Lord Clive Soley

Member of the House of Lords and former MP

Clive Soley is a Parliamentarian with 40 years’ experience – 26 as an MP and 14 as a Member of the House of Lords.
Elected Labour MP for Hammersmith North 1979-1983; for Hammersmith 1983-1997; and for Ealing, Acton and Shepherds Bush 1997-2005.
Member of the House of Lords from July 2005 and still an active member; in June 2019 he was elected Vice Chair, Scottish Peers Association.

As chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) during the first Blair government he was one of the four officers of the PLP and as such chaired the weekly meetings with the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister and Chief Whip who are the other three officers of the Parliamentary Party. He was a member of the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour Party and chaired committees selecting bi-election candidates, candidates for the GLA and for the Mayor of London.

Following his election in 1979 Clive Soley took an immediate and active interest in the troubles in Northern Ireland. He was the front bench spokesman on Northern Ireland (1982-85) and chairman of the Northern Ireland Select Committee (1995-97).
He was front bench spokesman on Home Affairs (1985-87), Housing and Local Government (1987-89) and Housing and Planning (1989-92). He was chair of the Draft Children (Contact) and Adoption Bill Joint Committee (2005).

He served on a number of committees in both Houses and chaired the Intergovernmental Organisations Committee (2007-2008) in the House of Lords. He is currently (since 2017) promoting the Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]; and has been a member of the EU subcommittee on Home Affairs since 2015

In the House of Lords, Clive Soley has been a frequent contributor on international affairs, reflecting his long interest in this area of policy. His international work includes:
• International Observer at the first national elections in Mongolia 1990
• International Observer Peruvian General Election 1995
• Leader, Westminster Foundation Group to Kosovo 1999: post-conflict political reconstruction
• Leader Labour Party Delegation to China 2000
• delivered the Sheikh Zayed Memorial Lecture ‘The Rule of Law and the Stable Society’ in May 2012 at the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, Abu Dhabi.
• Leader, Parliamentary Delegation to Bahrain 2014

Lord Soley is an experienced commentator in the media on many areas of political and economic policy.