Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

Lord Faulks Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Tuesday 24th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

I was on the Financial Exclusion Committee. When we talk about targeting the vulnerable, it is not a matter of someone taking all the numbers or addresses out of a book; it is done scientifically. These people look at the vulnerable and consider when they will be vulnerable and how they will get at them.

The amendment includes digital. We were given evidence that single, older and vulnerable people were especially targeted digitally in the middle of the night. So if they are not sleeping well and switch on their computer, what comes up? We should not think that this is just blanket coverage and some of these people picked it up. The high numbers we have been given are targeted numbers and therefore the response rate, sadly, is very high. These are the people we are trying to protect.

We would like to reduce the number of cold calls that people receive purely by chance and do not listen to, but far too high a proportion of these cold calls are listened to because they are targeted on vulnerable individuals in our society.

[Lord Faulks (Con)]

My Lords, I join this debate relatively late and I hope the House will forgive my intervention. I speak from the position of having been a Minister in the Ministry of Justice. One of my tasks was to try to do something about cold calling and the frustrations and distress it can cause. The noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, was right to identify whiplash injuries and, more recently, the problem with holiday sickness. It is a scandal and one is acutely conscious that the vulnerable should be protected from this offensive practice.

My question to the Minister about the amendment is this: is this really the right body for this particular function? I note that the drafting by the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, the skill of which I admire, tacitly acknowledges this by giving the body a consumer protection function which seems, on the face of it, rather beyond its original remit; albeit it includes a consumer protection function, I accept. Then there are the various stages which are included in Amendment 2 and the riders in Amendment 7. This is quite a cumbersome method of achieving what I think all the House will agree is a satisfactory aim, which is to prevent cold calling.

I understand that the Government are committed to doing something about cold calling. Various attempts have been made before and I acknowledge that they have not been as successful as they should have been, but this does not seem to be the obvious fit for such an initiative. Can the Minister satisfy me and the House that the Government intend to bring forward appropriate legislation if they believe, as I suspect they may, that this is not the right vehicle for that process?

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[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I can be helpful on a couple of the points just raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. These amendments ban solicitations in real time, as he will have noticed. That obviously excludes letters. It means that you can send information through the post; no one would wish to prohibit proper kinds of marketing. It is the nuisance and intrusion and the element of pressure that comes from that real-time activity that is the pernicious side of solicitation. That, essentially, is cold calling and is exactly what this is intended to deal with.

The noble Viscount suggested that financial education and capability are the way to go; indeed, many in the Government feel that that is the route to deal with cold calling, so that people know to hang up. However, the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, was very clear in illustrating that, while we all get cold calls, we are merely the tip of an iceberg. For those who pursue this, the real focus is on people who are absolutely the most vulnerable. Being realistic, financial education and capability, even on the most extraordinary scale, would be very unlikely to provide adequate protection to that group of people who are now constantly being abused.

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, if this body is not associated with consumer protection, quite frankly I wonder what this body is for. That is the underlying premise that sits behind both the predecessor groups that are now being put into the single financial guidance and advice body. It is essential to bring this on to the face of the Bill in a very clear way, as it is the underlying motivation and characterisation of this body, and certainly it is a responsibility.

The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, also suggested that the Government do intend to move in this area. We have been hearing that for an incredibly long period of time and, with constant pressure, perhaps one day the Government will move. The problem is that we need protection now. We need protection in the near term because, as my noble friend Lord Sharkey, the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and others have illustrated, this has grown in such scale and momentum that there are daily victims. Every day that we wait there are more victims. Since it is completely unnecessary to wait because the language in this Bill serves the purpose, then in a sense it would be extraordinary to say we will sit back and wait 18 months or two years or whatever else, allowing people to be abused. We can bring a stop to it now in a very simple and straightforward way.

