Olympic Games 2012: London Air Quality

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

No, my Lords. Everyone is responsible.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, what was the weather like in 1948 and, while we are at it, in 1908 as well?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I am not aware of the weather in those periods. All noble Lords know that legislation over the years has vastly improved the environment in which we live. We need only to think of the Clean Air Act and the benefits we got from it.

Postal Services Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox]

My Lords, during an earlier debate on Amendment 54 the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, asked what was meant by a consultation with the Post Office company and I should like to respond to that point now. Amendment 54 will require Royal Mail to consult a Post Office company about its activities in relation to the proportion of the archive and museum collection for which it is responsible. I hope the noble Lord finds that helpful. I beg to move.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I am most grateful for being guided on the procedures of the House and grateful to my noble friend for remembering that I raised this and providing me with the opportunity of coming to listen to her at this hour. I am still not absolutely certain that I understand what the process of consultation that she envisages will consist of, but at this late hour I would certainly not wish to press her any further than I have already.

Amendment 55 (to Amendment 54) not moved.

Postal Services Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2011 Lords Chamber

The intention behind Amendment 54 is to ensure that Royal Mail must be open and transparent about its activities with regard to the archive and the museum. It will not be able to shuffle them off into a dark corner. It requires Royal Mail to report to the Secretary of State annually on its activities. The Secretary of State will be required to lay this report before Parliament. We recognise that Post Office Ltd, while separate from Royal Mail, will have something to contribute to the report. This is why the amendment also requires Royal Mail to consult Post Office Ltd when preparing the report.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

The following line is not totally transparent:

“Before preparing the report, the company must consult any Post Office company”.

Consultation can take a wide variety of forms. Could the Minister give your Lordships’ House some idea of what kind of consultation she envisages?

[Baroness Wilcox]

I will get a note and come back to that. I will continue with my point for the moment. Amendment 55, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Clarke and Lord Christopher, would amend Amendment 54 to require the Royal Mail company’s report to include details of financial support, both in cash and in kind, for the museum collection and its archive. In tabling Amendment 54 we have not been prescriptive about what should or should not be included in the report. As I have said, we fully expect a Royal Mail company to continue to recognise the importance of its heritage. How it chooses to support the museum and archive will be a matter for the company. However, any support that it gives to the museum and archive will be an intrinsic part of its activities, and it follows that the report will include these details. It is not, therefore, necessary specifically to include this requirement in the new clause.

The Government want to see the heritage of Royal Mail preserved. Amendment 54 provides the right balance and places a sufficient spotlight on Royal Mail’s activities to ensure that the Government and Parliament have the opportunity to scrutinise those activities, and for Royal Mail to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to its heritage. I hope that your Lordships will be able to support Amendment 54. I ask the noble Lords, in view of the reassurances that I have given, kindly to withdraw Amendment 9 and not to move Amendment 55.

Postal Services Bill

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, with whom, more than 25 years ago, I negotiated across a table in the Treasury on the pay and conditions at the Inland Revenue. Likewise, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Hampstead.

This is my first participation in the proceedings on the Bill, so I should declare a coincidental interest. When I was a temporary part-time undergraduate postman in Hampstead, nearly 60 years ago, I was assigned to a delivery round in Hampstead, later served so remarkably by the noble Lord. When I told him that I had delivered Christmas mail to the late Sir Ralph Richardson, who used to open the door to me in a silk dressing gown, the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, could give me the particulars not only of that address but of the whole round. When later I lived on the south face of Highgate West Hill, immediately overlooking the garden of the noble Lord, Lord Healey, on the Holly Lodge Estate, our regency terrace abutted that shrine of philatelists, the grave of Sir Rowland Hill, the inventor of the penny stamp, in the northern element of Highgate Cemetery. I would not want whoever lives in my house today to be troubled at night because Sir Rowland was turning in his grave at the treatment of his remarkable inheritance by either Her Majesty’s Government or your Lordships’ House.

