Baroness Howe of Idlicote, CBE 1932-2022

 The Baroness Howe of Idlicote, CBE, life peer, Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Commission 1997-99 [Chairman Broadcasting Standards Council 1993-97], died 22 March, 2022. She was 90.

She was born Elspeth Rosamund Morton Shand, 8 February, 1932, daughter of Philip Morton Shand [1888-1960], and his fourth wife the former Sybil Mary Sissons [1895-1970], and was a [half] aunt of HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, KG, GCVO.

Elspeth Shand married 1953, [Richard Edward] Geoffrey Howe, QC, PC [1926-2015], later the Baron Howe of Aberavon, the Conservative Government minister, sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary, &c., by whom she had issue, one son and two daughters.

All her life she was a committee woman, most notably chairing the Broadcasting Standards Commission from 1997 until 1999 and the Broadcasting Standards Council for four years before that. Her career was garlanded with honours, and in 2001 she was appointed to the House of Lords as Baroness Howe of Idlicote, of Shipston-on-Stour in the County of Warwickshire, in the first list of “people’s peers”. She and her husband – who had become Lord Howe of Aberavon in 1992 – were among the few couples to sit in the Lords each in their own right.

Lady Howe served as deputy chairman of the Equal Opportunities Commission from 1975 to 1979, and in various other capacities from 1980. She was later made chair of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. In the 1999 New Year Honours she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Lady Howe was a Justice of the Peace in Inner London from 1964 until her retirement from the Bench in 2002. She sat in the Youth Court at Camberwell where she was a bench chairman.

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