Grand Committee
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Energy Bill [HL]
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Grand CommitteeRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Harris of Richmond)
My Lords, if there is a Division in the Chamber while we are sitting, the Committee will adjourn as soon as the Division Bells are rung and will resume after 10 minutes.
Clause 4 : Assessment of property etc
Amendment 10A
Lord Davies of Oldham
“( ) An assessment made and provided under this section must clearly detail those energy efficiency improvements that qualify under the green deal.
( ) In making an assessment, the assessor must include all energy efficiency improvement options that qualify under the green deal.
( ) Nothing in this section prevents green deal assessors from identifying energy efficiency improvements in their assessments that—
(a) sit outside the green deal; or(b) collectively exceed the total amount qualifiable under a green deal plan, where this is clearly identified on the assessment.”
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for my late arrival. The Chair will have saved me by indicating that sittings in the Chamber take precedence and, unfortunately, Questions went on beyond the scheduled start of this Committee. I hope that government business managers will look at that difficulty, which has been the source of a little embarrassment to me today and, more than that, a disadvantage to the Committee.
The amendment is concerned with giving consumers choice. It would enable consumers to have the benefit of a more comprehensive range of options, so that those who are motivated or who can afford a range of energy efficiency options can think about installing measures that go above and beyond the Green Deal. Providing a range of such options helps consumers to think more intensively about which measures they would like to install, as some measures will be better suited than others, according to the circumstances of the building that is due to be treated.
We have heard in Committee arguments in favour of thinking beyond what may strictly be provided through the Green Deal. We all appreciate the importance and significance of the Green Deal. I am not in any way, shape of form doing anything other than commending the objectives of the Green Deal, but there are possibilities beyond it. We all have a major job in educating the public and our fellow citizens about how they can respond. We all know what a challenge that will be because, in all circumstances, despite the fact that the arrangements for payment are so skilfully done through energy bills, costs are involved and we all know people’s natural response to additional costs, particularly when, in the immediate future, household budgets are likely to be constrained.
We want to make sure that as much information as possible is available and that we emphasise the necessity of both hitting the targets and ensuring that individual citizens and consumers sign up to the proposals in the Bill. This amendment builds on the momentum in this House for a more comprehensive energy perspective. I hope, therefore, that the Committee and the Minister will look on it as a constructive proposal to assist in the general objectives of the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I had hoped that the noble Lord would have given some indication of the range of improvements and benefits that might be available under the Green Deal. It seems to me that, if one were to list the entire range, including appliances and all the other things that now qualify under the Green Deal, that could in many cases be misleading to a householder, as it might be that only two or three of them could possibly be relevant to his or her house. I just wonder what the purpose is of listing the whole lot if inevitably the assessment will be that, within the price and given the nature of the building concerned, numbers 1, 2 and 3 are really the only ones that will be applicable. What is the purpose of listing, as the amendment suggests in the second subsection, all energy efficiency measures, if most of them might not apply to that house?
Lord Dixon-Smith
Following a slightly similar line of thought, but not exactly the same one, I think that, if you are going to have people in undertaking works to improve the energy efficiency of your building and you are able to do works outwith the scheme, why should that not all be done at the same time? I would hope that the Green Deal might set a minimum standard and a financial limit of the funding available and that, within that financial limit, as much work as the individual owner and improver wishes to undertake can be undertaken. After all, it is a financing arrangement that we are talking about; if the property owner or housing association or whatever wants to go the whole hog and really do the whole job, I do not see that the upper limit matters. What we want is the security of a scheme and it must have a minimum standard. We do not need the rest of it, so I think that the idea of listing it all is completely unnecessary. The only thing that needs to be totally determined is the minimum standard. After that, let it rip.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
The attraction of this amendment is that it affords flexibility. A range of options will be available and, if an assessment is being done, it would be sensible to have a clear list. Let us face it, there may be a number of people who, having become interested in the Green Deal, will be able to purchase some of the items that are outwith the terms and purposes of the Green Deal but which might come cheaper if they get the whole job done at the one time. If a tradesman is visiting a house, it could involve just one visit and a person would have to pay only for another hour. Other pricing mechanisms might involve a second visit, with the first hour costing so much, et cetera.
It is important that we get an idea of the ideal deal as well as the Green Deal so that we can see all the requirements of the household and so that, when the assessment is done, the individuals, within the criteria of the Green Deal, are able to pick and mix. Within certain guidelines and appropriate standards, we should provide a range of options. This amendment may be unnecessary, but I would hate to think that this deal, as I have already characterised, is perhaps in reality more limited.
The Minister and I were not quite in dispute, but he noted his disagreement with me when I said that a number of properties will probably be too expensive to fall within the Green Deal. I identified the solid-wall rural household outwith the gas network, which would be very difficult to fund. The savings may not be sufficiently large to make the loan repayable over a 15-year period, but that should not mean that at least part of the work could not be done in the household under the Green Deal.
If people have enough money, they could take on a private financial arrangement with a bank, add to their mortgage or do whatever to carry out the other improvements. It would be helpful if the Minister could indicate whether he envisages the system being, in the first instance, capable of accommodating a whole list of possible options and being sufficiently flexible before the contract is signed to include some of the options, if not all, on the original list. The system should allow the individual, if they see fit, to have the other works done at their own expense and paid for by whatever means they can privately arrange, whether that be the credit card, the bank loan, adding to their mortgage or simply hard cash.
If we had that, we would get a clearer idea of the potential for flexibility. We do not want so much flexibility that people could be ripped off by cowboys, but qualified tradespeople, good assessors and a wide range of options would be a selling point for the Green Deal. That will not do everything, but it will help. It will perhaps free up resources for people so that they can do the things that they would like to do but otherwise might not consider to be a possibility.
Lord Moynihan
My Lords, as one who enjoyed spending Monday night in your Lordships’ House reading through every clause, including the details of the impact assessment, the Explanatory Notes and everything that goes with the Energy Bill, I may have overlooked something but I think that my noble friend’s point is, in effect, already answered. A request to list all the energy efficiency improvements that may or may not fall within the Green Deal would be fairly simple because it is already covered by the Bill. It was made clear by the Minister that under Clause 1(4) there would be an order made by the Secretary of State setting out the qualifying energy improvements. Anyone would be able to see those energy improvements. We would be at risk of repetition if we were now to add into this clause, and lift from the order, all those improvements that would qualify under the Green Deal.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, although I do not entirely agree with this amendment, or the way in which it is written, I think that it is important that the Green Deal plan is put within a broader context. In some ways, the Bill allows for that. In our last session in Grand Committee, we discussed the clauses that refer to the Green Deal plan and/or energy plan and I think that it is that broader energy plan that we could include in this.
As we will see in the next group of amendments, there will be occasions when there will be a much better deal available because more than one property is involved in the decision. This should also be pointed out in the Green Deal energy plan. I like what we are trying to achieve, because I believe that there is a broader issue.
There is another issue that has been left out. The biggest part of any energy plan is not the hardware or the physical changes that are made but how you use energy in your house. I would like to see an obligation in the code of practice—it is not appropriate for the primary legislation—that requires the assessor to ask whether it is possible to run a dishwasher or heating overnight off-peak rather than during the day. Your use of energy can be more effective in ways other than making physical changes to a building. I would like to see that included in recommendations in any energy plan.
This group of amendments includes Amendment 11, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Although I do not agree with all of the amendment, I agree with the end of the sentence, which says the improver should have,
“no bias towards any one green deal provider”.
That comes back to the issue of ensuring that the improver gets a fair choice and option and that there is no bias within the system.
Lord Whitty
Prompted by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I rise to speak to the amendment in my name. Amendment 11 would require the assessor to inform the householder or landlord of the full range of possibilities and the flexibility within any recommendations. The assessment should be subject to clear, objective criteria. I know that some noble Lords dislike the reference to “standardised assessment”, but we need some objectivity and we need to give the householder some choice in how they take the assessor’s recommendations. We need to indicate some flexibility, even within the Green Deal, if we assume that there is a financial limit. This is before you consider the possibility of other arrangements to go beyond the provision of a new deal.
On the point made by the noble Lords, Lord Jenkin and Lord Moynihan, it is clear that there will have to be a detailed code of practice and it may be that some of these issues will be dealt with in that. However, those issues covered by the code of practice in Clause 3 do not include the listing or the objectivity in that listing of recommendations. While I accept that it may be more appropriate for this to go into the code of practice, the primary legislation has to make clear what the Secretary of State will have to bring forward when that code of practice eventually appears.
Finally, I underline the point that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, made about the importance of there not being any bias towards any particular provider. This goes back to who is doing the assessing and what the qualifications for the assessing are, which we discussed at our last sitting. These things are quite ticklish. Obviously, we wish to encourage innovation in this area and we wish to encourage new entrants in the provision of energy-saving installations, ventilation equipment and so on, but these things get roguish at times. It is important to recognise that there is no point in going for the latest super-duper micro CHP system in an individual house if the roof is still not properly ventilated and the windows are not properly fitted. There is a hierarchy of things that you need to do, both in terms of cost and in terms of the most appropriate treatment of those premises. The code of practice and, in broad terms, the primary legislation need to make that clear. Otherwise, we will—I go back to the point that I made when I first spoke in Committee—get back to a situation where, in the very early days, there will be some bad publicity about what people have been lumbered with and the inappropriateness of the work that has been carried out. That would be very dangerous to the success, which we all want to see, of this Green Deal scheme.
Lord Oxburgh
My Lords, in view of the concern that some noble Lords have expressed over the difficulty of achieving a uniformly high level of competence in the assessors, it ought to be explicit in the Bill whether or not individual householders will have the opportunity to go to a different assessor if they feel that the job has not been done properly by the first.
Earl Cathcart
My Lords, this is the first time that I have spoken in Committee, so I should declare that I am a landlord in the private rented sector. The assessors will obviously need paying, but who pays for that? Is it the household or is the cost added to the Green Deal and then paid off over time?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Lord Marland)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, who seems to be indispensable to the Labour Party at the moment—two Questions and then running in here and doing this. I congratulate him on the energy and commitment that he shows to this great House. I just warn him of the words of the noble Lord, Lord Winston, who said that statistically, out of the Members of your Lordships’ House, 140 would die from a heart attack. All of us clutched our chests at that time. Seriously, I welcome him and thank him for leading from the opposition Benches. I send the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, our good wishes as she sees her medical experts. I hope that we will welcome her back next week. I also thank all those noble Lords who are here, as usual, making their very good and committed contributions. I say just for reference that the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, and I rarely disagree on things, as he always makes very valuable remarks for us to listen to. I do not want us to be under any illusion on that front. Some valuable points have been raised and I shall try to pick them up as we go through.
Clause 4 is central to the Green Deal. It sets out key conditions that must be met before a Green Deal plan can be taken out on the property. In so doing, it defines the circumstances in which the Green Deal can be offered to the customer, which is fundamental. Subsections (2) and (3) require that an accredited Green Deal assessor has assessed the property in accordance with standards. To comment on the remark made by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, if an assessor has failed, he has clearly failed the assessor regulation; all the usual consumer protections are in place and the householder would be entitled to use another assessor, as people would be able to in anything. To pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, standards are completely fundamental, as we have said on several occasions. I worry—as he does, rightly—about the bad publicity that might ensue if we do not do this properly. That is why the noble Lord’s valuable comments are correct.
In many cases, we envisage the Green Deal provider employing or contracting the assessor. The assessor would identify the potential for energy savings using the standardised methodology. This assessment will be used by the provider as the basis of an offer of Green Deal finance. Subsections (4) and (5) require that an accredited Green Deal provider—the body seeking to contract for the work—should give the customer an estimate of the savings on the energy bills that are likely to result from the proposed energy efficiency improvements and over what period these are likely to accrue. The Green Deal provider is required to base these estimates on a standardised methodology to be set out in regulations, thereby ensuring consistency and rigour in the process.
Lord Oxburgh
I am not sure whether this is the right point to raise this issue, but it certainly has a bearing on some of the Minister’s comments and the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Giving householders a firm estimate of what their savings are likely to be seems to me to be a recipe for tears. A crucial element is the future cost of energy, but frankly no one can say what that will be. Might it be worth while to think of a formula similar to those used from time to time in selling life insurance, for example? We could say: “If the price of energy is so and so, your savings will be X, but if the price is so and so, the cost will be a little higher”. In other words, we could give a range of savings, so that consumers would know the risks, which would be associated with the future price of energy.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
Another difficulty, which I referred to in our previous sitting, is that the householder faces a choice—whether to have a warmer home or lower bills. It will be difficult for anybody to estimate what the bills will be if the consumer decides that they have been cold and that they want the temperature to be a couple of degrees higher in their house. The problem is in quantifying. I totally support this whole proposal, but one has to make sure that it is realistic and workable. The noble Lord suggested an estimated range, making it clear that the estimate depends on whether the householder wants a warmer house. In many cases, one of the best things to do is to wear another layer of clothes. My granddaughter shares a flat. She is a sensible girl but one of her flatmates is not and their bills are higher because the flatmate chooses to wear pretty skimpy clothes. One has to take account of these human foibles.
Lord Dixon-Smith
Perhaps I could intervene as well at this point. This illustrates the classic difficulty of legislating in a way that is dependent on regulations, which we cannot possibly see at this stage. A critical issue is whether the Green Deal has a fixed rate of interest. Each individual deal must be based on a fixed interest. If the system fails to have a fixed rate of interest, a deal may show a clear saving when it is begun—particularly because interest rates are low and one could probably get financing for this sort of thing at 3 or 4 per cent—but, if interest rates rise to 5 per cent and the borrowing rate goes up to 8 per cent, that could completely take out the effect of the savings over a period of time. There is a real issue, which comes back to the fact that we are, as with all legislation of this sort, flying blind. We need to think seriously about interest rates. If the deals vary with interest rates, their attractiveness will be considerably eroded.
Earl Cathcart
I asked my noble friend whether the cost of the assessor could be rolled up within the Green Deal loan. The assessor may charge £100 or £120 plus VAT, which, if the cost is up front, may be a deterrent to the very people whom we want to take up this deal.
Lord Marland
Noble Lords have made good points about how we should evaluate this. I am sure that many young women will feel well advised by my noble friend Lord Jenkin of Roding about how they should dress in a cold climate; we should encourage them not to wear skimpy clothing in these snowy conditions.
The central point is a good one and we must look closely at it, but we are talking about companies that are used to dealing with the consumer. It is not as if they are going to pass a standard accreditation not having been used to dealing with the consumer. We would not want to prescribe to a Green Deal provider such as British Gas or Centrica how it should interrelate with the customer, because there are all sorts of customer protections available. The Consumer Credit Act quite clearly lays down the relationship between the consumer and the provider. Whereas we must ensure at all turns that this is not taken advantage of, and that there is a creditable method, it is up to the providers to come up with the method so that, in turn, the consumer has recourse against them, to challenge them if that method is wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, has much greater experience than I have in these matters, but I have experience in the insurance industry—I think that he mentioned life insurance. I could point to many life insurance predictions made by actuaries that are utterly wrong, so we have to be very careful about being overly prescriptive in this area.
It is hard to think too far out—I speak as a consumer myself—because most of us at the time are thinking about today: what we can save today, what we can do to benefit our housing today and what the effects are. A lot of us sit and think that prices may well go up; we live in a world where prices have traditionally gone up as, traditionally, have taxes, as most people think. That is not an excuse, but it is the mental approach that I personally would take to this Green Deal. I take on board the general points that everyone has made. It is vital that we protect the customer. This is fundamental to the Green Deal and the approach that we are taking. All of us in this Room feel exactly the same and, as we take this Bill through its various stages, the standard words that go underneath the Bill will be “consumer”, “assessment”, “accreditation”, “customer” and “must be protected”.
Lord Oxburgh
Does that mean that the form of the recommendation to the consumer will not be prescribed and that this will be up to the assessor? It is important to know to what extent and how far the procedure is to be standardised.
Lord Marland
The methodology for the golden rule will be standardised and it is fundamental that it is. That is a good cornerstone from which to start. I hope that that answers the noble Lord’s question.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My noble friend has not touched on the question of the cost of the finance.
Lord Marland
I would rather pick that up later on, when we come to Amendment 15. If the noble Lord does not mind, I would be happy to deal with it then. As for rolling up the costs of the assessor, we would not encourage that, but there may be a framework in which it could happen. We will need to look into that further.
Lord Davies of Oldham
I am grateful to the Minister both for his response and for his good wishes to my noble friend Lady Smith, which I will convey to her; we anticipate that she will be back for the next session of the Committee. I will bear in mind his good wishes to me. He shares with me an interest in cricket and, as long as our cricket side is doing well internationally, I am sure that my heart will still continue to beat strongly. That ought to take us through this Committee in any case.
On the questions that have been raised in the debate, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have participated, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, for his supportive comments. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, that, if a household were to get the full list of potential measures as a result of this amendment, it might chill the blood somewhat. People would be overwhelmed by the prospect of the enormous amount of expenditure that could be involved if they followed a range of options. Of course, I wanted to emphasise—and perhaps I did not make it explicit enough in my breathless opening remarks—that we are talking about specific proposals in regard to the property, so that the customer would be looking only at a range that was relevant to what he might expend on the property.
I understand the noble Lord’s more general points, although I still subscribe to the opening statement that I made in support of this amendment. We need to engage in a major exercise in effective communication in order to make this scheme work. Ultimately, the householder will recognise that costs are involved and there will be some anxiety and scepticism. I emphasise that it should be made clear to the householder what is within the Green Deal and therefore within the framework of the scheme. If there are other proposals that might improve the property but are not within the scheme, that should be clear so that there would not be confusion.
I listened carefully to what the Minister said about the ability of the consumer to challenge the method if the method proved to be wrong. We are dealing with specialisms and technical skills. I do not know about other noble Lords but I am a dummy in the hands of quite a number of specialists who come to my home and seek to advise me on the improvements that I could effect at absolutely minimal cost and at huge benefit to me and probably the wider community if I listened to the spiel long enough. At times, such presentations are difficult to analyse effectively and to refute where they need to be refuted. This will not alter the fact that consumers will have a degree of scepticism.
I also want to emphasise that we are not suggesting at any stage that the assessor or the installer is doing the choosing. The responsibility, obligation and right rest with the property owner who is having the improvements. That is central to our amendment.
I am not quite sure whether the Minister responded to the contribution made by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, as well as I would have hoped. I was feeling my way to that position and the noble Lord expressed it more precisely. My noble friend Lord O’Neill, who is not in his place, also contributed on this. We need to be clear. I understand the issues with regard to the code of practice but we also know the vagueness and generalities of the code of the practice. The noble Lord expressed anxieties about how this would impact on the consumer, as did my noble friend Lord Whitty in his contribution.
Nevertheless, the purpose of Committee stage is to identify areas of uncertainty, which the Minister will have recognised. I am sure that some of these questions will re-emerge in our debates. At the moment, I am happy to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Teverson
“Local housing authorities(1) Local housing authorities shall be empowered to arrange, with green deal providers, energy saving schemes that cover the whole or a part of housing estates, roads, districts or other local communities.
(2) Local housing authorities will negotiate on behalf of improvers to obtain savings that arise from economies of scale, which will be passed on to individual improvers.
(3) Local housing authorities will be empowered to award council tax rebates to participants in such communal schemes as incentives; and the rebates will be reclaimed from the Energy Company Obligation.”
Lord Teverson
My Lords, this amendment brings two different subjects and two different strands to this debate: the role of local authorities and the ways in which we might incentivise the great British public to take advantage of the Green Deal. Ultimately, the measure of success of this scheme will be whether people sign up to see an assessor and say, “That’s a great deal for me. Go ahead”. I believe that they will and that they should.
Something that surprised me when I first read this Bill—I was going to say that with pride, but its sounds as though my noble friend Lord Moynihan has read it in much greater detail than I managed—was that local authorities do not seem to be covered until we get to the need to make sure that landlords behave themselves and participate. They seem to have disappeared from the concept of the Bill. I know that that is not the case, because the Government are heavily into localism, which I strongly applaud.
However, in the Bill and in the massive task nationally to deliver energy savings across the nation, we need allies. Natural allies in this are local authorities—the ones with a track record. They have previously been involved in this area and have shown their keenness. More importantly, they know the lie of the land and more about communities, housing estates and roads than do central government or the Secretary of State, and they know more than individual utilities, deliverers or providers within the scheme. That is why it is important to involve them.
Another theme that needs to come out with which local authorities could be very helpful—I refer to housing authorities in particular—is the achievement of even greater gains and possibilities as regards energy efficiency and saving, and help as regards fuel poverty. That can be done not only by looking at individual properties and flats or individual business units, but by looking at the opportunities that exist to act together. I do not propose that we substitute individual households participating in the scheme—I am sure that that will always constitute the major part—but I suggest that we bring together communities, streets, housing estates and those in flats of multiple occupation to form a single deal. That will bring better value to individual households and will enable us to complete this task more effectively.
This is a probing amendment. I would not for one minute expect it to appear in the Bill because it is not written in the correct language and probably would not work. However, I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s comments on, first, how local authorities can be involved and, secondly, on how we can ensure the rollout of a number of schemes that would be more effectively done on a community basis. As things stand, we will have a scattergun effect, where individual households make their decision about whether to participate. It will be like looking at the Milky Way, or the stars at night, where they appear all over the place with some areas of concentration. I think that it will be extremely effective to have individual street or housing estate action.
Lord Moynihan
My noble friend is speaking with characteristic eloquence and expertise on this subject, but I wonder why he has not included housing associations in the amendment.
Lord Teverson
That is a very good question. It is because, as a result of a lack of forethought, I did not think to include them. They would be an excellent addition to the list. Housing associations and social landlords would be the right types of organisations to be involved in such a scheme.
Finally, I turn to incentivisation. In talking about how we involve households in these schemes, I should mention that a couple of the more successful schemes that arose under the CERT programme involved a rebate through participation, particularly to do with council tax. I know that British Gas has successfully operated a couple of these schemes. Households will know that the Green Deal will mean that their energy bills will come down and that they can invest in their house in the long term without there being an immediate cost.
Nothing attracts people better than a bargain and something off the price when they sign up on the deal. I would like the Minister to use his imagination to think what we might do to ignite excitement about the Green Deal. Much as I support local government, I have to admit that there are few better incentives than knowing that you are going to have to pay less council tax. This has a track record as an incentive and I think that, if that sort of scheme could be included in some way, it would work well.
I realise that there is a problem about this and that I have solved it in a very imperfect fashion. The Green Deal is clearly self-financing through private finance rather than through other ways. To achieve the participation with local authorities and maybe the council tax rebate, which needs to be found from somewhere, I have taken the easy route and suggested the energy company obligation, which I am sure the energy companies will not thank me for. That is roughly how the CERT system works at the moment and it could potentially be a way through this as well, although I realise that that itself would effectively add to household energy bills.
Those are the areas about which I would be very keen to hear from the Minister. I very much look forward to this Bill finally passing and to the start of this scheme. It would be good to involve local authorities more and it would be good to have a community aspect to this. I believe that using incentives, however much we might look down our noses at them, are a way in which to ignite this plan, make it work and make it successful. I beg to move.
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, in rising to speak about local authorities and to support my noble friend, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. Like my noble friend, I am concerned about the role of local authorities. If we are going to succeed in all our efforts around climate change and reducing our energy consumption, we have to involve citizens and their local communities and councils. The purpose of the new clause proposed in Amendment 31, which is grouped with my noble friend’s amendment, is to do just that. It is not specifically about the Green Deal; it is about energy plans and local authorities. Although it would be placed later in the Bill, for the purposes of our debate it is about the role of local authorities.
I am particularly concerned about the role of local councils, as Clause 102 of the Bill repeals the Home Energy Conservation Act 1995, an Act that, as I said at Second Reading, I was successful in getting through when I was a Member of another place. I believe that that Act has successfully driven a lot of local authority action since 1995. It has had very good results. Involvement, for me, means the active empowerment of citizens and of their local authorities; it is not just about consultation.
Noble Lords may ask why this is so important. I think that it is because local authorities have been seen to have very good ideas. Indeed, it is probably what is driving the localism agenda, which is something that I and my colleagues have believed in for a long time and which now nearly everybody seems to believe in. It has become clear that not everything can be driven from the centre and that the centre is not the only place where there are good ideas. I believe that, unless we involve and empower people—my noble friend touched on this in talking about his amendment—we are not going to succeed. If people do not understand what they are doing and do not feel that they want to be involved, this whole thing will not work.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, my best line has been taken by my noble friend Lord Moynihan, as I was going to accuse the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, of speaking far too conservatively. He has neglected to take note of the change that has altered public sector housing enormously over the last decade and a half, which is, of course, the advent of housing associations. Housing associations are now responsible for a very large proportion of public sector housing, but they do not have the opportunity to offer things such as rent rebates.
Speaking as an old local authority man, I am not entirely sure that if I was still there I would like the thought of somebody committing my ratepayers to having to pay for something, however beneficial, by way of an added inducement. We need to be extremely careful to make sure that what is done in a scheme such as this is self-justified entirely within the scheme. If somebody else wants to add further inducement, there is nothing to prevent a local authority from doing it.
However, we should not begin to assume that any aspect of this scheme is going to be dependent—or might become dependent, which would be even worse—on some other outside source of funding. If the schemes are not justified in their own right, standing entirely within the terms of reference that will be established in this Bill, then frankly they are not worth having. We absolutely have to stick with that, as a primary rule in what we are doing here, without expecting others to make other commitments to support it.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
My Lords, we will come to the question of the energy company obligation later, but at this stage I must say that I was relieved to hear my noble friend Lord Teverson qualify the proposal in the third subsection of his Amendment 12 by saying that this is a bit of a cock-shy and may not necessarily be the right way ahead. At Second Reading, I remarked favourably on the energy company obligation because it was going to be more targeted on the fuel-poor than is the comparable measure under the CERT programme, which provided for a priority group covering about 11 million people, including every pensioner. It seemed to me that that was a very broad scattershot and made the cost to the energy companies that much greater. As I understand the Bill, the ECO is firmly linked with the question of fuel poverty; it is aimed at providing benefits for those who are classified as fuel-poor.
I am entirely with my noble friends in their assertion that local authorities have a major role to play in ensuring the success of the Green Deal. I recognise the value of incentives in the form of reduction of council tax or whatever. For instance, this is being offered by the Government in the case of communities that accept onshore wind farms; for a limited period they will be able to keep the additional rateable value coming to them, which will help the councils. On this occasion, however, it would be difficult to justify putting on to the energy companies the cost of any council tax rebates that may be awarded under subsection (3) of my noble friend’s Amendment 12. I was grateful to hear that he was not hooked on that as a solution to his problem.
Lord Whitty
I support the thrust of these amendments and I am grateful that we are discussing the role of the local authorities this early. Both as movers and shakers and as facilitators and providers of a framework or catalyst for movement, they will be extremely important.
In most parts of the country, opinion polls show that local authorities are relatively trusted. They are certainly trusted more than central government and energy supply companies. Whether the reasons for that are right or wrong, it is important that we mobilise that general good will. Local authorities have a role in a number of different respects and while it is true, as the noble Lord, Lord Dixon-Smith, has said, that the social housing stock has largely moved to housing associations, that is by no means totally the case. There will be many situations in which the local authority is still the landlord, although it may have a management company to run things, and it will have a responsibility for fairly substantial parts of the social housing stock and its maintenance and improvement.
It is regrettably true that the early stages of the last Government’s decent homes programme did not have a very strong energy efficiency dimension. That improved as time went on, but an opportunity was missed; a substantial amount of expenditure went on upgrading social housing stock, but improved energy efficiency was not one of the prime objectives. Local authorities as landlords can take that on.
Of course, there are also landlords of estates that are no longer a single form of tenure. Some of the occupants may well be tenants, but some of them may be owner-occupiers and some may be leaseholders or on a sublease, while some properties may be run by housing associations within the same estate. We have a complex and largely beneficial mix of types of housing on some of our larger estates, but the local authority is still the landlord and therefore in a strong position to try to persuade those on all forms of tenure to take advantage of the Green Deal, which probably individually they might not.
It is wrong that some improvements on estates have applied only to one form of tenure, because the economies of scale, to which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred in a wider dimension, apply whatever the form of tenure. The totality of the provision and use of energy in those estates means that economies of scale will be achieved if the majority of the residents participate. The local authority is by far the best body to ensure that that happens.
Where housing associations are the landlord, of course they also have to have a role, but that is a slightly different role from what the amendment envisages for local authorities. Housing associations are no different from any other landlord that could effectively take advantage of this scheme and negotiate better terms, because they deal with substantial properties. It may be, however, that the Bill also needs to refer to housing associations in this regard.
Of course, local authorities can go beyond their role as the landlord or as a body that has an indirect interest in the property to a role in which they can help to persuade landlords of private tenanted property—that will include a significant number of the fuel-poor, but not necessarily only them—and owner-occupiers to operate this scheme on a street-by-street, similar-property-to-similar-property basis, again achieving economies of scale.
That role of local authorities is important. Some will be more prone to take up this cause and will be better at it than others, but that is the essence of devolution. Indeed, I assume that the essence of localism is that you will have different patterns in different areas. It is important that the Bill recognises that.
As for subsection (3) in the amendment, it is true that the new ECO commitment will be largely focused on the fuel-poor, but local authorities will be able to negotiate—not only with the householder but also with the energy supply companies—different ways of incentivising the adoption of the Green Deal. As I said early on in our proceedings, we have to recognise that this is a voluntary thing. It is not something that the Government, the energy company or your landlord can impose on you; take-up is voluntary. That may require some incentives. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, it is already the case in a number of areas that, by dealing with the energy supplier—British Gas, mostly—local authorities have already provided an incentive, so presumably they already have the power to do so. Subsection (3) suggests that we need to legislate for the link with the new energy company obligation, but I believe that local authorities already have the power to do this. If, by agreement with the energy supply companies, they can reach an accommodation that delivers the Green Deal on a wider scale, they certainly should not be inhibited from so doing. Amendment 12 is important in that it recognises these proactive and direct roles of local authorities, so I hope that the Government, if not agreeing with every word of it, will accept the general thrust.
Lord Teverson
Just to clarify, the noble Lord is absolutely right. I have written this amendment so that the local authority would be the catalyst that makes things happen. Who the freeholder of the property or the land is is irrelevant to that—whether they are a private landlord, a public landlord or a registered social landlord, this would apply to them. This is not just about local authority estates. It is about any estate or group of houses geographically, not about tenure, exactly as the noble Lord has pointed out.
Lord Whitty
Yes, the role would be somewhat different in different cases, but I think that the new clause would provide for that. On the second new clause in the group, if we are to drop HECA—which many of us would regret; I acknowledge the noble Baroness as a prime mover of it—local authorities need to be aware that they can have a commitment in a broader framework to sustainability and energy efficiency in their area. Again, that is a facilitating provision, but it is broader than the Green Deal, and I would very much welcome some reference to it in the Bill. I hope that the Minister can say that that is also part of the Government’s thinking.
Lord Grantchester
My Lords, we are very encouraged that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, is looking more widely than the simplistic interpretation of the Green Deal to make the greatest benefits available. We share his reflections on how local authorities can utilise their wide influence in the housing market to achieve added benefits.
As my noble friend Lord Whitty said, we were anxious when we looked at the drafting of the new clause that we should not overcomplicate the situation, because local authorities are involved in so many different facets of the local market, either as landlords, with other landlords or, under the wording of the new clause, acting as an agent for the building improver. We are concerned that that role needs to be clearly thought through: how they are working and interfacing with the different participants in the plan. For example, they may, through a housing association or through their managing agents, take on side or even employ an assessor in their area. That would put them straight in as a participant in the whole complex matrix of these arrangements.
However, we largely go along with the thrust of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. Yes, we see that an added impact may be needed to bring the greatest benefits. To be fair, local authorities will be thinking how they can help their residents along the Green Deal plan to bring the greatest benefits to their communities. Under subsection (3) of the new clause they may be able themselves as landlord to offer rebates or think about incentives, but we think that if they are achieving added benefits by economies of scale, that may well be sufficient to provide incentives that will encourage a greater take-up of the Green Deal. We support the thrust of the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and we would like the Minister to take it away to think about it, or tell us today what role she envisages in the matrix of the participants in the Green Deal that local authorities could be encouraged to take up.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, this group of amendments addresses the role of local authorities in relation to the Green Deal. We are very grateful to noble Lords for laying the amendments. We want and expect local authorities to exploit the opportunities that the Green Deal presents to them and to their residents. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, says, local authorities are indeed natural allies in this—as are housing associations, as the noble Lords, Lord Moynihan, Lord Dixon-Smith and Lord Whitty, observed.
I shall speak to Amendment 12 first. Section 2 of the Local Government Act 2000 already provides local authorities with a power to take any steps which they consider are likely to promote or improve the economic, social or environmental well-being of their local community. Local authorities are empowered to undertake a wide range of activities for the benefit of their local area and to improve the quality of life of local residents, businesses and those who commute to or visit the area. So certainly this could include local energy efficiency initiatives.
Moreover, the Green Deal will provide strong natural incentives and varied opportunities for councils to engage with and deliver it, in particular, the incentive of attracting new and additional sources of finance into their local areas to benefit local residents. Councils may, for example, choose to become Green Deal providers themselves operating on a commercial basis. Others may want to form partnerships with Green Deal providers working with them to ensure the widest possible availability and take-up of offers in their community. As trusted local brokers with knowledge of their housing stock, local authorities will be attractive partners for Green Deal providers. They will therefore be in a good position to negotiate advantageous programmes for their residents—for example, to deliver economies of scale and incentives, as the noble Lords, Lord Teverson and Lord Whitty, noted.
Many local authorities are currently working with the energy companies and others to deliver the community energy saving programme, which specifically targets whole-house, community-wide delivery of energy efficiency measures. We are carrying out a formal evaluation of this programme, which will complete in March of this year. That will therefore feed in. Anecdotal evidence to date suggests that CESP is delivering projects ranging from 100 to 1,200 properties, and because of this is achieving significant economies of scale. This experience is informing and will continue to inform the development of the Green Deal.
As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, notes, a number of local authorities already use council tax rebates as incentives. British Gas has worked with around 70 councils to offer a rebate on council tax bills for households who take up their CERT cavity wall or loft insulation offers. The rebate is funded by British Gas, although in some instances the council also match-fund. Local authorities will also often contribute resources for marketing, such as council-branded leaflets. Rebates, which are limited to one per household, vary from £50 up to £125 depending on the council involved. However, I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, on CERT and fuel poverty.
We fully expect local authorities to build on this experience and work with Green Deal providers and others to deliver schemes to whole communities. We are working closely with local authorities to understand and develop the roles that they might play in delivering and promoting the Green Deal and how to disseminate good practice, including thinking about how best to enable and incentivise such methods in delivering the Green Deal
Moving on to Amendment 31, the well-being power in the Local Government Act 2000 could already enable local authorities to propose, plan and deliver energy efficiency measures and programmes for their communities, and we will explore this further with CLG Ministers. Indeed, many councils already have a strong track record in delivering in this area, working in partnership with energy companies and others. As I have noted, the Green Deal will further incentivise this, and we are aware of a number of councils which are already considering how they might deliver the Green Deal. The noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, has a long track record in this area, and I note her concern to ensure that the take-up of this scheme is as wide as possible, building on the work of the Home Energy Conservation Act.
This Government fully support local residents in having a strong influence over their local council. I note that that principle underpins this amendment. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government has brought forward the Localism Bill to provide councils and local residents with a greater ability to deliver local priorities without necessarily having Whitehall direction on what they must do or how they should deliver locally. For example, the general power of competence proposed in the Localism Bill is based on a fundamental assumption that local authorities should be free to act in the interests of their local communities, except where restricted by statutory limitations or restrictions. We believe that freeing local councils to act and working to create the right incentives is the way to ensure that local authorities and local residents take up the opportunities presented by the Green Deal and the future energy company obligation.
While we are sympathetic to these proposals in terms of local government involvement in the Green Deal, incentives to use the Green Deal, and encouraging take-up, all of which are extremely important, we hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment. But I hope that noble Lords will be reassured by our continuing exploration of the role of local authorities in this area and by our recognition of how important they are in this regard, and how best to encourage take-up of this scheme.
Lord Grantchester
My Lords, we are continually told that we are not in normal times at the moment. What confidence does the noble Baroness have that local authorities, under the present budgetary controls, will take up the empowerment clauses about which she has just told us?
Baroness Northover
As the noble Lord will have noted, obviously there are economies of scale when local authorities are dealing with this. Therefore, there is the incentive in that of being able to provide for local residents a better deal if they access these funds and we expect that they would see this as the route to go down. All these areas will, of course, be looked at carefully to try to ensure that the Green Deal is as effective as possible, which is what we all, in any party, even in these tight financial circumstances, wish to see.
Lord Teverson
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that response. I am delighted to hear that local authorities have a number of those powers already. I omitted to declare that I am a member of a housing authority in terms of Cornwall Council, so I should declare an interest in that now, although I have absolutely no influence on what that council does, being a back-bench member of the opposition there. This important area is key to the success of this scheme. I am delighted that the Government recognise that and I am sure that we will have more conversations about this prior to Report stage. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Whitty
“(ia) the structure of repayments over the length of the green deal plan, which, must be equitable to the bill payer and any subsequent bill payer in accordance with a methodology to be in the form specified in the framework regulations;”
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 13 and speak to the other amendments in this group. One could argue that the first three amendments could appear in the code of conduct or some form of secondary regulation, but the fact is that the primary legislation does not specify that such arrangements should do so. Therefore, one way or another, these amendments aim to ensure that these principles are followed in whatever regulations cover the delivery of the Green Deal.
Amendment 13 aims to protect those who effectively inherit a Green Deal arrangement. It is attempting to ensure that, because the Green Deal attaches to the property and not to the current occupant, subsequent occupiers are not unfairly prejudiced by the nature of the deal. In other areas of financial arrangements, we know that a significant number of deals start at a relatively low level of repayment and rise over time. Indeed, one could argue that the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States based on those principles almost brought the whole of world capitalism to its knees, but it is used in more respectable circumstances as well. However, in this case, it is important that subsequent occupiers are not disproportionately penalised. The golden rule should apply to the totality of the deal, but if the golden rule is delivered by low payments at the beginning, then subsequent occupiers, while they are required to pay a larger proportion of it back, may well not benefit from the golden rule.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, may be pleased to hear that when I read through the Bill I put a question mark against the reference to a fee in subsection (5). Like him, I would like to know what this is about. I would envisage, particularly if there is a change of ownership, that a new owner might prefer and be prepared to pay off the debt that is on the house so as to be shot of that. I would be very distressed if that were going to attract a fee. Like the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, I am not clear what this fee refers to and I look forward to hearing what my noble friend has to say about that.
Having said that, I think that if one is entering into an agreement that may well last 25 years, it is asking too much to expect any provider to offer a loan at a fixed rate of interest over the whole of the 25 years. The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, did realise that that might be difficult for the Government to accept. One inevitable consequence is that the interest rate on the loan would have to be higher than it might otherwise be. He knows much more about this than I do, but you can have tracker bonds that will follow the rate of interest, and obviously, if interest rates are low, you will start very low. However, you are actually recognising that if interest rates go up—and whether we will face this later this year remains to be seen—inevitably then the rate on the loan goes up. It will be for the provider to propose a rate of interest for the loan and for the improver to agree. Simply starting from the proposition that there would have to be a fixed rate over the whole period may, I think, be going, as the noble Lord indicated, a bit too far.
Earl Cathcart
My Lords, I was wrestling with an amendment—it was going to be a probing amendment—to the effect that a landlord of private rented property should not be liable for the Green Deal if the property becomes vacant. I realise that this amendment might better be put in Chapter 2, when we are discussing the private rented sector, but it did not seem to fit there and seems to fit much better in Clause 5, which deals with the terms of the plan and in particular the persons liable to make any payment under the Green Deal.
When a private rented property becomes vacant between lettings, does liability for the Green Deal loan repayment fall to the landlord, bearing in mind that energy bills are likely to be minimal between lettings? It seems obvious that if the property is vacant, it would fall to the landlord to carry on paying any energy bills for the duration of the vacancy, even though they are minimal, but does he become liable for the Green Deal? And if so, does the repayment of the loan instalments get adjusted downwards, bearing in mind the very small energy bills while vacant and the golden rule? Secondly, what happens if the landlord cuts off the energy supply and reconnects when a new tenant arrives? The energy bill would be zero but there would still be interest to pay. Would this fall on the landlord and what about the golden rule here? Could this act as a disincentive to landlords to take up the Green Deal, or do the Government think it will act as an incentive to landlords to reoccupy the property more quickly, bearing in mind that the landlord may have to carry out repairs, maintenance and redecorations between lettings?
