House of Lords Commissioners for Standards

Debate between Lord Duncan of Springbank and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 26th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, I also welcome the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, being in the House today. I have two questions for him to do with Valuing Everyone. I apologise, because I know that the Motion he moved has nothing to do with that, but there are very rare occasions when we can question him and his committee on what they are doing.

When I last spoke on this issue, the Valuing Everyone course was costing the taxpayer £750,000. That now seems to have gone up, and is little short of £900,000. That seems an awful lot of taxpayers’ money to spend on a course of extremely dubious value. When the noble and learned Lord’s committee were spending this amount of taxpayers’ money, why did it not get the people it was commissioning to come and give the course to it before it signed the contract to spend all this money, so that the committee at least knew what course it was inflicting on everybody in your Lordships’ House and in the other House?

The other question is this: is this really the right reaction to a handful of people behaving in a very bad way? It seems an incredibly broad-brush approach to send everybody on a rather questionable course, when most people in your Lordships’ House behave, I would have thought, pretty immaculately. We are talking about a very small minority of people, yet we subject everybody in your Lordships’ House to going on this course and to facing certain restrictions if they do not attend. This is where I might fall out with my noble friend Lord Balfe, but I wonder whether exemplary punishments of the few people who do misbehave would be a much better use of resources and save the taxpayer enormous sums of money.

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Duncan of Springbank) (Con)]

My Lords, before I call the next speaker I will rehearse the order in which noble Lords will be called. It will be the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, next, then the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, then the noble Lord, Lord Stoneham of Droxford, and finally the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark.

Climate Change: COP 26 and Civil Society

Debate between Lord Duncan of Springbank and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 15th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

The noble Lord will be aware that very soon after that was announced, there was an election, and shortly after the election there was Christmas. Unfortunately, the cabinet committee has not yet met, but it will meet this month, very shortly. I will report back to this House on what has been discussed at that meeting.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

I congratulate my noble friend on the United Kingdom lowering its CO₂ emissions from 2% to 1% of the world’s output, but meanwhile, worldwide net emissions of CO₂ have gone up. Are we not in great danger of meeting 2050 with no net CO₂ emissions only for worldwide CO₂ emissions to have gone up, because the Chinese and Indians will have continued to build coal-burning power stations?

[Lord Duncan of Springbank]

My noble friend is right to express that simple point: carbon emissions have gone up year on year since the beginning of the COP process, and some significant emitters are doing too little to address this. The United Kingdom has been powerful in its advocacy of decarbonising, while still growing the economy. If we can continue to grow the economy and secure jobs while decarbonising, that is a model that the world should follow.