The Lord Meston
Crossbench
Member of the House of Lords
M
Lord Meston's full title is The Lord Meston. His name is James Meston, and he was excluded from the House of Lords on 29 April 2026.
Allowance claims · 2026
Data not yet released for 2026 — the Lords Finance Office publishes monthly CSVs ~6-8 weeks after month-end.
Lords votes · 2026
162 divisions
28 Content(17.3%)
12 Not-Content(7.4%)
122 didn't vote(75.3%)
2026-02-04
Not-Content
62–295
Not-Content
2026-01-05
Not-Content
132–124
Content
Source: lordsvotes-api.parliament.uk. "Result" shows the headline
Content vs Not-Content tally (including tellers). The Lords doesn't
publish a "didn't vote" attendance roll like the Commons, so the
figure above conflates absence with abstention.
Recent Hansard contributions · latest 25
2026-04-22
Burial Provision in England and Wales
My Lords, the excellent report last month from the Law Commission on burial and cremation law addresses the problems of burial grounds which are either full, closed, disused, poorly maintained or even lost. It makes specific proposals for the modernisati
2026-03-25
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I was going to be brief in agreeing with what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, just said and in welcoming Motion D, because the Government’s proposed amendment in lieu, which relates to sibling contact, is to be welcomed; indeed, it is a pleasan
2026-03-25
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I will confine myself briefly to supporting Motion B. It is commonly agreed now that the pilots of the pathfinder model in selected family courts have been a success and represent the way ahead. This model has been shown to reduce delays signif
2026-03-16
Humanist Weddings
My Lords, the deficiencies and complexities of our marriage law were addressed by the Law Commission as long ago as 2022, followed by a government response three years later. The common objective is simple enough: to provide legally binding and reasonabl
2026-02-09
Victims and Courts Bill
My Lords, I have four amendments in this group, three of which, like that just proposed powerfully by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, seek to explore the thinking behind the four-year minimum prison sentence required by Clause 3 to trigger the duty of
2026-02-09
Victims and Courts Bill
My Lords, I begin by commenting on two parts of the noble Lord’s amendments. I find it difficult to understand how his Amendment 16 would work in practice. These orders have to be made at the point of sentencing; they cannot come later on as an afterthou
2026-02-03
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 221, cogently moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, to place child’s rights impact assessments on a statutory basis for the purposes referred to in her amendment.
In Committee, the Minister, the noble
2026-01-28
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I support Clause 31 and government Amendment 120. I also support Amendment 121A, which would extend the scope of what Clause 31 seeks to achieve, which is to prevent concealment of the real reasons for attempts to withdraw children from school,
2026-01-27
Asylum and Immigration: Children
My Lords, would the Minister agree that this Question would probably have been unnecessary had the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child been embedded legislatively much sooner in English law, just as it already has been incorporated both in Wales and
2026-01-21
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I strongly support Amendments 99 and 101, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These are designed to tackle the sad and difficult problem of successive removals of children and babies from their parents, in particular from their moth
2026-01-21
Age of Criminal Responsibility
My Lords, have the Government made any assessment of the carefully considered change enacted in Scotland in 2019, when the minimum age was raised to 12 with the intention of protecting younger children from earlier criminalisation and exposure to the cri
2026-01-19
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I too support these amendments. The debate in Committee threw a light on the working of the deprivation of liberty jurisdiction, which, one could not help noting, was not altogether familiar to many.
