Helene Hayman, Baroness Hayman

Helene Valerie Hayman, Baroness Hayman, PC, née Middleweek (born 26 March, 1949 in Wolverhampton) is Lord Speaker of the House of Lords in 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.

Daughter of Maurice and Maude Middleweek, 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. She married Martin Hayman in 1974; together, they have four sons.

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 David Alton in 1979. She was the first woman to breastfeed at Westminster. She lost her seat to the Conservative Christopher Murphy in the 1979 general election.

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.

She 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 as 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 office the same year to become chairman of Cancer Research UK. She became chair of the Human Tissue Authority in 2005 and is a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She is also a member of the HFEA.

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 the first of nine candidates to be offered 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 Hayman 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, she will resign party membership and outside interests to concentrate on being an impartial presiding officer.

References

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

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