Infected Blood Compensation Scheme (Amendment) Regulations 2026
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Lord Pack (LD)
I am deeply conscious of how much knowledge many noble Lords have on this topic, knowledge that has often been tragically accumulated through their own personal experiences and those of their families. I pay tribute to those, both in this House and outside it, who have done so much to expose the scandal and to push for justice, including of course several noble Lords who have so eloquently spoken in this debate. If I may, I will briefly mention one other: my noble friend Lady Featherstone’s late sister, Della, who I remember as always such a smiling and happy person, but who was also such a formidable campaigner, driven by her own family’s tragedy.
Of course, one issue of widespread concern, as the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in particular have touched on, is the speed with which compensation payments are being made and will be made, especially given the steady death toll, sadly, of victims of this tragedy. I very much welcomed the Government’s response when the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, of which I am a member, dug into this SI, confirming that they expect the “vast majority” of payments for infected people to be made by 2027 and for those affected by 2029.
Last year, however, the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, the Minister, went a little further on 19 March, when she talked of IBCA’s
“aim to have made the majority of payments far ahead of those dates”.—[Official Report, 19/3/25; col. 1316.]
I hope she might be able to tell us what progress is being made on those more ambitious dates. When, for example, can we expect the majority of payments to be made by, and have those dates changed since the original profile of compensation spending was agreed with the Treasury?
However, even with the best possible answers on those points, it will still be several years before payments are concluded, so the fixed financial figures set in this statutory instrument and other related legislation will, as we have heard, continue to be eroded by inflation, reducing what people receive before everything is settled. I must admit that I found the Government’s explanation to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for not uprating figures to cater for inflation to be a little puzzling, because it was a two-pronged justification, the first being that it
“would not be consistent with a tariff-based approach”,
and the second being that it would be “administratively burdensome”. I find that puzzling, because there are many other SIs that come through Parliament that appear to manage both those things. Conscious of time, I will mention only one.
The Armed Forces and Reserve Forces (Compensation Scheme) (Amendment) Order 2026 takes several financial numbers related to compensation that are fixed in legislation and updates them explicitly in response to those figures having been eroded by inflation over time. The Government’s Explanatory Memorandum also talks of plans to regularly review the relevant lump sum to uprate it in future in line with inflation. That is just one of many different examples of other schemes and compensation arrangements where the Government regularly update figures in line with inflation. They do not find it inconsistent with tariff-based approaches in those other areas, and they do not find it unnecessarily administratively burdensome.
I therefore hope the Minister can, if not necessarily promise future uprating to deal with inflation, at least set out a clear path to look further at this issue. This is not just an abstract matter of geeky maths and statistical detail; it goes to the heart of whether victims of this appalling tragedy will finally be properly treated and respected by the systems that govern us. I very much hope that the Minister will respond positively on those points and on the others that we have heard in this debate.
Civil Service Pensions
Lord Pack Excerpts(2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Finn (Con)
My Lords, I apologise to the House and to the Minister for having to wear these glasses today. I am doing so on medical advice.
Before turning to the questions raised by the Statement, I want to express my deepest sympathy with the civil servants and families caught up in this failure. Many of those affected will have given more than four decades of their lives to public service. They have planned their retirement in good faith and, having left work, may now be entirely reliant on their Civil Service pension to meet ordinary household bills and maintain the standard of living for which they have worked and saved. They should not be forced to borrow, depend on relatives or postpone retirement because the state cannot administer the pension it promised them. The damage done to their finances, health and confidence is unprecedented and entirely unacceptable.
I thank the noble Baroness for giving the House the opportunity to question this important Statement. Our first concern must be the people affected, with more than 6,700 pension quotations still outstanding for past retirement dates and more than 4,100 bereavement cases on which Capita can take action. Behind every figure is a retired public servant, a grieving family or a household left in uncertainty. They must remain at the forefront of the Government’s response.
The Paymaster-General has emphasised that the Capita contract was signed in November 2023 under the previous Government. That is a relevant fact, but it cannot be the end of the matter. The Cabinet Office retained institutional responsibility throughout a two-year transition between Governments, and critical decisions on readiness, data migration, contingency planning and the go-live of the contract on 1 December 2025 were taken after repeated warning signs. The issue is not only who originally signed the contract but whether the Cabinet Office acted as a capable and sceptical contracting authority. On these Benches, our concern is not ideological and we remain agnostic about whether a service is delivered in-house or by a contractor. Either way, the Government must remain an intelligent and accountable customer.
