Tributes: Lord Fowler

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, there are three Deputy Speakers in the Chamber at the moment—or four if we include the Lord Speaker, who of course has been promoted from Senior Deputy Speaker. We welcome him. It has been a pleasure to work with the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, as Lord Speaker. We had marvellous meetings on Thursdays, where we would talk through the business due to come up the following week and pick up some of the gossip we had heard around the Chamber. The leadership of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, of our group of deputies has been a delight to us, and I hope that he enjoyed those meetings as well. Certainly, from that point of view, we wish him every good fortune, not in retirement, as everyone else has said, but in his new existence.

The noble Lord, Lord Balfe, referred to the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to improving the image of the House. I thank him for inviting me to be the first chair of a Lord Speaker’s communications group, which has attempted to redress some of the bad media coverage that the House has received. This is very much unfinished business and I was delighted to hand over the chair to the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, who I am sure will do an even better job when that gets going.

I very much endorse what has been said about the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, gave Back-Benchers the opportunity to play a greater part through Private Notice Questions—and I can understand why the Lord Privy Seal might not be so enthusiastic about that. I should also say that the establishment of the Burns committee and the determination to keep it going is also a piece of unfinished business which I hope will go on and come to fruition.

I finish by saying that I first came across the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on 7 November 1979, when he was Secretary of State for Transport and found himself answering questions in the House of Commons about a Guardian report of that morning on the likelihood of 41 local rail services being axed—a product of what was quite clearly a conspiracy between the British Railways Board and Department of Transport officials. This was put to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler—he was not Lord Fowler then, obviously—as the Secretary of State, and he was able, on one day and in one statement, to put to an end all the speculation about cuts to the rail network on anything like that sort of scale. He said:

“Let me make it absolutely clear that the report in The Guardian is untrue. I read it with astonishment … I see no case for another round of massive cuts in the railways.”—[Official Report, Commons, 7/11/1979; col. 380.]


Those of us who care about the railways—we are now supporting the Government’s initiative to reverse the Beeching closures—are deeply grateful for what Norman Fowler did on that day and the support that he has given to our railway system since. I thank him particularly for the support that he has given me.