It is also a pleasure to serve as a foot soldier in the gallant band assembled under the command of the two noble Lords opposite, whose concern, inter alia, is to ensure the maintenance of our postal heritage, which is the subject of the amendment. I would be misleading your Lordships’ House if I implied that either my signature or, I suspect, that of my noble friend Lord Boswell beside me, was written in invisible ink between the particular words in all three amendments in the group. Certainly, in my case and, I suspect, that of my noble friend Lord Boswell, my heart is loyal to the general calls of the noble Lords opposite. The whole House is in their debt for providing the hook on which to hang an exploration of how far Her Majesty's Government constructively concur with that concern.

Given the interest shown in the archive beside Mount Pleasant, not only by Back-Benchers but by Ministers—I know that my noble friend Lady Wilcox has paid a visit to it, and I hope that she was as impressed as I was when the All-Party Parliamentary Arts and Heritage Group had an enthralling visitation—I am reasonably clear that Her Majesty's Government are seized of the issue. At the end of this debate, we shall all have a clearer idea of how seized they are of a solution.

Of course I can see the problems that this inheritance confers on HMG but, at this time, those problems should be a spur to an imaginative and constructive solution rather than a response of despair and inertia. When I was at the Harvard Business School more than half a century ago, an engaging professor reminded us that if you did not know where you were trying to get to, any road would get you there. Conversely, in this instance, the scale of the inheritance and the United Kingdom’s pivotal role in postal history provide the knowledge of whence we have come. The existing collection, as the noble Lord, Lord Christopher, said, is designated in the “outstanding” category, which makes it the equal of the National Archives at Kew, and no one in your Lordships’ House would suggest that we should not seek to preserve those.

I should warn my noble friend that this is a battlefield over which I have fought previously. My favourite-ever Committee stage was that of the Greater London Authority Bill in the other place, where 27 of the Committee’s 29 Members sat for London seats. The only outsiders were the Minister’s PPS, who was from Aberdeen, and the Official Opposition’s Whip. The latter had, in his day, been the leader of another metropolitan authority. Much of the initial Bill, which grew by more than 50 per cent in the number of its clauses by the end of its progress, was devoted to strategies that the Mayor had to prepare. However, there was to be no strategy for archives. I moved a small amendment in a short speech saying that there should be such an archival strategy, but warned the Minister, the right honourable Nick Raynsford MP, that if his response showed no sympathy for the idea, I had a much longer speech up my sleeve for my response. He showed me no sympathy. I delivered my gargantuan but pertinent oration. The amendment was not carried, but the debate was the foundation for a similar amendment that was carried in your Lordships’ House.

I reassure the Minister that I am not uttering that threat today because I have every confidence that her heart is in the right place on this issue. However, I will listen closely to what Her Majesty's Government propose. Since I have not put down an amendment, I would be abusing the procedures of your Lordships' House—as some may feel I have already—if I aired my views, except to say that if the Government are, almost certainly sensibly, reluctant to load burdens on to the private sector for heritage maintenance. I suspect that transferring this task to Post Office Ltd would contain what an American advertising executive once described in my hearing as “the mucus of a good idea”. To mislay or disperse four centuries of postal history would be a stain on the escutcheon of any Administration, and especially on that of the coalition.

Student Visas

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings]

My Lords, I am afraid we are out of time.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, I understand about the time, but I wish to make a complaint. More noble Lords would be able to contribute if others asked only two questions and did not make long statements. At least three noble Lords have been shut out.

Transport: Bus Stops

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, the police get involved where a parked vehicle causes an obstruction or a safety problem and they can have the vehicle towed away. Local authorities keep the revenue raised from parking fines, but they have to be hypothecated for transport-related projects.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, moving marginally from bus stops, is my noble friend aware that there is a strong correlation between cars parked in disabled parking spaces outside the main entrances to supermarkets and drivers with a criminal record?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, yet again, I was not aware of that.

Visas

Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, I believe that this happened under the previous Administration. I am not aware of the case, but I shall write to the noble Earl.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, does my noble friend, in the context of Amman, recall the exchange in 1918 in a military hospital between a visiting general and a Scottish private? The general asked the private where he had been wounded. The private replied topographically, rather than anatomically: “Three miles the Ardnamurchan side of Baghdad, sir”.

[Earl Attlee]

That is a very interesting anecdote from my noble friend.