There is a provision in Clause 15(3)(d) of this Bill to suspend Green Deal payments. Does this suspension provision apply when a property becomes vacant, and, if so, what would this do to the repayments? Would it increase the term of the agreement and increase total liability due to interest accrued during the suspension? I ask all this because it does not seem to be at all clear as to how this would work and what the figures would be like for the landlord in the event of his property becoming vacant. I would be grateful for clarification.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the Minister will be relieved to hear that I do not have a great deal to add, as he has quite a bit to answer from his noble friend Lord Cathcart, who has identified issues which concern us all. Whether the answers come down in relation to the landlord or in any other respect, there are anxieties also about the tenant. We need a clear position with regard to that. We have our uncertainties and I am grateful to the noble Earl for having identified those.
The noble Lord, Lord Whitty, will accept what the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, had to say about the fixed rate of interest. I once had a friend who took out a fixed-rate mortgage with a London authority just two years before the oil price rise in the 1970s. We can all recall inflation running at staggering figures at that time and interest rates going well into double figures. If you had a fixed-rate mortgage of 2 per cent, you reaped considerable advantages from that. With regard to a scheme that has any length of time attached to it, the question of fairness over a period of time has to be addressed.
My noble friend Lord Whitty raised the obvious question of what those costs will be and the interest which will bear upon the initial person living in the property. Consumer rights need to be safeguarded. We want clarity on that point too. Our amendment requires clarity on the changeover, to which the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, also referred, with regard to whether the relationship between the improver and the person paying the Bill could change to the disadvantage of one or the other. How will the scheme work to guarantee that there is fairness over the considerable period of time involved in this exercise? That was the burden of the questions addressed earlier today.
I do not really need to add my voice to this matter because, if my noble friend Lord Whitty and the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, are worried about the word “fee”, I am too. I, too, had also identified that. So that is a question for the Minister to answer. Is he not lucky to be in the place that he is?
Lord Marland
I thank the noble Lords very much. Just before I respond to the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, among others, I want to clarify some comments on the previous amendments relating to Clause 4 about the Green Deal providers deciding how they would apply parts of the Green Deal, such as the assessment or the golden rule. I hope that I did not give the impression that firms could pick and choose. I hope I gave the impression that customers could pick and choose. Nevertheless, I want to be clear about that and that the prescribed methodologies for these steps, including expected savings, are very much part of the Bill.
I hope that I highlighted the beneficial flexibility, which experts and customer insight will have to present information in a useable format, as well as communicating accurately in line with the regulation. I want to emphasise another important protection. It covers all credit arrangements. Let me put on record that for consumers the Green Deal will need to meet the requirements of the Consumer Credit Act with only limited exceptions. For example, all communication on the terms of the plan would need to meet responsible lending rules.
I turn to the excellent amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty. Clause 5 sets out requirements for what terms must and must not be present in a Green Deal plan. In doing so, it builds on Clause 4 by further specifying the basis on which a Green Deal can be offered. Clause 5 ensures that, through the terms of the plan, key consumer protections are in place about the financing as well as the advice, the measures and the installation. Subsections (2) and (3) ensure that no charge over any person’s property may be taken away by way of security. Early repayment cannot be required of the bill payer, except in conditions to be set out in regulations, and a bill payer’s liability for maintaining Green Deal repayments cannot be extended beyond the period for which they are the bill payer for a property. This ensures that the Green Deal does not become a personal loan and remains a charge on the energy bill.
The noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, wishes us to expand on this point, particularly on when the property becomes vacant. As regards the person then liable for the bill at the end of a tenancy, that obligation would usually revert to the owner. Clause 2(10) also makes provision for where there is no energy bill because supply and connection charges have been suspended. We will provide in regulation that the person who would otherwise be the bill payer, usually the owner, is liable for the charge. I hope that that answers the question posed by the noble Earl.
I have just been passed a note saying, “Be fast if you can” and I am trying my best. I thought that I was being quite fast. Amendment 13A proposes a further element to the terms of the plan to provide for confirmation of the ownership and maintenance of the Green Deal improvements.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Countess of Mar)
My Lords, I think that we should restart, but I should say that there is very likely to be another Division immediately after this one is decided. I will try not to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Marland, in the middle of a sentence this time.
Lord Marland
I shall start the sentence again. I will rely on Hansard, as I always do, to dig me out of any holes that I have got into.
Amendment 13A proposes a further element to the terms of the plan to provide for confirmation of the ownership and maintenance of the Green Deal improvements when the bill payer and improver are different people. I am grateful to noble Lords for raising that issue. It may need to be provided for within the terms of the Green Deal plan. However, I resist the amendment on the basis that we have already provided for further compulsory conditions to be specified in the framework regulations under subsection (1)(b). If the issue needs to be addressed, we already have the power to add it to the terms of the plan.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
My Lords, on a point of order. I do not know if one can do this on this Committee, but we are breaking for 10 minutes but the vote has not finished yet. I realise that you have exercised a degree of flexibility, but we are going to have a number of Divisions. Surely we should have breaks commensurate with the length of time it takes for the Division to be held and announced next door, because, at the moment, we are having a Division on closure followed by a Division on substantive amendments, and the two follow one after the other.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
I appreciate that. I am afraid that I had to call the noble Lord, Lord Marland, between the two Divisions. I recognise that there is a problem when we get Divisions back-to-back like this. I have given some leeway; I gave about five minutes on the last Division.
Lord Marland
Amendments 13 to 16 all deal with the financial terms of Green Deal plans. However, before I address the amendments, let me put on record that the Consumer Credit Act applies to the Green Deal plans in full bar a few essential amendments in the Bill in Clauses 23 to 27. This provides a high starting point for consumer protection. Clause 5 gives the Secretary of State power through regulation to put additional protections into the Green Deal regime.
Amendments 14 and 16 are closely related to the Consumer Credit Act. Amendment 14 seeks to apply one specific aspect of the CCA: the presentation of the terms of the plan. This means that Green Deal providers would need to set out the total credit payable, the amount of the regular payments, and the annual percentage rate—APR—calculated in accordance with the rules. However, it is not necessary to include the amendment, as the relevant legislation already applies in full to Green Deal arrangements for consumers.
The purpose of Amendment 16 is to remove the ability to set out, in secondary regulations, how the fee for early repayment should be calculated. The effect of the amendment would be that no provisions about early repayment fees could be set out in regulations for Green Deal plans. Domestic Green Deals would be subject to an early repayment rule, which would be set out in the Consumer Credit Act. However, business Green Deal providers are not subject to any existing regulations on early repayment fees. This amendment would remove Government’s ability to set out regulations limiting the fees that can be charged. This means that the business Green Deal providers could be free to determine their own fees for early repayment of the Green Deal and could lead to inappropriately high fees being charged. For small businesses in particular, that could be a concern when signing up for the Green Deal. I therefore respectfully request that the noble Lord withdraw the amendment to allow us to put in place in secondary legislation the appropriate protections for businesses taking out Green Deal plans.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
Can my noble friend give some indication of what level of fee—I made the point about early repayment, perhaps a successor owner wishing to pay off the whole bill and not have it hang over them—he thinks is likely to be charged under the arrangements that my noble friend has outlined? There really is an argument for keeping that as low as possible.
Lord Marland
I totally agree with my noble friend Lord Jenkin. There is always an argument for keeping everything as low as possible. However, we are not at the stage of the Bill where we should be able to predict or prescribe how additional fees are charged. I think I have spoken to that; I hope that my noble friend feels that I have. We have a lot of discussion, dialogue and consultation to have with the financial institutions who may well be providing that finance.
Lord Moynihan
To assist the Minister on this, can he clarify to the Committee that the Government intend for there to be the flexibility that my noble friend is looking for?
Lord Marland
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Moynihan for assisting me in this regard. Absolutely—we have to allow the framework to take its course and we have to be open to consultation and views to find the best method of dealing with this.
Earl Cathcart
My Lords, I am not sure that my noble friend answered my questions quite as fully as I might have hoped. I asked whether the suspension provisions in Clause 15 might apply to the landlord of a vacant property. It seems that repayments of the Green Deal are fixed at the outset—or am I wrong? Is there flexibility? What happens if one tenant does not use much energy and the next one does? Does the Green Deal repayment change under any circumstances? What if a tenant defaults on paying his energy bills, does the landlord become liable?
I am not asking the Minister to answer everything now—I do not want to regurgitate my previous remarks—but would he consider writing to me once he has considered the issue?
Lord Marland
I am grateful to my noble friend for asking me to explain again. A lot of this will be picked up in the group of amendments that relate to the rental sector. When we reach that point we will be able to clarify the situation.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for spelling out some of this, but I am still puzzled by bits of it. For example, there is the reference to the consumer credit regulations. He seems to be saying that they apply by default, but then referred us forward to Clause 23, which provides for some exemptions from it. It is not clear, as his words implied, that all such credit arrangements are covered by the Consumer Credit Act, except where specifically excluded. As he said himself, some of the organisations which will be Green Deal providers—with whom the householder actually has the deal, as distinct from the financial vehicle behind it—are not covered by the Consumer Credit Act. I am not necessarily asking for a detailed reply at this point but it would be useful for the Committee to have spelt out how and to whom the Consumer Credit Act applies and what, if any, are the exemptions referred to in Clause 23.
Lord Marland
Perhaps I may clarify that question for the noble Lord. Our legal advice is that the protection is in place. I am happy to debate the subject with him afterwards, but that is our legal advice.
Lord Whitty
It would probably be helpful to us to have that legal advice—or the gist of it—in writing, otherwise we may return to this.
The issue in Clause 13, equity between the original occupier signing up for the Green Deal and a subsequent occupier, is still important. I agree that aspects can be covered by secondary legislation or the code of conduct, but it is obviously key that any potential payment needs to be spelt out—this is where it links to Amendment 16 with relation, for example, to an exit fee. If you sign up for an agreement, and there is an exit fee included, you are going in with your eyes open—or you should be if everything is transparent and spelt out. However, the agreement is not with the person who may subsequently pay the exit fee; other things being equal, on acquiring the property, a subsequent owner will have calculated that it is better to pay off the debt early. If there is a fee attached that is not included in the deal, it is important that contingency is covered. Transparency, caveat emptor and a search on acquiring the property or taking up the tenancy or lease must all be taken into consideration, but if a subsequent owner is to be liable for such fees down the line this must be spelt out.
To some extent, I accept the view that Amendment 15 is not appropriate in that it would prescribe a fixed rate of interest. On the other hand, it is difficult to calculate, even within the range of outcomes we discussed on the earlier amendment, whether the golden rule works unless you have some understanding of the interest implied in the total package. Some will be marginal, and a fixed rate will give you at least the minimum rate of return and benefit, whereas with a variable rate it will be difficult to assess whether the golden rule has been met. We will have to assume certain things about energy use. As the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, said, some people will use more energy because it is cheaper, for obvious reasons. However, on the basis of equal use and equal interest rates, you can make a reasonable stab at a calculation on the golden rule. If both of those are variable, it is more difficult to say how it applies.
I realise that we have to have flexibility, and therefore Amendment 15 in its absolutist sense is probably not appropriate. The previous amendment, with the clarification on compensation and Consumer Credit Act provisions, is needed. We need to protect consumers from the possibility that the whole structure of repayment is either to their detriment or unclear when they sign up.
Although I will withdraw the amendment at this stage—
Lord Davies of Oldham
My noble friend will have recognised from the contributions of Members of the Committee the anxiety about the concept of the fee. I wonder whether he will withdraw his amendment before we have made a great deal of progress, as I heard from the Minister’s reply, on how that issue is to be resolved. We have expressed anxieties on it.
I apologise to the Minister if, in the disturbance caused by the Divisions, I lost track of his replies. He may have covered the matter. I know that my noble friend was exercised about this, but so were other Members of the Committee and we all gave voice to it. We certainly have anxieties, and I wonder whether, before withdrawing the amendment, my noble friend will press the Minister on the matter.
Lord Whitty
I will press the Minister for communication with Members of the Committee who have taken an interest in the matter, on both the legal point and on any fee that applies.
Lord Marland
Given that there has been disruption and that not everyone heard what I said, I am happy to communicate with other Members of the Committee to clarify these things and carry on with the dialogue. That is the spirit in which this Committee, including the contributions of all noble Lords, is operating.
Lord Whitty
It would be relatively easy to say what any fee does not cover, which would provide some clarity. I would also welcome any communication from the Minister between now and Report. I would hope that that clarification indicates that fees paid up-front are not included, even if there is need for flexibility about fees paid later. On the understanding that we will be hearing from the Minister, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Davies of Oldham
“(A1) Before any improvements are installed under section 7, or a plan is confirmed under sections 8 to 10, the improver must consult—
(a) the bill payer, where the improver is the owner of a property; or(b) the owner of a property, where the improver is the bill payer, about the assessment undertaken and options outlined in the assessment, and receive the consent of that person to the intended improvements.(A2) At the time of consulting a person about the assessment and intended improvements under subsection (A1), the improver must provide the person with a copy of the assessment undertaken.
(A3) Where a person is consulted about intended improvements under this section, they must not unreasonably withhold their consent to those improvements.
(A4) The framework regulations shall make provision for an appropriate period for a person to consider and consent to intended improvements under this section.”
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the amendment seeks to clarify some important aspects of the clause and identifies just what the Opposition’s anxieties are. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us on this. It is quite clear that necessary consultation will take place between the improver and any potential bill payer. It is important that we appreciate the obvious fact that whoever is saddled with the additional costs that are reflected in energy bills knows exactly what is going on in relation to the property.
The issue does not arise with regard to the householder for obvious reasons, but we are also concerned with kinds of property entirely different from properties inhabited by the owner-occupier or a single tenant. We are concerned with the situation where there are improvements going on across a number of flats, for example, where the improver is the landlord but the individual tenants are going to be the bill payers. We want to make sure that, in any such exercise, everybody is fully informed and knows what is going on.
We also recognise, and I hope that we have included this satisfactorily in the amendment, the enormous danger of the awkward one person putting a veto on desirable improvements right across the range of the property. That would lead to a situation in which proposals were vitiated simply because one had no framework at all to deal with the minority—not that I am against minorities, nor do I think that at any time the individual’s rights should be overridden. However, we have to take the interests of the generality into account in circumstances where someone, for all sorts of reasons that we do not dare to presage, might be awkward.
Of course, there is the obvious fact that, with regard to bill payments, some may consider that they might be in for the shorter term because they might be a little older than other people in other properties and that any costs at this stage—anything at all that puts up a fuel bill—is disadvantageous to them, while at the same time they might not think that there is much in the way of long-term benefits for them because they may not think that their own term is very long. Such difficulties must be overcome.
This is a probing amendment. It merely asks the Minister to identify both the process of consultation and how he thinks the difficulties that may occur from time to time should be addressed. I beg to move.
Lord Marland
My Lords, this clause enables the framework regulations to require that the energy bill payer consents to the adding of the Green Deal charge to their bills. This is important in cases where the Green Deal plan is set up by someone such as a landlord who does not pay the bills for the property. This clause will enable the framework regulations to prevent, for example, landlords from imposing charges on to tenants’ bills without first obtaining their express written consent. The clause also enables the framework regulations to provide for redress in cases where it transpires that the necessary permissions or consents to the improvements have not been obtained—for example, that the improvements have been made without consulting the freeholder.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, and other noble Lords for Amendments 16A and 16B. As I have outlined, there is adequate provision within this clause for the framework regulations to set out more detail on the issue of consent where the improver and bill payer are different people. It is important that such detail is contained within the framework regulations, as the detailed arrangements may be subject to change as the Green Deal develops. These regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure.
In addition, it is not our intention to force the Green Deal on to any party. It must be allowed to work on a voluntary basis, even where the improver and the bill payer are different people. We are proposing powers under the private rented sector chapter that would ensure that a landlord does not unreasonably withhold consent to a tenant’s request for a Green Deal. However, these powers would be used only if the sector as a whole does not take advantage of the Green Deal and improve properties voluntarily.
I turn now to Amendment 16B. The Bill contains powers to provide for redress in cases where an improver incorrectly confirms that he has obtained all necessary consents to the improvements. We do not consider that it is necessary, as this amendment seeks to do, to provide for redress in respect of matters agreed to by the improver, as the improver will himself confirm consent by signing up to the Green Deal. I hope that this gives the noble Lord reassurance, enabling him to withdraw his probing amendment.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am partially satisfied. I am pleased to note that the noble Lord says that the regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure, so we recognise that the Government appreciate the importance of this. However, surely the matter of the principle of consultation and the certainty that attends on it is of such importance that it ought really to be on the face of the Bill. I understand that the details ought to be in regulations and I accept entirely his point about changes over time. We all appreciate the obvious fact that you cannot have excessive detail in primary legislation. However, I am not pressing him on the detail at this point; I am pressing him on the principle underpinning the operation of the clause and I am not certain that the clause is clear enough. I hear what the Minister says. As I said, it is a reassurance that the regulations are going to be before Parliament, but we have some anxieties and so might return to this at a later stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
My Lords, noble Lords had indicated their intention to oppose a series of clauses and my instructions were that I must take each clause individually, but I understand that that opposition has now been withdrawn. Are noble Lords willing to discuss the clauses en bloc? If not, we start with the question whether Clause 7 should stand part of the Bill.
Clause 7 : Installation of improvements
Lord Grantchester
I am sorry, but we had a few concerns over some of the clauses. We did not want to draft a specific amendment, but we wanted to raise our concerns under the stand part debates. The first concern indeed relates to Clause 7. On our team’s side, having debated this clause, we are a little concerned whether we have identified an inconsistency. I will explain and the Minister can then perhaps satisfy us that we have not misread the situation. Clause 7(3)(a) requires that,
“the improvements installed meet the standard specified in the code of practice”.
The debate on Monday seemed to us to suggest that there was not a standard specified in the code of practice. Nevertheless, we want consistency and a consistent approach. We understood from the debate on Monday that there was not a standard to be specified in the code of practice, so we were concerned to clarify whether we misunderstood or whether there has been an error in drafting on that principle.
Lord Marland
I am grateful to the noble Lord for raising this matter. Perhaps I may take it away and respond to him later. It is a technical matter and, rather than reading the answer now and taking up the time of other noble Lords, I will commit to doing that. I thank the noble Lord for bringing the matter to our attention.
Lord Grantchester
Perhaps we may be indulgent for a few minutes more. We looked at Clause 9 to see how it fits with Clauses 10 and 11 in referring the confirmation of plan, and how this applies in England, Wales and Scotland and in updating information. I speak only to Clause 9; the point is echoed in Clauses 10 and 11. Together with my noble friend Lord Whitty, our antennae prick up when under Clause 9(3)(c) appears the imposition of a requirement to pay a fee. That is replicated in a similar fashion. Perhaps the Minister could clarify why there is a fee, the level to which he thinks a fee may be appropriate and who will be liable to pay that fee under this clause.
Baroness Northover
I am informed that mention is made of this simply for administrative purposes. Your Lordships will note that Clause 9 provides that framework regulations may allow a fee to be imposed. No doubt that is simply an enabling thing, but if I am wrong about it I shall come back and clarify.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister—that is most helpful. It has opened up the possibility of a dialogue so that we can understand better.
Lord Grantchester
Perhaps I may ask the indulgence of the Committee yet again, rather than introduce a specific amendment. I want to pick up the principle as outlined in Clause 12. It has a crossover into Clause 13. It relates to our discussion of the disclosure of a Green Deal plan in connection with the sale or letting out. I well understand the clause and go along with the thrust of it. Previously in Committee, we identified that there could well be an energy plan put forward on a property in respect of which the Green Deal plan is a subset. We wonder whether it would make sense for the Minister and his team to go away and think about whether, if an energy plan attaches to a property, it may be attached to a Green Deal plan such that there is clarity on the property that passes from one occupant to the next. That seems sensible to us. If under energy conservation a landlord, tenant or bill payer may undertake a wider energy plan of which an element of the Green Deal may not apply, it would make sense if that could attach to the disclosures under Clause 12.
Baroness Northover
I thank the noble Lord for raising that. This relates specifically to a Green Deal plan. I am sure that anyone selling a property in the circumstances that he mentioned may want to emphasise the additional work that has been done. This relates specifically to the Green Deal in trying to ensure that there is transparency and clarity for anyone buying a property or anyone taking up a tenancy on a property. It places an obligation on sellers, landlords and licensors of properties to disclose the existence of a Green Deal plan. It is fairly specific, with the intention that there is the clarity and transparency that the Opposition and the Government are keen to see.
Lord Grantchester
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for clarification. It may be in our dialogue outside when we explore further.
Lord Davies of Oldham
Lord Davies of Oldham
I note that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, also looked on this clause and also saw that there was an issue with regard to the appropriate penalty. I appreciate that he is looking at it slightly differently from us, as we distinguish between the individual and the body corporate. We are concerned that we need an order of magnitude with regard to the nature of the offence. Here we are, involved in an exercise when we all know that we want, as far as possible, to see provisions go through on the basis of consent and mutual amity. We also know that things can go wrong. When they do so, we need to have some feeling of the order of magnitude which is attended on the wrongdoing, consistent with the overall objectives of the scheme. I look forward to the contribution that the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, will make to his amendment. I beg to move.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I was inspired to table my amendment by the proposal of the Delegated Powers Committee. In paragraph 11 of its report, it drew attention to the absence of a limit in the Bill and of the penalty that could be imposed. It took the view that as the affirmative procedure would be required, it would not regard the derogation of the power as inappropriate. However, it suggested that there should be a maximum penalty.
Looking at this provision, and applying my little skill and dubious judgment, I suggested a figure of £500. My amendment was tabled before that of the Official Opposition, and I am intrigued to see that they tabled the same figure for corporate bodies but a much lower figure for individuals. I would like to know what the Minister has in mind as an appropriate level of penalty. Mine is an entirely probing amendment.
Lord Marland
I thank noble Lords for their suggested amendments to Clause 14 to limit the level of financial penalty on individuals and companies for failure to comply with the disclosure and acknowledgement provisions. This clause provides the powers of the Secretary of State to make regulations to ensure that sellers and licensors comply with their disclosure and acknowledgement obligations. The clause allows for the following specific provisions to be made: sanctions for non-compliance, including civil penalties; requiring the Green Deal provider to cancel the liability of a bill payer to pay Green Deal plan instalments; requiring the Green Deal provider to refund any payments already made; and requiring those at fault to pay compensation to the Green Deal providers.
I understand noble Lords’ desire to protect individuals and businesses from excessive penalties. However, the disclosure and acknowledgment requirements are vital to the effective operation of the Green Deal and indeed to protect the customer, so we need robust and transparent sanctions to ensure that they are all complied with. We will work with relevant industry stakeholders to develop options as to how these provisions will apply in practice to minimise instances of non-compliance. I wish to emphasise that we will consult before setting out these arrangements in regulations.
Our aim will be to use existing and well established systems of sanctions and redress where possible. Further consideration is necessary to determine what level of civil penalty would provide sufficient deterrence to ensure compliance, but I trust noble Lords understand that it would be premature to make a decision on an upper limit at this stage. In conclusion, I assure noble Lords that we will seek to ensure that penalties are proportionate. I hope that this assurance will enable the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Davies of Oldham
I do not wish to pre-empt the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, but my amendment, too, was a probing one and I am satisfied with that reply. I beg to withdraw.
Lord Davies of Oldham
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Gould of Potternewton)
I should announce that there is an error in the wording on the Marshalled List. It should say “Page 13, line 29, leave out paragraph (b)”.
Lord Davies of Oldham
I am grateful for the clarification on the terms of this amendment. The purpose of the amendment is to draw attention to the additional ways in which the Government are intending to disconnect someone’s power. We need to be clear about this. We all know the controversies of the past in relation to disconnection, and we also know that the major energy companies are careful about disconnection issues, particularly with regard to winter disconnections and vulnerable households. However, of course that refers to the big providers; and it is merely a code of practice and therefore not in legislation. We are concerned that here is a cause for potential disconnection and we want to know the circumstances in which disconnection would take place.
We are not quite clear whether we are creating with this legislation something that detracts from the existing protection that so many consumers have, and that would render vulnerable those who are not at the present time, because of the nature of the scheme. We think that this issue is of such importance and that we ought to get this right in primary legislation. All noble Lords will of course fully appreciate the problems for a household if disconnection occurs at any stage. It is of sufficient import for the Minister to give us greater assurances than we have in the Bill on the issue of disconnection. I beg to move.
Lord Marland
My Lords, Clause 16 permits the Secretary of State to modify gas and electricity supply licences to make provisions as to the steps that can be taken by energy suppliers when the customer defaults in making Green Deal payments. We intend that the existing procedures employed by energy suppliers in the event of a non-payment by a customer will also be used to collect Green Deal charges. The clause also enables provision to be made in licences regarding disconnection of a customer who has defaulted on the Green Deal charge. However, we expect that disconnection will, as is currently the case, be very rarely used by energy suppliers and only in the last resort when all other means of collecting payments have been exhausted. Furthermore, licences prohibit energy suppliers from disconnecting households in the winter months where they know, or have reason to believe, the customer is, for example, a pensioner or lives with other pensioners or those under 18. In addition, the larger energy suppliers have developed their own safety net procedure, which is a commitment to never knowingly disconnect a vulnerable consumer at any time of the year.
Clause 16 also allows provision to be made in licences enabling suppliers to require a deposit as security for Green Deal payments in specific circumstances. We intend to exercise this power to ensure that, if a customer is required to provide a deposit in respect of energy supply charges, that deposit can also be used as security for Green Deal payments. We do not intend to allow suppliers to request a deposit solely because a customer has a Green Deal finance arrangement. As is currently the case in the domestic market, a security deposit should only be requested from a domestic customer in specific circumstances. For example, when a customer has a poor credit history and a secure method of payment, like fitting a prepayment meter, is not feasible.
All these provisions are necessary to ensure that the Green Deal charge part of the energy bill can be treated equally with the energy component by suppliers when the customer defaults on payment. This will in turn help to secure low interest rates on Green Deal finance, as debt recovery rates on the Green Deal charge should closely match the high historical recovery rates observed for an energy bill. I therefore invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I am largely satisfied with that reply. Can the Minister clarify one issue? When he talks about the special deposit, is that specific and unique to this legislation or is he building upon a power that exists elsewhere and applies to deposits where there have been problems with failure of sustaining payments? If this is novel, he has not relaxed my anxieties about this power. If he is saying that in order to protect the Green Deal we are merely buttressing the provision which exists in other circumstances, I have no quibble, but I would like reassurance on that.
Lord Marland
I am grateful to the noble Lord for pressing me on this. There is a practice in place in the non-domestic sector and we are building on that here in the Green Deal. I hope that satisfies the noble Lord; if he wants us to specify how that works, I would be happy to do so during the course of proceedings.
Lord Davies of Oldham
I am grateful to the noble Lord; I would like a note from him on this point, because we have real anxieties.
Lord Marland
Is the noble Lord looking for clarification on the domestic or the nondomestic sector?
Lord Davies of Oldham
This is a power that stretches across the board, so I want reassurance in both instances. The noble Lord has been entirely reasonable, as he always is, but we are anxious that this is originating in primary legislation a concept which is merely practice elsewhere thus far. If it is built on precedent in other Acts to which energy companies or other providers respond, of course I am entirely reassured by his response. I just want a note to clarify that point. As the noble Lord has indicated that he will reassure the Committee on that point, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I raise a point on this, because it is relevant to a question that I asked on Second Reading. If there is a default on the repayment of a Green Deal loan by a bill payer, which of the parties bears the cost of that default? Is it the energy supplier, whose job it is to collect the repayment as an addition to the energy bill, or is it the provider who put up the money in the first place? I am not sure that I have yet had an answer to that question. I know that it is one that worries suppliers. Many of them are energy companies, which are likely to face considerable strain on their balance sheets due to the huge investment which they will be making in generation and transmission equipment over the next few years. They are anxious that if they find themselves liable to bear the costs of default under the Green Deal scheme, that may affect their balance sheets and the perception of the financial markets.
I do not know whether this is an appropriate point to raise that question, but we are talking about defaults, and that is a question which really needs an answer. My noble friend may well not yet be in a position to answer. I think that I am right in saying that it was not answered on Second Reading, but it is a question which is causing concern and to which, at some stage, there will have to be a full answer.
Lord Marland
We will develop this theme as the Bill goes through. Of course, in the first instance, it is the consumer to whom we would go in the event of default. Then, my noble friend rightly asks, will it be the Green Deal provider or the electricity provider? We are consulting on that issue at the moment. It is a very important thing to consult on, and when the consultation is over, we will bring it in to the Green Deal.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
Was the noble Lord speaking to the amendment or to the clause?
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I was speaking on the Question whether the clause should stand part.
Lord Grantchester
“Additional green deal payments: gas and electricity meters
Bill payers who are asked for their consent for green deal plans under section 6 or who are subject to payments under green deal plans under section 1(6), and have pre-pay meters installed must be provided with details about any extra payments that they incur as a result of—
(a) meters being installed, and(b) intended or existing green deal plans.”
Lord Grantchester
Amendment 16E concerns prepayment meters. We wish to highlight the fact that there should be transparency to to help overcome any disinclination of poor households in fuel poverty to try to improve their heating. As we all know, a prepayment meter requires cash to be paid before energy can be consumed. Some meters take cards or tokens on which cash can be credited.
PPMs are used by energy suppliers as an alternative to disconnection and are routinely fitted to recover outstanding bills. As the financial crisis worsens, we are worried that more and more consumers with PPMs are going without electricity or gas under self-disconnection even in the coldest months of the year. This research sought to understand the extent of self-disconnection among PPM users and the effects that it can have. In research undertaken by Consumer Focus, the majority of households welcomed their prepayment meters for the control that they offer over budgeting and debt. This control comes at the price of inconvenience in managing and topping-up meters. Some consumers resort to going without heating, or without even the most basic of everyday essentials to ensure that they have enough money to keep their meters topped up. For some households this is an ongoing struggle. Around 16 per cent of PPM users self-disconnect at least once a year. That could affect as many as 1.4 million people, some of whom are highly vulnerable.
The tariffs charged for prepayment meters are more expensive than direct debits or online tariffs. Yet, despite the relative high costs, the majority of families on PPMs have an annual income of less than £17,500. Thirteen per cent of households pay for their gas and electricity using prepayment meters, with almost two-thirds of these households using them to pay for both gas and electricity. More than half of households on such meters receive a means-tested benefit or benefits for disability.
Ofgem’s own investigation found that prepayment meter customers were paying more for their energy than it costs energy companies to supply. To ensure that the tariff was cost-reflective, Ofgem introduced new licensing conditions for energy suppliers. Since September 2009, the new conditions have required energy suppliers to ensure that the price paid by prepayment meter customers reflects the cost of this form of supply when compared with direct debit or standard credit tariffs. Ofgem has concluded that the new conditions have led to the average premium for prepayment meters compared with direct debit falling to £69 from £111 since October 2007.
Nevertheless, an investigation by Consumer Focus has shown that the cost of poverty premium, based on a real-life example, reveals a differential of £250, which has caused us to raise the problem with the Minister in Amendment 16E. We are seeking clarity for people who wish to use prepayment meters and may wish to disconnect. There should be clarity that the extra charges which could be levied under this are separate from the extra charges that they could pay for Green Deal, such that the benefits that we would wish them to seek under a Green Deal application are not undermined. I beg to move.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
I discussed the whole question of consumers with prepayment meters at some length with the body representing electricity producers. It was in the context of the CERT scheme, which we debated several times over the past two or three years. The point that they made very firmly was yes, of course, there are a number of consumers with prepayment meters who are fuel-poor. As the noble Lord properly said, it is one way in which the companies can make more certain of securing the cost of the energy they supply. But the companies also made clear to me that it is a very poor surrogate as a test for who are the fuel-poor. I found this surprising, but they were quite clear: a surprising number of consumers actually prefer to pay by prepayment meter so as not to be faced with bills at the end of a month or three months. One needs to bear that in mind: it is not an accurate indicator of who is likely to be fuel-poor.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
My Lords, will the noble Lord bear in mind that these same electricity and gas companies have the postal codes of their consumers, and that it does not take a computer genius to link the postal districts with areas of great disadvantage and social vulnerability? It is quite clear that there are a number of people in second homes who find it very convenient for understandable reasons to have prepayment meters. However, the argument advanced by the energy companies that they do not really know who the poorest people are, is self-serving, because they make a lot of money out of charging a higher rate for these meters. It has been one of the great sources of antagonism for many of us against the power companies, that they have disadvantaged people who are already vulnerable. The ones who have second homes we can understand; but the correlation between the postal codes of poor neighbourhoods and the fact they are on prepayment meters is simple to establish, but they never want to do that because they hide behind so-called Freedom of Information provisions, which I do not think stand up to close scrutiny when they are set against the disadvantage of the people exploited by this form of charging, in many instances.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
The noble Lord is perfectly entitled to make his point, but it does not refer to the point I was making. My point was that, yes, prepayment meters are used by many poor households and of course the gas and electricity companies have a very clear idea of who they are. Under the previous arrangements, they had to get 40 per cent of their carbon dioxide savings from people in that priority group, so they had to find out who they were, however difficult it was. That is not the point that I was making; my only point was that the presence of a prepayment meter in a dwelling is not of itself a good surrogate for who is fuel-poor. As the noble Lord himself has recognised, there may be many people with second homes; there may be people doing short-term lets who prefer to put in a prepayment meter, but whose tenants, the bill payer, may be miles from fuel-poor, but that is one of the ways that a landlord can make sure he is not landed with a bill at the end of the day. It is just not accurate to say that all prepayment meter households are inevitably fuel-poor or poor. They are not, and I think it is very important to recognise that fact and not take refuge in abusing the companies, which the noble Lord is so fond of doing.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I am not sure of the relevance of this argument to the actual clause before us. The issue here is that prepayment meters have a history, whether you are fuel-poor or not, of having significant charges over and above the cost reflectivity and over and above the degree of security which the supplier can assume on other means of payments. In other words, if you are on direct debit, there is a reasonable degree of security, but it is slightly less than on a prepayment meter, which is an almost absolute security of payment, because you do not get any electricity unless the meter is turning.
Historically, the issue has been pretty appalling. Frankly, the regulator denied the problem for many years. I declare my previous interest as former chair of Consumer Focus. Consumer Focus and Energy Watch banged on for years about that before the point about cost reflectivity was finally accepted by Ofgem. It does not matter whether the reason that you have a prepayment meter is because you are fuel poor or because your landlord, in various tenancy situations, insists on you having a prepayment meter. It does not matter whether it is a second home. It does not matter whether you are in a mansion block in Kensington, where many are on prepayment meters—generally speaking, the income of that particular subgroup is somewhat higher than the fuel-poor. The point is that they were being ripped off.
As I understand it, the new clause is proposed by my noble friend because we do not want a similar nontransparent rip-off to occur by clobbering the structure of tariffs on prepayment to hide the fact that, as a result of having a prepayment meter, you have a differentially poor repayment profile under the Green Deal.
The new clause also touches on a substantial point that, had I been present on Second Reading, I would have made: the fact that, at the same time as we are introducing the Green Deal, we are mandating energy supply companies over the next 10 years to install smart meters in every household in the land. The energy companies will have to carry out that provision, over which the landlord, the tenant or the owner-occupier has no real control. Whereas the Green Deal will be a voluntary sign-up, smart meters will not. I happen to be in favour of smart meters for energy efficiency, carbon saving and behaviour change reasons, but we could get those three things muddled up. It may be that the same supplier who is offering you a Green Deal is at almost the same time proposing to put the smart meter in, as they will be required to do, and perhaps negotiating with you the terms of your operation of a prepayment meter.
The point of the new clause, as I understand it, is to separate those different elements so that there is no distortion for the consumer. The wider point is whether the rollout of the Green Deal can in a conscious, planned way relate to the rollout of smart meters. The reality is that, on the one hand, people are going to go into every home in the land under the smart meter installation programme; and, on the other, somebody will be offering a deal under the Green Deal.
A lot of householders will be seriously confused as to which bit they have to accept, and the repayment for that, and which bit they have some option and flexibility about, and they do not have to take the deal at all if they do not want to. I assume that paragraph (a) in the new clause relates to any meter being installed, including the new requirement that smart meters be installed. We have to separate those things in terms of repayment; but in terms of delivery, there may be some benefit in associating them. I would like the Minister to comment on that point, and particularly to endorse the point lying behind my noble friend's amendment: that those three separate issues must be disentangled.
Lord Marland
There are two extremely valuable points here. If I may, I should like to defer the discussion on smart meters because there are a number of later amendments about them. As the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, said, it is important that we focus on this part of the Bill, Which is about the prepayment meter. It is fundamental that we get this bit right, and get smart meters right later. Of course, we need to have in our mind on joined-up thinking, and the two interrelate.
Through the Green Deal, people who pay bills through smart meters first receive information about extra payments that they incur as a result of meters being installed or existing Green Deal plans. We intend that the Green Deal charge can be collected by energy suppliers through all existing payment routes, which include prepayment meters as well as quarterly credit cards, which were mentioned earlier.
A number of licensing conditions are in place to protect customers who receive their energy supply through prepayment meters, including changes to prevent unfair price differentials between payment methods. We will ensure that all relevant protections extend to the Green Deal charge and we are working with Ofgem to make sure that that happens. I hope that that gives enough information for the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister for his reply. I also thank all noble Lords who have spoken for their contributions. They realise the vulnerability of many of our citizens to energy companies using meters. I thank my noble friend Lord Whitty for further clarifying the purpose of the amendment to the Committee on my behalf. His interpretation is entirely correct and I am disappointed if I did not make it clear. We are greatly concerned that the Green Deal should work for the fuel-poor in all households, because they see that not only will they save money but that they will heat and warm themselves far better if they undertake the Green Deal. With that in mind, I would like to think clearly and look at the matter again, especially in relation to amendments that may be tabled and our discussions about smart meters. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Grantchester
My Lords, now we are in stand part discussions again, I draw to noble Lords’ attention some thoughts regarding Clause 28. When we look at the Green Deal and everything that is happening in it, the Minister has said many times that the market will provide. We are most anxious that the Green Deal is taken up and proves to be a great success, and are under debate on Clause 28 pressing the Minister to understand how the Green Deal will work and what he has in mind under delegation and conferring of functions. We are beginning to wonder whether the Green Deal needs a promoter. Lots of people are involved in the Green Deal. We have mentioned the participants, the assessors, the providers, the bill payers and the landlords, as well as situations that occur as properties change hands and the circumstances of bill payers. There does not appear to be a one-stop shop—if I may call it that—unless the Government are going to provide it. Under Clause 28 we may consider whether we need a one-stop shop and who can put out overarching material and promotion to explain and promote the Green Deal. The Minister may be thinking that his department may be that promoter. We have been thinking whether the Energy Savings Trust could be such a valid promoter.
What are the Minister’s thoughts on the need for Clause 28 and what it might pertain to? If it was thought that our financial constraints—which we are forever told about—make it inappropriate, we have in Clause 32 funding for energy efficiency advice. The Minister gives himself powers to spend money; would that allow a promoter to take up this opportunity? What would that delegation be? Does he agree with me that a promoter could help the uptake of the Green Deal? I beg to move.
Lord Marland
The noble Lord asks a very good question, which I will seek to clarify. This clause gives the Secretary of State power to delegate Green Deal functions to one or more public bodies, and to fund the work they do. It is a key clause allowing us to create the most effective oversight framework for the Green Deal.
Where public bodies are tasked with creating codes of practice required to support the Green Deal, the codes must be approved by the Secretary of State before they are issued. Codes of practice will be one of the key mechanisms by which we govern the Green Deal and create consumer confidence in it.
The clause also allows the Secretary of State to delegate administrative functions connected with the licence modification powers contained in Clause 15(3). An example would be where a public body was appointed to administer an administration fee payable to energy suppliers, as in Clause 15(3)(f). This is a key clause in the Bill, allowing us to create the most effective delivery and oversight framework for the Green Deal, and to give Green Deal participants and customers confidence in the deal as a whole. I hope that that answers the excellent question asked by the noble Lord.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister for his reply, and it could well be that I am wide of the mark. He has explained the key purpose of the clause. We will reflect further on the idea that I proposed.
Baroness Parminter
“Annual report(1) The Secretary of State must lay before each House of Parliament an annual report on the operation of Chapter 1 of Part 1 of this Act.
(2) Such an annual report must include appropriate indicators to assess whether the targets for emission reductions are being met.”