The National Audit Office reported in June 2025 that Capita had already missed three of the six transition milestones that were then due, that the Cabinet Office had withheld £9.6 million of payments and that the service planned for launch had been simplified because important functionality would not be ready. It also found there were no fixed innovation or digitalisation milestones against which the promised benefits could be managed. In October, the Public Accounts Committee warned that there was a clear risk that Capita would not be ready to take over as planned and concluded that the Cabinet Office had not shown that it could effectively manage the outsourced administration of the scheme.
The evidence given to parliamentary committees since the collapse is more troubling still. Senior Cabinet Office officials have acknowledged that they relied heavily on assurances from Capita, that there are lessons to learn and that the department is still not fully confident in the quality of Capita’s management information. Independent technical auditors are now being brought in to test the data, systems and assumptions. That is welcome, but it raises the obvious question: why was that independent specialist verification not completed before the system was permitted to go live?
We welcome the withholding of £9.9 million from Capita and the intervention of the pensions recovery task force, but a recovery task force, however necessary, is a remedy for failed contract management. It is not a substitute for proper assurance before launch. Can the Minister therefore tell the House who authorised the go-live decision, what objective go or no-go criteria were applied, which criteria Capita had failed to meet and whether any requirements were waived? Will the Government publish the relevant readiness assessments, assurance reports and risk decisions, subject only to genuinely necessary commercial redactions?
Capita has now missed both its end-of-April and end-of-June recovery milestones. Scheme members should not be asked to rely on another unverified promise. What firm dates have now been set for clearing the overdue retirement quotations and actionable bereavement cases? Have those dates been independently stress-tested by people with the technical and operational expertise to verify that they are deliverable?
There are also wider questions about supplier management across government. Will Capita be referred to the Debarment Review Service or will it continue to be permitted to compete for public contracts without such a review? Why was Capita selected in February as the preferred bidder for the DWP-led Synergy shared services contract while serious concerns about the pension transition were already evident? What cross-government assessment of Capita’s delivery risk was undertaken before that decision was finalised?
Finally, I welcome the provision for interest where full pension benefits are paid more than one month late and the ability to seek redress for other losses through the complaints process. However, compensation delayed can compound the original harm. What service standards will apply to those complaints? How quickly will consequential losses be assessed and paid? How will the Cabinet Office ensure that Capita, not affected pensioners and not the taxpayer, ultimately bears the cost of this failure?
This is a corporate failure by Capita, but it is also a grave failure of public sector commissioning, assurance and contract oversight. Civil servants who have spent their working lives serving the country were entitled to expect the Cabinet Office to test promises, verify systems and manage risk before transferring a service on which their livelihoods depend. The Government must now resolve the individual cases urgently, compensate those who have suffered loss and demonstrate that the machinery of government has learned the fundamental lesson: outsourcing responsibility does not outsource accountability.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, Capita’s failure to meet its end-of-June deadline following the previous end-of-April missed deadline is obviously extremely disappointing, but this is a story not just of corporate failure, missed KPIs or missed calendar dates but of so many individual cases of heartbreaking distress, especially for those whose loved ones died unexpectedly and who are now left in limbo, in uncertainty and, in many cases, facing financial hardship as well.
To be fair, the Government’s rhetoric on this has been fairly robust not only in reminding us of when the original contract was signed but also, for example, in the Minister saying in the Statement:
“I will continue to apply the most stringent commercial levers”.
I note that, in the discussions in the Select Committees’ joint meeting in the House of Commons last week, there was some discussion of the pros and cons, for example, of sacking Capita outright from this contract. But one of the other stringent commercial levers that could be applied, of course, would be to raise the question whether Capita should be placed on the debarment list, if its failures in this case so significantly undermine our confidence in its ability as a company to deliver on its promises that it would not be appropriate to award it any new future contracts. Such a step might help concentrate minds somewhat when it comes to resolving the current problem.