If I understand the Government correctly, they are willing to look at certain targeted areas in which to stop cold calling but not to provide a stop to cold calling in each area where there is clear detriment, which is what the amendment allows through use of this new single body to identify and communicate that detriment. These organisations are so slick and quick they can move from one topic to another very rapidly—you close one door and another door gets opened. For example, we stopped cold calling on mortgages. That is an excellent example that tells you we can do it. It is straightforward. The dimensions are understood. The complexities are well-considered and we have plenty of track record to look back at to make sure that it is done well. We have all of that in place. However when cold calling on mortgages was banned, it shifted on to the next issue—currently, it is pensions, claims management and holiday sickness. Everybody can be absolutely sure there will be something new, provided loopholes are left, by simply attacking one issue here and one issue there. That is the beauty of this particular amendment: it gives us the power to deal with this whole industry, the same people and the same players.

I shall make one last remark and then sit down. I want particularly to congratulate the four noble Lords whose names are on this amendment, all of whom have been working so hard in this area. Three of them are here today, able to speak for themselves, but one of them cannot. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, as we know, has been a real mover and shaker on these issues, not just over cold calling for pensions—pensions are her area of real expertise and we have heard her on that—but we have also heard her in this House speaking around the much broader issue as well, which is why she has put her name to the amendment. She had a speaking engagement at lunchtime in the Midlands which she felt she could not cancel. She has not eaten lunch but run to the train station. She is on the train which pulls in to the station at 4.30 and had been greatly hoping there would be a Statement today that would delay this long enough that she could be here to join in with this particular section of the debate. I am sure she will speak in later parts of this Report.

The noble Baroness should not be left out when we recognise that the movers and shakers on this are from every side of the House. This is not a partisan or party-political set of amendments. This is a set of amendments by Members of this House who recognise their responsibility to protect those who are most vulnerable now, before more damage is done, and I hope the Government will see it that way.

[Lord Faulks]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, will she clarify one thing? She was critical of my suggestion that the insertion of the consumer protection function is in some way an attempt to expand the scope of the SFGB. She said, quite correctly, that it is part of the SFGB’s function to protect consumers, but surely the purpose of this amendment is to expand the scope of its activity beyond that which is already in the Bill so that it can deal with matters that are beyond what is apparently in other parts of the Bill.

[Baroness Kramer]

I thought that we could only speak once on Report, but I hope that the House will excuse me if I get to my feet again. Fundamentally, I disagree with the noble Lord. Consumer objectives are merely bringing to the face the underlying discussion and the ethos which sits entirely behind this body and every one of its instructions. If the noble Lord reads all the roles and responsibilities and the debates about those roles and responsibilities, he will understand that this meshes perfectly with these activities. It strengthens its hand in an obvious way, rather than leaving it in a slightly awkward, ambiguous situation.

Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill

Lord Faulks Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, this is a momentous piece of legislation, arguably the culmination of a development of the law that began with the Wolfenden report. Why is it so controversial?

The first reason is that many fear that there will be inadequate protection for religious organisations and individual ministers. There has been a plethora of legal opinions on this subject and I have read, I think, all of them. The main cause of legal alarm in this context is that the European Court of Human Rights, or even our courts interpreting the convention in accordance with the Human Rights Act, may penalise those who for religious reasons do not want to be involved in any way with same-sex marriage.

I do not share the enthusiasm of some noble Lords for the Strasbourg jurisprudence and have very considerable reservations about the Human Rights Act. One of my principal quarrels with the Strasbourg court is its repeated failure to afford individual states what is known as “the margin of appreciation”. Where Parliament has expressed a clear statutory intention or otherwise manifested its view in an unambiguous way, the European Court of Human Rights should be very slow indeed to interfere. However, despite such expressions of purpose—for example, on prisoner voting—Strasbourg has decided that our law is non-convention-compliant.

However, the court in Strasbourg has shown considerably more reluctance to interfere in areas of life where religious freedoms are involved. Article 9 of the convention guarantees the right to freedom of religion, and I agree with those distinguished lawyers who have advised on this point. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, are very confident lawyers. They say that it is inconceivable that there should be a challenge. I am perhaps not as confident as they are—few lawyers are. However, the robustness of the challenge so far seems to be sound. The parliamentary draftsmen, by their so-called quadruple lock, seem to have skilfully ensured that the Bill is as Strasbourg-proof as it reasonably can be.

