Complications from Abortions (Annual Report) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 13th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Frost, I stress how important the Green Party and many other people regard protecting those receiving healthcare from harassment and abuse. That is something that the law has increasingly stepped up to do, and it is terribly important.

I oppose this Bill. I begin by commending the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who gave us an important sense of context here. This is about a very long-term, global, but US-based, exceptionally well-funded campaign against human rights. Back in 2014, I wrote a chapter in a book entitled Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, which told the story of what happened in the 10 years leading up to where we are today.

I will focus a little on context. It is important to note that, last year, YouGov looked at attitudes towards abortion and found that 87% of Britons said that abortion should be allowed, while only 6% said that it should not. It is interesting to note that one in 10 Britons think that the law makes it too difficult to get an abortion in the UK. When you look at those for whom this is most relevant—women under the age of 40—you find that that figure rises to 19%. Those are the people who are most likely to encounter the detail of the law and to have discovered, as many are surprised to, that abortion is covered by criminal law still in the UK. It is important to highlight that.

As we talk about abortion, one issue is the rise we have seen in the investigation and prosecution of what is suggested might be illegal abortions. In the 18 months to February, there was a risk of convicting as many women as have been convicted for that offence in the previous 55 years. Six women were prosecuted over suspected abortion cases, although three of those cases were subsequently dropped—the women having been through very considerable turmoil in the meantime. The president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has noted how outdated abortion law really is creating problems. That is the context.

We have already covered quite a bit of ground here. It is obvious that creating a law about one set of medical statistics is exceptionalising it, as BPAS says. In 2023, three years of work went into a report then that said that the statistics were inadequate and needed to be improved. The work is being done; we do not need to pass a special law on one set of statistics. We are making progress on this, and more progress is certainly needed.

Climate Agenda

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for securing this debate, even if perhaps it has turned out somewhat differently from what he expected. It has been a rich and encouraging debate, but I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, has been watching the same debate as the rest of us. We have seen not a crumbling but rather a strengthening of the wall of understanding and common sense, particularly among the majority opposition party on this side of the House.

I join others in welcoming the noble Baroness, Lady May of Maidenhead, to your Lordships’ House, and to publicly offer thanks for her notably restrained resignation list, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, noted, offering the Green Party the seat that came to bring me into your Lordships’ House. I hope that she might encourage further moves in that direction from her new position in your Lordships’ House.

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, in introducing this, said that he wanted an honest and informed debate. I start by picking up a couple of the terms that he used, including “cheap energy”. Fossil fuel energy, as a number of noble Lords have outlined and as the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, identified, has very considerable externalised costs. In fact, burning fossil fuels is costing us the earth. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, highlighted, looking at the risk of the ending of AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, often referred to as part of the Gulf Stream—giving Britain the climate of Scandinavia would be a considerable cost and could not be called a result of cheap energy.

I pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, on the drop in territorial emissions in the UK. As the Climate Change Committee has highlighted, we should be counting our consumption emissions. When we look at those figures, those emissions are only 19% lower in 2021 than in 2001. They are the goods and services that we are using, and we are responsible for the emissions associated with them.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, I think that the criteria that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, has used to judge climate change action are interesting: jobs, growth and prosperity. I shall focus briefly on each of those. On growth, I am going to differ from most of the speakers thus far. We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet. We are, whether we like it or not, in a post-growth world, and it is not just me saying that—I point to the fact that the IMF has just been saying in the past week that we cannot have expectations of growth in future like the ones that we have had in the past. The pie of our economy cannot get bigger. What we have to do is to stop forcing some people to rely on crumbs and slice that pie up fairly. Who is benefiting from growth in an economy where, in the UK now, we have 4.3 million children growing up in poverty?

The second point is jobs. Everyone is saying that we need to create jobs. I remind the House that in one debate this week we were looking at the new funded childcare places. We need 36,000 more workers to provide those childcare places. We are short of 50,000 nurses and 100,000 care workers—and look at the immigration shortage list, which has chemical and biological scientists, bricklayers, stonemasons, tilers and retrofitters. These are the activities of the economy that we desperately need. What we need to do is to stop having jobs that trash our climate and environment and ensure that, in a just transition, those skills, and the energy, time and talents of those workers, go towards doing what we actually need to be done. That is a just transition.

Finally, I focus on prosperity. One dictionary definition gives it as

“the condition of being successful or thriving”.

