement by Ofcom. The Government considered options to categorise small but risky services, including those proposed by many thoughtful people on this complicated issue, but ultimately a workable and robust condition for capturing small but risky services was not found. I emphasise that the Government share the significant concerns about small but risky services, such as those that exist purely to stoke hate and division. Ofcom has established the Small but Risky Services Taskforce. It has monitored and carried out active engagement with the providers of 14 services that represent a significant risk of harm to children, from harmful content they host or disseminate. A number of those have geo-blocked the UK as a result, but the Government keep the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act under review and will not hesitate to take further action where there is clear evidence it is needed.
Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)
My Lords, currently, the Online Safety Act requires platforms to conduct suitable and sufficient risk assessments but does not legally require platforms to take action to address the risks identified in these assessments. Does the Minister think that the OSA should be amended to deal with that problem?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
The implementation of the Online Safety Act is something the Government are highly focused on. We have asked Ofcom to look at capabilities; the chair of Ofcom is looking at capabilities around supervision and enforcement. We are taking further measures to protect children, with the restricting of social media companies providing services to under-16s. We are very live to the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act. As the Secretary of State and others have said, where we find evidence that more action is needed, we will take it.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, pro-anorexia online forums promote extremely dangerous content, exacerbating eating disorders, yet Ofcom has chosen not to take powers to tackle these pernicious sites, despite knowing that anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders. Are the Government reviewing how Ofcom is using the powers that this Parliament gave it to tackle small, high-harm eating disorder forums, and if it is not, will it commit to doing so?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
As I mentioned, the Government share the significant concerns about small but risky services. The Ofcom taskforce is working to ensure compliance with the Online Safety Act, focusing on platforms hosting priority harm content such as CSAM; hate and terror content; suicide, self-harm and eating disorder forums; and violence against women and girls. That is a very important focus of activity. As I also mentioned, this is something that we expect Ofcom to enforce robustly. Ofcom has the Government’s full backing to use its enforcement powers, and the chair of Ofcom is undertaking a review of Ofcom’s enforcement capabilities and powers. The Government are in discussion about what more needs to be done here.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, is it not the case that, once again, Ofcom is hopeless, and we need to review its role? Unless we have an effective regulator, things such as this will happen on a regular basis. We need to do something about the poor standard of regulators in this country.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
Ensuring that there is a safe, digital experience for citizens and young people in this country, as my noble friend alludes to, is absolutely essential, and we expect robust enforcement of the Online Safety Act. We welcome the capabilities review commissioned by Sir Ian Cheshire, the new chair of Ofcom, which is expected to conclude this autumn. We expect the review to identify practical improvements needed to strengthen the pace and impact of Ofcom’s enforcement function. Enforcement goes hand in hand with the further measures the Government will bring in to regulate the online environment for young people.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, it is clear that smaller platforms are causing disproportionate harm to society. We supported the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, with his regret amendment in February 2025 on, quite rightly, regulating these smaller platforms, in which the Contents had it. Do the Government now accept that it was a serious mistake to resist the will of the House?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
Small but risky services are regulated under the Online Safety Act; they are subject to the duties around illegal content and harm for children. It is very important that those duties are abided by; it is very important, as I mentioned before, that Ofcom enforces with a focus on those services that are disseminating, or creating the environment for, such harm. It is something that we absolutely back.
The Lord Bishop of Gloucester
My Lords, can the Minister comment on how the exclusion of small, high-harm platforms from category 1 supports the Government’s violence against women and girls strategy, given concerns that online abuse, coercion and the spread of misogynistic content often occur on very niche platforms, with relatively small user bases?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
Small services are subject to the illegal content and child safety duties. Ofcom absolutely must enforce those duties where there is evidence that services are not abiding by them. That is one reason we have asked Sir Ian Cheshire to take forward his review of Ofcom’s capabilities. It is important that the online space and the offline space are safe for women and girls and that illegal content is clamped down on.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for his reference, but I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for her work on this. I am not surprised that she has raised this again. When she tabled an amendment to the Online Safety Bill, we all thought that this categorisation matter was sorted. Will the Government now firmly commit to a fixed date for reviewing the categorisation thresholds, informed by evidence of harm rather than user numbers, so that this is not left adrift until the statutory review of the Act?
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
The focus when taking forward the categorisation duties is to ensure that those duties come into force in 2027. Let me return to the point that I think everyone in this House agrees with: small but risky services should not provide illegal content or harm to children, and Ofcom should take the necessary action to enforce the duties under the Act.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
My Lords, how is Ofcom working with the consumer council to look at the control of so-called toys targeted at children as young as three, which have AI responses in them? They are linked to the internet and can give really disgusting, highly sexual answers when children, from the age of three onwards, pose even simple questions.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)
Obviously, we must keep examples such as that in mind. I would prefer to write to the noble Baroness to answer her question, as it crosses a number of activities and regulations. We are taking action to restrict children’s access to services that provide the kind of harm that she mentions. I will follow up with her afterwards.
Sudan: Aerial Bombardment
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Alton of Liverpool
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of recent aerial bombardments in the war in Sudan.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)
The increasing use of aerial warfare, including drones, is inflicting devastating harm on civilians and civilian infrastructure in Sudan, killing over 1,000 civilians in the first half of this year and contributing to the growing risk of famine in the country. The UK, both publicly and in our diplomatic engagements, is urging the warring parties to protect civilians, comply with international humanitarian law and facilitate safe and unhindered humanitarian access. At the UN General Assembly, the Foreign Secretary and Minister for International Development convened international partners to co-ordinate action to protect civilians in Sudan and issued a communiqué on behalf of the UK-convened coalition for atrocity prevention on the impact of drone warfare on civilians.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for his reply. Can he tell us what response we have received from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons about credible allegations concerning the use of chemical weapons in Sudan and the bringing to justice of those responsible, along with the quartermasters whose actions have led to an estimated 400,000 deaths in Sudan? That includes terrible atrocities in El Fasher in Darfur, the displacement of some 14 million people and 19 million people facing acute food insecurity and famine. As penholders in the Security Council, will the Minister take this opportunity to clarify reports that the UK intends to support a candidate to become Secretary-General of the United Nations who has dismissed the findings of the UN’s own panel of experts about the involvement of the UAE in arming RSF paramilitaries? What convoluted message would this send on seeking an end to the world’s most deadly and catastrophic war?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for that and pay tribute to him; no one inside or outside this House does more to keep the spotlight shining on what is the worst humanitarian crisis facing the world in the 21st century, and I thank him for that. On the chemical weapons issue, we take any alleged breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention very seriously. As Sudan is a state party to that convention, we expect all those in Sudan to abide by the prohibition on developing, producing, processing, transferring or using chemical weapons. We have consistently raised concerns about allegations of weapon use by the Sudanese Armed Forces, including at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. I hosted the director-general of the OPCW a couple of weeks ago in this very building and discussed exactly that, and we are using our national and Sudan-specific statements at the OPCW’s executive council to further this agenda. On the issue of the United Nations Secretary-General, I urge everyone in the House not to believe wild speculation in the newspapers on any UK preference for any candidate; we do not comment in public on that, and that is how we will continue to approach this issue.
Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)
The actions that the UK has taken on the credible information on the use of chlorine gas on civilians is that it has asked the alleged perpetrators to investigate their own actions. This is wholly insufficient. Under Articles IX and X of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the UK, as a state party, can take actions to demand independent investigations of this credible information on the use of gas. As the UN Security Council penholder for Sudan, why have we not taken this action?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for his question. We are engaging on a number of strands of this issue with the OPCW. He is absolutely right that part of that is urging Sudan to conclude the investigation that is under way. We have a range of discussions at the OPCW and at the UN in our role as penholder, across the community of nations, about ways to address the issue and take allegations seriously. As I think the noble Lord and everyone else in the House know, the OPCW has enjoyed strong support from the United Kingdom for a number of years, and we take it extremely seriously as the primary vehicle to investigate serious alleged breaches.
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)
My Lords, given the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan over the past number of years, like the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I again ask my noble friend: will he, along with international counterparts, put some diplomatic pressure on President Trump to persuade him not to allow control of the UN to go to the UAE, as it funds the rebels in Sudan who have committed immeasurable atrocities in Darfur, including El Fasher?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
My noble friend is right to point to the role of external interference in this conflict and the way it fuels the conflict. We have been clear from the start that all external support for either side serves only to fuel the bloodshed and prolonged violence and must end. That is why we have imposed an arms embargo on Sudan. With reference to the United States, that is why we are not just continuing to call for compliance with the United Nations arms embargo on Darfur; we are also working with the US and others to support efforts to strengthen the scope of that UN embargo.
Lord Bellingham (Con)
Further to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, it was exactly a year ago that the RSF attacked El Fasher and 6,000 civilians were killed. A similar appalling atrocity was committed in El Geneina a few months later. These are vile, wicked and evil crimes committed by people who are beyond being reproached. What more can be done to bring them to justice?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
I agree with the noble Lord—as I think everyone will—on the vileness of the actions in El Fasher; the events were horrific. Earlier this week, the Minister for International Development and the All-Party Group on Sudan held a joint event in Parliament to remember the victims. On the first anniversary of the RFS assault on El Fasher, we announced a new round of sanctions on suspected perpetrators of sexual violence and other atrocities. The answer to what can be done is: a whole range of things. Frustrating as this is, I am pleased to say that the United Kingdom is leading on both humanitarian support—providing £146 million a year—and on justice and accountability, through leadership of the Coalition for Atrocity Prevention and Justice for Sudan. We are also using our penholder status at the United Nations for a variety of activities.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, I very much welcome what my noble friend the Minister had to say about our continuing support, and particularly the humanitarian response. Can he update the House on the processes that are being led by the US through the quad? In addition, because these quad processes and other statements and UN processes have so far been unsuccessful in preventing the grim atrocities that we continue to see, can he commit the UK to playing a leading role in the painstaking work of working with civil society and local political civilian leadership in order to bring about a lasting peace?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
My noble friend knows what she is talking about on this; she played a leading role in responding on it for a number of years, and I work with officials who are extremely grateful for all the leadership that she provided on it over a long time. She is absolutely right that the UK must play, and continues to play, a leading effort in not just formal multilateral fora but informal environments. Recently, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary was in Istanbul for an—excuse the acronym—E3+R4 meeting, which engages countries with different kinds of access to involve parties in ways of trying to find ways through on the range of difficult issues that are involved in the Sudan conflict.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester
My Lords, churches have been widely used as shelters over the course of the conflict in Sudan, particularly in the Nuba mountains, from where the majority of Sudanese Christians originate. Attacks on places of worship and religious leaders have been widely documented, and both sides have used places of worship for military purposes. In the light of these developments, can the Minister say what assessment the Government have made on the situation of freedom of religion in Sudan and what steps particularly they are taking to ensure that the urgent humanitarian assistance that he has already referenced is also reaching vulnerable and historically marginalised religious communities, including in the Nuba mountains?
Lord Wood of Anfield (Lab)
The right reverend Prelate is right to point to issues to do with freedom of worship and the use of religious buildings, such as churches and other locations, by parties to the conflict. On the guiding principles of the humanitarian support provided—it is not just about the amount, £146 million a year, which we are pleased to say is reaching millions and millions of people—one of the developments, the evolution of which I think my noble friend was partly responsible for, is that we are providing help to local responders using NGOs and local organisations, including religious organisations, as partners and destinations for funding. That is an important principle in the humanitarian response that the right reverend Prelate asked about.
Rosebank Oil Field
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord Moynihan
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the exploration of the Rosebank oil field, following its development being accounted for in the OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook published on 28 October 2026.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Curran) (Lab)
The OBR makes assumptions about future oil and gas production in order to forecast tax receipts. It uses the North Sea Transition Authority’s projections, which include potential production from potential new fields, including Rosebank, and future discoveries. It is therefore normal for the Government’s future revenue forecasts to include both current and potential future oil and gas projects. Rosebank, for example, has been included since at least 2019. This in no way reflects the Energy Secretary’s independent decision on the project, which will be made through a quasi-judicial process, taking into account all relevant factors in the case. It will not surprise the noble Lord to hear me say that I am unable to comment further on individual projects and that the Energy Secretary will be making a decision on whether to grant consent or not in due course, in the normal way.
Lord Moynihan (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as chair of Amey, Acteon and Buckthorn. The legislation governing the OBR gives it an explicit, legally binding right to access information and seek assistance from government departments. When it is uncertain, it says so. However, what it says on pages 93 and 94 is as clear as crystal. The projection for oil and gas receipts,
“includes production from currently producing fields (including Jackdaw), and the NSTA’s estimate of production from development of new fields, which includes Rosebank”—
so there is no prevarication and no rider, and it is specifically named.
At today’s oil prices and with current reserve estimates, it is likely that the tax take could be north of £10 billion for the life of the field. Can the Minister say why it has taken over a year for the Government to announce the decision to produce Rosebank, with the Secretary of State stating to the Guardian that she is “leaning towards” refusing Rosebank when the words of the Chancellor this morning in the context of Jackdaw were:
“I really welcome the decision … It’s common sense. It’s practical. It adds to our energy security. It produces revenue”—
all of which are equally applicable to Rosebank?
Does the Minister agree that if these figures are wrong, then the OBR, despite its right to consult DESNZ, should bin its projections and rewrite them? Alternatively, should not Parliament be informed first when the Government make an announcement, especially when backing the Conservative campaign to approve Rosebank and back Scottish workers—indeed, over 1,000 Scottish workers and their families?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
The noble Lord makes a number of points. In terms of what he says about the OBR, I have to re-emphasise the points that I have made, that it is a normal process for the Government’s future revenue forecast to include both current and potential oil and gas receipts, and it has been included since 2019. However, the noble Lord went on to make a number of other points.
The Chancellor indeed said that Jackdaw was common sense—I think I used that very phrase myself when I was at the Dispatch Box earlier this week. I have to emphasise that we have had a legal challenge through this process—the noble Lord’s former Government will understand that, because the Court of Session said that scope 3 emissions had to be taken into account, so we have had to revisit that. I want to be as clear as I can be that this is quasi-judicial and I do not wish to jeopardise that in any way whatever. I take the point the noble Lord made; I am under no illusions about the Conservative Party’s view on this is—it has been pointed out to me on countless occasions. I want to just leave it at that. I am sure as the questions develop, we may go into a bit of a party-political debate, but at the moment I just want to emphasise the quasi-judicial nature of the Rosebank decision.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)
My Lords, further to that point, will my noble friend confirm that, if this decision is made on a political basis and not on the facts for and against going ahead, there could be another legal challenge, which would delay it for a further two years and which would certainly not be of any benefit to the people of Scotland?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I do not mean that disrespectfully. I mean more that my noble friend usually challenges me in his questions, not that he does not put his case well; humble apologies for that if it was inappropriate. My noble friend makes the point very well that the decision is quasi-judicial and all the factors will be—and must be—taken into account. If not, they are bound to be legally challenged. We know that there are stakeholders with great interest on all sides of this decision. I counsel those who are against and those who are for Rosebank to think about that, because it may jeopardise the future if we do not get the legal process right.
Earl Russell (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for the earlier answer she provided to give clarity on the OBR forecasts. However, separate from that decision, does she agree that 90% of Rosebank’s oil reserves would be destined for international markets and would be sold at global market prices, providing little or no benefit to UK consumers?
Earl Russell (LD)
Does the Minister also agree that the 254 million tonnes of scope 3 CO2 emissions will be equivalent to 70% of the UK’s annual emissions in 2024 and seem very incompatible with our carbon budgets?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I have to make the same point again: I cannot be tempted into making any comment about that. The noble Earl made his point and it is on the record. I heard some challenges to him and some support for him; that is on the record.
Lord Harper (Con)
My Lords, did not the Chancellor really give the game away yesterday when he referred to Jackdaw and accidentally let the truth out, which was that the Energy Secretary was opposed to it, but the Prime Minister and the Chancellor said yes? Is not that exactly what we are going to see with the Rosebank decision? The Energy Secretary is against it, but the Prime Minister and the Chancellor know it is the right thing to do, that is what the Government are going to do, and if they do the right thing, we will support them.
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I understand the process and I understand politics. I understand why the noble Lord is making that point. But I have to say that it is quasi-judicial, and I can absolutely guarantee, because I know the Energy Secretary very well, that she has not made the decision, she will make the decision on the facts, and the Government will stand by that decision.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that this process occurred under previous Conservative governments and that that really is not important in this discussion? She is quite right, of course, to say that the Secretary of State will make the decision in her own time, exactly as a previous Conservative Secretary of State would do. All I would say to her is that I hope the Secretary of State realises how important it is for Britain not to encourage other people to extend the exploitation of oil, because we are fighting a battle against climate change which is crucially important for our children and grandchildren.
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I never thought I would ever find myself saying this, but I have listened to the noble Lord’s speeches on climate change and have had a very positive response to them. I think he makes very significant contributions on climate change and pay tribute to the work that he has done. I will reference the Jackdaw decision because I do not want to reference the Rosebank decision, but the Government are very clear that we are maintaining our commitment to get off the fossil fuel rollercoaster. It is entirely consistent with our commitment to building clean energy, and we remain committed to understanding and explaining to the British people the threat of climate change and the way that it will impact on their lives. It is happening now. We need to adapt, we need to mitigate now and we need to get off the fossil fuel roller coaster. I recognise the arguments that the noble Lord has put so well in this Chamber about that.
Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)
The Minister has kept saying, as have the Government, that this issue is quasi-judicial. Would she explain why? A judicial decision was made in the Scottish courts about a year ago. The duty of the Government is to make a factual decision, taking into account a judicial decision already made. That cannot be regarded as quasi-judicial.
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I answer the noble Lord with some degree of trepidation, because I know of his great expertise in this matter. My understanding is, and I have been told categorically by officials, that it is quasi-judicial because, given the range of factors that the Secretary of State has to take into account on this, it could be opened up to a court challenge. I am happy to further explore this matter so that in future I give a more adequate legal answer to the noble Lord.
Lord Bridges of Headley (Con)
My Lords, I ask a very simple question of the Minister. Given what my noble friend Lord Moynihan said about what the OBR has stated, can she confirm therefore that if Rosebank does not go ahead, the Government’s fiscal headroom will be much reduced?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
The OBR will have to republish the figures if Rosebank does not go ahead, and that will need to be addressed.
Baroness Hayman (CB)
Does the Minister agree that perhaps noble Lords opposite should be a little more careful and a little nuanced in their interpretation of the OBR report? It did indeed, for the reasons that the Minister set out, include both Rosebank and Jackdaw in those assessments, but the overall assessment was that receipts from North Sea oil revenues and taxation would decline, as they have over the last 20 years, in the next five years to zero. Is it not really important that we concentrate on the future, and could the Minister tell me what progress we are making—it was mentioned in the Budget papers—on that important issue that would save consumers money, delinking the price of electricity from the price of gas?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for pointing out that that is what the OBR actually says about that.
Baroness Curran (Lab)
Well, there is a discussion going on across the Benches at the moment, and we will return to that, no doubt, if there is disagreement about it. I share that understanding with the noble Baroness, and that is what I have been briefed. She is absolutely right about the importance of delinking, because, fundamentally, we all know that the North Sea is a declining basin and that that is something we have to come to terms with. I understand the politics of what the Conservative Party is trying to do here, but as I have often said at this Dispatch Box, the Tory Party is in utter denial about what we face in terms of climate change, and as a country we have to come to terms with it.
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I just point out that there are some nodding on the Conservative Benches who agree with that. The Conservative Party is in utter denial and broken the consensus on that. I said before that I think it is a dereliction of duty not to address the interests of the British people on that matter. That is why our move to clean energy and delinking is so important. As I said earlier, the price of electricity was determined at 90% and it is 60% today. The Chancellor yesterday referenced the contracts for difference process that will keep us maintaining that momentum to delinking. It is fundamental to our policy going forward.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, a lot of the focus on the Rosebank decision has been on climate change, naturally, but this is a development at a depth of over one kilometre, the deepest ever proposed on the UK continental shelf. The remote location, depth and harsh Atlantic conditions make it a very difficult site. A major oil spill could have serious impact on at least 16 UK marine protected areas. Can the Minister reassure me that that is really seriously being taken into account?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I am afraid I am going to have to disappoint the noble Baroness, because I just do not want to be dragged into any detail about the decision. I will absolutely assert that when the Secretary of State makes her decision, she will be given a range of information that I know that she will read and study carefully. She will make the decision in the round and will address that. As I said to the noble Earl, Lord Russell, those issues are on the record in this House.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
I do not know about other noble Lords, but I would welcome a little bit of financial context on this, following the question by the noble Lord, Lord Bridges. When I look at the OBR document, it is very hard to understand what the financial difference is. It refers to, with Rosebank, a 10% decline in revenues over the period and, without it, a 14% decline over the period. What does that mean in terms of pounds and pence over the financial forecast period?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I was going to say thank you for that question, but I do not know if I do, to be honest. The OBR does not actually make forecasts. It recognises the potential tax receipts for Rosebank, but it does not actually give pounds and pence forecasts for it.
Lord Lilley (Con)
As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, this quasi-judicial nature has been shown to be a quasi-excuse. I can assure the Minister, having taken quasi-judicial decisions, that they do not need to take a year. If the Government decide that it is illegal under the present law to go ahead with Rosebank, why do not they change the law, and as soon as possible?
Baroness Curran (Lab)
I can only assert what I have already stated. It is our understanding—my understanding, certainly—that this is quasi-judicial. I need to understand some of the points being made in greater depth. It was raised at the Court of Session. We do not want to go through another legal process again. We have to give it proper consideration. That means that these decisions take time, and we want to be absolutely clear that when a decision is made, it is the final decision and does not end up in the courts again.
Mediation, Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale
That this House takes note of the impact of mediation and conflict prevention globally, and the role of the United Kingdom in peacebuilding.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
I note several entries in the register of interests in relation to work I have done recently for the World Bank, the CHD and Conciliation Resources, my position as a ministerial adviser on soft power and my attendance at more than a couple of conferences on mediation and conflict prevention over the past year.
I thank all noble Lords who have volunteered to speak in this debate. I am very grateful for their participation and particularly for the Minister stepping up to address this important topic in his closing response. I am also grateful for this opportunity to address the escalation in violent conflict that we have seen across the globe in recent years and to speak a little about the hope that exists in the efforts that are escalating to prevent violent conflict and what we here in the UK can do to contribute.
Across the globe today we face the highest number of states involved in violent conflict that the world has seen since 1946. A recent report, Peace Works, by 11 international NGOs based here in the UK, showed that the cost to the world of this conflict is about 10% of global GDP—approximately £16 trillion. Nearly 120 million people across the world are displaced today, approximately half of them children. Over 200 million people face humanitarian need as a result of the impact of conflict. Tens of thousands of children are impacted directly by violent conflict every year. Sexual violence is increasing as a weapon of war after many years when it was enthusiastically tackled. Just under a quarter of a million people, combatants and civilians, were killed in 2025 as a result of violent conflict. In the UK we face the impact of that. We see increased division, distrust, the impact of displacement in different parts of the world and disruption, most of all to our energy supplies.
Unfortunately, over the last decade the UK has stepped back rather than stepping up into this challenge. We used to lead the world in global thinking, global action on conflict prevention and peacebuilding. Between 2005 and 2015, successive Governments took the action that was required at home and abroad, and in the multilateral organisations, to make a real difference to combating global conflict, bringing about peaceful resolution and supporting those trying to implement peace agreements. But there has been no refreshing or updating of the conflict prevention strategy of the United Kingdom since the 2016 building stability overseas strategy. Over that decade, we have reduced our capacity for working in the multilateral organisations and, perhaps more importantly, on the ground in local peacebuilding initiatives. Our spend on conflict prevention reduced from £296 million in 2017 to £118 million in 2023; the figures for the next three years have not yet been published.
It was noted, in an independent report this time last year to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Resolution 1325 at the United Nations on women, peace and security, that there was an increasing gap between policy and rhetoric—all very positive, not just about women, peace and security but about peacebuilding and conflict prevention generally—and action and delivery by the UK. Globally, we face enormous challenges, not just because of the scale of the conflict but because a United Nations that was designed for approximately 50 member states in 1946 is increasingly unfit for purpose for nearly 200 states in 2026.
There is good news amid all this misery and violence. We have countries around the world stepping into the area of conflict prevention and mediation. Turkey, for example, joined with Finland in 2010 to establish the Group of Friends of Mediation at the United Nations. It also co-chairs the friends of mediation in the OIC and in the OSCE. Over these last 16 years it has been involved in helping to resolve disputes between Ethiopia and Somalia and in supporting the peace process in the Philippines. Of course, closer to home it has also regularly engaged with a number of conflicts in its own neighbourhood.
In Japan, just this year the new Prime Minister established the international peace mediation unit in its foreign service to take a “more proactive role” in peacefully settling disputes in other places. That is particularly significant in south-east Asia, given some of the challenges that we are seeing.
Qatar has become both a location and a voice for mediation and conflict prevention since 2004. It has been involved in several ceasefires, the return of hostages, the establishment of peace agreements and support for them afterwards, not least recently in Gaza but also in the DRC and on an issue close to my heart—helping to secure the return of some of the Ukrainian children stolen by Russia, many thousands of whom still lie behind Russian lines. The UK established a partnership with Qatar just 12 months ago to take forward this work on mediation and conflict prevention. I would be interested to hear an update from the Minister on the progress of that partnership and the actions that have been or could yet be taken.