Of course, adding any company to the debarment list—and I think this would be the first company to be so added—is, I appreciate, not a step to be taken lightly, but the scale of repeated failure in this case is quite striking, as is the scale of repeated broken promises. Capita clearly made commitments on technology and then to meet remedial deadlines that it has not met. Those commitments were not just made off the cuff, casually, at a junior level; as the Cabinet Office’s Permanent Secretary set out in her evidence in the House of Commons last week, these were very serious commitments made at senior level that have not been delivered on. Given this record from Capita, can the Minister tell us: will the Government consider commencing the process to review adding Capita to the debarment list?
I turn to the existing contract and its problems. The Cabinet Office has said—and I think this is very welcome—that it is doubling its capacity to deal with pension complaints, which will increase following these many problems. Of course, the Pensions Ombudsman, a little bit further down the track, could expect a surge of complaints working its way through the system as well. Although there have been comments and commitments about how Capita is paying some of the costs of dealing with this mess, I do not think it has been made clear yet, and I hope the Minister can therefore clarify, whether Capita will pay for the extra costs that the Cabinet Office, and in due course the Pensions Ombudsman, will incur for dealing with the complaints arising from this mess.
Given the dependency on Capita for getting the McCloud remedy cases resolved, and indeed the extra pressure of legal deadlines in those cases, what extra steps are the Government now taking, given Capita’s failure to deliver on that end-of-June deadline and the obvious doubts that therefore arise about its ability to deliver what it has promised in other key areas? That question also applies to Capita’s recently won synergy contract.
Finally, to return to the main pensions fiasco, the Minister in the Commons said the Government are imminently expecting a new update and a new set of promises from Capita. Given that we will shortly go into recess, can the Minister also update us on what the Government’s intentions are to ensure that Parliament is fully updated on those new plans before recess commences?
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I echo the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and the noble Lord, Lord Pack, and pay tribute to our fantastic public servants. Many Members of your Lordships’ House have worked extremely closely with members of our Civil Service. They deserve, at the very least, the security and dignity of a decent pension, which is their entitlement, and their deferred salary, rather than what they are currently experiencing. We are talking about people who have dedicated their careers to our public services. It should be non-negotiable that they deserve a pension service that is reliable, efficient and secure. We are, after all, discussing their deferred salary, and too many experiences have simply been appalling. When the standards they deserve are not upheld, the Government will not hesitate to act decisively to protect their interests.
The failure of Capita to meet its critical operational recovery milestones follows a complete non-delivery of promised automated technology and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Capita’s senior leadership team gave explicit personal assurances to Ministers and to very senior civil servants ahead of the handover that they were fully capable of managing the workload—yet they were clearly completely unprepared, allowing the system to become overwhelmed and the backlog to peak at a staggering 120,000 unresolved cases.
The operational reality since the transfer to Capita on 1 December has fallen far short of the required standard. As of the end of June, there were still more than 6,700 outstanding retirement quotations for past retirement dates and over 4,100 unresolved bereavement cases on which Capita could and should have taken action. The stories of members and grieving families falling into hardship are distressing and entirely unacceptable. This is why a specialist pensions recovery taskforce was established to take strategic oversight of operations and ensure no one faces financial anxiety alone.
The emergency transitional support loan scheme has been expanded, with over £15.6 million in interest-free funds already issued to more than 2,842 members who need financial support while we very quickly try to fix what is so horribly broken. Without the vital support of the Cabinet Office pensions recovery taskforce and the 140-strong government surge team, the progress that has been achieved would simply not have happened. This intervention was essential to inject immediate operational capability when the system was overwhelmed.
To reassure your Lordships’ House, as both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord have asked, public money will not be used to fund corporate failings. We will claw back every single penny of these surge costs directly from Capita. There is no intention to remove a single member of the team until the service is permanently fixed and fully restored to contractually required standard levels.
The noble Lord, Lord Pack, asked about the Pensions Ombudsman. I believe we will be several months away from that, but we will have a meeting over the summer to look at all the costs concerned. I will ensure that those potential costs are considered as part of any arrangement.
Transitioning to Capita was assessed as the operationally lower risk path to safeguard scheme continuity, given that remaining with the previous provider, MyCSP, had become commercially and operationally unviable. The only alternative proposal demanded astronomical costs and the total removal of all standard service level agreements for the contract—all while the backlog of cases was increasing by 10,000 every month while MyCSP was in charge. Crucially, ahead of a handover, explicit personal assurances were secured directly from Capita’s chief executive that they possessed the necessary operational capacity to manage the transferred workload successfully.
