Families with Children: Accommodation
Baroness Meyer Excerpts(1 year, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
The noble Baroness is absolutely right that part of the issue is the heating of the system and the lack of accommodation available. That is why, since 2010, more than 2.2 million additional homes have been delivered in this country, including 632,000 affordable homes. We have also announced £10 billion of investment in housing supply since the start of this Parliament, together with—I have said this many times at this Dispatch Box—£11.5 billion in the years 2021 to 2026 for the affordable homes programme, which will deliver thousands more affordable homes for rent. I am not saying that this is not a difficult issue to deal with, but the Government have it as a priority and are working through both the affordable housing system and the rented sector.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
Does not my noble friend agree that these statistics and the lack of homes illustrate the fact that we need to take a grip on immigration, and therefore we need to pass the Illegal Migration Bill as fast as possible?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
I can agree with my noble friend on the fact that we have pressures on our system, which I have already mentioned, particularly on housing, but we are a country that cares. Anybody who comes into this country and is homeless deserves a home.
International Women’s Day
Baroness Meyer Excerpts(1 year, 8 months ago)
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Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend Lady Lampard on her excellent speech and welcome her to this House.
The last time I participated in a debate on International Women’s Day, I spoke about my personal experience of working in financial services in the 1980s and how I was confronted with sexual harassment, molestation and abuse. The view then was that, if you wanted to make it in a man’s world, you had to pay the price and shut up. Thankfully, today in the UK, that kind of behaviour is considered totally unacceptable, even illegal. The view that only men can succeed in politics, business or the arts is no longer acceptable. We have moved a long way in one generation.
The challenge today is to get the balance right and not let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction. We should not condemn femininity, nor should we emasculate men. We should not wage a war between the sexes. Above all, we should not fall into an ideological split between true feminists, of which there are many in this House, and groups that promote extreme ideologies to the detriment of women’s rights. Woman should be allowed to identify themselves as women; allowed to speak without fear of being cancelled; and allowed to have their own space and privacy. Unless we women rise up against these belligerent gender-based ideologies, we will reverse all the hard-fought progress that we have achieved since the 1960s, while the next generation will find themselves more confused and constrained than our parents ever were.
This is why I am deeply concerned at what is being taught in schools, where external lobby groups have been allowed to disseminate inappropriate teaching materials to promote their belief that gender identity is a fact. Of course, teaching children about the lives, experiences and rights of gay, lesbian and bisexual people is welcome; it will help them to understand sexuality in a non-judgmental manner and develop empathy for people from different backgrounds and with different beliefs. However, this is far removed from teaching children that there are 100 genders, and that they may have been born in the wrong body; and encouraging them to believe that changing their gender could be the solution to their problems and anxieties. This is moving from the factual to the ideological. Sex is binary and immutable; encouraging children to believe otherwise is unscientific and dangerous.
Girls often reject womanhood as they start to go through puberty; this is an understandable reaction to their bodies changing and to society’s expectations of what a woman should be. When I lived with my parents in Africa, I had short hair, climbed trees and played with Dinky Toys; that tells noble Lords my age. I wanted to be a boy; I behaved like a boy. This was a phase of my development into who I am today. Not all girls who prefer male pursuits when they are young are trans.
Propagating ideologies that are not based on facts and indoctrinating children reminds me of the Soviet Union. This gender ideology plays straight into the hands of Mr Putin, who accuses the West of moving towards Stalinism—that is a funny comment from him—and
“teaching sexual deviation to children”.
As he explains,
“we’re fighting to protect our children and our grandchildren from this experiment to change their souls … The Russian people still know which bathroom to use.”
Thank goodness for Miriam Cates, who is calling for an urgent inquiry into what is being taught in schools. Will my noble friend the Minister urgently review the material used at school? Will she also press for RSE lessons to be truly age-appropriate? Does she not agree that talking about sexual desires with adults is not only embarrassing for children but is a clear safeguarding red flag?
While we are talking here about our rights, we must remember all the Ukrainian women and children who, at this moment, do not have that privilege. Their concern is survival. Their wish is to end the war, to end the devastation of their country and to survive.
