International Women’s Day

Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)]

My Lords and my Ladies—a phrase I have never used before here either—I am delighted to follow my noble friend, to congratulate her on her wonderful maiden speech. As she said, she is another alumna of the Margaret McDonagh school of politics, which had at its core discipline, professionalism, steeliness and fierce camaraderie. She would join the rank of what I proudly call the “backroom girls”—headsets, clipboards, pagers and all. We know who we are, on all sides of the House, who kept our respective bosses in line and our shows on the road.

When asked if such and such could be done, my noble friend never replied, “I’m not sure” or “I don’t know” but rather, “By when?” I relied on her enormously, as have many others. She invented what became known as the “game face”—the ability to behave utterly professionally, however ludicrous the thing you have been asked to do. At this she was the mistress of the art, quietly burying the madder requests without letting her guard slip.

My noble friend is the consummate professional—ruthlessly efficient, undramatic, unassuming, committed to the values of the Labour Party and rising to be its COO. She will, though, be for ever remembered as the one who was on the stage in a trice at the party conference when our Prime Minister was attacked with glitter, calmly removing his jacket and undoubtedly whispering something encouraging. She is the kind of person you want by your side when the going gets tough.

My noble friend will find many fellow travellers and strong female friendship in this House on the causes and issues she wishes to advocate for—though, for her sake, I hope not for a further 47 years. I am also delighted to be in the House to hear the maiden speeches of my other noble friends. We all warmly welcome our new female noble Lords.

I return now to one of my pet issues: namely, women in engineering. Last year in this debate, I talked about Fei-Fei Li, the first female winner of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which is the engineering world’s Noble Prize. I declare my interest as a board member. This year’s winners, just announced, include two more brilliant women. Ingeborg Hoffmeyer is the co-inventor of the world’s first microelectronic cochlear implant, transforming the lives of millions of people with hearing loss worldwide. Jocelyne Bloch’s team developed electronic spinal stimulation technology—in other words, people with spinal cord injuries can regain the use of their limbs.

These women represent a new frontier where medicine and engineering converge to restore capabilities thought lost. I salute them on this International Women’s Day. They are at the top of the female engineering tree and there are many brilliant female engineers on its branches: Eleanor Stride, a bioengineer inserting drugs into bubbles that can be targeted on, say, a tumour; Yewande Akinola at Laing O’Rourke and Jo da Silva at Arup, construction engineers addressing climate, biodiversity and equity issues in their designs; Dame Sue Ion, in nuclear engineering; Judith Hackitt, in chemical engineering, who led the post-Grenfell panel on fire safety and building regulations; and Muffy Calder, in Glasgow, a computer engineer working in national security. All are formidable women and brilliant role models.

I thank my noble friend the Minister for spelling out the Government’s initiatives to support women in tech, which I know command support across the House. Women still make up just 16% of the engineering workforce, put off by the male-dominated culture in engineering, inequitable promotion and pay and inflexible working conditions. Some 57% of female engineers leave the sector in their 30s and 40s. The Women in Tech Taskforce’s stated aim is to dismantle those barriers for female engineers via public and private industry collaboration, as the Minister outlined, concentrating on tested, best practice solutions that work. This is an imperative. The Royal Academy of Engineering recently reported a huge shortfall of engineers, with the expected growth in jobs in clean energy, defence, digital and housebuilding over the next five years amounting to 834,000 additional jobs. One in four job adverts in the UK now relates to engineering in some form. I look forward to continuing updates of the taskforce’s progress from my noble friends Lady Lloyd and Lady Smith of Malvern, two more great women I salute today.

Steel Industry (Special Measures) Act 2025

Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to be following our newly appointed Peer and Minister, my noble friend Lady Lloyd, and I am most grateful to the usual channels for allowing me to do so. It is quite something to be standing at the Dispatch Box to make one’s maiden speech, never having been a parliamentarian before, and to do it so skilfully and eloquently. My noble friend has had a stellar career to date, in a wide range of jobs here and overseas, where people co-operate, deals are made and business gets done. She will bring all that wealth of experience to her role in your Lordships’ House.

I was my noble friend’s—or even Lloydy’s, as she was then—first boss. She is one of our Guildford three, along with James Purnell and Tim Allan, close schoolfriends, ferociously intelligent, who from 1990 came at various periods in their university holidays to work in Tony Blair’s office as researchers. She joined us permanently in 1993 aged 23, and stayed the entire course, one of the most consequential individuals of the Blair Administration.