There is a common thread running through this international action, which is supplemented by the historic and important work of the Scandinavian states, the Swiss, more recently the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and others. That thread is that every mediation, every sincere effort at conflict prevention, has three key elements. It has to have sincere dialogue; it has to have a sustained, patient and consistent approach to the mediation itself; and increasingly it has to have regional ownership. In the neighbourhood, people understand the historical, cultural and identity issues that will drive many of these conflicts, and which local leaders could bring about an end to the conflict and sustain the peace.
I have seen this for myself, working with the FCDO, with a number of NGOs, with the Philippine Government and with the former Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Bangsamoro region of the Philippines. Centuries of division between the Catholic and Muslim populations of the Philippines and decades of armed conflicts in Muslim Mindanao led to a quarter of a million people dying between 1968 and the early part of the 21st century. But in 2014 the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro, supported by the United Kingdom and the international community but led locally and chaired by the first-ever woman to sign a peace agreement anywhere in the world as the chief negotiator, was signed. I have spoken about this process in your Lordships’ House before, but I am delighted to report that in September, just two months ago, the Bangsamoro region held its first elections to the democratically elected autonomous parliament that was promised in the peace agreement. Those elections have been relatively peaceful. The new chief minister will be elected by the new parliament tomorrow in Cotabato. The UK has been a partner in that process, just as we were a partner in Colombia and a driver for the peace process in Somalia. I hope that we will continue to help build peace in the Philippines and elsewhere in south-east Asia. Perhaps the Minister could reflect on that too.
The UK has significant assets that we can contribute to conflict prevention and to mediation and peacebuilding across the world. We have the honour and the responsibility of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Our other networks include NATO, the Commonwealth, partnership with the European Union and our considerable diplomatic assets—still one of the best and most respected diplomatic networks in the world, despite some of the cutbacks of recent years.
Here in the UK, we have the expertise and the trust not just in government but outside government that so many people feel that they can, or at least have been able to, rely on. We must use those soft power assets that we have to be engaged more in the years to come in trying to reverse this increase in violent conflict and support those who are seeking peace.
That same report, Peace Works, that was published just last month and launched here in Parliament by the All-Party Group on Conflict Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, had five key priorities that the UK could follow. The first—this is a statement of purpose that might seem very obvious, but it is not yet up front in the Government’s international strategy— would be to prioritise prevention, and to say that quite clearly and embody it in the work that we do on an everyday basis.
The second would be to energise coalitions. We have discussed this on many occasions. In fact, I think my last contribution in your Lordships’ House was on the coalition of the willing to support Ukraine in this time of desperate conflict against the Russian invasion. But we should be energising other coalitions for peace and supporting and participating where we can. The third would be to harness the capabilities that exist here in the UK, in and outside government, and use them in the way that can be most helpful. The fourth would be, at the same time, to champion local peacebuilders, because ultimately, without local ownership of peacebuilding processes, those processes cannot be sustained. Finally, in a world where technology is increasingly changing the nature of violent conflict, we need also to spearhead technology for peace. We can use many of these new technologies to help support peace rather than just dealing with war.
In securing this debate today, I ask whether the Minister can perhaps clarify for us the current state of funding and the plans for support from the Government for conflict prevention, not just this year but in the next three years. Can the Minister say whether that funding will be maintained in this difficult financial climate or whether there is even a possibility that it might be increased? Will we commit to being a reliable, engaged, long-term partner for not just those international partner countries that we can work with on mediation, conflict prevention and peacebuilding but those trying to build peace on the ground and within countries trying to recover from conflict, to ensure that future generations have a better future? Will we, ultimately, refresh the strategy from 2016 and ensure that we use our assets for the best purposes and the maximum impact as we intervene and take our responsibilities seriously around the world?
We have that responsibility. We have a historic responsibility—a very current responsibility in our role at the United Nations—but we also have an opportunity to use the skills, talents, capabilities and passions of people here in the United Kingdom. Will we use that responsibility and opportunity to not just resist and defend from violent aggression and prepare for that properly, which I fully support, but to contribute to peacebuilding and prevent conflict in a way that will ensure that future generations can live more safely and maximise the opportunities that they deserve?
There has been a bit of debate over the last 18 months within and outside the Government, and perhaps even elsewhere in the world too, about the competition between hard and soft power. Many countries, not least the UK, among the developed democracies of the world, have had to step up, rightly, and improve their hard power capabilities. However, I submit to your Lordships’ House that that cannot be at the expense of soft power. We need to not make this a choice between hard and soft power; we need to use smart power. It will be smart power that will not just allow us to prevent and deter violent conflict against ourselves or our allies but allow us to make a difference around the world and ensure that people are able to live in peace. With that hopefully positive potential outcome to all this, I move the Motion standing in my name.
Lord Redwood (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for introducing this debate. There is no more important topic; the world would be a much better place if there could be peace in places today torn by war, with the damage, destruction, and the violence that brings. I agree with a lot of what the noble Lord said about the opportunities for the United Kingdom with our great diplomatic skills, the reach of our diplomatic service, the experience we have gained over many decades and centuries of intervening around the world and, where we could, trying to find resolution of conflict, and with our own experiences bringing peace out of the very difficult situation in Northern Ireland. But, as the noble Lord referred to at the end, one of the reasons the United Kingdom does have a role in the world and is taken seriously is that we have serious and important defence forces. It is most important that they are used with a view to promoting peace where we are intervening, or to right wrongs that can be righted relatively easily by the judicious use of force. That has not always been true in the interventions that we and our NATO allies have made in recent decades in different parts of the world.
I hope the Government, as they go through a rather long defence review and discussion about how best to spend the money that is clearly needed, will have at the forefront of their mind how those forces can be used to deter violence and the outbreak of new conflicts, and how they can be used for expeditionary forces that can make timely interventions where necessary, particularly where those interventions can help create a peace, or where they are needed to police a peace which has been brought about by diplomatic process.
I am sure all of us agree that talking and diplomatic compromise are usually better than conflict extending into aggressive war, and that we would all agree that you only get a war when diplomacy and politics have failed. We all here believe that politics, particularly democratic politics, should be a benign force channelling the conflicts and disagreements into words and arguments and resolving them by compromise or votes. But that will not always be possible in different parts of the world, and that is why we need to choose to spend our money on defence wisely, and to see how we can best help the world through those places where we have power: through the United Nations, through our senior membership of NATO and through the Commonwealth and all the associations that brings.
Looking at defence priorities, it is most important that the Government do not forget that the main priority is to be able to defend these islands and to show that these islands are so well defended that they would be a very hostile environment should any external force wish to intervene. That must mean strengthening our sea forces and our ability to respond to drone and missile attack, and to know how to police our waters when we see possible hostile powers looking enviously at our cables and pipes that are such an important part of our economic progress. So, will the Government please make sure that that is all beefed up and the best modern technology adopted?
When it comes to expeditionary force, we have in the past shown that we have that expeditionary capability, and at times it has been very successful. The Falklands are only free today, and the people of the Falklands are only safe in their wish to be British, because we had enough expeditionary force on our own to drive out the Argentinian invader and restore order. It is most important that we now keep enough force available in case anybody has changed their minds in Argentina about what they might wish to do to try to gain control of islands that are clearly British. British forces were also very successful alongside the American allies leading the operation when Kuwait was liberated, which was a very good example of a sharp use of overwhelming force to right a very obvious wrong where a country had been badly invaded.
Today we have two very big conflicts, which are damaging in themselves—particularly damaging for those involved with them, with too many deaths and too much destruction of property—but also very damaging to the rest of us economically, and because we are morally offended by how they originated. Those are the conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East.
We need to hear from the Government a bit more about how they wish to proceed. If we take the case of Ukraine, the war has dragged on for so long and we keep Prime Ministers for such little time that there have now been five United Kingdom Prime Ministers who have had to respond to the difficult situation in Ukraine. They have shown complete unity of understanding and purpose, they have all condemned the Russian invasion and the atrocities that have resulted and they have all wished to offer sensible support to the very brave Ukrainians defending their country. But they have all been very clear that we are not going to declare war on Russia, commit British forces or drag NATO into a conflict with Russia. That would greatly worsen the position and is much against everybody’s interests, including those of the Ukrainians, because it would intensify the exchange of barbarity with all the extra firepower it would bring to the conflict.
That means that we in the West have a dilemma: we are not going to offer a military coalition to beat the Russians, and the Ukrainians, fighting very bravely, have not yet been able to evict the Russians from their territory. I would be interested to know what the latest government thinking is about when and if there is going to be any chance for talking to replace war-fighting and for the two belligerents to be brought to the table in a way that might produce some kind of diplomatic answer. It is not obvious how you do it. President Trump has been much criticised for trying to do it; people thought he was being too kind to Russia, which is not something that people want. It would be interesting to know what the United Kingdom and the European Union position on all this is, and whether there is any way through. I think we all feel that five years of war is excessive and that the awful problems it is creating for the Ukrainian people are unacceptable, difficult though it is to see a way out.
In the case of the Middle East, the United Kingdom does not have a big role to play because it appears that we do not really have serious forces to offer to try to police the sea-lanes and to deal with some of the attacks on our allies in the Gulf. America has the near monopoly of power that can be committed to that, and in that sense it is America’s war. We all rest upon what happens in the exchanges between the President of the United States of America and those now leading Iran.
I would be interested to know whether the Government feel there is anything we can do by way of helping our allies in the Gulf, and whether they can see any way forward, which is more likely to be led by local interests there, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, very sensibly said. We too are friends of the UAE, Qatar and so forth—the places most likely to be able to help. It would be good if we could get our defence forces into a shape where we could play a more significant role in trying to help the restoration of normal shipping in the Gulf and Red Sea area. Clearly, energy prices, interest rates and other things globally have been driven up by the extent of that conflict and by the interruptions to trade. In a world that should have plenty of oil and is in transition to using less of it, we find ourselves short of it because of a very nasty war.
I would hope that the defence review would come up with good answers on that combination of defending the home base, which needs more defence, and the appropriate expeditionary force for policing commerce and sea-lanes and going to the aid of allies. It would be very useful to know from the Minister how the Government can extend the skills and the experiences we have had diplomatically and in governing places that are subject to these conflicts. The world desperately needs peace, particularly in those two centres of warfare at the moment, and we would all be better off if that could be brought about.
Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on securing this debate and thank him for introducing it so well. I declare a non-pecuniary interest as chair of Inter Mediate, the charity founded by Jonathan Powell and inspired by the Northern Ireland peace process. Inter Mediate has been engaged for almost 15 years in dialogue with Heads of State and armed groups in attempts to resolve some of the most dangerous and intractable conflicts of our time. Some of its successes, such as Colombia and Mozambique, are matters of public record; the great majority of its work is not, and for good reason. Suffice it to say that I am more proud of the achievements of our remarkable staff, led by Claire Hajaj and Mockbul Ali, than I am of anything else apart from my own family.
When this House amended the National Security (State Threats) Bill this summer to avoid penalising or chilling dialogue between good faith conflict resolution organisations and designated foreign bodies, it was acknowledging that states do not have a monopoly in conflict resolution. Indeed, some of the principles identified by Jonathan Powell in his book Talking to Terrorists may be more usefully performed by non-state entities than by Governments: dialogue with actively hostile groups, the establishment of back channels and the taking of calculated risks to build trust.
Unlike some noble Lords present today, my experience of international conflict resolution is largely second hand. I am not out there cutting deals with national leaders or armed insurgents—just sitting in London checking the kidnap insurance and signing off on the accounts—so I shall not detain your Lordships for long. I venture to make three points that have struck me with particular force during my eight years with Inter Mediate.
First, we in the United Kingdom have a very good name for this sort of activity. I am regularly impressed by the regard in which our diplomats and third-sector peacemakers are held for their influence, their convening power, their trustworthiness and their moral leadership, even—perhaps especially—in those parts of the world where we were once the coloniser. In a 2026 Conciliation Resources survey, 65% of those polled expressed support for UK investment in peacebuilding around the world. They were backing a British success story that, with the right support, has the potential for more success still.
Secondly, conflict resolution is not some wishy-washy nice-to-have. Here I go perhaps a little further than the noble Lord, Lord McConnell: it is an essential ingredient of our hard power. Conflict, weak governance and institutional collapse can create opportunities for terrorist recruitment, regeneration and expansion, and can provide hostile actors with opportunities to undermine UK interests. Integrating early warning, intelligence, local partnerships and institutional resilience into security planning enables us to anticipate threats and head them off. If our counterterrorism or containment strategy begins only when a threat becomes operational, we have already surrendered the advantage. Enhanced military power is certainly necessary, as the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, said—a year on the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme has left me in no doubt about that—but it can be strategically effective only when accompanied by work at every level to develop relationships, forge compromises, make agreements and see that they are implemented.
Thirdly, money spent in this field offers remarkable value. Public investment in civilian peacebuilding, conflict prevention and mediation is minuscule as a proportion of overseas development aid, and barely noticeable by comparison with defence spending. The annual budget of Inter Mediate would barely stretch to the purchase of a single fixed-wing attack drone or a Patriot missile. If we are serious about boosting our security, our self-reliance and our ability to respond to and shape international events, planning for a serious investment in mediation and peacebuilding needs to be a long-term priority, both in our world-class capacities here at home and in local partners who are essential for reach and for delivery. This means more than simply increasing budget allocations, although after years of the brutal cuts that have been referred to, that would be a good start. We need funding vehicles that are flexible and responsible, partnerships across government and with peacemaking organisations and, returning to where I started, a political and legal environment that supports the risks necessary to make peace.
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for securing this timely debate, though I confess I speak with some trepidation given the considerable expertise in this Chamber. But as a refugee who arrived in this country from Iran as a young girl because of political violence and religious persecution, and as someone who has stayed abreast of developments in Iran and across the wider Middle East, this is a subject close to my heart.
I have spoken previously on why I think the joint US-Israel attack on Iran in February was an act of strategic folly, the consequences of which we continue to live with. The prospect of a renewed assault on Iran, soon after the mid-term elections in America and the recent elections in Israel, fills me with dread and illustrates all too well that our collective ability to mediate and prevent conflict is diminishing.
Although our assessments of the 1945 global order as broken, bruised or in the process of being bolstered may diverge, surely those who care about human flourishing and the conditions that support it cannot be content with the current era of disorder and unpeace. From a faith perspective, I certainly find this state of affairs deeply troubling. The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, chapter 14, verse 33, that God is not a God of disorder, tumult or dissension but of peace, order, harmony and shalom.
Some will argue that, if you want peace, you must prepare for war. That logic is evident in last year’s strategic defence review and in subsequent conversations about how we fund Britain’s military commitments. I do not deny the utility of military deterrence, and I am immensely grateful and indebted to our Armed Forces, who risk danger to protect us. At the same time, I fear that the practice of some countries in recent years suggests we are now moving towards a new formulation altogether—namely, that if you want peace, you must first wage war.
That is a dangerous path to tread. It invites a new global arms race, renewed wars of conquest, shrinking trade and prosperity, and the collapse of the co-operation needed to confront shared global threats. It is a dystopian path that threatens our God-given human dignity and the very integrity of God’s creation. I worry that the preparation for war and the act of war itself become our principal ways of imagining the road to peace. We need instead, as the Lutheran archbishop of Estonia has suggested, to take an alternative pathway—namely, if you want peace, prepare for peace and invest in the instruments necessary to uphold it.
The 2025 strategic defence review was necessary, but where is the strategic peacebuilding review to complement it? At a time of heightened insecurity, we need a focused assessment of whether the UK has the policies, institutions, capabilities and partnerships needed to prevent violent conflict and strengthen the conditions for sustainable peace. At a time when considerable attention is rightly being given to defence, deterrence and national resilience, we also need to examine the other side of the security equation: how Britain prevents conflict, addresses the conditions in which violence and instability develop, and strengthens social cohesion and supports peace before, during and after crises. A strategic peacekeeping review could bring together the domestic and international dimensions of peacebuilding and consider the contribution of government, civil society, faith communities, business and international partners.
None of this is to belittle steps that have been taken in recent years. The creation of a 16-person peace process and mediation team at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is a welcome step, but how might this capability be strengthened and embedded across government, rather than remaining primarily as an FCDO-led operational function? Rather than undertaking such a strategic peace review and investing in peacebuilding mechanisms, we seem intent on financing our rearmament by salami-slicing the development budget and, in so doing, diminishing our ability to tackle the drivers of conflict in many parts of the world. This is a false economy and feels self-defeating. Instead, we should invest in peacebuilding, with fresh funding and a more joined-up national conversation than we have had to date.
This is an agenda that the Church takes seriously. The commitment to peacebuilding is part of our very DNA. We are willing to work together with government and others in creating the conditions in which war and conflict no longer feel like the logical choice or the inevitable outcome. Only last year, the Church of England Pensions Board established the Global Centre for Peacebuilding and Business to respond to the growing global demand for minerals and energy; the expansion of extractive industries into fragile and conflict-affected contexts; the risks that flow from this; and the extraordinary presence and reach of the Church in many of those places.
In South Sudan, a country where, for ordinary people, the situation is getting worse and nothing seems to be getting through to the political inner circle, the Church continues to be the most trusted and far-reaching national institution, engaged in peacebuilding, humanitarian responses, education and healthcare. This role is replicated in other fragile and conflict-ridden countries and underscores the Church’s commitment to being a force for reconciliation and peace.
All this is by way of saying that, in today’s age of disorder, peacebuilding should be understood not merely as a humanitarian endeavour but as a strategic imperative to national security, economic resilience and long-term stability. In a world increasingly focused on preparing for conflict, it is important that we continue making the case for peace and peacebuilding with all due seriousness. Committing to a strategic peace review, to sit alongside the strategic defence review, would be an important but long-overdue step in this direction.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate, who brings unique experience to this conversation. I point her in the direction of the emerging markets and developing economies taskforce that the Church of England pension trustees are participating in. If successful, that project will achieve and deliver investment at a far greater scale than any development assistance from any country ever could and will unlock the real gains that are needed in developing countries, which will see more stability. That relates directly to the topic of today’s debate.
I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord McConnell for securing this debate. Occasions such as these often allow this Chamber to be at its best. So far, the contributions this afternoon have proved that to be the case.
The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, referred to Inter-Mediate. I thank him for the work that he has led with it alongside Jonathan Powell. They have done tremendous work, almost all of it invisible by necessity. I have had some involvement with some of its work at various points along the way, and I have had some amazing advice from Jonathan about the necessity of patience, discretion and building trust. In today’s world of what is too often reactive diplomacy, where everything needs to be said publicly and responded to instantly, the work that Inter-Mediate does just proves what can be achieved by taking a slightly different approach.
Last night, I had the pleasure of attending an event here to mark 10 years since the signing of the peace agreement in Colombia. Former President Santos spoke about the painstaking work, the political risk, the essential role of the international community, and the commitment that is needed to this day to protect and secure that agreement.
When asked how the UK had helped, former President Santos said, “The most significant change happened when we instructed the Colombian armed forces to stop killing the FARC”. President Santos explained that, when the army began to capture fighters to demobilise and reintegrate them into society, the armed forces were no longer seen as devils by the fighters. He said that real progress was achieved when the enemy became viewed as people, not to be destroyed but rather to be defeated, because you need them to negotiate with in order to bring about a stable peace.
There are obviously lessons that can be learned from the Colombian experience, just as there are from other fragile and all-too-rare lasting peace agreements, such as the Good Friday agreement and Dayton, which are incredibly fragile and which we must protect at every opportunity. But there is a warning about trying to learn lessons and apply them directly in different contexts. It is tempting to search for a template—a set of principles to deploy that will guarantee success in other contexts—but, as we all know, each conflict is unique. The motivations, relationships, history and political space, the involvement of neighbouring states, which we see more and more, the approach of more distant but powerful nations, the presence of hard power, the deployment of technology and the character of the protagonists are all different.
Instead of the hard work of innovation—coming up with creative new approaches, combining our defence, diplomacy and development work, working alongside the multilateral development banks and multilateral systems—too often I see the international community’s response is to look to the tools that it used last time to ask itself which of those it ought to deploy. This is fine, important and can lead to some success—UN resolutions, increasingly outraged statements of condemnation, which I have given myself, sanctions, demands for accountability, side meetings and symbolism. These are all important and have their place, but issues and places are too often picked up and put down by the multilateral system and by nations. Look at Haiti, and even Sudan. There are so many examples. Who is holding it close? Who is really taking responsibility for what is happening and saying, “We’re the penholder: we have the job of making this better, however long it takes”. In an era when countries can trade off their relationships, not just with their neighbours, but with the US, China, Russia and Europe, protagonists can and do ignore the standard toolkit responses.
When agreements work, they are the result of deep understanding and, often, local leadership. This is especially true in Africa, where one year since the fall of El Fasher we continue to see widespread massacres and atrocities. While high-intensity wars in Ukraine and Gaza generate so much news, attention and, it is true, a massive share of the casualties, it is Sudan and, indeed, Africa as a whole that is the deadliest continent for deliberate non-combat violence, directed deliberately and specifically at civilians, with women paying a particularly high price. We see non-state armed groups, private armies, Russian mercenaries, extremist terrorist groups, weak states and communities desperately trying to survive despite it all.
This debate is about what the UK can and should do. If the UK and our partners want to help, as I believe we do, we must supplement the statement making with statecraft. We, by which I mean the international community, need less reliance on shaky deals between warlords and more time given to building long-term, resilient, civilian relationships that form the foundation of any lasting peace. We saw Kagame and Tshisekedi summoned by the White House to sign a deal. That did not bring about peace to eastern DRC, which is now ravaged by Ebola and lacks the community trust or state apparatus to do what is needed.
Last night, when I asked President Santos what his experience told him would help in Sudan, he gave an answer that I agree with completely. He said that the UK should give its time and attention to the supporters of the warring parties in neighbouring countries and further afield and that we should work hard to support civil society and local civilian leadership. It is low-key, unglamorous and time-consuming, but it is vital. Trade, transactional approaches and saying that we will bestow or withdraw development assistance or other such gestures will always fail. They have always failed. There is no example of where that approach, so often advocated for, has succeeded.
The UK, as others have said, has credibility in building and sustaining peace alongside others, notably Qatar and Norway. We must use this well and do so urgently, especially in places where the ordinariness of earning a living, raising your children and seeing out your days in peace is far too often denied. It should never ever be taken for granted.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I join in the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, not just on his luck in the ballot but also on his continuing zeal and determination in trying to focus our minds on these vastly important, indeed giant, world issues. Mediation, conflict prevention, peacebuilding and our role in it all are very big issues indeed, covering enormous areas. At least half our home Troubles, which sometimes seem just local matters, are in fact issues that, in a world in which what the Chancellor calls “global economic storms” are coming along, have their roots in precisely the areas that we are discussing today. They require strong and respected international and multilateral institutions to handle and calm them down.
Probably most important of all in the calming down process that is so badly needed are the multilateral agencies and respected fora, which are where our global decisions can be reached and the frameworks, design and rules must be established. Trusted and respected multilateral bodies must be rebuilt, as they were in 1945. People forget that, in 1945, after the rubble of the Second World War, we created from nothing—Americans and British in the lead, but many others as well—an entirely new structure of international co-operation. Yet all those post-war institutions, which served us quite well for decades in the 20th century, are now in deep trouble. They are the rule-makers, or are meant to be, and the referees, but they must have respect and some trust if their writ is to run.
Obviously, we need a new Bretton Woods to shape the financial regulations of an entirely different world from that of 80 years ago. We plainly need new trade rules in a far more complicated trade and investment world of supply chains. We need entirely new maritime controls, both subsea and surface. We need overhauled international courts, new insurance systems and so on and so forth. Where are the visionaries today? Where are the equivalents of Truman, Marshall, Maynard Keynes and Dexter White, for instance—although I am told that he had other interests as well. They were supported by a dazzling cast of American and British economists, officials and financiers.
National plans and solutions we have two a penny—they are coming out all the time—but missing is the other half of the story: the global network and new international organisations that are the shield under which our own reforms become possible and relevant. Where are the new levels of co-operation that we need to assume some control over artificial intelligence and superintelligent machines that are beginning to think for themselves and have their own agenda?
All this is ignored or barely reported or discussed in the media or in public policy. The spirit of 1945 and those visionaries is plainly needed all over again, but in an even more ambitious form. Without that, we can carry on attacking one another and attacking the nearest targets as well, but we remain the playthings of past economic fantasy theories, swept along in a rudderless craft in a world without rules, referees or restraints. Amid many uncertainties, the one thing that can be said with absolute certainty is that such a world, without the handrails of accepted standards, is fatal to the prospects of a nation such as Great Britain.
To those who shake their heads and say that the required degree of co-operation is politically impossible today, the answer is not so. Political parties may be harder than ever to keep together, but authors such as the brilliant Adrian Wooldridge, whose book I strongly recommend and who writes about centrists in all parties needing to come together, are pointing a way to a new kind of revolution. The middle ground may sound a quagmire to party warriors from the old ideological wars, but the new common ground, which is a very different thing, undoubtedly lies ahead. That is where the real revolution is, and where those with real foresight should be concentrating their views.
This is the political powerplay and style of co-operation in the internet age and beyond. It avoids the traumas of party “betrayal”, which the press loves to play up, but unites the search for common ground. The barrier, of course, is the old left-right battle that grew out of Marxism-Leninism versus laissez-faire capitalism and led to unstable ideological stalemate and worse.