We are a society in poor and declining health, and what the noble Lord identified as “cheap energy” is a significant contributor to that ill health. There is air pollution, for example. We can look at recent mapping from the EXPANSE project at the University of Utrecht. There are only a few areas in the north of Scotland that have pollution levels at or below World Health Organization-recommended levels. Those levels of air pollution are contributing to heart and lung disease, COPD, lung cancer, dementia, lower birthrate babies and asthma. We are not a prosperous society, we are an ill society, and the burning of fossil fuels is a significant contributor to that. Climate action is also action to improve health in our society.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, questioned the insulating of homes. Having a warm, comfortable and affordable-to-heat home—a healthy home—is surely a foundation of life that our economy should provide to every single person. Let us not forget that the cleanest, greenest and cheapest energy that you can possibly have is the energy that you do not need to use.

I briefly mention childhood obesity, poor diet and our broken food system, based on fossil fuels. Our five year-olds now are shorter than they were a few years ago. The economy is not working for our people and it is not working in its own terms, so we cannot afford not to have a climate agenda—one that needs to be far bolder and more effective than what we have now. We should be looking for zero carbon by the early 2030s, because of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the planetary boundaries that we are exceeding—but also for health and well-being and the prosperity of our nation. We need to ensure that we have well-paid and secure jobs in every role that actually needs doing. We need a climate agenda and a just transition for a society living within the physical limits of this planet.

There has been, and will be, a lot of talk about technological innovation. Of course we need that, but we also need social innovation—such as a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay; universal basic income; and free education. These are the social innovations that we need for climate action and for a prosperous society.

Public Sector Productivity

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Patten, I have to reflect on the experience of commuting, whether that is stuck behind the wheel of a car in a traffic jam or having your face stuck in someone else’s armpit on an overcrowded, delayed train. I really could not think of anything less productive than those experiences, which of course not allowing working from home forces people into every day.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, for securing this debate and both your Lordships’ Chambers for timing perfectly the finish of the previous two debates, which has allowed me to run between the Moses Room and the defence review and this debate—an extremely efficient use of my time this evening.

I want to begin with a very quick overview of the state of public services in the UK. They have had 14 years of austerity and I am going to draw on an Institute for Government report from October 2022, ‘Austerity’ in Public Services: Lessons from the 2010s. It points out that our public services are fragile because of austerity. Austerity meant that the pay of workers was pushed down and the number of staff slashed so that people had to work harder. That was not a viable position, this report and I conclude. Very many people are now simply worn out. They are overtired. Many people have left. Huge amounts of experience, knowledge and skills have been lost. There were very few easy and genuinely effective efficiency savings to be found, and what there were have been found.

We saw situations, as happened with policing in prisons, where there were slashing efficiency cuts, but then money had to be put back in because the institutions had fallen apart. That meant that experienced staff left, and new, little-trained, inexperienced people came in, and that was really bad for productivity. Austerity is wildly inefficient. Of course, that is not the fault of the public sector but of politics. If we are talking about the productivity of the public sector, maybe we have to look very close to home for reasons why there might be issues.

A second issue that has been driven by ideology and politics is privatisation, financialisaton and marketisation. I recall marching in 2014 with the 999 Call for the NHS campaign on part of its Jarrow march against the privatisation of the NHS. Many of the people on that march were NHS staff, and they could tell the story of the past couple of years where they had had three or four different job titles, three or four different bosses, and had worked for three or four different organisations, and yet they had been seeing the same kind of patients in the same office every day. All of those things take vast amounts of time, energy and stress and lead to people getting frustrated, giving up and leaving, and all of it was driven by political decisions and political ideology. Why do we have a productivity problem? Let us look closer to home. We need a better quality of governance and politics.

Finally, on health, we have a terrible quality of public health. In the working-age population, we have a huge number of people suffering from long Covid and all sorts of chronic conditions who struggle into work every day and do their best. We need to find ways to get a healthier society, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, just mentioned; this is about taking a systemic approach to our society.

I want to devote my final minute to one simple idea. No one idea is a panacea, but here is one way forward: a four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, who secured this debate, might like to know of an article published by the World Economic Forum which states—with invisible but clear exclamation marks—that a four-day working week as standard, with no loss of pay or extension of hours each day, “actually increases productivity”. The article also notes:

“Work smarter not harder has been the mantra of management consultants”.