Baroness Parminter
This amendment provides for reporting on meeting our carbon reduction targets—an issue I raised at Second Reading and one also raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, in Amendment 1. The Minister was not minded to accept her amendment, although I am hoping that it was the bulk of issues that she packaged together which made it rather too heavy for the Minister’s taste. I am proposing a rather more simple reporting structure on the success of the Green Deal in meeting our carbon reduction targets.
The Green Deal is the Government’s flagship policy for ensuring that we reduce carbon emissions from our homes, which account for 25 per cent of total emissions. We know that if we do not meet it through efficiency it will be a lot more expensive to meet it by other measures.
In response to the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, the Minister suggested that an annual report was unnecessary because it was provided for by existing legislation. My noble friend specifically referred both to the departmental carbon plans and fuel poverty targets. With respect, I contend those are separate issues; worthy of monitoring and reporting but unable to provide the level of information about how much carbon savings would be achieved solely by the Green Deal.
Such reporting would not require of companies the release of commercially sensitive information. We are not asking them how many loft insulations they are installing, or how many boilers they are fitting. We are asking for the total carbon savings that they estimate will be achieved by the provision of these home improvements. This is not commercially sensitive information that would be inappropriate for Parliament to be made aware of. Without this information it would be hard for the Government to make it clear how much carbon reduction is being achieved by the Green Deal. Indeed, we could miss a very important opportunity on an annual basis to promote to the public just how much this Government is doing in order to deliver a low carbon economy. I beg to move.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the Committee is grateful to the noble Baroness for her amendment. She will see that we agree with her in terms of intent; but we think there are advantages in the annual report having some more specific dimensions to it. We agree with her entirely that the more general reports that are referred to will not monitor the success or otherwise of this significant scheme. As she rightly says, it does not raise the issue of commercial information; it is a question of the householder, the dweller and the landlord making their contribution in an important way to our carbon targets. We think the country will benefit from a close monitoring of this scheme.
That is why we think there are advantages in ensuring that local authorities keep a check on progress and that they ensure that as much progress as possible is being made in their areas. This is going to be a scheme, after all, to which the energies of the nation will have to respond. Therefore, all agencies that are capable of promoting this scheme should be brought on board. That is why we think the local authorities have a role to play and that small-and medium-size enterprises and local community groups can play their part. I respect the point that there may be issues involving commercial confidentiality, but we are talking about small units here and not major companies. We therefore think it is appropriate that we ask them to make their contribution. Certainly local community groups are going to be the cheerleaders of some of this work. I can think of those who will set a fine example by the community premises they hold, where they will be first into the field. We should not underestimate the extent to which progress can be made almost by word of mouth and by encouragement and example. That is why we want local communities involved.
We also think that it important that we should monitor this issue geographically across the nation. It would be very sad if it proved to be the more prosperous areas which were able to engage in the Green Deal because they had less anxiety about the additional costs. So we need to know the balance of the scheme, and whether we need to address the failure of take-up, given that the whole nation needs to contribute to this. That emphasises the obvious fact that we would need some analysis of the response by different sections of community in terms of socioeconomic groups. This scheme is not going to be successful if only those who can take the risk with extra cost are going to play their part; we need everyone to be involved in it. Therefore an annual report identifying progress in some detail would be an enormous advantage to what we all appreciate—as opposed to all our other activities aimed at carbon reduction—is the activity to which we are all committed, is among the most imaginative and requires engagement by so many people. That is why we hope the noble Baroness responding on behalf of the Government will give a fair wind to the concept of an annual report on this scheme.
Baroness Maddock
An amendment of mine is in this group. I support what has been said about the importance of looking at how successful things are and looking year-on-year at figures. Mine is a more general measure. Indeed, I had placed it much further on in the Bill, but it was obviously seem to be convenient to debate it at this time; I do not mind that. Mine is about the assessment of the costs and benefits of energy saving, as opposed to those of energy generation.
Energy saving is universally acknowledged on all political sides to be the cheapest and cleanest way to achieve our energy policy objectives. That view is behind the Green Deal. As I understand it, an assessment of the costs and benefits of investment in energy generation capacity compared to the costs and benefits of demand-reduction policies has never been carried out. As noble Lords have said, I have been involved in the area for a number of years and have worked closely with the Association for the Conservation of Energy. I therefore know that it has pursued the issue but has never received a satisfactory answer. Over the years, as I have looked at, sat through and taken part in all sorts of legislation—a lot of it reforming legislation—I have learnt that reviewing and taking note of what has happened before moving on to the next piece of legislation is something that Governments seem to be bad at, particularly in the area of energy efficiency.
That is important when you have a lot of sceptics around and people argue about what is the best way to do things. The European Climate Foundation reports that emissions from buildings can be reduced by 95 per cent. It breaks it up into a 40 per cent as a result of reduced demand and 45 per cent as a result of the electrification of heating. Its predictions of energy efficiency mean that overall electricity demand increases only by about 40 per cent with full electrification of heating and, largely, of transport. That is in stark contrast to DECC figures, which predict a doubling, and possibly a tripling, of UK electricity demand. It is therefore important, when debating an Energy Bill, to consider that.
I hope that I can get a positive response from the Minister that he will take the issue seriously. I am not saying that the amendment has to be in the Bill in this form, but it is an important issue—particularly now that we are moving ahead with the scheme.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I support the amendment. We have had repeated statements from the Minister to the effect that, in many ways, the Green Deal will be market-driven, that there is little public funding but that there is a great deal of public provision, in the sense that the Bill will mark the paving of the way for the Green Deal. I think that, therefore, it is important that there is a degree of public reporting of what we are trying to do so that we can measure its effectiveness, whether in environmental terms or the penetration—which parts of the country respond better. We would anticipate that continuing for many years, so it would be desirable for us to have proper indications of take-up rates, the environmental impact and, in particular, who is getting it and where they stay. While we are not asking for a street-by-street report, it would be useful on a regional basis or a local authority basis to get an indication of what is happening. It might even be useful to see the take-up within the devolved Administrations and see whether they are playing their part alongside the Whitehall-driven part of the exercise.
I take the point that the first line of defence of most Ministers, when faced with amendments which seem to be rather good in intent, is that the wording is wrong, or it is not properly drafted. That is why the ministries have masses of civil servants; not necessarily to do the drafting themselves but to instruct those who do it to do so. Therefore, before we get any feeble excuse that it is not properly worded, many of us would be very happy if the Government were prepared to take the amendment away, look at it in some shape or form, and see whether we can achieve that. As we have said in respect of so many aspects of this Bill, while it is very ambitious and wide-ranging, it is not rocket science. This information will be held somewhere. It is just a question of making sure that we can get it from that somewhere into the public domain so that on a draughty Friday morning we can have one and a half hours of debate on it in order to subject the whole proposal to some kind of public scrutiny and public accountability. While we might not be spending much public money on this, we are going to be investing a great deal of, I think, Westminster prestige. There is not a lot of that going about at the moment, but what is there, if it is to be effective in this instance, ought to be reported. If it is not as effective as it should be, we ought to be doing something about it, not on the basis of prejudice but on the basis of hard information, which I think a report of this nature would provide.
Baroness Maddock
My Lords, I suggest that, if we were not repealing the Home Energy Conservation Act, it is precisely under that Act that the figures could be got together by local authorities.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, we fully support the underlying principles of these amendments, which are all about ensuring transparency—and maybe even Westminster prestige, as the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill, has indicated. The Green Deal is the Government’s flagship energy efficiency scheme, and much will hang on its success, so it is right and proper that Parliament should have the information it needs to hold the Government to account. Of course decisions need to be based on evidence, which demands proper analysis.
Amendment 17 proposes an annual report. The Government are already obliged to report annually to Parliament on progress towards our legally binding carbon budgets, as referred to in response to the reports of the Committee on Climate Change. These reports include a sector-by-sector account of the carbon savings achieved; and the Green Deal, once under way, will be a key element of these reports. As my noble friend Lady Parminter recognises, we have argued that the aim of this amendment is already provided for through these existing reporting arrangements; but I note her reaction to that argument.
Amendment 20DA seeks to enhance reporting requirements for the Green Deal. Again, we believe that the principle of this amendment is sensible and laudable, although we feel that the case for specific reporting from Government may be stronger for the energy company obligation than for the market-led Green Deal. This is the subject of Amendment 30A, which we will discuss later. I would point out to noble Lords—and we will be coming on to this later as well—that the Green Deal will be reviewed early in its life. Therefore I believe that the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, will be addressed as part of that review. While still agreeing with the principle of these amendments, it is important that we do everything we can to encourage the take-up of the Green Deal, as we all wish to make sure that this is as widespread as possible.
We will be publishing a report on meeting the fourth carbon budget this autumn, which will provide this type of whole-economy assessment. The costs of particular technologies are assessed through extensive consultation, so we believe that the aims of this amendment are provided for already by published impact assessments. However, we hear what the noble Baroness, Lady Maddock, says about learning from past experience and proper analysis. We note what noble Lords have said and are indeed very supportive of the principles of what they are aiming to do. In the mean time, we hope that noble Lords will be willing not to press their amendments and that we can discuss this further.
Baroness Parminter
I thank my noble friend for that very positive and reassuring reply, in terms of understanding both the spirit in which the amendment was tabled and what we hoped to achieve. I am certainly happy to withdraw.
Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
I return now to the issue of fees and how they are referred to in a rather different context. Both this amendment and my next group of amendments relate to references to fees. Clause 30 covers powers to deal with special circumstances. The first of the special circumstances is the suspension or cancellation of the Green Deal. Subsection (2) refers to the provision setting out the procedure,
“for securing a suspension or cancellation (including the payment of an administration fee calculated in accordance with the regulations)”.
It is the bit in brackets that I am seeking to change. If a Green Deal arrangement is to be cancelled, it is presumably for one of two reasons: either because the provision under the Green Deal has not met the specifications—in other words, the provider has defaulted—or because the repayer, whether or not they were the original repayer, is now in circumstances where they cannot repay. In either of those circumstances, it seems inappropriate, in addition to cancelling the deal, to charge a payment. It is therefore odd that there is reference at that point to the payment of an additional fee. Even though it is referred to as an administration fee, in the circumstances it is an additional payment. It is conceivable that there are other circumstances than the two that I have suggested, but I cannot think of them. If the Minister’s imagination is better than mine, no doubt she will tell us.
The second such provision relates to subsection (2)(d), which goes back to the argument about early repayment. If the original agreement was clear, the terms of early repayment would be clear. As it stands, this runs into the same difficulty that I referred to an hour or so ago, which is that a new occupier or a new landlord might have to meet a repayment fee—to which they had not previously been committed, as they were not the original signer of the agreement—for deciding that on all other grounds they wished to repay early. It is not clear, as it is not clear in many other respects, why a fee should be paid for early repayment or exit. Because we have seen exit fees abused in other areas of energy provision, I would be deeply suspicious of the primary legislation referring to an exit fee in this form. No doubt we will return to this issue when we come to the details of defining the situations to which this applies, but in the primary legislation the apparent presumption that a fee is involved should be deleted. I beg to move.
Lord Grantchester
I support my noble friend in his Amendment 18 and his proposal regarding early repayment penalties under Amendment 19. My noble friend and other noble Lords spoke strongly about this issue when it was discussed earlier. The Minister replied that, if this provision was taken out, it could lead to an awkward situation in which it would be open for different people to charge different levels of fees. Perhaps the Minister could take this away. If she could propose that no penalty fees would be levied in this situation under the Bill, that would sort the problem out and not leave it to the providers to decide. If it is not covered, there would be a disparity in the fees and penalties that could be levied.
Baroness Northover
My Lords, Clause 30 allows regulations to be made that set out when and how a bill payer’s liability to make Green Deal repayments can be cancelled or suspended. Amendment 18 would prevent the regulations from making provision for a procedure to be followed for securing such suspension or cancellation of the repayments. Noble Lords have made the point about this being proportionate and not abused.
An example of when the bill payer’s liability might be cancelled is where the bill payer had chosen to make full early repayment of the Green Deal finance arrangement. In such an eventuality, there may be a need to include an administration fee. I will turn to why that might be in a minute. As discussed earlier, such a fee would be calculated in line with the rules of the Consumer Credit Act for the domestic Green Deal and in line with the regulations that we propose to set out in secondary legislation for the business Green Deal. This clause also gives us the flexibility to introduce a payment suspension mechanism for the bill payer in appropriate circumstances.
The legislation permits an administration fee to be requested for the arrangement of payment suspension. This is essential to balance the needs of the property owner to have flexibility while minimising the loss that the provider of finance might incur. The details of this—for example, when such a fee might be requested and the level of such a fee—will be subject to consultation later this year.
Amendment 19 would remove the ability to set out in regulations what should be payable in the event of early repayment of the Green Deal being required, including how any fee should be calculated. The effect of this amendment would be to prevent the regulations setting out the rules on early repayment from being set out in Green Deal plans.
The domestic Green Deal is subject to the early repayment rules set out in the Consumer Credit Act, which prevents consumers from being charged unreasonable fees when they repay early. However, business Green Deal providers are not subject to any existing regulations on early repayment fees. This amendment would remove the ability for the Government to set out regulations limiting the fees that can be charged when a business is required to repay the Green Deal early.
Early repayment fees are an important protection for the investor providing the finance. They have invested their money expecting a particular rate of return over a particular period. Being able to claim some compensation when an early repayment is made is an important element to keep the cost of finance low. This practice is not uncommon in the mortgage market.
However, we do not want Green Deal providers to charge disproportionate fees when early repayment is required, so the ability to set out some rules around this in secondary legislation is important. There is a danger that these amendments could remove that protection, which I think is far from the intention of the mover of the amendment. I hope that noble Lords will be reassured by my explanation and, on that basis, that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I understand and accept part of that argument. These regulations are going to be subject to consultation. It may be appropriate that in some circumstances an administration fee is charged. A reference was made to the mortgage market, but in that context this is not just an administration fee but effectively—the noble Baroness used the term “compensation”—a major disincentive to people repaying their mortgage early. There is a certain amount of consumer dissatisfaction about this from people who, under all other calculations, would repay their mortgage early but who have been put off so doing by the size of the early repayment charge. I do not know that the analogy with the mortgage market is particularly helpful; I would hope that, at a maximum, any fee would reflect the real cost of the administration of cancelling early rather than the potential loss. After all, the finance provider would get the money back and could then reinvest it in as good a deal as they could. I do not think that the compensation issue should arise in these circumstances.
My main point is that this is primary legislation. The noble Baroness referred to the fact that this is subject to consultation. I suspect that the issue of fees will arise during that consultation among potential providers and finance companies as well as among consumer groups. The fact that the Bill is written in this way suggests that the procedure must include provision of a fee. Clause 30(2)(a) refers to,
“the procedure to be followed for securing a suspension … including the payment”,
as if the payment is an obvious matter. Similarly, paragraph (d) says, “including a fee”, not “a possible fee” or “there may be a fee involved”. It is worded as if the regulations are going to have to provide for a fee.
I would prefer to keep that open until we come to the consultation on the regulations. I think that in this case the primary legislation—I am using the opposite argument to the one to which the ministerial Bench usually resorts, which is that we do not have to prescribe so much in primary legislation because we can leave it to the consultation on regulations—is too prescriptive or could be seen to be too prescriptive.
Baroness Northover
Perhaps I may reassure the noble Lord that what is being sought here is a balance between bringing providers in and the very important aim of encouraging people to take up these schemes and for them not to think that their fingers are going to be burned if they pay off what they owe early. What underlines these provisions is the attempt to find a proportionate way to deal with that and to protect people through this legislation. However, as my noble friend Lord Marland has indicated, we will be discussing the subject of fees further.
Lord Teverson
Clearly, one of the points where someone might want to repay is when there is a transfer of the debt—for example, when the house is sold and the next person takes it on. Is the Government’s proposal for an exit fee or whatever to apply all the way through or does that particular circumstance make a difference?
Baroness Northover
I may need to come back to noble Lords on that but, as I understand it, if people choose to repay early the expectation is that they would pay a fee. However, I do not think that I have fully answered what the noble Lord has asked, so I will need to come back to him to clarify that.
Lord Whitty
In view of the hour and the fact that we will be returning to this, I beg to withdraw.
Lord Grantchester
Lord Grantchester
Amendment 19A draws attention to the lack of detail in this clause in respect of appeals. While we acknowledge that it may be appropriate to include some issues in regulations, such as the fee payable, we do not consider that other issues—specifically who has the right to appeal, where they can appeal, the grounds for appeal and the powers of the court or tribunal in making a determination—are suitable matters to be left to further regulations that the Minister may draft. Surely, the class of person who is eligible to appeal under the clause is not likely to change during the course of time and there is no obvious reason why this should be flexible. We are interested to hear what the Minister of Justice and his officials might have advised in this area as it appears to breach fundamental issues of access to justice. It is an equally important point of principle that people should have the protection of primary legislation. We ask the Minister to put down amendments to take these comments on board and to seriously consider amending the Bill in this area on Report. It is an issue that we will be turning our minds to in the next couple of months. I beg to move.
Lord Marland
I thank the noble Lord for his suggested amendment to Clause 31. This clause requires the Government to provide the right of appeal when a sanction has been imposed by the Secretary of State or their delegate. This clause provides a right of appeal against sanctions imposed for any breaches relating to consent, disclosure and acknowledgement, or requirements set by a scheme regulating and authorising Green Deal participants, such as any future schemes for registration and accreditation and their codes of practice. This clause enables an appeal to a court or tribunal. Subsection (3), which noble Lords would omit through their proposed amendment, clarifies that we can address issues such as who can appeal, under what circumstances and to what body, and the powers to suspend the sanctions originally imposed. These are all matters that would need to be dealt with in establishing a fair and workable right of appeal against any sanctions imposed and it is important that the Bill clarifies that these can be included in regulations.
Clause 31(5) enables the Secretary of State to revoke or amend any subordinate legislation governing the jurisdiction, process and powers of any existing tribunal system that may be used to enable this right of appeal. The Government will consult fully and set out details in regulations about who may appeal and under what circumstances. These regulations will be subject to the affirmative procedure.
In conclusion, I assure noble Lords that we will seek to develop a transparent and workable appeals mechanism and I hope that with this assurance the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister for his reply but, with respect, he has not addressed my point. We do not feel that regulations sufficiently take account of these concerns which should be under primary legislation. We are mindful that consumers must have confidence in the situation facing them and that this is something that should be upfront in the Bill. That is the most appropriate place and it is where these aspects should be dealt with, rather than in regulations. Nor did he take up my point about whether he had consulted the Ministry of Justice over any of these aspects.
Lord Marland
We have consulted the Ministry of Justice. We would not get to this point without having done so.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister for clarifying that. In his answer he referred to subsection (5), which is that regulation may be introduced that,
“may revoke or amend any subordinate legislation”.
Under subsection (6),
“‘subordinate legislation’ has the meaning given in … the Interpretation Act 1978”.
We are concerned about the overuse of regulation in this Bill and ask how far, under subsection (5), it is justified or appropriate that there should be powers to revoke or amend any subordinate legislation. We ask for clarification of the extent of those powers. I understand the Interpretation Act to merely interpret terms and not cover any policy issues. Finally, I should like to ask whether this part of the Bill been commentated on by the Merits Committee.
Lord Marland
There is no greater authority on these things than the Secretary of State. He is responsible for delegating powers. Every intention behind the Green Deal is that we get it right, which is why in matters involving disclosure, breaches relating to consent or any sanctions, the top-down authority will come from the Secretary of State. I hope that that clarifies that point.
As to whether this has been through the correct procedural process, I am not at liberty to answer that question now, but I will respond later rather than put officials through the mill now.
Lord Grantchester
I thank the Minister for his consideration. He no doubt understands that we take this matter extremely seriously and will consider further. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw.
Lord Whitty
Lord Whitty
My Lords, since I packed my bag before we gave up, I will be brief. This group of amendments relates to fees, on which I have expanded at some length already. Some of these simply follow through from those that we have already discussed. Some relate to appeals, and I think that a disincentive to appeals is an area of significant concern. Some relate to other details of the way in which the Green Deal will be delivered. However, they all raise the issue of fees. I think that it would be helpful to the Committee—it would certainly be helpful to me—if, before we come to the next stage, the Minister could arrange for someone to set out why the issue of fees has to apply in these various situations. That can probably be done more logically than going through clause by clause, because some of them obviously hang together. There are only three or four subjects, but there are a lot of points where fees arise. If the Minister would commit to doing that, I would be prepared to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Marland
My Lords, at this point in the proceedings the noble Lord’s views on fees are well known, and he has our assurance that we will look at the issue very carefully. As we have already said, the level of any fee will be set out in secondary legislation. I think that the noble Lord is making the point that he would like us to develop a thinking process before we get to that and that, between us, we can develop it further before we get to that point. I look forward to discussing the matter with him in the near future.
House of Lords
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Introduction: Lord Empey
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Introduction: Lord Palmer of Childs Hill
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Inflation
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Spicer
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reduce the rate of inflation.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, the UK’s monetary policy framework gives operational responsibility for maintaining price stability to the independent Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. The MPC stated in the minutes of its December 2010 meeting that its central view remained that a substantial margin of spare capacity in the economy was likely to persist for some time and would bear down on inflation in the medium term as the impact of temporary factors waned.
Lord Spicer
I thank the Minister for that reply. Now that the consumer prices index has risen to almost twice the Bank of England’s target inflation figure, will the Government consider exchanging quantitative easing for quantitative tightening?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, of course the Government are concerned about the current level of inflation and the impact that it has on many parts of society, particularly on working families, savers and others. However, how the Bank of England meets the Government’s set target for inflation, including decisions about what it does, if anything, about quantitative easing or the reversal of it, is an operational decision for the bank.
Lord Barnett
My Lords, can the noble Lord confirm that he is not joining those who wrongly seek to pressurise the MPC to increase interest rates? Furthermore, as he cares about transparency, will he perhaps now take the opportunity to answer the Question for Written Answer that I put to him some time ago and tell us precisely what the Treasury representative on the MPC was instructed to say to the committee about the Treasury’s view on interest rates?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I am very happy to confirm that the Government have every confidence in the MPC. They regard its independence as a cornerstone in making sure that the Chancellor’s inflation target is hit as far as it is in the power of the MPC to achieve it. That is what it is asked to do and there is absolutely no interference. As I have explained before, a representative of Her Majesty’s Treasury does indeed attend MPC meetings—not in any way to interfere with the independent deliberations of the MPC but to make sure that the committee is aware of relevant Treasury policy decisions, such as what is coming out of budgets. That is all I can say.
Baroness Kingsmill
My Lords, what impact on inflation does the Minister think the recent increase in VAT will have?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, first, the recent relatively high levels of inflation reflect, among other things, the previous Government returning the rate of VAT to 17.5 per cent, so that number is included and it is one of the factors behind the rise in inflation in December. As to the effect on inflation of the increase of the standard rate from 17.5 to 20 per cent, that depends on how much of the increase is passed on to consumers, and we will wait to see on that. However, because the rise to 17.5 per cent will come out of the inflation numbers, it will partially offset the effect of the increase that comes in in January.
Lord Myners
My Lords, we fully accept the importance of the independence of the Monetary Policy Committee but the Government cannot wash their hands of any responsibility for inflation. The exchange of letters between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England has now become very anodyne and routine—the same explanations are brought forward time after time. What are the Government going to do about the MPC’s inability to hit the target that the Government have set?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I know that it is customary for me to answer the questions and for noble Lords to ask them but five letters were written by the Governor of the Bank of England to the previous Government and I do not recall the previous Government having done anything about them in response. It is quite right that the Governor of the Bank of England explains the situation, but the previous Government put in place and supported the framework that exists, exactly as we are doing, and it is an important part of that framework that the governor writes letters.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, the Minister will surely recognise that the Government take responsibility for the VAT rise and also take responsibility for the fact that the general inflation rate impacts with particular savagery, through government policies and cuts, on the poor and less well off in our society. In present circumstances, when our citizens are suffering and the growth rate is 2 per cent or below, surely the Government should express more than a little anxiety about the possibility of a rise in interest rates.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, I could not agree more with the starting premise of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham. The Government are concerned about the hard-pressed, hard-saving, hard-working low earners in this country. That is why, in April this year, 880,000 people will be taken out of taxation altogether. That is also why 23 million taxpayers will each receive back £170 compared with the plans of the previous Government. That is an absolute recognition of the fact that the Government understand how low-income families are suffering and are doing something about it.
Lord Bates
My Lords, will my noble friend also comment on the consequences for inflation of the reductions in corporation tax, the reductions in national insurance contributions, the freezing of council tax and business rates and, most importantly, the tackling of the deficit that have all been announced?
Lord Sassoon
I agree absolutely with my noble friend that these are all critical policies to ensure that growth gets going again. It is precisely by the Government both reducing the deficit and ensuring growth that the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England will have a firm policy background against which to make its decisions that bear on the inflation target.
Baroness Falkner of Margravine
Can my noble friend indicate at what stage, after a series of letters from the MPC to the Chancellor, the latter would be prepared to reconsider the inflation target of 2 per cent and revise it in either direction?
Lord Sassoon
My right honourable friend the Chancellor has no intention of revising the target for inflation. It is a matter on which he can write a new instruction whenever he wants, but he has no such intention.
Stem Cell Research
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to review scientific developments in stem cell research, as recommended by the Select Committee on Stem Cell Research (Session 2001–02, HL Paper 83), with a view to ascertaining whether research on human embryos is still necessary.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (Baroness Wilcox)
My Lords, current scientific evidence supports research involving all forms of adult and embryonic stem cells rather than focusing on any distinct type. Investments in stem cell research are always evaluated against the current understanding of the science and of its application. The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, will be pleased to note, having chaired the Select Committee on Stem Cell Research, that the Government are in the process of taking stock of developments in regenerative medicine, and that this review will inform strategies to support the development of regenerative medicine in the United Kingdom.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
I thank the Minister for her reply. Does she not agree not only that the issue is of general scientific importance, but that it is important to ensure that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act is properly observed? The HFEA is allowed to award a licence to a research project only if there is no way of doing the research other than by using embryos. In the debates in this House, it was not only the Government who accepted the recommendation that there should be a review after 10 years; there was very broad support. Will the Government do their best to encourage a reputable medical body such as the Academy of Medical Sciences to undertake a scientific review of the whole field?
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, this is a complicated subject. I will do my best and apologise if my answer is not exactly what the noble and right reverend Lord wants. Perhaps he will write to me again if it is not. The UK has a strictly regulated but facilitating system that allows all forms of stem cell research to take place under licence. It is not yet clear that research on adult stem cells will be the best approach in all cases. Enabling scientists to work on all forms of stem cells can help accelerate the process of finding alternatives to embryonic stem cells where appropriate. The Government continue to support this because at this stage we do not know from where the major advances in knowledge and the development of cures will come, and it is too early to tell whether iPS cells will be a viable alternative to embryonic stem cells.
Baroness Williams of Crosby
My Lords, does the Minister accept that the great and renowned report by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock, gave a special status in research to the human embryo? Will she assure the House that the Rawlings report, which we are now awaiting, into speeding up the process of research decisions will still respect that special status, to which the current chairman of the HFEA has drawn attention only in the past few days?
Baroness Wilcox
I support the noble Baroness in saying that we should support that wonderful report. Of course, every haste will be made, but only in the proper way. We know that in keeping with the Haldane principles the prioritisation of an individual research council’s spending—whether it does and what it does—is up to it and is not something that Ministers should interfere with.
Lord Winston
My Lords, there are approximately 400 people in this Chamber, of whom 150 will be likely to die of heart disease. Is the Minister aware that at Imperial College Michael Schneider and his laboratory have grown beating heart muscle, which has been possible only by using human embryonic tissue? Is she also aware that in the United Kingdom there are at least 200,000 infertile women who have approximately an 18 per cent chance of an embryo implanting? We need to understand why that implantation rate is so low. To do so, it is essential that we study the human embryo.
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I was a governor of Imperial College for seven years, as the noble Lord, Lord Winston, knows. I had to stand down to take this wonderful job. I know about the work that is going on and also about the work that the noble Lord is doing. Stem cell research offers enormous potential to develop and deliver new treatments for some of the most chronic and debilitating conditions that face people. I can only agree with everything he said.
Lord Patel
My Lords, does the Minister agree that today, aside from bone marrow transplantation for leukaemia patients, there are no off-the-shelf therapies available using any type of stem cell that would treat hundreds, thousands or millions of patients? The potential for developing such therapies still lies in using stem cells with pluripotent characteristics that are also safe to use clinically. Science research has no guaranteed avenues of success. Does the Minister agree, as my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth suggested, that a review of regenerative medicine and the science that will deliver it is more important than a review of single-cell stem cells?
Baroness Wilcox
My Lords, it is a pleasure to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Patel. He is an expert on stem cell research and a member of the council of the Medical Research Council. It is a pleasure and an honour to agree with him.
The Lord Bishop of Wakefield
My Lords, to return to the question of adult stem cells and pluripotent cells, given that adult stem cells are currently used in the successful treatment of more than 70 different illnesses and that induced pluripotent adult stem cells are being used for new treatments, do Her Majesty's Government agree that adult stem cell research ought to be given priority in stem cell research in the current challenging economic environment?
Baroness Wilcox
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield asks an excellent question. I agree with him. Research excellence continues to be the primary consideration in funding decisions. Research on iPS cells has shown that although they are like embryonic stem cells, they behave very differently. I am only too delighted to agree with his statement.
Police: Crime Rates
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of cuts in police funding on crime rates.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I welcome this familiar Question, which I think I have answered in one shape or another from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, several times already. The Government do not accept that reductions in police funding will impact on crime rates; what matters is how resources are used and prioritised. We believe that police forces can make savings while maintaining or improving the service that they provide to the public.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath
My Lords, under Labour, police numbers rose and crime fell. We are now seeing thousands of police posts being lost and front-line officers having to take on admin duties because of reductions in back-office infrastructure. What does the noble Lord have to say to the Civitas report of two weeks ago, which concludes that the public will face a greater risk of crime because of the actions of his Government?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am not sure whether the noble Lord has read the report as well as the press release—which, incidentally, said only that police cuts “could” lead to a surge in crime—that Civitas produced. I quote from the report:
“The data suggest … A nation with a larger proportion of police officers is somewhat more likely to have a lower crime rate”.
When one examines the statistics—as an academic, I usually try to look at the statistics—one sees that, according to the report, crime in Romania is 10 per cent of the scale of crime in Britain and Cyprus has three times as many police officers per head of population as Britain. I suspect that the data are not entirely reliable.
Lord Blackwell
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the example being set by Surrey Police, whose chief constable has introduced efficiencies that allow him to combine significant savings with an increase in the number of police officers on the beat? Does the Minister believe that that is a model that other police forces could follow?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am sure that everyone here is aware of the HMIC report, which suggests that there is potential for a 12 per cent cut in police spending without damaging police resources at all. In the other place, Vernon Coaker speaking for the Labour Party said,
“we would have accepted what the HMIC report says”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/12/10; col. 358.]
That is to say that he admits that Labour was committed to at least a 12 per cent cut. I think it likely that, if Labour had won the election, we would have been talking about 15 to 20 per cent cuts in overall spending, so we are not talking about a vast partisan divide here.
Lord Clinton-Davis
Does the Minister assert that there will be no rise in crime, or will there be some rise? Can he be sure about the present situation? The view that he has expressed is not shared by all the police officers. Would he like to comment on that?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, if I were a police officer, I am sure that I would argue exactly that point but, having looked at some of the evidence on this, I think that the simple relationship between police numbers and crime that parties in opposition—including my own, I regret to say—tend to argue for is not borne out by the evidence. In Sweden and Spain, there has been over time an increase in both police numbers and crime; in New York and in Northern Ireland, there has been over time a substantial reduction in police officers, which has been accompanied by a reduction in crime.
Lord Eames
My Lords, given the relationship of central government to the devolved Administrations, will the Minister elaborate on what he has just said regarding the particular position of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, given the level of security risk to the people of the Province?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, in answering this Question, I am responsible for police services in England and Wales only. Policing in Northern Ireland is a devolved matter.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
Would the Minister care to consider, if fewer police are to be seen around our homes and streets, what effect that will have on people’s feeling of security and safety in and around where they live and work? Is he saying that there will be no impact at all on that?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the evidence is that police concentration on hot spots for crime has a great deal more impact than police numbers overall.
Baroness Hamwee
My Lords, detection uses forensic techniques quite extensively these days, yet the Government have announced the winding down of the Forensic Science Service, which is making a considerable operating loss. Will the Minister tell the House whether the Government have any concerns about the risks inherent in such a move, in particular whether commercial forensic science services are likely to concentrate on the more routine and easier cases? We may lose out as a result if such services do not use more expensive techniques. There is obvious potential for miscarriages of justice or, indeed, failure to prosecute.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, the Government are working very closely with ACPO and with the National Police Improvement Agency on managing the transition for the wind-down of the FSS. That includes identifying whether there are any needs that cannot be provided by the forensic market.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, will the Minister comment on the fact that in my experience—this is shared by police officers, police authorities and members of the public—although Surrey Police may be able to make the cuts at the speed that this Government want, other police forces will not be able to do so. Would not the general public prefer to see more police officers on the street than the costly introduction of police commissioners?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, police commissioners will cost money, but police authorities cost money. Adjustments have been made for the election of police commissioners. We will come at a later point to the question whether police accountability is sufficient—I know that some people are concerned about police accountability and undercover officers—but police accountability is one of the things that elected police commissioners are intended to serve.
Lord Maginnis of Drumglass
My Lords, in so far as those of us who have served in, and in support of, the police recognise the need to sustain that support, is it not important to remember that the Justice Minister wants to reduce the number of people who become victims through their lack of communication and land in prison? When we talk of the funding of the police, we must also recognise our responsibility to those, for example, who are on the autistic spectrum who find themselves in trouble and whom we have a responsibility to help.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I agree strongly with the noble Lord. In the prevention of crime, working with deprived children and disturbed teenagers is clearly an important part of reducing the crime rate and holding it down.
Financial Services: Shareholder Engagement
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord McFall of Alcluith
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions they have had with the financial services industry on shareholder engagement.
The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)
My Lords, the Government are committed to improving shareholder engagement and have already taken significant steps, including the new remuneration disclosure rules, the FRC stewardship code and the revised corporate governance code. We have also issued a call for evidence on governance and short-termism. This will establish whether there are issues affecting the functioning of capital markets, including questions about shareholder engagement. Ministers and officials have had meetings with a variety of organisations as part of the process of policy development and delivery in this area.
Lord McFall of Alcluith
The concept of ownerless corporations was reinforced last week at the Treasury Committee when Bob Diamond admitted that there had been no engagement between institutional shareholders and Barclays regarding remuneration and risk structure. Does not this absence of stewardship and judgment only exacerbate a situation where, when companies are in trouble, the taxpayer has unlimited liability whereas the executives have very limited or no liability? Will the Government, therefore, reinvigorate the debate so that risk is understood and properly monitored to ensure that bond-holders take some of the pain, which they do not at the moment, and will there be minimum structural change to ensure that in future no bank is ever too big to fail?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord McFall of Alcluith, ranges over some big questions there. To start with the remuneration issues, the introduction of the new FSA code of disclosure from 1 January will contribute to making shareholders better informed. My right honourable friend the Chancellor has taken note of Sir David Walker’s suggestion that there needs to be further international agreement in this area so the Chancellor has written to his EU counterparts to see what can be done to further drive forward aspects of disclosure. There is certainly a lot of activity going on there. As to some of the bigger questions about “too big to fail” and bond-holders and so on, I look forward to the light that the Independent Commission on Banking will doubtless shed on these important issues and I note that the chairman of the commission is scheduled to be making a speech in the next few days on this topic.
Lord Razzall
My Lords, I am sure the Minister is aware that, in hostile takeovers, the result is often determined by hedge funds which have simply acquired or borrowed stock short-term in order to make a short-term profit, irrespective of other interests. Is this an issue that the Government are prepared to discuss with the financial services industry?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, the takeover panel operating independently keeps that issue and all other issues related to the good working of the takeover market under regular review. The department of business consultation, A Long-term Focus on Corporate Britain, which is currently calling for evidence, will be interested to hear what people have to say on that very topic.
Lord Naseby
Has my noble friend noted the recent statement from the Financial Reporting Council suggesting that annual reports shall no longer be printed? How does he think that will improve small shareholder engagement?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, there is a fine balance to be struck between making sure that shareholders get all the information they require on the one hand, and on the other hand allowing companies to take advantage of electronic and other media to disseminate information in a way in which an increasing proportion of shareholders wish to receive that information and which may be environmentally friendly if it does not require large amounts of paper to be used. I am glad that the FRC is grappling with that issue.
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, this is an ongoing challenge but institutional shareholders over the last few years—under considerable pressure from the previous Government, I am happy to say—have taken steps to make sure that, where they are representatives of pension funds or other representatives, they are more active in exercising proper stewardship in the votes of the underlying shareholders they represent. I recognise that it is an important issue.
Lord Lawson of Blaby
My Lords, does my noble friend agree that one of the problems of shareholder involvement in so far as the banks are concerned is that auditors are reluctant to qualify the accounts of a bank in any way whatsoever, even if they have reservations, because this might lead to a run on the bank? Does he agree that the answer is what I put in the Banking Act 1987—to have a mandatory dialogue between the regulators and the auditors of banks so that there can be two-way communication, which unfortunately went largely by the board with the changes in legislation under the previous Government?
Lord Sassoon
I am grateful to my noble friend for reminding us of the importance of audit, particularly in relation to banks. It enables me to remind us all that the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House will, I hope, play an important part in the broader ongoing debate about stewardship when it comes up with its current report into the role of auditors.
Lord Davies of Oldham
When thousands of our fellow citizens are losing their jobs and millions are subject to a pay freeze and the bosses of industry are rewarding themselves very high increases indeed, is it not time that institutional and all shareholders had votes on the remuneration of executives and that the votes should be binding?
Lord Sassoon
My Lords, these are important issues and they are precisely why my right honourable friend the Business Secretary has a current consultation out to look at the question of shareholder engagement in relation to the effective running of the capital markets.
Fixed-term Parliaments Bill
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Constitution Committee
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Chairman of Committees
That Lord Rennard be appointed a member of the Select Committee in place of Baroness Falkner of Margravine, resigned.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
17:29 - Division on Motion that the Question be now put. - Ayes: 229 / Noes: 188 - Motion that the Question be now put agreed.
17:44 - Division on Amendment 65B - Ayes: 167 / Noes: 242 - Amendment 65B disagreed.
19:47 - Division on Amendment 66 - Ayes: 196 / Noes: 122 - Amendment 66 agreed.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, I understand that this may be an appropriate time to ask a question, in less than two minutes, about whether these proceedings should continue. I do so on behalf of the 1 million people who voted for the UK Independence Party at the last general election. I should add that that was an increase of 50 per cent in our vote and was the best performance of any fourth party in British political history—it was achieved in spite of the party’s leader at the time.
Be that as it may, my question is simply this: why are your Lordships spending so much time arguing about the method of election of Members to the House of Commons when a majority of our national law is now imposed by Brussels? I remind your Lordships that the House of Commons has no influence in making that law. So have we not got things the wrong way round? Would it not be sensible to abandon these proceedings until we have repatriated our sovereignty to Parliament and only then decide by what method the people should send their representatives to the other place to hold the Executive to account and to take their decisions for them? Will the Deputy Leader of the House explain why we are wasting so much time, so much sleep and so much energy in the mean time?
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)
It is a kindly thought, but I beg to move that the House do now again resolve itself into a Committee on the Bill.
Motion agreed.
Clause 11 : Number and distribution of seats
Amendment 65B
Lord Bach
My Lords, Part 2 of the Bill is aimed, on the one hand, at reducing the size of the House of Commons by 50 and, on the other, at making the 600 remaining seats or, at any rate, the vast majority of them, more equal in size. As noble Lords are aware, we on this side are opposed to the arbitrary and somewhat dubious proposal to cut the other place by 50 seats. What we see as the failure of the Government so far to provide any coherent, considered reason as to why 600 is the better number, let alone the ideal number, for membership of the House of Commons has fuelled concern that the governing parties reached that judgment either on the basis of private, partisan calculation or that, as the some of the rather flip answers that have been given as to why 600 suggest, they did not really care terribly what the figure was. It is for the House and perhaps eventually the country to judge which of those two alternatives is worse.
We on this side of course support the principle of more equal-sized seats. However, we have considerable concern about the practical way in which the Bill sets out to achieve that objective. As we have previously heard, the rigidity of the proposed new rules, with their overriding emphasis on numerical equality to the practical exclusion of all other factors, is likely to unravel long-established patterns of representation in ways that will disrupt political organisation and even break up community identities.
