We are today announcing that, as of today, we are officially pausing our support for House of Lords nominations.
In recent years, the number of Crossbench appointments in the Upper House has been very low (on average less than 2 per year) and the profile of those appointments makes it seem highly unlikely, in our opinion, that these successful candidates have been appointed through the public application / nomination system. Coupled to that is the ongoing pressure on the size of the House of Lords which will almost certainly see either a reduction or freeze in numbers of Crossbench appointments as political appointees continue to join.
We are aware that some businesses are cold calling potential clients to suggest that they are highly qualified to make an application and charging fees to provide an advisory service. We wish to clearly distance ourselves from this practice. We never “cold call” clients offering our services nor encourage people to apply for such processes. To anybody weighing up whether to engage such services, we would encourage them to look back at the number and resumes of recent appointees before deciding whether this is worth pursuing.
Should the Appointments Commission be given greater scope for recruitment in higher numbers or a genuinely more diverse and open process be established in future, we would provide this service to clients who we feel would have a realistic chance of serious consideration.