I do not want to suggest a Stakhanovite, Amazon-warehouse type arrangement where everyone comes into the office, puts their heads down and is forced to act like a robot. Ultimately, however, we need to think about not just the productivity of our public services but the productivity of our society. A healthy society that cares for people and has time for family and community, which a four-day week would provide, would be a highly productive society.

Product Regulation and Metrology Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 8th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I am going to start with history. I used to live on Leather Lane in central London between the City and Westminster, where, despite Victorian urban expansion, a dairy farm continued to operate in the middle of the city. That was no historical accident. With the adulteration of milk rampant, with filthy water and much worse, the only way consumers could be sure that milk would not kill them or their children was if they actually saw it come out of the cow.

A few years ago I was privileged to visit the Rochdale Pioneers Museum in the home of the first successful consumer co-operative in the UK: the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844. Its aim was to ensure not just affordable products but safe and genuine products, without sawdust in the flour or arsenic in the sugar. But not everyone had a co-operative nearby. It was eventually conceded back in the 19th century that it was the responsibility of the state to protect consumers.

Amid a huge ideological debate about the freedom of traders to sell whatever they liked, the Sale of Food and Drugs Act 1875 was passed. However, it took time to take effect. In 1877 a quarter of all the milk examined by the local government board was seriously adulterated. However, the law worked. By 1894 adulterated milk accounted for less than 10% of all samples. Campaigning worked to get the law and the law worked for the good of the people. Lives were saved. I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Winterton of Doncaster, noting in her wonderful maiden speech that such protections are particularly important for the most vulnerable in society.

Today, in 2024, however, we are seriously failing to provide protections. The noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and others referred to the fact that it has been clear for some time that there is a huge problem with lithium-ion batteries and chargers. We have seen this problem, yet there has been no action. I would like to ask the Minister specifically about what timeframe the Government see for taking action on this. Do we have to wait for the Bill to go through the many months it will undoubtedly take? I do not know if that is necessary. Could something not be done sooner? As the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, said in bringing his particular expertise to this debate, in the current age we need a kind of agility in reacting to changing products, circumstances and methods of sale, but we are utterly failing.

Last weekend, I was listening to the London Review of Books podcast. James Butler, who closely followed and reported on the evidence to the Grenfell Tower inquiry, was speaking angrily, and rightly, about the decades of regulatory failure that led to the deaths of 72 people. When you read in Hansard the debates about the 1875 Act, we had people then making the same kind of arguments that are made today: about the need to protect business from extra costs; about the need to allow business to make profits; about the need to allow freedom of trade, even of substandard products. But what could be more central to the role of government than keeping people safe?

It is demonstrably clear that exercising the rhetoric of cutting so-called red tape has killed and continues to kill. Anyone using that language really should take a good hard look at themselves. Taking the US approach of waiting until a product kills and injures, then setting the injured consumer or their relatives against the enormous weight of multinational companies—or in pursuit of some fly-by-night trader who cannot possibly be located—in the hope of financial recompense through the slow lottery of the courts, years or decades later, when of course that will not restore their life or their health, is indefensible and ineffective. It is fit only for a society that does not care for its people.

Product regulation is not just a matter of life and death. It is also about keeping a basic quality of life and well-being, not just for the purchasers of products but for general society and our disastrously battered environment on this planet, where the boundaries for novel entities have already been exceeded, in addition to the now acutely obvious climate emergency and nature crisis. Product regulation is crucial in the quality of our everyday lives and health, in both obvious and more subtle ways. How much energy your TV or computer uses, how much noise your neighbour’s strimmer makes or how much pollution you breathe in as you walk down the pavement affect all of us, every minute of every day. With public health in the UK in such a terrible state, this is even more crucial.

Since Brexit, Europe has demonstrably continued to advance in health, well-being and the safety of its products—even if, as the European green parties regularly point out, still far too slowly—while the UK has been sliding further and further behind. I want to particularly note three briefings that I received before this debate from the Green Alliance, Friends of the Earth and the Institute for European Environmental Policy. Those organisations are, as those names suggest, particularly focused on environmental health. What we need to adopt, of course, is a one-health approach acknowledging that environmental health, animal health and human health are all intimately interrelated. In that context I have to note, as I acknowledge the Minister did in his introduction, that this is an environmental Bill. It therefore contains significant devolved elements which cover areas under the control of the Scottish Parliament and the Senedd. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has been listening closely to our debate and I expect that in later stages of the Bill we may well be working on these issues together.