Voter Identification Regulations 2022
Baroness Meyer Excerpts(1 year, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, I can say the same about what is happening in Europe. In France and, as far as I know, in most European countries, you need a photo ID to vote. You have to be over 18, and I think the only instance when you do not need a photo ID is if you vote in a municipality of fewer than 1,000 people. I do not think there is a complication, and I have not seen, in France or in other European countries, people in uproar because they have to show a photo ID to prove who they are.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
They can show an ID card, or a passport, or there is a whole list of identification with a photograph that can be used.
Lord Rennard (LD)
Does the noble Baroness accept that there is a fundamental difference if, as in most of western Europe, you are issued with a national ID card and that is a legal requirement? Then everybody has it and can vote, but in the UK we do not have national ID cards, and therefore at the moment there are 2 million people without the requisite form of ID who have to apply. An extra barrier is created, unnecessarily and at great cost.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
As far as I know, in England there is a photograph on a driving licence. In France, your driving licence with a photograph is acceptable for voting. There must be a way forward. In my opinion we are complicating this rather simple issue.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I will pick up on a number of points in relation to comments made during this debate, particularly by our two Northern Ireland colleagues. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and I have sat on virtually every committee, if not every committee, related to voting and voting legislation since I have been a Member of this House. At no point in any debate has any contribution we have received from any person from Northern Ireland said, “Do not go for photo ID”. There has been no such representation, nor any to say that we should revert to a position without photo ID, as was indicated previously. If there were problems in Northern Ireland, clearly we would have had representation from students, some civil community groups or whatever, saying, “Revert to the position we were at before”. But in the seven years I have served in this House—and I believe I have served on every single review of electoral law—we have never had such a submission from Northern Ireland.
I move on to the observation by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in relation to students. Oh, I feel so sorry for them. After all is said and done, we will have elections in May and there is the Easter holiday between now and then. In my former life I was chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association. Noble Lords may wonder what on earth that has to do with this debate. My members operated late-night licensed locations. All people who attended were required to produce proof of ID. Ask any pub company how many managers are holding passports, driving licences and other forms of photo ID every Monday morning because clientele in pubs and bars have left them there. The reality is that students carry their ID with them on a regular basis, because they are used to producing them in very regular circumstances.
Both the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said that the introduction was being rushed. In recent years we have moved from a rigid electoral roll system whereby the new election rolls were registered sometime between August and October to a system in which people can now register on a very rapid basis. I think the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, will agree that I have been a regular supporter of reducing the workloads of returning officers. As an event at elections, we now get a surge in registration by people who think they are not registered. Actually, two-thirds of them are registered and that workload could be removed with read-only access. That surge is because people are suddenly conscious of the upcoming election.
If you ask the relevant organisations—the AEA, the Electoral Commission—when they are going to launch their advertising campaigns in relation to the May elections, no sane marketer would say, “We are going to launch the advertising campaign in November or December”, because people’s minds are on Christmas and other similar arrangements. You launch an advertising campaign to make people aware that they need some form of ID—whatever it may happen to be—in January or February, which is what is actually going to happen. You do not spend millions in November or December. Therefore, it is not rushed to say that you are going to launch that campaign in a few weeks’ time.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, quoted from the Electoral Commission’s comments. I would take a quote from the second paragraph rather than the first. Referring to the statutory instrument, it says:
“This detail has enabled us to start developing the guidance that electoral administrators will need.”
Start? We have had the example in Northern Ireland for 20 years, and there is barely a difference between the two in England and in Northern Ireland. Start? Even the difference of interpretation of the Tory party manifesto—whether it is an ID or a photo ID—indicates that it has been a policy of this Government for the last three years. Start? We passed the Elections Act some seven months ago, so in fact there is no reason why the vast majority of the paperwork—in preparation for distribution to everybody—to be used in the marketing campaigns that will be launched in January or February next year should not already be prepared.
This statutory instrument gives effect to something that was debated at length months ago. Many of the contributions that I have listened to this afternoon have repeated some of the arguments that were made then. In conclusion, I am going to cause embarrassment to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, by saying that I found many of her comments as constructive as some of my colleagues did. As far as I am concerned, for the reasons I have identified, on this occasion I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. There is no reason for a fatal amendment at this stage; it is not justified—as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde identified—and we should be supporting the statutory instrument and vote for it this evening.