I have some residual anxiety because the convention is what is called in Strasbourg a “living instrument” and there is nothing to prevent the court taking a different view in the future, particularly if one has regard to the rather different approach that is adopted to precedent in Strasbourg compared with how our courts operate. However, no Government can legislate in complete certainty that a Bill will survive any legal challenge. It is almost certain that some litigation will be generated by these provisions. Of course, that is not desirable but it cannot be avoided where some who are genuinely alarmed at the change in the law and others who are merely mischievous may seek to use the courts. However, it seems most unlikely that these challenges will produce any success and they should peter out in due course. I do not agree with the scenario described by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, of endless litigation costing millions of pounds. He did not identify the basis of such potential legal challenges.

As well as concerns about religious freedom, there is a substantial body of opinion which feels that this Bill undermines “traditional” marriage. This seems a highly respectable and understandable response to such a cultural change. But marriage has changed over the centuries and from generation to generation. I understand the anxieties of those who feel that it is being irrevocably altered, but surely my noble friend Lord Jenkin is right that marriage will not be changed retrospectively or prospectively by this Bill. However, in our desire to embrace equality in this context, we must be careful that we do not create a new illiberalism. To describe those who oppose same-sex marriage as bigoted, even in the first draft of a speech, seems highly regrettable. Indeed, I salute the noble Lord, Lord Dear, for his tenacity and sincerity in opposing this Bill.

On the question of civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples, the Government have correctly changed their position to a consultation. I do not think that a party or a Prime Minister who brings forward this legislation can fairly be regarded as “obsessed” with gay marriage. In fact, one of the consequences that I envisage if this Bill becomes law is that the question of somebody’s sexual orientation will become less and less a matter of consequence or even—dare I say?—of interest.

Looking back at the debates that followed the Wolfenden report is a salutary experience. It was not my party that was responsible for the 1967 Act, and I am not altogether convinced—to put it mildly—that if it had been in power such legislation would have been passed. I am therefore particularly pleased that a Conservative-led Government are responsible for this landmark piece of legislation. I am not making a party-political point because I expect that the party opposite would have brought in similar legislation. But I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in her winding-up speech, to confirm whether or not that would have been the case.

At a time when we as a Parliament are not highly regarded, we should be proud that there are young men and women—and not so young men and women—who will feel more and more that a society that benefits from their contributions in terms of both their talent and their taxes is now valuing them properly and no longer barring entry to what is to so many the central relationship of their life.

Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill

Lord Faulks Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, the Government introduced at a late stage in the Commons proceedings, and with very little consultation, a clause to remove civil liability from health and safety offences. This would mean, as has already been explained, that a worker who is injured because their employer broke the law by failing to carry out a statutory obligation would find it much more difficult to claim compensation for the injury. It would also make the law much more complex. As a result, many workers or their dependants will lose out on compensation, causing further injustice.

The Government have claimed that they introduced this amendment to implement a recommendation from the recent Löfstedt report into health and safety regulations. However, Professor Löfstedt has since made it clear that this is not what he proposed and the government amendment went well beyond what he recommended.

We voted to remove the clause in a move that was welcomed by victims’ groups, the legal profession and health and safety professionals. The Commons, however, has voted to disagree with our amendment. I do not know why. We should maintain the position that we took up before; it is reasonable and fair. We have to remember that there are many industries anyway where there are inherent dangers to workers. Where there are statutory regulations, those should be applied and the workers should be able to claim if those statutory regulations are not complied with, which is what the present law provides for. We have been advised by lawyers concerned with these employment issues that if the amendment we are proposing is not carried and the Government’s position is maintained, we would be taking the law and the employment right consequent upon it way back beyond the beginning of the previous century. That really is quite unacceptable, and I hope therefore that your Lordships will agree to maintain the position that we took before as far as this clause is concerned.

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, I was unable to attend previous debates on this clause but I have had an opportunity of reading what was said in your Lordships’ House and in the most recent debate on the amendment in the other place last week. I declare an interest as a practising barrister with experience in this area of the law and as a former special adviser to the last Government on an inquiry into the compensation culture.