However, it is probably already clear from my comments that the Bill is welcome from the Green Party perspective, if severely insufficient in its current form and approach. I foresee many a debate about “may” or “must” being in its clauses. Surely, the Labour Party will not be reversing the kinds of positions it took in debating such matters when they were on the Opposition Benches. I hope we are not going to see the kind of 180 degree U-turn that we saw from the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, much as I am glad to see that the Conservative Party is now concerned about Henry VIII clauses.

I want to focus briefly on a couple of areas. Chemical regulation is a huge area of concern, with the science fast exposing how disastrously we have poisoned this planet. I am looking forward to a commitment from the Minister, either today or down the track, to either a new chemicals strategy or a new chemicals agency. I note that the Royal Society of Chemistry has been calling for this.

I also want to take a brief look at the advances being made in Europe, particularly the EU’s eco-design for sustainable products regulation, which entered into force on 18 July this year. This is part of a wider circular economy plan, an approach I hope to see the Government taking forward. It is focused not on a particular problem or product; it is a framework law that aims to drive forward improvements across a whole range of products and product categories by encouraging products that use less energy—so saving consumers money—last longer, can be easily repaired or recycled, contain more recycled content and have parts that can easily be disassembled and put to further use. It ensures that each product should have a digital product passport, so that producers have to collect and record the sustainability of their products. This means we can look at how to best use these products in the future. Do the Government plan to take a similar approach?

I am perhaps surprised that this debate has not focused more on another issue. Chemical substances in toys are an obvious area of grave concern to the health of our current and future generations. We need particularly to protect children from exposure to harmful endocrine-disrupting chemicals. I note that public awareness of PFAS and “forever chemicals” is growing fast; the Government are going to find themselves coming under considerable pressure in these areas very soon. At the moment, the Bill’s powers appear primarily to cover products that come under the Department for Business and Trade and the Office for Product Safety and Standards. Are the Government prepared to consider—I would be delighted to discuss this with the Minister—whether the Bill can be extended to cover the EU REACH restrictions and bans on other consumer products not falling into those categories? An obvious example here is formaldehyde in furniture, an area of growing health concern.

I have two final points to make. One is about Clause 11, which lists the regulations to be considered under the affirmative procedure but misses an opportunity to deal with something that, again, the now Government frequently lamented from these Benches: the impossibility in your Lordships’ House of dealing with statutory instruments with regulations that are patently inadequate but which we have no effective opportunity to stop. There is a chance to create further oversight in Clause 11, including perhaps a potential option for the House of Lords to disapprove draft instruments, sending them back for extra homework where significant concerns are raised. This, of course, is crucial, given that in the Bill’s current form there are essentially no real commitments.

Finally, I want to pick up one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath. I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. The noble Lord rightly highlighted how our trading standards enforcement has been absolutely sliced away by austerity. Your Lordships’ House can do wonders with this Bill, but without enforcement—if the Bill is not enforced—that is pointless. I hope that the Government will address the issue of austerity’s impact on local government, particularly trading standards, as a matter of urgency.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lords, Lord Warner and Lord Oates, and others want to remove reference to Israel. The question has been raised as to why one country should be singled out. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, drew attention to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. He did not mention the noble Lord’s other remarks—that part of his deal to recognise Palestine as a state would be that Hamas was expelled and, of course, the release of all hostages, which is an integral part of the jigsaw.

Others have commented that the Bill, which I support, does nothing about anti-Semitism. That is a minority view within the Jewish community. Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which was referenced, has an extremely small minority view. The vast majority of the Jewish population in the UK is represented by the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council, on which I serve as vice-president. They are both in favour of such a Bill. They would not be in favour of this Bill if they had any worries that it would lead to an increase in anti-Semitism.

Likewise, with reference to the impact on the West Bank, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, was asked whether she goes to the West Bank much. I have been to the West Bank. I chair a charity called the Jerusalem Foundation. One of the projects we are doing is building a very large sports centre in east Jerusalem. It includes a swimming pool, and it will be run by the locals for the benefit of the local community. It would be a great shame if this sports centre could not be built by a British contractor in whole or part because of fear of sanctions and thus its inability to win local council contracts.

It is obvious why Israel has to be protected by this Bill: precisely because it is the one country singled out for unparalleled abuse, criticism, misinformation and, sadly, hate. Which other country has people on the streets of the UK calling for its complete destruction? A country controlled by autocrats, or denying the rights of women, gays, minorities or religious groups? No. In fact, it is only one country—the one that achieves the reverse of all that.