This is remarkable, considering that ahead of the transition the chief executive of Capita even promised that technology improvements would create a flagship use case for the largest AI-enabled pension scheme in the country. It is now clear that the non-delivery of technology has been a fundamental part of Capita’s inability to deliver. Because those guarantees have been broken, milestone payments totalling £9.9 million have been withheld. We have instructed Capita to provide a full rectification plan by 14 July— tomorrow—and every right is reserved to take further formal action, including potential litigation or direct control step-in remedies.
As both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord highlighted, Capita has missed both its end of April and end of June milestones to return service to standard, contractually required levels. These were milestone deadlines that Capita agreed to; they were not imposed on Capita. It has failed to meet its own deadlines. Its current working assumption is to systematically clear the remaining past retirement quotes and actionable bereavement backlogs throughout July and August. To provide robust oversight on the ground, we are immediately deploying independent technical auditors to review data integrity, alongside a remedial adviser, appointed at Capita’s sole expense, to force daily rectification.
On Synergy, while individual public sector deals such as the DWP Synergy contract are governed under separate legal regulations, this crisis highlights the limitations of outsourcing. Under the new public interest test, introduced on 17 June, outsourcing by default will end, and this pension scheme remains a prime candidate to be brought permanently back in-house.
The noble Baroness and the noble Lord asked me two specific questions on debarment and the Procurement Act 2023. Noble Lords will appreciate that we are in the middle of a contractual dispute, so we are following each element of our contract. I therefore cannot comment in detail on next steps regarding any contract, but all strategic suppliers remain under constant review. We will not hesitate to use our powers under the Procurement Act to investigate and, where appropriate and proportionate, exclude poorly performing suppliers from future procurements.
The noble Lord, Lord Pack, raised the implementation of the McCloud remedy. This is a complex programme requiring revised statements for approximately 74,000 pensioners and 21,000 deferred members. We are working hard with Capita to aim to keep to our target of issuing the majority of revised option statements during 2027, and we are applying rigorous commercial pressure to ensure that these public servants receive the correct pension adjustments they are owed.
I take this opportunity to confirm to Members of your Lordships’ House that current recipients of the pension scheme have not been affected by this appalling contractual failure; the problems lie with people who are seeking to access the scheme. Given how many people are members of this pension scheme, it is important that we do not scare current recipients with what is happening.
In conclusion, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, rightly pointed out, every statistic is not a number but a family, a retired civil servant—a human being not receiving their core pension entitlement. This is simply unacceptable. We will continue to use every commercial lever at our disposal to ensure that members receive what they have earned. In October, your Lordships’ House will receive a comprehensive formal update on the definitive findings of the independent audit and the longer-term structural options for the scheme.
British Industry and Services: Public Procurement
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble and gallant Lord is absolutely right: we need not just sovereign capabilities but sovereign skill capabilities so that we can build what we need, especially in the defence sector—he will not be surprised that I agree with him there. Defence is an area that we are working closely on. It is one of the pathfinder areas for the new procurement strategy that we have announced as part of the exemption from the Procurement Act 2023. A lot of this will have to be about what happens next. I was not aware of that specific case until the noble and gallant Lord raised it, but I will speak to my colleagues.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, what progress are the Government making in ensuring that procurement processes for key public services do not result in them being dependent upon digital services which could simply be terminated at the decision or whim of a foreign billionaire or Head of State, who may of course not feel inhibited by detailed contractual obligations? They may decide to switch off the service and then let the lawyers just slug it out.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I wonder who the noble Lord is talking about. He will be very aware that we have to operate within a contractual framework; we follow the rules and always will, but he raises an incredibly important point. The way in which we procure all contracts has to be considered in the round. That is why we are changing the social value test to make sure that other factors beyond pure cost are considered as part of any negotiations. But also, as the world changes, we are making sure that appropriate AI tools and others are used not only as part of the contracts but to deliver on the contracts too—they are used by government as well as by our contractors.
Political Party Finance and the Electoral Commission
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Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for such a helpful and timely debate. As we have heard from the contributions today, it is useful to debate this topic in advance of legislation coming to this House, but with a step back from the necessary microfocus we quickly get into when the legislation is in front of us. As someone who has also long called for consolidation of election law, I have been particularly heartened by the number of contributions, including the one before me, highlighting this issue and raising its importance.
