House of Lords: Size

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings (Con) [V]]

My Lords, following the constructive report of the noble Lord, Lord Burns, can the Government consider the proposal that when the Prime Minister appoints new Peers, only a small amount of them are legislators, thus considerably limiting the House’s next intake of new Members?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend raises implicitly the question of whether some Peers who are not legislators might be appointed. This idea has been put forward at various times historically. Currently, the position is that they are.

Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Rawlings]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government which Government-owned properties the Office of Government Property has discussed with Parliament as possible relocation sites as part of the Restoration and Renewal programme.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, as part of the Joint Committee work that helped to prepare for the restoration and renewal programme, the government property unit discussed potential temporary relocation sites with the R&R programme team—namely Richmond House and the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre. The Government Property Agency has continued to provide advice on those relocation sites, and of course the final decision will be a matter for Parliament.

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register, and I thank my noble friend for his Answer. But can he give noble Lords an assurance that the grade 2* listed Richmond House, completed as recently as 1998, which is a major work by the architect William Whitfield, will not be substantially or partly demolished to make way for a temporary House of Commons Chamber; and, as importantly, that a full feasibility study of the alternative options and locations for this temporary Chamber will be carried out?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

My Lords, ownership and responsibility for Richmond House has now been transferred to the other place, where it forms part of its northern estate strategy. The other place is now looking at how Richmond House might be reconfigured to meet its needs. Any changes will require planning permission and listed building consent, and the other place is working very closely with Historic England in view of the importance of the building, which my noble friend has rightly pointed out.

Parliament and Central Government: Relocation

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

My Lords, the problem is that that could interfere with central budget considerations, and then the whole thing becomes a bit muddled.

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister mentioned that the northern powerhouse will be mainly private sector. Will the Government encourage the artistic institutions to move up there more?

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

Absolutely. The whole point about the northern powerhouse is that it considers everything in the round—businesses, artistic initiatives and tourism. It is meant to bring financial stability to the country in the round for all interested parties.

Disability: Premature Deaths

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Monday 17th October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, the honour and great pleasure of following my noble friend Lady Fall falls to me, on these Benches, to welcome her warmly in the name of the whole House and congratulate her on her remarkable maiden speech. It was outstanding, by any standards—from Moscow to the Lords. This does not come as a surprise to anyone who knows the noble Baroness, as her curriculum vitae hardly begins to do her justice. Early on in her career, after having excelled at Oxford, she steered me through many difficult negotiations after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the accession of Austria, Finland and Sweden into the European Union, extending the Fulbright/Monnet scholarships programme and much more. However, it is not just her dedication which distinguishes her, but also her other special qualities of loyalty, humility, astuteness, style, intelligence and genuine care for others. These qualities were revealed between the lines in her excellent and interesting maiden speech. We all hope that she will play a prominent part now in your Lordships’ House and that we shall hear a great deal more from her in the future on this and many other subjects.

Before making my modest contribution, I too would like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, for introducing this debate. I started my career working for the London County Council in Stepney, Bow and Poplar, for the children’s care committee, then trained as a nurse with the Red Cross—hence my interest in this debate.

As we have heard, people with learning disabilities experience significantly worse results than the rest of the population. Bristol University’s confidential inquiry, which the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, mentioned earlier, into the deaths of 247 people with learning disabilities from 2010 to 2012, discovered that men with learning disabilities died, on average, 13 years sooner than men in the general population, and women with learning disabilities died 20 years sooner. These studies show the urgent need to improve practice within the National Health Service. I therefore welcome all efforts that the NHS is making to tackle premature mortality among people with a learning disability.

I will mention two initiatives from which I hope we can learn lessons about how to improve on these results. The clinical commissioning group improvement and assessment framework was launched in March. It includes two indicators on learning disability: reliance on specialist in-patient care and the proportion of people on GP learning disability registers receiving an annual health check. I hope this will enable us to see clearer how clinical commissioning groups are performing. In March 2015, NHS England commissioned the Learning Disabilities Mortality Review programme. This programme aims to support local and regional areas, conduct reviews of deaths of people with learning disabilities and implement the recommendations and plans of action.

I hope the Minister will be able to address these few points and so contribute to alleviating the unhappiness and stress that this causes families.

EU Referendum: Voter Registration

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

The noble Lord makes an extremely good point. I will ensure that we are thinking about that right now. I am certainly not complacent.

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome Her Majesty’s Government’s decision, but are they certain that all the calls to register were genuine and were not to disrupt the system in any way?

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, it is impossible to tell at this stage who was unable to register when the site had crashed.

Queen’s Speech

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, it is a brave Peer who says anything in your Lordships’ House about prisons with the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, present and due to speak. However, I commend the Prime Minister for including the prison and courts reform Bill in the gracious Speech and for searching for ways to reduce the number of prisoners in our overcrowded jails, as was spelled out so well by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf. The Minister of State started his speech with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, called the centrepiece of the Queen’s Speech. The Minister stressed the importance of being “accessible and proportionate” and “out of the courtroom” where necessary, and spoke about disputes being resolved through mediation rather than jail and the importance of human rights, which I imagine includes self-protection, which was put into historical context so clearly by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans.

I agree wholeheartedly with what the Minister of State said, and I have just two brief questions for the Parliamentary Secretary, my noble friend Lord Bridges. I will hardly detain your Lordships at this late stage in the debate. Following the Minister of State’s very clear opening speech, will the Government look into reforms to magistrates’ court fines and Crown Court convictions concerning listed building enforcement notices requiring two years’ imprisonment for non-compliance? There are so many of these offences yearly. Does the Parliamentary Secretary think that minor offenders, such as those contravening Section 9 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990, should be clogging up our overcrowded prisons?