However, even if those flaws were ironed out and a more balanced approach applied to the rules for drawing constituency boundaries, the Bill would still be undermined by a fundamental defect in its design; namely, that you cannot produce equal seats from an unequal register. It is to that effect that I move Amendment 65B, which is grouped with Amendment 67B.
The Deputy Prime Minister told the other place that the December 2010 electoral register will form the basis for the boundary review that this Bill stipulates must be completed by October 2013. But the Government accept the view of the Electoral Commission that in excess of 3.5 million eligible voters, our fellow citizens, are missing from that register. The Government’s solution to underregistration is to expedite the rollout of individual voters’ registration. That marks a departure from the previously agreed timetable which we feel will harm rather than help voter registration, particularly if the Northern Ireland experience is anything to go by. However, in any event, the Government’s own timetable does not begin the move to individual registration until after December 2010. We fear that this amounts to an admission that millions of eligible voters will be ignored when the boundaries are redrawn. That would be bad in any event, but it is made worse when one considers that the missing voters are not randomly spread.
An Electoral Commission study published in March last year found that,
“underregistration is concentrated among specific social groups, with registration rates being especially low among young people, private renters and those who have recently moved home … The highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.
The Electoral Commission’s study was underpinned by Ipsos MORI research which found—these are pretty shocking figures—that only 69 per cent of black and minority ethnic voters are registered and only 44 per cent of 20 to 24 year-olds, as opposed to 97 per cent of 60 to 64 year-olds.
In light of these facts, what are we to make of the Government’s determination to press ahead with a timetable for boundary changes which ignores specific social groups based in particular locations? There are a number of explanations. At one extreme is the possible explanation that the Government want somehow deliberately to exclude these people from the boundary calculations for whatever reason; that is, they actively want to leave certain people and places underrepresented in Parliament. Of course, we do not accuse the Government of that, but it would be serious if there were people outside who thought that it was their motivation. An alternative explanation is that they regard those excluded voters somehow as collateral damage—a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the need to rush to pass the Bill and secure the two political reforms which it contains. It is important to remember in this context that the Bill contains a commencement clause so that the alternative vote, even if it were passed in a referendum, may not be introduced unless and until the boundary reforms are implemented. That is why there is a rush.
Our amendment is an attempt to mitigate the damaging effects of the Government’s decision to press ahead on this undemocratic basis by placing an upper limit on the extent of electoral inequality that may result from the Bill. As noble Lords will have gleaned, Amendment 65B is a paving amendment. The substance of the changes that we suggest is contained in Amendment 67B, which states:
“No constituency shall have a total population of those aged 18 and over which is more than 130% of the electoral quota”.
I am of course aware that criticisms can be levelled at the amendment, Most obviously, it may be pointed out that not everyone above 18 will be eligible to vote, but the only source that would enable us to work out the eligible electorate is the census. As it happens, the Electoral Commission has said that it is working alongside the Office for National Statistics on a project to use the data from this year’s census for that very purpose; but, unfortunately, the Government have already announced that they are unwilling to wait for the fruits of that study because it will not be ready until 2014, which does not suit the political timetable. So we have no alternative but to propose this alternative method. It is intended to provide a backstop on the level of distortion that will be allowed to occur under the new boundary rules.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I am sorry to take my noble friend back to the debates that we had some time ago, and I am not sure whether he was the Minister dealing with the electoral registration legislation. However, does not this amendment have implications for individual registration, and could not the position be aggravated if the amendment were to proceed on the basis that one has to knock on the door and have a document signed in the case of every elector? Surely this amendment has implications for that and the gathering of signatures.
Lord Bach
We believe that it certainly does have implications for that, and I have already mentioned individual registration. One of the Government’s responses to this line of criticism is that bringing forward individual registration will somehow mitigate it. Our concern is that it will make it worse, certainly in the short term. What disturbs me more is that my noble friend does not remember that I was the Minister responsible for the legislation to which he referred.
Lord Mawhinney
I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord. He was talking about mitigating the effects of underrepresentation. As a former Minister, is it his contention that underrepresentation started in June of last year? If not, what steps did the previous Government take to mitigate underrepresentation when the boundaries for the 2010 general election were being culled together?
Lord Bach
If the noble Lord is gently trying to say that this is not a problem that has just arisen and that just happens to coincide with the formation of the coalition Government, I am absolutely with him—of course the problem has been with us and with our system for quite some time now, for probably more than 20 years. However, what brings it into stark relief is the fact that if the Bill goes through in its present form, we will build the size of constituencies on the basis of much stricter numbers than we used in the past. Those numbers will be very important indeed; more important than they were under the rules set by previous Governments over the past 40 or 50 years. In the instance where numbers will be even more important, it seems more important to us to get the numbers as correct as we can.
Lord Wills
I am just wondering if my noble friend is as surprised as I am that the noble Lord who previously intervened on him seems to be completely unaware of the legislative measures that the previous Government took to tackle this profound problem of underrepresentation. For example, we gave the Electoral Commission significant new powers—data-matching powers and so on—precisely to help it to tackle this problem of underrepresentation and to ensure that by 2015 the register was comprehensive and accurate. I should have hoped that before intervening the noble Lord would have apprised himself of all the measures—not only the measures that I have just mentioned but all the measures—that the previous Government took to tackle this problem.
Lord Tyler
I wonder if the noble Lord can confirm to your Lordships’ House that the Electoral Commission recommended that the only way to make the register more effective and more accurate was to move to individual registration—and that it did so in 2003. How long did it take the previous Government to get round to activating that recommendation?
Lord Bach
If the noble Lord has kept to the rule that you should know the answer to a question before asking it, he will know when the previous Government got round to it, to use his own phrase. All sorts of other methods of trying to improve underregistration were tried before. A great debt is owed to my noble friend Lord Wills, who—I think this can be said openly—had a large part in persuading the previous Government that individual registration was the proper way to proceed.
Lord Bach
Yes, eventually. I am afraid that it may be a lesson that the current Government will also learn—that you do not always get everything absolutely right to start with, and that sometimes it takes a few years to do. It is perhaps best to acknowledge that, particularly when you are rushing through legislation that you may live to regret later.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Does my noble friend accept that one of the reasons why there was a delay—in the case of some of us, we wanted the delay to go on for ever—is the experience in Northern Ireland, where electoral registration rates dropped dramatically? Even to this day we are suffering from the legacy of the introduction of individual registration in Northern Ireland. I apologise to my noble friend, but he knows that I repeatedly argued against this system.
Lord Wills
I am sorry to keep interrupting my noble friend, but having spent years on this issue, until my brain hurt, I fear that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler—who has a proud history of espousing constitutional reform for many years, and I pay tribute to it—is under a real misapprehension about the nature of reform of the registration processes. Of course individual registration is important. That is why, as my noble friend has said, I espoused it. That is why the previous Government brought it forward. However, it is primarily important for the accuracy of the register; it does not help the comprehensive nature of the register. In fact, as my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has just pointed out, it has the real potential to damage the comprehensive nature of the register. That has, for years and years, been the problem with dealing with individual registration. The previous Government, I am pleased to say, found a way forward, and I will, if the House permits me later, speak at greater length about it. It is true that individual registration is important for the accuracy of the register; it is not true—with all respect to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler—that it is important for the comprehensive nature of the register. That is the core of the issue here.
Lord Bach
My Lords, illustrating the point that I was seeking to make before I was interrupted, perhaps I may refer to a study undertaken by CACI for the Electoral Reform Society late last year. It found:
“After equalisation, the average constituency will contain about 76,000 registered voters. It will have a total voting age population … of about 83,000. But in areas of the country where registration is low, the VAP could be as high as 110,000—a third bigger than the average constituency”.
Typically, as we have heard, the areas of low voter registration tend to be poorer, urban constituencies where the MPs face a bigger and more difficult caseload than their colleagues in more affluent parts of the country. The people who make up much of that caseload often do not appear on the voter registers but they turn up in numbers in constituency surgeries—and they will continue to turn up even after this boundary review has failed to count them. They will be the invisible electorate which will inflate inner urban seats and will grow in size in line with the requirement to meet the official electoral quota, increasing still further the constituency burden that bears on the MPs who represent them.
So the Bill may be aiming at creating more equal-size seats, but it is going to shoot well wide of that mark. Our amendment will provide a small correction. Using the proposed new electoral quota of 75,800 as the starting point, our amendment would prevent the creation of seats within excess of approximately 98,500 adult residents. It will therefore provide a little more parity between constituencies and, in doing so, prevent the complete overload of MPs representing inner urban populations. I beg to move.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)
My Lords, the noble Lord has explained the basis of his amendment. It sets out the requirement that Boundary Commission recommendations should comply with both an electorate and a population range. Under the amendments, the total population aged 18 or over in a constituency could not exceed a number that is 130 per cent of the electoral quota. As a preliminary point, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, has again raised the question of people missing from the electoral roll, as indicated in the report last year by the Electoral Commission. These are matters that we have already debated at some length in the course of this Committee, and I have indicated in replies to previous amendments the steps that the Government are taking to address them. However, it is worth making the point yet again that even if we were to go with what the noble Lord, Lord Bach, wishes to see, and even if we were to be hugely successful in getting people who are eligible on to the electoral roll, under what he is proposing the election for 2015, certainly as far as the English constituencies are concerned, would nevertheless be fought on constituencies that were determined by an electoral quota based on the year 2000; in other words, it would be some 15 years out of date.
In spite of the noble Lord’s sweet words of concern about the underrepresentation of certain groups, and I have no doubt whatever that he, along with all sides of the Committee, is genuinely concerned about this, so far as the 2015 election is concerned, the amendment will do absolutely nothing to reflect these people in the electorate, which will determine the boundaries. Indeed, I have already indicated that under this Bill and the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, the election due for May 2020 would be based on the electoral register and the base date would be December 2015: in other words, after there has been some opportunity for the various initiatives that have been proposed to have effect, including individual registration.
Here I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and what he set in motion for individual registration, along with the rolling register, which I think was a product of the last Administration. Those were positive moves and we are planning for more. However, let us not get it into our heads that through this amendment, people who are currently missing from the electoral roll will somehow be taken into account for the constituency boundaries as far as England is concerned for elections in 2015. As I have said, we would still use constituencies where the relevant base date was as long ago as 2000.
It is accepted that the intention behind these amendments is to ensure not only that constituencies have electorates of more equal size and therefore that the weight of votes is fairer and more equal but, as the noble Lord has explained, but that the populations they contain are also fairer and more equal. I would be among the first to recognise that the responsibility of a Member of Parliament is to represent not only those who are registered in the constituency, but the entire population. Some might be eligible to register for a vote but for one reason or another have not done so, and some people might not be eligible because they are under 18 or for reasons of nationality.
There are issues of both principle and practice in dealing with these amendments. I agree with the principle that Members of Parliament must represent all their constituents, whether or not they are eligible to vote, but it does not follow that the boundaries should be designed around that principle. Constituencies are by their nature diverse, and indeed we have had numerous debates in which former Members of the other place have described their different experiences, workloads and issues that arise. We have talked about the difference between inner city and rural areas. It is inevitable that there will be these differences, but I think it would be utterly impossible to design a system that takes account of every conceivable difference. It is also worth restating the simple principle that underlines our reforms as set out in this part of the Bill. They are focused on fairness and equality for electors. What ought to be borne in mind is that we want to ensure that one elector means one vote.
The real point I want to make in relation to these amendments is that of the practical difficulties. I fear that they would be unworkable in practice. Population statistics are derived from the census, which as we know is taken once a decade. Annual estimates of change are then made from the original census data, but at present these are produced by the Office for National Statistics only at local authority level. On the other hand, the electoral register is updated annually, and whatever debate, discussion and controversy we have had over registration rates, the number of people on the register is an absolute figure and beyond dispute. It is not an estimate.
Lord Campbell-Savours
The noble and learned Lord in reading his brief referred to what I think he said were annual recalculations. He said that they are based on census figures with an annual uprating. How is that uprating calculated? What new information does it include that leads to the higher figures?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I cannot give a technical answer, but I can say that they are produced by the Office for National Statistics at the local authority level and that they are estimates of change. I do not have the psephological—I am sorry, I meant the statistical—basis for this.
Lord Rooker
The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys used to do the same job and was the guardian of data on births, marriages and deaths by geographical area. To my certain knowledge, it used that data in Birmingham to update the figures. The health authority used those OPCS figures for births, marriages and deaths. It did not track the population, but it had a base of information that could be used for an annual update. That is what I recall.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
Just by saying that, the noble Lord will see that data on births, marriages and deaths give you only a certain reflection of changes in population because there is also immigration and emigration, which would not necessarily be picked up. I accept that for health statistics, it might be better if people registered, but there is no necessity for them to register in their particular area.
Lord Campbell-Savours
If that is the case and an annual uprating is being made along the lines set out by the noble and learned Lord, is it fair to refer repeatedly to the 2000 census being the basis for calculations?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I did not say that it was the 2000 census; I said it was the 2000 electoral register. The 2000 electoral register is the relevant basis for assessing the electorate. In the same way, the report that the Boundary Commissions will be expected to produce by October 2013 will be based on the electoral register as at 1 December 2010.
As I have indicated, because population estimates are produced at the local government level, it would be equally or even more of a problem to estimate the true level of the population at lower than that level. Local government geography is obviously a relevant issue for the Boundary Commission, but it might find that even if population estimates were consistently compiled for areas smaller than the local authority level, the data may not be sufficient to allow it to draw up a constituency boundary that meets the two size requirements as set out in the noble Lord’s amendment. For example, the commission might have to depart from using wards as a building block to reduce the population of a constituency that was slightly over the 130 per cent limit. Furthermore, the amendments are silent on what would happen if the commission found itself unable to comply with both of these rules in an area. The amendments would make the commission’s task vastly more complex and unachievable.
Lord Wills
I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord. I hope to be able to make a contribution to this debate at greater length later. Will he clarify something? It is probably my fault, but I am baffled by it. He keeps referring to the inequity—I am paraphrasing—of voters being subject to a year 2000 set of statistics. Could he explain what he means by that? What I think I understand by it, but I may be completely wrong, is that it is wrong that registered voters should somehow be included in constituencies that are not equalised. Obviously the Bill’s purpose is to equalise constituencies, for all the reasons which the Government have set out. Is that what he is driving at when he refers to this figure of 2000? If it is not, I would be grateful if he could explain exactly why he thinks this is so unfair.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I am grateful for the opportunity to explain. I was surprised that when the noble Lord, Lord Bach, sat down the noble Lord, Lord Wills, did not stand up, hence why I intervened at this point. He will, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said. The point that I have tried to make is that the electoral quota, which is one of the key building blocks of the constituency boundaries, is determined by reference to a relevant date.
In terms of this Bill and the four Boundary Commission reviews for 1 October 2013, the relevant date for the electoral register is 1 December 2010—last month. The point I am trying to make with reference to England is that the relevant date for determining the boundaries is the year 2000. The general election in May last year was fought on boundaries on which, if we do not have a further boundary review before 2015, the general election of 2015 will be fought. The data go back to the year 2000. Therefore we will have constituency boundaries that are based very much on outdated data. The point I am trying to make is twofold. First, that in no way serves those who are not included in the register but are eligible. Secondly, under our proposals and what we intend to do to improve voter registration, voters will be on the register for December 2015, which will be the relevant date for the report to be produced in October 2018 for the general election of 2020.
There are two uses of the electoral register. There is the use of the relevant date, to which the Boundary Commission must have regard in determining the size of constituencies and constituency boundaries; and there is the continuing importance of the electoral register to determine who is eligible to vote at a particular election. That is a very important issue, and work continues to try and ensure that those who are eligible are on that register.
Lord Maxton
The Minister and I have had a dialogue about the use of data from various sources in drawing up the register. Is the Boundary Commission bound entirely, in drawing up these figures, to the printed and published register of voters, or is it entitled to use other forms of data in order to ensure that the maximum number of people are included in a constituency?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
In terms of this Bill and the four Boundary Commissions’ reports, which are required by October 2013, the relevant date is 1 December 2010. That is fixed.
There is the separate issue of trying to get the electoral roll as complete as possible through a number of initiatives such as the rolling register and data matching, which the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, and I have discussed. That will not be used for determining the electoral quotas for constituencies until the next boundary review, but it will be relevant for determining who is eligible to vote at any election—be it a European election, by-elections, local elections, Scottish parliamentary elections, Welsh National Assembly elections, Northern Ireland Assembly elections, and indeed the general election of 2015. That is why it is so imperative that we give an impetus to get people on the roll. In terms of their being eligible to vote, that effort ought to be made.
I do not want to mislead the House in any way. If those people came on the roll now, or during a drive that brought them on to the roll in the next 12 months, that, by definition, would not affect the number of people on the electoral roll on 1 December 2010. Hopefully, by sustaining that, these people would be on the electoral roll on 1 December 2015, and therefore would be part of the calculation for the quota and the constituencies, which would be the subject of the ensuing boundary review.
The other point, which goes along with that, is that people might not be taken into account if they come on to the register now for the 2015 election, but many people have come on to the electoral register since 2000 in England who likewise would not be taken into account for 2015, if the amendment that is being moved by the noble Lord’s noble friend were to be carried. An update of 10 years is some considerable improvement.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I am not delaying the debate, but there will be people in the Chamber who have not been here during our previous debates and who are wondering why we are going on a register that is based on December 2010. Why cannot we wait, let us say, 12 months? If we were to wait 12 months, could we not get a boundary inquiry in and the new boundaries introduced for the next general election? Will the Minister explain why we have to have a register that is based on the end of last year and not, perhaps, later this year?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I am certain that I have already given that explanation, but I am more than happy to repeat it. The judgment was that in order to get the Boundary Commission reports by 1 October 2013, 1 December 2010 was the date that was necessary to give the Boundary Commissions their starting point: the raw figures from which they must work. October 2013 was chosen because it is approximately 18 months before what would be the general election in May 2015. I cannot remember which noble Lord it was—it might even have been the noble Lord, Lord Howarth—but someone certainly made comments in debates earlier about the importance for local parties selecting candidates to adjust to new boundaries. Eighteen months was thought to be sufficient time to allow that to happen. That is the judgment that has been made. It will be pretty challenging. I do not think anyone has denied that. Indeed, noble Lords opposite have commented that it will be a very challenging task for the Boundary Commissions to have their respective reports published by October 2013, but that is why we have chosen that date.
Lord Howarth of Newport
Why should not the Boundary Commissions, as they work towards a review to be completed by 1 October 2013, take, as the relevant date for the register, 1 December 2012?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
You have to have a fixed date in order to be able to produce the draft recommended constituency boundaries and have an opportunity for consultation. The work has to start very soon to be able to do that. If you start to import new figures two years down the line, it is practically not possible to do that. It comes down to sheer practicality. You cannot do that and have that all in place by 2013.
Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke
I might be being dense about this, but there does seem to be a degree of logic in the position of both my noble friends Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Howarth. It seems unusual to choose in the middle of this legislation a date that is in the past. All of us in this House know or should know about the difficulties of encouraging people to be on the electoral register. If we were able to choose a date—it need not necessarily be into 2012, it could be a date perhaps in the later months of this year—that would give an opportunity. Maybe it is lack of sleep, but I am not grasping the saliency of the point that the noble and learned Lord is making.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
From memory—and if I get this wrong, I am sure that I will be corrected—1 December is the date on which the new electoral roll comes out. That is the obvious date for the new electoral register. When we started Committee on this Bill, that date was not in the past but in the future—very shortly in the future, but in the future none the less. You do need a date. The judgment that was made on the basis of the experience of the Boundary Commission, which has many years of experience, was that that timescale is required if the new boundaries are to be in place to allow an election based on these new boundaries in May 2015, and to delay it by 12 months would not make that possible. The base year for constituency boundaries for England would be 2000. That is a marked improvement. This may be slightly technical, but there is no jiggery-pokery about it. It is done on the basis of advice on what is required to get a Boundary Commission reports by October 2013.
Lord Tyler
I am grateful to my noble and learned friend, who is giving a painstaking analysis. There is an additional reason for this, which I know was endorsed by noble Lords opposite. The year of a general election, for very good reasons, because of the work done by the previous Labour Government, includes a number of people who register at a very late date before the general election. So the 2010 register is likely to be more comprehensive than the 2011 one, thanks to the improvements made by the previous Government. That point was made by a number of Members opposite. I hope that we in the Committee all agree that December 2010 is rather a good base, because it does not prevent anyone from coming on the register before the next general election. It just means that there is a pretty solid figure to work from.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
That is a very good point, and one that I certainly remember being made—and making—some days ago. The point was made by one of the noble Lords opposite, possibly by the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, when we debated the amendment with specific regard to those in the 17 to 24 age group, about the number of young people who came on to the register during the general election campaign. They will be there, and their presence will be taken into account. I have tried to explain, and tried to make the important point on this amendment, that there are real practical difficulties in having both a figure for the electorate and an estimate of the census population. I have not heard yet from the noble Lord, Lord Sewel.
Lord Sewel
I am a late contributor to the debate. Several years or decades ago, I tried to earn an honest penny by looking at things such as interdecennial census estimates and the date that the Boundary Commission used. I have to say that they were all grossly inaccurate, as you could see when you had more detailed data coming through. I used to sit back and wait for the census to come out and see how the interdecennial data had to be revised in the light of the census. There was a fairly radical change quite often. Have the Minister or other colleagues consulted the Office for National Statistics to ask whether it can produce with confidence estimates of population or potential electorate population for the country?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, in the question that the noble Lord asked he gave the answer as to why it is not possible. He used the word “estimate”, which is what it would be—an estimate. The Boundary Commission is using actual figures on the electoral roll.
The secretary to the Boundary Commission for Scotland was asked when giving evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place about the accuracy of population figures compared with electoral figures. His answer was:
“I think there are significant practical problems. One of the things that this country does not have is a precise and continuously updated register of population. Our electoral register is continuously updated and spring cleaned or autumn cleaned once a year, whereas our population is only precisely counted once every decade”.
In other words, the secretary of the Boundary Commission for Scotland thought that there were significant practical problems in using the basis of population. Against that background, we would be unwise not to give heed to that very practical consideration. It does not diminish the importance of a drive to have people registered so that they can vote in elections, but in these circumstances I beg the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Desai
For the first time I am beginning to understand why things are as complicated as they are. If I understand correctly, the Boundary Commission needs population estimates for the quota to be decided, and for that to happen you do not need the exact population number; estimates should do. For voting, you have to have the exact, accurate electoral register. As my noble friend Lord Sewel asked, why cannot we have interdecennial estimates of population from the Office for National Statistics to decide the quota that the Boundary Commission uses while waiting for the accurate figure? These are two separate things. For voting itself, people have to be resident, but for the boundary to be decided, estimates might be a better thing than exact census numbers.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
There are two points here. First, it has been recognised in earlier debates that this Boundary Commission review will be on a much shorter timescale than many previous Boundary Commission reviews, which underlines the point as to why it is not possible for us to move the date forward continuously. For completeness, I should note that the English Boundary Commission’s fifth periodical report about projected electorate changes, which were published in 2007—and there may be an amendment at some point on these issues—said about estimated electorate changes that it was sometimes asked to take into account projected growth or decline, but usually growth, in the electorate. The commission said that such projections were considered to be speculative and that it did not have regard to them, but that when it was satisfied that growth or decline would occur in the very near future—such as in the case of a large housing development nearing completion—it felt able to take such factors into account. There was some effort, but it was based on substantive grounds and not on the sort of estimates that attend population figures. I hope that the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. He has been extremely indulgent of these interventions, but they are very helpful if they discourage people from making speeches about issues that he has addressed. My question relates directly to the last point that he made, which is at least some recognition that there will be population movements, which must be accommodated in drafting constituency boundaries in anticipation. My understanding of the Bill is that even that minor recognition of population changes will not be possible if the Bill becomes law. Am I correct in that understanding?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
If I have got it wrong I shall say so, but it was not speculative, which is what the Boundary Commission is invited to do. It has indicated that if it comes up at the stage of the representations in the consultation, it might be able to talk about some hard, factual and practical changes. I shall confirm, I hope sooner rather than later, that that is possible.
Lord Bach
I continue on from what my noble friend asked. As I understand it, in the past Boundary Commissions have worked on the number registered at a particular date—that is certainly right. However, under the 1986 rules, or the way in which they have been applied, the Boundary Commission has been able to look carefully at what is proposed to be built in a certain area, such as a new town, to use an extreme example, in the relevant period. I might be wrong about that, and I look to the Minister and his advisers about that. The Boundary Commission can take that as another consideration. Of course, the commission cannot add a population as such, but it can take into account what is likely to happen in that area in a broad way.
Perhaps the noble and learned Lord will answer this when he replies to other comments that have been made, but we are concerned that if the Boundary Commission's role is so numerically based, it will really have the opportunity to look at these wider matters. At the moment, under what we consider to be rather good rules, will the commission be able to consider them in the same way as it has in the past? I do not expect an immediate answer because this is an important point about the new rules that will be created under the Bill.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, the noble and learned Lord spoke of his desire to achieve fairness and equality between electors in the processes that this Bill provides for by introducing constituencies that reflect that. We might also want to see fairness and equality between citizens. I know that it is not our tradition and practice in this country to draw constituency boundaries on the basis of population. Instead, we take account of those who are registered electors. However, it is highly desirable that the real population figures should effectively be taken into account. The way to square that circle is to do everything possible to improve the state of the electoral registers to make sure that the registers, constituency by constituency throughout the country, are as accurate and complete as they possibly can be.
The noble and learned Lord said that the Government are intent that that should happen. But it is not realistic to talk, as the Government do, about equal votes in equally drawn constituencies if the registers are so patchy. They are more incomplete in some constituencies than others. Therefore reform of registration, or at least a serious and effective drive to update and improve registration, must be intrinsic to the project that the Government have embarked on in their quest to achieve equal votes in equally drawn constituencies.
Yesterday, the Deputy Prime Minister, answering Questions in the other place said:
“It is the choice of the coalition Government to say that we want to reform politics not in a piecemeal fashion”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/1/11; col. 682.]
If that is indeed the intention of the coalition Government, as stated by the Deputy Prime Minister only yesterday, then surely the Bill should be amended in some way to incorporate provisions that give impetus and drive to ensuring that registration is greatly improved.
There is a political problem for the Government in that there is a perception that the Government are happy to see significant proportions of the electorate unregistered. A greater number of those who are unregistered may not be disposed to vote for the coalition. Why are we not getting registration built into this legislation? Is it simply because the Government are in such a rush to get the Bill on the statute book? They do not need to be in such a rush to get the whole Bill on to the statute book. As we have been saying, we are happy to accept that Part 1 of the Bill has been scrutinised in this House with some thoroughness. If Part 1 of the Bill were separated from Part 2, we would be content for that to go ahead. For some reason to do with mistrust between the coalition partners, they are still unwilling to do that, but let us hope that it can be done. Then we would have more time to ensure that these important reforms proposed in Part 2 of the Bill are not only properly scrutinised but made more complete by the incorporation of measures in relation to registration.
Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke
My noble friend makes an important point. These are extremely technical parts of the Bill and they are areas of debate where we should not be at odds. We should be working together to try to find a route that resolves an issue that has troubled all political parties for many years. I cannot see what the problem is with decoupling the first part of the Bill. Let us get the pressure of time out of the way and try to get this right.
Lord Elton
We are addressing a particular amendment and the noble Lord is asking the Committee to talk about the procedure for the whole Bill. We should decide the amendment before we go on to talk about the procedure.
Lord Howarth of Newport
But the amendment carries important implications about registration. I suggest that we need to continue to address that issue. It is difficult to do so if the coalition insists on getting the whole Bill through in very short order.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I will give way to the noble Lord in a second. I am just replying to the previous intervention. We should try to keep good order. What I am talking about is relevant to the amendment in that sense.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, we all enjoyed the picture of the noble Lord fast asleep in the Chamber that appeared in today's Independent. I hope that he is not intending to send the rest of us to sleep with his speech. He normally takes 20 to 25 minutes. Perhaps he can shorten it today and talk to the point for once.
Lord Howarth of Newport
The noble Lord himself is occasionally capable of quite soporific oratory. If I had fewer interventions no doubt I would be able to sit down rather sooner.
Lord Tyler
Perhaps I can help the noble Lord in that respect. Some of us have seen a fascinating grid, the Opposition’s speaking grid, that was left in some facilities of the House overnight earlier in the week. It was very helpful because we were then able to see when noble Lords were being instructed to speak on various amendments. Would either he or one of his colleagues tell us what the grid is for today? Then we could know when the noble Lord was going to speak and perhaps we could slip outside to have a cup of tea or even a snooze. At the moment, we are not given any guidance as to when various Members of the Opposition are going to speak and that is a pity because we could make more progress. Also, if I can make a suggestion to the opposition office that produced this grid, it would be helpful to know how long the noble Lord will speak.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I would personally be terribly disappointed if the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, were to take advantage of the fact that I was on my feet to go and have a cup of tea because I depend on his presence as a stimulus and discipline to myself. I might be tempted to speak more rashly and randomly if it were not for the invigilatory presence of the noble Lord in the Chamber.
Lord McAvoy
In relation to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, does he know that just before we adjourned yesterday, Conservative Whips happened to find some papers that had been left in one of the gents toilets indicating a rota going on until six in the morning? There were then all sorts of phone calls and various messages went out to Conservative Members to come back quickly and to make sure that they were there. It turned out, somehow or other, that the paper was a hoax.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My noble friend has a knowledge of the dark arts that I could never match, nor would I wish to match.
Lord Elton
There is a great difference between the traditional arrangements of the Chief Whips of both parties in ensuring that they have a sufficient number of people here to keep the House or if necessary win a Division, and a formal arrangement to get a series of people to speak to make sure that the debate goes on longer than it otherwise would. I confess that I am myself speaking away from the amendment.
Lord Elton
May I just finish? I am happy to give way when I have finished. I confess that I am myself departing from good order by not addressing the amendment, which is what I hope the noble Lord, Lord Bach, is about to do.
Lord Bach
I want to address the point that the noble Lord felt obliged to make. The rules of the game changed slightly, did they not, when the Government announced that they would have an all-night sitting on this Bill? They said that would do everything they could to ram the Bill through as quickly as they could. Once they had decided to do that, the rules changed. Why was it not good sense to have a document that would help this side, with our limited power, to set out some sort of rota for matters that need to be debated? The rules have changed and they have changed only because of the way that the Government have behaved.
Lord Elton
With respect, the previous Government had all-night sittings as well and we did not change the rules.
Lord Howarth of Newport
I do not know whether I may be permitted to resume these brief remarks that I want to offer to the Chamber. It is difficult when noble Lords on the other side of the House digress into procedural matters and interrupt to waste time. Perhaps I might try to make progress. On the general consideration—
Lord Howarth of Newport
I deprecate another intervention, but as my noble friend always has something worth while to say—
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I wanted to say how much I am enjoying my noble friend’s speech and I ask him to ignore the loutish behaviour of Members opposite in what could now be described as the Onslow tendency.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My noble friend is possibly entitled to enjoy my speech rather more than to enjoy a photograph of me making a speech. On the general considerations as to why the Bill should be amended—and the Government should be very willing to amend it—to ensure that it addresses itself to the question of improving the electoral register, I add one consideration. It is that, probably, the principal reason why the register is so inaccurate and incomplete, even 20 or so years later, is because we know that a great many people dropped off the register as a result of the introduction of the poll tax. I am not going to go on at length about this because we touched on it in an earlier debate but that political reality—that fact of history—implies a responsibility, at least on the Conservative wing of the coalition, to ensure that the problem for which it carries a large measure of responsibility is remedied.
I turn to two specific and more technical aspects of this amendment and its implications. The Minister was helpful to the House in what he had to say, both about the relevant date and the census, but I remain in some perplexity. Perhaps I have not sufficiently understood the purport of what he was saying or perhaps it is simply that it was not entirely convincing. It seems to me that it must be desirable that the relevant date should be set as late as possible. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, say that the earlier the relevant date is, the more likely the electoral register is to be complete and accurate. I found that a little counterintuitive and not entirely persuasive. The questions of the relevant date and of a census are bound up with each other, even though our constituencies are not based upon population.
The data that would be provided by the 2011 census are obviously enormously important. They will transform the appreciation that the Boundary Commissioners and everybody else will have about the distribution of population and of how, via electoral registration, the new constituencies should be drawn. It seems very odd, and the public will perceive it as very odd, that the relevant date should be set at 2010 when we have a new decennial census in 2011. While it takes some considerable time, understandably, for all the data emerging from the 2011 census to be established, none the less I would have thought that it would be possible, within a reasonable period, for the experts responsible for the process to begin to take account of that data. It would be very good if they could do so. For these reasons, I would have thought that if we could have a relevant date in 2012 there would be twin advantages: of being up to date, in any case, and particularly in that the information obtainable from the 2011 census could be fully considered and absorbed in the overall process.
The noble and learned Lord said that it all takes time, and of course it does. I do not say that the Boundary Commissioners should not start their work by reference to earlier data but I would have thought that it would be possible for them to update their work as they go along. Certainly, the objective should be—who can possibly disagree with this?—that the fullest account should be taken of the latest and most accurate and relevant data. It seems to me that these issues are worth further examination, for the major reason that it must be wrong and, indeed, unrealistic to attempt to draw equal constituencies without achieving the fullest possible registration and because we will have a rich source of additional data. It is not sensible to rush to conclude matters before those additional data can be properly absorbed.
Baroness Mallalieu
My Lords, I wonder if I might contribute briefly to this debate. I add that I am not on any roster or rota; I will be very brief and address the amendments. There will not be time, I am afraid, for the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, to get out and order his tea at all.
In order to have equal-sized seats, which I hope are what we are all aiming for, it is essential that there is an accurate and comprehensive register. It was brought home to me on the day of the last general election just how defective our present register is. I heard someone a moment ago say that it was pretty good, as a result of people wanting to vote. However, I sat for four hours on polling day outside a polling station in Lambeth and I found—I have done my best to be as accurate as I can—that something of the order of a third of the people who came up wanting to vote, when they came out and were asked if they would indicate how they voted, told me that they were not on the list. They were almost invariably from ethnic minorities and many of them were young. If that is the register that we are going to be working on, it is not good enough.
It seems to me that if the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, has put before the House are defective, this cannot simply be ignored. I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, is anxious to make this Bill as good as possible and anxious to get it through at the speed of light, but these problems must not be in-built into the fresh legislation. If anything calls out for a pause and a chance to try to find a way of getting this right, and if that means using data from outside what are currently used, surely that must be the way to achieve our main aim of equal-sized seats.
Lord Wills
My Lords, I start by associating myself with the comments made by my noble friend Lord Browne about the generosity of the Minister in taking interventions. He really was very indulgent and I am grateful. He really helped the Committee in his constructive and positive response to all the interventions that he was good enough to take, so I express my thanks to him for doing that.
As I understood it, the burden of the Minister’s justification for resisting this amendment—I hope that he will correct me and I am happy to give way to him if he wants to do that—was that it was wrong somehow that the boundary revisions should be taking place on the basis of out-of-date data. Perhaps he will just nod if I have correctly summarised his resistance to the amendment. I will just repeat that so that he can nod his assent. The basis of his resistance to the amendment was, essentially, that it was wrong for this boundary revision to take place on the basis of out-of-date data. Is that broadly it?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I think that it was a little more complex than that. It was the fact that the population estimates—indeed, the first thing is that they are estimates—are annually updated compared to the electoral register, which is an actual number. Certainly, the indication that the Boundary Commission for Scotland’s secretary gave to the relevant Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place was that it saw significant practical difficulties in doing that.
Lord Wills
I am extremely grateful to the Minister for that elucidation, but will he consider this: is not an even greater problem this continuing shame that 3 million to 3.5 million of our citizens, who are eligible to vote, are for one reason and another excluded from the register? That seems to me to go to the heart of the problem which this amendment is designed to address. The real issue, it seems to me at least, is one of timing. If the Minister was able to tell the Committee—
Lord Wills
Quite simply because they are not on the register. There is a lot of suspicion that some local authorities do not invest the money given to them by central government in paying enough attention to ensuring that everyone who is eligible to be on the register is on the register. Many local authorities do an admirable job and spend more than is given to them by central government for these purposes. If the noble Viscount is trying to suggest that I am somehow insinuating that there is a positive process here, rather than people just excluding themselves, as it were, he is partly right. There is no doubt, from some of the evidence I have seen, that some local authorities are far less diligent than they should be in including people on the register.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My noble friend refers to the 3.5 million who are excluded. It is not that they will not be allowed to vote in the next election; they may well be if they seek to register. The issue must be that the 3.5 million excluded are therefore not being taken into account when the boundaries are being set for the new constituencies. That is the key argument that we are not getting over in the Chamber—the exclusion of those people from the calculation on boundaries is distorting this whole piece of legislation.
Lord Wills
My noble friend is absolutely right: this is precisely the point I made on Second Reading. This is the key point. If this were somehow an intractable problem, and we were stuck for ever with large numbers, millions of people eligible to vote who somehow, for whatever reason, could never be included in the register and therefore, for a practical purpose, we just had to get on and deal with all the other issues that the Minister has alluded to, I would agree with him. I agree with him that a lot of what he has said is desirable, but he has failed to grapple with this essential point. If, as I say, this were somehow an intractable, insoluble problem, I would be much more sympathetic to the approach that he has taken, but it is not.
Lord Sewel
Building upon what my noble friend has been saying, does he accept that as a measure of those entitled to vote, an electoral register of any date is likely to be more inaccurate than an estimate derived from the wide number of data sets which could be available to the Electoral Commission?
Lord Wills
Of course, I agree with my noble friend—he is absolutely right. This goes to the point about the folly of the Government rushing this through. I will come in a moment to the point about the 2011 census, which is crucial, as my noble friend Lord Howarth has already mentioned. The point is that measures are in place to make the register comprehensive and accurate. I hope that I can help the Committee to have a little more understanding; those who followed the debates about individual registration in the other place will be familiar with the argument and I crave their indulgence.
The previous Government—I was the Minister responsible—faced a real, intractable problem. Everyone agreed, I think, that individual voter registration was desirable. There was very little doubt about it. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, mentioned pronouncements of the Electoral Commission many years ago and I think most people recognised that individual registration was desirable.
Lord Wills
I will come to the doubts that people had, and those of my colleagues who are shaking their heads may feel more comfortable when I have made further remarks about this.
Individual registration was desirable as an objective in its own right. It helped to guarantee the integrity and accuracy of the register and, in a modern democracy, it is right and proper that individual citizens should register their right to vote, rather than the head of the household doing it in some 19th century, Victorian way. However, the problem was that it was widely recognised—and the Northern Ireland experience, which was arguable in several ways, substantiated this—that any move to individual registration was likely to exacerbate the problem of the comprehensive nature of the register.
In other words, more people were likely to fall off the register, for all sorts of reasons, not least that there are a large numbers of adults, regrettably, who are still functionally illiterate. Any move to individual registration, desirable as it was in its own terms, carried with it a very real and severe risk that even more than the 3 to 3.5 million people already disfranchised, despite their eligibility to be on the register, would be disfranchised. That was unacceptable, so for many years there was a stand-off between those who felt that the integrity of the register was more desirable, and that we should therefore move immediately towards individual voter registration, and those who said that we should not do that at the cost of disfranchising eligible citizens. This was a real problem.
The previous Government came to grips with this by bringing in a measure to implement individual registration; not immediately, not rushing it through as this Government are doing with this registration; but in a measured way. We made it explicitly subject to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015. We did not do that lightly; we gave the Electoral Commission the power to oversee the process, to report annually on its progress in achieving the objective and we gave it substantial new powers, data-matching powers, at a time of great anxiety about the Big Brother state and all the rest of it.
These measures went through with all-party consent in the House of Commons—the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives all agreed. I hope that the Minister is listening to this, because this is important. We went through this process with all the Front-Bench spokesmen and spokeswomen in the House of Commons and explained to them why their initial reservations about the timescale were misplaced. We had lengthy discussions and consultations, all of which, I am afraid, have been absent in the progress of the Bill. We persuaded them, genuinely persuaded them, that it was simply not possible to achieve a comprehensive and accurate register any more quickly than on that timescale and they agreed to it.
