Helene Hayman, Baroness Hayman

The Right Honourable The Baroness Hayman PC
Hayman on 2009.
Lord Speaker
Incumbent
Assumed office 4 July 2006
Preceded by	Lord Falconer as Lord Chancellor
Member of the House of Lords
Incumbent
Assumed office 1996
Member of Parliament for Welwyn and Hatfield
In office 10 October 1974 – 3 May 1979
Preceded by	Lord Balniel
Succeeded by	Christopher Murphy
Personal details
Born	(1949-03-26) 26 March 1949
Political party	Independent (2006–present)
Other political affiliations	Labour (?–2006)
Spouse	Martin Heathcote Hayman

Helene Valerie Hayman, Baroness Hayman, PC (born 26 March 1949 in Wolverhampton as Helene Middleweek) is Lord Speaker of the House of Lords in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. As a member of the Labour Party she was a Member of Parliament from 1974 to 1979, and became a Life Peer in 1996. Outside politics, she has been involved in health issues, serving on medical ethics committees and the governing bodies of bodies in the National Health Service and health charities. In 2006, she won the initial election for the newly created position of Lord Speaker.

Family life and career before politics

Helene Hayman is the daughter of Maurice and Maude Middleweek; her father was a dentist. She attended Wolverhampton Girls' High School and read law at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1969; she was President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1969. She worked for Shelter from 1969 to 1971, and for the Social Services Department at the London Borough of Camden from 1971 to 1974. In 1974 she became Deputy Director of the National Council for One-Parent Families.

She married Martin Hayman in 1974; together, they have four sons.

Political career

She contested the Wolverhampton South West constituency in the February 1974 election. She was elected as the Member of Parliament for Welwyn and Hatfield in the October 1974 UK general election. On her election, she was the youngest member of the House of Commons, remaining the "Baby of the House" until the by-election victory of Andrew Mackay in 1977. She was the first woman to breastfeed at Westminster. She lost her seat, a marginal, to the Conservative Christopher Murphy at the 1979 general election.

She was a member of the Bloomsbury Health Authority (later Bloomsbury and Islington Health Authority) from 1985 to 1992 and its Vice-Chair from 1988 onwards. She served on the ethics committees of the Royal College of Gynaecologists from 1982 to 1997, and of the University College London and University College Hospital from 1987 to 1997. From 1992 to 1997, she was a member of the Council of University College, London, and chair of Whittington Hospital NHS Trust.

Helene Hayman was made a Life Peer in 1996, and took the title Baroness Hayman, of Dartmouth Park in the London Borough of Camden. After the Labour Party won the 1997 general election, she served as a junior minister in the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions and the Department of Health, before being appointed Minister of State at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in July 1999. She became a member of the Privy Council in 2001, but left political office the same year to become chairman of Cancer Research UK (2001–2005). She became chair of the Human Tissue Authority in 2005. She was a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (2002–2006) and of the Tropical Health and Education Trust (2005–2006). She was a member of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in 2005-06.

She was a member of the Lords Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill, 2004–05, and of the Lords Constitution Committee, 2005–06.

Lord Speaker

In May 2006, after the position of Speaker in the House of Lords was separated from the office of Lord Chancellor as part of the reforms under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, she was one of nine candidates to be put forward for the new role of Lord Speaker. She was nominated as a candidate by Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean and seconded by Lord Walton of Detchant. Her narrow victory in the election was announced on 4 July 2006, and she became the first ever Lord Speaker. On her election, Lord McNally, the Liberal Democrat leader in the House of Lords, called her the "Julie Andrews of British politics". Like the Speaker in the House of Commons, but unlike the Lord Chancellor who was also a judge and a government minister, the Lord Speaker resigns party membership and outside interests to concentrate on being an impartial presiding officer.

On 2 March 2011 the Lord Speaker gave a lecture to the Mile End Group in the Attlee Suite of Portcullis House. This was the third in a lecture series to commemorate the 1911 Parliament Act. A transcript can be read here.

References

• Dod's Parliamentary Companion online
• "Hayman chosen to be Lords speaker", BBC News, 4 July 2006
• Lord Speaker election results (PDF)
• thePeerage.com, 10 July 2006