International Women’s Day

Baroness Lampard Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lampard (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, on an occasion like this, it is perhaps only natural that I should be thinking of my parents. I am the child of a refugee. My mother, who is now 92 years old, was born in Germany. In 1939, at the age of eight, she and her younger sister travelled on one of the last Kindertransport trains from Berlin to England to escape persecution in Nazi Germany. Her husband, my father, was a highly successful, colourful, somewhat idiosyncratic lawyer.

With this parentage, it is perhaps unsurprising that I, too, became a lawyer and that I have a deep commitment to parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and open and accountable public institutions. It is perhaps unsurprising, too, that I have devoted much of my professional life to considering the way that public services are run and whether they meet the needs of those they purport to serve.

Against this background, it is of course a very great privilege and opportunity to have become a Member of your Lordships’ House. I thank noble Lords for the encouragement that they have given me in my first weeks in this House. I thank in particular my sponsors and my mentor. I also thank all the staff of this House for their help and kindness.

In the early part of my career, I practised as a barrister at the Chancery Bar. For some years, I engaged in the sometimes comically inept juggling of the demands of a legal practice, bringing up three children, commuting from the North Downs in Kent and supporting my husband in the running of a family farming and forestry business. I recall that, on one occasion, I was on my feet addressing the High Court when my client—a famous and notoriously anarchic punk rock star—tapped me on the back. I assumed that he wanted to share some pearl of legal wisdom; what in fact he said was, “Kate, do you know you’ve got baby sick down the back of your jacket?”

Eventually, the strain of this juggling—no doubt familiar to very many noble Baronesses present—led me to take another course. I took on a number of non-executive roles, including within the NHS. I also started to undertake reviews and consultancy, often related to governance and management failures in public services. I led the investigations into the sexual abuses perpetrated by Jimmy Savile in NHS settings—a sometimes distressing experience, as noble Lords can imagine. Among other reviews, I have conducted one into the circumstances of the abuse of women at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre.

This sometimes draining work has taught me that those providing services need at all times to be alert to identifying and mitigating the risks and vulnerabilities associated with women service users. To highlight some of these: the potential for subtle, as well as more obvious, imbalances of power to allow abuses to happen and to facilitate their cover-up; the risk that those in positions of power and influence will be indulged and go unchallenged about their wrongdoing; and the reluctance of women to report abuse because of stigma, shame, lack of confidence or a fear of not being believed. There is obviously a role for the education of women and girls to play here. We need to talk openly about the issue of sexual abuse and to educate women and girls about what behaviours are and are not acceptable, and about their right to challenge abusive behaviour. As I found out, these safeguards were largely lacking during the Savile era.

As the noble Baroness—and my friend—Lady Armstrong of Hill Top so generously trailed, I chair GambleAware, the leading charity working to keep people safe from gambling harm in Great Britain. Gambling harms can affect anyone but, as with other serious public health issues, some communities are more at risk than others. People living in more deprived areas are three times more likely to experience gambling harms than those living in the least deprived areas. Those harms can include financial difficulty, relationship breakdown, mental health issues and, tragically, sometimes even suicide. Over the past four years, there has been a 54% increase in women gambling online. There is now a casino in your pocket—indeed, in all our homes and on our sofas—and it carries an increased risk of harm.

The number of women seeking support from GambleAware-commissioned services has more than doubled over the past five years. Terrible as it may seem, a quarter of women who gamble say that they are likely to increase their gambling to supplement the household income. The stigma surrounding women who gamble can also be particularly damaging. Two-thirds of women who gamble say that their gambling is seen as “less acceptable” than gambling among men. I am reminded of the words of Tracy, who spoke about her gambling story publicly last year. She said, “You want to be the perfect mum, you want keep the perfect home”. For too many women, these feelings of shame mean that they do not seek support. Recognising this need, last year GambleAware launched its first harms prevention campaign to educate women on the risks of gambling. I am delighted that, of the women who saw the campaign, half reported taking action as a result.

Gambling remains a male-dominated industry. The long-awaited White Paper on gambling reform is an opportunity to address some of the concerns about the risks that gambling harm poses. At the risk of straying into areas of contention, my hope is that it recognises the need to regulate advertising and marketing by gambling companies better; for deposits, stakes and prizes in online gambling to be brought into line with land-based gambling; the need for safer-gambling messages—including, by the way, by the National Lottery—and the need for a statutory levy on gambling companies to ensure fair funding of the research, education and treatment necessary to tackle gambling harms.

I return to my indomitable 92 year-old mother and her story about arriving in this country, speaking no English, separated from her parents and wholly dispossessed. If she were asked what the key to the revival of her and her family’s circumstances had been, she would undoubtedly say that it was education. I can only concur.