The moderating instincts of balanced international liberalism ought to be the ones driving global financial stability and restoring free trade, which Trumpism has thrown into turmoil. They ought also to be the ones that open the gates to closer co-operation, rather than a standoff between private funding and public need in almost every sphere of public policy.
I end with one final observation: with the binding force of the English language still dominating global trade and holding together a still growing Commonwealth, the largest network in the world and the largest network in history, it may be that a new vehicle of thought, action and hope is about to be born. Let us wait and see.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab) [R]
My Lords, I have spent 47 years in Westminster. I have supported conflicts worldwide, most notably in the Middle East and eastern Europe, but some recent conflicts have caused me to reflect and have cost me dearly. Friendships have been fractured. My view that we have sometimes questionably intervened in matters overseas has been unpopular. Today’s debate is about global mediation and conflict prevention, and I shall concentrate my remarks on Ukraine and Russia.
In 1992, as a Labour shadow Agriculture Minister, I visited Moscow to investigate our beef export trade. That eye-opening visit gave me an early opportunity post Gorbachev—Yeltsin was president—to look at developments in Russia. I visited the Duma, NGOs and institutions. The Russian economy was in free fall. Its proud people, the spirit of Stalingrad, were being humiliated before the civilised world. Its administration was often riddled with corruption, with many former Soviet apparatchiks openly exploiting the system to survive, their actions often underpinned by reckless acts of officials who sanctioned violence.
I particularly recall the poverty. I witnessed a respectable, well-clad woman in effect begging over a small stall in the street with her meagre offerings—a bunch of vegetables, a tin or two and some vodka—to raise money to survive on little pension. She was one among many whom I witnessed. The currency was in free fall. My hotel rate was $150 for foreigners; it was $5 for locals. Black marketeers were touring the hotels dealing in currency. Russia was in a state of total humiliation and collapse, and the political response was suspicion of the West.
Of course, it was totally unwarranted, a complete misunderstanding, the truth being that across our political divide there was a hope that their suffering would end and a new Russia committed to democratic values would surface and enter the world of advanced, civilised nations. It was not to be, as within two years of this period of humiliation, Russia signed the 1994 Budapest memorandum. It was a treaty born in duress that was prayed in aid by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie, last week. That memorandum was signed by Russia at its lowest ebb. Russia, in humiliation, never accepted that treaty. It arguably led to the election of Putin in 1998, a former spook with visions of rebuilding Russia which appealed to its humiliated peoples.
That brings me to the Putin years. I well recall that day in October 2001 when my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, as NATO Secretary-General, met Vladimir Putin—I think it was in Vienna. My noble friend had proposed that a working group be established to promote a NATO-Russian relationship—all very welcome—but it was to be completely undermined by President Bush’s calls in the same year for NATO expansion into eastern Europe. Those Bush interventions were critical, as they heralded an end to détente and the revival of a militant Russia, where they were seen as acts of hostility. Russia had relied on the maintenance of a string of non-nuclear, non-NATO barrier states stretching from Finland to Georgia. Ever suspicious of the West, it followed up with its desperate but ill-considered attempt to take over Ukraine, and Zelensky was elected on the backlash.
It was about this time that I started following events in Russia more closely, which I do to this day. Talk of détente had gone, and the Robertson/Putin agenda was dead. We now had an inflexible Russia extending political control, grabbing territory—the Crimea—and manipulating populations in Ukraine’s eastern provinces, provoking a fearsome and brutal response from the Azov Brigade with its history of support for Germany in the Second World War, thus the Russian references to the Nazis. When historians reflect on developments in Ukraine during its darkest periods, let us not underestimate the significance of those battalions in Russia’s decision to use them as foil in justification for their invasion of Ukraine.
For me, the issue is how we should respond. We now face a future where a Russian leadership, paranoid and challenged, stands in isolation. I fear for the future of mankind in this period of conflict. A rogue operator in Russia’s nuclear military establishment could act in isolation. I well recall with concern the actions of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the rebel commander of the Wagner brigade, a former confidant of Putin, who died in suspicious circumstances. Putin himself saw the dangers, and it is in that light that the drift into war where Zelensky controls the agenda worries me.
So now how should we proceed? A proud Russia is cornered, and I suspect it seeks a settlement without humiliation. We need an agenda that avoids humiliation for all concerned. We need to settle this dispute. I have called repeatedly for the UK Government to seize the initiative and take on the settlement agenda. In my most recent interventions, I have called for the establishment of protectorate status in eastern Ukraine, for which there are well-established precedents—a settlement to include much of Donetsk and Luhansk, underpinned by guarantees from the major powers, to include the United States, Europe and Russia. I still believe that Russia’s future lies with the West and that Putin, for all his misunderstanding, can be returned to rational discussion. It is the British who should take the lead, but it is an agenda requiring courage, understanding, wise counsel and risk, and an agenda that listens to those of us who take a different view without the name-calling.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)
My Lords, I begin my remarks with a simple reflection: the true test of diplomacy now is not how eloquently we respond to conflict but how effectively we prevent it. I draw Members’ attention to my registered interests with the World Humanitarian Forum and the International Communities Organisation, and as a member of the International Relations and Defence Committee. The issue of conflict prevention is very close to my heart. I thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for tabling this debate. Over many years as a Minister, I saw his passionate advocacy for both conflict resolution and humanitarian affairs.
Today, as we confront a world marked by more than 65 conflicts, depending on how you define a conflict or a war, deepening geopolitical divisions and immense humanitarian suffering, the responsibility on all of us, and the United Kingdom in particular, has never been greater. Behind every statistic of a life lost—and we heard harrowing statistics from the noble Lord, Lord McConnell—there is a human story: a family displaced, a child deprived of education, a woman subjected to violence, or a community whose hopes for a peaceful future have been shattered.
Having served in government, represented the UK internationally, and worked extensively through the United Nations, I have seen both the potential and success of diplomacy but also, tragically, the consequences that come when you act too late. The UK was part of the conflict resolution between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Perhaps we do not get the credit we deserve. I remember shuttling between Foreign Ministers. But that was the true sense of British diplomacy: discreet and understated. I have learned that peace is not achieved through declarations alone. It requires, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, said, sustained political engagement, conversations, crucial and trusted partnerships, and, above all, the courage to keep working when progress seems elusive. Prevention, mediation and peacebuilding are not separate stages of our international responsibility; they are interconnected parts of the same endeavour.
The United Nations, a clear focus of our debate, was founded on the determination that future generations should be spared the devastation of war. In my view, millions have been failed in this regard. The founding vision remains as relevant today as it was in 1945. The UN, as I saw myself, brings together the international community, provides a framework for collective security, supports peacekeeping, facilitates mediation, and gives a voice to nations that might otherwise be unheard. Yet we must be candid: the UN’s effectiveness in recent years has been diminishing or indeed absent from the negotiating table. As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and others have said, we have seen other countries stepping forward—Qatar in the Middle East and beyond—and regional players playing their part to ensure that conflicts can come to an end.
When divisions within the Security Council prevent meaningful action, as I saw myself, the credibility of the international system suffers. Yet my own experience of multilateral diplomacy also reinforced a fundamental lesson. International institutions, whether we talk of the UN, the ICJ or the ICC, are as effective only as the political will that sustains them. We need a more responsible, dynamic and agile United Nations but, importantly, with the right people who can act as advocates. Reform matters, but so does the willingness of member states to use the instruments that already exist.
One of the most important lessons of diplomacy is that conflicts rarely emerge without warning. Political exclusion, discrimination and the erosion of human rights, economic insecurity and the deliberate targeting of communities are often the basis. Yet too often, as a collective, we wait too long. We wait until violence has erupted before mobilising the full weight of international diplomacy. This must fundamentally change. Prevention requires investment in early-warning systems, strong institutions, inclusive governance, and the protection of fundamental freedoms. It also requires listening to communities and faith leaders, as the right reverend Prelate reminded us. I saw directly the importance of sustained relationships and direct engagement with international partners. In diplomacy, trust built before a crisis is essential.
I have a plea that applies to my party as well as the current Government. We must stop the revolving door when it comes to ministerial change on the global stage. Relationships matter and we must invest in those relationships. Without that, the UK loses credibility. We have excellent diplomatic networks and international relationships. We have the experience in this House as well. I say to the Minister: leverage those experiences. We have names who have built security and trust. We need to ensure that we get the optimum benefit for the world as a whole. The most successful act of conflict prevention may be one that the world never notices, precisely because that conflict never happens. Those who have been involved with this have seen it.
My noble friend Lord Redwood also mentioned the importance of diplomacy, but it needs the strength of all our assets, including defence. So I ask the Minister: as the United Kingdom previously has operated, and continues to operate, on issues such as Operation Prosperity Guardian, what is the current support we are extending to ensure that places such as the Bab al-Mandab and the Red Sea continue to be secure, despite the Houthis’ attacks? Mediation also means that we keep the door open. It requires patience and political judgment. When we believe in peace, we must be prepared to do the hard work of pursuing it.
Let me emphasise an important distinction. Engagement does not mean endorsement, and dialogue does not mean abandoning principle, especially when it comes to dealing with conflicts such as Ukraine and Russia. This is where the UK and its regional partners can make a real difference, co-ordinating diplomatic pressure and ensuring that negotiations are accompanied by a realistic pathway to peace. We must also resist the temptation to measure success solely by whether the parties all sat around a table. It is far more than that. The real measure is whether the process produced meaningful progress, peace, and security. A ceasefire can stop the immediate violence. Only sustained political engagement can help prevent its return. Peacebuilding begins long before a peace agreement is signed, and we must emphasise the importance of women peacekeepers. The UK led on the issue of conflict mediators, creating the very networks of women mediators. Yet, with the one exception that the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, pointed out, we have not seen women mediators involved in the current live conflicts that we witness.
I turn to a subject which was very close to my heart. I pay tribute to my noble friends Lord Hague and Lady Helic on the issue of preventing sexual violence in conflict. I spent seven years on that. In terms of listening to voices, of effecting global change, we listened to survivors, not after the event, but we put them at the heart of our strategy planning. I hope the Minister can assure me that we will continue to stand by UK leadership, and I would welcome an update on the international alliance that was created in this respect.
To conclude, the UK’s responsibility is immense. First, I do not subscribe to the view that we are a middle power. We are slightly more enhanced than that. We are not China or the United States, but we are the United Kingdom. We have incredible diplomatic networks, as has been mentioned, and we need to invest in those to sustain our principled diplomats.
Secondly, we need to practise principled, consistent engagement and maintain channels of communication. We must be the champions. It is not woke to stand up for women in mediation; it is simply the right thing to do. We must support peace beyond the negotiating table and build effective coalitions. But, above all, we must maintain consistency between our words and our actions.
Let me conclude with a reflection drawn from my own experience on the international stage. Diplomacy can be frustrating: I served five Prime Ministers and six Foreign Secretaries, so I know that it starts at home. Yet history reminds us that conflicts once considered intractable have found pathways towards resolution when political leadership, international engagement and public determination have come together. We must never confuse the difficulty of achieving peace with the impossibility of achieving it. The UN has a vital role, but it must be revitalised. Let us therefore move from reacting to crises towards preventing them and from managing temporary pauses to political settlements. Let our legacy be measured not simply by the conflicts we helped to resolve but those we helped to prevent, the lives we helped to protect and the generations who were able to grow up in peace.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, I begin by joining the chorus of thanking the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, for bringing us this debate and introducing it so clearly. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who, as we have just heard, has maintained an acute focus on gender issues in conflict; I echo his comments by saying that I hope we will continue to see this from our current Ministers. I also note that the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, did a brilliant job in the recent Lord Speaker’s Lecture with Dr Fiona Hill. For those who missed it, it is on YouTube and I can strongly recommend it.
I am going to focus on three issues. The largest and first is atrocity prevention, which is of course absolutely crucial to maintaining and restoring peace. I have raised this issue previously in your Lordships’ House and it is an acutely urgent one. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, referred to the first anniversary of the El Fasher massacre this week. I was at the commemoration in your Lordships’ House of that massacre, an indescribably awful event. We heard there from a woman who described herself as a child of El Fasher; she lost 40 people there. Of course, one of the realities of such massacres today is that she was on the phone to one of the people killed at El Fasher—their children were killed as well—just hours before El Fasher fell. If we think about the kind of experience that people are going through, we must not forget that. She made the plea, so often heard and so often not delivered: “Never again”.
There is a great deal of academic work being done on atrocity prevention, which is worth looking at. The answer to the simple question of why leaders choose to engage in mass atrocities is that they do it because the rewards seem greater than the costs. They end mass atrocities either because they have achieved what they saw as their goal or because the balance of risks and costs has changed. That really is where the international community could and should be coming in.
What we have seen, sadly, is that three of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have increasingly been challenging, to varying degrees, the post-war legal order and seeking to weaken the institutions which should be acting to increase the costs of committing atrocities. For the middle powers—Canada, Brazil, Japan and the UK—that means we have an even larger responsibility to act. As the right reverend Prelate set out, we have a huge moral responsibility, but there is also the practical outcome of why it is in our own interests to take action. Atrocity crimes drive human displacement and destabilise entire regions; many would point to the fact that they disrupt markets and demand costly responses. I note that the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Peace Index estimates that such violence cost $2.8 trillion in 2025, equivalent to 18.5% of global GDP.
In November last year, I put a Written Question to the then Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, about the staffing level of the mass atrocity prevention hub in the FCDO that was created in 2022. As the noble Baroness told me, it had been integrated into the conflict and atrocity prevention department in 2024. I was asking for numbers in that Written Question and did not get them, so these are direct questions to the Minister and I will understand if he needs to write to me. How many people are now working in that conflict and atrocity prevention department? How does that compare with the number of people working in the department 12 months ago and where do the Government expect the staffing in that department to be in 12 months’ time?
I ask that in the context of an important report that came out earlier this month from the Standing Group on Atrocity Crimes, an independent but very respected group which published The Atrocity Crimes Review: a Comprehensive UK Strategy for Atrocity Prediction, Prevention and Response. The review concludes that
“the UK’s approach … remains fragmented and reactive … there is no coherent framework to ensure … early warnings of atrocity crimes”
and there is now a great deal of academic literature and professional understanding of how we can see these crimes approaching. It says that this is not being “translated into timely action” and that there is
“no comprehensive national strategy, no dedicated ministerial lead, and no clearly identified budget”,
as we have seen from the structural changes I just referred to.
The review stresses that it is talking about successive Governments—it is not picking on any Government in particular—and warns that this is directly affecting the UK’s national security and economic interests. It also has impacts on migration pressures, as well as in the overall application and exercise of the international rule of law. Acting before the atrocity happens not only saves enormous human costs; it saves enormous economic costs. The review recommends:
“A dedicated cross-government atrocity prevention strategy”
with clear funding and parliamentary reporting;
“An independent statutory expert body to assess atrocity risks and advise Government and Parliament”;
and a “named ministerial lead” for these issues, with “stronger mechanisms” to get action. My question to the Minister is: will the Government be looking seriously at this review and responding to it?
I come briefly to two further points, which both relate to the UK’s position in the world. If we are to take action, be regarded as a leader and be effective in that action, when we make commitments to the global community, to scientific researchers and citizens, we need to ensure that we can meet them. I note it has recently emerged that HMS “Protector” will not be deploying to the Antarctic for the 2026-27 season, which will leave the UK without an ice patrol vessel in the South Atlantic for the second year in a row. We last had a vessel, which was the HMS “Protector”, in the 2024-25 season.
That vessel could not sail from Teesside to Devonport this month. Reports suggest that it has suffered a catastrophic double engine failure. This vessel was taken on in 2011 as a short-term replacement for HMS “Endurance”, which had been crippled by flooding in 2008. The vessel carries out surveys and inspections under the Antarctic treaty and it supports the British Antarctic Survey, as well as taking on more obvious defence responsibilities. Can the Minister reassure me that, by whatever means necessary, we will be meeting our responsibilities to the Antarctic treaty and supporting the British Antarctic Survey?
I come finally to a very large subject which I can cover only quickly. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich, spoke, absolutely rightly, about how our diplomats and third-sector organisations have a very good international reputation, but we are seeing worldviews shifting as geopolitics shift. I note that the UN adopted a resolution in March 2026 declaring the trafficking of enslaved Africans as the gravest crime against humanity, and of course the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, has launched a new manifesto from Caribbean leaders asserting their moral, ethical and legal case for reparations.
As noted in a 2024 report by the UCL Policy Lab and Hertford College, Oxford, former colonies are making increasingly vocal demands around the need for reparations for colonialism and compensation for the loss and damage arising from historical industrial emissions. I must cross-reference the Rosebank debate we had earlier: that decision will impact on our international standing in the world, as well as all the other impacts.
Other noble Lords have already referred to some very unwise military interventionism and adventurism in which we have engaged with the US in recent decades. Not being Airstrip One is something that we must think about very hard in terms of our international relations and how we will be treated by the rest of the world. The UK needs to be an independent actor, standing up for human rights and the rule of law. If we are not in that position then we will not be as effective as we could and should be.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)
My Lords, a week ago I took part in a debate here on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution. I was put on the speakers’ list to follow a slew of noble and learned Lords whose knowledge, experience and fingertip ability to bring out the right quotation and citation was extraordinary and belittling. This week, I am put on the speakers’ list to follow diplomats, politicians and others who have run the world or been close to people who have run the world. Here I stand now, seeking to make as much sense and legitimacy for my being here as I tried to make last week. The feature in common for both debates is the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. I am now so used to the noble Lord that his presence is comforting; last week, it was less so.
I want to move from macro to micro, and those who know me will not need much help to understand that I wish to speak about a country that is very dear to me, namely Haiti. I lived there for 10 years and did all kinds of things, from microfinance to organising co-operatives, planting trees, literacy and working with Haitian people in the fields and the council chambers, sometimes in the midst of alarmingly hostile situations. I come from that experience and it allows me to declare, as a possible conflict of interest, my co-chairing of the Haiti APPG. I was also ordained as a Methodist minister in Haiti. Our two sons were born there in a local hospital with Haitian medical care, so nobody could ever accuse me of being impartial as I share my remarks with the House today.
Three items concerning Haiti have come to my attention in the few days since I put down my name to speak. First was the news that the United Nations has agreed to extend its remit to maintain a Gang Suppression Force in Haiti for a further six months. Secondly, one of the countries providing troops to that force is Sri Lanka. Some 1,500 of its soldiers have been present in Haiti since June. Thirdly, there was a long article in the Spectator by a man called Bruce Gilley under the headline
“It’s time to colonise Haiti”.
I found it provocative, ill informed and malicious. That is not untypical of the approaches to encapsulate or describe what is happening in Haiti.
Despite the longer time than usual which is now allotted, time limits me to just two of those items. Between 2004 and 2007, at least 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers sexually exploited and abused Haitian children, boys and girls, some as young as eight, anally and orally. This was revealed by an internal United Nations report; it is excoriating to read. None of these peacekeepers was imprisoned for sexual assault or misconduct or brought to justice. There is no evidence of any credible, transparent or independent vetting process for troops constituting the present deployment from Sri Lanka. The complete absence of such measures is causing great concern to members of the Sri Lanka Campaign with whom I have been in conversation. Yet 1,500 Sri Lankan soldiers are on Haitian soil again. It is doubtful that many lessons have been learned from the previous dreadful experience.
Such happenings seem to be a regular occurrence in Haiti. Let us remind ourselves that the country suffered an enormous earthquake in January 2010. Over a quarter of a million people died—more than twice the total number of people killed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. The world made a show of rallying round and the United Nations strengthened what it called a “stabilisation force” to keep order on the streets, but abusive events seemed to flourish in the chaos of those times. Uruguay was forced to recall five of its peacekeepers from Haiti in 2011 amid allegations that, while wearing their country’s uniform, they were involved in the sexual assault of a local young man. Apart from that recall—even though there is much informal sharing of information that cannot be ascertained—no further investigation was mounted.
In the same year, an internal investigation conducted by Oxfam revealed that some aid workers, including the charity’s Haiti director, used local women. They were shamefully described as “prostitutes” as if they bore some of the blame for what was happening. All they had post-earthquake was their bodies; nothing else could earn them a penny or two. That they took part, therefore, in what were called “orgies” among the development workers under the aegis of Oxfam was a horrid thing. Amid widespread allegations of a cover-up, details of that 2011 event did not become public until 2018.
Peacekeepers from Nepal were accused of being responsible for a cholera outbreak, subsequently proved to the satisfaction of the investigation, which has killed as many as 10,000 in Haiti—a country that had never known cholera before. Compare the blanket of silence that has fallen on this experience with the publicity given to the incidence of Ebola in Sierra Leone at roughly the same time, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in more recent times.
Then there is Donald Trump, bless him; I paused for effect there but I did not seem to get it. In the 2024 election he and, please note, his Vice-President alleged that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating their neighbours’ pets. There were no credible reports, police records or substantiated evidence of pets being stolen, harmed or eaten by Haitian immigrants.
The grotesque Mr Trump repeatedly referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, an adjective which, if he continues on his present course, might become useful to us all in our attempts to describe his country. He has begun the process of repatriating 300,000 Haitians to the land of their birth, where 10 million are already subjected to poverty of an order almost impossible to understand; it is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
I call these observations that I put together for this talk a charge list. The United Kingdom is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. The United Nations has signally failed to engage with the needs of Haiti. The hundreds of millions of dollars it has poured into Haiti for various iterations of peacekeeping, stabilisation or gang suppression forces represents a downright waste of money of the first order. Can our representative in New York show an interest in these matters and see how a fraction of what has been lost and wasted there could have done immense good in the country I am referring to? With that, I rest my charge.
Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for his permanent passion and pursuit of these issues. We know that he digs away when many of us would rather sleep, and we are grateful to him for this debate. I also thank my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Burry Port for his heartfelt and painful speech—many aspects of it were difficult to hear but many of our private conversations have expressed the horrors that he has described well today. The whole House owes the noble Lord respect, given that he has lived and served in Haiti, and continues to advocate for it. Thank you.
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, for referring to President Santos. I will be with him in Cape Town next Friday. President Santos will be delivering the 24th Nelson Mandela lecture, in which he will pose the important question, “When is silence complicity”? He will ask us to consider what has happened to our voices as nations and our voices as leaders. He is a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has worked strenuously to bring opposing forces together. In other meetings I have had with him around the One Young World Summit—it takes place in Cape Town next week and I am there as a trustee—he has been strident, as also the leader of the elders, that the voice is vital to the piercing power of the impact we seek to find.
One of the other elders, Desmond Tutu, said that if we are neutral in situations of injustice, we have chosen the side of the oppressor. That is a painful thing to hear because I suspect that many of us, both in the previous Government, including the long-serving and honourable Ministers who saw out many who found the exit, and in this current Government, look at our governmental processes and wonder where is the voice? To what extent are we silent in the face of evil events? Albert Einstein reminded us that the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. Will the Minister reflect on the extent to which we are we watching but not commenting? Are we seeing but not speaking? Are we afraid to express our voice in public? Martin Luther King Jr reminded us that
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends”.
I was thinking about the last time there was a governmental conference on one of the most difficult and intractable wars currently under way, which is in Sudan—probably the most vile of all the current wars. We must give credit to the former Foreign Secretary David Lammy for holding a conference to address those concerns, but subsequent Foreign Secretaries, certainly to my awareness, have not done so. The point ably made by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, was that we keep swapping around Foreign Secretaries, Defence Secretaries and Ministers who are meant to carry memory, and the memory should help us to continue mature conversation and enable us to make better decisions. If we constantly refuse to hear because the voices have gone silent, we are complicit. We must ask ourselves why. To what extent has Britain lost its backbone?
Last night, I pointed out to the students that I have the joy of teaching at an American business school—I teach online, as I could not have got from here to there for this debate—an article that appeared in a local South Carolina newspaper by the former executive director of the World Food Programme, David Beasley, on 20 October. He is a great personal friend, and I was pleased that the university I represent gave him the Stephen R. Covey leadership award three years ago for his life of principles.
In this article, David Beasley, who was also a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his exceptional work in leading the World Food Programme, takes the question to the very heart of what I want to think about. The title is:
“Before America can be great, she must be good”.
He is currently running a campaign called “Make America Good Again”. That is not the business of this House, or the House down the Corridor, but it is a very important point.
I listened intently to yesterday’s—may I say, tinkering—Budget. Some may have loved every bit of it, but I went through the Budget book this morning and looked up what is said about foreign affairs, defence and conflict resolution—helped by AI a little bit, I must say, especially for “conflict resolution”. There was nothing. A lot is said, quite rightly, about £10 billion for Ukraine and the acquiring of weapons and structural systems, but not about conflict resolution. Maybe we have given that up. Buried away somewhere in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office there is a group of civil servants beavering away, advising Ministers, but we do not know how many and we do not know what they are saying.
We do not seem to express a strident voice that really matters on the global stage on these issues. I am going to say something dangerous: the United States President has invited the Russian President to attend the G20, which will take place in the United States. I hope every grown-up European politician, and our own Prime Minister, will take that as an opportunity for dialogue—not to run away and simply not be seen but to have communication, to shake hands and to be present. That is an easy response. Trust between opposing powers is built only when we meet.
I also spoke to my students last night about the work of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. Everyone in this House remembers 1977 and 1978 because we were all around and very old at that stage.
Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)
Okay, maybe not—let us allow youth to speak. We all remember what it took for President Carter to sit for 23 days with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David, to discover a peace between Egypt and Israel that has held to this day. The same can be said of Northern Ireland and South Africa: whether we like it or not, dialogue is essential, even with opposing people, powers and those of a vile disposition, as we see it.
I will meet President Santos next week for the third time. I have been in Colombia three times and the last time I was there I went to Medellín, the town in which Pablo Escobar managed to conduct his vile campaigns of police and army corruption and destruction. I witnessed 20 women telling stories about the killing of their husbands and sons. Then I witnessed 20 of Escobar’s men step forward to apologise. The necessity of facing what we do not want to hear, and dealing with others because we must, is what I call “heart power”. We say a lot about soft power and hard power, but we need heart power to solve conflicts and bring people together. That requires guts, and I hope the Minister has them.
Lord Bates (Con)
My Lords, it is always a privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Hastings. He is the last of those who could be accused of remaining silent in the face of injustice. He has been at the forefront of so many cases and I agree very much with what he said, including his words about Dave Beasley, with whom I had the privilege of working, when I was Minister of International Development, at the World Food Programme. He did immense work there.
I join others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for initiating this debate. No one in this place has done more over the years than him to advance the agenda of stopping wars and saving lives. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for the work that he does not only in this place but, as we heard in his introductory remarks, around the world. I place on record my interest as qualified mediator with the International Mediation Institute and I serve as an officer with the All-Party Group for Sudan and South Sudan.
Peace-seeking and peacemaking are never popular. In the short term, everyone wants to be a Churchill; no one wants to be a Chamberlain. Yet, in 1954, Winston Churchill became so deeply concerned about President Eisenhower’s refusal to talk to his Soviet counterpart amid rising tensions that he went to the White House to tell the President publicly that
“jaw to jaw is better than war”.
Eisenhower listened and agreed to hold talks which temporarily defused the tensions.
Often, we are unable to meet jaw to jaw on our own and we require an intermediary, a trusted mediator or a mediating institution to bridge the gap and facilitate the dialogue. When both sides are shouting, no one is listening. Mediation does not compel us to agree with our enemy, but it does require us to listen to them, and they to us, and for both sides to do so respectfully.
I recall being the most junior of bag-carriers to the Security Minister in the Northern Ireland Office in 1994, when messages were being received about a possible ceasefire. But the experiences of the terrorist atrocities, the lack of trust and a deep suspicion meant that we could not bridge that chasm on our own. It was not until President Clinton sent, as a gift, Senator George Mitchell as an envoy to Northern Ireland later that year that we had someone who would stand in the gap for us and form a bridge for mediation that led to the Good Friday agreement. There was nothing weak about negotiating that agreement—it was done with huge political and personal risks by all those involved—but it saved hundreds, if not thousands, of British lives.
It is so much easier to throw a brick or build a wall than it is to build a bridge, easier to raise a fist in vengeance than it is to extend a hand in forgiveness. That is easy for me to say—I have never lost family members in war or been a victim of violence. Erich Fromm, on the other hand, was a German Jew, one of the greatest psychoanalysts of the last century. He was living in Frankfurt when the Nazis came to power. He narrowly escaped the Holocaust, but members of his family did not. He had every reason to be filled with self-righteous hatred and judgmentalism. But instead, he wrote a small book, The Art of Loving, which I will quote some of here today:
“The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are concerned, is notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one’s own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard—every action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by the enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve … The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility”.
In a world where nine men have at their fingertips enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on this planet many times over, our only hope is human reason. But Erich Fromm reminds us that reason is built on objectivity and humility. The capacity to reason is that we see things not as they are but as we are; where we sit determines where we stand. We do not see the whole picture, we may be wrong and our enemy may even have a point. Let me illustrate this: I follow Newcastle United Football Club.
Lord Bates (Con)
Thank you. As you can tell, I am an optimist. Even my blood group is B positive, and that helps. But when I am at St James’ Park, watching a game from the stands, the minute one of our players just trips over a shoelace in the opposition box, 50,000 fans rise as one to call for a penalty for such an obvious and devious foul. Yet when the opposing player is flattened by big Dan Burn in our box, the crowd rise as one to call it a clear dive that deserves nothing but a yellow card for simulation. But when I watch the game at home on TV, I see multiple different perspectives replayed endlessly in slow motion and from every angle. We have them assessed by a referee and a linesman, and independent commentators, and we see things differently, perhaps more objectively.
The point is that we live in a Westphalian world of sovereign independent states where each state is its own referee. We call events as we see them, but then so does everybody else. We believe we are right, but then so does everybody else. We believe our actions are just, but then so does everybody else. It is a system designed for chaos and conflict. Yet, with our incredible human ingenuity, we have designed mediating institutions to compensate for our human weakness, chiefly the United Nations to act as a bridge between sovereign states and within states to maintain order and over which they can seek to mediate their differences. When we uphold the United Nations, we are upholding international order. When we attack or undermine it, we are destroying the critical infrastructure on which the very future and hope of civilisation depend.
I believe it is no coincidence that today we are seeing armed conflicts at their highest levels since 1946, when at the same time great power rivalries are undermining the United Nations at every turn and cutting its budgets. In international relations, as in life, you get what you pay for. Global military spending last year was $3 trillion, 1,000 times the budget of the UN. The entire peacebuilding budget of the United Nations to respond to 65 active armed conflicts around the world is $124 million, less than the cost of a single modern fighter jet. We could mediate an entire peace process for less than the cost of a single cruise missile.
Moreover, we are blessed in this country with some of the most skilled and respected diplomats in the world. The convening power of London is second to none. We are a soft power superpower, but that superpower is hard power. We have also been the beneficiaries of patient mediation ourselves in Northern Ireland, and that imposes an obligation on us to repay it by mediating for others.
It is also in our own enlightened self-interest to do that. Around three-quarters of those arriving in small boats in this country are from areas of conflict abroad. We are more secure at home when there is peace abroad; we are more prosperous too. Peace is the greatest generator of prosperity humans have ever discovered, and war is the greatest cause of poverty. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor told us yesterday that they are seeking opportunities to invest for growth. My message to them is simple: invest in peace.
Lord Rook (Lab)
It is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bates, and I thank him for that contribution. We have the privilege of catching the bus home together occasionally, and on Monday we discussed his recent trip to Sudan, which was fascinating, and this upcoming debate, which we were much looking forward to. I do not think either of us have been disappointed; I might disappoint some people now, but up until now, we have not been disappointed. My thanks go to my noble friend Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale for securing this debate, and to other noble Lords for what has been a fascinating and broad-ranging set of contributions.
I point to my register of interests, and the work I do at the Good Faith Partnership, in respect of some of the work I will talk about next. Around the world, faith leaders are often on the front line of peacebuilding. From them, we learn that religious diplomacy can reach the parts that Governments struggle to reach. In my honest opinion, there are some false and lazy assumptions that sometimes prevent us harnessing the power of faith for mediation and conflict resolution. I want to talk about that today.
One false assumption is that the relationships of faith leaders are held largely with other religious people. It is not true in western countries; often, our faith leaders are the most well-connected people across different sectors and the range of society. It is certainly an irrelevant assumption in much of the world, where more than 80% of people say that faith has a role in their own personal identity. I am really grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford for highlighting earlier the role of the Church in the work of mediation and conflict resolution. I hope what I say next will bring more power to the right reverend Prelate’s elbow.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, rightly said that London has a remarkable convening power. Earlier this year, my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland hosted a group of senior Christian and Muslim religious leaders from Nigeria, prior to a peacebuilding summit that was hosted and convened in London by a former colleague of ours, Bishop Justin Welby. Those leaders were all opponents at one time, and some were enemies. Over the last month, starting at that event here in London, they have started to build relationships and plot paths to peace in parts of their country where conflict is rife.
My noble friends Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale and Lord Griffiths of Burry Port both made it clear that local ownership is essential for successful mediation. Those Nigerian leaders would have been clear, and are clear, that there are only really Nigerian solutions for Nigerian problems; coming to London does not put things right. However, what we have learned from this experience is that the support of our Government and the US Government, in helping to enable and empower those leaders to take a role in their community, has been more than powerful.
I thank my noble friend Lady Chapman of Darlington, who, in her then role as the Minister, addressed the leaders when they came to your Lordships’ House. I am grateful to Minister McNeill, the new Minister for International Development and Africa, who confirmed, only this week, her support for the Government working with those faith leaders in Nigeria. I am particularly grateful to David Smith MP, our UK Special Envoy for Freedom of Religion or Belief, who has worked hard with those faith leaders to encourage them in the work they are doing in their own country. We recently met again in Abuja in Nigeria and received great support from both the British and the US embassies, with the high commissioner and the US chargé d’affaires attending and engaging in the discussions. While conflict is not going down in Nigeria—sadly, it is rising in large parts of the country—these discussions, wherever you go, are a cause for real hope and, most importantly, for real practical action. A path to peace is being laid out by these leaders.
Far from engaging only with other people of faith or other faith leaders, those leaders in Nigeria are demonstrating an extraordinary capacity to build relationships both wide and deep. Together, they can engage those people who perpetrate violence; together, they can engage those people who are in danger of being drawn into violence; and together, sadly, they have to engage the victims and survivors of violence. I obviously encourage the Government to continue their support for the work of those faith leaders in Nigeria, but I also ask that we explore whether there are other regions in the world where religious diplomacy might be a route to help us support mediation and conflict resolution.
Following that false assumption, I want to raise a lazy one: the assumption that faith is more responsible for conflict than it is for peace. We do not have too long to go into that now, but often when religion is blamed for these conflicts, it is a false or thin depiction of that faith, often through radicalisation and extremism. Exploited by others, these false depictions become something that adds to conflict and local tension. In such situations, faith is actually not the poison; it is the antidote. Faith leaders have a moral and theological authority to call out bad actors in their community, to influence people to take a different path and to modify bad behaviours. In Mozambique, the United Nations has worked extensively with bishops to prevent acts of terrorism—the fight against ISIS. Where government sometimes lacked the ability and the authority to ask communities to do things differently, faith leaders provided powerful and practical solutions and, over a period, were able to reduce significantly the recruitment of community members into extremist activities. In Mozambique, we experienced that authentic expressions of faith can enable mediation and prevent conflict.
In 2025, my noble and learned friend Lady Scotland, whom I mentioned earlier, met two of the Nigerians who came to London in September, as she presented Pastor James Wuye and Imam Muhammad Ashafa with the inaugural Commonwealth Peace Prize. Some 40 years ago, James and Muhammad were fighting in rival militias; they had been recruited by local extremists and were waging war on each other’s communities— James lost his right arm in the process. However, as faith leaders, they have built a friendship and become reconciled. They have created an interfaith mediation centre and now run a national network of peace clubs, with more than 10,000 members, in their country. They are a parable of the power of faith leaders to build lasting relationships and to provide moral leadership that changes attitudes, behaviours, communities and—one day, I hope—their country.
I very much look forward to the response of my noble friend the Minister. I close with two questions for the Government. First, I am so grateful for the ongoing support of His Majesty’s Government for the faith leaders in Nigeria who are working so hard to build a path towards peace. In Nigeria and other countries, David Smith, our FoRB envoy, is playing a leading role in helping His Majesty’s Government to harness the power of faith and to build our capacity for religious diplomacy. At the launch of our freedom of religion or belief strategy at the FCDO in 2025, the department committed to publishing an annual report on the progress and impact made in this area. I am interested to know from my noble friend the Minister when we might expect the first of these reports, because it will provide valuable opportunities to recognise, celebrate and promote the important work that our Government are undertaking. In dark and difficult times, I hope we can find some good news, which is desperately needed.
Secondly, the FCDO’s Office for Conflict, Stabilisation and Mediation provides excellent specialist expertise in conflict prevention, mediation, peace process and stabilisation. It works with Governments, international institutions and civil society, and only this week a leading actor in this field was lauding its work to me. I am interested to know from the Minister how that unit can make an even greater impact by working with faith communities and religious diplomacy to draw on their unique relationships, local knowledge and moral authority to strengthen the UK’s impact in preventing and resolving conflict.
In closing, let us exercise smart power, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, mentioned earlier. Let us not be the victims of false or lazy assumptions; let us recognise the vital role of religious diplomacy in mediation and peacebuilding. Let us recognise the unique and remarkable relational capacity and the moral and theological influence and authority of religious leaders in conflict zones around the world, and let us do all we can to support them as they work faithfully on the front line of international mediation and peacebuilding.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie (LD)
My Lords, I join all other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, on initiating this debate and on the way he introduced it. We have had a pretty wide-ranging debate, with lots of different perspective brought into play, which is as it should be and is extremely valuable.
The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said that the problem with the Government is that they have tended to step back rather than step up. I am glad that he went on to say that there were some more positive things, and I think we should relate to that. However, it seems to me that the conversation we have is less about peacekeeping at the moment and more about conflict resolution, because until you resolve a conflict it is very difficult to keep the peace, and things have been moving in a pretty bad direction. However, this debate has been extremely instructive.
The comments of the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about his role as an intermediary were fascinating. He made it absolutely clear, as many other speakers have, that quiet engagement below the headlines can often make the difference, and he cited some really interesting examples. The work that has been done there is extremely valuable and not to be overlooked, and I am glad that he brought that to the debate.
It was also pointed out that peacekeeping and conflict prevention represent value for money, but, unfortunately, we are not actually providing the money at the moment. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford touched on a very powerful point. She said that the concept at the moment seems to be that you have to wage war to secure peace. That is increasingly the way some of the conflicts look, and it is extremely difficult to know how you can pull them back to say, “Actually, no, you have to fight for peace”. That was an interesting analogy because, as I will come on to say, one of the problems we have is that too many of the protagonists are not interested in peace.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, quite rightly said that we should not just reach for the same old toolkit, useful as it may be; we have to recognise that, in a changing world, we are going to have to find different ways of doing things. Increasingly, also, it is not just about states but non-state actors, and sometimes we have to invest in the long term.
I was cited by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, whose intervention was not unexpected. I do not wish to discredit his own genuine view, which is not widely shared but which he has come to on his own basis—I am not suggesting that he is an agent for anybody else—but the reason I raised the Budapest memorandum is that he is looking for a solution which will require the same guarantors who have not honoured the original memorandum. It is difficult, therefore, to see how you can get a settlement that can be trusted, which is really the problem we face.
I want to pick up in particular what the noble Lords, Lord Hastings and Lord Bates, said. We have to engage with people we do not like, we have to take the criticisms as to why we are talking to them, and we have to do it both publicly and privately, and extensively, and be more objective. Those are powerful arguments, and all the best peace outcomes have always had that characteristic to make them happen.
As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said in his opening remarks, conflicts have proliferated to the extent that we currently have the highest level and number of conflicts since the Second World War. The worst ones, with none showing any capacity for peace interventions, are clearly Sudan, the Middle East and Gaza and Ukraine. I am afraid that, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said, the UN’s current weakness is revealed for all to see. Much of this is exacerbated by the disengagement of the main players on whom the UN depends: notably, Russia, the US and, to a lesser extent, China.
The UK, which supports peacekeeping and conflict prevention and resolution, has actually cut its funding to peace initiatives. I just checked the figures for the integrated security fund: for the current year, there is £854 million; next year, £545 million; the following year, £499 million; and the year after that, £471 million. That is the Government’s financial commitment to peacekeeping declining. It is not all about money—I accept that—but it is, I suggest, a movement in the wrong direction.
Turning to some of the conflicts, in Sudan I find it slightly extraordinary that, with Saudi Arabia supporting the Sudanese Armed Forces and the UAE supporting the Rapid Support Forces, they are also half of the mediating quad, which also includes Egypt and the United States. It is difficult to see progress or even the capacity to prevent the most appalling atrocities and humanitarian abuses when the mediators are also protagonists in the process. The UK is the penholder, so one question to the Minister is: to what extent can we exert some pressure? We had an earlier Question about aerial bombardment in Sudan, which has been perpetrated as extensions of two of the outside players. What can the Government do to put pressure on those two players to stop these atrocities and to pay a price if they do not, as my noble friend Lord Purvis called for in the earlier Question?
In the Middle East, we have not yet had the results of the Israeli elections, but Prime Minister Netanyahu has escalated assaults in the West Bank and Gaza, and he has been actively encouraged to do so by the White House—although I am not quite sure who is encouraging whom—when President Trump described him as a warrior Prime Minister, which is supposed to be a compliment. We are talking about peace, and he praises a warrior Prime Minister. Both sides in the Middle East are now promoting single-state solutions, turning their backs on the two-state solution, which is the only thing that offers long-term peace and stability. We still must not abandon our aspiration to get there, however difficult it may be. Tony Blair commented of the Belfast agreement, when he was made envoy for the quartet, that it was ironic that there was no agreed long-term solution to the division of Ireland, but peace had been secured, whereas there was an agreed and viable long-term solution to Middle East peace, but there was no peace. In the midst of this current situation, Trump and Netanyahu have started a war that they do not know how to end.
On Ukraine, we have equivocal support, not from us, but from the United States—or from the White House; I see the difference—and pressure to end the war by surrendering. It is no longer just equivocal support; it has now switched to outright support for Putin’s Russia, with Trump’s envoy, Witkoff, describing Putin as humanitarian for releasing one US prisoner. That might be welcome, but he was ignoring the daily slaughter of Ukrainian civilians by Russian drones and missiles, aggravated by the United States’ degrading of Ukraine’s defence capability.
It difficult to see how we can get out of these situations while the main players are behaving in this way. It must almost be observed that they do not want peace. They just want their side to win at all costs. How on earth are we supposed to respond to this? We must of course support the United Nations and initiatives that may fly. However, when President Trump seriously nominates Viktor Orbán as the candidate to be Secretary-General of the United Nations, it is obvious that, for the time being, we must look to other ways of promoting peace.
The conflicts that I have referred to are promoted by misogynistic leaders with the characteristics of bullies and cowards. The UN recognised in the year 2000 with Resolution 1325 that lasting peace required the active participation of women. Yet, precisely because so many of these conflicts are about power and control by men, they are still too often ignored—while mobilising humanitarian relief and exposing abuse is all that we are left with. Yet women played a key role in the Northern Ireland peace process and are conspicuous in the fight for Ukraine’s survival.
We have been talking about the United Nations and the international community. What is the role of the UK? We need a reset, a SWOTs analysis, to see what our strengths are and to deliver them on a priority basis. I ask the Minister whether that could be considered.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale, for initiating this important debate and all noble Lords for their contributions.
Throughout the debate, a number of points appealed to me and struck a chord. Funnily enough, it was noble the Baroness, Lady Chapman, who talked about trust and her predecessor, my noble friend Lord Ahmad, who talked about relationships. We are talking about smart power, regional ownership, local peacebuilders and the importance of moving quickly on mediation when conflict occurs. However, none of this will proceed unless there is the political will for it to succeed. This debate has looked at how the contributions from different sectors can push more mediation and prevention of global conflict.
We live in an increasingly dangerous world. It has been said many times in this debate, but in a debate such as this it is right that we reflect on the conflicts that we are seeing all over the world, as noble Lords have, whether in Sudan, the Holy Land, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Philippines. It seems almost that wherever we look there is conflict, as many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, and my noble friend Lord Bates have said: 2025 saw 65 active state-based conflicts across 35 countries, the highest number recorded since 1946. There are many more places in the world today in tension to an extent that threatens conflict. The appalling scenes in Ceuta earlier this year showed the threat that illegal migration poses to countries across the world. In France, internal disorder has seen the mass destruction of livelihoods and public buildings. Every one of us wants to see order and peace in every part of the world. His Majesty’s Government should continue to use all the diplomatic tools available to work towards that goal.
The noble Lord, Lord McConnell, has highlighted the importance of mediation in his Motion today, and we are particularly well placed as a nation to support mediation. We are a nation that respects the rule of law and is known the world over for our respect for fairness and, as other noble Lords have said, for our Diplomatic Service. But Britain today does not have the global reach it once had, and we must reflect on that. Can the Minister, when he replies to this debate, comment on the reality of Britain’s role in our increasingly unstable world and say what specific steps his department is taking to promote peace and an end to conflict across the world? In particular, can he say what work his department is doing towards a stable and long-lasting two-state solution in Israel and Palestine?
As a member state, Britain supports the work of the United Nations in promoting peace and stability through its Peacebuilding Commission, the Peacebuilding Fund and the Peacebuilding and Peace Support Office. I understand that this structure has recently been reviewed. Can the Minister say whether the United Kingdom fed into that review process and, if yes, what submissions did we make? I would also be grateful if the Minister could comment on the broader challenges faced by the UN, not least as a result of the fact that Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, is pursuing an illegal war in Ukraine, and what His Majesty’s Government’s position is on that.
The UK has contributed £630 million per year in funding for the UN for the last decade. Can Minister say whether the Government intend to continue that level of contribution or increase it? Further to that, can he say what work his department is doing to ensure that funding is going to the right places? We have all followed with interest the controversy surrounding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Can Minister update the House on the Government’s assessment of the situation at UNRWA? But mediation after conflict has begun is not enough. Constant engagement, rebuilding and trade across cultural divides has an important role to play. Can the Minister say what work Ministers are doing to promote constructive engagement between nations in conflict areas across the world?
The harsh truth is that, when conflict occurs, there is often a call for more direct intervention. Peace cannot always be achieved through mediation and international co-operation alone. We saw that in Sierra Leone, where a total of nearly 4,500 British personnel were deployed in-country. We must not forget that five dedicated British military personnel lost their lives in that conflict. We saw it again in the Balkans, where tens of thousands of British troops served as part of the NATO-led peacekeeping mission. A total of 72 British Armed Forces personnel have died as a result of those operations in the Balkans, including in Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia, since 1992. We should remember their service too.
Diplomacy is essential but, without hard power, as mentioned by other noble Lords, Britain cannot play a full role alongside our international allies and partners. That is why defence spending is so important and why it was disappointing to hear the Chancellor of the Exchequer fail yesterday to set out a clear plan to hit the 3% of GDP spending target on defence. The Budget was in many ways an exercise in avoiding the tough decisions that we expect Ministers to tackle, and that was true on defence. Not only are we still waiting for the 3% spending plan, but the Chancellor has been accused of stealth cuts to the defence budget by diverting pensions savings to the Treasury rather than the defence budget.
The situation we are in on defence spending sends the wrong message to our allies, and it is important to get that message right. Overall, this debate has been really informative. It has given much food for thought and I look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Wood of Anfield) (Lab)
My Lords, I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale for securing this debate and for the way he opened it with his experience, reflections and wisdom on this broad issue. I pay tribute to his work as co-chair of the All-Party Group on conflict and peacebuilding, and to his long personal commitment to peace in many parts of the world, particularly in Mindanao, which he spoke about.
I thank all noble Lords who have spoken. It is a debate that has brought not just experience of diplomacy, negotiation and the slow challenging work of building peace on the ground but a sense that peacebuilding is not the work of Governments alone. In fact, sometimes Governments are not the best-placed partners to make progress. I will come back to some of those points in a minute and I will try to respond to as many of them as I can. Apologies if I do not get to everything, but I will come back to you if I do not.
In particular, I would like to start by endorsing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, that we should stop the revolving door of ministerial appointments. I could not agree more; we should start that right now.
We meet at a sobering moment. As many noble Lords have said, including my noble friend Lord McConnell and the noble Earl, Lord Courtown, there are more conflicts in the world today than at any time since the Second World War. The figure my noble friend mentioned was that a quarter of a million people died in violent conflicts across the world in 2025. Conflict is driving terrible humanitarian crises, forcing families from their homes and seeing the most appalling atrocities committed against innocent people. We talked about Sudan earlier. I will come back to that in a minute. It is perhaps the most egregious example but, sadly, they are all too common.
The noble Lord, Lord Redwood, mentioned Ukraine. Just last month I was in Ukraine, meeting veterans, families, civil society leaders and others enduring a brutal assault on their country. I went to the village of Yahidne, which some noble Lords may know about. Just after the invasion, some 400 people were held in a school basement there for 27 days. I was taken around that basement by people who were in there without food, lighting or any provisions, and by people whose family members had suffered, some of whom had died. Ten people died in that basement. In Kyiv, I visited a UK-funded centre that is doing the heartbreaking but extraordinary work of tracing children who have been stolen from occupied territories and deported to Russia, where they have been adopted by Russian families. In the short time in my job, the human cost of this one example and the incredible courage of ordinary Ukrainians in this war is something I will not forget.
A few days after that I went to Toronto, where I joined more than 80 countries at a conference to discuss how to respond collectively to the problems that Ukrainians under Russian control face. There, we committed to convene a core group with Ukraine in London on the identification, return and reintegration of civilians from the occupied territories detained by Russia. That is perhaps a small example, but it is one of an attempt at peacemaking: the patient, often unseen work of getting people home, working with NGOs in the community of nations, trying to secure a just and lasting peace at a time when prospects seem pretty bleak, and using international law to do so.
I take seriously the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, on the need to have a heard-headed strategy to go along with that. In a nutshell, our strategy is to raise the costs of conflict for Russia so that it is forced—reluctantly, perhaps—to come to negotiation and discussion. This is at a time when Ukraine has made it clear, even at some cost to itself, that it is prepared to engage in those discussions. I am pleased to say that we are doing a variety to things, from sanctions to incessant diplomatic work, to try to achieve that outcome.