Any noble Lord who wants to read the Hansard record of these debates will see that they signed up to this timetable. They all recognised it. The Liberal Democrat spokeswoman and the shadow Justice Secretary for the Conservative Party agreed to the timescale because, when they familiarised themselves with all the details, all the difficulties of making the register comprehensive as well as accurate, they recognised that this could not be rushed through; it did need that timescale. To do those politicians credit, they changed their minds about this. They had thought we should just rush in individual registration and that the register could look after itself, but when it was explained to them what the consequence of this could be, they changed their minds. I pay tribute to them. This was a consensual process, a process of consultation; we reached agreement on it and, in doing so, incidentally, the Government changed their mind on certain details as well. It was a genuinely consultative process, which, from my perspective, is a model for how constitutional reform should be conducted.
Lord Campbell-Savours
The objective was laudable and it was supported by many Members. However, when discussions about resources took place, was there not a reservation in the mind of my noble friend that, if a Government were ever elected who would starve local authorities of resources, the whole programme of individual registration would collapse, particularly when, in the register which will apply in 2018, we find that the boundaries set in 2018 will be based on individual registration? Is it not a sting in the tail that we introduced a measure, with the best will in the world, but now that the resources will not be there to ensure that it is properly introduced, the measure will damage boundaries in the future?
Lord Wills
My noble friend is completely right: I was full of reservations and trepidation about the future. One does not embark on this sort of wholesale radical change without a lot of consideration and worry about whether one had made the right judgments about this. I was very worried and I remain worried about some local authorities. A lot of local authorities are exemplary democrats in this respect. They spend a lot of money and resources on ensuring that registration is comprehensive and accurate. It does not matter what their political complexion is—there are Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat local authorities which are exemplary in this respect—but I came across enough evidence to show that many local authorities do not take these issues sufficiently seriously. A lot of colleagues from the other place told me of examples where they thought that local authorities were wilfully not putting effort into registration, for party political advantage.
I make no secret of this now: I wanted to ring-fence the money that central government gave to local authorities for this. I thought it was so important to our democracy that local authorities should have no option. I was stopped by the Department for Communities and Local Government, which was hysterically paranoid about anything that might smack of central government directing local authorities. Such is the power of the universal panacea of localism. I am in favour of localism, let me say, but there has to be a balance. I wanted to get this money ring-fenced and I was stopped.
I hope that the Government will look again at this matter. I see that the Local Government Secretary is, in many ways, admirably robust in trashing local authorities. This is one area where he could show his iron fist and ensure that every local authority invests the money that it is given by central government in making sure that we have a functioning and healthy democracy.
Lord Campbell-Savours
It has never come out publicly before, but my noble friend was blocked. I knew that, and I knew the Ministers responsible for doing it. When he was blocked, though, did that not give him cause for concern about what he was introducing? Maybe we should not have proceeded with this process, which we are now being punished for. We introduced it for the most honourable of reasons, and now we are punished by the lack of resources available to local authorities.
Lord Wills
Let me respond to one intervention, and then I assure the noble Lord I will happily give way to him.
I beat myself up about all sorts of things that I did when I was in the other place; I assure my noble friend that I am not complacent about anything. Of course it gave me pause. I was anxious and concerned. I returned to the fray on many occasions over several years, believe me, but I failed. Yes, I was worried, but I do not think that we are being punished for doing the right thing.
I still think that bringing in individual registration was the right thing to do. It was right to yoke it together with moves towards making the register comprehensive and accurate and making one dependent on the other, I am sure about that. I am sure that we would not have had the measures that are now in place to make the register comprehensive and accurate if we had not yoked it together with individual registration. I am afraid that if my noble friend thinks that if we had done nothing, the party opposite would not have rushed forward even more precipitately and inconsiderately with moves to bring in individual registration without any attempt to link it with the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register, I think that for once he is deluded. I happily give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, we are terribly interested in the noble Lord’s ministerial career in the House of Commons, but it has nothing at all to do with the amendment that we are discussing. It is a positive abuse. Further, the noble Lord has been speaking for 15 minutes, and the Companion says that,
“speakers are expected to keep within 15 minutes”,
unless they are making,
“a speech of outstanding importance”,
which the noble Lord most certainly is not.
Lord Wills
I am very sorry that the noble Lord should make such a personal and slightly vindictive comment. I am trying to help the House understand these matters. These are subjects that, as my noble friend rightly said, have not been made public before. The experience of any Minister in a Government is relevant to the passing of legislation, and this legislation is important. I am sorry that the noble Lord thinks that it is irrelevant that 3.5 million people are not registered but I think that it is profoundly important, and it is very important to this amendment.
I was actually concluding my remarks. I have given way to everyone, following the Minister’s generous example. I will give way again, subject no doubt to further spiteful comments from the noble Lord opposite.
Lord Howarth of Newport
It would be helpful and interesting for the House if my noble friend could make a few remarks about the census.
Lord Wills
That is how I was going to come to the conclusion of my remarks. I was responding to an intervention about that, and I was not talking about my ministerial career; this is about the process of legislation, which is directly relevant to this clause. All parties in the House of Commons agreed, parties that have now changed their minds about it, including the party of the noble Lord opposite. His spokesman in the House of Commons agreed with what we proposed, which has now been jettisoned. When I have sat down, I would like to hear him explain exactly why his party has changed its mind about the importance of people being on the register. That is relevant to this debate.
The reason why we were able to persuade the spokespersons from both the Conservative and the Liberal Democrat parties about the importance of a timescale—in other words, to 2015, not the new precipitate timescale—was, above all else, the importance of the 2011 census data. Only when those are available can we be sure that we have a comprehensive and accurate register. This was not a political decision; we were assured by officials, and I am sure that the Minister is getting exactly the same advice, that the full benefit of those data will not be available until 2014. So we come back to the central point about the timescale.
I understand all the arguments that the Minister has made in resisting the amendment. They are important, they are not negligible and I do not resist them all. There is a greater argument, though, about the central importance of having a comprehensive and accurate register, and, at the earliest, that cannot be available before 2015. I am not necessarily opposed to what the Minister is proposing overall in the legislation, only to the process and unforgivable rush. If he sticks to this timetable, he is putting forward profoundly flawed legislation, and I urge him once more to think again.
Lord Kilclooney
My Lords, as one-time Minister responsible for electoral registration in Northern Ireland, I have been interested by the references to the introduction of individual registration in Northern Ireland. As several speakers have said, several conclusions could be reached about what the result of that individual registration was. However, it certainly was not, and I strongly refute the suggestion, that it was because elderly people there did not know what they were doing—the word “illiterate” was used. I remind the House that the standard of education in Northern Ireland, and indeed in Scotland, is generally higher than in England.
On a serious point, the average size of the family in Northern Ireland is considerably larger than a family in England. When the head of a household filled in the registration form, he would very often put down all the members of the family whether they were living in Northern Ireland, England, New York or wherever. That was brought to an end when the requirement for individual registration was introduced and people outside Northern Ireland were no longer registered, only those who were actually living there. That is one of the reasons why the electoral register fell in numbers.
Lord Soley
My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this matter. I shall be brief, subject to interventions, which I will take if I possibly can.
I am not a great expert in this area, which is why I do not intend to speak for very long, but we have had the advantage of listening to two very good speeches. One was by the Minister, who demonstrated as usual that he is in command of his brief and was willing to answer questions—that is where he scores over some of his colleagues, who are not so in command of their brief and do not answer in the detail that he has—and I learnt a lot from that.
I have learnt an enormous amount from the other very good speech, which was from my noble friend Lord Wills. We ought to listen to him with great care. He has vividly described what was happening under the previous Labour Government in order to increase registration and how to get local authorities to do that well. Anyone who was aware of that during that period, and I certainly was, will be aware of the efforts that he and others made in order to get this right.
My purpose in intervening now is to say that we need to listen and learn from my noble friend’s experience. I do not want to go into the detail of it, but he is right. I simply want to say that a deal on the Bill is possible if the Government would go the extra mile that they need to go to do it. It is crazy to drive through a constitutional Bill without getting the all-party agreement and involvement that we need. It is possible to reach agreement. This may be a late stage but the Government need to do it. They do not have to bring the House into a position whereby it becomes a carbon copy of the House of Commons, but on constitutional Bills they have to try to reach agreement on key issues. That is not impossible. My noble friend has convinced me on this point. I shall not go into great detail about my former constituency. I took an interest in registration, as every MP does. I was always worried about underrepresentation of certain groups in my constituency and above all about the fluidity of an inner-city area where the population turnover is very high.
I say again that the point my noble friend made about the estimates, and using figures from elsewhere, is profoundly important. It is important to note that underrepresentation in some areas is due not to the ignorance or lack of concern of the local population but stems from its socio-economic make-up and so on. I repeat that it is possible to reach agreement on this matter but you cannot do that with a Government who are not prepared to reach agreement. I say to the Government, please to try a little harder.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, the Minister’s early intervention was very helpful because a lot of the things that he said answered questions that I had. I can therefore be relatively brief. I hear the sighs of relief. I wish to make two points. First, we have been discussing two issues. One is underregistration. Every party represented in this House and in the other House thinks that that is a bad thing. Every party wants to increase representation and encourage local authorities to get as many people on to the register as possible. That is in all our interests and is something we should all be doing. We should accept the good faith of other parties in wishing to do that. However—this is my second point—what we are talking about today, as my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours said, is not that issue at all. What we are talking about today is the best way for the Boundary Commission to make a judgment about the boundaries and the most accurate figures that it can use.
I have made my next point on a couple of previous occasions, much to the Minister’s annoyance. I have put down Amendment 67C, which says that we should use the number of people eligible to vote rather than those on the register. Questions have been asked about the accuracy of various figures. I and other Members have argued for a figure based on population. The Minister criticised that on the basis that it was an estimate. I have been talking to wiser colleagues than me about estimates. We pay taxes based on estimates. The Barnett formula gives money to Scotland and Wales based on estimates. As my noble friend Lord Desai said to me, the retail prices index, on which our pensions and other benefits are calculated, is based on an estimate. So there is nothing inherently wrong with estimates. As my noble friend Lord Desai also said to me, many things which cannot be measured scientifically are based on estimates. Despite the criticism that we have heard of the population estimate, it is relatively accurate. As has been said, it is fortuitous that the census is taking place in 2011. Therefore, we will get a very accurate measure—not an estimate—of the population, and those over 18, in 2011.
The Minister said that the register of electors is absolutely accurate but that is not the case. As I regularly used to find out when I went round canvassing, a lot of people on the register are dead. I understand that some of them used to vote in Northern Ireland, and not just in Northern Ireland. Of course, people move from one constituency to another and some of us are registered in more than one constituency for different reasons, so there are variations there. However, I argue that the biggest variation occurs—we know this as we have discussed percentages in previous debates—in the percentage of those eligible to vote who are actually registered in each constituency around the country. In some it is only 60 per cent, in others it is nearer 90 per cent, even towards 100 per cent. That is where the major imbalance occurs and that is why using the number of those eligible to vote is far fairer—“fairer” is the relevant word—when working out the boundaries than using the number of those who are actually registered to vote.
Having listened to this debate and having heard the arguments, will the Minister ask the Boundary Commission what its views are and whether it thinks that it would be feasible, better and constitute an advance to make its judgments based on population rather than on the electorate? I would welcome that. I know that the Minister will tell us that the Boundary Commission has given evidence, but will he put this to it de novo? Will he tell it that this submission has come from people who have been involved in elections and has arisen from a debate specifically on the issue which reflected our concentrated thinking on it? I would welcome a new response from the Boundary Commission as that would greatly help the debate and the discussion.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, the secretaries of the Boundary Commission were asked about this by the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee in the other place and they indicated the significant difficulties that would arise from using a population base rather than an electorate base. I have made that clear. I am sure the noble Lord is not suggesting that they were not displaying their expertise when they answered that question put by the Select Committee in the other place.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I accept that they were asked the question. But what is the purpose of having debates like this in the House of Lords?
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I am grateful. What is the purpose of hearing from people who have genuinely been involved in elections and in the conduct and practice of elections—some people have sneered at that—as my noble friend has as a former Minister, if the Minister is not willing to go back and say to the Boundary Commission, “This issue has been raised. Can you have another look at it?”.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, referred to the winding-up speech of the Minister which took place more than an hour ago. Since that time we have had a further hour of debate. The abuse that started on Monday—organised by the party Whips, according to the documents that we have seen—is continuing. With great regret, I beg to move that the Question be now put.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes)
My Lords, I am instructed by order of the House to say that the Motion that the Question be now put is considered to be a most exceptional procedure and the House will not accept it save in circumstances where it is felt to be the only means of ensuring the proper conduct of the business of the House. Further, if a noble Lord who seeks to move it persists in his intention, the practice of the House is that the Question on the Motion is put without debate. I repeat, the Question is put without debate. I look to the noble Lord to see whether he wishes to persist.
Lord Bach
My Lords, I make this application more in sorrow than in anger, but actually in both. The reason that I beg to move that the House do now resume is that it is the Committee’s only way of showing our distaste and anger at the use of the procedure of closure that has been moved this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. This precious procedure of the House has strength because it is extremely rarely employed. Indeed, apart from the other night, as I understand it, the closure procedure had not been employed for 20 years, but it has now been used twice in less than 48 hours.
Closure may sometimes be justified—although it is hard to think when—but how it could be justified in a debate on an important amendment on the question of the underregistration of 3.5 million of our fellow citizens in the voting registers is hard to understand. The debate had lasted for 93 minutes and was coming to a conclusion. It is true that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, of whom I make no criticism at all, had spoken quite early in the debate. However, this is Committee stage, not Report. In Committee, even if the Minister speaks early, other Members of your Lordships’ House are entitled to be heard and to make their speeches in due course. The noble and learned Lord made his speech and then there were speeches from other noble Lords around the Committee. However, for a debate of this seriousness to be effectively guillotined—because that is what it was—after that period of time and when, as I said, it was coming to a close is, in our view, an abuse of the House. For that reason, I beg to move.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal
My Lords, as your Lordships will know, I have not spoken so far in this debate so I rise now with a great deal of sadness. When the closure Motion was first moved by the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, towards the early hours of Tuesday morning, the noble Baroness, our Lord Speaker, refreshed the Committee’s memory about the circumstances in which such Motions can be moved. I am going to trespass upon your Lordships’ time a little by doing so again because it is important that we remind ourselves when such Motions are proper. The paragraph reads as follows:
“I am instructed by order of the House to say that the motion ‘That the Question be now put’ is considered to be a most exceptional procedure and the House will not accept it save in circumstances where it is felt to be the only means of ensuring the proper conduct of the business of the House; further, if a member who seeks to move it persists in his intention, the practice of the House is that the Question on the motion is put without debate”.
I repeat that closure is “an exceptional procedure”. I ask the House: what is exceptional about a 90-minute debate about anything in your Lordships' House? If there is nothing exceptional, we tread on very dangerous ground. This House—not the other place—demands good conduct from us all.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal
As such, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure that we conduct ourselves with propriety. There will be times when emotions will be high, but we must hang on to judgment. I fear for this House if such a practice becomes no longer exceptional but the norm. That would not be proper or right. I hear what is said from the Benches opposite, but noble Lords know well what they do. This is a moment when we should draw breath and understand the constitutional significance of behaving in such a way that we are tacitly allowing the guillotine to enter our House. I hope that that will never happen.
I hear noble Lords opposite saying that I am facing the wrong way. I am facing the right way. The noble Lord who moved the Motion for closure knows that it was undeserved after a 90-minute debate.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
Of course it was deserved, because the proceedings on Monday and into Tuesday morning were an organised filibuster.
Baroness Scotland of Asthal
I was not talking about whatever happened on Monday night. Then, the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, raised his objection, which was put. A number of us thought that it should not have been. That situation was exceptional and was the first time that such a thing had happened for 20 years. To move such a Motion again today, after a 90-minute debate, was not right. The noble Lord knows that very well.
Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve
My Lords, we must do some simple and clear talking among ourselves. The situation that we have arrived at, with the double use of the closure Motion, is edging us towards a guillotine. If this House introduces a guillotine, scrutiny will be impossible. I think that scrutiny has become impossible in the course of the debate on this Bill, in part because of the repetitive and irrelevant comments, whether co-ordinated or not, made in many speeches by noble Lords on the opposition Benches. That, too, is an abuse of the procedures of the House. However, I also believe that the resort to the Motion for closure, with its implicit guillotine, is an abuse of the process of the House. As a Cross-Bencher, I beg the leaders of the Opposition and of the coalition to remember that their loyalty to this House stands above their partisan loyalty.
At the moment, I and some other noble Lords do not vote on the substance of this legislation only to prevent closure and the move towards the guillotine. I know that many noble Lords opposite care greatly about the House. I hope that they will discuss with their colleagues why the repeated use of the Motion for closure will prove destructive. It will end up as an argument not for an elected or a non-elected House, or for a hybrid House, but for unicameralism.
At the other end of this palace there is a guillotine. We know how much legislation reaches us undiscussed, undigested and unscrutinised. The function that we try to carry out is important. It is not the grandest function, but it is essential. Until things are changed, we have a duty to preserve that function. We will lose it if collectively we adopt tactics that either amount to a filibuster, even if they were not co-ordinated as such, or that amount to a guillotine, even if they are not so labelled.
Lord Low of Dalston
My Lords, I did not vote for the closure Motion because I felt that it was wrong to vote for what was, to all intents and purposes, a guillotine—or what was rapidly becoming one. I came to the Chamber shortly before the closure Motion was put to see how the debate was going. I had other business this afternoon and had not been able to join the debate before. I had left the Chamber as Amendment 65B was moved. I came back a couple of hours later and was more than a little dismayed to discover that we were still on the first amendment of the afternoon. I feel that we need to be making more progress on the Bill. As I said yesterday, the Opposition must be in no doubt that they have long since lost the patience of the House. There have been plenty of stalemates or near-stalemates in this House, and the only way they can be resolved is the way that they traditionally and on a daily basis are resolved, which is through a process of negotiation with give and take on both sides.
A little time after I said that yesterday morning—I do not impute a relationship of cause and effect—the Government began to say that they would look further at some of the amendments being moved. With that, the spirit of the debate began to change—at least my impression was that that was the case yesterday—and things began to move along at a somewhat brisker pace yesterday afternoon. Indeed, I am advised that the kind of negotiations that I called for yesterday morning have been in progress between the Government and the Opposition. In those circumstances, I urge that the Government and the Opposition redouble their efforts to reach a compromise so that the debate can proceed in a timely fashion and we are able to conclude the Committee stage of the Bill in a timely fashion with the necessary compromises on both sides having been achieved.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My Lords, at the time of a clash and a rather sour atmosphere at some stage on Tuesday morning, a still small voice of reason was heard in the Chamber. It was the noble Lord, Lord Low. I think most of us approved of and were delighted by the way he spoke. There clearly must be negotiation and it must be in the spirit of give and take, not “We take and you give”. There has to be some serious discussion—not just throwing a few sprats, such as the Isle of Wight, to the Opposition—because this is a matter of very considerable importance.
We are here at the moment because the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, moved his closure Motion. I do not know whether that was done with the approval of the Government, but the Government certainly adopted it by going into the Lobby with him. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, may have in his spare time read a very famous American book, How to Influence People Without Making Friends. That may be the spirit in which he moved his Motion. As a lawyer, he must know that if he were called upon to give a judicial interpretation of the words “a most exceptional procedure”, it cannot be an Alice-in-Wonderland world in which one defines words as one wants to define them; it must mean “most exceptional”. We are in the unprecedented position of having had two closure Motions. In the spirit of what the noble Lord, Lord Low, said, I fear that unless we are very careful and hold back from the brink, we are indeed slipping inexorably along the road to guillotine.
The guillotine was used in the other place, which meant that rather important amendments relating to Wales, my own country, were not touched, and that whole swathes of the Bill were not touched. Are we moving to the position where a guillotine will, in practice, be created in this House? It will indeed be unprecedented and will undermine the process of self-regulation. I hope that all of us, even the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, will now proceed in the spirit of that remarkable speech in intervention yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Low. We wait to see the colour of that which the Government bring forward, but I hope that they will work in the spirit of this place and will not try to juggernaut through that which they have agreed within the coalition.
Lord Addington
My Lords, I have been in this House for well over 20 years and have seen many long debates. I have never experienced anything like what has gone on on this Bill. There has been almost a relay of speeches designed to inform you about just about anything other than about what is on the Order Paper. Somewhere there will be a pedant’s description of what a filibuster actually is, but this looks and smells like one. That is where we have got to.
Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, I have not taken part in the Bill, but I have been in the House for some 20 years. I was a Minister for rather a long time during that period. On behalf of the Government, I must have been responsible for taking through 12 to 15 Bills. On every Bill for which I was responsible, I expected to negotiate for two reasons. The first was the practical reason that as a Labour Party in the House of Lords we had no overall majority, and the second reason why I expected to negotiate was that time and again Lord Mackay, who was my first opposite number, and then the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, very often joined by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, had a better argument and better evidence to support their position than was in my brief, and I learnt from them. Therefore, the basis of negotiation was first on the grounds of not having the numbers and secondly because the Opposition had something worth while to say and very often had a more powerful case than my department could offer. That was the basis on which we negotiated on every Bill for which I was responsible.
Now, because for the first time ever there is a government Tory-led coalition majority on the Benches opposite, there seems to be a belief, which I hope is not shared by all Members opposite, that numbers count and arguments do not. I hope therefore that noble Lords will reflect that there is virtue in negotiation, not just because of numbers but because wisdom—judgment, as my noble friend said—does not belong to any one section of this House. That is why we have been so effective as a revising Chamber over the years. There is wisdom and judgment around the House, and any Government, if they are wise, listen to it, reflect upon it and, I hope, adjust their position accordingly. I hope that we never see the disgrace of the Motion moved by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, today to bring closure on a particular amendment and thus to cut out the possibility of the negotiation that we need to have. I ask noble Lords opposite to reflect on what happened during the past 13 years. I understand that opposition is painful, but they made a powerful impact on the Government’s programme not just by virtue of numbers but by their argument, their judgment and the experience they brought to bear. It is foolish beyond belief to think that because you have the numbers, you can dispense with that judgment now. I beg noble Lords to reconsider.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, it is with considerable difficulty that I find myself addressing this position which, as far as I am concerned, has never happened before. We have come to this position as a result of a government Bill which deals with very important matters—I am the first to concede that—which require discussion, and we have had a good deal of discussion. Yesterday, for example, there was a concise and effective debate on the amendments proposed by the opposition Front Bench. My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness explained that he could take the matter away for consideration but no undertaking could be given. That was what ought to have happened and the response by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, was warmly accepted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. I see no reason why we should not be able to proceed in this way.
The other day the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood, said he had taken a Bill on the digital economy through Parliament. It was a very interesting Bill. I took part in the early more general clauses but once it became technical, it was beyond me, so I was not able to assist and had to desist from taking part. But there were 700 amendments. If these amendments had all taken the time that was taken by the first two or three amendments in this week’s Committee, he would certainly not have got his Bill through that Parliament. I am all in favour of scrutiny and I value the right we have here to raise every amendment for discussion and get a government answer to it. That is extremely valuable and I have explained it often in answer to people who ask what the function of the House of Lords is in relation to legislation. I am able to say that anyone who has a reasonable point and can get a Peer to see it as a reasonable point has an opportunity to get an answer from the Government on that particular point. It may not always be a satisfactory answer or the answer that one wants, but at least we have the right to get an answer from the Government on every point that is made.
The total number of amendments on the Marshalled List for this Bill is quite large and I would think that quite a number of them have substantial points. I have listened with care to a substantial proportion of the discussion in this Committee and I have been interested in the points made from the opposition Benches, most by people of considerable experience. I have paid particular attention to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, in relation to the possibility of improving the electoral register. However, as the time has gone on and the same amendment is still being debated, my interest has slightly waned as a result of the extraordinary amount of repetition. It is not for me to judge always, but I have a feeling that not every remark is equally relevant to the point of the amendment. Indeed, my noble friend—I think I can call him that as an exception—Lord Foulkes of Cumnock gave a very interesting speech the other day but he never mentioned the amendment that was being dealt with. I do not believe in making many interventions on these amendments because it just makes matters worse, but on this particular occasion I ventured to intervene to ask him whether he was for or against the amendment. His answer, typically generous, was, “Well, I haven’t made my mind up yet”, and he expected that I would not make my mind up, either, until I had heard the whole of the discussion.
I make no apportionment of blame as to where this has happened but there has crept into the debate an extension of discussion beyond what is reasonable if we are going to get through this Committee stage in anything like a reasonable time. For example, one of the amendments took something like three and a half hours. If you take the total number of amendments on this Marshalled List and multiply it by three and a half hours, we will be using most of this extended parliamentary Session for this Committee. Whatever one thinks about the merits of the Bill, that is really quite excessive in terms of discussion. I feel that we have got to a stage where we have lost the complete adherence to relevance and succinctness which are the advantages of this House’s procedure. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, made some reference to this the other day and was regarded as having threatened people, which I certainly do not think he did, but he mentioned the point that in the other place this had been lost. The reason we have had it for all the time that I know of, and I hope that it will continue for a very long time to come, is that we have exercised self-restraint and discipline in relation to the total number of amendments that are on the Marshalled List with a view to succeeding that the points are understood. When I have listened here, I have understood very well and quite quickly most of the points that are made from the opposition Benches, but by the time they are repeated five or six times, one begins to feel, possibly, that they have lost their impact. I am afraid that is, at least to some extent, what has been happening in the discussion.
Not everyone has the same level of patience but we have to exercise a certain amount of patience with one another. I greatly regret that we have come to the position where this closure Motion has happened on two occasions.
Lord Clinton-Davis
I have a tremendous regard for the noble and learned Lord and the advice that he proffers, but is it not essential in pretty well every Bill that there should be some discussion between the opposition Front Bench and the Government? He has not referred to that.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
I am not a member of the usual channels and I never have been, unlike my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Graham of Edmonton, who came from Tyne to Thames via the usual channels. However, I feel that we have come to a stage at which we need to reconsider. I hope that there will be no further Motions for closure. I also hope that all of us, me included, will conduct ourselves in a practical way and make points that we believe will be listened to. I believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, was kind enough to say, that my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness has always conducted himself with complete propriety, anxious to reach an understanding of the points made from the Opposition and to do his best to answer them.
I understand the Motion moved by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and the proper course for us to take now might be to have a very short Adjournment so that we can consider the position. I believe that there have been negotiations through the usual channels—I do not know exactly to what effect. I hope they may continue, because it has always been the way to work. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, suggested on Monday as a condition of negotiation that the Bill should be split. I understand perfectly the very great difficulty with that, and I do not think that the condition will necessarily be met, but other things could happen. I suggest that the House resume for a short Adjournment and that we resume Committee in a spirit of real co-operation—I hope to speak on the next group of amendments, I have to say—whereby we will be able to have some concessions from Her Majesty's Government, at least to the extent of considering amendments, which should be the usual method in Committee.
Lord Bach
My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this important debate, not least to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, for his wise comments, which included criticism of the Opposition as well of his own side. The point that I seek to make in moving this Motion is that you cannot begin to have a system of regular guillotines and at the same time hope to retain a scrutinising House that holds the Government properly to account. We cannot go down the route of regularly using guillotines as a tactic in Bills. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, put that point so much better than I can, and it came from those on the Cross Benches, who sometimes look at us, I think, from on high and make judgments about us that we do not make about ourselves.
I was minded to put this Motion to the vote, but, having heard the spirit of this debate and speaking in a spirit of desire for negotiations, it seems unnecessary to do so. I hope I get the feeling of the Committee right in deciding not to put the Motion to a vote. I think we want to continue, particularly with the debate that is about to take place on the next amendment on the Marshalled List. With the Committee’s leave, I will withdraw the Motion, but I hope it is on the understanding that neither the government Front Bench nor their Back-Benchers will indulge in closure Motions of this kind. It is just not acceptable.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
I associate myself with that last hope.
Motion withdrawn.
Amendment 66
Lord Fowler
Lord Fowler
My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 89, which deals specifically with the Isle of Wight. I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for the action that he has taken, which enables this amendment to be debated earlier. I hope that I can bring the Committee on to a happier and more consensual road than during the past hour.
Perhaps I may say gently to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that I do not consider the Isle of Wight, a sprat of an issue, to use his phrase. It has support from all parts of the House, very much including his own party.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
I wholly accept that the Isle of Wight deserves to be treated in the way in which the noble Lord wants. I also accept that the same principles should apply to other areas, such as Ynys Môn in Wales. My position was that if that was to be the only concession the Government made, it would be insufficient to show the spirit, which they should show, of give and take.
Lord Fowler
Having started and tried to get consensus, I shall not continue to debate with the noble Lord, because I am obviously not doing very well at it. It was the word “sprat” that offended me.
Few issues in politics—many of us who have been in the other place will understand this—are more important or sensitive than constituency boundaries. I speak with some experience on this. My first constituency was not Sutton Coldfield but Nottingham South. Sadly, when I entered the other place in 1970 for my first Queen’s Speech, it was to hear that the boundary review was to be implemented and that, as a result of that, my seat was to be abolished. It is not exactly what you hope and expect to hear on your first day in Parliament. Things could only get better.
The seat was being abolished because the Boundary Commission thought it wrong to have a constituency that crossed the river at Trent Bridge, going from the city to the county at West Bridgford. That was in spite of the fact that it took only a couple of minutes to walk over the bridge, there was no toll on the bridge and you certainly did not need a ferry to make the crossing.
When it comes to the Isle of Wight, of which I have been a resident for more than 25 years, the theory is exactly the opposite. The consequence of what is being proposed in the Bill is that a new constituency would be formed that would be partly on the mainland and partly on the Isle of Wight, in spite of the fact the two parts would be eight to 10 miles apart, over a stretch of sea and with expensive ferries being the only means of communication. It is claimed that there must be this kind of new constituency because it is essential that all constituencies should have electorates of around 76,000, when the Isle of Wight has 110,000. No exceptions are possible, except the two in the Bill both concerning island constituencies and where the electorates are not abnormally high but abnormally low.
My amendment would allow there to be one or two constituencies on the Isle of Wight. Most importantly, it follows the amendment put down in the other place by Andrew Turner, the excellent Member of Parliament for the island who was elected on a manifesto that promised opposition to a cross-Solent constituency. You might think that his amendment would have been carefully considered in the other place, but you would be absolutely wrong. Due to the timetabling arrangements in the other place, which perhaps underlines a little the debate that has gone before, he was allowed no time at all in Committee, four minutes on Report and no opportunity to bring the proposition to a vote.
I cannot believe that this is a sensible way of governing this country. If nothing else, this amendment gives the other place the opportunity at least to consider the proposition concerning the Isle of Wight. I emphasise that the proposition is supported by every political party on the island; we speak as one on this. It would be the first time since the Reform Act 1832 that the unity of the Isle of Wight in parliamentary terms would be destroyed. It would be a bad deal for the island and for whatever area of the mainland forms part of the proposed new constituency.
There are several practical reasons why the proposal is not in the public interest. The most basic point is that however you put together a new, divided constituency, no one believes that you can create a community, yet all the political parties in this country talk at some length about the importance of building communities. This proposal goes smack against that objective. If a new constituency was created out of part of Portsmouth and the east of the Isle of Wight, the travel difficulties involved in moving between one part and the other would be both immense and expensive. We are not talking about walking over Trent Bridge but about having to take a ferry or a hovercraft. A return journey by car ferry is likely to cost £50, and it could cost £100. A trip by hovercraft is less expensive but presents the problem of how to get about on the other side. The bus service tries hard but everyone would concede that it does not meet all the needs of the public. The internal rail service is typified by the provision of antique, cast-off London Transport carriages, as everyone who has been to the Isle of Wight knows. None of this is a recipe for free and easy movement in the new constituency or in a community.
Nor are the interests of the island and the mainland necessarily the same. For example, on another part of the island, the islanders want an improved ferry service from Yarmouth to Lymington, but they are strongly opposed by the mainland Lymington River Association, which wants nothing of the kind. There is no community of interest.
There has been no consultation with the people on the island about this proposal. Had there been, the Government would have discovered that all three political parties are opposed to a cross-Solent constituency—as are the county council, including the independents, the other councils on the island and, overwhelmingly, the public, 18,000 of whom have signed a petition against the proposal, which was collected in literally only a couple of weeks. Obviously it is not as easy to gauge the view of the public on the mainland because we do not know what part of the mainland the new constituency is meant to tie up with. However, if we are talking about Portsmouth, Southampton or somewhere else, I guess that there would not be overwhelming support for the proposition.
Two points in particular need to be borne in mind. First, given the electoral size of the island constituencies that are made exceptions to the 76,000 size rule in the Bill—Orkney and Shetland and what used to be the Western Isles; Orkney and Shetland has 33,000 constituents and the other constituency has 22,000—if there was only one constituency on the Isle of the Wight, the difference from the standard would not be anything like as great as that, and the same would be true if there were two constituencies.
However, a second and perhaps even more fundamental point is that the Boundary Commission looked at the proposition of a cross-Solent constituency in 2007, using figures from 2000. The electorate in 2000 was, even then, 103,000—33 per cent larger than the average—and the commission considered severing part of the island and putting it with a mainland constituency. However, it concluded that to do so would,
“disregard the historical and unique geographical situation”.
It found that it would,
“create confusion and a feeling of loss of identity”,
among the island’s electorate. It also stated that,
“communications would be difficult both for the electorate and the Member of Parliament”.
I am sad to say that, despite that conclusive and independent thumbs down, the Government have persisted with this proposal.
Lord West of Spithead
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I have holidayed on the Isle of Wight for some 40 years in a family cottage, I have been a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes for 30 years, I lived in Southsea and Portsmouth for some 20 years, I am the chancellor of Southampton University and know that town well, and my family come from the New Forest. So I know both sides of that not inconsiderable patch of water. A battle was fought at Spithead and I parked more than 170 ships in the east Solent for the bicentennial. It is a large stretch of water.
I can assure the House that there is a huge difference between the people who live on the Isle of Wight and those who live on the shores of the mainland. I am sure that this is an oversight. It is extraordinary that the Government could even consider having a constituency across a piece of water such as that. I do not intend to speak for long because I think it is an oversight. It makes absolute sense to leave the Isle of Wight as one constituency—or two—but certainly not to stretch it across the water.
The Lord Bishop of Wakefield
My Lords, I support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. Having worked in the diocese of Portsmouth, which included the Isle of Wight, for some seven years, I always saw it as my international ministry.
I made several mistakes when I first got there. I remember going over there for the first time overnight and saying to some people, “Perhaps one of the best things that could be done here is to build a bridge”. There was total silence at the table and I was never invited back.
The noble Lord, Lord Fowler, asked what the people on the mainland would think. The divide is seen just as seriously from the mainland as it is from the island. It was baffling that when people phoned me up in Portsmouth and asked “Is he there?”, they were told “No, he is on the island”, as though there was only one island in the world. I remember, for example, that we would organise diocesan synods to gather the whole of our diocese together, and that they were almost always held on the mainland. There were complaints about their being poorly attended by those on the Isle of Wight.
On one occasion I made the radical suggestion that the diocesan synod might be held in Ryde, which is the nearest place to anywhere on the mainland and the easiest place to get to. It was very well attended by members from the Isle of Wight, but there was a devastatingly low attendance by those on the mainland. That was because it requires a significant effort to make your way across to the island, and as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, pointed out, it involves considerable cost. One of the things about living on the island is that there are more favourable ferry fares for those who live on the island to come across to the mainland.
As has been pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, I assume that this was an oversight, but if it was not, it jolly well ought to have been. I hope that the Government will consider rethinking this one.
Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay
My Lords, I am proud to put my name to this amendment, which has been moved by my noble friend and neighbour in Seaview. The case for keeping the Isle of Wight as a single constituency is overwhelming. I can confirm that it is supported by all three political parties on the island and, indeed, by every single person I have spoken to there. Only last Friday I spoke at a meeting of the Isle of Wight Liberal Democrats. I explained to them the amendments due to be debated this week, but I did not know that we would have to stay up all night to get to them. Those at the meeting reaffirmed their support for the changes and asked me to pass on to my colleagues on these Benches how strongly they felt.
My noble friend Lord Fowler ran briefly through the numbers, as I did at Second Reading. The important point is that the Isle of Wight as a single constituency, which is how I imagine it would come out, is closer to the quota than either of the Scottish island constituencies. It will be 1.45 of the quota, whereas Orkney and Shetland will be 0.44 and the Western Isles only 0.29, which is barely a quarter. I support the exceptions made for the Scottish seats, but there is clearly an even stronger argument for making an exception for the Isle of Wight.
I stand shoulder to shoulder with my noble friend Lord Fowler. I hope that the Minister will listen to our concerns and give us some hope of substantial movement in the later stages of the Bill. If he does not, let me give him a word of warning. Anyone who has seen my noble friend Lord Fowler, resplendent in his beach shorts directing operations in village sports which take place in front of our cottage in Seagrove Bay, will know that you cross him at your peril. On the beach, his word is law. When we make law in this House, we cannot ignore a real people’s campaign like this. It unites the Wight, and it is as determined as I am to keep it whole.
Lord Judd
My Lords, I have the honour to have been granted the freedom of the city of Portsmouth. In my years in the other place, again I was honoured to represent part of the community of Portsmouth. Of course, Portsmouth is very much involved in the implications of what is being proposed in the Bill and in the amendment. I want to say to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, that he could not have put the case better. It was a well argued and most convincing presentation, so really I would just like to say that I fully endorse it.
However, I want to make one other point. I now live in Cumbria, at the other end of the country, but last Sunday I was back in Portsmouth for a memorial service in the cathedral for the victims of the blitz. Portsmouth suffered a terrible blitz which wrought tremendous damage on the city with a large number of deaths and injuries. On the occasion of that memorial, one could feel the great sense of community in what is often rightly referred to as Portsea Island, because in many ways Portsmouth itself has the characteristics of an island community.
I made a point of gazing across the Solent. My wife asked, “Why we were taking this route?”, and I said that I just wanted to look at the Isle of Wight. I thought about the occasions when I have been able to cross the Solent and visit the Isle of Wight. I thought to myself, here we have the epitome of two rich communities. In every sense, they really are communities. While the noble Lord’s amendment speaks for itself and has my full support, I will make the point that this cannot be looked at in isolation from the argument about the importance of community if our constituency system is to mean anything.
I assure noble Lords in all parts of the Committee that in many ways Cumbria feels itself to be distinctive and very much apart from mainland, industrialised Britain. It has a real sense of community and therefore wants its representation in a political system to be based on communities. We cannot have a healthy democracy if it is simply a relationship between Government and a number of individuals thrown together in a constituency formed by some mathematical calculation. The dynamics and strength of a democracy are when people in communities are able to come together, collectively assert themselves and examine the implications of what is being proposed for legislation and how it will affect them. That is how individuals become strengthened—not by being given rights by central Government, but by being able to get together and assert themselves. All those who have been Members of Parliament know perfectly well that while of course we wanted to listen to and respond to the individual irrespective of how they voted, we also knew well that it was when the community asserted itself that we were really being held to account.
In that sense, the dynamic social and historic reasons for the amendment before us are unanswerable. However, they also have a far greater significance for the other issues that we are debating in this Bill.
Viscount Astor
My Lords, I should like to support my noble friend Lord Fowler. Anyone who is even an occasional visitor to the Isle of Wight, as I am, will realise that there is a special sense of community there because it is an island. It is difficult to get to and occasionally, if one is there in the winter, it is quite difficult to leave. It has an important and special identity, and I hope that my noble friend on the Front Bench will consider the amendment very carefully.
Finally, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Fowler on moving an amendment that has produced concise and relevant speeches to it. I hope that noble Lords opposite will not regard that as a challenge.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on having put the argument so clearly. I dare say that in the far reaches of the Government they are saying, “This is a big mistake. We have got to get out of this one”, or at least I hope that that is what they are thinking. My connection with the Isle of Wight is that my mother lived there for many years, until she died. I used to go there a great deal. However, she was not of the Isle of Wight, and those noble Lords who know the Isle of Wight will also know that the people there call everyone from elsewhere “overners”. They are quite contemptuous of overners in the friendliest possible way.
It is a lovely island, with above all two characteristics that have been mentioned in part. The first is that communications are difficult. There was no hovercraft in the days when my mother lived there, but I remember going down to Portsmouth Harbour on a Friday evening, taking the Southampton ferry, or going from Lymington to Yarmouth. Even if things have got a little better, these journeys are still difficult to make. One cannot do them late at night or too early in the morning.
