the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Shrewsbury, for giving us this opportunity to debate this matter. We all approach this important subject from different angles. I want to emphasise one that is economic and the other that is personal in the sense of our own personal investment and commitment. I serve a diocese which is largely rural although it has large centres of...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, would the Minister find it helpful if the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury was made aware of the concern of the House about there being sufficient meetings of the Crown Nominations Commission, so that when there is a pile-up of episcopal vacancies, as it were, there are sufficient meetings to address that? Is the Minister also aware that we very much hope to have...
the Bishop of Oxford: They would therefore be eligible, and much overdue, to come into this House.
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, given that discussion of sexual violence is always a very sensitive subject in any culture, will the Minister give assurance that the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative team that is working in Syria will draw in responsible, enlightened religious leaders to combat the stigma that is so often associated with these awful crimes? This can prevent the kind of recriminations and...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I am not among those who decry the frequency with which criminal justice Bills come along. The world is changing fast and the shapes assumed by criminality change no less quickly. It is important to respond to change and to take care that the unchanging core of justice—a British value if ever there was one, as well as a Biblical value—is honoured both in the detail and in the...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving us the opportunity for this short debate. The stories of the abuse of older people hardly need rehearsing—the media are full of them—and the scandal of a particular care home recently has shocked the nation. Some of us will have had opportunity—even in our own families, doubtless—to experience some of this problem. The Health...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, would the Minister agree with the comments made by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury last weekend to the effect that, however abhorrent we may feel the organisation to be, it is necessary to engage in some way with Boko Haram and to do that at different levels? If that is the case, would the Minister give some indication of what kind of support or encouragement...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, given that prevention is better than costly cure, can the Minister let us know what is being done to make sure that free schools are established as groups of interdependent schools, rather than independent and autonomous units? Can he let us know how what we have learnt from the academies programme—that we need to get schools grouped together in multi-academy trusts—is being...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I am grateful for those two contributions. To my noble friend Lord Elton I say, yes, a concern has been expressed to me about what the impact of this would be. It is as well to be clear what we do at the moment—what the Church Commissioners, for instance, are using derivatives for. They use them for three things: the hedging of foreign currency, the hedging of interest rate risks...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, every few years, the General Synod produces a miscellaneous provisions Measure in order to excite the general population. Its purpose is to sweep up all those small and uncontroversial legislative changes that would not in themselves justify stand-alone legislation, but which appear to be either necessary for the purposes of clarifying or simplifying the law or administratively or...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, given the court ruling last week against Thanet Clinical Commissioning Group saying that it was obliged to follow NICE guidelines unless a special factor could be determined that would justify departure, will Her Majesty’s Government give an assurance that the same test will apply to NHS trusts in regard to the ratio of nurses and patients?
the Bishop of Oxford: It is well known that to have a peace process that works all the relevant parties must be gathered together, not just the moderates. Can the Minister assure us that, at Geneva II, the more extreme nations will be involved, including Iran, Saudi Arabia and so on, as well as the opposition groups, both internal and external? Will they all be there?
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for calling this debate. Citizenship education is an important subject and I will speak mainly about it as it is lived in, through and around what happens in schools rather than necessarily what happens after those school years; although what the noble Lord spoke about is important. Citizenship education prepares young people for...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I rise to pay tribute to Baroness Thatcher, sharing with noble Lords a string of strong memories of a remarkable woman, the first woman to occupy the office of Prime Minister. As others have said, the change that she made to the face of Britain was complete. It opened up new avenues of possibility in all directions: share ownership, home ownership, liberalisation of the markets,...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, there are two aspects of the gracious Speech that I would like to comment on with regard to education. One is the proposal to improve provision for children with special educational needs. I am very pleased to have heard the announcement today on that subject. There is great need for reform in that area. As the Green Paper so eloquently demonstrated, it is a cumbersome system and...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, for an extraordinarily erudite narrative. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness for initiating the debate because it gives us the opportunity to look at this very important and sensitive issue of the regulations. I have been much exercised, as I am sure many of you have, by the conflicting opinions I have...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, the call for tighter regulation of scrap yards, including cashless transactions, is widespread. We know that the industry itself wants to back regulation. I wonder whether the Minister could be a bit more specific on the timescale and when we might expect some real reform of the regulations, including particularly the easy access to cash which supports something causing not only the...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, economic growth must be for some people an end in itself but for many others it is actually a means to an end: a larger end of human happiness, the quality of life and a fairer society. How does the Minister propose that the Government will try to co-ordinate an approach to economic growth, which is important, that also contributes to a richer, more holistic goal of human and social...
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, is the Minister aware that many of us are very concerned that the measure envisaged might have a deleterious effect on the very group that the Government are most concerned to help-that is, those who would come into the support group eligible for universal benefit, but who are actually living alone and without carers?
the Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, Amendment 85, proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Turner, seeks to make it plain that religious criteria may not be used to employ staff in academies without religious designation or to make it obligatory to teach RE in such a school. That seems to me to be unexceptionable and I wonder why the amendment is needed. If it seeks to achieve a result that we would all agree with, it...