On prevention, beyond tragedies overseas, we have all seen how the effects of conflict reach our own shores—through irregular migration, organised crime, and higher costs for families here at home. For those who do not look abroad perhaps as much as noble Lords in this debate do, with their expertise and interests, prevention is in the national interest. My noble friend Lord McConnell is right that prioritising prevention is crucial. It is a hard-headed choice. It is not a soft option. Acting early saves lives and saves money. Mediation—helping those who are fighting to find a way to stop—is one of the most practical tools we have.
This theme has recurred in this debate: prioritising prevention is not the job of a single small group of people sitting in the Foreign Office; it runs through the activities across the Foreign Office and across government departments. Money is crucial, of course, and I will come back to that, but it is not reflected in a single pot of money allocated to something called “prevention”. It is much broader than that. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who has extensive knowledge of this across six Foreign Secretaries and five Prime Ministers, rightly talked about the interconnection of different activities, such as peacebuilding, prevention, peacekeeping and mediation.
However, we have to acknowledge that the world of peacemaking in particular has changed—although the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, is right that we need more imagination in thinking about pre-emptive action and the way that the UK Government should act in the future. On the one hand, the group of states playing significant mediation roles has expanded, as my noble friend Lord McConnell mentioned at the start. However, as my noble friend Lady Chapman pointed out, some deals are short-term and transactional, do not stick, and leave the causes and drivers of conflict untouched. Some deals between states have that characteristic, as well as deals between non-state actors. The United Nations has also found it much harder to play the role it once did, which is a point many noble Lords have made. That must shape how we think about our role.
So what is our role? The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, rightly challenged me to spell it out. I will put it in three sets of categories or clusters of activities. Before I say that, it is striking that there was universal agreement that the UK, for all our faults, has pedigree in this area and a strong reputation. Despite some parts of the world thinking we are perhaps historically tainted in some ways, we are a country full of organisations, diplomats and experts that has a positive role to play. We should be proud of that and it continues to be true, for all the challenges we face. I will put the UK strategy in three parts: the first is to bring expertise, the second is on partnerships, and the third is to strengthen and protect the institutions of peace.
I will start on bringing expertise. We rarely lead mediation processes ourselves, often because others—NGOs, other countries or faith groups, to come back to my noble friend Lord Rook’s point—are better placed and more trusted by the parties concerned. Instead, we tend to back mediators, regional organisations and parties themselves, drawing on our diplomatic relationships, our influence, our expertise, back channels and ceasefires. We have experience: the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to the sad, painful experience in Northern Ireland, which gives us a mixture of pain, experience, credibility and wisdom, and enables us to have some perspective and authority.
My noble friend Lord McConnell knows this from Mindanao: in 2009, at the request of the parties, the UK led the formation of the international contact group, alongside others such as Japan and Saudi Arabia, and helped pave the way to a peace agreement that has significantly reduced violence. On Colombia, which the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to—he is about to meet former President Santos, as he said—my noble friend Lady Chapman noted in quite moving detail the specific way in which UK engagement actually made a difference, particularly in the perceptions of the enemy at the point of demobilisation. Here, the UK used its role on the Security Council to keep international support behind the peace process.
Through our new conflict and violence community of expertise, we deploy specialists on mediation, atrocity prevention and conflict-related sexual violence where they are needed. Through our conflict resolution programme, we have funded expert partners to support dialogue in some of the hardest places to achieve that. Much of that work is very discreet and is not talked about, for good reason: as many noble Lords have mentioned, discretion is an important part of keeping people safe and keeping talks alive.
On this issue, I want to go back to my noble friend Lord Rook’s comments on the role of faith-based organisations and individuals. I always love listening to my noble friend; he is one of my favourite speakers. He raised two issues. Last year, when we announced our approach to freedom of religion or belief, the Government made a commitment that we would have a report, and I can confirm that the report, which outlines the progress we have made, will be presented to the Prime Minister before the end of this year. On contact between FCDO conflict experts and religious leaders, I am pleased to say that it not only is crucial but happens frequently. It is pivotal to informing the FCDO’s understanding on how to use its influence, where not to use its influence, where to delegate, where to use partnerships and other approaches.
The second theme is building partnerships. As my noble friend Lord McConnell mentioned, since 2025 we have formalised co-operation on conflict resolution with Qatar and Turkey, for example. I know from our ambassador in Qatar how much effort he and his team are putting into that partnership, particularly with the Iran conflict and other conflicts in mind. They are partners with growing roles as mediators whose expertise we value. We have also begun working with Japan’s new mediation unit, which I know my noble friend has championed, and we are deepening our co-operation with the European Union, as provided for by the security and defence partnership.
Again, our job is not to crowd an already crowded field; it is to help those with access and more legitimacy than we sometimes have to succeed. As I mentioned earlier in answer to a Question on Sudan, my right honourable friend the Foreign Secretary was in Istanbul last week for an E3+R4 meeting looking at ways in which countries with other kinds of relationships in areas such as Sudan and Iran can play a more constructive role.
I come back to a very important point that my noble friend Lady Chapman raised. She is completely right about the framing of responses being overly dictated by the last response. With my academic hat on—I can never quite give up being an academic—there is a wonderful book by Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War, which is precisely about military engagement falling prey to exactly the same vice: fighting the current war based on the lessons from a previous war. Peacebuilding can suffer from some of those same vices as well. That is an incredibly important point.
The third set of activities to which I want to draw attention is strengthening the institutions of peace. I was in Vienna last month where I opened the UK’s chairpersonship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is one of the few multilateral institutions where we sit around the table with Russia and which, in my view, is more valuable for that. In my speech—I am sure noble Lords have read it, but I will just summarise for those who may have missed it—I talked about how dialogue matters most when trust is at its lowest ebb and how Europe’s security institutions still have a role, despite it being unfashionable in many quarters, to manage risk and prevent escalation. We will keep investing in them. For example, we have contributed more than £200 million to the UN peacebuilding fund since 2006, which makes us a very long-standing and loyal donor.
The noble Lord, Lord Howell, gave us a chastening and correct challenge to try to recapture the spirit of 1945. Let us be honest: this is not a good time for multilateralism and the UN. It is therefore not a time for us to walk away from these multilateral institutions. To go back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, it is a time to try to put some steel back in the multilateral architecture. I will respond to the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, in a minute.
It is also a time to beware false choices, which have been presented in some noble Lords’ comments today, between hard and soft power. I completely agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford’s point that if you want peace you have to invest in the institutions of multilateral co-operation that bring it about and not assume war. There is also the false choice of thinking that it is either defence or development. Of course, this has been a very difficult time because of the cuts that have been made to the development budget. But there is a more fundamental challenge than just zero-sum trade-offs of funding, which is to rethink the way we think about defence and to bring security, economic and military dimensions—pre-emptive downstream interventions—into our concept of what proper security and defence are about.
We helped shape last year’s review of the UN’s peacekeeping architecture. We fund the UN’s mediation experts, and as the UN prepares for a new Secretary-General, we want a United Nations that uses its good offices actively and early. Regional organisations matter too, particularly the African Union, for example. We will support these organisations to make that commitment real and will work with the World Bank and other international finance institutions so that money flows to prevention before violence breaks out.
Several noble Lords raised early warning, including the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad. The problem is rarely that we cannot see a crisis coming; we usually can. It is about turning warning into action. The FCDO has developed a variety of mechanisms and tools to support early warning and early action across the network. The importance of using technology to improve translation of that early warning into action was a point well made. The Foreign Office is bringing conflict, atrocity and humanitarian analysis together into a single view of risk, drawing on our embassies, open-source data and horizon scanning. We support local civil society organisations to strengthen their early-warning functions.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned atrocity prevention. I welcome the challenge in the Peace Works report launched by my noble friend’s all-party group and in the Atrocity Crimes Review published earlier this month. We are considering their recommendations carefully. I am particularly considering their recommendations carefully because my old boss, Gordon Brown, spoke at the launch of the review, and I have learned over the years not to ignore Gordon Brown, especially on early-warning issues. Officials are meeting the authors, and I would be glad for our officials to meet my noble friend and the group’s officers as well.
I was going to talk about some particular cases. Given the time, I probably will not, but we talked about Sudan earlier and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, challenged us on Sudan. There are definitely complexities with those involved in peacemaking also being parties that have interests. That is not just a complexity of Sudan, but clearly it is a complexity there. What are we doing? We had an UNGA event specifically on the drone attacks to try to make some progress on that. We are leaders of the coalition for atrocity prevention group, and there is constant engagement on this. I am sure there is more that can be done, but it is not a field in which we are silent.
I also want to mention the leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, on the question of the International Alliance on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict, which I believe he was instrumental in starting. We are continuing to prioritise that. We work with Colombia, the DRC, which I think is chair this year, Ukraine and others. We are vice-chair this year, and it is an agenda that is being actively pursued with energy from the United Kingdom.
Inclusion is vital. Peace agreements are more likely to last when, for example and in particular, women participate in a meaningful way, and parties are more likely to come back to the table if talks falter. We need women’s leadership and meaningful participation in these spaces. We have protected funding for women, peace and security, and we are refreshing our national action plan on this. Inclusion also means hearing local peacebuilders, the people who raise the alarm first, stay the longest and have most at stake. We must do more to protect women peacebuilders and human rights defenders who face growing intimidation, reprisals and violence.
Many noble Lords asked about resources. I will not pretend that reducing aid to 0.3% was easy and has not had trade-offs—of course it has. It has had consequences, but we are concentrating on where we can do most good. I am pleased to say that more than 70% of our country and regional aid will go to fragile and conflict-affected states by 2028-29. As I said earlier, and I speak as someone who used to come up with pots of money as a Treasury special adviser for a previous Chancellor, this is an area where money is crucial, but the magnitude of commitment cannot be expressed simply by how many people work in a particular unit or how much money goes to a particular sub-activity inside the Foreign Office, crucial as that is.
The noble Earl, Lord Courtown, rightly challenged us on defence, although traditionally the spending review is when spending decisions are made. At least, that is my understanding. There will be more to say on that.
To conclude, the success of prevention is often invisible: the war that did not start, the ceasefire that held, the talks that kept going when everyone thought they would fail. These are non-events that are huge events in the world of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. It is one of the best investments that we can make in security for people living through conflict and for us here at home. Our role is to bring expertise, build partnerships and strengthen institutions.
I will make two quick last remarks even though I am hitting my time limit. The noble Lord, Lord Hastings, asked whether Britain was afraid to speak. Absolutely not—I say that with all due respect. Without being pious, I see myself as part of a team of Ministers at the Foreign Office who are putting ending suffering and violence at the forefront on Israel, even though many noble Lords will not agree with our position on Israel and in our Israel reset, on Sudan and on Ukraine. I am sure everyone will keep us challenged on that, but it is absolutely at the centre.
Lastly, are we afraid to talk to those with whom we disagree? This point was made by the noble Lords, Lord Bates—whom I congratulate on bringing Dan Burn’s name into a debate on conflict prevention—Lord Hastings, Lord Anderson, and others. The answer is yes, sometimes we are too afraid to speak to those with whom we disagree. That is probably true of our Government at times, so that is a good challenge, because lines of communication are more, not less, important when tensions and conflicts are at their greatest. That is a salutary lesson to take away.
Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)
I thank noble Lords for such a fascinating, interesting and thought-provoking series of speeches in a debate that I am sure will live on in the minds of those of us who have been here to listen for days, weeks and perhaps even months to come. My thanks go in particular to my noble friend the Minister for his wide-ranging response. There is much there for us to think about, but also for us to welcome. It would be impossible to comment on even a range of the points that have been made, but I will briefly comment on two.
The first is in relation to the United Nations. Many noble Lords mentioned the importance of the United Nations, and many others reflected on the frustration about the ability of the United Nations to do its job in 2026. Given the Government’s commitment to decentralisation, devolution and the understanding that not everything can be done centrally, perhaps one of the questions we need to address over the next 20 years towards the centenary of the United Nations is whether everything centralised in New York is the right format for an organisation that has grown from 50-odd states in 1946 to nearly 200 today. Perhaps those regional organisations that I have referred to regularly in debates such as this—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, the Gulf Cooperation Council, which has an important role in the Middle East these days, and so many others—provide forums through which we can deal with many of these issues much more successfully.
Finally, I want to comment on the issue of patience and persistence and sticking with the difficult business of peacebuilding. When I first became involved in the Philippines in 2014, there was much enthusiasm about the peace agreement. Nine months later, the Philippine National Police, at the instigation probably of the United States of America, went looking for a couple of Malaysian terrorists in the area that was controlled by the erstwhile Moro rebels. They were not warned in advance. They thought they were under attack. They attacked the police officers who had gone into the area, and killed 41 police officers. There were calls in Manila at the time to scrap the peace agreement, to tear it up, to go back to square one, and to go in and kill everybody who was associated with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front rather than stick with the peace agreement.
I was in Manila at the time and I was asked to do a series of interviews. I recalled the Omagh bombing in 1998, the worst bombing during the whole of the conflict in Northern Ireland, six months after the Good Friday agreement, and the calls on Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern to cancel the agreement because of that bombing and their determination not to do so at that time. My calculation in 2015 was that every single child leaving school in Northern Ireland that year aged 16 had lived their entire life in peace as a result of that decision not to cancel the peacebuilding in Northern Ireland. I am glad to say that my colleagues in the Philippines stuck with it through three Presidents and even a change of local leadership from the liberation front, and tomorrow they will elect their first ever chief minister in an autonomous parliament that, I hope, will give them peace for many decades to come. Persistence, sticking with it, going through the bad times as well as the good times, dealing with your opponents and having an inclusive process are essential, and I am very glad that our debate reflected that today.
Refugees: Community Sponsorship
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the number of refugees that will be settled annually through community sponsorship; and what steps they are taking to provide adequate resources and support to sponsors.
The Lord Bishop of Chelmsford
My Lords, I am grateful to have secured this debate, and to those who will speak. Community sponsorship offers a distinctive approach to refugee settlement. It enables people not simply to welcome refugees in principle but to stand alongside them in practice in securing a home, navigating unfamiliar systems and building relationships and new lives. It is a considerable commitment and an expression of the best of our civic life—or, as the Prime Minister might choose to see it, a courageous example of hope, where families are welcomed by their neighbours. It has been a privilege to witness the scheme’s extraordinary capacity to transform the lives of displaced people and enrich communities in my own diocese of Chelmsford, and across the UK, since its launch at Lambeth Palace in 2016. People want to help provide refugee protection.
The Government’s role is to create a safe, managed and sustainable framework that turns that willingness into action; I am grateful for their commitment in wanting to make that work. My understanding is that the Government will open applications to the scheme today. If I am correct, that will be an important milestone. I hope that this debate offers an opportunity for the Minister to share more about the Government’s ambitions for partnership working with communities and sponsors to make this pathway a joint success. Communities need to know what is expected of them, how many refugees the programme hopes to support, and what resources are available. These are questions of ambition, capacity and responsibility, which I hope we can explore a little today.
The Government want to restore public confidence in the migration system. We all see the human tragedy of people risking their lives in small boats and we hear concerns about pressures on services, housing and cohesion, yet these concerns are too often presented as a choice between compassion and control. The model of community sponsorship demonstrates that this is a false choice. It offers a safe, regular and well-managed route for refugees to rebuild their lives while strengthening communities.
In this scheme, communities choose to participate. Numbers are known and arrivals prepared for. Accommodation and support are planned and secured beforehand. This contrasts starkly with disorderly arrivals, emergency hotels and last-minute dispersals, which undermine trust and fuel anxiety. Sponsorship instead encourages cohesion, establishes relationships from the start and leads to faster integration. Evidence shows that sponsored refugees learn English more quickly, find work sooner and rely less on public services, because support helps their independence, reducing the long-term costs associated with homelessness, unemployment and poor health.
It is right that the scale of sponsorship is driven by the willingness and capacity of communities rather than by an arbitrary cap, but how will the Government assess that capacity, and the potential for growth, as infrastructure develops through new pathways for education and employment? How will faith groups, refugee-led organisations, voluntary sector organisations and local authorities be consulted before numbers are determined?
Sponsorship should also be a flexible national asset that can be mobilised rapidly in response to emerging humanitarian disasters. A mature system could provide a durable framework for future crises without requiring entirely new programmes. Homes for Ukraine demonstrated the public’s willingness to respond, with over 175,000 arrivals. The Government have said that arrivals through the resettlement scheme and sponsorship routes will initially number in the hundreds rising to the low thousands. However, they must ensure they do not constrain the ambition of willing sponsors. In time, I hope the scheme will become fully accessible to other parts of the world, not just those currently named. The existing scheme has supported more than 1,200 refugees through over 200 sponsors. Canada’s comparable programme has resettled over 440,000 refugees since 1979.
In preparing for this debate, I contacted organisations supporting refugees, as well as the Church of England, to gauge their interest in participating. I heard from the Salvation Army, Welcome Churches, the Pickwell Foundation, Refugee Education UK, Citizens UK, REST, Rohingya Association UK, the Welsh Refugee Council and Micro Rainbow. That is an impressive and diverse group of potential partners. It is important that government and this House welcome the welcomers. Community sponsorship is emotionally and practically demanding, particularly in divisive times. Those giving their time and resources should be recognised and protected. Civil society and government must work closely together so the welcomers feel confident to provide support effectively. I hope that today is a helpful opportunity for the Minister to place on record the Government’s thanks to these thousands of volunteers who have supported refugees through sponsorship schemes over the past decade and will be integral in the future.
My Question also concerns the support available to sponsors. It would be easy to focus on funding without acknowledging the Government’s considerable investment in the processing requirements, including overseas vetting and logistical arrangements. What plans do the Government have to build societal infrastructure so that community sponsorship becomes a self-sustaining, resilient and community-owned model? Generosity cannot replace professional support, so how will the Government help lead sponsors to offer specialist assistance, including training, safeguarding and administrative support? How will they ensure that sponsorship remains accessible to less affluent groups that wish to participate, including local churches and faith groups?
The Question before us today is not simply how many refugees the Government intend to welcome through sponsorship; it is whether they are ready to build a programme that communities can participate in confidently and on which refugees can rely. Community sponsorship can be a powerful expression of shared responsibility. It is a safe and controlled model and, importantly, it is rooted in the best of who we are as a society. With proper planning, sustained support and a clear commitment from government, it can offer refugees not only safety but the opportunity to belong, to flourish and to contribute.
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, I am incredibly grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford for bringing this vital issue before the House today and for the excellent and eloquent introduction to the debate. The question of how we resource, support and scale our resettlement programmes goes to the very heart of who we are as a nation. I welcome the Government’s commitment to expanding our safe and legal routes, specifically through the introduction of the new community sponsorship, refugee study and refugee work streams. These are commendable steps in the right direction.
However, having had the privilege of serving as a Minister for Faith, Communities and Resettlement, I know at first hand that a policy framework is only as strong as the infrastructure supporting it. During my time in office, I was consistently humbled by the immense, untapped generosity and operational capacity of our civil society. From churches and mosques to local neighbourhood coalitions and secular charities, the British public have a profound desire to step up and welcome those fleeing conflict and persecution.
Community sponsorship is not merely an alternative delivery model for immigration policy; it is a gold standard for integration. Traditional state-led resettlement provides a roof and basic safety net, which is vital, but community sponsorship provides a community. When a local group wraps its arms around a refugee family, the results are transformative. We see accelerated language acquisition, swifter entry into meaningful employment and deep-rooted social connections. Neighbours do not just hand over keys; they help to register children at the local school, navigate GP appointments and introduce new arrivals to local employers. This model actively fosters social cohesion, bridging cultural divides and building shared purpose at a grass-roots level.
If we want to see the true transformative potential of this model when it is backed by real government ambition, we need only to look across the Atlantic to Canada, as mentioned by the right reverend Prelate. For nearly five decades, Canada’s private sponsorship of refugees programme has been the global benchmark. Since its inception, ordinary Canadian citizens, faith groups and community associations have directly sponsored more than 400,000 refugees.
The Canadian data speaks for itself. Decades of independent longitudinal studies show that privately sponsored refugees consistently find employment faster, learn the local language more rapidly and report a higher sense of belonging than those entering through standard government assistance routes. Why? It is because they arrive with a ready-made social network of citizens completely invested in their success. Canada proved to the world that when you trust civil society and you build a robust partnership between the state and the community, you create an engine for successful integration that scales naturally.
Yet if we are to unlock that same potential here, the Government must match the ambition of our international peers. The recent indication from the Home Office that initial arrivals across the UK resettlement scheme and these new streams will number only in the low hundreds is, frankly, overly cautious. While I understand the need for careful management, we must remember that community sponsorship is uniquely scalable because it relies heavily on civil society’s energy and private good will. It alleviates, rather than exacerbates, the immediate strain on hard-pressed local authority budgets. The low hundreds should not be treated as a comfortable ceiling; it must be a strict baseline for year one backed by a clear road map for growth.
Furthermore, we must address the bureaucratic barriers that historically caused enthusiastic local groups to lose momentum. If we are to open these routes to non-profits and charities, the accreditation and vetting processes must be rigorous but accessible. Overly complex financial checks and prolonged processing delays can smother community good will before a single family even arrives.
Our finest asset in integrating refugees is the open hearts and operational capability of our faith and community groups. Let us give them the tools, the streamlined processes and the long-term certainty they need to succeed. I urge the Government to expand their vision, resource our sponsors adequately and allow British communities to do what they do best: welcome, integrate and heal.
To ensure that our communities are truly empowered to deliver this vision, I put four specific, brief questions to my noble friend the Minister. My noble friend has noted previously that initial arrivals across the UKRS and the new community sponsorship routes will be in the low hundreds, as I have mentioned. Can the Government outline what specific criteria or milestones will be used to trigger an expansion of these numbers as more charities and non-profits achieve accredited status?
Secondly, as the Government open up the new community sponsorship streams, what steps are being taken to streamline the application and vetting processes so that smaller grass-roots community groups are not inadvertently locked out by prohibitive administrative red tape? Thirdly, will the Government consider establishing a dedicated regional Home Office liaison unit tasked specifically with providing ongoing operational advice, training resources and troubleshooting support to accredited sponsors during their first critical year of hosting? Finally, while community sponsorship leverages immense voluntary resources, local statutory services like ESOL and healthcare still experience impacts. Can my noble friend the Minister clarify how the funding architecture for these new routes will ensure that local authorities are adequately compensated alongside voluntary sponsors? I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s response.
Baroness Monckton of Dallington Forest (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interest as someone who hosted a family from Ukraine for four years. They have recently moved on and I am expecting another family to arrive just before Christmas.
I agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford that we need to be certain that steps are taken to provide adequate support and resources to sponsors. It is in that context that it is worth looking at the Homes for Ukraine scheme, which has supported thousands of Ukrainians, with individual families opening their homes and hearts to welcome them in. Hosts were originally allocated £500 a month to help with extra costs. Last year, this was reduced to £350 a month, and now the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government has said that the monthly rate is going to be reduced to £100 a month from 1 January next year.
Ostensibly, this is based on the view that Ukrainian families should by now have been able to develop their own resources here. Yet, the same cut of over 70% will apply to UK families taking Ukrainians who have just arrived, and the situation is getting worse. Even while we have been sitting in this Chamber, in the last hour 14 people have been killed at a Kyiv railway station by a Russian drone. A fortnight ago, the Lord Privy Seal rightly argued in this place that the moral obligation of this country to do what we can practically to help Ukraine and its people remains as high as ever. The noble Baroness seemed surprised when I told her about the change to the funding arrangements for hosts.
Research conducted by the Office for National Statistics outlines how the cost of living has already forced many host families to abandon this scheme. Hosts were originally asked to commit to six months. After that time, 23% pulled out as they could no longer afford it, and 99% of these hosts cited significant extra costs, such as utilities and food. The Local Government Association told us that thousands of Ukrainian households have had to register as homeless here, after their hosting arrangements collapsed. Apart from the fact that this may well cost local authorities more than the proposed cuts, it is also incredible to me that we offer families a safe haven from a country at war, yet they may end up sleeping on our streets.
Ukraine, and particularly its capital, is facing a devastating winter. It will be the worst of the war so far, given the increased Russian ballistic missile attacks on infrastructure and the almost complete cessation of the supply of US Patriot defence systems. The father of the family we have hosted for four years is still in Kyiv. In the last three weeks, he has had three hours of running water. He spends nights sleeping in either a corridor or an underpass, and he is lucky if he gets two hours of electricity a day. This week, I received an email from the guest who is joining us shortly, with his young son—the mother is no longer alive. He wrote:
“The situation in Kyiv feels more dangerous now than at any other time during these four years of war. With almost constant air raid alerts and attacks, the city sometimes feels more like a place near the front line. Even going outside has become a source of uncertainty and concern”.
As a result of this escalation, more parents from Ukraine with traumatised children are looking for homes here, yet the combination of reduced funding and high living costs has drastically reduced the number of families who are able to sponsor.
Another factor causing concern, which also needs to be taken into account, is the lack of clarity on the duration of visas, which affects not only Ukrainian children, many of whom are now totally integrated into our education system, but their mothers, or parents, who are trying to get a job and find somewhere to rent, with no fixed idea of how long they will be here. This adds unnecessary stress to an already intolerable situation. So, I urge His Majesty’s Government to look again at their changes to the Homes for Ukraine scheme, to reconsider the proposed cut of almost three-quarters to the amount paid to host families, and to make sure that lessons are learned and that the resettlement of refugees through community sponsorship is adequately resourced.