The other thing is what my noble friend Lord Judd said: there is a tremendously powerful sense of community on the Isle of Wight. One has only to talk to the local people to get a sense of that very quickly. It would be a travesty of geography and of community if the Isle of Wight were not to be one constituency. The evidence shows that the people of the Isle of Wight would resent it deeply, and we would be doing them a disservice. Many of us who have represented communities at the local or the national level know the importance of representing a community. It makes for a better and more effective political process that works well. I totally support the noble Lord and I hope that the Government will think again.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
My Lords, it is a pleasure to support my noble friend Lord Fowler in his amendment, and to support Mr Andrew Turner, the Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be a Member of a governing party, or a party in a coalition, and find that a proposal is put forward to link your constituency with a part of the mainland for which there is no logical link. He has behaved with very considerable restraint. I have personally appreciated the way in which he has briefed us about the background to those issues.
At Second Reading, I made it clear that I do not like this Bill very much. Ideally, these issues of reducing the size of Parliament and deciding on how the boundaries are achieved would have been done by a Speaker’s Conference and not by a Bill of this kind. Ideally, there should not have been the two separate issues of AV and the reduction of the size of Parliament in the same Bill. That, however, is all water under the bridge. I confess I looked at the Bill with a certain degree of hostility, and perhaps because I am cynical, when I saw that there was an exception for Orkney and Shetland, I thought that that must be a bit of a deal with the Liberals, because that is a Liberal constituency. I realise that that was a wicked and improper thought. The Western Isles, of course, is a nationalist constituency. Then I had lunch today with Mr Charles Kennedy and I said, wrongly, “Of course, your seat is not affected”. He quite rightly pointed out that that was a widely held mistaken belief; although his seat is the largest—Ross, Skye and Lochaber—it is, of course, not exempted because the Boundary Commission simply has that as a size. He is in the same boat as everyone else. I accept that the reason that the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland are made exceptions in the Bill is that, quite rightly, somebody recognised that they are distinctive communities. There are many islands that form part of Argyll which have all the problem of ferries and the rest that affect the Isle of Wight, but the key point is whether it is a distinctive community. Clearly the Isle of Wight is a distinctive community.
I do not wish to detain the House, but I would like to make one other general point. I return to what I had to say about Mr Andrew Turner. All of us in this House—especially those I expect who were Members of the other place—must feel great distress at the way in which the status and standing of Members of Parliament have taken a knock of late. One thing, however, that is really encouraging in all the polls and surveys is that people still hold their own Member of Parliament in high regard, even if they have a jaded view of Members of Parliament as a group.
One of the reasons for that is because the Member of Parliament is seen to be the Member for their area or community. I was a Tory in Sterling where two-thirds of the voters had never experienced or wanted a Tory but, as such, you were respected as the Member of Parliament—their man or their woman in Parliament. Even in the days of the rotten boroughs people came to represent the rotten borough, they did not come to represent a block of so many voters on the map. I support my noble friend’s amendment in the hope that the Government will listen—
Lord Martin of Springburn
I am sorry to disturb the noble Lord’s thought, but I would also like to say that I have a very high regard for Mr Turner. Andrew is a lovely person and a very hard working individual. It disturbs me that he had only a few moments on the Floor of the House to put the arguments that the noble Lord has put so succinctly. The noble Lord touched upon Argyll, and this disturbs me too—a great island community; I think we are talking about 15 islands—as the same went for Alan Reid, who was unable to speak or had very little say. The noble Lord is quite right that a Speaker’s Conference would have allowed those Back-Benchers to put the case for their communities.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I bow to the noble Lord’s very great experience, not just as a former Speaker but as a parliamentarian. But, of course, we are where we are. The point that I wanted to make was that the identity between communities and Members of Parliament is very important. I am supporting my noble friend in the hope that the Government will recognise that the Isle of Wight has just as strong a case. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, said, that it should have one constituency; it could have two and still be closer to the criteria set under the Bill than either the Western Isles or Orkney and Shetland.
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Martin, the Government, in looking at the Isle of Wight, should also think about this point about the identity between Members of Parliament and constituencies. This is not just a numbers game. If we end up making it a numbers game, we may very well find that the respect, support and influence that Parliament is able to bring to bear through its Members in their constituencies are greatly diminished at a time when we need to strengthen Parliament. That seems to me to be a very retrograde step.
On the other point that the noble Lord made, we have had a long debate about the procedure which in effect is bringing a guillotine to this House. That would, of course, bring all the disadvantages that we see in the Commons, which is why our workload has gone up. It was Robespierre who invented the guillotine and he ended up being a victim of it himself. I venture to suggest that this House may like to consider that example.
Lord Pannick
The strength of the case for this amendment confirms the mischief in this part of the Bill which we debated in Committee yesterday. The rigidity in the formula contained in rule 2 allows for these vital geographical and local considerations to be taken into account only in the two specific cases or within the rubric of the 5 per cent tolerance that the Boundary Commission has. We can seek to address this specific case, and there are many other examples—perhaps not quite as strong as the Isle of Wight—of particular local and geographical considerations, by adding one or two more exceptions to rule 2. Or, as I would prefer, the Government could now recognise that the rigidity of the Bill is quite indefensible. We desperately need a broader exception which allows the Boundary Commission to take account of these factors in what it regards as exceptional cases, of which the Isle of Wight is plainly one.
Lord Desai
My Lords, just before the closure we were talking statistics, and I make a small statistical point. The Government want to equalise the constituency boundaries, which is a very laudable aim. With the best will in the world, they may be able to do it in 99 per cent of the cases within three standard deviations; that still leaves six spare seats out of 600. The Government should not feel too nervous about having one more exception. The Government should say that it is just not humanly possible to fit everything within 598 seats. It is possible to allow a little bit of slack and, if the Government do, they will not lose the thread completely, and it will help many Members of your Lordships’ House to breathe easy.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, my connection with the Isle of Wight is that when I was Lord Chancellor I was invited to open the new magistrates’ court there. My host was the late Lord Mottistone, who was a Member of this House and at that time the governor of the Isle of Wight. I gather that the governor’s post has fallen into desuetude, but at any rate that shows that it was a separate—whatever the right noun is for whatever the governor has to rule over. I was shown very well over the island during that visit. My noble friend has succinctly explained the powerful case for separating out the Isle of Wight, and I hope that the Government consider it.
On the wider point made by the noble Lords, Lord Judd, Lord Forsyth and Lord Pannick, I believe that the amendment moved yesterday and dealt with so expeditiously yesterday afternoon, which is to be considered by the Government, would provide a pretty good answer to most of the difficulties, if the Government are pleased to accept it.
Lord McAvoy
My Lords, without injecting too much of a sour note, I would like to follow up some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Judd, who made them far more eloquently than I will—I have never claimed to be eloquent.
Community is certainly to the fore in these matters. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, rightly explained the sense of community that people feel for the place where they live and where they may have stayed all their lives. Noble Lords will tell me if I step out of order, but I shall run the risk of perhaps bringing in things that are for a future amendment but that are, nevertheless, relevant to what is being discussed here today. I make no apology for attempting to do that.
In 1973, a Tory Government ripped apart the Royal Burgh of Rutherglen and shoved us into the new City of Glasgow District Council, with no regard for the community or the political unity of the burgh, the Cambuslang or Halfway areas—absolutely nothing. “You’re going in and that is it”, was the attitude, as the Government did not listen to a single thing. Many years later in 1993, 1994 and 1995, with the help of a more benevolent Conservative Minister, Allan Stewart—who was a first-class Minister and a first-class community man as well—the towns of Rutherglen, Cambuslang and Halfway were taken out of Glasgow and put back into their natural home of the county of Lanarkshire. Although there is not the obvious geographical case for Rutherglen, Cambuslang and Halfway that is apparent for the Isle of Wight, nevertheless we also have a sense of community. The difficulty for me is that the Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight has made an outstanding case; I hope to make an outstanding case for my community at a later stage, but—there is always a but, and this is where I might do myself a bit of damage personally, but there we are—first and foremost I am a Rutherglonian, and I shall represent that burgh to the best of my ability in matters where the law is being changed.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, I have to make a correction. I referred to the late Lord Mottistone. I should not have said late, as I gather that he is still alive.
Lord Eden of Winton
My Lords, having sat silently through the long night watches, I am grateful that by accident this important debate is taking place at a more reasonable hour than I had originally anticipated. I am also grateful for the spirit in which the noble Lord, Lord Bach, withdrew his earlier Motion, which has enabled us to carry on with this debate.
I have no need to say anything at all at length, because all the points have been most effectively made. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and to his colleagues for having tabled these amendments. I will add one word.
For many years in my life, I have occupied one part or other of the coast of Hampshire—for many years I represented the constituency of Bournemouth West—and now live not too far from there. Prior to that, having lived for decades in the New Forest, I have constantly looked across and seen the outline of the Isle of Wight, which has always been over there, almost beyond reach. If we ever contemplated visiting the Isle of Wight, it was the subject of quite a lengthy discussion beforehand, and we knew that the visit would write off a complete day, whatever else took place. So it was not something that you just popped down the road or hopped on the bus to visit. It was a big excursion and a considerable undertaking.
To contemplate having to represent such a constituency as a Member of Parliament would be very exhausting and frustrating. I can quite see the enormous practical difficulties that would arise from that. I hope therefore very much that my noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness will be prepared to do what my noble friend Lord Fowler asked and give these amendments very serious consideration. I see no reason in the timetable, or for any other purpose, why we should not have an amendment that makes common sense—and it is common sense that we want in all our legislation.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
As everybody will know, I have spoken in the debate on the first half of this Bill only against the Government and, indeed, have voted against the Government. This is a time when I intend to support the Government—or I hope that I am supporting the Minister. If he makes an exception over the Isle of Wight, the argument about communities will be rerun about every conceivable constituency around the country. It is extremely dangerous to start making exceptions. The effect of this Bill is going to be that a number of constituencies that have been a coherent whole will be broken up, but that is the result of the Bill. Once you start on exceptions, why should it end with the Isle of Wight?
Lord Davies of Stamford
Is the noble Lord in favour of the two exceptions that the Government have already made?
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
No, I am not in favour of them either. I agree that they have breached the principle, but I suppose that there is a greater argument for an enormous land mass with a very small electorate in Scotland being represented by one person.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Let me reinforce the noble Lord's argument. If we have a debate like this for 45 minutes on each of the 650 constituencies, it will take another 450 hours.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
That is absolutely true. That is why I hope that the Government do not give way on this issue. That rules out any question of creating an exception for the Isle of Wight. It may be uncomfortable for the constituents of the Isle of Wight to be represented by two Members of Parliament, but it would not be the end of the world. I sincerely hope that my noble friend holds out on this.
Baroness Nye
I support the noble Lord’s amendment. I told him that I would do so and I had not intended to speak in the debate, but a few points arose from his speech that I want to take up. He said that the Member of Parliament campaigned at the election to keep the Isle of Wight as a single constituency, but the same candidate must also have campaigned at the election to have a 10 per cent reduction in the number of seats. That gives a new twist to the phrase “not in my constituency”.
The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who is not in his place, said at Second Reading that the problem is that equal votes are a good idea and people support that, but people can believe two things at the same time. People want fair votes, but experience in the Isle of Wight and Cornwall shows that they might want something else as well. That is partly why we have tabled these amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, we have been trying to change the nature of this threshold to give constituencies such as the Isle of Wight more flexibility.
The noble Lord also said in his speech that there had been no consultation with the residents of the Isle of Wight, which is one of our objections to the Bill. More important, there will be no consultation when the Bill is passed because the Bill will also abolish public inquiries into Boundary Commission decisions. We would like people to have a say both at the beginning and at the end, but this Bill will abolish that. I hope that, for the reasons that he gave in his speech, the noble Lord will support some of the amendments that we have tabled because they apply in other cases. I agree with the noble Lord who has just spoken—in certain respects—because if we amend the Bill so that it is fair to all constituencies, that would be better than having specific exceptions.
Lord Selsdon
I speak as treasurer and secretary of the House of Lords Yacht Club and I am an islander. Historically, I come from Islay. My family are normally buried at sea and the female line like to have their caskets dropped off the Nab Tower—perhaps the Government can advise me on whether the Nab Tower is, or is not, part of the Isle of Wight. However, I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Hamilton, with whom I have the advantage of sharing an office.
I recognise that the two householders who tabled Amendment 89 have a certain interest because they live on the Isle of Wight; my interest lies in the fact that, when I was a Pompey rating, I had to row across the Solent from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight and back—I had to sail in a single cutter—and, just before Suez, I was shoved on an aircraft carrier and made to be ballast in a helicopter as we were dropped off on the Isle of Wight because plans were being made to invade Suez later. My feeling is this: there are some 70,000 islands and atolls in the world. All islanders are islanders; they do not like anyone else and they are a united community. It is not the same as a community that is divided on the mainland. There are islanders who have suffered from weather, affliction and everything else.
In my job, I had one very difficult time, when we had invested in a hovercraft service—
Baroness McDonagh
I have some sympathy with the noble Lord’s arguments, but would he address the issue of why this island should be treated in one way and other islands in a different way?
Lord Selsdon
I was not suggesting anything about other islands. This debate is about the Isle of Wight.
The thing about an island community is that, when you connect it to a mainland politically, you create divisions. Even within an island, when you split it—as in Cyprus or any of the other islands in the world—you create divisions. You need a united community, which can be united only if it has the sea around it. Therefore, I support the amendment.
I also feel that there is something quite remarkable about what my noble friend Lord Mackay has done. He has taken the heat out of the debate. We are all debating on the same side. Yes, noble Lords opposite will want to protect certain constituencies and claim that they are all of one ethnic group or different ethnic groups, but communities are communities. Island communities are—I promise you—individual communities. I therefore support the amendment. I encourage the noble Lord who moved it to press it to a Division and I will vote, because it is about time that we had a vote on something worth voting on.
Lord Touhig
If the Government concede on this amendment, of course it could be said that they are setting a precedent. That does not bother me. I rather think that, when the first human being stood up on his hind legs instead of crawling around on all fours, people tut-tutted and said that that was setting a precedent. The argument put by the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, is important because it goes to the heart of the Bill. As we discussed to some extent at Second Reading, our representation in Parliament should be community based. If ever there were a case for that, it is that of the Isle of Wight.
The fact that the Isle of Wight is an island is down to the handiwork of the creator and we cannot do much about it, but we can inject some common sense into the Bill and say to the Government that this makes sense. Parts of the Isle of Wight should not be joined to a constituency on the mainland. We could argue the same case, I am sure, for Ynys Môn—there will be other examples I have no doubt—but this makes sense and I hope that the Committee will support it.
Lord Bach
I say from the Front Bench that my party's view is clear that the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, should be supported. The Isle of Wight seems evident to us to be a prime candidate for exemption. It meets the island criteria of the other two preserved constituencies. It has a historic basis to its case for being looked at somewhat differently.
Many noble Lords will have received a letter from the Isle of Wight Council, to which I pay tribute for the way in which it has run its campaign. The letter informs us that there has not been a cross-Solent seat, as the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, said in moving his amendment, since 1832—a date that regularly appears in our debates on this Bill—and successive boundary reviews have very strongly rejected any such consideration. We are in favour of his amendment.
The debate has been of interest beyond the Isle of Wight, because of the two different strands of opinion on whether the Bill is too rigid. The Forsyth/Pannick strand—I do not mean “panic”, but that shows what happens when you break the rules and do not say the “noble Lord, Lord Forsyth”, and “the noble Lord, Lord Pannick”—argues that the Bill is much too rigid in terms of constituencies and begins to lose common sense as a result. Then there is the purist view—although I did not think I would ever say that about the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton—that says that, if the Government mean what they say about numbers being everything, they had better keep to their word. I know which side of that argument I am on.
As the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, said, I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to press his amendment to a vote. Whether he does so is entirely a matter for him. I never thought that I would be in a position to advise the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, with his vast experience, but he should beware of being offered something in the next few minutes by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who I am sure will make such an offer with huge skill. The Minister will mean every word that he says, but the noble Lord should beware. If he decides to pay a visit to the ministry in order to hear what the Government have to say in the way of compromise, he should know that he has us at his back, as it were. He has our word that if he does not get what he wants we will support him in the Lobbies.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, by my calculation this has been a debate in which 18 noble Lords have taken part and have made some compelling arguments for the case put forward by my noble friend Lord Fowler. While trying to use some of the skill that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, referred to—I will probably need it—I reply to this debate as someone who has a distinct sense of community, and a number of contributors to the debate referred to Members of Parliament and their community, not least because I represented an islands community.
I am acutely conscious that the islands community which I represented is one of the exceptions in Rule 6. When the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Wakefield commented about someone having phoned up and being told, “No, he’s on the island”, it brought to mind my first ever visit to Orkney when I went as a prospective candidate. Talking to some people, I said something about the mainland—meaning that landmass south of the Pentland Firth. I was taken aside and told, “That’s not the mainland, that’s Scotland. We are on the Mainland”. That was a valuable lesson, which I learnt, so what I say here is against that background.
I am acutely conscious that residents in the Isle of Wight have been taking a very keen interest in the provisions set out in the Bill. A range of views has been expressed in correspondence to the Government, and I understand that those views were made known to my honourable friend the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform when he visited the island on 1 October. I know that he takes an acute interest in the Official Report on the proceedings in this House, so he will no doubt see what has been said in this debate.
As has been made clear, the amendments tabled by my noble friends Lord Fowler and Lord Oakeshott would prevent the constituencies being shared between the Isle of Wight and the mainland and allow the Isle of Wight constituency, or constituencies, to be outside the 5 per cent parity rule. I readily acknowledge the strength of feeling that has been expressed in this debate—it has been expressed by many on this matter: by the Member of Parliament, Andrew Turner, by the council and by the political parties—but I also believe that it is practical to have a constituency representing part of the island and part of the mainland and for that to be done. While I am not in any way trying to suggest that the letters have been in equal number, it is important to put on the record that there has indeed been correspondence to the Government from people resident on the Isle of Wight indicating that they do not necessarily support the OneWight campaign.
Lord Fowler
I wonder whether the Minister might give us some indication of in what proportion those letters of support have come.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I cannot, at the moment, but I clearly conceded that I am not suggesting, and I would not wish to suggest for a moment, that it has been equal. When people actually make their views known, it is perhaps easy to suggest that there is no one there. It is important that that is recognised.
Lord Oakeshott of Seagrove Bay
Will the noble and learned Lord kindly let us know how many letters he has had, when he gets the chance?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
When I get that information, I will certainly impart it.
Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Is my noble and learned friend intending that there should be a letter-writing campaign for every constituency in the country, to preserve it as it is?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
Perhaps the Royal Mail might find that useful for their coffers, but I am not sure whether that is going to happen. Perhaps I might draw it to the Committee’s attention that the Isle of Wight shares its police force with Hampshire and that, in other areas, the island is already making the most of its links with the mainland. On 28 October last, the Government approved a bid to create a Solent local enterprise partnership covering the economic area of south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Indeed, one of the expectations for successful bids was whether the geography proposed represented a reasonable, natural and economic geography. I am confident that an MP would be able to represent a constituency that meets those criteria, such as in a cross-Solent seat. The island has indicated a willingness to develop its long-term interests, where appropriate, in conjunction with its mainland neighbours.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I find the point that my noble and learned friend has made about the police force curious. Orkney and Shetland share a police force with the mainland. What is the relevance of the police force?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I was acutely aware of that. I was just indicating that there were links. I was almost immediately going to come on to the point that the distinction which we believe that there is between the Isle of Wight and the two named exceptions in the Bill is that they cannot readily be included physically in a constituency with the mainland, owing to their distance and to the dispersed nature of those constituencies, which we believe are distinctive. Indeed, as has been said—the Committee was reminded of this by my noble friend Lord Hamilton of Epsom—there is the principle in the Bill of equal votes and equal value. The Government recognise the strong views that have been expressed and believe that, at the end of the day, the principle which I have articulated would not be achieved by this amendment. I nevertheless want to say in conclusion—
Lord Winston
Forgive me, for I am not a politician, but I find myself really quite confused. I promise the Minister that I am not trying to timewaste, given the accusations that have been flying about. I am genuinely puzzled, because on Monday night—I forget what time it was—my noble friend talked about the importance of not crossing county boundaries, because of the nature of constituencies and the unique influence of community. That question was never answered, yet here we have an exception possibly being made for the Isle of Wight. That is a very apposite and appropriate thing to do but I am worried that we have still not really addressed that question. I would be hugely grateful if the noble and learned Lord could try to address this confusion which I feel, as I suspect some others of my noble friends do, about why the Isle of Wight should be a unique example, as has been discussed.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I apologise very much if I have confused the noble Lord, because my point was that I have not actually conceded that it should be a unique example. I think that that has been recognised. However, the Government recognise the considerable interest and concern which the impact of a boundary review could have on the Isle of Wight under the proposals in the Bill. The Government have, nevertheless, been consistently clear that there are not compelling reasons such as those that apply in the two exceptions to make an exception for the Isle of Wight. My ministerial colleagues in the other place have indeed met with representatives from the Isle of Wight. My noble friend Lord Fowler asked whether I would be willing to meet him. I would certainly be very happy to do so to discuss this matter further, but I am afraid that I cannot go further than that.
Lord Fowler
Is the Minister seriously saying that all he is prepared to give is to meet me and that he is not prepared to consider changing the Bill or having any alteration to the Bill?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I have made it very clear what the Government’s position is. Obviously, I would not ask my noble friend to come in for a meeting as a waste of time but I hope that he will take up the offer of a meeting.
Lord Crickhowell
Last night, I supported an amendment on the 10 per cent question that was moved from the Opposition Front Bench, which had wide support in the House. Very wisely, on that occasion my noble and learned friend said that he would take on board very seriously the arguments and take them back to his colleagues for consideration. He made it very clear that he was making no commitment. He could not assure us that we would get what we wanted but he assured us that he would take the argument back. The Minister does not seem to be doing the same thing tonight. I beg him to take the same view tonight and to take the argument back. Otherwise, I will join noble Lords very firmly in the Lobby against the Government.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I do not wish to suggest that by doing so the Government are about to change their mind. Equally, I would not ask the noble Lord to come in for a waste of time. As I indicated in my opening remarks, this debate will be read by my honourable friend in the other place. I have indicated a willingness to meet the noble Lord and would not ask him to waste his time by having such a meeting. I hope that he would be willing to take up that offer.
Lord Fowler
On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, in the debate that ended yesterday, the Minister is not making the same guarantee to me that he made to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, on the amendment that was passed. That is the fact of the matter. I am always interested to talk and to have a meeting—I am sure that it would not be a waste of time—but, to be frank, I do not think that that goes far enough as an assurance to this House.
Lord Elton
Before the Minister replies, he said only that his honourable friend would read this debate. Will he intervene with his honourable friend in person?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
Indeed. I said that because I know for a fact that he does read these debates. I will certainly ensure that, before I have any meeting with my noble friend, my honourable friend, Mr Mark Harper, has read the terms of this debate and that would then inform the discussion that I am offering to have.
Lord Forsyth of Drumlean
I will put this very gently. What are we doing here? This is a Chamber of Parliament. We are debating legislation. My noble and learned friend speaks for the Government and says that a Minister in the other place reads our proceedings and will have a meeting. I am sorry, but that is treating this House with contempt. None of us wants to create a Division here, but the arguments have been put, this is Parliament, and surely the Minister’s duty is either to say “Your arguments are rubbish and we do not accept them”, or “I will go and talk to my colleagues to see if we can get collective agreement to meet them”. Simply to say “We will have a meeting” is not acceptable and not treating this House as a House of Parliament.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
In response to my noble friend, this is a Committee stage, there will be a Report stage and there will be an opportunity—the opportunity I offered—for the outcome of the discussions that take place to be considered. The House will return to it and if my noble friend Lord Fowler is not satisfied with the outcome of that meeting, I have no doubt that he will be willing to table an amendment again.
Lord Mawhinney
For the first time since the Bill started, my noble friend has me confused. Until now I have been giving him very high marks for clarity and sensitivity, but now I am confused, so I put a question in the hope that he will be able to “unconfuse” me. When he draws the attention of his honourable friend to this debate and they discuss it, will he urge his honourable friend to think again with a view to making an amendment, or will he simply talk to him without any motivation of change? I think this House would be pleased to know what the words actually mean.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I will undoubtedly express to my honourable friend the strength of feeling and the argument that has been put in this House. I indicated yesterday that I am not in a position to make any commitment and that is why I hesitate to go further. The most I can do is to ensure that ministerial colleagues—not only Mr Harper—are made well aware of what has been said in this debate and of the strength, the conciseness and the power that have lain behind the arguments that have been put. That is the spirit in which I will take what the Committee has said today back to Government and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, will be prepared to follow that up with a meeting. I cannot make a commitment; equally, I would not ask the noble Lord to do it if I thought it would be a complete waste of his time.
Lord Davies of Stamford
Will the Minister consider, as part of the further consideration and in the course of discussions with his honourable friend, the very real danger that if the Government make two concessions in the Bill in respect of Scottish islands and give no consideration to the case for making an exception for an English island—the only substantial English island—a very unfortunate impression will be created in England that English electoral sensibilities of this kind are being dismissed very lightly?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I hear that point. I have heard more compelling, stronger arguments than that, but it is a point of view. I would not have thought that it would necessarily cause a rift within the union, but other arguments, not at least in terms of community, have added weight to the case for this amendment.
Lord Fowler
My Lords, I confess that I am disappointed by the noble and learned Lord’s response. I do not think that it goes as far as the commitment that was given yesterday to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. I said that my hope was the Minister will today give a commitment that the Government will look at this again and that they will consider the arguments that I have put—and, doubtless, others will put—in the debate.
Incidentally, the noble and learned Lord referred to 18 speakers. He is quite right—17 speakers supported me. Only one did not. I hope that we can have a sensible commitment to take things further on Report. I do not think, frankly, that I have any alternative, because the one thing I can do is to underline to the Government just how strongly people feel on this. I found the Minister’s argument on the substance of this case to be not all convincing.
I thank everyone for taking part in the debate—all 18, even my noble friend—but I feel that I have no alternative but to test the opinion of the House.
Sustainable Local Transport
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Earl Attlee
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement made by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport in the other place. The Statement is as follows:
“With permission I should like to make a Statement to accompany the publication today of the coalition Government’s White Paper on local transport and the simultaneous publication of bidding guidance to accompany our new local sustainable transport fund. Both documents are available to colleagues in the Vote Office and have been placed in the Library of the House.
This Government’s vision is for a transport system that helps create growth in the economy and tackles climate change by cutting our carbon emissions. The launch of this White Paper and the associated local sustainable transport fund represents a significant step towards meeting these two government objectives. In both the Budget and the spending review the Chancellor pledged to make the tough choices that will allow us to maintain investment in new and existing infrastructure to support a growing economy while eliminating the structural deficit over the lifetime of the Parliament. The spending review reflected transport’s vital role in this. I am pleased that we were able to secure significant investment to allow us to go ahead with important transport initiatives. The investment we have committed to in rail, low-carbon vehicles and public and sustainable transport reflects the determination to secure growth while cutting carbon.
In the medium term, our transport decarbonisation strategy centres around the progressive electrification of the passenger car fleet, supported by policies to increase generation capacity and decarbonise the grid. By also prioritising spending on key rail projects such as high-speed rail and rail electrification, we will be providing travellers with attractive new options instead of the plane and the car. In the immediate term, addressing shorter, local trips offers huge potential in helping to grow the economy and tackle climate change. Shorter trips are important—two-thirds of all journeys are under five miles. Walking, cycling and public transport are all real, greener alternatives for such trips.
What is more, we know that people who travel to the shops on foot, by bicycle or by public transport can spend more per head than those who travel by car and research shows that improvements to the public realm can increase turnover in the high street by 5 to 15 per cent. Increased sustainable travel also helps tackle congestion, which is a drag on business and causes excess delays in urban areas at a cost of around £11 billion per annum. And let us not forget the further benefits that follow a shift to more sustainable transport—benefits to the air we breathe, to our levels of fitness and to the money in our pockets. Investment in sustainable transport helps make our towns and cities healthier and more attractive places to live, work and shop.
This White Paper sets out how we can encourage the uptake of more sustainable modes at local level, and the unprecedented £560 million we have allocated in our new local sustainable transport fund will support this. Our commitment to helping local authorities with this vital agenda is reaffirmed by the amount of money we are making available. The local sustainable transport fund forms part of a wider picture of more streamlined and simplified funding to local authorities. This will give local authorities more power and flexibility to meet local transport needs.
Across the Government we have demonstrated our commitment to ending the top-down decision-making and the tendency in Whitehall to develop one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the specific needs and behaviour patterns of local communities. The Government have already taken significant steps to hand back power to local communities. These include replacing regional development agencies with local enterprise partnerships, giving communities a much greater say over planning decisions and ending the top-down imposition of housing targets.
Today’s White Paper is about extending the decentralisation of power to local transport, putting into context what this means for local authorities. We are particularly keen to receive bids for the local sustainable transport fund from local authorities who are in partnership with the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector and have the support of local businesses. We believe that by encouraging bids in this way we will be able to capture innovative solutions to local transport needs in all areas, rural and urban. Wheels to Work schemes provide transport to people who are unable to access training, employment or education due to a lack of suitable public or private transport. Schemes can, therefore, particularly benefit people living in isolated rural communities and can play an important part in helping people to come off benefits and regain their independence. These are real examples that are happening right now, and we want to enable similar stories to unfold in other areas across the country.
In addition, we also recognise that some initiatives benefit from a single national approach. These include: providing £11 million for Bikeability cycle training next year to allow 275,000 10 to 11 year-olds to benefit from on-road cycle training and a commitment to support Bikeability for the duration of this Parliament, which will allow as many children as possible to undertake high-quality training; improving end-to-end journeys by encouraging transport operators, and those involved in promoting cycling and car clubs or sharing, to work together to provide better information and to integrate tickets and timetables; and delivering, with operators and public sector bodies, the infrastructure to enable most local public transport journeys to be undertaken using smart ticketing by December 2014.
We will work with the transport industry to support the development of e-purses and other technology related to smart ticketing and to support the infrastructure to make this happen: reviewing the way in which transport investment decisions are made to ensure that the carbon implications are fully recognised; transferring responsibility for local roads classification to local authorities, giving them the flexibility to adjust the status of their roads better to match the real-life priorities of their communities; setting out in a strategic framework for road safety, by spring 2011, how to ensure that Britain’s roads are among the world’s safest; and modernising traffic signs policy to provide more flexibility and reduced costs and bureaucracy for local authorities to enable them to develop innovative traffic management solutions.
We want to build a transport system that is an engine for economic growth, that is greener and that creates growth and cuts carbon. By improving the links that move goods and people around, encouraging people to travel sustainably, and targeting investment in new projects that promote green growth, we can help to build the balanced, dynamic low-carbon economy that is essential for our future prosperity. This White Paper, with the associated local sustainable transport fund, demonstrates our commitment to taking this agenda forward. I commend it to the House”.
Lord Davies of Oldham
My Lords, I suppose I ought to congratulate the Minister on the good intentions expressed in the White Paper. After all, good intentions are better than nothing, although we all know where the path of good intentions can lead. A White Paper that is not backed by any bank directives or papers is not worth a great deal. This is full of good intentions and objectives on sustainable local transport to which the Opposition also subscribe. The problem is that the Statement takes no account of the fact that the Government are neither able nor prepared to will the means, thereby rendering the Statement almost valueless.
The Minister talks of a new £560 million local sustainable transport fund, but he knows that it is just a sticking plaster to cover the 28 per cent cut to local government transport spending. He knows that his own White Paper says that local transport is largely subsidised by local authorities, as indeed it is. However, the local authorities do not have the wherewithal to maintain what they have—they are engaged and will be engaged in extensive cuts—let alone to begin to approach the noble ambitions of the White Paper’s good intentions. Will the Minister confirm that the cuts have been front-loaded, which means that local government transport was cut by £309 million this year, and that he is giving £80 million back next year? No wonder his objectives cannot be realised.
I have some sympathy for the Minister. After all, his burden is to repeat the Statement that has already been presented in the other place. He is all too well aware of the bad hand he has been dealt. However, he must realise that the 20 per cent cut to the bus service operators’ grant is having a devastating effect on local bus services. With fuel prices at record levels, he must surely understand the impact of cutting this fuel cost subsidy on bus operators. How will they be able to sustain unprofitable services when the subsidy of which the White Paper boasts for the role of the local authorities is being savagely reduced? Has he not seen that, up and down the country today, councils are withdrawing services? Half of subsidised services are being axed in Somerset. More than 70 rural services are being scrapped or reduced in Durham. Nearly 30 services are threatened in North Yorkshire and 60 are being reviewed in Suffolk, while Kent, which is often significant, has warned that all unprofitable routes will be axed.
Does the Minister appreciate the social consequences of that? Is he aware that 94 per cent of colleges believe that scrapping the EMA—the educational maintenance allowance—and cutting local transport will see students unable to get to college and unable to complete their courses? We should, I suppose, praise this more recent coalition Government for not saying that those without jobs should “get on their bikes”. They have progressed to saying that they should take the bus. Which bus—the bus that is subject to being cut entirely, or the bus whose punctuality cannot be guaranteed because of the reduction in resources?
This White Paper points out, accurately, that two out of five jobseekers need to use public transport to try to find jobs and put that as the key priority in their ability to make themselves available to prospective employers. How will they look for these jobs when the services on which they depend are being cut? Is the Minister aware that his own department’s figures show that without the grant we will see a 6.5 per cent increase in fares and, consequently, a likely 6.7 per cent fall in bus use? Who are the people who will reduce bus use? They are those who either cannot get a bus or will not be able to afford the fares because they are jobless and were using the bus to try to find a job.
The Government emphasise the green agenda and the improvement in the carbon count. Is that why rail fares are to go up by 30 per cent over the four-year spending period before us? Does the Minister accept that the consequence of hiking up the cost of using public transport will be to force people to use cars more intensively? Where is the green agenda when we force people to use private transport, as opposed to what we all know are the advantages of public transport in those terms?
Finally, I note that the noble Earl indicated that he was looking forward to bids for the local sustainable transport grant. To judge those bids, the Government will have a little panel. Will it be a little quango?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Lord’s response to my Statement, although it was a little gloomy. I am surprised he did not cover some of the good news. For instance, the child fatality rate was quite high by European standards. Over recent years, for which the noble Lord was responsible, our child fatality rate has fallen. I am not sure that it is the lowest in Europe, but it has been driven down so that it is nearly the lowest. That is seriously good news.
The noble Lord made much about the bus service operators’ grant—the BSOG. Yes, it has been reduced. However, my honourable friend Mr Baker has fought long and hard, and successfully retained 80 per cent of the BSOG when some in the other place were suggesting that it might be removed altogether. It has not; it has been retained.
The noble Lord mentioned several alterations to services and made some fairly detailed points. I was surprised because I very rarely sign Answers to Written Parliamentary Questions from the noble Lord on these points. However, I will look forward to future Questions from the noble Lord on these issues.
Lord Lea of Crondall
My Lords, in other circumstances, this would be a Statement of intentions that one could welcome, but its credibility, at a time when local authorities are having to make considerable cuts, as my noble friend Lord Davies of Oldham pointed out so eloquently, means that the most vulnerable in society cannot use public transport—which ostensibly is what the Government want them to do—and these vulnerable people will therefore not add to the green economy at all. My question arises from our disappointment that the aspirations of the White Paper cannot be met. I was chairman of a government inquiry into sustainable journeys to work. Does not the Statement add up to less opportunity for the most vulnerable? Can the noble Earl enlighten me as to whether there is anything about bus services being the alternative to the school run and one person in a 4x4? Is that sustainable? Finally—this is the heart of the contradiction—will the Government revisit the financial settlement? Without doing that, none of this will be possible.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord suggested that the aspirations cannot be met. They can be met if one is determined enough. The noble Lord said that we have not got the money. Any money problems we have arise from the deficit, and I will not say where that came from.
Earl Attlee
I always wait for that groan. The noble Lord talked about the school run. That is precisely an issue we want to address. I mentioned Bikeability in the Statement, which will receive £11 million a year to encourage children to take up bicycling, and to encourage adults to take it up for short journeys which would otherwise produce disproportionate emissions. The White Paper deals with precisely the issues that the noble Lord raises.
Lord Mawhinney
My noble friend will know that I have transport interests in my curriculum in this place, which may help to explain why I am the only Conservative Back-Bencher present for the Statement. He will appreciate that because we have been busy in the Chamber, I have not had a chance to read the White Paper, so my question may be a little simplistic. I hope he will forgive me. He talked about a fund for local authorities. I was not clear—it is my fault and I apologise—as to whether that fund would be given to local authorities or be centrally administered on the basis of local authority bids. Whichever it is, as a former Secretary of State, I am sure that there will be rules, regulations and guidance applied to the dispensing of funds. Will my noble friend be kind enough to place in the Library, if it is not in the White Paper, the list of rules, regulations and guidance against which local authority bids will be measured?
Earl Attlee
My noble friend makes an extremely important point. I confess that, like him, I have not yet read the White Paper in full. Whether I will ever read every page is doubtful. Local authorities will bid directly to the Department for Transport, but we have devised a system which is as simple as possible. There will initially be two tranches, and guidance about the application process is in the Printed Paper Office and online.
Lord Palmer
My Lords, I very much look forward to reading the White Paper. I am a resident of Scotland, and I have a particular worry relating to my part of Scotland, which I know does not come under the noble Earl’s jurisdiction. In northern England, a number of local authority-funded coaches travelling from X to Y and A to B are nearly always empty. I hope that the White Paper will look at this most carefully to make certain that we have a really good public transport system which will actually have people travelling on these buses.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Lord makes an interesting and important point. I have started to use a bus service from Alton to Bordon in Hampshire, and it always surprises me how very few people are in the bus, despite it being quite large. However, part of the policy is to allow more suitable vehicles to be used by a variety of schemes.
Lord Faulkner of Worcester
My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Mawhinney, I have not had time to read the entire White Paper, but I thank the Minister for including a section at the back on heritage railways, which is a subject close to my heart. I hope it is an indication that we shall have a satisfactory outcome to the debate on the future of the Railway Heritage Committee when we finally return to consideration of the Public Bodies Bill. I have a particular question about sustainable transport. I was going to ask about the school run, to which my noble friend Lord Lea referred. However, does the Minister believe that the Mayor of London’s decision to cut the congestion charge area is a helpful contribution towards sustainable transport in London? Is any consideration being given to road pricing, which is a further way in which more people could be encouraged to use sustainable transport and public transport, rather than get into their cars?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, a heritage railway could bid for a scheme. Although it might not be able to bid for its operating costs, it might be able to bid for certain facilities. The noble Lord will have to look closely at the criteria, given that some things cannot be bid for under the LTSF, because they relate to other types of grant. I very much hope that the noble Lord is successful in finding an alternative location for the legislative powers associated with the Railway Heritage Committee. We will have to see how that unfolds; it is a matter for my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach. I think I am correct in saying that we have no plans at all for road pricing in this Parliament. We have made more detailed statements elsewhere, but it is not on the cards. However, the noble Lord will be aware that it is possible to have a local scheme, such as the mayor’s congestion charge scheme.
Lord Bradshaw
I thank the Minister for what he has said. It puts me in mind of a period about 13 years ago when I attended several presentations by the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, who is not here. He provided documents like this White Paper, although his had more photographs, but in nearly every case they did not produce what was set out in them. Therefore, I ask the Government to think very hard about whether the promises will be delivered and how they can be delivered.
I particularly want to know about the assessment criteria, which I have read. This document strikes me as more or less the usual stuff that we get served up by the Department for Transport because although there are a lot of warm words about saving carbon, for example, at the end it mentions the method of assessment that the department will use and—surprise, surprise—there is a reference to it being in line with the DfT’s appraisal framework, NATA. We all know that that is used to measure small time savings, which are then put together. There may be lots of people—say, 10,000—who save half a minute each, and the department has some magic way of turning these into money. However, it is fool’s gold because no one can predict whether they are going to save half a minute or a minute on a journey. People need to get to wherever they are going and they allow time to get there. Therefore, I ask the Minister to read the assessment criteria very carefully and to impress on his colleagues in the department the need to include achievable things and common-sense ways of measuring the benefits of these many initiatives. If they are all delivered, they will be useful, but I am afraid that here we have a blueprint for a great deal of bureaucracy.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I did not manage to write down the noble Lord’s last point, so I shall answer it first. This is not a blueprint for bureaucracy; it is a blueprint for doing things more efficiently. The noble Lord initially said that it would not be productive. However, it is for local authorities to deliver the scheme and it is for the department to assess the scheme and fund it. The noble Lord talked about this being the usual stuff that is served up. I am a little disappointed about that but I say to him that every scheme has to meet two criteria: it has to provide for both growth and carbon reduction. A scheme may provide for carbon reduction indirectly but it has to show carbon reduction as well as growth. As for the noble Lord’s point about NATA and the detailed assessment, he has been on at this Government and the previous Government for some time about this but I assure him that my department is working on it.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, will the Minister look again at the passage in the Statement which says that the local sustainable transport fund,
“forms part of a wider picture of more streamlined and simplified funding”?
