Employment Rights Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 28th October 2025 Lords Chamber

I feel this is a bit like Groundhog Day. We are back stuck with a model which will either be a labyrinth or a straitjacket, which will end up blocking innovation and—ironically—will damage and hold back the earnings and prospects of the very staff whom all of us in this House wish to support.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Motion N1 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and declare that I am still a teacher in a state secondary school in Hackney, east London.

In over 10 years of teaching, I have encountered tens—maybe not hundreds—of TAs, technicians, IT staff, catering staff, site staff and all the support staff who make schools function. My subject, product design, is entirely reliant on technicians. They set up and prepare materials, maintain equipment and teach skills to us and the students.

I have seen technicians who had to be hunted out from one cigarette break to another to do their job, and those who have used the school’s 3D printer to print a better 3D printer, to print a better 3D printer, and so on. Support staff are not all the same. Some are quite happy to do the basic 8 am to 3.30 pm job and are content to be paid for that, while others will take on extra responsibilities and duties.

I had one very fine technician who would not go into the classroom while students were there, because he used to be paid extra for a teaching role, but the Government abolished it. Quite rightly, he would say that if he was not paid to do the job, he would not do it. I have also seen technicians paid well over the going rate because schools could see that they were irreplaceable; otherwise, their job would have to be done by teachers who had neither the skill nor the time.

At the moment, these decisions rest with heads of department, who can make them. Schools need that flexibility. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, very sensibly creates a floor, not a ceiling, on pay, as in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, meaning that all get a decent wage, but those who put in extra time and effort get rewarded. Should she be minded to test the opinion of the House, I will be with her.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, very briefly, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, on making progress, along with the cosignatories of that amendment. I also congratulate the noble Lords, Lord Faulkner and Lord Parkinson, who have realised a lifelong dream of putting children back to work on the railways.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 11th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a joy to follow a couple of Earls, except possibly into battle. It was a great pleasure to hail the noble Lord, Lord Brady of Altrincham, and bid farewell to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. I enjoyed both their speeches very much.

I spoke at length in the debate on the reform of the House of Lords, so I will stick to the Bill. At first reading, I was reminded of the words of the popular music group Bananarama when they sang

“Na na na na


Na na na na

Hey hey hey

Goodbye”,

for is a very simple Bill, somewhat terminal for some of us. I was tempted to draft an amendment adding the words “except for my friends and me”, but I did not think that the Public Bill Office would wear that one.

We have a problem: people like their hereditaries. We are house-trained, hard-working—we turn up. Considering this problem, I had one of those lovely conversations you have in the House of Lords. Walking down the corridor, I met a Peeress whom I knew by sight, and we got talking. We started talking about the hereditary peerage and she said, “The problem is, you have to separate principle from the people”. That is what we have to do here. How do we separate the emotion from the legislation?

As ever, we can learn from the American military. In his very fine book, “The Men Who Stare at Goats”, Jon Ronson talks about how American special forces trained. They had a kennel of dogs; they would take a dog, shoot it with a bolt gun, then train one of their men to give it a wound dressing as if it had been shot. The trouble was that, after a while, people got too attached to the dogs and could not do it. After a lot of experimentation, the American military discovered that no human can form an attachment to a goat, so the Americans now train on goats. Noble Lords need to start thinking of the hereditary Peers as goats.

My father served in your Lordships’ House for 25 years, retiring in 1999, when the House was dominated by hereditary Peers with perhaps a less diligent approach to turning up. When he was asked whether it worked, he tended to say, “Yeah, pretty well. The only time it gets weird is when there are debates on horseracing or fly-fishing and suddenly you get groups of men around the place who have no idea where the lavatories are””

When this is all over and the hereditaries have been moved out of the House, if noble Lords ever think of me, I hope they will think of me sitting quietly at home with my wife, with the butler ironing my copy of the Times Educational Supplement—or perhaps on a crisp morning riding to hounds on Hackney marshes. If they think of me at all, I hope they will think, “Ah, Hampton—he knew where the lavatories were”.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 12th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor.

On 13 October 2022, I won a Cross-Bench by-election by one vote, causing the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, to describe me as the least safe seat in the country. I think he followed that by saying you could not make it up. There was 70% turnout and single transferable vote—democracy at its finest. Unfortunately, I was keenly aware that all 12 candidates and the electorate of 30 were all men, not exactly representative of the UK as a whole. Like my noble friend Lord Devon, I was also keenly aware that, as the seventh Baron Hampton—I am the youngest of three and my father was the youngest of four—an estimated 16 females had been bypassed in the passing on of the title.

It is difficult to justify, although some noble Lords have made a pretty good fist of it. However, it is the only way that a working secondary school teacher could get into the House of Lords. The head of an academy trust? Yes. An ex-Education Minister? Certainly. That is what I do, as do many of my noble friends among the hereditaries. We have some quite real jobs.

The House of Lords fundamentally works but needs a few tweaks. The age debate is strange to me. Why would you get rid of all this expertise? As many noble Lords have said, why not give HOLAC more power and let it decide? Obviously, the hereditary Peer by-elections would have to go, but those deemed useful and who had done good work could be turned into life Peers. This fulfils the manifesto pledge. As the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and others have said, all prime ministerial and party appointments should be stopped. HOLAC should have powers over who gets appointed. New appointments could be capped—two out, one in, perhaps—to bring the numbers down under the Burns principle. The numbers could be judged on the last general election. Cross-Bench numbers could be in line with the Official Opposition. Also, as we have said many times, all those who commit serious breaches should go.

Regardless of age, every Peer should have a seven-year fixed term, but they can reapply to HOLAC, if it feels that they have been useful. That decision is based on expertise and performance in committees and legislation, rather than just speeches—because let us face it, we do not necessarily need to encourage more speeches. This might get rid of the captains of industry, the captains of England and the party donors who turn up only one day a year to retain their right to sit.

The House of Lords is a House of experts. These changes that will weaken the House are driven by some doctrinal need to please an electorate that really do not know or care about reform of the House. Strangely, they are also being touted as a way of cleaning up politics. This is not stagnation—only 59.7% of the electorate bothered to turn up to vote in the last general election to get rid of a deeply unpopular Government. The interest in this House is negligible. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, asked, “Do you hear the people sing, my Lords?” Me neither.