This pattern has happened since Israel’s creation, facilitated in 1948 by a body—the United Nations—that has subsequently done all it can to demonise it. So why should special protection be given to Israel as Clause 3(7) suggests? I can answer that if noble Lords can explain to me why, since 2003, the UN has issued 232 resolutions in respect of Israel. Some 40% of all resolutions issued by the UN in that period have been on Israel, six times that of the second-placed country, Sudan. In 2023 alone, the UN General Assembly brought 15 resolutions against Israel and only seven on the multitude of conflicts around the world. Furthermore, the UN Human Rights Council has a dedicated, permanent line item—item 7—on Israel, specifically and alone. It has not done this with any other member state.

I argue that special prejudice and discrimination deserve special protection. The UN has had nine meetings of the Security Council to discuss the situation in Gaza, but not one about the hostages. If such a once-distinguished—now, sadly, widely regarded as discredited—organisation can show such bias against Israel, and only Israel, we need to take steps to ensure that this cancer of thought does not spread to UK institutions. Many agitators have run out of causes to address with their ire and prejudice, so their polemics are focused on a country they believe they can, by means fair or foul, destroy by a series of lies and hate- filled allegations.

I take the noble Lord, Lord Collins, at his word and believe him to be keen to find a way to avoid BDS. He is an honourable person and he says what he means. So I am disappointed that those on the Labour Front Bench support this amendment. I thought that they, and indeed all noble Lords, would understand that stopping BDS is right, fair and just, as are steps to protect the State of Israel from abuse by organisations themselves funded by the fair-minded British taxpayer.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to offer Green support for Amendment 20 while stressing our continued opposition to the entire Bill. The argument for Amendment 20—that Clause 3(7) not be in the Bill—has already been powerfully made, but I will make three brief points. The first is about international law. This point has been powerfully made by many noble Lords already, and you do not have to listen to me; you can listen to Alicia Kearns MP, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, who pointed out that, as the Bill is written, it constitutes a departure from British foreign policy that

“puts the UK in breach of our commitments under UN Security Council resolution 2334”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/7/23; col. 604.]

My second point picks up a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Oates. We have seen changes, over the months, in the British Government’s rhetoric at least, if not in their policy, when it comes to arms sales to the Israeli state, which will become only more legally, diplomatically and politically pressing. But we are not here talking about policy. We are talking about law: something on the statute book that remains until the law is changed. The convention, of course, is that no Parliament binds its successors, but we know how time-consuming and energy-consuming it is to change past errors as circumstances change.

The third point I want to make is one that no one else has made, but I am afraid that I have to, which is to refer to what is happening as we speak. Hundreds of thousands of people are in desperate fear with nowhere left to run, nowhere to seek safety. The Israeli state has seized the Rafah border crossing. A couple of figures haunt me. One of them is, of course, the death toll, which is approaching 35,000 in Gaza, but another figure I saw last week is that 5% of people in Gaza have been killed or injured. That is a deeply shocking figure.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for speaking so soon after my previous contribution, but I will speak to my Amendment 20A. I associate myself with the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, which I have signed.

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for adding their names to my Amendment 20A. This iniquitous Bill challenges the very foundations of devolution in the United Kingdom—namely, that decisions should be taken at the local level, and that local leaders should be answerable for them, rather than decisions being taken at the centre by remote politicians and officials. I say that as a former Secretary of State for Wales who helped bring in the Government of Wales Act 2006, which strengthened the devolution possibilities for the now Welsh Parliament —the then Welsh Assembly. My amendments and those of my noble friends address one aspect of that: they seek to remove from the Bill matters for which the Governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should properly be responsible.

I will speak about Wales in particular. The Explanatory Notes acknowledge that the Bill affects the decision-making of the devolved Administrations. The memorandum of 8 September 2023 from Rebecca Evans MS, the responsible Welsh Minister, set out in detail the way in which the Bill intruded into devolved competences in Wales and why it was right to withhold the legislative consent of the Senedd—which has occurred.