Noble Lords, and particularly the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, in a number of thoughtful contributions to the debate, suggested that to legislate on the mere perception of a compensation culture was to do so based on a “flimsy structure”. He accepted that there had been a problem of overcompliance with health and safety but he said that there was now a problem with undercompliance. I am unsure of the basis for this last assertion and it is not reflected by the report of Professor Löfstedt or by the report two years ago by my noble friend Lord Young of Graffham. Both identified a perception of a compensation culture, as did the report produced by Parliament when I was a special adviser. This cannot be dismissed on the basis that to respond to it is simply to pander to myths. There is a strongly negative effect on employers and indeed on schools and local authorities which feel the need to set up elaborate systems to combat largely hypothetical risks. Overcompliance costs time and money and makes it more expensive and less attractive to employ anyone, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises.

The aim should surely be to ensure that all reasonable steps are taken to protect the health and safety of employees, but at the same time employers should not be overburdened with unnecessary and elaborate bureaucracy which can be the enemy of enterprise. I accept that this is a very difficult target to hit and I confess to being a little nervous about how much is left to regulation. However, I feel much more confident in saying that the debate, principally in the other place, was positively riddled with hyperbole. Both there and in your Lordships’ House the opposition Front Bench used the expression “a near impossible burden” when describing the prospects of a claimant bringing a successful action for injuries at work. I simply do not accept that. A breach of a regulation will be regarded as strong prima facie evidence of negligence. Judges will need some persuasion that the departure from a specific and well-targeted regulation does not give rise to a claim in negligence.

Many regulations are sensible, comprehensible and can be effectively interpreted both by employers and the courts, but this is not always the case. For example, the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1992 were revoked and re-enacted by similar regulations in 1999. Originally they did not give rise to a civil course of action—they now do. The regulations are extraordinarily wide and extraordinarily vague and seem to require extremely elaborate arrangements, ostensibly for health and safety purposes, in particular as to risk assessments. What a risk assessment is and how you prove you have done an appropriate one is problematic. It seems to require quite a number of employees simply to be devoted to compliance with the regulations rather than actually doing the underlying work.

It was said in the other place that this prospective change in the law was “not about compensation” but about “not being killed” and that the change was not simply a matter of red tape. I am afraid that I do not agree with the burden of those comments. Nor are the Government seeking to turn back the clock a hundred years. Rather, these provisions are a response to an overreaction to an entirely appropriate aim which is to ensure health and safety at work. The problem of overreaction is having a negative effect on enterprise. To borrow the title of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Young, the aim of this change in the law is to restore common sense and common safety. I support the Government’s position.

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[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

My Lords, we remain steadfast in our opposition to the Government’s position, and fully support the case led by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, and spoken to in support by my noble friend Lady Turner and the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. We are dismayed that parliamentary process has allowed so little time for consideration of this matter in the House of Commons and that more than a century—in fact, nearly 150 years—of settled law is being overturned on the basis of such brief deliberation.

The arguments to remove Clause 61 from this Bill have not of course changed in the few weeks since we last debated the matter. Nor have the serious consequences which will ensue should we not carry the day. Removal of the existing right of an employee to rely on a breach of health and safety legislation represents a fundamental shift, and one which is to the detriment of employees.

We heard before, and again today, that having to prove negligence will provide a more difficult route to getting redress. The burden of proof will shift to employees, or to the family in the case of a fatality at work, there will be a requirement for more evidence-gathering and investigation, and the incurring of greater costs. In that respect there will be no lessening of the regulatory burden on employers. This change goes well beyond the issue of strict liability which the Government’s own impact assessment accepts is likely to give rise to only a small number of claims.

The issue of a near impossible burden referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, I think in our previous debate, was not applied generally but specifically to those circumstances where strict liability has hitherto been in force.