When I asked an Oral Question in this place a while ago about the topic, it was perhaps understandable but a little disappointing that the Government’s position seemed to be that, because consolidation will take a long time to carry off, they were not going to prioritise it. One can therefore unfortunately characterise the Government’s position as: “Because it’s going to take a long time, we’re going to put off starting it”. The alternative interpretation is that, because it is going to take a long time to do, maybe that is all the more reason to start it sooner rather than later.
I very much agree with the comments by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, about the long delay in implementing the provision about the original source of money. It is welcome to say something nicer about the Government’s position in this case. It is welcome that the Government have definitely moved on that—it happened to be the topic of my first Oral Question in this House, and I acknowledge that the Government have moved on that issue. But underlying all this is a basic tension in a free and democratic society between, on the one hand, the basic principle of one person, one vote—an essential equality between us all—and, on the other, the fact that we all should be free to spend or give our money as we wish in a free and democratic society. That means that, inevitably, those with more money have an ability to chip away a little bit at the fundamental equality that there should be in a democracy.
Not all these issues are going to be easy to resolve or address, but it might be useful to focus on one area which has not had attention so far in the debate: donations that are made direct to candidates at election time and declared on their candidate expense returns. This is an issue on which I did some research with Chris Butler that was published in Political Quarterly a couple of years ago. I am sure all noble Lords are deeply familiar with that, but I will expand on it for those who are newer to the topic. If, for example, at general election time, someone makes a donation directly to a candidate, which is then declared on their election expense return perfectly legally and properly, the problem is that that money then essentially disappears from the system. Those donations direct to candidates do not appear in the Electoral Commission’s published register of donations.
Moreover, when Chris and I asked the Electoral Commission for copies of some of the expense returns that it had kept so that we could do our research, it decided—I am sure on good legal advice—that it could share those forms only with the names of the donors redacted for data protection reasons. We have a system where donations are declared on bits of paper but, when you ask to see those bits of paper, the name of the donor is redacted. That is, I think it is fair to say, an unsatisfactory situation. It is unsatisfactory not just in principle: our estimate was that around £3.5 million was donated at the 2019 general election in this way, so it is not merely an obscure, fun or trivial point but a route by which millions of pounds are flowing into our political system. Indeed, about one in four donations received by successful candidates who were elected were direct to them; the money was not recycled from a political party and then passed on to them. As I said, who those donations were from were, in effect, kept secret.
In some cases, where people are successful and are elected, there is the MPs’ register of interest, which people are meant to fill in and declare appropriate sums on. But that does not wholly solve the problem, because that applies only to donations of a higher threshold and only to people who are successful. The names were redacted on the forms that the Electoral Commission was willing to provide so one has to step cautiously in trying to compare those forms with the MPs’ register of interests, but Chris Butler and I found that about one in 10 of the donations appear to be of a significant enough sum to an MP that they should be on the MPs’ register of interests, and that there was no matching entry on the register of the right size. There may be some explanations in one or two cases, but there is a question about how the system does not appear to be properly joined up, and a non-trivial amount of donations that people who end up being MPs receive and should be declaring do not appear to be being properly recorded.
There are many other circumstances in which donations direct to candidates and direct to politicians are reasonable, legit and above board, and the system works well. I say that not only because, when I twice ran to be president of my own political party, I received donations directly, which are all properly recorded and can be looked up on the Electoral Commission website. I hope that the example I have given highlights how much of an issue there is around the donations of money directly to individuals.
I will briefly give one other example. It is true that the Representation of the People Bill, as it stands, introduces a cap on foreign donations, but that cap is a per candidate or per person cap. Therefore, very simply, under the current proposals any political party contesting all the seats in the country—most of the parties that contest across the board do not stand in Northern Ireland, so there are 632 seats, including the one held by the Speaker—would be able to donate 632 times the cap. As such, the figures that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, gave earlier are unduly modest on the amount of money that could legitimately be given within the spirit of what is currently proposed.
I very much hope that we will hear from the Minister some intentions and thoughts around tightening up some of the proposals, particularly for donations made directly to politicians and candidates. Of course, if the Electoral Commission is right—I grant that it will have taken specialist advice on this—that it is not allowed to release the names of those donors, that may be a suitable ground for an additional amendment to the Representation of the People Bill when it comes our way.