Does he not agree that it would be more honest to include the word “reduced” in that sentence? Although I welcome extending the decentralisation of power to local transport, which the Statement also mentions, does the noble Lord not agree that there is a regional dimension to transport and transport infrastructure which the abolition of the regional development agencies will make more difficult to realise than otherwise? Will he indicate whether the Government have any intention of making the Highways Agency more accountable, and, in particular, will he indicate how, under the system of very localised transport, authorities in the north-east will be able to put pressure on the Government or the Highways Agency for the dualling of the A1 north of Newcastle, which appears to have been shelved for a very long period? Finally, does the noble Earl recall that his very distinguished grandfather, the first Earl, in an interview in later life identified transport as one of the major priorities for the future? Does he agree that this White Paper does not bring that future very much nearer?
Earl Attlee
It is my turn! The noble Lord initially asked whether I would look again at a part of the Statement, and he said that funding for transport is reduced. It is, although I shall not generate a groan from your Lordships by saying why. He talked about the abolition of the RDAs but he will also be aware of the local enterprise partnerships. They are not primarily a funding vehicle but they are a means of putting together stakeholders, who can then get on to the local transport authority and bid for money. The noble Lord talked about the Highways Agency and, in particular, the A1 in the north-east. That is a very important point. We have made a start, in that the A1 is now on the strategic route network and is therefore managed by the Highways Agency, although it will still be a long time before it is dualled.
The Earl of Erroll
My Lords, perhaps I might ask the Minister a quick question about smart ticketing, which he mentioned. I declare an interest as a director of LASSeO, the Local Authority Smartcard Standards e-Organisation, which looks after and promotes SNAPI, the Special Needs Application Program Interface. This is a very useful thing that is underadopted. It tailors the terminals that people use to put credit on their cards, the gates that people go through and things like that, to the special needs that individuals might have when they use the system. In the transport system, gates may close too quickly if someone is a bit slow. People who are colour-blind also need special help. The system is useful but has been largely ignored. Will the Minister look at allocating a small amount of money—not a lot is needed—to encourage the take-up of this standard for smart ticketing systems that are introduced? If the Minister would like to look it up, the system was developed by Dr John Gill.
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Earl makes an important point about smart ticketing. There is no doubt that better ticketing systems encourage the use of public transport. They encourage me, and I am sure that they encourage many others. He talked about better systems. We are aware that what technology can do for us will rapidly improve. Noble Lords will be aware that the power of laptop computers doubles every 18 months. I would appreciate it if he would brief me on these matters; I would find that very useful.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the section on the scope of the fund in the guidance on the application process refers to making,
“public transport, walking and cycling the most attractive sustainable travel options. For journeys involving a variety of routes to and from suburban areas and rural hinterlands”.
To that I would add urban services. I live in Colne in Lancashire. If one wants to go to the centre of Colne—to a doctor or to the shops—it is called going up Colne. That is what people say, for the good reason that the town is built on a hill. Many people live on the other side of the valley. They have to go down and up. I am a councillor there, and in my ward we started the route 16 bus service, the Lenches and Bunkers Hill circular, in 1986 after bus deregulation. It has been quite successful. There are only five journeys a day. However, you cannot make it more sustainable if you take it away. Lancashire County Council has now decided that it will take away the service, which is much needed by old people, those with less mobility and so on, to get up Colne. Will the Government, as well as cutting money to local authorities, make some of this fund available for more innovative ways of providing services when current services are reduced for financial reasons?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, I have the same problem; I live on a hill. I am not sure that I would like to ride a bicycle up it, but I will try in the summer. The noble Lord will know that bus routes and bus provision are matters for the local transport authority. He talked about the need for innovative solutions. I agree with him, but it is for local transport authorities to develop these solutions. Our role is to encourage them, not to tell them exactly what to do by means of a long screwdriver.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
My Lords, I have two questions for the Minister on the Statement. The first concerns the carbon implications of transport investment decisions. Does he not accept that one of the great successes of the previous Labour Government was the over-60s bus pass, which ensured that many pensioners either leave their cars at home or use them less frequently, and use buses a great deal more? Will he give a guarantee and a commitment that that bus pass is safe and will not be removed or reduced, or the terms altered to the detriment of the over-60s, to ensure that we keep people on buses and not in their cars?
Secondly, as a former Road Safety Minister in Northern Ireland, I take a great interest in road safety measures. The Minister was right to highlight the reduction in the number of young people and children who have been killed or seriously injured. One of my concerns is the reduction in the number of safety cameras across the country, which many in his party support. Does he feel that the number of young people—or people of any age—who are killed or seriously injured on the roads will increase as a result of the reduction in the number of safety cameras?
Earl Attlee
My Lords, the noble Baroness talked about carbon implications and the over-60s bus pass. She asked for an absolute commitment. I confess that I had not anticipated the question. Perhaps the best approach would be for her to ask a Written Question, whereupon she will get a categorical answer. She also talked about safety cameras. Speaking for Her Majesty's Government, I say that we will watch very carefully what happens and monitor the accident statistics. That is the only thing that we can do.
Lord Shipley
My Lords, perhaps I might press the Minister on the issue of the Highways Agency, and the powers on the classification of roads—particularly A-roads—that will be passed to local authorities. Trunk roads controlled by the Highways Agency run through urban areas but are treated in practice as local roads. I declare an interest as a member of Newcastle City Council, but I am talking in particular about our western bypass. Issues arise over the powers of the local authority, particularly where the council's roads dissect the Highways Agency's trunk roads. I would appreciate guidance from the Minister on what additional powers local councils might have over the Highways Agency in situations such as that.
Earl Attlee
I do not think local transport authorities will have powers over the Highways Agency. I do not think that there is any superiority issue with the Highways Agency or the local transport authority. We would expect them to consult each other, particularly when the local transport authority is reclassifying a road. Sometimes it may be considering reclassifying a road that is nowhere near a Highways Agency road, and I am not sure that it has to consult the Highways Agency. Clearly, when it could affect a Highways Agency route—routes on the strategic road network—I am sure it would consult.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
(13 years, 11 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lipsey
“( ) For the purposes of rule 2(1) the electorate shall be defined as the registered electorate, adjusted by the Electoral Commission’s best estimate of the unregistered electorate.
( ) In making that estimate, the Electoral Commission shall take account of the known socio-economic profile of that constituency.”
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, the Bill provides for an equalisation in constituencies so that their electorates have to fall within bands of plus or minus 5 per cent, with only two exceptions. This amendment proposes a small but important change that that should be not plus or minus 5 per cent of the electorates but plus or minus 5 per cent of a notional electorate, which is calculated to provide for shortfalls in registration.
I will turn to the substance of the argument in a minute, but I want to make one point that pervaded our earlier debates and which, as the House’s resident statistical geek, rather grates on me: the tendency of people to prefer an exact figure, however ill based and peculiar, to an estimated figure, however well calculated. The fact is that the registered electorate is a very poor figure indeed for calculating anything. I will come to the detail in a minute, but will say now that only 91 to 92 per cent of the actual electorate are registered. Some 3.5 million people are missing from the electoral register. We all want better registration, but it will not come in an instant. So it is not really a good figure.
I cannot help but contrast the imprecision of that number—not that it is a precise number; it is a meaningless number—with the precision of the 5 per cent that is allowed each way. I have argued in various contexts that the Bill is too inflexible for the purpose that we all share, which is equalising the size of constituencies. That led me to wonder whether there was not a way of coming up with a notional figure for electorates that more nearly reflected both up-to-date figures and the actuality of the number of should-be electors in each constituency that also deals with non-registration.
I remind the Committee of the figures. Non-registration is very serious, but it is concentrated in particular groups. The Electoral Commission published in March 2010 a study, The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain. The figures given in it are striking: 56 per cent of 17 to 24 year-olds are not registered. Of private sector tenants, 49 per cent are not registered. Of people from black and ethnic minorities, 31 per cent are not registered. That distorts the figures on which we are trying to base size of constituency in the future.
If those figures are soundly based—everyone can look at the Electoral Commission’s study and see how soundly based they think they are, but it seemed a good piece of work to me—it would be possible to construct mathematically and with no great difficulty a model that provided a decent estimate of what the electorate in each constituency would be if everyone who is eligible to register had done so. This would have certain effects. For example, it would mean that inner-city areas tended to have rather more representation, while stable suburban areas had rather less.
There are various advantages to this. First, MPs represent everyone. Therefore, an estimate of the notional electorate—actually, the number of people who really live in their areas—would be nearer to the number of everyone whom they represented than the actual registered electorate. Secondly, it would be a more robust measure in a system of registration that will have great noise and perhaps instability injected into it. In principle, individual registration is a great thing. As we know from Northern Ireland, the reality, at least at first, can be very different from the theory.
Lord McAvoy
The noble Lord’s amendments are always very clever—first class; a lot of work goes into them. Who would establish the model to apply to constituencies, who would decide which model was applied to which constituency, and how long would the noble Lord propose for that to take?
Lord Lipsey
The Electoral Commission would be the obvious body to do this work, because it has done the original study and is very familiar with it. I do not think that it would take long at all, given a decent computer; it is a perfectly simple mathematical formula. It would generate a notional electorate for each constituency. I agree with the noble Lord—I was going to say this later—that there are practical matters to be sorted out later about whether the proposal is workable. That is why I said that the amendment is exploratory and is not necessarily the finished article.
Lord Rennard
Before the noble Lord develops his argument much further, perhaps he could tell us what consultation he has had with the Electoral Commission about this rather unusual proposal, which gives the Electoral Commission potentially tremendous power that could involve it in huge political controversy? We have always agreed in this House that it is important that the Electoral Commission is seen to be above party political controversy wherever possible. Does the noble Lord not think that conferring on the Electoral Commission the power to make crude estimates of the electorate for the purpose of redrawing constituency boundaries and somehow to define socio-economic profiles in making those estimates would embroil it in such huge controversy that it would undermine much of the rest of its work? Perhaps he could tell us what consultation he has had with the Electoral Commission.
Lord Lipsey
I am happy to: I have not. I was going to suggest that the Government should now embark on such consultation. The noble Lord seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. The Electoral Commission and the Boundary Commission already deal with matters of extraordinary—
Lord Lipsey
Please may I finish answering one question before I address another?
Lord Lipsey
The commissions already deal with matters of extraordinary complexity and political controversy. On the basis of the evidence that I have seen, this would seem to be not a difficult exercise and not necessarily very controversial in its outcomes. It is more a matter for mathematicians and statisticians than for politicians, and that is how it should be.
I was going to invite the Government to consult on these proposals before Report—there may be some hitch to them that has not occurred to me—but it would be a very sad day if you were not allowed in Committee in this House to raise a proposal unless you had bottomed it out with every interest group and authority that might be involved. I think that occasionally one is allowed to play with one’s bright ideas.
I think the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, is next. I look forward to hearing several more interventions from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in a minute.
Lord Maxton
My Lords, the noble Lord opposite referred to “crude estimates” landing in the political arena. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who is not in his place, and I have had a running dialogue throughout the Bill about using other databases to put people on the register. These would provide not crude estimates but hard facts drawn from databases to which local government, the Electoral Commission and others should have access and would be able to use to give not an estimate but the real number of people not on the register.
Lord Lipsey
The noble Lord sustains the point I am making. This is not a completely impossible exercise and other data sources could be brought in to meet the point. Does the noble Lord wish to intervene again?
Lord Rennard
The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said that I was suggesting that every organisation had to be consulted before we could consider something like this, and I was not. I was suggesting that it would have been proper to discuss it with the Electoral Commission. The noble Lord said that the Electoral Commission deals with Boundary Commission matters, but of course it does not. As it was set up in 2000, it was going to be responsible for boundary committee reviews but, when this House considered the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, it felt that the Electoral Commission was dealing with too many and too wide a range of issues. The commission itself suggested that it should have its remit narrowed and that it should concentrate on what was really important and not be responsible for matters such as Boundary Commission reviews. I suggest the Electoral Commission would not welcome being tasked with this purpose.
Lord Lipsey
The noble Lord might be right. I did not say that this particular proposal should go to everyone for consultation. I said, in general, that I did not agree with the proposition that you could not raise an issue in this House in Committee without first consulting everyone who might be affected. This amendment has been on the Marshalled List since the moment I tabled it.
Lord Lipsey
Will the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, please be very kind and allow me to finish my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, inadequate though it might well be?
The amendment has been on the Marshalled List for two or three weeks. We have had briefings from the Electoral Commission in the course of the proceedings on this Bill, and if it thought this was nonsense it could have said that it was nonsense in one of those briefings. It has not done so and I do not intend to apologise for raising the matter this evening.
Lord McAvoy
I urge my noble friend not to give too much—if any—credence to anything the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has to say about political controversy and lack of consultation. He supports a constitutional Bill that is being rammed through this House and that has had no pre-legislative scrutiny, no consultation and no appeal. I urge him not to pay too much attention to the noble Lord. In fact, I would not pay any attention to him.
Lord Lipsey
I have been paying great attention to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, for many years and I have learnt many things from him. Although I cannot say that I agree with him on absolutely every issue, the noble Lord and I agree privately on more things than we disagree about.
I wanted to be brief but, because of the interventions, I have been a bit too long. I think that any moment now someone will move that the Question be now put and so I must try to draw towards a conclusion.
The Government might be a little nervous of this because they think it will affect them adversely, but I do not think it would. In fact, some of the constituencies that would be likely to gain greater representation as a result of my proposal are held by Conservatives, the Cities of London and Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea being very good examples. In any case, as we established in the valuable discussions that we have had on the Bill, size of constituency is not the crucial factor in the bias that exists within the electoral system, and therefore it is unlikely that changing size will make a big difference to the actual results in a general election.
I have tried to put this forward in a tentative spirit, although some have tried to elevate it into a proposition that requires a 100 per cent justification before it is raised in Committee. It would represent a minor but important change to the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response and I hope that, in the spirit that Ministers have been applying to most debates more recently—if not that on the Isle of Wight—the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will at least give a considered response. If he feels it would be fit to give it a further whirl around, he has the necessary expertise and I hope he will agree to that. I beg to move.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is splitting hairs. There is a principle behind the amendment, which my noble friend is saying is that the register is incomplete and there must be some way of adding to it those groups of people who should be on it but who are not for all sorts of reasons. In trying to identify them, socio-economic data based on the profile of any particular constituency should be taken into account. That is a perfectly reasonable argument, but the noble Lord is splitting hairs on whether the Electoral Commission is equipped to carry out that function.
This is a particularly important case. It goes to the heart of many of the amendments that we have moved and dealt with over the past few weeks and no doubt will deal with over the next few weeks as well, which is that the register is inaccurate and that population is important. Therefore we have to find a formula for establishing what the population is in any given constituency in the United Kingdom.
I have been following the debates on the question of the census. Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading a report from the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I suspect that Ministers have not read it. Indeed, I would ask the noble Lord whether he has actually ever read it. It is impossible to consider this legislation without reading this report because it repeatedly draws attention to all the concerns that were expressed, and in some areas it does so in greater detail than the report produced by our own Constitution Committee in the House of Lords did.
I refer to a particular section in which the Minister responsible for the Bill in the House of Commons was asked questions by Ms Catherine McKinnell on the census. At the end of the quotation, I ask the Minister to note what I am asking for because it would be helpful to have the answer set out. I will read out what is unhelpful to my case and what is helpful. On the 2011 census, Mr Harper said:
“There are two difficulties with using Census data. The first is that Census data is of population and does not look at whether people are eligible to vote, and of course many people who live in the UK are not citizens and are not eligible to vote for various reasons. The second difficulty relates to the level of detail of the information collected in the time available. Clearly, Electoral Registration Officers are able to access Census data and use it, but Census data at the individual level that could be used to track whether actual people exist, so that they could be approached, is not published at that level of detail, but it is aggregated”.
When it is aggregated, I presume that there must be some data behind the aggregation. I wonder what those data are. They may not be published, but I wonder whether they are available.
Mr Harper goes on to say in his reply:
“Therefore, with regard to electoral administrators using it as a source to identify people who exist in an area and who are not registered, they can look at overall number and make some assumptions, but it does not really give them the detail to drill down”.
That is based on the aggregated data. Again, what is the material behind those aggregated data? He then says—and this is where my noble friend Lord Maxton has become involved in the debate, unless we are talking about other matters here:
“There are other data sets that might be more helpful in that regard that we are going to pilot in 2011”,
to which the noble Lord has referred.
“There is no bar on them using the data that is published.”
Can we have a list of all those sources of data? I have seen references in various documents to bits and pieces of data, but I have not seen an aggregate list of all the additional sources of data that can be taken into account by registration officers when they carry out their functions.
I am also trying to establish whether there is some way in which those additional data can also be used by the Boundary Commission in carrying out its work, or are those additional data somehow excluded because of the fact that we seem to be confined to the use of data that were drawn up in 2010? We should have a very clear statement as to what actual data the Boundary Commission can take into account when it draws up its reports on individual constituencies.
I have always presumed that when the Barnett formula was established, the allocations for Scotland took into account the data that my noble friend is referring to, but perhaps I misunderstand how the Barnett formula is calculated. I also understand that some areas of local government finance are also influenced by socio-economic data at the local level. Is that not the data source that my noble friend Lord Lipsey is referring to? Is it the kind of source that my noble friend is referring to? I do not know. Perhaps the Minister might be able to clarify whether that could be the source of the additional information that my noble friend would seek to include in the information that is necessary to draw up the boundaries.
Lord Maxton
My Lords, I hope to be brief and hope that the cameramen from the Independent are taking photographs on that side this time to note those who are closing their eyes and going to sleep.
We have been talking about the 3.5 million who are not registered. I think in a modern democracy everybody has a right to be on the register and therefore a right to vote. It is not just a matter of taking the 3.5 million people into account in dividing up the various constituencies. It should be their right. Whether they vote or not is a matter for them; that is their right. But in my view—and as I listen to these debates it has increasingly become my view—that it should be the responsibility of Government to make sure that people are on the register, not the right of the individual to take that decision. It should be the Government’s decision.
In the modern world that is now possible. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, and I have been having this ongoing debate—it has been a very friendly debate—about the use of other databases to find people who are not on the register. When somebody is found through another data source—social security records, medical records, local government records, housing records, school records, or whatever else—it seems to me that the Government’s view is that it is useful to check the register that exists. It is not to be used to ensure that people go on the register. If you find an 18 year-old who has left school and has not registered not on the register when he is clearly living at that address—because that was where he was at school, and as far as you know he has not moved—do you put him on the register? In my view, that is exactly what should happen. He should be put on the register so that we have a register that is much more accurate than the one that we have at present, and we are also fulfilling our democratic duty of giving people the right to vote if they wish to use it. That should be key to what we are doing.
The argument in the past would be that of course you had to send people round to houses and check the register. It was the argument in the past—and listening to these debates, I sometimes wonder what world people in this House live in. It was a physical act, but it is now electronic. You do a search for a particular name on your computer, in the electoral register that you have there, and up will come the name and address. You can then cross-reference that without moving from your desk on your computer with another data source that you have, and you can see whether the names and addresses marry up. That takes a few seconds, not the hours and hours that many noble Lords seem to think it would take to carry out that task. Yes, the records exist and, yes, we should be using all the databases not just to check the register but to put people on the register when we get the opportunity to do so.
Lastly, as I know noble Lords will expect me to say, this whole process would have been so much easier if we had had compulsory ID cards from the beginning. If we had everybody with an ID card who was a British citizen, that would have become the easy, straight source of an electoral register.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, would my noble friend agree with me? My title is Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton. A very strong resistance to being on the electoral register developed as a result of the preceding tax to the council tax, the poll tax, which led to many people refusing to put their name to the electoral register. We still have a remnant of that about, in that people fear that, given a Conservative Government with Lib Dem support, it could come back.
Lord Maxton
I entirely agree with my noble friend. In a previous existence, I was the Scottish Office spokesman for the Labour Party on the poll tax in Scotland. Nowadays there is no fine at all and no compulsion on anyone to register in terms of the law, but the Conservative Government of the day increased very considerably the fines that were available to the courts to fine people if they did not fill in the registration forms. Why? Because they knew that the register was the best way of trying to ensure that they got the poll tax paid. Some people were advised not to go on the electoral register. I think that was wrong, but large numbers of young people did exactly that.
I think that we should have had compulsory ID cards. This whole question of who was or was not registered would have been solved, and it would have been to the benefit of our society. Yes, it would have cost money, but the registration process would have been much cheaper and the health service might well have been considerably better and cheaper, and there would have been a whole range of other benefits that would have accrued from having it.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
Does my noble friend agree that were all these people to be registered, support for local authorities that is grossly weighted towards the south of England might have better reflected the needs of the north?
Lord Maxton
I cannot disagree with my noble friend. I think I have made my point.
Lord Harris of Haringey
I originally planned to make a very straightforward speech in support of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Lipsey. I will not rise to the helpful and interesting trail that my noble friend Lord Maxton has dragged along the ground about ID cards, but his analysis is accurate. We would have had a much clearer database that could inform the electoral registration process and much else besides. However, I will not go down that road.
I cannot allow the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, about the north being disadvantaged because of the south. However, the point that I want to make about the amendment is that it is accepted throughout the House that there are inadequacies with the current level of electoral registration. I have not heard any noble Lord arguing that the electoral register is currently a perfect piece of data collection. It is inadequate. There are significant shortfalls. Reference has been made to the report done by the Electoral Commission in March 2010 The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain. Noble Lords can see that that is clear in terms of the number of people who should be registered but are not. But the significant point and the one that I want to make which has not been made so far in this debate is that the shortfall is variable.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
Does my noble friend agree that one of the variables is the zeal of the local authority officers responsible for that?
Lord Harris of Haringey
It is not only a question of the zeal, but of the budgets that they are allocated and the way in which that resource is used.
If noble Lords look at the register, they will find that there is a shortfall that is variable throughout the country and in different types of area. If we accept, as no doubt the noble Lords opposite all do, that the objective of this legislation is to create fairness across the country, the Bill has to address the shortfalls in electoral registration and, in particular, the variables between different parts of the country.
In the Electoral Commission’s March 2010 study there were a number of case studies in various parts of the country. One was in London, in Lambeth. It has a population of 266,169 and a population density of 99.2 persons per hectare. There is an ethnic minority population of 50.4 per cent and worklessness of 16 per cent and so on. In particular, figures were quoted for the percentage of households that were in the private rented sector and the percentage of residents who had moved in the past 12 months.
In the London Borough of Lambeth, 17.7 per cent of those on the register had moved in the previous 12 months. That is a substantial degree of turnover and churn. In my experience of being an elected politician in London for many years, that degree of churn and turnover was a particular facet of many parts of London. It would be true of many other inner-city areas and parts of the country, but it was not uniform. It was not uniform in London and it is not uniform around the country. Therefore, without the sort of amendment moved by my noble friend—or an alternative because there are a number of other possible ways of addressing this—the Bill is in danger of institutionalising poorer representation in certain sorts of area.
I looked at the paper produced by London councils in the past few months which examined the 2001 census. This paper tries to ensure that next year’s census will be a better one. Yet even if we use the census data as the source of information about what the population and the registered electorate ought to be, there are problems. Kensington and Chelsea—not, I have to say, the typical example of a rundown inner-city area—had the lowest response rate in the country to the 2001 census. Its response rate was 64 per cent. I suspect that the good residents of Kensington and Chelsea might not be interested in filling in the form about the census, but would probably make considerable efforts to make sure that they were on the electoral register to return MPs of a particular colour to Parliament. The point is that there was that degree of poor response even to the census in that part of London.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
My credentials are that I was an elected councillor for the ward of Golborne in north Kensington. My noble friend will have to be a little careful in talking about Kensington and Chelsea as an affluent borough, when the northern part of Kensington has some of the areas of highest deprivation in the country. It was a cauldron of social movement, with fair housing and the first legal advice bureau with Peter Kandler. It was an area of multi-deprivation, so there must be considerable variations within the one London borough from the affluent south to the relatively disadvantaged north.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Indeed, that is the case. The interesting issue about that, since we were talking earlier today about the importance of community, is that that is one area where we now see parliamentary constituencies straddling local borough boundaries in London. I think that the MP for the area that my noble friend described is Karen Buck, who also represents part of Westminster. It is a bad idea to cross London borough boundaries; I suspect that we will return to that at a later stage in this Committee. However, my point is about the degree of underrepresentation. I picked on Kensington and Chelsea because, apart from those pockets which my noble friend knows so well, it is not regarded in most people’s minds as being an area of acute deprivation—although parts of it are.
The figures are: in Hackney, there was a 72 per cent response rate; in Tower Hamlets it was 76 per cent; in Hammersmith and Fulham, 76 per cent; in Camden, 77 per cent; in Southwark, 77 per cent; in Islington, 78 per cent, and in Lambeth, 79 per cent. The point is that the work which has been done where there are concentrations of poor response, either to the census or to electoral registration, demonstrates a number of characteristics. First, the highest non-response rates come from those who rent from a housing association or a council. There are higher non-response rates: where the occupants are from black, Asian or mixed ethnic groups; where the household contains a single-parent family; where the average age of the people in the household is 70-plus; and in areas with higher income deprivation scores.
I am not making any moral judgment about people in those households. I am only reflecting the research that has been done, which demonstrates that there are certain socioeconomic characteristics suggesting, as my noble friend Lord Lipsey has identified, that there will be lower rates of registration.
Lord Rooker
My noble friend makes an interesting point and I am not gainsaying anything that he has said, but the other propensity among the groups that he has just listed is that of knowing how to apply for housing benefit. Therefore, they are on a list and the local authorities know, because we know the propensity and the distribution. I cannot see what the problem is or why, on the census, we put up with this low rate when there is easily obtainable information to know that there are people there. The propensity to claim is co-related exactly with the groups that my noble friend has just listed. I do not understand why we still have this problem now, let alone having had it 10 years ago.
Lord Harris of Haringey
My Lords, I do not disagree with anything that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has said. He is right—it is not something that we should necessarily tolerate. If there was much more of the passing of these registers, electronically, between the various agencies, or if we adopted the simple solution that the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, put forward—that of an identity card—we would resolve some of these problems. However, my point is not that we could resolve them like this, but that there is a wide variation, which is not standard in terms of the degree of electoral registration, and that it happens to be correlated with certain types of socioeconomic group.
My noble friend Lady Farrington, before she made her tendentious comments about the north and the south, made a point about the consequences and implications of the poll tax.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
I would like to correct any misunderstanding I created. I was referring to government allocation of resources to local authorities, not to a disparity between the north and the south in terms of electoral registration. Some of us believe that there are some leafy suburbs in the south—not the sort of area that my noble friend represented so well for so long—that have done quite well out of the Government’s financial allocation to local authorities.
Lord Harris of Haringey
That is certainly the case in one or two parts of London, though, as a general principle, London subsidises the rest of the country, particularly the countryside, to a quite extortionate extent.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Well, you did draw me on to it. When you bear in mind that the population of London is the same as the populations of Scotland, Wales and, I think, Northern Ireland combined, there is underresourcing of London, which is, after all, the economic engine of the United Kingdom. However, that is not the point that I wish to engage with and I suspect that, if we persist in it, it will offend Members opposite.
Lord Harris of Haringey
The point I am trying to make, which is very important, is that there is a variation in the registration that it is linked, for whatever reasons, to certain socioeconomic groups and may be linked to the history of the poll tax and the community charge. I well remember the way in which official statistics on the number registered plummeted in the time of the poll tax. I was the leader of a local authority at that time; we had the distinction of setting the highest community charge in the country, because of the underresourcing of a borough such as mine—no doubt akin to one or two of the areas that my noble friend refers to elsewhere in the country. The point is that there is a variation.
If noble Lords believe that we are trying to create a fairer electoral system—and we are all, presumably, signed up to that—we have to address that problem. It might be an acceptable argument to say that we would simply go with the last electoral register, if the degree of underrepresentation were consistent in every constituency—but it is not. It is biased towards specific areas. I am not going to suggest that the reason there is a reluctance to resolve that issue is because it is biased against certain types of community which might have a propensity to vote in a particular way. I am not going to make that suggestion, I am simply going to make the point that, if we really believe in a fairer electoral system, we have to address this issue of underrepresentation.
It will take some time to deal with it, whether we go down the identity card route recommended by my noble friend Lord Maxton, or whether we try to cross-reference different registers. Therefore, if the Government are intent on going ahead with this legislation at this speed, they have to put into the system some mechanism for making the adjustment that my noble friend Lord Lipsey has put forward, and I hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, replies to this debate he will acknowledge that there is a problem with underregistration, that that is variable and that the Government must address it.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
My Lords, one of the consequences of this Bill is that it forces the Boundary Commission to construct a new electoral map on the basis of the electoral register as it stood last month, December 2010. There is no dispute between anyone in this House that millions of eligible voters are missing from that register. In 2005 the Electoral Commission estimated that 3.5 million eligible voters were missing from the electoral roll in England and Wales alone—that was based on five-year-old figures. A more recent estimate by Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg, the leading academic expert on electoral registration, suggests that the figure for the whole of the United Kingdom today could be closer to 6 million potentially registrable electors.
According to the House of Commons Library, in excess of 400 parliamentary constituencies have a registration rate of at least 95 per cent, but over 200 seats have a rate below that number and around 100 seats have a rate below the national average of 91 per cent. In a significant number of cases, mainly in urban constituencies, around 80 per cent of the eligible electorate is registered to vote. That means that one in five voters is missing in some constituencies, predominantly those with a lower income profile.
The Electoral Commission investigation that I have referred to before, which was published in March last year, shines more light on the socioeconomic characteristics. In the course of these debates, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has explicitly agreed that,
“under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds (56% not registered), private sector tenants (49%) and black and minority ethnic British residents (31%)”.
The commission’s report, published in May 2010, said:
“The highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.
Given that the Government’s stated aim is to create more equal-sized constituencies and has always been fairer votes, one assumes that they are concerned about using an unequal register to pursue that objective—unequal in that there is not a consistent level of underregistration right across the country. By excluding the missing voters from this rigidly arithmetical review of constituency boundaries, the Government will inevitably and in practice distort the electoral map of Britain and dilute the representation of people who come from the specific groups that I have just identified. That would be unfair and fundamentally undemocratic. It is difficult to see how the Government want knowingly to proceed with a process that will deliver that outcome, particularly in the light of the stated fundamental aims of the review.
It is true to say that, over the past decades, boundary reviews have been conducted on the basis of the existing incomplete electoral registers, and previous electoral registers will have been more inaccurate than the electoral register now. So why change from that process? The answer is that in recent times there has never been a review of the scale being proposed here, with probably every single constituency being affected by the review that will take place, at some speed, up to October 2013, and of course 50 seats being chopped in the process.
In addition, under the previous arrangements—this is a secondary point—the process was always balanced by the opportunity for genuine public consultation, via the local public inquiries that this plan does not just abolish but forbids the Boundary Commission to conduct. Moreover, under the previous arrangements, the Boundary Commissions had the ability to take into account at least the direction of travel of the populations of these places. Therefore, they were able to take into account over a period of time what the likely population was going to be. There has never been such a large-scale review in the past. There will be no local inquiries at which these points can be made and, because numbers have to come first in all save three constituencies, there is no scope to try to build them in as one of the discretionary factors.
Two options are open: one is to pause and work to get the missing eligible voters on the register. That has been persistently and aggressively rejected by Ministers from the Dispatch Box in this House. If the timetable cannot be altered, why not do as the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Lipsey proposes and ask—or instruct through this statute—the Boundary Commission to use a formula that would enable missing eligible voters to be factored into its deliberations? A range of data sets can be used. There would be inaccuracies but I respectfully suggest that the probably minor inaccuracies that would arise would be a very worthwhile price to pay to get greater equality and fairness in our electoral boundaries, as they would reflect more accurately not just those who were registered but those who were entitled to be registered.
My noble friend Lord Lipsey has said that this is a probing amendment and described it as tentative in some respects. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s answer to the amendment, particularly as Ministers have acknowledged the problem but, with respect, have not really come up with a solution. They have said, “It is just one of those things. We’re doing some data matching pilots”. I hope that there will be proposals to deal with the issue because, if there are not, in my respectful submission that undermines what has been said about the fairness which the Government seek to obtain.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is now in his place as, in answer to a question from me a long time ago, he gave the House an assurance that the Government would attempt to ensure that the problem that my noble friend Lord Lipsey has raised would be tackled. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, can now explain to the House how the Government have been tackling it and intend to tackle it.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
I join the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, in expressing pleasure at the arrival of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. However, I am disappointed that, far from it being the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who is to reply to the amendment, and who could have explained how the Government will deliver on their assurance, it will be the noble Lord the Leader of the House.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, I assure the Committee that I have no intention of allowing the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to steal my thunder on this amendment. I have waited some 11 and a half days to reply to this subject, which we have discussed several times. I want to become more knowledgeable on many of these issues and this gives me an opportunity to do so. I admire the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for the way in which he introduced his amendment. He said that it was a probing amendment and I can understand why. I will spare him all the details but it is not technically perfect and I do not think that it would achieve what he wants it to achieve. However, I understand the issue that he is trying to resolve.
The amendment seeks to amend the definition of “electorate” to include those eligible to register who have not done so. It would require the Electoral Commission to make an estimate of the unregistered electorate and include this in the figures used by the Boundary Commission to draw up constituencies. The amendment would require the Electoral Commission to take into account the socioeconomic profile of each constituency in estimating the number of unregistered eligible voters.
The most important principle here must be to make sure that one elector means one vote. For this to be the case there must be broad equality in the number of registered electors in each constituency. That is the key principle. The only question then is of how best to achieve it. Surely that is to use the register of electors and make sure that it is as accurate as possible. While we know that there is underregistration, we must also remember that the registration rate in the UK—estimated at around 90 per cent—is broadly in line with that of comparable democracies. The electoral register has been the basis of boundary reviews for decades, under Governments of all shades.
Lord Beecham
Do the Government have a view on the impact of individual registration on the likely overall levels of registration when that comes into effect? Is it not likely that individual registration will reduce the number of registered electors, particularly in those areas with a socioeconomic profile that already causes problems?
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I do not see why that should be the case.
It is also not straightforward to determine the number of people missing from the register. Although it would be possible to match population estimates against registration numbers to generate a notional rate, population data are estimated and would include some people who are not eligible to register to vote due, for example, to nationality. The Electoral Commission itself, in its recent report on underregistration, calls the process of estimating registration rates “an imprecise science” and says:
“All current approaches to estimating the completeness and accuracy of the electoral registers at a national level are imperfect”.
The House has already heard about the limitations of the population data that would inevitably be the basis of any estimation. We will return to this in the next group of amendments.
Introducing estimated figures—acknowledged as imprecise and imperfect—into the calculation of constituency size risks introducing inaccuracies or inconsistencies across the UK, as my noble friend Lord Rennard pointed out. In the interests of a fair and equal system, where each person’s vote across the UK has the same weight, constituencies should be calculated on the basis of registered electors, as the Bill proposes. To do otherwise would be to perpetuate a situation in which some votes are more equal than others.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I want to pick up on something that the Minister has just said. When asked in an intervention whether individual registration would lead to a reduction in the register, he just said no. I asked him earlier whether he had read the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons, which deals with that matter in great detail. All the witnesses, including those from the Government and Boundary Commission people, have conceded that there is likely to be a drop. Does the Minister not think that at this stage on the Bill, with controversial areas to come, he should read that report, which will hugely enlighten him on these very important areas?
Lord Strathclyde
That is a kind offer by the noble Lord, and I shall make sure that my officials have read the report.
The Government do not believe that it should be compulsory to register. It should be a matter of personal choice.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, can my noble friend confirm that the issue of individual registration cannot possibly make any difference as far as the amendment is concerned, because we are of course referring to the electoral register of December 2010, which could not possibly be affected by individual registration? I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has introduced a completely irrelevant red herring.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton
My Lords, surely the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will have read the report cover to cover and could enlighten the Leader of the House?
Lord Campbell-Savours
Can I make a suggestion before the noble Lord sits down? He might want to visit those jurisdictions in various parts of the world where you do not even have to come to the Dispatch Box to read your brief. All you have to do is give it to the Clerks and they can put it on the record for you.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, I have never heard of that, but perhaps it should be a matter for the committee of my noble friend Lord Goodlad.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked about the Boundary Commission’s use of databases when drawing up these constituencies. He will know this, because we have had this debate several times during Committee and I am not planning to give a hugely different answer from the one that he has already heard. This year, we plan trials—
Lord Maxton
The problem is not whether there is a database—we have had that debate—but what use will be made of the database once the Electoral Commission and local authorities have that information. Will it be to add people to the electoral register, or is it just to check the electoral register?
Lord Strathclyde
First of all, it will be up to them to decide what they want to use the databases for.
Lord Maxton
Does that mean that the Electoral Commission can add people to the electoral register in any particular area and then use those people to calculate where the boundary division should be?
Lord Strathclyde
No, the commission will be using a register of electors. It may well wish to use a database to see where potential electors are, who can then register. What are these databases? Let me just—
Lord Strathclyde
Let me just finish the point that I am trying to get to on the databases. I have a fascinating list: the databases that we are concentrating on are those held by the DWP, HMRC, the DVLA, the national pupil database held by the DfE, MoD data on service personnel and the Student Loan Company. I am happy to give way to the noble Lord.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Perhaps the Leader of the House can enlighten me, but I had understood that the fundamental principle of data sharing was that the use to which data would be put would be made explicit. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Maxton’s question on what permissions are being given to the Electoral Commission in terms of what it can use the data for is absolutely pertinent. Have the Government given permission that the data can be used for adding to the list, or is it simply for checking whether people have erroneously registered?
Lord Strathclyde
This gives me an opportunity to read out the final couple of lines of my brief.
The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has worked hard on all this. He said that the amendment was probing. He has demonstrated great care in bringing this issue forward again. I am extremely happy, if it would be helpful, to facilitate a meeting with him and my officials to go through the matter with him.
Lord Lipsey
I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord for that offer, which I would happily take up for my education, if not for that of his officials. It enables me to make a point, because a lot more noble Lords are in the Chamber now than when they were enjoying pudding and I was moving the amendment. With the exception of the utterly disgraceful spat between north and south on my own Benches, anyone reading the debate, which has lasted for just over an hour, would agree that it was in the very best traditions of this House—as was the previous debate about the Isle of Wight. Without going into the past, I hope that I speak for the House in being glad that, on this amendment, we have returned to our great traditions in this Chamber.
Perhaps I may make one point to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. Perhaps, having just come into the Chamber, he missed the point that I made at the beginning, which goes to the heart of this matter. He rightly said that these estimates of notional electorates would be imprecise, which of course is true. However, a figure that is imprecise is not necessarily worse than a figure that is utterly precise and utterly bogus, and that is what the electoral registers are. By consent, the registers are only 91 to 92 per cent accurate overall. Also by consent, in many areas their accuracy is very well short of those figures. There would also be imprecision in the estimates—of course I accept that and it would be silly to do otherwise—but I think that that imprecision would be very much less than the precise falsity represented by the numbers on the electoral register.
Lord Harris of Haringey
Before the noble Lord concludes and decides whether he wishes to press the amendment to a vote, perhaps, like me, he was so bowled over by the very engaging offer of a meeting by the noble Lord the Leader of the House that he missed whether he accepts the principle that the unfairness of the underregistration is differentially spread around the country and that, if the Government’s objective of fairness is to be achieved, something must be done about that in this Bill.
Lord Lipsey
I wholly agree with what the noble Lord says, and I would have drawn attention to it if I had not been so excited by the prospect that, instead of a weekend off after tonight, I shall spend my time closeted with the Minister’s officials. I can offer them 3 am on Sunday morning or 7 pm on Sunday evening in between writing my speeches for Monday’s proceedings on this Bill, should there be any. I do not want to go on for too long, so I shall resume my seat and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 66ZA withdrawn.
Amendment 66ZB
Lord Lipsey
where U is the population of the United Kingdom aged 18 or over minus the population of the constituencies mentioned in rule 6”
Lord Lipsey
I apologise for the vagaries of the Marshalled List, which mean that I am on my feet twice running. This, again, is a slightly exploratory amendment but it has a serious purpose. The intention behind it is to suggest that, if we are to equalise anything, there is quite a strong case for equalising not electorates but population of voting age. This issue has come up from time to time during our discussions. It is not necessarily a question of either/or; it would be possible to arrive at a figure for equalising which contained an element of both. I may well put down a formula to that effect on Report but I shall not try it out now because I think that it would be a little hard on the Hansard writers.