Baroness Brinton (LD) [R]
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford on securing this short but important debate on the process of allowing refugees to settle through community sponsorship, to assess the numbers involved and to look at whether the Government are giving adequate resources and support to sponsors. I join her in thanks to the many communities that have already supported refugees.
It is an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton of Dallington Forest. Her example as a sponsor of a Ukrainian family, and shortly to sponsor another, is absolutely to be commended. But I share her concern at the reduction of grants for host families and the consequential loss of hosts. Please, Minister, can this be changed?
The noble Lord, Lord Khan, spoke powerfully of the strength of a welcoming community, to ensure that arrivals settle and become part of the community, and I agree with him.
In 2016, under Prime Minister Theresa May, the community sponsorship scheme was launched. In that scheme, managed by the Home Office, families were allocated to approved sponsors, who could be charities, faith groups or other civil society organisations. It has developed very slowly. The Sunak Government said in 2023:
“Over 1,000 vulnerable refugees fleeing regions of conflict and instability, including Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Eritrea, Iran, Somalia and Afghanistan, have been welcomed under one of the UK’s safe and legal routes by local communities across the UK, so they can start their new lives here”.
That was not many, over seven years.
The scheme does have good ideals. The sponsors have to demonstrate capacity to deliver their side of the scheme, which includes available funding of at least £9,000, as well as the appropriate accommodation and written consent from the local authority. Once approval was given, they were given the responsibility of supporting a resettled family for at least one year, providing accommodation for two years, and providing support for all that they might need, from accessing medical services, language tuition, schools, social services, and, importantly, helping them to find employment. This absolutely encourages cohesion.
However, the low numbers have demonstrated a problem: the capacity of local authorities to be able to play a practical role in this, without any extra resources. Let me be blunter than that. Most local authorities are struggling to deliver anything beyond their statutory duties, and it is disappointing that yesterday’s Budget was not able to change that. However, even if it had, I suspect local authorities’ capacity to help community sponsors would remain a low priority compared with the statutory duties of children’s services, children in care and adult social services. The noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, graphically laid out the consequences to local authorities of the government grant to hosts being reduced.
What has also exploded in the last few years is a worrying resurgence of groups on the far right who, instead of objective to government about their concerns for refugee policy, have taken to demonstrating, marching and intimidating the refugees themselves. Too often, police resources have been needed to intervene to stop these aggressive patterns of behaviours by protesters. That is why, 12 months ago, then Prime Minister Starmer published Restoring Order and Control: A Statement on the Government’s Asylum and Returns Policy. Along with my party, and the noble Lord, Lord German, I have been arguing for years for effective, safe and legal routes to asylum for people with real cause, and I am not sure we have really got effective, safe, legal routes at the moment. I am interested in understanding how quickly this scheme, if it works, can be developed further from the scheme first introduced a decade ago by the previous Government.
Despite what many people want us to believe, there are refugees with a real and understandable fear for their lives in their own countries, who seek to come to the UK, often because of direct—that is, familial—or indirect reasons, for example the Afghan troops who worked with us in the war in Afghanistan.
The 2025 government policy paper said that refugee sponsorship would
“become the framework for most of the UK Government’s refugee resettlement efforts”.
The three new routes still include the route I described earlier but, unless resources are improved, I cannot see that increasing very much.
The second route is by universities, through the study sponsorship route, and by companies, through the work route. This too is very welcome, but I am sure I was not alone in absolute despair when our universities had found money and offered some places to prospective students stuck in Gaza last year and this year who could not leave their small children behind in a war zone. Some of those prospective students also could not get their status confirmed in time to start their courses. The sponsorship opportunities were wasted by the universities through absolutely no fault of theirs or the prospective students. What steps are the Foreign Office and the Home Office taking to improve visa processes for candidates under this scheme, especially for universities, where new students have a deadline that cannot be changed?
The third route is the UK refugee settlement route, which opened to new referrals recently. I echo the questions of the right reverend Prelate, who asked what numbers the Government expect in each of these three schemes over the next few years. The Government say they will set annual limits, but are the appropriate resources available to make sure that, once the community sponsors have fulfilled their side of the bargain, the Government will have capacity to deliver their side, especially the timely approval of visas? The other area that community sponsors, including Reset Communities for Refugees, are asking for is support in
“clear guidance, appropriate resources, effective safeguarding arrangements and access to specialist training and support”.
I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response on those.
Finally, there is one community I know well and have worked with for some time which has been accessing a safe and legal route to settlement in the UK for many years, but not without some problems. Unfortunately, the Government still refer to this group as refugees, but I believe they are wrong to do so, and I have said so before. These are the brave opponents of the Chinese regime in Hong Kong, who already hold British national (overseas) status and have fled to the UK because the Conservative Government of the day recognised, when we handed Hong Kong back to China, that they were entitled to be British nationals.
Since that handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997, and especially over recent years, when people fleeing Hong Kong arrive in Britain, Home Office staff often treat them as if they are exactly the same as all other refugees without British national status. Please will the Minister ensure that this practice stops? Yes, they may seek help and support if they arrive in distress, with no or few possessions, and they will need help with resettlement, but the first and biggest hurdle for them is overcome already. They have a right to come to this country, and it is shocking that their first encounter is immigration staff who do not even know this.
Lord German (LD)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to speak after my colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who has so eloquently laid out the position of those groups in which she has some direct interest.
I must declare my interest as being supported by the RAMP organisation, and I must thank the right reverend Prelate for being ahead of the curve again in being able to bring forward debate on an issue that is very potent in the current scene. I must also declare my interest—with a small “i”, not a capital “I”—as the general rapporteur on European migration and asylum policy for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. I will be reporting on this debate as it is an important part of the structure we face across the whole of our continent.
For generations, Britain’s proudest chapters have been written not when we turned our backs on the world but when we stepped forward to offer sanctuary to those fleeing terror, persecution and war. We saw that spirit when our towns and villages welcomed displaced families from Ukraine, as we heard so eloquently, and in the response to the fall of Afghanistan. I remember the crisis of the Ugandan Asians many decades ago, when we sought and brought to this country those who were being displaced so horribly. We have seen it across the hundreds of quiet, compassionate community sponsorship groups that have opened their homes and hearts across our country.
The Liberal Democrats have long argued that the best of British values is found in our local communities. That is why we welcome the principle behind the Government’s new community sponsorship scheme. Establishing new safe and legal routes is a necessary step in the right direction. Allowing communities, faith groups, universities and local organisations to step forward to directly sponsor named individuals, to support students and to welcome displaced workers is a proven and powerful concept. When local communities have direct ownership, integration flourishes. Refugees do not arrive as numbers on a Home Office spreadsheet; they arrive into an existing network of neighbours, mentors and friends who help them find work, master our language and truly belong.
We on these Benches reject outright the cynical, ungenerous claims from those on the political right. Those who demand that no safe routes be created until every boat has stopped miss the fundamental reality. People take to dangerous dinghies precisely because safe and legal routes do not exist. We do not smash the vile business model of criminal smuggling gangs by building higher walls; we smash it by opening controlled, orderly doors that render the smugglers obsolete.
Although we support this scheme in principle, we must be brutally honest about its practical realities. Compassion without ambition is mere sentiment. As it stands, this policy suffers from glaring shortcomings that risk setting it up to fail. First and foremost is the question of scale, which was mentioned earlier. The Government talk of this scheme breaking the cycle of irregular channel crossings, but look at the figures to which the Home Office has now quietly admitted. Total arrivals across the reopened UK resettlement scheme—that includes all three new sponsorship routes—will start in the hundreds before slowly growing into the low thousands. Reports suggest an ambition of just over 10,000 altogether by the end of this decade. Schemes need to be known about and understood, and people need to be provided with sufficient information for the schemes to make a difference and for the people to make a choice.
To present a scheme that admits a few hundred people as a serious deterrent to the tens of thousands not just crossing the channel but entering by other means is, frankly, a tokenistic drop in the ocean. The Refugee Council and civil society have made it clear that, if we are serious about safe routes, we must aim for real ambition by restoring settlement to at least the pre-pandemic level of 5,000 people a year, not trickling out places in the low hundreds.
Secondly, the Government are engaged in passing the buck to local communities from local authorities. Ministers say that they want to relieve local authorities and end the reliance on expensive asylum hotels. We agree with closing the hotels, but the Government’s answer is to offload core statutory responsibilities on to volunteers, charities and churches. Under the scheme, sponsors are required to secure independent accommodation for at least two years and to raise substantial private capital.
In the middle of the worst housing crisis in modern memory, how on earth does the Home Secretary expect local charities to outbid the market to find two-year tenancies without statutory backing? Under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, the state provided monthly thank-you payments to assist host households, yet under this new scheme Ministers have completely failed to guarantee whether similar financial support will exist. If the state treats volunteer good will as an unpaid substitute for proper governance, burnout will follow and the intake will grind to a halt.
Thirdly, I am afraid that we cannot ignore the punitive rollback of refugee rights baked into this agenda. For years, community sponsorship granted refugees immediate indefinite leave to remain, giving them the certainty needed to rebuild their lives and contribute. Now, the Government have reduced that to a precarious five-year route to permanent settlement, while slashing domestic asylum protections into 30-month temporary visas and threatening 20-year delays on settlement.
Fourthly, there is a serious danger that, by shifting the bulk of resettlement to named, study and employer routes, we risk abandoning the most vulnerable. Resettlement must never become a corporate recruitment fair or an elite academic exercise. We cannot ignore the disabled, the elderly or those who lack language skills and overseas connections—those whom the UNHCR identifies as facing immediate peril.
We want this sponsorship scheme to work. We want British communities empowered to open their arms. But a genuine safe route cannot be treated as an afterthought or a cheap PR shield to justify harsher enforcement. If the Government genuinely want to offer sanctuary, they must meet the four tests and the four queries that we set out earlier. As our immigration moves towards net zero with those coming in and those leaving, we need to be absolutely certain that we are giving people the compassionate best we can. We as a country are at our best when we are open, generous and fair. Let us not build a scheme of token numbers and shifting burdens; let us build a system that is controlled, compassionate and truly fit for purpose.
Lord Davies of Gower (Con)
My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford for securing this debate. The right reverend Prelate asked what assessment the Government have made of the number of refugees who will be settled annually through community sponsorship. The honest answer so far, from what I can see, is that we do not know. In response to a Written Question that I asked on 5 October, the Minister said:
“The Government expects the total arrivals across the UKRS and the three new community sponsorship routes to number in the low hundreds at first”.
It is the words “at first” that concern me. What timeframe does that cover? Is it a few hundred people in the first year or the first three years? How many people do the Government believe will be able to come to Britain after this undefined initial phase? Do the Government even know how many people they want to bring into the country under these new schemes? The Minister must tell noble Lords how the cap will be set and by whom, whether Parliament will have a say, and what happens if the cap is exceeded. He must also say whether numbers will sit alongside a commitment to reduce overall migration.
Furthermore, in that same Answer, the Minister said:
“The Home Office works closely with the local authorities that volunteer to participate in the UKRS”.
Can I take that to mean that local authorities will have to house these refugees only if they volunteer to do so? If so, can the Minister rule out any local authority being forced to house refugees who enter the country under one of the new schemes if they do not wish to do so, or will we see a repeat of the current situation whereby local authorities have no say over where asylum seekers are housed?
The context matters. We are told that this scheme depends on illegal migration falling, so let us look at where it stands. More than 41,000 people crossed the channel in small boats in 2025. In the 12 months to June this year, around 33,000 did so. The Government point to a fall, and they are right that the number has fallen. However, 33,000 people in a year arriving in dinghies, in defiance of our laws and at the mercy of criminal gangs, is not a problem solved. The Government’s answer to this is to reopen the resettlement scheme, but to open the front door while the back door is still being forced open sends exactly the wrong signal to the people smugglers, the illegal migrants and, indeed, the British people.
What of the cost? The National Audit Office has estimated the cost of asylum accommodation at £15.3 billion over 10 years. Even after recent reductions, around 16,000 asylum seekers remain in hotels, and many thousands more are in other Home Office accommodation. Every one of those places is paid for by the taxpayer. The Government propose additional intakes and say that the sponsors will carry some of the burden. Can the Minister tell us what the total Treasury cost will be? What funding will be given to local authorities for school places, GP registrations and housing when a sponsorship arrangement falls through?
The Government’s policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the country has placed enormous pressure on small towns and rural communities that never asked to be at the centre of a national problem. Residents in places with one GP surgery and one primary school have found hundreds of newcomers placed among them with little warning and even less consultation. Local councillors and police have told us how hard it is to preserve cohesion in those circumstances. Whatever one thinks of the policy, those communities have a right to be heard. The Government are now asking those same communities to take on a further burden through sponsorship, and they are doing so before they have shown that they can manage the problem they already have.
Under these proposals, charities and non-profit organisations will be able to apply to become sponsors, and approved groups will be able to choose the refugees they support and take responsibility for their housing, integration and employment. That is a significant degree of trust to place in an organisation. Let me be plain: there have been a number of cases over many years of charities, mosques and NGOs that have hosted extremist speakers or whose trustees or associates have held views hostile to our way of life. The Charity Commission has opened statutory inquiries into such cases, and we have a duty to ask whether an organisation of that kind could become an approved sponsor with direct responsibility for vulnerable people who may depend on it for their housing, income and daily lives. This is even more important given that we know that the Iranian regime has been sending operatives to Britain on small boats. What is to say that they will not attempt to do so through the community sponsorship routes?
So I have a few specific questions to the Minister. Will every applicant be vetted against Charity Commission records and Security Service advice? Will trustees and key personnel be checked? Will there be ongoing monitoring, and will approval be withdrawn swiftly if concerns arise? Will the Government ensure that no sponsor, of any faith or none, is able to exploit a position of influence over refugees, whether to radicalise, to coerce or to profit?
We need a real assessment of the numbers involved in these schemes. We need a full costing of the policy, including the burden on local authorities. We need proof that the small boat crisis is under control before the legal routes expand. We need a commitment that communities will be consulted, not simply informed, and we need a rigorous, transparent vetting regime for sponsors. I look forward very much to the Minister’s response.
The Deputy Leader of the House of Lords (Lord Collins of Highbury) (Lab)
My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the right reverend Prelate for initiating this timely debate. Let me reassure her that the Written Ministerial Statement announcing two of the three new safe and legal routes was laid about an hour and a half ago, and I am hoping that, as I speak, it will be published, so it is extremely timely. Two of the three safe and legal routes will have applications open to become lead sponsors: the named community sponsorship and the refugee study routes. This is an important step demonstrating the UK’s commitment, as noble Lords have said, to playing a part in the international protection system.
The noble Lord, Lord Davies, has heard me make the point in earlier debates, but the Home Secretary said in her conference speech this year that our purpose
“is to create that fairness. In our immigration system … And, in doing so, to hold this country together. At a time when others seek to divide us”.
In the Restoring Order and Control statement of November 2025, the Home Secretary announced the development of three new safe and legal routes to offer sanctuary to those genuinely fleeing war and persecution: a named community sponsorship route, a refugee study route and a refugee work route. These new routes will operate under a lead sponsor framework. UK-based charities and non-profits will be accredited as lead sponsors, supporting community groups, universities and employers to sponsor refugees.
These sponsors will identify refugees they wish to sponsor. Accredited lead sponsors will then refer cases to the Home Office for consideration. Individuals will not be able to apply directly. The UNHCR will confirm that individuals are refugees before they travel to the United Kingdom. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that all individuals will be subject to the necessary security and identity checks by the UK Government. Arrivals under the named community sponsorship and refugee study routes are expected from autumn 2027 onwards. The refugee work route is expected to open in spring 2027, with the first arrivals to follow later that year.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and a couple of other noble Lords raised the question of eligibility in the application process. The guidance for lead sponsors has been published and will be available to noble Lords. The lead sponsorship framework draws on proven international experience. My noble friend Lord Khan and the right reverend Prelate referred to the Canadian experience and the figures of that scheme. The Government have worked with a range of stakeholders, including the Canadian and Australian Governments, to develop the new routes. Lead sponsors will support sponsors, enabling successful integration of arrivals and intervening where difficulties arise. Sponsors will be responsible for accommodation and integration support, helping refugees to work towards self-sufficiency. The model will lessen the burden on local authorities and ensure that routes do not strain local services.
The right reverend Prelate raised an important question about support for sponsors. The Home Office today published guidance outlining roles and responsibilities, and will ensure that there is appropriate training and support. The Home Office will also look to build a lead sponsor network to share knowledge and best practice. On anticipated numbers, as noble Lords have said, the Government expect the new routes to number in the hundreds at first, growing into the low thousands as levels of illegal migration fall. A cap will be set annually, based on the capacity and willingness of communities to welcome refugees. Participation is voluntary and arrival numbers will depend on sponsor demand and capacity.
Questions were raised, particularly by the right reverend Prelate, about that capacity. In contrast to previous resettlement schemes, the new routes are community led, meaning that communities will be able to determine who they support. We have worked with local authorities throughout the development of the new routes to ensure that local authority feedback is incorporated into the new routes.
The right reverend Prelate and my noble friend Lord Khan asked how we build societal infrastructure. The Government are committed to supporting community groups, universities and employers to play an active role in refugee sponsorship. As the new routes are implemented, we will continue to work closely with stakeholders, including through appropriate training and support. As I said, we will look to develop a lead sponsorship network to share knowledge and good practice. I assure the right reverend Prelate that the Government will put in place training to deliver the lead sponsor role.
I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, who is an example to us all. I wish we could all play the role that she has played. The United Kingdom is absolutely united, and the Government of the United Kingdom are determined and steadfast in their commitment to Ukraine and its people. What she described was incredibly moving. The Homes for Ukraine scheme has evolved from an initial emergency response into a more established programme. Nobody expected this war to continue for as long as it has. That is why the Government are making changes to funding to ensure that the scheme remains sustainable for much longer than we had originally thought, so that we can continue to support those fleeing the war in Ukraine.
The Homes for Ukraine per person tariff will decrease from £5,900 to £3,300 for claims made after 1 January 2027 to ensure that this funding remains affordable. Thank you payments will be reimbursed at £100 per month per household, again reflecting a sustainable level of support while continuing to recognise the generosity of sponsors and hosts. I know that will not satisfy the noble Baroness, but I believe we have to show that we are totally committed to Ukraine and the people of Ukraine.
I will just pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and others. As part of the fundamental change to the UK’s protection offer, the annual cap will be set following engagement with local authorities, mayors, and other partners, and existing community sponsor groups. The methodology will consider community capacity—that is an important part of this scheme—and, of course, sponsors’ willingness to support integration.
I could respond to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and talk about the boats. Our programme on immigration is to ensure fairness. We have recently ensured a reduction in the boat people, not just by the arrests of the gangs that are doing it, although that is really important, but by our collaboration with France, which is also ensuring results. As I think noble Lords have said, we are absolutely committed to retaining the values that the noble Baroness, Lady Monckton, referred to. We are a country that has acknowledged the need of refugees to come to this country, and we are proud of it. Many people in this Chamber are descendants of refugees, and we should not forget that.
Throughout our history we have offered sanctuary to those in genuine need of protection. The new routes will ensure we continue to do so, drawing on the generosity, expertise and commitment of communities across the country while maintaining public confidence in the immigration system—that is really important. I hope my answers have resolved the points raised. If I have not addressed a specific point, I am sure we will be able to write to noble Lords and cover it.
Arrangement of Business
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath) (Lab)
My Lords, there has been a slight change of timing for the next debate. A mistake was made on the Order Paper. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer of Childs Hill, and the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, each have 12 minutes. That means there are no minutes in the gap. I am sure we will all be very grateful in the House if everybody sticks precisely to time, and then both the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and the Minister will have time to respond.
Personal Independence Payment and Disability Benefits: Implementation and Impact
(1 day, 11 hours ago)
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Baroness Jenkin of Kennington
That this House takes note of the implementation and impact of Personal Independence Payment and other disability benefits and linked schemes.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for this opportunity in the aftermath of the Budget to debate one of the most pressing challenges facing our country. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have stayed to debate it in the graveyard slot. This challenge, of course, is the sustainability of our welfare system and, in particular, disability benefits, including personal independence payment and the wider set of entitlements passported by PIP.
The basic purpose of our welfare system ought to be straightforward. It is a safety net for those who need it, to help people who are out of work to return to employment where possible and to provide proper support to those who cannot work because of illness or disability. PIP has a particular role within that system. It is to cover additional costs associated with long-term disability or a health condition. That is a legitimate purpose, but we know that in practice it is not always how PIP is functioning.
When we look at the disability benefits system more widely, there are serious questions about whether it too is fulfilling its objectives. We have a system that too often fails to provide people with the practical help they need, which can leave them dependent upon financial support, without addressing the underlying difficulties they face, and which, through its interaction with other benefits, can create uncertainty and financial disincentives for those who might return to work. Despite the increasing sums being spent, the Government have yet to demonstrate convincingly how they intend to bring the welfare bill under control while improving the effectiveness of the support being provided.
PIP itself is a generously conceived benefit. It is unconditional, non-contributory, not means tested and does not need formal medical evidence. International comparisons by the TaxPayers’ Alliance show that PIP is a looser regime that also pays more generous rates than our nearest colleagues in the European countries we like to compare ourselves to. It needs skilled assessors who can discriminate effectively and maintain thresholds. Assessors need strong support from immediate managers all the way up to Ministers for some tough decisions, as well as appeal mechanisms that consistently apply those same thresholds. PIP was also designed before courts interpreted the relevant law as encompassing a wide range of mental health conditions, and before Covid and furlough normalised paying healthy people to stay at home and not work.
Let us now have a look at the figures. As of July 2026, some 4.1 million people in England and Wales were entitled to PIP, of whom approximately 3.4 million were of working age. Some 37% were receiving the highest level of award, while over the preceding five years 42% of new claims made under the normal rules resulted in an award. According to Department for Work and Pensions statistics, 79% of planned award reviews resulted in an increase or no change in the award. For reported changes of circumstances, that figure was 89%. Meanwhile, 27% of mandatory reconsiderations cleared, excluding withdrawn cases, resulted in a changed award. These are substantial—indeed, enormous—figures. They make it all the more important that we understand what is driving the growth in claims, how eligibility is being assessed and whether the support being provided is producing the outcomes we should expect.
PIP is designed to support people who find daily living or mobility more challenging because of a disability or health condition and there is an important question here about the distinction between recognising a condition and identifying the practical support that someone actually needs. Take, for example, conditions such as anxiety, depression or ADHD. We should also be asking whether the assessment system is sufficiently effective at distinguishing between different levels of impairment, identifying the additional costs people actually face and determining what form of support would be most beneficial.
The current system presupposes that a cash award is the most appropriate intervention. But surely, with the substantial rise in those claiming benefits on the basis of a mental health condition, should we not consider that timely therapy, appropriate treatment, occupational support, workplace adjustments or other practical interventions may do far more to improve their quality of life, and indeed that they might enable some to return to work? The purpose of the disability benefits system should not be simply to recognise that someone is experiencing difficulty; rather, it should help them overcome that difficulty wherever possible.
That brings me to how PIP awards are assessed and reviewed. The figures I just cited raise important questions about how consistently assessments are conducted, how effectively changes in circumstances are identified, and whether decisions are made correctly in the first place. Where a person’s circumstances have materially improved, there must be a fair and reliable means of recognising that change, and, where an initial decision is overturned, we must consider whether an avoidable error was made in the initial assessment. I would therefore be grateful if the Minister could explain what steps the Government are taking to improve the accuracy and consistency of PIP assessments and how they intend to ensure that reviews respond appropriately to permanent, fluctuating, and potentially treatable conditions.
There is a related point here about face-to-face assessments. Can the Minister commit to restoring face-to-face assessments in their entirety rather than relying on assessments conducted over the telephone? If not, can she explain how the Government can be confident that they are accurately assessing an individual’s physical needs and their entitlement to support without ever seeing the person concerned?
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility’s report yesterday, spending on sickness and disability benefits alone is forecast to reach £100 billion by 2028-29, a year earlier than forecast in March. That is up from £85.6 billion in 2025-26. These are very substantial sums, particularly at a time when public finances are under such considerable pressure, and they bring us to a fundamental point which is sometimes overlooked in debates about public spending: every decision about government expenditure is ultimately a choice about whose interests we prioritise and who bears the costs. This was made abundantly clear in the Budget debate yesterday. That is why fairness must be at the centre of this discussion—fairness not just to those receiving support but to those whose taxes fund it and to those who depend on the other public services competing for the same resources.
This brings me to the question of incentives. We cannot consider PIP entirely in isolation from the wider benefit system. For people who receive PIP alongside other forms of support, particularly means-tested benefits, there is a serious question about whether the interaction between different payments creates the right incentives. For some people, returning to employment or increasing their working hours can mean a substantial reduction in means-tested support, at the same time as they face the additional costs of going to work. The result can be that someone takes on greater responsibility, works more hours and contributes more in tax but sees relatively little improvement in their disposable income. Where people are concerned that attempting to return to work or demonstrating an improvement in their condition might place their existing support at risk, that uncertainty can become a barrier in itself.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a system that can leave people afraid that making progress in their life might result in them being worse off. We should want people to recover where possible, to become more independent and to enter or remain in employment where their circumstances allow. The welfare system should support those ambitions, not discourage them. If we want people to enter employment, work must offer a clear and worthwhile reward. It should not be the case that the structure of the welfare system itself discourages people from doing precisely what the country needs and wants them to do. What does it say about the fairness of our system when people who work hard, pay their taxes and contribute to the economy can struggle to see the financial rewards of doing so? What message are we sending when we ask those working families to shoulder an ever-greater tax burden while failing to demonstrate that the substantial sums being spent on welfare are delivering the best possible outcomes? Those people are increasingly impatient and intolerant about how their taxes are being spent.