[Lord Faulks]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. The point is that there is always a claim, as I am sure he will agree, in negligence. Whether there is a breach of a regulation will be strong evidence of a departure from an appropriate standard of care. All that is changing is simply that it is not actionable per se. I would like the noble Lord to say why he adheres to his suggestion that there is a near impossible burden.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton]

The point I sought to make is that in some circumstances it has been accepted, I believe, that there is a near-impossible burden. That is not necessarily the case, but even the route to proving negligence is a greater burden than the route to proving breach of statutory duty, which is what operates generally at the moment. The “near-impossible burden” description was particularly applied to those areas where strict liability applies in circumstances related to the provision of equipment, where purchased, maintained and sourced by the employer, and the employee is in a disadvantaged position in seeking to prove negligence.

The impact assessment recites the belief in a compensation culture which is having an impact on the behaviour of business. However, even if true, why on earth should it be a justification for reducing access to justice for employees injured or made ill by their work? This cannot be a rational basis for acting. Why should employees bear the strain of tackling these perceptions? Where is the evidence that unreasonable claims are being made and indeed settled? If there are fewer claims, the beneficiaries, as we have heard, will be the insurance companies, the providers of employer liability insurance. Where the Government are particularly remiss is in failing to see this from the perspective of the individuals who are injured at work, because one way or another they and their families will bear an increased burden. They may be forced to place greater reliance on the health, caring and benefits system. What does the Minister say to those families whose circumstances may have been eased by receiving compensation but who face a life on benefits in the future? Health and safety impacts on the lives of millions of individual employees every day of the week. It is not some distant concept related to red tape.

There is undoubtedly some overcompliance with health and safety requirements, but there are ways in which this can and is being tackled. The register for consultants is one route that the HSE is seeking to apply. However, there is also undercompliance. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, asks what my evidence is for that. Let us look at the data. People are still being killed at work and hundreds of thousands of people are injured every year. I spent three and a half years as Minister for health and safety. We know those sectors where there is a struggle to get compliance. It does not operate across the board. There are some very good employers who try to do the decent thing, but there are some who do not. This undercompliance has been made worse by restrictions on funding, by limiting the regulator’s role in proactive workplace inspections, and by the portrayal of health and safety as red tape and its undermining by myths that bear no relation to reality. Promoting the changes in Clause 61 will also send the wrong message to those employers who would undervalue health and safety and cut corners, safe in the knowledge that their chances of being held to account are diminished. This is to the detriment not only of employees but of those many employers who do the right thing.

The Government’s position is untenable. It is changing the settled legal position of over a century on the basis of anecdote and perceptions. It is making it harder, sometimes impossible, for employees to access justice when they are injured at work. It is undermining the cause of health and safety. The Government have failed to consult properly on this or make reference to the EU. They offer an inappropriate remedy to any perceived compensation culture which can and should be addressed by other means. Most of all, they are careless of the personal cost to those who are damaged by their work. That is why we support the amendment of the noble and learned Lord.

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[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

The noble and learned Lord makes a fair point. Employers will continue to need to have to defend themselves. The issue depends entirely on the particular case in hand but this government action redresses a balance that is long overdue.

[Lord Faulks]

Before the Minister sits down, I am sure he will agree that, while some of the regulations have the defence referred to by the noble and learned Lord, quite a few of them do not provide this defence at all and there can be automatic liability without any fault. Does he agree that one of the problems of the perception of a compensation culture—there was perhaps an inadvertent hint of this—is the fact that these changes are not welcomed by safety consultants or those who are concerned to gold-plate some of these regulations?

[Viscount Younger of Leckie]

I am grateful for the points made by my noble friend. That is a very helpful intervention.

Health and Safety: Common Sense Common Safety

Lord Faulks Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Faulks]

My Lords, it has become something of a convention in maiden speeches to acknowledge the friendliness and assistance which new Peers receive on arrival in your Lordships’ House. I express my own thanks not because of the convention but because of my sincere appreciation of the many instances of help and guidance that I have received from all the staff, some of whom I know from Committee Rooms 1 and 2 in a rather different capacity. Noble Lords, when spotting a lost figure, have been quick to engage and I have been the recipient of much good advice. I know that many noble Lords consider that the House is overcrowded and even that there should be a moratorium on further appointments, but they do not let it show.