Typically, these orders are made when par
2026-01-19
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I wish to speak in support of Amendment 49, specifically relating to sibling contact, to which I have added my name. In doing so, I do not want to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, other than to stress, as she did, the importanc
2026-01-19
Domestic Violence Against Children
My Lords, it is a particularly sad feature of domestic violence cases that adults are doing what was done to them as children. Indeed, their children are in turn exposed to similar violence and come to see it as normal and acceptable. This difficult prob
2026-01-14
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, is unable to be here and has therefore asked me to lead on this amendment. It follows on from that moved by the noble Baroness in Committee on 22 May last year. As I have said, the noble Baroness
2026-01-14
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
2026-01-14
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, I am very grateful for the contributions to the debate on this amendment. It seems to me that the debate has exposed two possible problems. First, there is no sanction for the creation or use of an unregistered contact centre. Secondly, there i
2026-01-14
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for returning us to this important topic of family group conferences and for the refined amendments she has now presented, including Amendment 3, to which I have added my name. They woul
2026-01-09
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
My Lords, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Garnier, said, we really have to make a choice between court-based decisions and the panel, as the Bill provides for in its present form. There is merit in both. There is a strong case for the use of the expe
2025-12-16
Victims and Courts Bill
My Lords, I join in welcoming the Bill. The Long Title states that it is to
“make provision about the experience of victims within the criminal justice system”.
In that context, it is strange to be considering such a Bill in the absence of Lady New
2025-12-15
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, we should be grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, for her probing Amendments 335A and 335B, raising the problem of wrongful retention of children in the context of the criminal law and, in particular, the Child Abduction Act 1984. Esse
2025-12-05
Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill
I seriously question whether Amendments 11 and 11A are necessary or useful. Following on from what has just been said, my experience in the courts is that the concept of ordinary residence stated in the Bill is well established in our law, workable in pr
2025-11-27
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, it is now appropriate for me to beg leave to withdraw Amendment 272, reserving our right to return to it, and others not moved, after proper discussion with the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, when she has seen our debate—and read and marke
2025-11-27
Crime and Policing Bill
Thank you for that. I was slightly confused, because the first amendment in the group was not moved.
2025-11-27
Crime and Policing Bill
My noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson cannot be here and has asked me to speak to her amendments in this group, 12 in number, to which I had already added my name in support. I pay tribute to her dedicated campaigning on what we will now debate. All her ame
Source: hansard.parliament.uk via hansard-api. Snippets shown
verbatim from the search API; click any debate title for the full record.
Register of Interests · 1 entries on file
Declarations under the Lords Code of Conduct. Free text — no monetary values, no hours worked. A declaration that an interest exists, not a claim about its size.
Nil
-
No registrable interests
registered 2026-03-02
Source: UK Parliament Members API (Lords register). Refreshed weekly.
Read the full
Lords Code of Conduct
for what each category covers and the disclosure thresholds.
Party history
1999-06-30 → 2026-04-29
Crossbench
1984-03-29 → 1999-06-29
Liberal Democrat
Government posts
None recorded.
Opposition posts
None recorded.
Committee memberships
2024-09-05 → 2026-04-29
Statutory Instruments (Joint Committee)
2024-01-31 → 2024-05-30
Statutory Instruments (Joint Committee)
Contact
No contact details recorded.
APPGs (2026) · 0 active officership(s)
No APPG officerships found for this peer. (Officer matching is by name —
if the parliamentary register lists them under a slightly different
form, the join may miss; check
/appgs directly.)
Written parliamentary questions · 2026
Showing
5
of 5 tabled
5 answered(100.0%)
1
departments
Source: UK Parliament Members API. The amber "interest" tag is set
by Parliament's own system when the asking member has a register entry
it deems related — typically a paid role or directorship in the
sector being asked about. Click any "i" icon to see the full
question and the department's answer.
Bills sponsored & supported · 2026
0 bills
0 as lead sponsor
0 as supporter
No bills sponsored or supported in 2026.
Source: UK Parliament Bills API. "Lead" sponsor is the
primary mover (sortOrder = 1); "Supporter" rows are
members of either House who
backed the bill at introduction. Year is the bill's first-reading
date.
Historic bills (all-time)
0 bills
0 as lead sponsor
0 as supporter
No bills sponsored or supported on record.
Same source as the year-scoped panel above, but unconstrained by
year. The "Sponsored" tag = lead sponsor; "Supported" = backed at
introduction. Sorted newest first.