Reducing Government Spending

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My noble friend is far more expert than me, and I agree entirely with all three points that he makes. I do not seek to add very much to what he says, but I agree most of all with his last point that returning to austerity would be the very worst thing we could do at this point for growth.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

I hope the House will forgive me, but I can scarcely keep up with the good news that the Minister keeps showering upon us, so may I ask him for an indication—not a guarantee or promise but an indication—that he will put his noble name to? One thing he has not mentioned is when unemployment will start coming down. Can he tell us whether it will be in 2027, 2028 or 2029, or have the workers’ Government forgotten about the unemployed?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question. I can only go by what the OBR says, and it says it will be 2026. The OBR said that unemployment will peak later this year before falling for the remainder of the forecast period, ending the Parliament lower than the rate we inherited at the election. Clearly, the economic impact of the situation in the Middle East will depend on its severity and duration, but the OBR forecasts that over the course of this Parliament, employment will rise and the unemployment rate will fall.

Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, I have a lot of personal regard for the Minister, and I listened to his speech carefully, but I did not hear a single word about unemployment, so allow me to help him.

Many of us, sadly, are old enough to remember the Government of Harold Wilson. He came in promising “white heat” and left with more people out of work, which I suppose was unfortunate for a Government formed by the party of the workers. It was even more unfortunate when Labour next got in. It was Wilson and Jim Callaghan—Sunny Jim, a decent man whom I liked very much—but once again, when Labour left office, unemployment was up. Then came Blair and Brown and—surprise, surprise—after 13 years of the Chuckle Brothers, it was up again, at nearly 8%. How can it be that every time in living memory that Labour has got into power, it has left with more workers out of jobs than when it started?

And now, dear Keir: after just a year, and an avalanche of election promises about growth and new jobs and not taxing workers, can you guess it? Unemployment is up. “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough. They all blew up; I know not how. And when I look into the sky, all I see are pigs that fly”. I hope for Santa’s sake, this Christmas, that the reindeer are going to be able to find it past all those squadrons of flying pigs.

It is really all the fault of the OBR, of course, and so its boss joins the growing list of all those who are losing their jobs under Labour. And he will not be the last. I hope that I am wrong. I hope that the Minister will give us an assurance that, by this time next year, unemployment will be lower. I ask him for that assurance, but I fear he will not give it—he cannot; that is why he did not mention it in the first place. At the last Budget, we were promised that things were sorted. “I’m not coming back for more”, the Chancellor said. Well, I bet she wishes the BBC had done one of its special editing jobs on that one and left great chunks of it on the cutting room floor.

“Those with the broadest shoulders must carry their fair share of the burden”. It is a good phrase, but those with the broadest shoulders also have the fastest feet. They are leaving, and so are the young. Almost all emigration from this country is made up of people under 35, taking their future, and ours, with them. Every time Labour gets into power, it puts more people out of work. That cannot all be the fault of Brexit, can it? The working men and women of this country deserve better than they are being given.

Taxes

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I completely agree with my noble friend on that point. Every time we hear from the party opposite, it opposes every single measure we have taken to stabilise the public finances, yet at no point has it opposed the spending that that has gone to fund. That is exactly the mistake Liz Truss made in her mini-Budget, which saw mortgage payments rocket for working people. They are still paying the price of those higher mortgages, and that is something we absolutely will not do.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, I understand why the Minister refuses to give hypotheticals on forthcoming tax. However, this Government made a clear commitment not to introduce taxes on working people. They have looked very much like a fish on the end of a hook over the last 12 months when trying to define what a working person is. Perhaps they should have thought about that before they made such a clear, binding commitment. Without being hypothetical, does the Minister agree with the Chancellor, who, during that election campaign, defined working people as

“people who go out to work and work for their incomes … There are people who do have savings, who have been able to save up, and those are working people as well”?

Does the Minister stand by that commitment?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

A working person is someone who goes out to work. The Government have pledged not to increase taxes on working people. We stand by that, which is why we are not increasing their income tax, national insurance contributions or VAT.

Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to welcome, with that wonderful maiden speech, my new noble friend Lord Booth-Smith. It is also a pleasure, if I may say so, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Grady. I understand that it may have been her birthday over the weekend. I have a birthday in a couple of days too, so at least we Scorpios have this to share even if we share nothing else in the Chamber today. I thought some of our Budgets over the years were pretty rubbish.

I went to bed last night counting the various definitions the Government offered about what a worker is. I had reached 23 before I fell fast asleep, so I guess I missed a dozen or more. Labour is, of course, the party of the workers, for the workers—up the workers. The trouble is, there are going to be fewer workers as a result of this Budget. You cannot raise £40 billion without hammering ordinary people. The increase in national insurance will be passed on to employees, not matter what the Chancellor has offered. In ordinary English that means lower pay, slower hiring, fewer jobs and fewer workers. It is sad, it is unintended—I am sure—but it is inevitable.

This is a Government of change. They have said that, and perhaps they will change this. After all, they changed their chief of staff pretty quickly. Did your Lordships notice, by the way, that they changed their policy on freeports? Two days before the Budget, the Prime Minister announced that they would create five new freeports. I thought that was rather a good idea, but then that policy changed too—no new freeports at all. A No. 10 official explained what had happened. They had misread the email from next door. It was, in his words, “a total cock-up”. No change there, then. There will be no flood of exports as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, wanted—not from those non-existent free ports.

Instead, noble Lords may have noticed that Labour has been concentrating on exporting dozens and dozens of advisers across the Atlantic to help its relentless battle against Donald Trump—a masterstroke. Then there is the Foreign Secretary’s view that President Trump, the next leader of our biggest export market and trading partner, is a “neo-Nazi … sociopath”. It is a fascinating negotiating tactic.

This Budget is an attack on workers. You cannot live, work, farm, go to the shops or even die without getting clobbered, unless of course you happen to be a train driver. It is not just the farmers, factory owners, service industry and supermarkets. Our charities, GPs, care homes, schools and even hospices are all being beaten under Labour’s national insurance hammer. Some workers are luckier than others. Some can find a helpful handout: the odd football ticket, an occasional concert ticket, even a friendly local clothes bank. That was something else that was changed, of course, once it all became public—another policy that, how can I put it, seems to have been tailored swiftly to the moment.

In its entire history the Labour Party has never been further from real workers than it is right now, and it must be our ambition on this side of the House to fill that gap between now and the next election. To govern is to choose, and the Chancellor has chosen badly. It is a Budget that will hit workers. This is another Labour Government who will leave office with unemployment higher than when they came in. The other day the Chancellor said that this is a Budget she does not want to repeat. I commend the Chancellor’s conclusion.