Electoral Registration

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I join the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, in congratulating my noble friend Lord Wills on raising this important issue. Like many Members of your Lordships’ House, I spent many happy hours, extending to 50 years, using the electoral register for the purpose of canvassing. As my noble friend has said, the keystone of any working democratic electoral system is, of course, that there should be an accurate and comprehensive register. As he said, all political parties have subscribed to the view that individual registration is desirable, albeit that that necessarily involves much more work and perhaps more cost to ensure its efficient administration than the situation hitherto.

The electoral register primarily serves as a function of democratic politics but it also serves other purposes. We may well hear in this debate about the uses to which the register can be put—for example, in relation to jury service, the avoidance of fraud through the use of the register by credit agencies and the like. On the downside, there is legitimate concern about the use of the register by commercial organisations for the purposes of marketing and so on, but that is a subsidiary question to the one that we are addressing in your Lordships’ House today.

Democracy ultimately depends on participation, and the attitude of the Government appears to be that inclusion on the register is to be voluntary—a sort of lifestyle choice. I suspect that most of us in your Lordships’ House would take the view that inclusion on the register is in fact a civic responsibility. Many of us would go further and say that voting is a civic responsibility. Some of us might be tempted to say that voting should be compulsory, but that is not within the province of this debate and would no doubt be a more controversial proposition.

It is clear that there is a real risk of a significant decline in numbers registering under the present proposals. My noble friend has referred to the Electoral Commission’s estimate of a 65 per cent effective register. The numbers have been declining in any event over recent years; 65 per cent would put us at less than the United States, whose record in these matters generally is regarded as pretty deplorable. In evidence to, I believe, the Electoral Reform Society at an event that it staged, the returning officer for Hackney predicted a reduction of 25,000 to 30,000 from an already low base of an electorate of 165,000. That is a very significant reduction.

Of course it is right, as noble Lords have already said, to create barriers to electoral fraud, but as my noble friend rightly points out, fraud essentially has been pretty minimal. There had been concerns around postal voting, but I have to say that postal voting has substantially sustained turnout in local elections. In my own authority in Newcastle, one of the experimental policies in 2004 was to have 100 per cent registration for postal votes. Since then, the turnout in local elections has resulted in 70 per cent of those with postal votes actually voting, with only a 15 per cent turnout among those not using the postal vote. There has been no evidence or even any suggestion of postal vote fraud in that authority. So postal voting, properly administered, can certainly help sustain turnout.

Making registration voluntary is surely a mistake. It is necessary to have the sanction of a possible fine—although very rarely, if ever, used. I think that perhaps a few more cases would engender more people registering now. If voluntary registration appears to be the order of the day, it is likely to engender a significant further fall, as has happened in Northern Ireland, as has already been said. When a few years ago the poll tax was a hot political issue, we saw a substantial decline in registration. People effectively sought to evade the poll tax by keeping their names off the electoral register at a time when there were potential sanctions to be applied. Without sanctions, there may very well be an even worse level of registration and therefore turnout. As my noble friend has indicated, this is particularly likely to be the case with young people, with people from ethnic minorities and with private tenants. When one goes canvassing, as I was doing last weekend, it is striking how in areas of private-rented housing one comes across a significant number of properties where there is no name on the electoral register; it is much less the case in local authority housing or in owner-occupied areas. That constitutes disenfranchising—admittedly by omission on the part of the residents—of a significant proportion of the population.

This has effects beyond just the turnout in individual seats. Potentially it influences hugely the drawing of parliamentary boundaries. Clearly, under registration, it could significantly distort the pattern of parliamentary boundaries that was determined under the legislation passed last year. The boundaries are now to be reviewed every five years instead of approximately every 10 years, and that could, of course, significantly affect the political outcome.

One area that has not really been touched on is the position of voters who, like Members of your Lordships’ House, are entitled to vote in local elections but not in national elections. That includes EU residents. I do not think that their position has been canvassed—to use an appropriate phrase—at all in these discussions. It is perhaps a matter that ought to be considered. They are entitled to vote and there is no reason why they should not vote, since they are paying local taxes. It seems to me that it ought to be part of the responsibility of the electoral registration process to ensure that EU citizens in this country with the right to vote in local elections are included in the register.

The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons considered these matters and clearly took a strong view that the offence of failing to co-operate with the electoral registration officer should be retained; that the Electoral Commission should promote a public information campaign on a regular basis to inform people of their rights and responsibilities in this respect; that there should be, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, confirmed, a full canvass in 2014, which will be critical as we approach the next general election—assuming that we have to wait until then; and thereafter that the register should be adequately maintained.

There is a resource implication. Local authorities’ budgets are under huge pressure and it is tempting to dispense with the necessary investment in keeping a register up to date. However, the temptation should be resisted and resistance would be facilitated if a grant were specifically ring-fenced for this purpose. I am not normally in favour of ring-fencing grants to local government, but this has implications for our whole political system and is a case for which I certainly would be prepared to make an exception. A project of data-matching is also under way, and that should also be evaluated.

The Welfare Reform Bill, which has occupied the House —and will continue to do so—for some time, threatens to take us back in certain respects to the 19th century Poor Law. I hope that these changes in the electoral system do not take us back to a 19th century electorate.

[Baroness Rawlings]

Perhaps I may remind noble Lords that when the clock shows seven, they are already in their eighth minute.