I will end on what may seem like a slightly less important point, but it concerns a fundamental, underpinning issue: the consolidation of election law. It is easy to always think that tidying up stuff and making it neater is never quite the priority. I confess that I have never put demanding the consolidation of election law as the headline story on the front of a Lib Dem Focus leaflet—and were I to find a colleague who was planning to do so, I would reach for the phone to tell the printers, “Don’t print this yet!”
None the less, the long-term commitment to keeping things neat, tidy, clear and comprehensible brings significant benefits. The Rycroft review rightly highlights the potential benefit in helping protect our democracy against foreign interference. Returning officers would absolutely talk about the benefits of it making their lives easier and, particularly in an environment of stretched budgets, making it more possible to run elections successfully in a more cost-effective manner. A bit like the frustrated parent who is trying to tell their teenage child to remember to tidy their bedroom now and again, I hope that, in that spirit, we will hear from the Minister on the topic of consolidation.
Civil Service Pension Scheme
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, I gently remind the noble Baroness that this contract and its details were signed by the previous Government. We are now trying to fix, and seek assurances for, a contract that has failed many people.
On the detail and the actions of the Cabinet Office, we have established a pension recovery task force led by Angela MacDonald, the Second Permanent Secretary at HMRC. There are 140 surge staff, the costs of which Capita confirmed in a letter to the Cabinet Office in April it will be funding. Capita has surged its number of support staff as well; 500 people are working on the contract, which is a 50% per cent increase on the previous contract. Clearly, however, too many individuals are waiting.
Regarding the details that the noble Baroness has requested, obviously a Statement is coming. If they are not included in that, I know she will make sure that I write to her with the details as and when we get to that point.
Lord Pack (LD)
When I previously asked the Minister in what circumstances a failure by a supplier could result in its being banned from future contracts, she said
“authorities can now also exclude suppliers who failed to rectify poor performance under a contract with a public authority despite an opportunity to do so, provided the issue is continuing”.
That sounds very much like the current situation with Capita, so I ask the Minister: how close are we now to Capita being excluded from future contracts, and what level of further failure on this contract would trigger its exclusion from any future contracts?
Democratic Institutions: Threats
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Lord Pack (LD)
As other noble Lords have done, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for securing the debate. It is good to see him continuing to be so active in this Chamber, even after stepping down from his role shadowing the Cabinet Office. The timing of the debate is particularly opportune as we are in the middle of a change of Prime Minister, because, traditionally, it is the early days of a premiership that have often been the most fruitful for taking steps to improve and strengthen our democratic systems.
As we heard from multiple contributors in the debate, there are many important challenges that we need to face. Several people made reference to the figures from the Electoral Commission, showing that only 14% of people trust politicians. I am tempted to point out that it was 10% the year before, so we have had a rise of 40% in the number of people who trust, but perhaps one should not overegg that rise too much.
As has been a regular theme through the debate, there is the significant danger of foreign interference. Given some of the comments that were made, let me give the example, which was also mentioned in this House earlier this week, of what happened when the internet was shut down in Iran: a whole load of very active social media accounts passing themselves off as UK citizens with very vocal views on Scottish independence suddenly disappeared. Those accounts were not the rumbustious exercise of freedom of speech by genuine Scots or other people in the UK; they were fakery by a foreign Government, deliberately intended to stifle the expression of free speech in this country. That is why it is so important that we take such dangers seriously.
I am afraid some noble Lords may be disappointed, but I will also mention Elon Musk, not because he has views that I disagree with but because of the way his platform deliberately, repeatedly and persistently sets out to amplify and spread violent threats against individuals. The fact that it is, sadly, now a common experience for many politicians to receive large volumes of images featuring nooses, for example, directed at them, and for X to be so slow in responding, is a genuine threat to freedom of expression and free participation in our democracy.
Of course, one should not forget the record of Vladimir Putin and Russia. There is not only a track record that has been established over many years of the Russian state being involved in violence being carried out within Britain; we also, as we saw all too recently, now have the connections between the Russian state and the direct incitement of violence involving the Prime Minister. It is right to respond to that situation. It is not a panic but a wise, careful evaluation of the evidence to think, when there are connections between the Russian state and violence directly involving the Prime Minister, that that is something we need to respond to. That, indeed, is very different from what the Russian state got up to in the Cold War. It goes beyond that.