Deciding whether a particular purchase or contract should be made by the Welsh Government, or any other public authority in Wales, is patently a function exercisable in relation to Wales under the terms of Section 3 of the Wales Act 2017. The conduct of foreign affairs is reserved to the UK Government under that Act, but the making of moral or political judgments about the conduct of foreign states is not conducting foreign policy. That is a crucial distinction denied by this authoritarian Bill, which abrogates powers to Ministers so that they can act by executive diktat—in this case, by overriding the devolution settlement in respect of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Moral and political judgments are made by every individual—and so they should be; they should not be dictated by the centre. That means that the decision-maker should be at the lowest accountable level. In the case of Wales, decisions should be taken by a county or county borough council, the Welsh Government or the Senedd. Those authorities would be answerable for the moral and political judgments they make at the local or all-Welsh level. Are the Government seriously saying that they have a monopoly on moral and political judgment? That is what the Bill saying, which is both arrogant and absurd. Council tax payers in Neath, Gower, Wrexham or the Vale of Glamorgan are best placed to decide whether their councils are making the right decisions, and electors in Wales can make the same decision about the Welsh Government’s and the Senedd’s choices.

I cannot agree more with the Welsh Government’s view that the Bill is disproportionate and unnecessary, and I support the Welsh Parliament’s decision to refuse to give it legislative consent.

There are also major constitutional issues. If the Bill is enacted, it will fly in the face of the fundamental constitutional principle articulated in Section 2 of the Wales Act 2017, with parallel provisions, of course, for Scotland and Northern Ireland, that the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of—in this case—the Senedd in Wales, the Parliament of Scotland or the Assembly of Northern Ireland.

The Bill would also fly in the face of the principle of subsidiarity to which the Government ostensibly subscribe: namely, that decisions are made at the level closest to the citizen, consistent with effective delivery.

So far as our amendments are concerned, because there is a single jurisdiction of England and Wales—something that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, has reported on compellingly—the amendment of Clause 17 to remove the word “Wales” would not work technically. For that reason, it is necessary to achieve the removal of Welsh devolved bodies from the Bill in a different way from the way that can be achieved for Scotland and Northern Ireland, because England and Wales have a common legal framework and that is not the case for Scotland and Northern Ireland. That is done by my amendment to the schedule. This would add the Welsh Government and public authorities that are responsible to that Government to those bodies excepted from the provisions of Clause 1. Effectively, it would mean that the Bill would not apply in devolved Welsh areas.

Our amendments are an opportunity for these issues of devolution to be canvassed, for the devolution settlement to be preserved and for the rights of the other Governments in United Kingdom and their legislatures to be asserted. I hope that the House, in some way, will manage to protect the devolution settlement, because otherwise the future of the United Kingdom is threatened.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bryan, and the noble Lord, Lord Hain, and to essentially agree with everything they said. I rise to offer Green support; I am not going to engage in the technical details, which the noble Lord, Lord Hain, set out so clearly, but I will simply say that this Bill should not apply to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

I listened to the debate on an earlier group, when the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, talked about a small nursery, run by a charity, deciding to ban oranges from South Africa. That obviously is not right—it is the sort of thing that the Bill appears to be addressing—but how much more so when we are talking about an entire devolved Administration? If we think about the kinds of examples that might apply here, let us say that one of the nations’ devolved Administrations might choose to block a supplier of staff uniforms because the clothing is made under abusive conditions in an abusive regime. How can it not be right that the people of Wales can decide for themselves that they do not want to see people wearing uniforms from that kind of source?

In the earlier group, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb pointed out how the environmental derogations are utterly inadequate. How can it be that the Scottish Parliament could not decide to ban food sourced from deforested areas of the Amazon from being served in the Parliament? Those are the kinds of things that the Bill is currently providing.

It is worth looking over the history of this a little bit. I think it was two Prime Ministers back—it is rather hard to keep track, but I am referring to Boris Johnson. Under Boris Johnson, it seemed that there was a real desire to pick fights with the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Senedd in particular. Since then, we have seen some improvement; we have seen the Review of Intergovernmental Regulations, which said that

“decisions will continue to work on the basis of agreement by consensus”.

I think that is an important phrase to look at, although I note we have seen some backsliding recently, and perhaps this Bill is a symbol of that.

Scottish Government: Devolved Competences

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 13th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I think that the way in which the Cabinet is organised and the responsibilities of different Ministers is very much a matter for the Prime Minister, but I am glad that we have a new Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Scotland Office. He has been an MSP, and I think that that will bring a new dimension to our discussions on this important subject.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in responding to the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, with whose contribution I entirely agree, the Minister said that there were well-established relationships between Westminster and the devolved nations. But there is a report out today from UK in a Changing Europe titled Brexit and the State, which says that, particularly under the regime of the internal market Act, relationships are nascent rather than developed. The report very much focuses on how the Scottish Government have made a decision to remain, particularly in the agricultural area, closely aligned with standards in Europe—which means higher standards than we have in England. Does not much more need to be done to develop those relationships identified as nascent?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

I have not seen that report. Of course, agriculture is devolved to Scotland, and it is Scotland’s choice, if it wants to do things in a different way. I think that we need to move forward on the new basis. I have nothing further to say.

Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi. In 2019, she told the BBC that she aimed to be challenging, authentic and brave. Your Lordships’ House often sees her living up to that.

I begin with a statement of the obvious. The Green Party, as a party that believes in democracy, in empowering local communities, in encouraging people to get involved in politics at all levels—to make politics what they do, not have done to them—and in defending the rule of law, is opposed to this Bill. My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb will focus on the attack on local democracy that the Bill represents, but I have a specific question about local government for the Minister. What happens if a city, town or village is twinned with another and decides for moral or political reasons that it wants to “untwin”? Is divorce to be banned under this Bill? Will a city, town or village be forced to arrange exchanges, even if it does not want to?

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, made a point that deserves repeating. The first clause of this Bill is entitled:

“Disapproval of foreign state conduct prohibited”.


In George Orwell’s Oceania, that would surely be a banned phrase—far too blunt and obvious in its repression —yet this is what the Government want to make law.

In her introduction, the Minister said that this Bill went through the other place without amendment, as if that were an argument for a light touch in your Lordships’ House. We know that it is instead a glaring red-light signal that we will have a great deal of work to do, not even necessarily in addressing issues that could be described as ideological but in simply tidying up the mess. This mess was noted in the other place—the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, reflected on the many comments across the Chamber about how poorly drafted it was—but no action was taken there. Our archaic, historically assembled and undemocratic constitution is not working at even the most basic level.

The Minister also said that foreign nations might be or are confused about UK foreign policy because of the actions that local councils or nations in these islands choose to take. That reminds me of the heat of the Brexit debate, when some politicians, particularly on the pro-Brexit side, seemed to think that other nations’ diplomats and leaders did not read Twitter or view television. They made pronouncements for local consumption in the UK and were then surprised when they had international impacts.

Please, let us not underestimate the capacity of the peoples of the world to deal with complexity, and to understand that, for example, when Sheffield City Council’s Green Lord Mayor Magid Magid once “banned” Donald Trump from visiting—and good on him—that is not Westminster and that is not UK policy.

However, I now want to turn deadly serious and take us to Gaza, as the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, did, where my latest briefing from Oxfam says that Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip has killed more than 29,000 people, including well over 12,000 children. Nearly 70,000 people are injured and at least 7,000 are missing, presumably still underneath the rubble. Some 1.5 million people, including half a million children, are sheltering in less than 20% of the Strip without access to shelter, water, food and medical facilities.

The Government are saying, in response to all of that, that local communities, as represented democratically by councils, cannot take peaceful, non-violent action—the kind of action that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hain, so powerfully set out, once helped to change the world in the right direction in the context of apartheid South Africa.

Much has been said about the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. This is something that the Green Party supports and has done since our democratic conference of members agreed in 2014 to call on

“individuals, organisations, councils and governments to refuse to deal with companies and institutions identified as facilitating Israel’s military capacity, human rights abuses or illegal settlement activity”.

The motion referred to this being how the Green Party could best act on its commitments as an anti-racist party committed to upholding human rights.

Looking over the history of the Green Party, you see that we have long been a leader—going back decades —in defending the rights of the people of Tibet, back when we were a much smaller party than we are now. We continue to speak for the Uighurs under genocidal repression from the same capital, as I have spoken as co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong. We have spoken for the victims of the massive human rights abuses of Saudi Arabia, to which we absolutely oppose arms sales, as we oppose arms sales to Israel.

Finally, I want to pick up the issues about the nations of the UK, as a number of other noble Lords have, including the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd. I will use a specific point to make a general one. The Government have claimed that there is no interaction with devolved matters, but how does the Minister explain the interaction with the Well-being of Future Generations Act in Wales?

The well-being of future generations is clearly dependent on a stable, secure, environmentally balanced world—shorthand for the delivery of the sustainable development goals. Even looking at the exemptions in Part 2 of the Schedule to the Bill, there are a lot of potential activities that the Senedd might choose to work with the Government to act against that are not covered under the Schedule.

