Baroness Taylor of Stevenage: ...as full a part as it can in delivering the Bill’s stated agenda and missions. There is a significant lack of ambition in not taking this further, described by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, as the elephant in the room. The noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Shipley, rightly highlighted that a key aspect of this is the extent to which the Government seek to reduce the current chronic...
Clive Lewis: ...these matters. What are these matters? I would contend that we cannot debate our Government’s role in promoting financial security and reducing inequality in the Caribbean without discussing the elephant in the room—namely, the preceding 400 years of exploitative colonial history and the urgent need for some form of reparatory justice. I am not the first person to raise the issue....
Mark Francois: I warmly welcome the principle of the Bill, not least because the whole House knows that the people traffickers are immoral and utterly heartless, but the elephant in the room, as has already been alluded to, is the ECHR. Unless we can somehow face it down, we will remain tied up in legal knots in our own domestic courts and ultimately in Strasbourg. Can the Home Secretary assure the House...
Lord Farmer: .... Apart from the reducing parental conflict programme, what else are the Government doing to make parents and professionals aware of the greater risks from parental relationship breakdown—the elephant in the room—which ultimately leads to so many children coming into care, or worse?
Lord Bew: ..., that the EU has to come to terms with its commitments to maintain the Good Friday agreement. In recent days, the EU has acknowledged that there were unforeseen consequences. The big and obvious elephant in the room in that respect is that the institutions of devolution and the Good Friday agreement are down. As Rory Montgomery said, a particularly narrow Irish version of the Good Friday...
Lord Weir of Ballyholme: My Lords, in dealing with this group of amendments, as we have to, it is undoubtedly the case, as has been said on all sides of this Committee, that we cannot get away from the elephant in the room: no matter how good an amendment is put forward—I include the amendments I have added my name to—it cannot turn what is an unacceptable Bill into an acceptable Bill. I urge the Minister and his...
Gary Streeter: ...of oral evidence, conducted a citywide survey completed by over 1,300 people, and received written evidence from a large number of sources. From the start of the work, it became clear that the elephant in the room is the fact that the violence against women and girls acronym, VAWG, unintentionally leaves out any mention of the perpetrators. The commission therefore deliberately referred to...
Lord Scriven: ...before it starts. It is still the Whitehall-centric view of the country from SW1: deciding if all is going well from that vantage point. It is indeed a “Henry VIII powers on steroids” Bill. The elephant in the room is that there is no reform of the Victorian monolithic structure of Whitehall itself. You cannot have an empowered set of regions until you start looking at the reforms of...
Grahame Morris: ...harbour authority or to staff of the harbour authority acting on behalf of the MCA? I would appreciate if he could clarify that point in his summing up. Nationality-based pay discrimination is the elephant in the room. We must get to grips with it. I realise that the issue is incredibly complicated because of international treaties, but we need to get to the kernel of the issue because...
Ben Wallace: ...want to take the gap in the middle of the decade —but of course, when we accelerate, we take risks. Nevertheless, I think that is important. I will definitely look at his suggestion, although the elephant in the room on the suggestion of accelerating procurement is His Majesty’s Treasury, which would have to reprofile the budget. As the time of the integrated review approaches, I shall...
Peter Grant: ...with. I might not entirely agree with everything said by the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), but he used a very small and localised example to highlight what is possibly the biggest elephant in the room: if we think that we will tackle climate change and that everything else will continue in the way it always has, we are deluding ourselves. It is not going to happen. The hon....
Lord Lennie: ...for the specific support that UK firms could benefit from in order to take advantage of the opportunities created by the agreements in both Australia and New Zealand. Turning to scrutiny, the elephant in the room is that both of the agreements which form the basis of this legislation are long overdue and have already been signed between the respective Governments. As a result, the scope...
the Earl of Lytton: ...mean, if anything, an admission of failure and an act of desperation that I think likely to backfire. I welcome this limited measure for what it is, but wag my finger at the lack of action over the elephant in the room that sits behind it. Noting that the 2023 revaluation does not reduce many of what one might suppose the most seriously affected sectors—namely, retail and food...
Jeremy Balfour: ...Such areas will have to be worked through at stages 2 and 3. However, I am grateful that the minister will lodge amendments, and I think that he will find cross-party support for them. Perhaps the elephant in the room is financial instruments, such as stocks and shares. There will be sole traders and partnerships that will want to use the new legislation, but we are mostly talking about...
Gillian Martin: ...the emissions that are involved in producing and extracting it, but there is a fundamental difference between that and what oil and gas is used for. We need to stop burning oil and gas. The real elephant in the room is not the production of oil and gas but the burning of it.
Lord Weir of Ballyholme: ..., but we should be in no doubt that not only is the Northern Ireland protocol the root cause of this legislation, but—although it is not directly mentioned in the legislation—it remains the elephant in the room when we are discussing it. I turn briefly to some of the detail contained within the Bill itself. As the noble Lord, Lord Caine, indicated, it has a number of component parts....
Pam Gosal: ..., happy to support the Government’s motion, but there have been developments in the past week that need to be addressed. It is important that Parliament is given the opportunity to address the elephant in the room. The amendment in my name seeks to draw attention to last week’s comments by the United Nations expert on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, which we cannot...
Ian Blackford: ...an even worse sight watching the leader of the Labour party desperately trying to out-Brexit the Prime Minister, ruling out freedom of movement and any hope of a Swiss-style deal. Brexit is now the elephant in the room that neither the Tories nor Labour are willing to confront. When will the Prime Minister finally see reality and admit that Brexit is a significant long-term cause of the UK...
Lord Razzall: ...tax increases to pay for services which should be funded by central government—the same old con trick. Of course, your Lordships would not expect me to pass on this speech without indicating the elephant in the room: Brexit. The Government say that the major reasons for our disastrous recent economic performance are the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, but our European neighbours have...
Stephen Farry: ...need for some degree of ad hoc scrutiny in what happens over the coming weeks and months. With respect to my DUP colleagues, amendment 13, taken literally, is somewhat onerous, but there is also an elephant in the room: our best means to scrutinise decision making in Northern Ireland is to have a fully functioning Assembly.