These are perfectly reasonable questions, which we should not shy away from asking. The welfare system ultimately depends on a degree of trust and shared responsibility. Those who contribute must have the confidence that their taxes are being spent effectively, support is going to those who genuinely need it and those who are capable of working are being given every reasonable opportunity and incentive to do so. Equally, those who depend on the system must have the confidence that it will provide them with proper support when they need it. For those receiving PIP, that means knowing that assessments will be conducted fairly and consistently, decisions will reflect their needs, and they will not be penalised simply for attempting to improve their circumstances. Those two principles are not in conflict. Indeed, I would argue that they are mutually dependent.
Before I close, I have some straightforward questions for the Government. Are PIP assessments consistently and accurately identifying the practical difficulties that people face and the additional support they need? Are we sufficiently distinguishing between permanent disabilities, fluctuating conditions and circumstances in which someone’s health or independence might improve? Are the reassessment periods that we have sufficient to capture those people whose conditions improve, meaning they no longer require the benefit? Are we doing enough to connect people with treatment, rehabilitation and practical assistance rather than relying on financial payments alone? Are we ensuring that those who wish to return to work or increase their independence can do so without the fear of abruptly losing essential support? We cannot simply continue increasing expenditure without addressing these points.
Nor should we allow legitimate proposals for reform to be dismissed as a lack of compassion for people with disabilities. We need a disability benefits system that protects those with the greatest needs, provides effective and practical support, helps those who can work to do so, and treats those who pay for it with fairness and respect. That is the balance that the Government should seek to restore. It is deeply concerning that they have yet to demonstrate either the political conviction or the practical plan required to do so. Until we see meaningful reform, we risk not only growing pressure on the public finances but a growing loss of confidence in the welfare system itself. Ultimately, it is those who depend most on that system who have the greatest amount to lose. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, for securing this debate. I look forward to hearing other contributions and, in particular, the response to the debate from my noble friend Lady Dacres of Lewisham, whom I warmly welcome to the Front Bench.
I will particularly address PIP. The Motion goes a bit wider, but I think that it is really focusing on PIP. We will of course receive the final report of the Timms review next month, followed by a White Paper, and we expect legislation in the coming year. So, it is an appropriate moment for Parliament to discuss the principles that should guide reform and the questions to which the Government must provide convincing answers. The decisions taken over the next year will shape the future support for millions of people with disabilities.
The interim report of the Timms review reached a striking conclusion: although PIP remains highly valued by many who receive it, the system itself is no longer fit for purpose. The review drew on more than 38,000 responses from people with disabilities, charities, professionals and others, making it one of the largest exercises of its kind undertaken by the Government. More than 90% of responses concerning the claims process were negative.
Much of the public debate has focused on the rising cost of PIP. Costs matter, and no responsible Government can ignore them. However, figures on expenditure do not speak for themselves. They require proper analysis.
The overall case load at any point reflects three separate factors: how many people are making new claims, how many claims are being accepted and how many people remain entitled to the benefits. If we are to make sensible policy, we need to understand which of these factors is driving growth. Reviews and reassessments alone do not explain the increase that has been identified. There has been a genuine rise in reported disability and long-term health conditions, particularly among younger people. The interim review highlights the changing nature of disability and ill health since PIP was introduced in 2013 by the coalition Government. I therefore hope that the Minister will ensure that the forthcoming White Paper provides a detailed breakdown of case load growth, separating the effects of new claims, award rates and claim duration.
We also need to work on the quality of decision-making. The points-based descriptors that underpin PIP have changed little since the benefit was introduced. Throughout that period, they have struggled to deal properly with fluctuating conditions, multiple conditions and many less visible impairments. The result is a system that too often fails to capture the realities of the lives of disabled people. The consequences can be seen in the appeals process and the relatively high proportion of changes through that process. The most efficient way to administer any benefit is to make the correct decision at the outset.
This brings me inevitably to the question of fraud. Some recent media coverage has created an impression that abuse of PIP is widespread. That narrative deserves careful scrutiny. Stories about social media influencers explaining how to complete claim forms may generate headlines, but guidance on filling in what are, in truth, complex applications is not in itself fraud. What matters is what the department’s own evidence shows. The latest DWP estimates put PIP overpayments due to fraud at 1.4% of expenditure in the last fiscal year. That represents an increase and should be taken seriously. However, it also means that more than 98% of spending was not lost to fraud. The overall PIP overpayment rate at 2.3% remains below the average across the benefit system.
It is also important to understand the nature of the fraud that does occur. A substantial proportion arises where an individual’s condition has improved and the improvement has not been reported. This is plainly a risk where conditions may change over time. It is much less relevant where conditions are lifelong and progressive. Learning disability is lifelong by definition, and the same is true of many degenerative conditions, yet people with such conditions continue to undergo repeated reassessments. That was one of the major complaints exposed by the Timms review. More broadly, across all claimants, the great majority of planned reviews lead to either no change or an increase in entitlements. Those figures raise a legitimate question: are we directing administrative effort to the places where it is most useful? The sensible conclusion is not that everyone should be reviewed more frequently; it is that reviews should be targeted when needs are genuinely likely to change, while people with lifelong conditions should be spared unnecessary reassessment.
To turn to the review, many of the emerging recommendations point in exactly that direction. They include a redesigned, improved application process, improved treatment of fluctuating conditions, and the creation of an advocacy service to support claimants. These proposals are to be welcomed, but good intentions alone will not be enough. An advocacy service without adequate funding will achieve little, and better assessments will require assessors who understand learning, disability and other complex conditions. I hope the Minister can assure the House that both will be properly resourced.
The more significant question concerns the long-term future of PIP. The review is exploring a shift away from the current assessment of functional difficulty towards awards linked more directly to categories of disability-related extra costs, while retaining cash support as the foundation of the benefit and preserving its non-means-tested nature. There is an obvious logic here. PIP is described as a contribution towards the extra cost of disability, yet eligibility until now has been determined primarily by functional tests rather than by assessing the costs that people face. Aligning the assessment more closely with the purpose of the benefit has an intuitive appeal. However, Parliament should not endorse such a change without answers to some important questions.
First, there is the question of evidence. Extra costs can be difficult to identify and even harder to quantify. Many are indirect, intermittent or hidden. People who need support with communication, decision-making or money management may find it particularly difficult to document them. How will costs be defined? How will evidence be gathered? And how will the Government ensure that fixed categories do not exclude claimants whose circumstances fall outside a predetermined list?
Secondly, there is the issue of choice. The review suggests that some support could potentially be delivered through services or other non-cash provision. Services have a role, but they cannot offer the flexibility of cash. People with disabilities know best what support they need and any move towards non-cash provision should therefore be optional and claimant led.
Thirdly, there is the question of distributional impact. Reform has to operate within the government spending framework, but changes within a fixed budget inevitably create both winners and losers. Parliament will need to see detailed analysis showing the effects by condition, age and component of the award. That analysis should also consider employment outcomes. It is important to emphasise that PIP is not an out-of-work benefit; indeed, it is a benefit designed to directly enable people to work. PIP is payable both in and out of work and for many people it is precisely what makes employment possible.
The interim review has performed a valuable service by bringing together evidence and challenging assumptions. The test now is whether the Government respond to that evidence. Reform should be guided neither by expenditure figures in isolation nor by alarming stories in the press but by the realities of disabled people’s lives and by the goal of creating a system that is fair, accurate, sustainable and worthy of public confidence.
Lord Willetts (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin on bringing this important subject to the House and on her important speech, with important facts and statistics within it. As well as welcoming her in leading this debate, I should say a word to welcome the Minister, because I believe that for the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, this is her first engagement and speech in our Chamber as a Minister. I welcome her to that and look forward to what she is going to say. I have at the end of my speech some particular questions that I hope she may be able to address.
The importance of this issue arises for many reasons. As we have heard from my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Davies, the well-being of people who are disabled and claiming PIP is important, but so is the backdrop of a really shocking increase in spending on welfare benefits, which is estimated to rise by £38 billion in real terms between 2026-27 and 2031-32. It is worth reporting the components of that £38 billion increase: £12 billion is for non-pensioner health and disability benefits—what we are debating today—£21 billion, significantly more, is for increases in spending on the state pension, driven above all by the triple lock, and £6 billion is for all other benefit spending. It is absolutely right to look at what we can do to reduce the costs of benefits for disabled people where the money is not having the effect that we hoped, but we should just remember the wider context of where the money is going.
I should declare an interest because I am president of the Resolution Foundation, a think tank. We produced only earlier this month a report, Hard Truths, which is about the whole issue of PIP. It was written by my distinguished colleagues there, Lindsay Judge and Louise Murphy, and I am going to draw on our Resolution Foundation research heavily throughout my remarks.
The estimates of the costs of PIP are of course very significant, perhaps running at £35 billion a year or more. This was absolutely not what PIP was supposed to do; I was serving as a Minister attending Cabinet when PIP was brought in, and I can still remember that it was supposed to be a cost-cutting measure, in contrast to DLA, but claims and costs are surging. There were 36,000 claims a month in 2019 and it is running at 76,000 claims a month this year, so it is right to reform it. However, reform has to be careful and evidence-based. At the Resolution Foundation, we did a survey of 2,500 claimants of PIP to try to understand better exactly what was going on.
PIP, of course, is an unusual benefit. In many ways, it is like child benefit: it does not depend on whether you are working, although it is possible that the way in which PIP functions could be a deterrence or barrier to work. It is not means-tested. The aim is that it covers the costs of some key condition. It is rather like child benefit, which is aimed at covering simply the costs of having children. The difference is that knowing whether you have children is rather easier to ascertain than establishing exactly what your disability is, what the condition is and what the costs are. You could have a condition-based system or a cost-based system.
Perhaps one of the most striking findings in our report at the Resolution Foundation is that 16% of people claiming PIP do not report any costs associated with their condition. However, of those people we surveyed who are receiving it—and the survey was done carefully, so it was a representative sample—47% said that PIP payments helped or enabled them to do economically valuable activities and 82% said that it boosted their well-being. In other words, we should be careful as we try to find ways of saving costs and ensuring it goes only to the people who most need it. It also has some beneficial effects which must not be sacrificed.
There is a lot of talk about particular conditions. Another significant finding from our research was that 56% of claimants of PIP have two or more conditions and there is often a mix of physical and mental conditions. In fact, 30% of recipients seemed to have a combination, 28% seemed to have just a physical condition, and 18% had just what was broadly regarded as a mental condition.
We need to reform it but we need to reform it with care. At Resolution Foundation, the broad outlines of what we propose are, first, a functional assessment. The assessment of what you are capable of doing is currently a very domestic set of tests, and we say that it should be more outward-looking and more focused on what you can do in society and in the economy. We should also look carefully at a breakdown of PIP. There is a case for a capital element: certain costs which are not regular monthly costs but that could be paid for and that, in turn, make a condition more manageable.
I disagree with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. We think there is some value in accessing services which help functioning and promote participation, including increasing the chances of getting into work. We think it could be useful if PIP were used as a contribution to the cost of receiving these services, and would help tackle the so-called notorious improvement trap. People are worried that, if they report that they are getting better or are helped to get better, this will cause them to lose the benefit entirely.
There needs to be more routine engagement with people on PIP and they should not be left totally disengaged from the system for years on end. We believe that there are some lower level conditions which, given the fiscal environment, should not of themselves lead to an entitlement to PIP. Put all this together, and the package we propose is one that we believe could save £4 billion to £5 billion in PIP.
I turn to specific questions on which I hope the Minister can give us some advice and guidance. The first issue is young people aged 16 to 24. This is a group whose claims for PIP are particularly scrutinised, and there are some who say that they just should not receive PIP—indeed, there are reports in the media that Alan Milburn may say they should not receive PIP at all. It is clear from our research at Resolution Foundation that one-quarter of young people receiving PIP say that they have no costs associated with a disability or no condition. There is absolutely a case for tightening up the regime. However, the other three-quarters say that they have some costs associated with their condition and that PIP enables them—this is relevant to Alan Milburn’s remit—to work, participate in education or volunteer. If there is to be a significant reduction in PIP entitlement for younger people, or it is to be removed entirely in favour of a new means of helping them work or participate in education, what assurances do we have that Alan Milburn’s report will ensure that simply removing PIP from all those young people who are using it—in exactly the way that he would like to get attention and support for to reduce NEETs—does not have the opposite effect from what was intended? For some young people, the risk of being NEET would go up rather than down. Young people matter.
The second point I turn to, and I hope that the Minister will forgive me for this, is education, particularly for young people aged over 16 or 18. This is something to which I attach a lot of value, and the links between education and disability benefits and work are very strong. If you have no qualifications and you are disabled, your chances of being in work are 40% lower than if you have no qualifications and are not disabled. Among people with no qualifications, sadly, the employment penalty for being disabled is severe. For those with a degree and who are disabled, the chance of working is 14% lower than for people who have a degree and are not disabled.
In other words, one of the many values of higher education—I was one of the people who unleashed and fought long battles to get out the evidence on specific pay returns—and some of the wider benefits to higher education are captured here. For people who participate in higher education and are disabled, it gives them a massive chance and opportunity of getting into work. I hope the Minister will assure us that those types of considerations will be very relevant as we look to reform PIP, including for people who have a mental disability. People with a mental illness or mental problem are significantly more likely to be working, despite their condition, if they are graduates than if they are not.
Finally, I put forward two other points to the Minister. Pensioners cannot apply for PIP but they can carry on receiving it. In effect, PIP becomes a lifetime award if you are a pensioner. There is an argument that attendance allowance is better suited to the needs of these people and it has a lower cost than PIP. There are already 700,000 pensioners on PIP. Will the Government consider this as an area for saving and looking at ways in which attendance allowance could be used, because this absolute lifetime caseload of pensioners claiming PIP will grow?
This is my final point to the Minister. The one point on which I disagree with my noble friend Lady Jenkin is that there is a lot of belief in face-to-face assessments. The evidence from our review is that your likelihood of making a successful claim from a face-to-face assessment is 39%, from a video assessment it is 40% and from a phone assessment it is 41%. The big gap is with paper claims, where the chances are 78%. We do not need to focus on particularly expensive face-to-face claims; there are other means as well. I look forward to the Minister’s response to our debate.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Willetts, who has shaped progressive thinking on welfare for many years and has asked a number of penetrating questions. I also congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin on her choice of subject for this debate and on her thoughtful and balanced introduction. Some 47 years ago, I was a Minister at what was then the Department of Health and Social Security, and my boss was Patrick Jenkin, my noble friend’s father-in-law. Social security expenditure in that year was £19 billion; it is now £333 billion.
Although this is a Conservative-led debate, I want to look at the issue through the eyes of two Labour politicians, Stephen Timms and Alan Milburn. The Timms review asked whether PIP is fair, accessible and fit for the disabled. Those are the terms of reference, and we have the interim report and emerging recommendations. The Milburn review is broader, looking across welfare, health and skills, but it is more concerned with the interaction of welfare, including PIP, with incentives to work and the sustainability of welfare expenditure. Again, we have his interim report. The two reports have different remits and different priorities, which, in turn, represent the tensions within the Government on the way forward on welfare reform.
First, The press often quote the very words Stephen Timms used about PIP: “not fit for purpose”. Against the background of the current debate about welfare expenditure, some people think that meant it should be cut back. But that is not at all what he meant. I could find one mention in the interim review about finance, but the whole thrust is about making the journey more user-friendly. The emerging recommendations take forward the terms of reference: improving the experience for people applying for and receiving PIP, increasing the availability of accessible digital services across the PIP journey to streamline the process and improve accessibility, and ensuring that people who need help to navigate the process can access advocacy services—all highly commendable objectives.
After reading the report, I, along with other Peers, got an invitation to a virtual briefing session with Stephen Timms and his co-chairs, Sharon Brennan and Dr Farquharson. I joined that session and it reinforced the message of the Timms review that the process could be dehumanising, soul-destroying and degrading. There were some very moving stories.
The tone of the Milburn review is different. He approached the subject not so much from the point of view of the claimant but from that of society as a whole and the taxpayer in particular. He is concerned about the cost. He says:
“Benefit spend on young people for PIP alone is expected to rise to £6.5 billion by 2031/32. If spend on DWP employment support remains at the levels currently being funded through the Youth Guarantee, we estimate that by 2030/31, for every £1 that DWP spend on employment support for young people, around £10 will be spent on welfare support for young people. This is not a spread of investment that prioritises participation. It is an investment choice that prioritises income transfers”.
When he looked at PIP, he said:
“PIP is the welfare system’s first point of contact with disabled young people from the age of 16 and for many it is the only point of contact before an out-of-work claim … Analysis we have undertaken however, does not suggest that it is achieving good participation outcomes. Administrative data shows that PIP claims are getting longer in duration, with 87% of 16- to 24-year-olds in the 2019 cohort still on the benefit five years later, compared to 74% of the 2013 cohort … The employment prospects of a young person claiming PIP get 21% worse over six years, whereas for everyone else they get 31% better”.
He goes on to say:
“The data makes it clear that PIP does nothing to support this key point of transition from education to work. At no point in a young person’s application or journey on PIP are they asked about, or supported to, work. This is not an accident of delivery. It is how PIP is designed”.
That is very different from the Timms approach, which leaves the basic design alone.
The implication from Milburn is not that we should spend more on PIP, but that we should spend less. He concludes:
“It is a symbol of a wider failure on the part of the benefits system to provide practical help for sick and disabled youngsters into work. The consequence is that a disabled person who seeks support is offered a benefit assessment, not a conversation about their goals, their struggles, the support around them and the help they need”.
He goes on to say:
“It measures what someone cannot do and writes a cheque. It does not ask what they could do and build a plan. The benefits system is founded on a deficit model of disability, one that pays for what a young person cannot do rather than investing in what they could become”.
Then he says:
“For a young person with a health condition who is unemployed and potentially seeking work, taking a pathway to inactivity can offer higher income, less hassle and lower risk. This is a perverse incentive. It is the polar opposite of what a participation-first welfare system should be providing and means more and more people are being trapped on benefits”.
Based on that Milburn claim about higher income, I worked out what a young person aged under 25 could potentially claim, using figures on the government website. Universal credit standard allowance would be £338.58 a month; universal credit LCWRA—limited capacity for work—would be £429.80 a month; and PIP highest daily living and highest mobility allowance would be £843.27 a month. Combined, this would be £1,611.65 per month. It would be more were they getting housing benefit.
I then worked out how much a young person could earn doing the national average of 36.7 hours a week of work, on the minimum living wage of £12.71. The answer was £2,021, from which you have to deduct the costs of getting to work, which are on average £55 a week, so you are left with £1,800 against £1,600. However, the £1,600 is guaranteed and involves no effort; the £1,800 is not.
Then it is claimed that not everyone gets the maximum available. That is indeed the case. Here I come to my final point: the ability to game the system, something touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Davies. I want to make one thing clear: I am entirely in favour of people getting proper advice about applying for PIP, as the noble Lord said. The application form is 20 pages long and it can be a daunting task to complete it. The Timms review makes the point that claimants are entitled to professional advice, and many organisations, such as the CAB, provide exactly that, which is absolutely right.
However, if you put into Google, “help with PIP”, the titles of some of the sites are clearly aimed at helping people to game the system. For example, “PIP assessors hope you don’t know this”, “Beat your PIP phone assessment”, “PIP telephone assessment masterclass”, “7 PIP mistakes—don’t get caught out”, “Secrets to scoring maximum PIP points”, “Unlock the secret steps for winning your PIP claims”, and so they go on. Some of them actually advise you to tell a lie. One site says: “Why do PIP assessors ask you if you have a dog or a pet? Even if you have a pet, just say, ‘No, I don’t’. They can’t prove you have or haven’t got one”. Another site gives the same advice and advises you to go into another room where your pet cannot be seen or heard. Another asserts—wrongly—that the assessor gets paid £85 for every refusal.
These sites—all on videos—have been seen by tens of thousands of people. Worse, they have been monetised by the advertisements that punctuate them—so people are making money by telling lies and assisting fraud. This underlines the point my noble friend made about a more robust assessment process. So, my final question for the Minister is: what is her department going to do about all these sites?
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will start with some statistics, some raw numbers that are sobering, alarming, and, in their way, shaming. Some 30,000 people every day are signing on for long-term invalidity and incapacity benefits. The largest rise, incredibly in every sense, is among people aged between 25 and 34, the cohort just above that identified by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts. Some 60,000 people every year go straight from university on to long-term sickness benefits.
Some 25% of people—25% of adults—identify as disabled, which suggests to me that the definition that at least some of them are using is very far from the definition traditionally understood. Then, of course, there is the cost. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, that 3.4 million people are claiming this benefit. That is, on the Government’s own figures, supposed to rise to 4.1 million by the end of this Parliament.
Why is this happening? Part of the answer was the lockdown, which introduced a lot of working people who up until then had never really claimed anything from the Government to a different way of living. We saw a large move away from employment and into other kinds of grants and benefits all over the world. But, for some reason, whereas in most western countries, and almost every other European country, that spike was reversed when the lockdown ended from the end of 2021, in this country, a lot of it has remained institutionalised. The huge improvements that were made between 2010 and 2020 in reducing the number of people who were out of work permanently were reversed almost overnight.
Why did that happen? As Warren Buffett’s right-hand man, Charlie Munger, used to say,
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”.
We just heard the incentives very ably adumbrated by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. If you can work and earn slightly more, but almost the same as you would be getting without doing anything—and the noble Lord, Lord Young, was too generous or polite to point out that, of course, within those benefits you could also be doing some side hustling which would push you over the limit—some people are going to follow the rational incentive, and we can hardly blame them. The real tragedy here is not so much for the taxpayer as for the people who get trapped in a life of low income and low expectations.
None of what I have said should be remotely controversial. Indeed, I think there is a cross-party consensus that the system needs to be tightened up. There was an attempt in another place to tighten up the system, and the reason that attempt failed and ended up extending some of the claims that were opened bears scrutiny. I remember talking to a Labour MP, a friend of mine, who showed me on her phone what the WhatsApp groups of some Labour MPs were saying. In particular, they were circulating a survey by a disability charity that tabulated by constituency the number of PIP claimants and showed in how many constituencies the number of claimants was bigger than the MP’s majority. Those of your Lordships who have served in another place will know that tends to concentrate the minds of parliamentarians. But we are doing people no favours if we shy away from reform. We are not just encouraging an atmosphere where mental health conditions become normalised; we almost serve as a vector for more of them.
I have noticed that this rise in mental health conditions has led to an extraordinary change in language among people. When did you last hear somebody under the age of 30 saying “I am unhappy” rather than “I am depressed”, which is almost always their go-to adjective? When did you last hear them saying, “This makes me nervous” rather than “This is giving me anxiety”? “This is giving me PTSD” is one I hear from a lot of my children’s friends. I say, “No, that’s really not PTSD. Someone said something mean to you; it is not quite the same thing”. But as we normalise the medicalisation of language, it is no surprise that people genuinely think they are succumbing to these conditions. I read that so many anti-depressants are being flushed into our sewage system that it is beginning to affect the fish in the channel. It must be true, because I read it in the Daily Mail.
Are we doing anybody any favours, other than those MPs worried about their majorities, when we shy away from tackling these conditions? I agree very much with what the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, said at the beginning: what is the rationale for having these personal independence payments? The clue is in the name: they are to deal with the additional costs that come from a disability. If, by disability, we understand what was traditionally understood—somebody who has a physical impairment—then there might be costs: they might need to adjust access to their house, there would be transport difficulties and there might be care costs. How does somebody who has anxiety or depression have a more expensive lifestyle than somebody who is unemployed but does not have those conditions? I do not mean for a moment to belittle those very unpleasant conditions, but it does not follow, unpleasant as they are, that they lead to a more expensive lifestyle. It is quite extraordinary that, as the definition of disability has expanded, we have not adjusted its financial consequences.
Perhaps the key point is this: for those who really suffer from anxiety, depression or related mental health conditions, are we helping them when we encourage them to stay home taking pills? When we give benefits payments that discourage people from working, we cut them off from the things that are usually the surest route—not in every single case—towards recovery. We all need to be needed. We all need to have others relying on us. Taking people out of employment takes that very real psychological prop away and often worsens the condition that we are purporting to care about.
I hope that we will have the courage and the vision properly to tackle this growing problem: a problem for the economy of the nation, yes, but, much more gravely, for that growing number of millions of our fellow citizens who are trapped in these lifestyles. Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome. The incentive for us should be to do the right thing by those of our fellow citizens who have been put in this situation, and to do the right thing by our own duty as parliamentarians.
Lord Godson (Con)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington on securing this debate. I too welcome my noble friend Lord Willetts and congratulate the Minister on her new responsibilities on the Front Bench. It is important that we are debating this matter in advance of the publication of two significant forthcoming reviews: the Milburn review and the Timms review.