I am interested in the definition of environmental misconduct in Clause 10(3) of the Bill. The Government have, in other instances, been firmly attached to the view that we can only consider illegal deforestation, for example, yet here we have a clause that refers to any kind of negative environmental impact. Some very interesting things might be done with that.

I have a final, quick question for the Minister. Does the Bill prevent public bodies calling on the Government to change their foreign policy—not taking actions but doing politics? Is that really to be banned, as the Government seem to suggest, as the Government have again and again sought to ban peaceful protest? What fate democracy?

Conversion Therapy Prohibition (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Friday 9th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have listened as we all have to many brave and important speeches today, so I join in humbly to offer my strongest possible support for the directions and intention of the Bill proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, which is very much in line with the policy of the Green Party of England and Wales. Our policies for a sustainable society, democratically agreed by members at conference, says on conversion therapy:

“The Green Party recognises that these practices are unethical and harmful and believes that such practices should be illegal”.


The policy goes on to acknowledge the particular harm that such practices represent to young people and vulnerable adults, reflected in the fact that our Young Greens have been particularly strong in campaigning for the Government to live up to their LGBT Action Plan 2018. One of the key actions listed in that plan was to bring

“forward proposals to end the practice of conversion therapy in the UK”.

The plan went on to say:

“Our intent is to protect people who are vulnerable to harm or violence, whether that occurs in a medical, commercial or faith-based context. We are not trying to prevent LGBT people from seeking legitimate medical support or spiritual support from their faith leader in the exploration of their sexual orientation or gender identity”.


I believe that that is what everyone who is speaking in support of this Bill today, and its direction, is seeking to work towards.

I feel that one of the most useful contributions I can bring to this debate is to reflect on what is happening in Scotland, where the Scottish Green Party, working with the SNP under the Bute House agreement, has been at the forefront of working towards a conversion therapy ban. The history of that is of careful, consultative, evidence-based work. In 2020, a campaign group, End Conversion Therapy Scotland, lodged a petition with the Scottish Parliament. The petitions committee considered the issue worthy of further consideration and passed it on to the equalities committee. The following year, the equalities committee began an inquiry into conversion therapy, and its final report recommended a criminal ban.

In the following year, 2022, the Scottish Government created the Expert Advisory Group on Ending Conversion Practices, which included legal scholars, human rights experts, LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, faith leaders, medical professionals and survivors of conversion therapy. The final report of that expert advisory group unanimously recommended a comprehensive ban and a suite of measures regarding communication, engagement, prevention and support for survivors—which is something that we have not really talked about today and that is urgently needed.

This year, the Scottish Government launched a detailed consultation on proposals to ban conversion therapy, which runs until 2 April. I cannot but note that, had the Westminster Government followed a similar path from 2018, we could today be debating a government Bill and saving the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and her team a great deal of work.

I want to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, that conversion therapy is about the abuse and misuse of power. It is nearly always conducted by someone in a position of authority, power or respect over the victim. It also often relies on secrecy, control and shame, so it is difficult for victims and survivors to come forward or seek help. It is therefore useful to consider conversion therapy to be a similar experience to domestic abuse in the form of coercive control.

In saying that, it is clear that many of the actions that we are talking about might well be covered by other legislation, but, as a specific pattern of behaviour and action, some elements would not be, and that is clearly what this legislation that we are talking about seeks to address, as does the planned Scottish legislation. It is worth looking at this from the international context—that conversion therapy is widely considered to be a form of torture, in certain forms. This was the view taken by the UN Committee against Torture and the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. Failure to protect people from conversion therapy leaves LGBTQ+ people at risk of having their convention rights breached.

I conclude by noting that many faith groups responded to the Holyrood equalities committee’s inquiry, and all were supportive of a ban. Scotland’s largest faith organisation, the Church of Scotland, stated its view that conversion therapy is wrong and should be banned.

Gaza: Humanitarian Situation

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece. A stock-take: more than 27,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. Many hundreds of those have been killed since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take all possible measures to prevent genocidal acts. Around 1 million children are in need of homes, basic sustenance and medical care, and almost an entire population has been displaced. Scores of Israelis remain hostage in Gaza and hundreds of Palestinians are being held in Israel. What can and should the UK do? First, it should call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire now, as the Green Party has long been doing. Secondly, it should resume the funding for UNRWA, the largest aid agency, that is so crucial to people’s survival. Thirdly, it should suspend all arms sales to Israel, particularly parts for the F35 joint strike fighter. This is particularly crucial: these sales could soon see us taken before the ICJ.