The Earl of Erroll
Crossbench
Member of the House of Lords
M
The Earl of Erroll's full title is The Earl of Erroll. His name is Merlin Hay, 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
34 Content(21.0%)
19 Not-Content(11.7%)
109 didn't vote(67.3%)
2026-04-23
Not-Content
152–207
Not-Content
2026-04-13
Not-Content
65–173
Not-Content
2026-04-13
Not-Content
69–332
Not-Content
2026-03-05
Content
193–143
Content
2026-03-05
Content
194–140
Content
2026-03-05
Content
198–139
Content
2026-03-05
Content
208–142
Content
2026-01-12
Content
201–169
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
2026-03-02
Crime and Policing Bill
My Lords, I can see what the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is saying about Third Reading, but it would be wiser to vote for this amendment now—if noble Lords have any conscience at all, they have to vote for it—and if it is slightly defective it can be ame
2026-02-24
Tobacco and Vapes Bill
My Lords, I will be very brief. I am worried not about whether it is right or wrong to try to stop smoking but about whether this would work. There is no point in passing laws that do not work, as they are not respected. I think back to the amount of pot
2025-12-17
Fair Work Agency: Small and Micro Businesses
My Lords, should we not remember Reagan’s great stricture that
“the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help”?
2025-11-03
Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill
My Lords, I will briefly speak to something that has always puzzled me. Article 8 has two paragraphs. The first is about
“the right to … private and family life”.
The second states that you can ignore that if it is
“in accordance with the law an
2025-10-27
Planning and Infrastructure Bill
My Lords, I want to make a quick point. If you are trying to build a lot of houses, you have to sell them. The rate of sale determines the rate of building: if you do not sell the houses, the builder goes bankrupt because houses are very expensive to bui
2025-09-18
Road Pricing
Does the Minister agree that there is in fact a huge privacy issue here? If, maybe in a marriage, someone can see where their other half has been going when they are not around, it could well cause a major rise in the divorce rate and other things.
2025-07-09
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I remember what you might call the good old days before the first reform, when a lot of hereditaries got chucked out. In those days, although there were nominally a lot of Peers—many more than now—people turned up when they knew something. Ther
2025-07-09
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
Just to help the noble Lord’s confusion, there are the courtesy titles of the younger sons of certain levels of the peerage.
2025-07-09
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I have seen two of these instances happen before. On legal advice given to a Minister not being revealed to this House, I can remember a huge row about it, and the House adjourned for 10 or 20 minutes while everyone recovered their composure be
2025-07-02
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, it may be worth thinking about where this power for the Prime Minister to appoint Lords came from—I am thinking of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. It derives from the fact that King John had his power to raise taxes taken away from
2025-07-02
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I shall say just a few words about Amendment 4, which I support wholeheartedly. It is a move in the right direction. The problem is that if this House does not have some democratic authority, it will lose the powers that it has left. In this mo
In case it may help, I was involved in the original RIPA 2000 and discussions about this. I remember the whole thing about ambulances. The reason it was thought of then was vexatious 999 calls to the ambulance service. Obviously, that had happened somewh
My Lords, paragraph 154 made me think about what on earth I could usefully add to this comprehensive and very pertinent report. We were consistently reminded that the creative industries sector is made up almost entirely of SMEs, of which a high proporti
2025-06-12
Wildfires
My Lords, I often walk in the hills—I love them—and the heather, so I have frequently thought about this. In the old days, you would normally find firebreaks burned into them. The trouble is that there has been a big movement from a lot of people who do
2025-06-11
Data (Use and Access) Bill [HL]
My Lords, there is another little problem, pointed out to me by a senior member of a publishing company, World Wide Publishing. It has a lot of research material and things for students, as well as books and things such as that. At the moment, if the AI
2025-05-21
Employment Rights Bill
I would like to take the noble Lord up on this, because I have had experience with this. When an employee has been behaving very difficultly and sometimes they want to go anyway, but you want to dismiss them, they say, “Right, we’re going to take you to
2025-05-21
Employment Rights Bill
Very briefly, because we are talking about the time periods here, you have to be very careful because accrued holiday goes into that, and if you do not give people notice before the holiday is up, you cannot get rid of them. So be careful: it should be
Would the Minister look at the policy on moorland and the selective burning of firebreaks? Some of the policies, which do not allow any burning at all, mean that, if it does catch, the whole thing goes up and it is much harder to control. In the old days
2025-05-06
Renters’ Rights Bill
The Minister said, significantly, that the Government are going to connect 99% of premises. That is not enough, looking forwards, because a lot of people sometimes move around, travelling. Nowadays, when you are not in a premises, you rely on broadband c
2025-05-06
Renters’ Rights Bill
My Lords, I will say a few words, particularly in response to the comments of my noble friend Lord Cromwell about loading costs on to the landlords. The problem is that, if you are in the countryside, they want to charge a huge amount to get it to you. W
2025-04-24
Transport Decarbonisation Plan
My Lords, I have been told the Department for Transport will not classify hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines, which are the only way of dealing with the heavy transport—large lorries, earth-moving equipment and stuff like that—as being net zero
2025-04-24
Transport Decarbonisation Plan
My Lords—
2025-04-01
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I will say two things very quickly. The first is on Amendment 93A. The Lord Lyon is also a King of Arms, so that ought to be added after “the Lord Lyon”. He is in fact King of Arms for Scotland, whereas Garter is not. His jurisdiction is north
2025-03-25
House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill
My Lords, I want to say to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that while I am a hereditary Peer, I am not here to try to stay here; whatever happens, happens. The reason that I and the other 91—92 in all—stayed here was to ensure the further democratic and pr
My Lords, I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said about this Bill—it is essential to our democracy. In the democratic principles, Parliament makes the rules and the Executive are meant to carry them out, enforce them and run things.
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 · 3 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.
Category 1: Remunerated employment etc.
-
Chancellor, British Institute of Technology, England
registered 2012-06-13 · amended 2025-04-05
-
Erroll Computer Consultants (information and communications technology (ICT) and management advisory)
registered 2010-04-20 · amended 2025-04-05
Category 3: Land and property
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House (from which rental income is received) and cliffs in Aberdeenshire; they constitute an SSSI, SAC and ancient monument
registered 2010-04-20 · amended 2025-04-05
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
1978-06-30 → 2026-04-29
Crossbench
Government posts
None recorded.
Opposition posts
None recorded.
Committee memberships
2007-11-14 → 2012-05-01
Information Committee (Lords)
2002-11-25 → 2005-05-07
Information Committee (Lords)
Contact
No contact details recorded.
APPGs (2026) · 1 active officership(s) · 3 historic
| Group | Role(s) | Funders | Officers in group | Next deadline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
All-Party Parliamentary Group for Inclusive Entrepreneurship
Subject Group
|
Vice Chair | — | 7 | 2023-11-16 |
One row per active APPG. Funder names link out via the
/appgs Top secretariat funders panel — click any funder
there to open its full relationship graph. Officer matching is name-based against
the parliament.uk register text and may miss titled / hyphenated variants.
Written parliamentary questions · 2026
No written questions tabled in 2026.
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.