House of Lords: Governance

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, this debate has been a case of cognitus interruptus if ever I have seen one. Sometimes those who are last in the batting order do not have much option other than to go in and have a bit of a slog. So I suggest that our House is in some peril. Our reputation in the wider world has shrunk, our support in the House of Commons has shrunk, and I would argue that our effectiveness as a revising Chamber has shrunk.

As my noble friend Lady Noakes said so exquisitely and eloquently, there is a growing distance between the management of our House and its Members. Who runs this House? We keep being told that it is self-regulating, but that is no longer the case. So many others in this debate have made these points very eloquently, and as a tail-end Charlie I do not think there is any purpose in my repeating them, except to say that I support so many of them.

But since we are tackling the subject of the governance of the House, perhaps I can hit over the head the rumour that we are soon to have another 30 Peers parachuted in to this place. These rumours are clearly fanciful. Why would a Prime Minister want to damage both his own reputation and the reputation of this House by stuffing another 30 Peers on to our Benches? We would end up looking like a Christmas goose, stuffed so full that we simply burst—folie de foie gras, you might say. On that note, the banning of foie gras from our dining room was yet another of those decisions which none of us participated in—it is probably tucked up somewhere with the clerks’ wigs.

What is the question to which another 30 Peers is the answer? I suppose it might be argued that the Opposition in this House have become so bloody-minded that the Government need all those Peers in order to get their business done. The other day, I asked our wonderful Library to look at some statistics to see whether 30 Peers would save the day for Ollie the Octopus, Lucy Lobster and all those other vital bits of government legislation that get kicked about. Of the last 100 Divisions in this House, the Government have won only 27. Another eight Divisions were unwhipped, which leaves 65 Divisions, all of which were won by the pesky Opposition. What difference would another 30 Tory Peers have made to that? Very little, actually, because two-thirds of those government defeats were inflicted by margins of 30 votes or more.

So saving the Government’s legislation will not come simply by stuffing the goose—and, as we have heard so many times this afternoon, neither will it come through more administrators, more bureaucracy or, as my noble friend Lord Cormack has just explained, more training videos like the coruscating Valuing Everyone training, which did not value us; it insulted us.

We and our institutions are in a very delicate place. We are vulnerable and perhaps in some peril. I am afraid that very few of the changes put forward in recent times have done anything to improve our public standing. We should not take it for granted that no Government would bother taking an axe to this goose, because I can foresee a moment when a governing party—yes, even my own—will include in its manifesto a pledge to get rid of this House because it would be the popular thing to do. I wonder what any new layer of management or bureaucratic gift-wrapping will do to deal with this threat.

My noble friend the Senior Deputy Speaker, for whom I have the deepest personal respect and affection, is a sensible and a sensitive man. He has listened today and heard from a glorious former Leader of this House, a hugely respected former Chief Whip and many other senior and experienced Members, all speaking with a similar voice. It is a hymn that he needs to listen to; because I know him so well, I am sure that he will listen to it.