Some have expressed polite curiosity about me, and it may assist if I give the House some brief answers to questions that might be posed. My name is pronounced “Faulks”—as in “Old Folks at Home”—thereby distinguishing me from the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock. The physical resemblance I bear to the novelist Sebastian Faulks is not a coincidence—I am his brother—and in answer to a possible supplementary question, sadly I have not, unlike many noble Lords who are here and those who are shortly to arrive, written novels. The limit of my published output is as a contributing editor to the snappily entitled Local Authority Liability—not much chance of a film there.

I said that I had received much local advice from noble Lords. However, on the subject of maiden speeches, that advice was by no means consistent. By some I was told that as it is not necessary to be particularly relevant, and certainly not controversial, it might be better to choose a subject I know little about. That left me with quite a lot of choice. However, the compensation culture is a subject with which I do have some familiarity. I declare an interest as a practising barrister who has spent the past quarter of a century defending increasingly imaginative claims brought against public authorities. I was also a special adviser to the Department for Constitutional Affairs on the compensation culture in 2005 and 2006.

In that context, as an outsider to Westminster I was very impressed by the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry and the consensus that emerged despite party differences. The conclusion was that there was not in truth a compensation culture but rather the perception of one. One of the results was the passing of the Compensation Act 2006, which declared that judge-made law was indeed the law and put the language of the House of Lords Judicial Committee into statutory form. It is not legislation that is often relied upon in court. Legislation is not always the answer, or certainly not the complete answer.

However, the compensation culture, whether based on hard facts or on perception, remains an important issue, with its stultifying effect on so much that is good about our society. I very much welcome the report of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Graffham, full as it is of eponymous common sense.

One of the report’s many merits is the broad-ranging implementation strategy. The role of legislation is only one part of this; indeed, it is a battle to be fought on many fronts. The report recognises the tawdry and unedifying aspects of personal injury litigation that have developed—the crude advertising, referral fees and the fact that too often claims become about costs rather than the merits of the case. All these are an embarrassment to most lawyers, and I welcome the suggestions in the report that should reduce, or indeed eliminate, many of the more unattractive features of the compensation landscape.

Another strength of the report lies in the fact that it represents the aspiration of many Administrations: namely, joined-up government. There are frequent references in the report to the recent proposals for reform of civil litigation funding and costs and to the proposals for reform for legal aid. The case for reform is described in the latter as being guided by,

“the desire to stop the encroachment of unnecessary litigation into society by encouraging people to take greater personal responsibility for their problems”.

So there is a clear policy at work in addition to a broad aspiration.

I have only one reservation about the report: the omission of any significant reference to the Human Rights Act. Whatever views on that there are in the coalition Government and outside, those of us who act for public authorities on a regular basis know that they face a wide variety of claims that are based upon it. Such claims have become an expensive and complex feature of litigation in this area. I appreciate that we may have to wait for the commission under the Deputy Prime Minister to report on the Human Rights Act, but it may be worth emphasising that you can be passionately in favour of human rights as a concept and have distinct reservations about the way in which the Human Rights Act works in practice.

In the rhetoric that surrounds the compensation culture, there is the undeniable implication that many of those who act for the claimants are unscrupulous or, in the popular phrase, “ambulance chasers”. I have to say that, although I almost invariably act for defendants, the type of lawyer who acts for claimants very rarely matches this stereotype. Most work very hard for their clients, many of whom are seriously injured and who need their legal representation to enable them to obtain compensation. I very much hope that one of the results of the steps that the report envisages will be a restoration of the reputation of lawyers who practise in this field.

Nor have judges entirely escaped criticism. Although, sadly, it does not always accept my submissions, the judiciary in this country is of the highest quality, both in its intellectual calibre and its incorruptibility. Despite the reservations expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, I remain proud of a legal system in which so many members of my family have played a part in the past 100 years.

As I stand here in the quiet of the Chamber, I can hear the not-so-distant sound of galloping hooves bringing news of reform to your Lordships’ House. I do not know for how long I will remain a Member. It is, however, an extraordinary privilege to be here at all.