We should recognise that there are some positives that we can build on. There has been the recent rise in turnout in elections. We may not always be happy about who people have chosen to vote for, but we are, at the moment, in a period of rising turnout, as we saw most dramatically in the most recent parliamentary by-election, with the exceedingly rare occurrence of turnout being higher than in that seat at the previous general election. According to the Electoral Commission’s data, there are high, and maybe even slightly rising, levels of satisfaction with the processes of registering to vote and voting, and, indeed, of confidence that elections here are run well. That is a very precious commodity.
However, as many have mentioned in this debate, we must not be complacent. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester rightly highlighted some of the wider social trends that are the backdrop to many of these issues. As the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, and many others mentioned, there are broader issues around trust that simply making some improvements to our democratic system on their own will not be sufficient to deal with.
However, there is good news: there are many reviews and reports, several of which have been mentioned in this debate, which give a rich menu of policy suggestions for the Government and others to pick from. There are also many legislative opportunities. All too often, we hear that something will be done “when legislative time allows”. Courtesy of the Representation of the People Bill, and indeed the commitment in the King’s Speech to legislation around the removal of peerages, we have legislative time coming up later this year in this House.
I want to concentrate for the moment on just one particular issue specific to today’s debate and to the Government’s legislative plans, which is the role of money, especially foreign money, in buying undue influence in our democracy. We are now in a new era of exceptionally highly concentrated donations. In the first quarter of this year, just two people were responsible for one-third of all the declared political donations made in the UK. Even though those sums were quite large and highly concentrated, they were still quite small compared with what a foreign Government or a billionaire could decide to spend.
For example, in the 2024 general election, Labour’s total declared national expenditure was £30 million. To those of us who have been involved in various ways with party fundraising, that feels like a lot of money: it takes a lot of raffle tickets to get to £30 million. But, in a different context, £30 million does not even buy you one F-35 aeroplane. Or, if you want to go for a slightly cheaper, slightly inferior model—I am not an expert in these things, so my pricing may not be absolutely correct—I believe the typical export price for a Su-57 modern Russian stealth fighter is around £30 million. So, if you are sat there in the Kremlin, just one plane costs the same as a complete national general election campaign by a party that won a landslide. So we should be worried about the possibilities of abuse.
I therefore very much welcome the Rycroft review and the implementation of its recommendations, so far as we have seen them, by the Government. However, they still leave a very significant set of loopholes. One I might call the “Trump loophole”. Although the Representation of the People Bill as it currently stands introduces some controls on the level of foreign ownership there can be of companies that donate to UK politics, all Donald Trump would need to do is split his ownership of a company with his children, and all of them would fall below the threshold. That is not an adequate threshold. Indeed, we recently approved in Parliament much tougher foreign ownership regulations for newspapers. It is a shame that the Government have not, so far at least, decided to drop the newspaper threshold for political finance.
There is also the donor cap in the Representation of the People Bill, which is welcome as a step forward from where we are, but, as it currently stands, is only a limit on what can be given to any one person or party in a year. If a political party has 650 candidates in the run-up to a general election, that means you can give 650 times the cap, giving a donation to each candidate and making a complete nonsense of the cap. Indeed, given that most political parties have local councillors as well, one could quite easily, and completely legitimately, give thousands of times the cap every year. It becomes not really any sort of cap at all.
I hope the Minister will be able to address four questions when she responds. One is to update us on progress in implementing the rest of the Rycroft review beyond the two measures that, to give credit to the Government, they have moved very quickly on. I know that she would not want me to disappoint her by not taking the opportunity to mention the importance of the consolidation of election law. It is very welcome to see the Rycroft review rightly highlight the need for us to have a robust and clear legislative framework for our elections. However, I hope the Minister can also explain, given that the newspaper ownership threshold was set so much lower for foreign interference in our media, why the Government have chosen not to set that threshold but instead to set a much more generous one when it comes to donations into our democratic system.
More generally, the narrow remit of the Rycroft review is specifically around finance, which is not the only form of foreign interference in our politics. What plans do the Government have to go beyond that in their further work? Our democracy requires nurturing and protecting. We need to be free to hold our own debates and make our own decisions free from foreign interference, so that we can exercise our own freedom.
