House of Lords: Governance

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 8th December 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I beg to differ with my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, that this by any benchmark is the “finest revising Chamber in the world”. I am not sure what the benchmark is. Perhaps we should put whether we should continue to the people by referendum. I recall several hundred votes against the people’s will on Brexit. That was not revising; that was hard politics. It was duplicating the role of the House of Commons, yet there was vote after vote after vote.

To be perfectly honest, having come here from the Commons, my observation is that the level of debate here is often as dismal as it is there because it is a replication. Our amendments are often replications. I am looking for the “revising” and I am seeing the political challenges in an unelected House. I have had plenty of disagreements with the Government but I am not elected here. There is the option to be elected in the House of Commons and, for better or worse, the people decide things. This is a gentleman’s club—although the one development over the years is that it now allows women in, so perhaps it is more accurately described as a private club. The only thing lacking from the traditions of the House in this debate is the brandy and cigars, with a butler to serve them.

There needs to be a level of reality. I suspect that nobody here would second a resolution for us to have a referendum to abolish this place. What vote would we get? It would be the overwhelming consensus of the British people that we should go. Frankly, the only problem would be those people who do not bother to vote; they would certainly be the majority because, a bit like with police and crime commissioners, most people care so little about us they would not even bother to vote to get rid of something they regard as irrelevant to their lives.

So what should we, as a non-elected Chamber that is bad at revising, do? We should change the way we think about this place. Who is debating the big changes in society? The Commons does not; it never finds the time or structure to do that. We are about to move to a society with cryptocurrencies and virtually no cash; it is one of the biggest social changes in our lifetime. Where is the debate on that? I do not mean debate for an hour, two hours or three hours—I mean weeks and weeks of it. Then there is the internet and how we cope with it. It should not be through party-political or government programmes and resolutions; we must think it through. Is that not where the expertise of those of us present and the rest of the House could contribute significantly on behalf of the country? I put it to your Lordships that that expertise is precisely why people are put in here, and yet we pretend to be a revising Chamber.

Even when it comes to managing the place, frankly, it is a nonsense that, in this Covid nightmare, I and everyone else have to go into the Chamber to try to ask a Question when we had a perfectly good system that allowed people to be selected to go in and reduced the number of people in the Chamber at any one time—I would call that a health strategy for this House. I thought that the voting system that was rejected, which led to this debate taking place, was excellent. But oh no, having a system where one could go through and vote by machine, paid for at great expense, is not for unelected Members.

This is the only private club where you do not pay to join but are paid to attend. Yet noble Lords believe it is valid that we get sound advice on a matter such as that but it is then for us, the Members, to choose whether we should have this, that or the other thing. It is a bit like Yorkshire County Cricket Club. It survived for 200 years and its members ran it but one day, oops, it is in disintegration. It may not even survive; it probably will, but only by cleaning out the stable, as the public might put it.

I do not think that we need that here. We have to wise up to where the world is at. Who runs this place? I will tell you: the Whips run it. There were 804 committee members when I last counted, and four of them are non-affiliates. I happen to be one of them—that is why I did the count, not that I am bothered about being on a committee. Non-affiliates make up 10% of the House, but only four out of the 800 committee members. It is the Whips who decide things. There is more power for the Whips here than there is in the Commons. It is a different kind of system—for example, they cannot force people to vote and there is no re-election—but the power is just the same.

As members of a private club, paid to attend, we should have a management structure. The only sponsor we could get for this building would be the Wildlife Trusts, given the amount of wildlife that wanders round the corridors—the mice, the rats—because this decrepit building needs an overhaul. I think the people of York are celebrating that we have chosen not to burden ourselves on them, but of course we should get out and let this building be modernised. It is not fit for the last century, never mind this one. If that is the professional advice, we should take it.

We should be embracing technology and having the big debates on the big issues. I do not mean that we should give away our revising powers—do not get me wrong—but let us not pretend that the majority of the votes in here are about improving legislation through revising it, because we know they are not. They are about party politicking and challenging legislation. I have been a party politician all my life, so I love that kind of thing, but it does not seem to me to be the fundamental role of this place. Let us have it properly managed. Let us move with the times. Perhaps then, we might even survive.