I declare an interest as director of Policy Exchange, which has undertaken extensive work on disability benefits over the past couple of years. I draw noble Lords’ attention to two reports by my colleague Jean-André Prager, who will be known to some and who played a significant part in policy-making on these matters under a number of previous Governments over the past decade. For Whose Benefit? and Lapse of Judgment? have examined both the purpose of PIP and the constitutional questions surrounding its administration. It is through those lenses that I will focus my comment today.
As Prager correctly puts it, there is sometimes a reductive quality to our desire to protect disabled people. Protection, although always well intentioned, can become a form of infantilisation at times, overlooking the great economic and creative potential of disabled people. Our disability benefits system embeds this paternalism in its architecture. Too often, it defines disabled people by their functional limitations rather than what their potential or capabilities are. If we focus exclusively on what disabled people cannot do, PIP can never act as a means of empowerment for disabled people. Therefore, our approach should be recalibrated, first and foremost, to enable disabled people and, then, to protect them where necessary.
This brings me to a second but equally important point. If we are to reconsider what PIP is intended to achieve, we must also ask some difficult questions about who exactly should be entitled to it. As the DWP Secretary of State said to the Times recently, we began this decade with 2.4 million people claiming PIP; today, that figure stands at 4.1 million, with projections suggesting 5.4 million by the end of the decade. Expenditure is forecast to double to £41 billion over the decade, which is more than double what we spend on the British Army. These are staggering figures. They underline the need for a benefits system capable of adapting to the changing world around it. That adaptation needs to take place in that way, rather than allowing eligibility criteria to evolve without regular parliamentary scrutiny, as has happened too often to date. Therefore, eligibility criteria should not be treated as immutable; they must be reviewed regularly to reflect changing medical understanding, technological advances and the objectives that Parliament intends the welfare system to serve. In short, it must be properly accountable.
Policy Exchange has recommended that the Government review PIP criteria every two years to ensure they remain an appropriate proxy for the additional costs that disabled people face. I implore the Minister to take forward this recommendation and the Government to create a more responsive PIP system. We need fundamentally to reform PIP to ensure that it meets the needs of disabled people, retains public consent and remains sustainable for many years to come. Our PIP system should be an enabler, and it is my firm belief in the enormous contribution that disabled people make to our society that motivates my comments today.
Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for setting this debate in process. I trust the Government will listen to the interesting comments that are being made. I welcome the new Front Bench team and wish them well.
I begin with a practical question about whether the benefits system responds when people tell it that their circumstances have changed. I recently raised with another Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the case of someone receiving sickness benefits; he had reported that he had recovered but was still waiting for a reassessment four years later. I was not asking the noble Baroness then—and I am not now asking the Minister now—to discuss an individual’s personal circumstances; I am asking about the administration of the system.
Can the Minister say how common delays of this kind are? How many people who have reported an improvement in their condition are still awaiting reassessment? How long have they been waiting, and what has been done to put it right? If someone tells the department that their circumstances have changed, surely they should be able to expect a timely response. This is not a question about an individual; it is a question about how the department operates.
However, let me be equally clear about what I am not arguing. I am not calling for everyone to face more frequent assessments. We need fewer unnecessary reassessments, particularly for people with lifelong or degenerative conditions. Repeatedly asking someone to demonstrate needs that have not changed serves neither the claimant nor the taxpayer. We need to distinguish between reassessments that serve a purpose and those that simply repeat, again and again, what is already known. Reducing unnecessary reassessments and responding promptly to reported changes are not contradictory objectives; they are two elements of competent administration.
Turning specifically to PIP, we must distinguish between failures in the way the benefit operates and the value of the support it provides. PIP helps people meet the extra costs of disability. It is not an out-of-work benefit. People can receive it while working, and becoming able to work does not in itself mean that they no longer qualify. That distinction matters; otherwise, we risk discussing disability benefits as though everybody receiving them is in the same position, with the same needs and the same prospects. They are not.
For many people, PIP is a lifeline, not a luxury. Its purpose is to support independence and participation, helping disabled people exercise choices that others can take for granted. Payment in cash is an important strength of the system. By that I mean giving people control over how the money is spent. Disabled people should be able to decide how best to meet their own needs rather than having those decisions made arbitrarily for them. An extra journey, help with a daily task or a different way of managing life at home may seem a small matter to someone else; to the individual concerned, it may make the difference between dependence and independence. The freedom should be protected in any reform—I hope that the department will think about that.
We must also take care with the language of this debate. Rising claimant numbers deserve scrutiny. Ministers must explain expenditure, account for decisions and demonstrate that public money is being used properly. However, a debate dominated by numbers risks losing sight of the people behind them. We should not allow legitimate questions about administration and affordability—both of which I have made—to become a general suspicion of people who need support. Nor should we make someone feel that applying for help is an admission of failure. A fair system must command public confidence, but it must also command the confidence of those who depend upon it.
That brings me to the assessment process. In our 2024 manifesto, the Liberal Democrats called for greater transparency in PIP assessments and an end to unnecessary reassessments. Those remain important objectives, but transparency alone is not enough. We need decisions that are better informed, more accurate and easier to understand. Assessors need the training and time to understand how conditions interact. They must be able to recognise that the effects of disability and ill health can fluctuate.
An assessment should not reduce someone’s life to how they appear during a single appointment. Some may manage a task on one occasion but struggle to repeat it. They may present confidently while finding daily life extremely difficult. The question should be about what someone can manage in practice, not simply what an assessor sees, often in a brief encounter.
Supporting evidence must be properly considered, and decisions must explain clearly how that evidence has been weighed. When a decision is wrong, individuals should not have to become an expert in the benefits system to challenge it. Getting decisions right first time should be a central measure of success, not an aspiration left at the margins of reform.
We must also recognise the limits of what benefits reform alone can achieve. Changing an assessment process cannot substitute for timely NHS treatment. It cannot by itself make a workplace accessible or ensure that appropriate employment support is available. If the Government want more disabled people who can work to either remain in or enter employment, they must address those practical barriers, along with the benefits system. Disabled people must have a meaningful role throughout the reform process, not simply be invited to comment after the principal decisions have been made. Their experience should help shape the questions asked, the evidence considered and the way success is measured.
I ask the Minister for three assurances. The first is that unnecessary reassessments will be reduced while reported changes in circumstances are dealt with properly, and that the Government will provide information enabling us to judge progress. The second is that the assessor training and the use of supporting evidence will improve, with a clear focus on getting decisions right first time. The third is that disabled people will help design and evaluate reform, with their independence and dignity treated as essential tests of success. Lastly, after those three items, we must not forget the person who asked for a reassessment and was not given it. Is that a one-off?
We should not have to choose between compassion and competent administration. A properly functioning system must provide both. It should support people when they need help, respond when their circumstances change and explain its decisions clearly. That is how we build trust, not through repeated promises of reform but through a system that works fairly, accurately and with respect for the people it serves. Many points were made during this debate. That is not against PIP; it shows the value of PIP and how it needs to be administered.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin for tabling this important Motion, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Dacres, to the Front Bench. Yesterday the Chancellor delivered a Budget that left one of the greatest challenges facing this country untouched. He acknowledged that in an interview yesterday when he said:
“There will be a reduction in the benefits bill, we’ll do that in a Labour way”.
I can hardly express how inadequate this is as a statement of government willingness to tackle a real crisis.
Others have already rehearsed the terrifying arithmetic. The OBR has said unequivocally that the borrowing trajectory is unsustainable. But this is not just a financial crisis. It is a crisis for those who act rationally, using the safety net of sickness and disability benefits at points of real need, but for whom the net becomes a trap, confining them to worklessness as efficiently as a lobster-pot. It is a crisis for the young people who turn to benefits in a labour market where their job opportunities have been drastically curtailed by Labour’s poorly directed tax, national insurance and minimum wage measures, and by the Employment Rights Act.
It is a crisis for those with mild mental health conditions who could and should live and work normally with just a little extra help, but who are incentivised by the availability of these benefits to drop out of work or, worse, never start work. It is a crisis for those who see others exploiting disability benefits to achieve lifestyles that many working families cannot hope for. This is, understandably, breeding cynicism and disaffection, and moral corruption is contagious. It is also a crisis for those with real and serious disabilities who need a fair and stable welfare system and are unfairly tainted by the increasing suspicion and distrust around PIP and its claimants. All this is a disaster for the mutual trust and cohesion that are essential to sustain public willingness to pay for a generous welfare state.
Many people are now studying this, most recently Fraser Nelson in his excellent project at the Times. The Centre for Social Justice has been looking forensically at the problems for years. The Chancellor has done another media round today to respond to criticisms that his speech essentially ignored what must be a flashing red light on the Treasury dashboard. Now he has promised proposals before the end of the year, after the Milburn and Timms reviews are published.
What indications do we have of what the Labour way might be? First, we have the ill-fated Liz Kendall reforms. These were a serious, if modest, attempt to start tackling the growing problem, but the Government were unable to carry them through, forced to eviscerate their plans by their own Back-Benchers. This is not encouraging. Next, we have the Timms review. As my noble friend Lord Young pointed out, there is little in its interim report to give confidence. The Minister’s assertion when it was published was:
“My view is that the current level of spending is not a great concern”.
Yet the OBR has already had to revise its projections for PIP substantially upwards. The Green Paper from which the review arose rightly emphasised that good work is good for health and plays a vital role in recovery from illness. Not all disabled people can work but, for the majority who can, work gives more than just income. It gives purpose, social interaction and respect.
Much of the recent rapid growth in disability relates to ADHD, autism and other mental health conditions such as anxiety. In most cases, these conditions should not be a barrier to work. Yet the interim report quotes, without apparent concern, a recent finding that of non-working disability benefit recipients, only one in 20 believed they could work now—even with the right job or support. Only just over a quarter thought they might be able to work in future if their condition improved. That leaves more than two-thirds believing they will never be able to work, some of them very young or in the prime of life.
This finding, along with the facts that only 20% of PIP claimants are working and that the longer they claim, the less likely they are to work, casts serious doubt on the suitability of PIP for many of those currently claiming it, as my noble friend Lord Young also pointed out. Granting PIP to anxious teenagers may be downright cruel. It does not help young people into work. It does not convince them that they are capable of maturing into resilient adults. Instead, it confirms their own pessimistic self-assessments and very likely locks them into dependency for life. It is so easy for the state to be kind on a short-term view and so much harder to be honest about what will really help young people in the long term.
The Timms review should have asked about disability definitions. The UK uses a harmonised definition of disability based on individual self-perception rather than clinical diagnosis. The ONS has published a study showing that roughly three times as many people are categorised as disabled under our definition as under the UN-recommended Washington Group methodology. This may help to explain why reported disability has risen in Britain in recent years at rates not seen elsewhere.
Yet Britain is not unique. Other countries experienced similar levels of Covid. Others have similar levels of poverty. We have universal free health care. We do not carry any particular genetic disadvantage. So why do we have high and increasing disability? How much of it comes from perceiving as disability what has previously been considered normal variability in the human condition? How much comes from poor welfare system incentives? At the margin, does a disability label help or hinder? As my noble friend Lord Godson said, are we infantilising or empowering people here? This needs honest analysis and discussion. In the light of all this, it is indeed disappointing that the interim Timms recommendations were mostly about improving the claimant experience rather than addressing more fundamental concerns.
The Milburn review is more encouraging. Much of the Milburn diagnosis is accurate and expressed admirably clearly and frankly. He has said that welfare spending must come down to make way for better support to get young people into work. But this might translate, in the face of fractious Back Benches, into a minimalist approach—just enough welfare reduction to fund a support package but nothing that will make a real impact on our parlous national financial position.
A common theme from Government Ministers and reviewers is the importance of supporting people into work, which is true. But not acknowledged is the fundamental problem that too many people, if they can succeed with a PIP claim and the passported benefits that brings, including unlocking the benefit cap, are often better off financially on benefits. No amount of support and encouragement will stop most rational people on an unconditional package of benefits from doing that arithmetic. Even though PIP is not means-tested, people see working as a risk to maintaining their claim to the benefit.
The disappointing findings published this week from the Government’s Connect to Work programme, which is meant to help health and disability claimants back to work, show that support does not compensate for unbalanced incentives. Despite a budget of more than £1 billion for the programme, take-up has been very low, including from young people. NEET numbers were declining pre-Covid but have risen steeply since and stand at close to 1 million, yet only 6,000 young people in that age bracket have signed up for Connect to Work. That is less than 1% of NEETs. In the first 15 months of the whole scheme, fewer than 1,000 people have worked for more than 18 hours a week for at least 26 weeks. Sadly, the likelihood is that spending on support will make little difference unless the incentive to claim disability benefits is reduced.
As I touched on earlier, there also need to be jobs. A Government who destroy jobs will quickly build up a sticky welfare pipeline. That pipeline is starting much earlier than many people realise. I talk to head teachers who are profoundly uncomfortable about the pressure they experience from parents to have perfectly normal children labelled as SEND to help the parents claim child disability living allowance. Claims for child DLA have shot up in the last two years. Why? It is a generous cash allowance that also unlocks other benefits and disapplies the household benefit cap. I know of one case where a parent is refusing to potty-train their seven year-old because that would remove the justification for their DLA claim. That child is being betrayed by the parent. Most DLA children move on to PIP at age 16, even though many should have outgrown childhood problems by then. We should be ashamed of this.
I welcome the announcement of 2,000 additional DWP investigators to follow up on suspicious welfare claims. It may have been unwise for the Timms interim report to dismiss the distrust associated with PIP as a false and damaging narrative derived from stigma and misinformation. Since I took up this role, so many people have told me of someone they know personally who is claiming PIP but either is not meaningfully disabled or whose disability does not bring extra costs. My noble friend Lord Willetts has shown solid evidence that these cases are far from exceptional. But while extra investigators are a good thing—fraudsters are deterred by a high likelihood of detection and sanction—it does not begin to address the problems of a disability benefit system that is now, quite simply, incentivising worklessness and trapping the youngest adults, and now also children, in an indefensible way.
I am going to add a few more questions to those put by my noble friend Lady Jenkin and my other noble friends. What exactly does the Chancellor mean by reducing the welfare bill “in a Labour way”? What assessment are the Government making of the impact of our unusually broad definition of disability? What steps are the Government taking to identify and eliminate disability-linked welfare traps, as happens in Sweden with the FASIT model? What work are the Government doing to establish whether claiming child DLA improves or worsens the long-term outcomes for a child? I very much look forward to hearing the noble Baroness’s answers.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Dacres of Lewisham) (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have participated in this debate. If I cannot respond to all points and questions that have been raised, I will review Hansard and write to noble Lords, and place something in the Library.
We have had a wonderful debate this afternoon. We have covered a huge variety of issues and touched on the lives of millions of people with disabilities and long-term health conditions across the country. Today’s debate has been an invaluable opportunity to address some of the topics that go beyond party-political debates and go to the heart of what really matters. It is about what we expect from our welfare state: how to recognise the lived experiences of those with disabilities and how to support and empower disabled people to live an independent, fulfilling life with opportunities and choices to participate fully in society. With that said, I would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, for bringing this debate to the House today. We truly appreciate it, as the noble Baroness could hear from all the contributions we have had today.
As has been commented by many Lords, there are millions of people who rely on the personal independence payment, or PIP, to help them meet the costs associated with daily living, mobility, communication, transport, equipment, support services, and countless other aspects of just living an everyday life. Entitlement to PIP is assessed on the basis of the needs arising from the health condition or disability, rather than the health condition or disability itself. The central purpose was, and remains, to help with the extra costs associated with disability and long-term health conditions. I want to acknowledge the noble Lord who, as a Minister, was at the genesis of PIP when it first came into being.
Similarly, the work capability assessment, or WCA, determines the eligibility for employment support allowances and additional health-related amounts of universal credit, and also assesses the individual’s capability for work. That is a key principle for both assessments: to consider the impact of that person’s disability or health condition, be it temporary or be it fluctuating, on their day-to-day life. While the purpose of these assessments has remained the same, the world around us has continually changed. The labour market has changed. Technology has changed. Healthcare has changed. Society’s understanding of disability has evolved.
Before discussing where reforms might be needed, it is important to be clear about the principle and values that underpin the Government’s approach. A successful state should prevent people falling into long-term economic inactivity; we should be helping more people into work, restoring trust through a fair and effective assessment system, and protect those who cannot work by supporting them to live independently with dignity. It also needs to ensure that the system is financially sustainable and to keep providing for those who need it most. The Budget on 28 October set out our latest forecast on government spending.
Before I go further, I will talk a little bit about the clearance times. We are committed to ensuring that people can access financial support through PIP in a timely manner. That has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords this afternoon. Reducing the time taken for the PIP claimant’s journey is a priority for the department and we are working constantly to make improvements to our services.
I would further like to assure noble Lords that we are always aiming to make an award decision as quickly as possible. The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, and my noble friend Lord Davies mentioned this. We need to take into account the need to review all available evidence, including that from claimants, and I shall come back to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, regarding face-to-face assessments.
We have seen a decrease in PIP clearance time since August 2021, with the latest statistics showing that the average end-to-end journey has reduced from 26 weeks in August 2021 to 18 weeks by the end of July 2026. This is because we are using a blend of phone, video and face-to-face assessments to support claimants and to deliver a more efficient and user-centred service; increasing case manager and assessment provider health professional resources; making sure that we are improving training for those who are doing these assessments; and prioritising new claims while safeguarding claimants awaiting awards reviews.
Noble Lords will be aware of the Timms review, which the noble Lords, Lord Palmer, Lord Young and Lord Davies, have mentioned this afternoon. It is the very first full review of PIP, which some might say is long overdue, and it seeks to ensure that we have a system that supports disabled people to achieve better health and higher living standards, with greater independence, including through employment. On 9 September, the review shared a set of emerging recommendations. These are not the final recommendations—as we know, those will be published by the end of the year—but they were a starting point for the steering group to be able to test, challenge and improve, with feedback going back to the Timms review. That symbolises part of what might be considered the Labour ethos: nothing about us without us.
The Timms review is being co-produced with disabled people, the organisations that represent them and other experts. This means that the Government are sharing ownership and responsibility for how the review runs and what it recommends. The Timms review is not working towards a fixed set of outcomes; it is listening to the lived experience and expertise of disabled people, because that is critical to the review’s success. Today, we cannot pre-empt what the recommendations will be, but we shall patiently wait.
I acknowledge what the noble Lord, Lord Young, mentioned in his contribution: there needs to be a balance between the Timms review and the Milburn review. The Milburn review, as he said, has taken a broader look at welfare, health, education, skills and employment, and is focusing on the challenges facing young people who are not in education, employment or training. We look forward to the final report and its policy recommendations, which will help young people to access education, training and employment. As I said, these are not the final recommendations.
I move on to PIP expenditure and the caseloads, which have grown substantially over recent years. As has been mentioned, as of 2026, around 4 million people receive PIP. A responsible Government cannot ignore the long-term sustainability of the system. The system must remain capable of supporting future generations, as well as today’s claimants. Alongside this, we have been clear that we need to build a welfare system that supports participation and opportunity, and that is part of what the Milburn review is looking at.
Looking ahead, the Timms review and the Milburn review will play a central role in shaping the future direction of policy. The noble Lord, Lord Young, mentioned that there could be tensions in that, but we shall wait and see how that flows when we get the full reports. The onus will be on us, as Members of this House and the other place, to look at the reviews and to work together for the best benefit of those who we seek to help through PIP and by getting people into work and employment, regardless of age, with or without disabilities. I assure the House that the Government will consider the recommendations and the reviews very carefully.
I will now attempt to address other points raised during the debate, starting with the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, about yesterday’s Budget. The Chancellor and the Prime Minister have both said clearly that we have to bring the benefits Bill down and fix the broken welfare system we inherited. But you do not do that by crude cuts, especially when people are feeling cost of living pressures. As I have already mentioned, we have two ongoing reviews, which are due imminently. The Chancellor has set out that the Government will respond by the end of the year. But we are not complacent. We are already taking action and delivering on welfare reform in different ways.
We have been rebalancing universal credit to reduce the incentive to be labelled too sick to work and increasing face-to-face assessments for health benefits, which declined under the previous Government. We are reforming mobility and tax breaks, which is expected to save over £1 billion over the next five years, and we are acting to get young people into work, with record funding for apprenticeships, grants for businesses taking on unemployed young people and our youth guarantee programme.
I said that I would come back to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and the face-to-face assessments, which are sometimes the best way for some people to get their assessments. It allows for a more human approach, where people can sit down and better explain their circumstances or illustrate the condition that affects them in practice. It helps to ensure that decisions are fair, accurate and based on the whole picture. But that is just one part of the routes we can take to do such assessments. It is an important part and one that we have taken seriously. We plan to increase our face-to-face delivery by 30% and are already making steps to increase and improve face-to-face assessment. By July 2026, face-to-face accounted for 14.6% of PIP consultations and 23% of WCA consultations—so we are moving in the right direction and will continue to do so.
Another point raised was the PIP criteria for individuals’ abilities and fluctuating conditions. That was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, my noble friend Lord Davies and the noble Lord, Lord Palmer. The criteria to consider an individual’s ability is over a 12-month period, ensuring that fluctuations are taken into account. It is essential for assessments to accurately reflect the impact of the variations in individual levels of impairment. This is important for all health conditions and impairments, not just typically fluctuating conditions.
The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, mentioned workplace capability assessments. Claimants who report a deterioration in their health condition, or a new condition, continue to be referred for reassessment but are waiting longer than we would like. We are prioritising initial assessments over reassessments, but we are also prioritising those who are seeking employment within a few weeks’ time, so that they can get their assessments and we make sure they are having the right assessment for when they go into work. That is another thing that we are doing.
We know that this is a very important issue for claimants and stakeholder groups, which is why we are urgently considering options for expediting reassessments of these cases as part of our wider intentions, set out in the Pathways to Work Green Paper, to resume assessments at scale when capacity in the system allows.
On awards durations, which was raised by my noble friend Lord Davies and the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, it may be helpful if I explain that, once somebody has been awarded a PIP, which can be paid at one of eight rates, either the award can be reviewed or the claimant will be required to submit a new claim. Award rates and their durations are set out on an individual basis, based on the claimant’s needs and the likelihood of those needs changing.
The Government are also prioritising welfare reform. Putting work and opportunity at the centre of our system should support people to get into work and to get on in work while ensuring that those who cannot work get the support that they need. We have already discussed at length the Milburn and Timms reviews, but in the meantime we will continue reshaping the system into one that puts work at the centre, while we will always support those who may not be able to work.
My noble friend Lord Davies and the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, made points about accuracy. It is our aim to make the right decision as early as possible in the claimant’s journey. To support this, we have made improvements to our decision-making process to ensure that people get the support that they are entitled to without needing to appeal. This includes giving decision-makers additional time to contact claimants proactively if they think additional evidence is required and may support the claim. It is a fundamental principle of our legal and political system that citizens should be able to challenge decisions made by the Government through the legal system. Mandatory reconsideration is a key element of the department’s decision-making process. It offers claimants the opportunity to challenge decisions and provide additional information that may be relevant to their claim.
Since the summer of 2026, when claimants tell us that they no longer consider themselves to have restricted ability to work, their case is reviewed to determine whether their limited capability for work or limited capability for work and work-related activity status should continue. The review considers whether there is sufficient evidence that the claimant’s circumstances have changed. In clear cases, the decision-maker can remove the LCW or LCWRA status without further assessment. Where there is doubt, including where health conditions are complex or fluctuating, the claimant may be referred for reassessment. In some cases, following the review, entitlement remains unchanged—for example, where the claimant has reported a change in error or the available evidence does not support removal.
The Government are committed to giving disabled people and people with health conditions confidence that working will not trigger reassessment and a potential loss of benefit. I hope that reassures the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, about the principle of right to try. There are already rules in place that are intended to encourage working-age people who are in receipt of health and disability benefit—be it PIP, universal credit or the new style employment and support allowance—to try work. The DWP suggests that there is a lack of awareness of these rules, and we will be working to ensure that this is widely promoted and that those who wish to have the right to try take advantage of this opportunity as well as the welfare reforms putting opportunities at the centre of everything that we do.
I have not had the opportunity to mention the claims management system. The noble Lord, Lord Young, and my noble friend Lord Davies talked about the codes that we have online, claimants who are getting poor information and people taking advantage. We will be introducing a new code of practice in the coming weeks that clamps down on activity by claims management, as well as the work that we are doing in guiding people to the government website so that claimants get the right information first-hand.
I thank noble Lords for their contributions this afternoon. I assure noble Lords across the House that we will engage constructively with the process of building a fair and trusted sustainable welfare state that is centred on the needs of disabled people.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
I thank the Minister for her response and wish her luck in the many debates which lie ahead for her. I was glad to hear that she will be writing to us to address some of the many points she was unable to address in her remarks.
As I hope she takes from the powerful speeches by my noble friends Lord Godson, Lady Spielman, Lord Willetts and Lord Young of Cookham, who speak from considerable and relevant government experience, this is a topic about which there is tremendous concern on these Benches, especially given the delays in the publication of the Milburn review. I therefore hope that we will have time soon in this Chamber to debate both reviews and the concrete proposals to address the welfare budget that should follow swiftly.
Finally, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken today. I appreciate their commitment to this important topic and their willingness to be here for what I described earlier as the graveyard shift.
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