My noble friend can grasp and synthesise detail, conscious of the bigger picture. She is not noisy or showy, but firm and straight, clear and crisp. She still has the face of an angel, but she also has—I hope I can get away with it in this debate—balls of steel, the late Baroness McDonagh’s famous pre-requisite for success in politics. We have all been on the end of my noble friend’s withering look, including, many times, Tony Blair, who said of her that

“most of all she was so transparently honest and fair to everyone that she exerted a calming influence on the madhouse”.

She will very soon discover that this House is of a very different order from that one, as I learned in the British Steel debate on Saturday 12 April this year, when I was a very new Member of the House and when the commitment to today’s debate was made.

I was pleased then that the Government acted so decisively on what became a historic day. It was the first time I had been present for a debate in its entirety and, like me, my noble friend will come to appreciate the depth and spread of knowledge of noble Lords and the dignified and respectful nature of our exchanges. I advise my noble friend to listen to the many experienced people on all sides of the House. Some she may disagree with, but she will learn a lot from them, as they will surely learn from her.

My own contribution to this debate is not born from steel expertise, although I am familiar with the industry’s vital importance through my work at BP and Anglo American, and my association with Tata Steel when I was working at the Royal Academy of Engineering. I have declared these interests in the register.

The deal the Government struck with Tata over Port Talbot last year, as my noble friend said, involved £500 million of investment to support the transition to electric arc furnaces, better terms for workers, and £50 million of investment in the local community to help people learn new skills and support the supply chain. This has ensured the site’s long-term sustainability. My noble friend Lord Murphy will, in his own inimitable way, advocate much better for Port Talbot than I.

I was very pleased that the Act was passed with such strong cross-party support in April. I was proud that this House recognised the urgent need to safeguard national capability, as well as thousands of skilled jobs in Scunthorpe, the UK’s only remaining production capacity for making primary, or virgin, steel, which is essential for infrastructure, defence and energy projects. The Act extended beyond just saving the steelworks; it also began to set out a clear long term-vision for ensuring that the UK retains its sovereign capability. As many noble Lords have argued before, reliance on a volatile global supply would expose the UK to significant economic and security risks.

I commend the Government for standing up for UK steel-making and seeking a pragmatic commercial solution which supports decarbonisation, safeguards taxpayers’ interests and protects jobs—up to 34,000 direct jobs and 42,000 in the supply chain. I was cheered recently to read that British Steel is enrolling its first apprentices in over three years. As I have said, I have spent much of my working life in the engineering sphere and I will always advocate for it. Engineering is essential in steel production, and, in turn, steel is the backbone of civil engineering. The relationship is symbiotic. The steel industry is not just a supplier of raw material; it is a driver of engineering progress.

Regions with strong steel industries often become hubs of engineering excellence, fostering apprenticeships, innovation and advanced manufacturing. I used to do a talk in schools entitled “Naked in a Field” to highlight the prime importance of engineering. I could have said the same in relation to steel. Without either of them, there would be no buildings, bridges, skyscrapers, railways, wind turbines, pipelines, factories, machinery or tools.

Steel’s essential integration into every major engineering discipline makes it vital to national development, technological innovation and the transition to a sustainable future. Steel will be essential in the precision engineering of the new generation of small modular nuclear reactors, especially the reactor pressure vessel. The industry supports a highly skilled engineering workforce, including metallurgists; structural, mechanical, electrical and chemical engineers; mechanical designers; and process engineers. The Royal Academy of Engineering has in place R&D partnerships between academia, government and the steel sector.

I warmly welcome this Government’s commitment to supporting the future of our steel industry. Although I understand the phrase “considering all options” during this process of consultation, I urge Ministers to come forward sooner rather than later with their promised steel plan and its place in the Government’s 10-year industrial strategy. Many present and future engineering jobs depend on it.

I am looking forward to hearing from my noble friend Lord Stockwood, today’s other new Minister, also making his maiden speech from the Dispatch Box. I do not know how it works when a Minister closes a debate with his maiden speech, but in lieu of anyone following him to recognise his first outing, I warmly welcome my noble friend and know that he will be a tremendous asset to our House, as will my noble friend Lady Lloyd.