Social Media: Use of X by Government Departments
Lord Pack Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Lord Pack
To ask His Majesty’s Government, in light of the Attorney General’s instructions to his Office to stop using social media platform X, what plans they have to review the use of that platform by other government departments.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government use a wide range of digital platforms to reach and engage citizens. We continuously evaluate channels for brand safety and suitability. In government, paid advertising on X has been suspended since April 2023, which means that no taxpayers’ money has been spent with the platform. Individual departments manage their own accounts, ensuring that activity is proportionate, appropriate and relevant to their audiences.
Lord Pack (LD)
Given the many issues with X, such as its frequent lethargy in reacting to extreme racial abuse or even violent threats, why do the Government continue to repeatedly single out X specifically for promotion above and beyond other social networks in so much of their activity, such as in the official signatures appended to many government emails, or in the Home Office’s own social media policy, which singles out X in encouraging people to use it? Is it not time to end this preferential treatment for Elon Musk?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord has been campaigning on this issue for many years, including before he entered your Lordships’ House. A level of pragmatism needs to be adopted. We need to talk to the electorate and to our citizens where they are, and not necessarily on which platforms we wish they were on. When 19.2 million British citizens use X, it is an important place, which I guess is why the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, is still on X.
Foreign Interference in UK Democratic Processes
Lord Pack Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
We do not routinely comment on security matters. We are absolutely committed to safeguarding the UK’s elections and have well-established processes to protect democratic integrity across the country. The Government are implementing the counter political interference and espionage action plan through the Defending Democracy Taskforce to reduce foreign interference and espionage threats. The Government continue to work closely with our international partners to increase democratic resilience and counter the threat of foreign misinformation, manipulation and interference.
Lord Pack (LD)
Since my Question was submitted, we have had the disturbing news of the convictions of two people apparently with Russian links for arson attacks related to the Prime Minister. The very welcome recent Rycroft review’s remit, however, looked only at financial influence from overseas, so is now not the time for a broader review of foreign interference in all forms in our democracy?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord raises a genuinely important point. The responsibility of every Government is to make sure that we keep all our citizens safe. We have seen significant state-based interference, both violent and online, in our democratic space. But rest assured that the Government keep these issues under review every day.
Lord Mandelson Humble Address
Lord Pack Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Pack
To ask His Majesty’s Government what further steps they are taking to retrieve information in relation to the matters covered by the Humble Address dated 4 February relating to the appointment of Lord Mandelson as HM Ambassador to Washington; and what assessment they have made of the extent to which relevant records, communications, and other material remain available.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government have published all available material, with the exception of a small number of documents that were withheld at the request of the Metropolitan Police, making this the largest ever government response to an humble Address. The Government now consider that they have duly discharged the duties set out in this humble Address.
Lord Pack (LD)
In recent days, we have seen various WhatsApp messages passed to the media that were not handed to the Government for publication as part of the humble Address. Obviously, we do not know who passed those messages to the media, but does it not highlight the importance of ensuring that current and former Ministers and ministerial appointees fully co-operate with such processes? So would the Minister commit to reviewing the terms of the taxpayer-funded settlement payments or pensions for such people to ensure that, if, in future, people do not fully comply with such processes, there will be financial consequences?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The noble Lord raises an important point about compliance with the will of both your Lordships’ House and the other place with regard to an humble Address. With regard to the specifics about any penalties, the Government currently have no plans to change the ministerial pension scheme, as I have put in writing several times to the noble Baroness, Lady Finn. However, I appreciate the noble Lord’s concern and I am sure there will be ongoing reviews.
Cabinet Manual: Guidelines for Government Formation
Lord Pack Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
The Prime Minister remains in place, and he has our full and utter confidence.
Lord Pack (LD)
The Rycroft review warned that our fragmented statute book—with redundant provisions left unrepealed, measures passed by Parliament never commenced and consolidation deferred again and again over many decades—poses a genuine practical risk to our democracy and our national security, yet the Cabinet Manual section on legislation omits those basic housekeeping tasks of commencement and consolidation. Will the Minister commit to consulting fully on ensuring that those key tasks are included in the next edition of the Cabinet Manual?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, given that the current manual is being redrafted as we speak, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the detail. However, to reassure Members of your Lordships’ House, we have asked both the Lords Constitution Committee and PACAC in the other place for their assistance on the consultation with parliamentarians across both Houses. How they choose to do so will be a matter for them.