First, I should say that there are big differences between large constituencies in terms of population and large constituencies in terms of electorate. To take an obvious example, which noble Lords will be able to relate to after our earlier discussion, the Isle of Wight is by a long way the biggest constituency in terms of electorate but it is only the third largest in terms of population. In Regent’s Park and Kensington North, the population of the relevant age was 146,000, which is nearly double the number of registered voters. For Kensington and Chelsea the figure is 135,000 compared with 65,000 registered voters—that is, more than double the electorate. There are 45 seats in which the electorate is less than two-thirds of the population.
Of course, an MP represents everyone who lives in a constituency and not just those who have a vote, so it would seem fair that some allowance should be made for that in terms of workload. This is particularly the case as lower registration tends to be correlated with people with particular kinds of problems, the most obvious being black and ethnic minorities, who are about 30 per cent less likely to be registered but are likely to give rise to a great many problems, such as immigration matters relating to their families. Therefore, there really is a case for taking population into account. The second thing—
Lord Anderson of Swansea
Does my noble friend agree that certain constituencies have a disproportionate amount of asylum seekers because they are designated by the Government as areas to which asylum seekers will go? I will give an example. I found that in my constituency surgery perhaps two-thirds of the people who came to me were not on the electoral register because they were asylum seekers. I concede that many of them were sent to me by solicitors, who no doubt hoped to obtain some form of financial assistance for them. Be that as it may, it means that certain constituencies have a far greater workload for their MP.
Lord Lipsey
My noble friend is right. It says a lot for his assiduity, and for that of most Members of another place, that they are prepared to work very hard for people who will never have the chance to vote for them. Those who are cynical about Members of Parliament should bear in mind that remarkable and cheering thought.
I turn to another fact that I had not realised before I prepared for this debate. The system that I propose for discussion in this amendment, whereby constituencies are equalised by virtue of population rather than electorate, is more common in other countries than the use of electorates. Britain has a jolly good constitution; we love it very much and certainly I am not knocking it. However, we should consider this. It is not a silly idea for a system that no country uses. Lewis Baston of Democratic Audit states:
“Most countries use some measure of total population to serve as the basic measure of constituency size, either total population or a modified population such as voting age population … or citizen population. Britain is a member of a minority, albeit a significant minority, of countries that use registered electorate”.
He states that the ACE Project shows that half the countries of the world use total population and one-third use registered voters as the population base. No doubt there are all sorts of ingenious combinations of the two. Countries that use population include decent democracies such as Germany, perhaps slightly less decent democracies such as Italy, and Hungary and the Czech Republic. That is a pretty good list of countries that think the population measure is right. If we are internationalists, we should consider whether we could learn from them, as my other argument suggested that we could.
I see that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will reply to this debate. I should be astonished if he did not stand up and say that estimates of population are to a degree inaccurate, which of course is right, and are to a degree out of date. That is also true, although it does not mean that if we decided to go down the population route, it would be beyond the wit of the Office for National Statistics and others to produce more up-to-date estimates of population for this purpose than they do at the moment.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Is not one of the problems with the Bill the fact that the Lewis Baston material on countries that use population bases does not include how those population statistics were produced? One would have thought, when obviously the Bill was going to be surrounded by discussion about population, that research would have been done by officials in the department to establish the basis on which other countries use population figures. Have they a different way of drawing up census information? None of that information has been made available, which makes it very difficult for us to argue the question of population during the passage of this legislation.
Lord Lipsey
My noble friend makes a very shrewd point. I look forward to discussing that with officials when we have our exciting meeting on notional electorates. It might mean that we go from three to 4.30 in the morning on Sunday, rather than from 3 to 4 am, but I shall be delighted to do that and to bring him the results of any information that they are able to provide.
The Deputy Speaker (Viscount Ullswater)
I must advise your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 66A to 66C because of pre-emption.
Lord Grocott
My Lords, my amendment is very simple. I am not quite sure why it is grouped as it is, but I have no interest in degrouping because I hope that there may be some movement from the Minister on this. My amendment is simple and straightforward. There are four characteristics that the Bill tells us a Boundary Commission may take into account when drawing new boundaries. I want to add a fifth which is entirely based on my experience in the other place and with the constituencies that I was privileged to represent.
The fifth characteristic that I would like to add is that the Boundary Commission may take account of local government areas with rapid increases in population. Unusually among amendments, I suggest to the Government that this one could conceivable save them money, which might make ears prick up. The reason I have brought this forward is that the two constituencies I represented had huge electorates. I represented Lichfield and Tamworth until 1979. When I was defeated, the electorate was 101,343. In The Wrekin, which was the second constituency I was able to represent, the electorate before the boundary changes was 90,892. The reaction may well be, “So what? Populations change and move. That is what Boundary Commissions are for”. The reason why I suggest to the Committee that my experience might be relevant and might be worth changing this Bill for is that the population increases in both these constituencies was entirely predictable and pretty accurate. They were both new towns in the West Midlands. Tamworth was a growing and expanding town with projected increases in population and The Wrekin contained Telford new town, which likewise had completely projected and predictable increases in population. All I am suggesting is that these predictable changes in the population should be taken into account when constituency boundaries are drawn because it simply means that constituencies obviously very rapidly become very large and above the quota, I suppose.
I can anticipate one of the things that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, might say, which is that under the Bill as it stands there will be boundary redistributions every five years, so it is easier for these rapid population changes to be taken into account. I stand entirely by my position on this Bill throughout: it is a big mistake to make constituency changes every five years because of the massive uncertainty and instability that creates for MPs and the communities in constituencies. There would be no need for redistributions as rapidly as are compensated for by the five-yearly alterations of the constituency boundaries because in most cases, large increases or changes in population do not come out of a clear blue sky. Certainly in the case of new towns, they are predictable and predicted. This is where my suggestion for money saving comes in. If these factors were taken into account, there would not be the need for quite the frequency of boundary changes.
I do not expect the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to suggest that there are going to be any changes on that basis, but given that in the case of The Wrekin the population increased by 8,000 between one general election and the next, it would make sense if we made the amendment that I am proposing. As happens when one sits down and looks again at one’s own amendment, I can see a better way of doing it which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and his officials might feel is simpler. Clause 5(1)(a) on page 10 says that,
“special geographical considerations, including in particular the size, shape and accessibility of a constituency”,
can be taken into account by the Boundary Commission. If the noble Lord were to be emollient enough to include “planned population growth” as one of those characteristics, he would make me a Member of this House with a great sense of achievement, so I hope he might consider that.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
My Lords, there are five amendments in this group. The noble Baroness, Lady McDonagh, has her name to one to them. I do not know if she is going to speak to it, but let me deal with them all briefly.
The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, says that determining the size of constituencies should not be done by reference to the registered electorate nor by reference to the registrable electorate but by reference to the whole population of the constituency. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, is saying that there should be an upper limit in relation to constituencies, just as there is a geographical upper limit in the proposed Bill, so that no constituency should have a total population which is more than 130 per cent of the electoral quota. My noble friend Lord Grocott proposes something slightly different from the others, which is that the Boundary Commission can take into account the explicit consideration of population growth. Where there are local government areas with rapid increases in population, on the basis of the current drafting, that would only be able to be used in relation to the 5 per cent deviation on either side of the electoral quota laid down by the Bill. And the final amendment in this group says we should have regard to the census.
All of these amendments wrestle with the problem that we discussed in the previous group of amendments—namely, what is to be done about the fact that there is substantial representation? I am not in favour of determining the size of constituencies as a starting point from people other than either registered electors or registrable electors. But just as the geographical size of the constituency, based on the burden on the MP who has to get around it, determines that no constituency should be bigger than a certain size, it seems to me to be legitimate to take into account whether or not one has an exception by reference to the total population. That means you still have the electoral quota approach. I see that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, is about to intervene. I am more than happy to give way.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
I think that I am right in saying the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, relates to the electoral quota. It cannot be right to use population as the basis for calculating size of constituency with the 95 per cent to 105 per cent variation proposed in the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord last night—I am assuming that the Government may think kindly of it. On that basis, the numerator and the denominator have to be in the same currency: either population or electorate. You cannot have the top of the fraction as electorate and the bottom as population.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
That may be right. What I understand the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, to do, though he must defend it, is replace both the denominator and the numerator, because he puts the total population at the top of the fraction and the number of constituencies, less the two—or now the three—at the bottom and gets to the figure that way. I am not sure that I am following the noble and learned Lord.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
The figure is essentially a portion of the population, whereas once you get to the stage of calculating size of constituency with the 95 per cent to 105 per cent variation, it is the electorate that is so far used. I have not seen an amendment which deals with that relationship. Both bases of calculation have to be the same. Which is the better one, I am not saying, but they both have to be the same.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
As far as I understand it, the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is taking U as the total population in Rule 2(b) rather than the registered electorate and dividing it by 600 minus 2, now 3. That then produces something called the electoral quota. Paragraph 2(1)(a) of the new schedule states that the electorate of any constituency shall be no less than 95 per cent of the United Kingdom electoral quota and no more than 105 per cent. I assume that we do not need as a matter of drafting to amend paragraph (2)(1)(a) because the electoral quota is simply the number of the population. Therefore, it will be assumed, I assume, that it can be 5 per cent lower than the total population or 105 per cent of it, not 95 per cent or 105 per cent of the registered electorate. The noble Lord can explain it, but I think that it is consistent. I am sure that it is clear to everybody. [Laughter.]
I am rather against that approach. [Laughter.] That is ultimately because the way that our system works is that Parliament defines who is entitled to be on the electoral register. By doing so, it is in effect defining who is entitled to participate in the process of elections. It would be wrong therefore, as a matter of principle, to seek to define constituency boundaries by reference to people, some of whom may be entitled to be on the electoral register and some of whom may not. You will therefore find, for example, that there are constituencies in particular areas—I have in mind central London constituencies; for example, the City of London as well as Kensington and Chelsea—where the population is very high and appears to be very much larger than those on the electoral register.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
While I am inclined to agree on the need for a definitive basis for the size of a constituency, as someone who has represented a constituency I can say that you do not represent only those who vote for you. Among the important considerations for any Member of Parliament are families, their children and their education. To ignore the population below the age of 18 when selecting the size of a constituency that MPs are to represent seems entirely at odds with what MPs do. By all means make the registrable electorate the basis of a constituency, but do not rule out, as some of my noble colleagues have said, all considerations of the population size of the constituency. At present, that element appears to be not included for—in fact, by its omission, it is specifically precluded from—the Boundary Commission’s consideration.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
I agree—not from experience but from what I have been told—that whether or not you are a registered elector does not make any difference to how a Member of Parliament will treat you.
I also agree that, if a constituency has a very large population, that should be reflected in what happens. That is why—although this is a probing amendment and I am speaking tentatively, I shall be interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, says—the most attractive way of dealing with the issue, in my view, is through the amendment that might be moved by my noble friend Lord Boateng if he is here. Amendment 67A in his name would provide:
“No constituency shall have a total population which is more than 130% of the electoral quota”.
Just as it is accepted that the limit cannot be increased for a constituency with a large geographical area, there should be a similar provision for constituencies with a large population. I have a note to say that my noble friend Lord Boateng is not here, but it is legitimate to refer to his amendment as one of the possible routes that the Government could go down.
The Opposition’s position is that they do not favour the approach of my noble friend Lord Lipsey, although we think that it is a sensible probing amendment. We are attracted by the idea that my noble friend Lord Boateng has put forward, and I shall be interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has to say about that.
The amendment of my noble friend Lord Grocott concerns a different issue. It seeks to provide that, in relation to the plus or minus 5 per cent, regard should be had to the fact that an area may be having rapid increases in population. As we understand it, such matters can be taken into account under the current arrangements, but it does not look as though such matters could so easily be taken into account under the new arrangements. When boundary commissioners are considering what the boundaries should be, it would be sensible for them to take that into account.
In all those circumstances, the Committee can see what we favour in this. We will be interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has got to say.
Lord McNally
My Lords, when I saw Amendment 66ZB on the Marshalled List, with its strange fraction of U over 598, I thought, “I hope to God it’s Jim Wallace’s turn to answer the debate”. I hope to match the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, in his grasp of statistics, but I certainly cannot match that of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, because, thank God, I do not sit up at 3 am poring over electoral statistics.
Lord McNally
Noble Lords on all sides of the Committee will take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Reid, that everyone who has ever stood for Parliament and has been lucky enough to win has said in their victory speech that, although they were grateful to the people who had voted for them, it was their determination to serve everyone in the constituency. That is certainly the case.
Lord Maxton
What my noble friend Lord Reid quite rightly said was that it was not just the complete electorate that we represented in the House of Commons, but the total population. That means babes in arms right through to the person lying in hospital about to expire. It means everybody.
Lord McNally
What makes this an absolutely Alice in Wonderland debate is that, when the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, reads Hansard, he will see that that is just what I said. I thank him for his support.
The commitment to represent everybody in the constituency does not necessarily mean, as has been made clear a number of times, that we should look to population rather than registration for basing the electorate. The electoral register has been the basis for boundary reviews since the 1940s. Current constituencies in the other place are drawn up on the basis of electorate, not population. It was made clear earlier this evening that there are reasons and principles for this practice and approach. The principle behind the Government’s proposal is to ensure that one elector means one vote of equal weight, wherever that vote is cast in the United Kingdom. In order for this to be the case, constituencies must have a broadly equal number of electors. Simply to substitute population for electors would exacerbate the present inequalities in the weight of vote because there would be variations in the number of individuals in an area who are not entitled to vote. The best way to achieve fair and equal votes and to address concerns about underregistration is to have an equal number of registered electors while ensuring that the register is as accurate as possible.
A further argument has been put that the constituency boundaries should be drawn on the basis of population rather than the register of electors because a Member of Parliament is elected to represent all his constituents and a significant part of an MP’s work can be on behalf of those who are not registered to vote. That argument has been made several times. However—this point has been made several times, but I shall say it again loudly—no Member of Parliament has a free ride. MPs have different kinds of pressures and different areas of responsibility, so it would be invidious to start deciding that constituency X rather than constituency Y had more problems. Most MPs will give a full description of the kind of problems that their particular constituency brings. That is why the Government believe that it is the right of electors to have a vote that is of equal weight between, as well as within, constituencies throughout the United Kingdom.
There have been ideas that we could use population. The difficulty is, as the Office for National Statistics has pointed out, that there are limitations with population estimates. Although I have heard in previous debates the suggestion that we could use the census, the data from the forthcoming census will not be available until far too late for the Boundary Commission to complete the task of reviewing the boundaries by 2015, which would mean that, up to the 2020 general election, the pattern of representation in the House of Commons would reflect the electoral register as it was in the year 2000. I cannot believe that we should do such a disservice to every elector in that way.
Nor, as I noted in the earlier debate on a similar amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, can we accept the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, that the total population of a constituency could not exceed a number that is 130 per cent of the electoral quota. I recognise the intention behind that amendment, but the data are not available that could make that work in practice. The Boundary Commission would need population data at a very low level of geography in order to ensure that the tests in the amendment were met. Those data are not available. It would be far better to use the electoral register, as has always been the case for boundary reviews, and concentrate our efforts on improving the registration rates. The census may provide valuable information that can support that work. The provisions in this Bill for a review once a Parliament, rather than once every eight to 12 years, will mean that the work will be reflected in a review very much sooner than would be the case under the existing provisions.
I note what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who made a valid point. I know that boundary reviews cause problems in terms of sitting MPs, but this proposal is for the benefit of the electors. Amendment 74C proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, would allow the Boundary Commission to take into account likely rapid changes in population when making recommendations for boundary changes. Amendment 78A, which has not been moved by my noble friend Lord Maples, would require the commissions to take into account projected increases in the electorate.
My concern is that, however calculations were made on the projected electorate, there would, by definition, be an element of interpretation that would be subject to repeated challenge. Furthermore, the amendments would abolish the fixed figure and replace it with a moving target. I am concerned that interested parties would be likely to use this for arguing for a more advantageous calculation method for the projections. In order to maintain the high levels of trust in our system, we must base boundary reviews on the availability of actual data.
That said, I hope that we can reassure noble Lords on this issue. The Fifth Periodical Report of the Boundary Commission for England notes that the commission takes into account projected electorate changes where it believes that the projection is likely to become a reality. We are confident that the Bill does nothing to stop the commissions continuing that practice, and we would expect them to apply this practice where they judge that the specific circumstances warrant it. I would advocate continuing to rely on the professional and expert judgment of the commissions.
We agree that constituencies should be as up to date as reasonably possible in order that boundaries reflect where electors live and in order that votes have equal weight. The answer to this is the Bill's provision for redistributions to take place every five years.
At this point, in the tradition that has been established in the last hour in this House, I would offer the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, a meeting on this, but I think that his diary is probably already full. I therefore invite the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Grocott
I am baffled by the Minister’s response. He is saying that the Boundary Commission can take account of factors that are not mentioned under factors (a), (b), (c) or (d) that are listed in Rule 5 of new Schedule 2. All I am saying is that if the Boundary Commission can take account of factors that are not listed—obviously, my amendment would add to those four factors—what on earth is the point of specifying the factors that are listed? My amendment would not impose a compulsion on the Boundary Commission; it would simply list a possible consideration that may allow for specific local circumstances. I simply did not understand his answer. I am also a bit upset because he did not suggest a meeting. Perhaps he will write to me.
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for his reply. I am sure that he will want to be present at the meeting that I am to have with his officials, which we will now reorganise for the time at which Blackpool kick off on Saturday.
It is good to see that Members of another place have come to observe proceedings in the House this evening. They will be able to return to the other end after doing so with two assurances. First, this House is indeed conducting detailed scrutiny of this Bill in good humour and in good order and with reasonable dispatch. Secondly, the reading skills of Ministers in this House far surpass those of Ministers in another place.
I have put forward two successive tentative amendments, and it is just worth saying—
Earl Ferrers
I am sure that the noble Lord wishes to adopt the courtesies of the House. It is incorrect to refer to people below the Bar.
Lord Lipsey
I apologise to the noble Earl, who has been here so much longer than I have.
I shall resume my thread on the debate on the Bill, as we are all anxious to proceed with it as rapidly as possible. We have just had two tentative debates on what I hope are interesting points of validity, which any Government in setting policy on these matters would have considered. It would have been so much better if we had had a consultative document before this Bill was brought forward that set out these alternatives and explained the pluses and minuses of each. It might have been unnecessary to debate these amendments this evening, and we could certainly have done so in a more informed way. So it does illustrate a defect of process.
To sum up the debate, there was an understanding that population is a relevant factor in determining the workload of MPs and therefore in all these matters, but at the same time there was no support for the proposition that I tentatively floated—that population should replace electorates as a basis for drawing constituencies. I accept that, but I shall make another tentative suggestion, which the Minister might like to think about. In Rule 5 in Clause 11, in the new rules that the Boundary Commission observes, there is a set of things that it may take into consideration, including special geographical circumstances. It might be worth considering adding to that list of things that it can take into consideration—at the moment within the 5 per cent limit—something relating to population, so that in cases where population is very large in relation to electorates it can explicitly make some sort of allowance for that in drawing up their final recommendations within the limits, which are 5 per cent each way at present. I leave that suggestion with the Committee and, on that basis, beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lipsey
where U is the electorate of the United Kingdom minus the electorate of the constituencies mentioned in rule 6 or otherwise exempted from the equal constituencies provisions of this Act, and where X is 600 minus the number of constituencies exempted under rule 6 or otherwise under the provisions of this Act”
Lord Lipsey
My Lords, I did not just propose this amendment because it allowed me to get a formula on the Order Paper. I was going to describe it as a paving amendment when I moved it, but it is no longer a paving amendment. The formula in the Bill has as its denominator the number of constituencies not otherwise exempt in the Bill—598. When I drafted the amendment, I thought that was a silly way to do it, because if we added to the list of exemptions the formula as in the Bill would no longer apply. It would have to be changed, which seemed a waste of everybody’s time, since it is perfectly easy to draw up a formula which adapts to however many exemptions you want to make.
I would not want to claim foresight; that would be a very dangerous thing to do in your Lordships' House. But in fact it turns out that this showed some foresight, because the Committee has agreed to add the Isle of Wight to those constituencies, so it is now 597 not 598. I believe that there is a large clutch of other amendments to be put before noble Lords, which the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, will of course oppose. For example, the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, wanted to make one in the case of his local area, and there will be other cases for exemptions. Who knows, noble Lords may want to agree to them. So making this amendment at this stage not only accommodates the change that we have already made but will allow the Bill to accommodate future changes without us needing to return to this and go over it. I therefore commend the amendment to the House.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees
I advise the Committee that if this amendment is agreed to, I will not be able to call Amendments 66B, 66BA or 66C because of pre-emption.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, this is an important amendment and my noble friend Lord Lipsey has shown foresight in raising the matter. He will also have seen Amendment 79, which is in the name not of one of our colleagues on this side but of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. The number of constituencies named in that amendment include not only Orkney and Shetland, the Western Isles in their Gaelic name and the Isle of Wight, but the Isle of Anglesey, Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly, the Highland Council area and Argyll and Bute. As my noble friend said, a number of us have tabled amendments in relation to areas that we have a particular knowledge of. My noble friend Lord McAvoy tabled one in relation to the Royal Borough of Rutherglen, which includes Cambuslang and Halfway, if I remember correctly.
I tabled an amendment in relation to the city of Edinburgh, arguing that Edinburgh should continue to have five constituencies once this boundary review is over and that that should be an instruction to the Boundary Commission in Scotland. There are a number of other amendments in relation to this, such as Amendments 66C, 78B, 79C, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 85A, 85B and 85C, which we will discuss.
My noble friend Lord Lipsey, with his usual sagacity, foresight and burning of the candle at night, has managed to table an amendment that, if the Minister was wise, he would see was like the amendment to Part 1 moved by my noble friend Lord Rooker. That amendment gave the Government flexibility in relation to dates for the referendum to be held on AV so that if any changes took place, the Government would not be forced to hold it on 5 May: they could have it at any time up to 31 October. This amendment also gives the Government flexibility, which is very wise.
I will not now argue the case for the five Edinburgh constituencies. I have a lot to say about them. I have a tour d’horizon for them just as I had for South Ayrshire—or Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley as it is now. I would like to describe some of the important facets of Edinburgh constituencies, but I will leave that until we get to Amendment 80. In the mean time, I am keen to support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Lipsey, which gives us this necessary flexibility.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
My Lords, it is clear to me that the amendment is correct. Therefore, I hope that the Government will accept it. It is simply a drafting amendment to take account of changes that have been made—and if the noble Lord is correct in his prophesying, some further changes will be made. This amendment takes account of that in an accurate way. There is no question of discretion or anything of the kind. It is simply a drafting amendment that takes account of existing changes.
Lord Falconer of Thoroton
I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern. My experience as a Minister was that when an amendment was passed even in opposition to the Government in Committee or at any stage of the Bill, the Government would bring the Bill up to date. Therefore, when it went back to the other place it would be a coherent Bill on which the Commons could then form a view about which amendments to accept. I completely agree with my noble friend Lord Lipsey. I hope that the Government will indicate that they will make the necessary amendment to reflect what happened earlier on today.
Lord McNally
Not exactly, because one has to realise that, as noble Lords will know, the other place has still to take a view on the amendments that we pass. It may well be that all the amendments that have been threatened or made may succeed. Believe me, if I am not convinced by the eloquence of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, or the command of figures by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, I certainly have a tingle between my shoulder blades when my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay announces that he is about to abandon ship.
By the way, it has just occurred to me that of course I would not, as the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, pointed out, make any comment about what was happening below the Bar, but it crossed my mind that government Whips in the other place might be shipping younger Members down here to take a look at us to stiffen their vote when we come to reform of the House of Lords.
Earl Ferrers
Does my noble friend not realise that he is now making the same mistake in referring to people who are below the Bar and are not in the Chamber?
Lord McNally
Again, I hope that people read Hansard as I deliberately did not make that mistake but I understand the noble Earl’s sensitivity on this. The other point was that not only does this amendment have another of those amazing fractions in it but, in my brief, there is the Gaelic name for the Western Isles. I was happy to notice that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, did not try the Gaelic name, so I will be excused as well.
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, gave me some wise advice. In fact, I was trying to encourage him to be my adviser for the rest of the Bill but he wanted to protect his amateur status as an adviser to the Government. However, he said that you should not be afraid to take decisions at the Dispatch Box. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is making a very valid point: the final calculation of exclusions may not be what is in the Bill. On the other hand, they may be, because the other place will have to look at what we send back to it. This is not an empty gesture; I really would like to take this back with the intention of bringing something back on Report.
Lord Browne of Ladyton
If I have understood the effect of this amendment and the existing drafting of the Bill, an amended clause of this nature could persist in the Bill even if the other place overturned any additional constituencies that were added to the list. In fact, this amendment creates a Bill that is proofed against any changes, whether they persist or not. This is actually a better piece of drafting than the original, which had a figure in it, because it is a calculation that will persist in any set of circumstances.
Lord McNally
I hear what the noble Lord says and I hear my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay behind me saying that he is right. All that I am asking, being a simple Lancashire lad, is to take this back with a firmness for Report. If what the noble Lord is saying is absolutely right, I assure the Committee that this will go in at Report.
Lord Lipsey
I rise, my Lords, with a deep sense of disappointment at the fact that the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, has risen twice. I have been in keen anticipation of the remarks he was about to make on the substance of the amendment—indeed, of the Bill—and I will now have to postpone the satisfaction of my appetite for a later date, at which I look forward to hearing his views on these matters, expressed with his usual skill and verve.
I am not disappointed at the Minister’s reply. My noble friend is absolutely right about the effect of this amendment—it is a circumstance that fits all; 598, 600, 520 or whatever. When the noble Lord, Lord McNally, considers this, he will see that it will be useful for the future. Let us suppose that the House of Commons overturns the Isle of Wight amendment. Let us suppose that, at the next general election, it returns the “Home Rule for the Isle of Wight” candidate, throwing the two Conservative candidates who will then be sitting for the island out of office. Suppose that whatever Government who are then in office quite rightly decide to respond to that by giving the Isle of Wight a constituency of its own. This is one piece of legislation they will not have to change; the formula still works. It is a form of future-proofing, to use the modern phrase.
I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing to consider this further. I am grateful for the support I have had from all over the House, including from the esteemed noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, who knows much more about the law than I do. I very much hope that this may yet be my one mark, in my 10 years here, upon the statute book.
where U is the electorate of the United Kingdom minus the electorate of the constituencies mentioned in rule 6, and P is the population of prisoners who at the time of Royal Assent are serving prison terms of 4 years or less”
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
My Lords, in the spirit that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, offered the House some hours ago, I shall be relatively brief. I am encouraged by some of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, who has accepted the advice of my noble friend Lord Rooker about not being afraid to take decisions at the Dispatch Box.
I start, unusually, by confessing that the amendment is not wholly fit for purpose on the matter of prisoners and their ability to vote. It omits to recognise that remand prisoners either awaiting trial or awaiting sentence having been found guilty are currently able to vote. After the Minister accepts the spirit of this amendment, which I anticipate he is going to do, it will give his parliamentary draftsmen no more than a fleeting diversion to put this oversight about remand prisoners right.
The amendment aims to make sure that, in the fine arithmetical balance upon which the Boundary Commission shall decide on the new constituencies, the impact of convicted prisoners and those on remand with the ability to vote shall be included in that arithmetic. The amendment assumes that only those sentenced prisoners serving a prison term of four years or less will have the vote. That matter has still to be decided by Parliament. I hope that it will be rejected and that all prisoners will be able to vote, as part of a better attempt to rehabilitate them and to reduce the expense of perpetual reoffending.
As a backdrop to this amendment, I was amazed to read in the Evening Standard tonight that my right honourable friend Jack Straw—not simply a former Home Secretary but, your Lordships will remember, as I do, a former Lord Chancellor—is now attempting, having won a debate in the other place for next month, to persuade the House that no prisoners should be given the vote, in breach and defiance of an order of the European Court of Human Rights made in 2004. It may explain why the last Government, to my disgrace and shame, did nothing to accept the judgment of that court. My right honourable friend incites Parliament to continue that disobedience. It is another slippery slope when Governments think that they can pick and choose what they do in reaction to decisions of the court of human rights and it gets us into an extremely difficult place.
Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke
I have not followed the issue of prisoner voting very closely, so I would be grateful if my noble friend could tell me where, if prisoners are successful in getting the vote, their vote would be. Would it be in their constituency, if they have a home somewhere, or in the place where the prison is? I ask this with some feeling, because my former constituency held one of the biggest prisons in Scotland and even with a 22,000 majority I would have been a bit nervous.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
My understanding on this matter is that prisoners will be able to vote either by proxy or by post. Where they do not have permanent home addresses, and many will not, they can use the address of the prison.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
I yield to no one in my admiration for the right honourable Jack Straw as both a former Foreign Secretary and a former Lord Chancellor, but can my noble friend say whether Mr Straw has attempted to make any calculation of the aggregate of fines that this country would incur if all the relevant prisoners were to take us to the European Court of Human Rights?
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
My noble friend has reminded me of a point that I meant to make. At the moment there are 2,500 outstanding claims of compensation by prisoners being denied the vote, which, if they were proceeded with and accepted, would cost the taxpayer £100 million to meet.
This is not the time or place to debate at length the merits of votes for prisoners, but surely it is time that this outdated sentence of civic death upon prisoners was removed. It was imposed under the Forfeiture Act 1870, although in my opinion it should never have been, and it has lingered for far too long. As I said earlier, the European Court decided in 2004 that the blanket ban on the ability of convicted prisoners to vote was unlawful and should be removed. I much regret that the previous Government did not obey that judgment, and welcome the fact that this Government plan to do so.
It is all about enabling prisoners to take civic responsibility, which chimes in well with the extra emphasis by the Secretary of State for Justice on better attempts at rehabilitation to reduce the expensive and alarming rates of reconviction. Up to 70 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of release, surely the most enormous waste of taxpayers’ money going.
It is time for change and time to ensure that the number of prisoners anticipated under the proposed government legislation be entitled to vote, and those prisoners on remand from wherever they are on the electoral roll should not be overlooked when the maths is being done by the Electoral Commission to determine the new constituency boundaries.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
Before my noble friend sits down, would he answer a question for me? In looking at his calculation of how many additional prisoners would be entered on to the electoral roll, is he aware of any estimate of how many prisoners were not on the electoral roll prior to them going to prison? There is a case to be answered that a number of prisoners who get into a life of crime lead somewhat chaotic lives and may never have voted or be on the electoral roll in the first place.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
I accept my noble friend’s point. Part of this touches on our earlier debates about the accuracy of the electoral register. It may well be that prisoners in that position should be encouraged to get on the electoral roll from the only address that they currently have, which would be prison.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I have added my name to my noble friend Lord Corbett’s amendment, even though in many ways I disagree with the stance that he takes on prisoners’ voting. My instincts would be to agree with the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, when he was Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Constitutional Affairs as was; when he announced that the Government of the day were appealing against the European Court’s ruling in 2005, he said that,
“it has been the view of successive governments, including this Government, that persons who have committed crimes serious enough to warrant a custodial sentence should forfeit the right to have a say in how the country is governed while they are detained”.—[Official Report, 14/7/04; col. 1242.]
That is a sentiment that I can certainly agree with. Indeed, as the Secretary of State for Justice is currently pursuing a progressive path of trying to ensure that fewer prisoners are locked up, it follows that those who remain in prison will be there for more serious offences, and in my view that in turn somewhat lessens the argument for votes for prisoners. That does not mean that I am not in favour of rehabilitation and that I do not think that there is a good principled argument to be made, but I happen to disagree with it. However, as my noble friend said, we should not rehearse the arguments at any length tonight.
However, in the context of this Bill, the Government have to allow for prisoners when deciding the boundaries for future general elections, given that the Prime Minister has said that he reluctantly accepts that he has to bow to the European court ruling in the case of John Hirst. This amendment enables me to ask the Minister a few questions that are directly pertinent to the Bill. First, the amendment refers to prisoners who are serving a term of “4 years or less”. What is the Government’s view on whether all prisoners should get the vote, as my noble friend has argued? What is their view on whether it should be given to those who are serving shorter prison terms? The amendment mentions four years but it could be two years or six months. Does the Minister think that the vote should be given to those prisoners who are coming towards the end of a sentence, however long the initial sentence was, and that that would be consistent with looking to rehabilitate them back into society?
Secondly, what is the right number of years? Does the Minister have a nice round figure that he might want to share with us, given that we have talked a lot about other round figures when discussing the Bill? My third question relates to the question that my noble friend Lady Liddell asked of my noble friend Lord Corbett in relation to the location of prisons. I hope that my noble friend gave the correct answer in that respect. When I was the Member of Parliament for South Dorset, I represented two prisons for some of the time and three prisons for another part of the time because the prison ship was located in my constituency, which meant that there were up to about 1,500 prisoners in my constituency. I would not have relished canvassing them and I certainly would not have relished the casework implications of representing the inmates in the various prisons. Some of them occasionally wrote to me. Contrary to what the Minister said about MPs representing absolutely everybody in their constituency, I am afraid that I tended to try to duck the casework involved with the issues that the prisoners raised as it would have occupied all my staff’s time and would have constituted a very slippery slope for me and for them. In addition, South Dorset was a very homogenous community in terms in ethnicity and religion with the exception of the prisoners. The majority of the inmates of the Portland young offender institution come from London and reflect the ethnicity and different religious make-up of London rather than that of Portland. Their inclusion would certainly change the character of the constituency significantly. Indeed, given tonight’s vote, there is the question of how the Isle of Wight will be accounted for in terms of the significant number of prisoners who now live on the island, and how they will be catered for.
Thirdly, if registration is based on the home address, as has been suggested, what would the Minister do to ensure that we avoid fraud in postal voting? That may become a sensitive issue as regards prisoners having postal votes given that postal voting has raised enough difficult issues as we have extended the opportunities for people to vote by post. It would be useful if he could tell us what arrangements will be made to enable candidates to canvass prisoners. Finally, what is the timetable for changing the law in respect of prisoners getting the vote, as that is critical for the Bill?
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I listened with great interest to my noble friend’s questions on this issue. It helps to understand the complexity of the issue facing the Government on giving prisoners the vote. I add a further complexity to the issue and the questions that my noble friend is posing. In this country, we allow those who are citizens of this country but who live overseas to register as overseas voters. Would we allow those serving sentences in prisons overseas to vote, and what arrangements could be made for them?
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon asks a fine question, which I had not previously thought of. However, I am sure that the Minister will have done so, will not need to think on his feet at the Dispatch Box and will be able to give us a precise answer.
On the question about the timetable, it is highly pertinent whether it coincides with the Boundary Commission review period to agree the boundaries for the next general election. If it does not, which arrangements will stand the test of time in respect of prisoners getting the vote?
Lord Thomas of Gresford
The noble Lord has eschewed acting on behalf of the interests of prisoners in his constituency. Who acted on their behalf in the absence of the noble Lord? To which agency was it left to represent them in any of the problems that a Member of Parliament might normally address in any constituency?
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend can help me in a moment, once I have had a chance to help myself. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, raises a question that is right at the heart of the legal case as I understand it and as interpreted by the BBC. John Hirst, who took the case to the European Court said:
“I’d read books that said if you want to change something you start up a pressure group, and then you put pressure on MPs and then you get things changed in parliament. Well that’s alright if you’ve got the vote and you’ve got some clout behind you. When you’re a prisoner, the only thing you can do if you want to complain and no-one listens is riot and lift the roof off—which isn’t the best way of going about things. Because we didn’t have a vote, there was no will in parliament to change anything”.
That is at the root of why he brought the case and, I guess, why he won it.
If a prisoner who had been a constituent of mine, or whose address was in my constituency, had written to me with a case when I was a Member of Parliament, I would have taken it up on their behalf, but I was unwilling to do so for people who happened to be resident in my constituency at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That was most difficult in respect of the large number of foreign nationals who were in Verne prison in my constituency. It was very difficult for them to get anyone to listen to them. It would have been a significant resourcing issue for me if word had got around the prison that they had a local MP who was willing to do all their legal work for them.
Lord Thomas of Gresford
Never mind the resources—is the noble Lord saying that he was happy that there were people in his constituency, whether they were there at Her Majesty’s pleasure or whatever, who had no political representation or access to Ministers through a Member of Parliament? Was he happy that people who had no home addresses that they could give to the constituency MP where they had formerly lived were left without any resource or recourse at all?
Lord Knight of Weymouth
I would not have been happy if that situation had existed. I sought to do my duty, as I saw it, to my constituents, whether they were in prison in other constituencies or not. The local prison for my constituency was Dorchester. The right honourable Oliver Letwin would, I am sure, have wanted me, rather than him, to deal with my constituents. I am sure that prisoners will have listened to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, and will now be writing to him at the House of Lords to take up their issues if they seek representation.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I had a fairly large prisoner mailbag. Prisoners get full service from Members of Parliament. Not only did they get full service, I visited prisoners from outside my own constituency on several occasions, including some of the most violent of offenders. Their stories were absolutely fascinating. It is a very interesting area of political representation.
Lord Mackay of Clashfern
At present, the law states that prisoners are disqualified under an Act of Parliament and, unless and until that is changed by Act of Parliament, there is no question of having to cater for them in this Bill. If and when a Bill is produced to change the 1870 Act—although I understand what the noble Lord is saying about that—it should answer the kind of questions that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, has asked. Until that happens, the law is as it has been since 1870. I am not going to deal with the merits of the issue, except to say that we believe in the rule of law, part of which is our country’s subscription to the European Convention on Human Rights and obedience to the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. That court has said in this case that a blanket ban is wrong, which leaves at least a certain amount of discretion to Parliament and the Government to decide what the change is to be. Until that happens, it is not for us here to speculate, because there is plenty for us to deal with in this Bill without introducing more material into a Bill that is not yet drafted.
Lord Dubs
My Lords, I very much agree with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, has said. Let me therefore briefly add some comments. When the time comes, which I hope will not be too long, for the Government to bring forward their measure to give prisoners the vote, we will have to ensure that in that process we amend this legislation to accommodate it.
Baroness Smith of Basildon
I understand the point that my noble friend and the noble and learned Lord are making, but surely the Bill before us seeks to set the boundaries before the next general election. I anticipate that if the Government put through legislation, in line with the European judgment, to give prisoners the vote, they will do so before the next election. We in this House and the other place will therefore have to amend legislation that we have already passed before the next election. We will find ourselves in a legal muddle at that point.
Lord Dubs
I am bound to say that I am persuaded by my noble friend’s argument. The principle and the arithmetic are obviously right, but the details of how prisoners are to be given the vote—and there will be a lot of details—are a matter that the House will have to deal with. However, that would not affect the principle of including prisoners in the formula that we are talking about.
I have been a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights for some time, and we have been anxious that the Government should adhere to their obligations under the Human Rights Act and under the European convention. We were disappointed—I was certainly disappointed, as was my noble friend Lord Corbett—that the previous Government did not bring this proposal into effect. I hope that this Government will do so. Given that public opinion, spurred on by some of our newspapers, is not sympathetic to this, I very much hope that more voices will be heard to say that this is a good thing and that it is right that people in prison, at least many of them, should have the right to vote and to have a civic responsibility that will help them when they come out. There is an important point of principle here, which has been totally lost in some of the hysteria in the popular press, which is arguing against this, to say nothing of the fine that we would have to pay as a country.
I have two brief final thoughts. I introduced a Private Member’s Bill when I was in the other place to give certain rights to prisoners. My noble friend Lord Soley and I discussed it, and he persuaded me to include in the Bill a proposal to give prisoners the right to vote. It was a 10-Minute Rule Bill and was therefore not going to get much further. It received a lot of publicity, but all that the press were interested in—even in the 1980s; it was a long time ago—was the clause about giving prisoners the right to vote. Nothing else in the Bill did they take notice of. I am bound to say, in all honesty, that the Labour Shadow Cabinet did not support my Bill and said that it was not in favour of it.
I have a final little anecdote, if I may indulge myself—it is getting late. I was in a pub in Battersea just before an election. I was meeting a journalist who wanted to take a photograph. The pub was almost empty because it was mid-morning. A man at the bar came up to me and said, “’Ere, are you Alf Dubs MP?”. I confirmed that I was and he said, “I came out of the Scrubs this morning. You’ve got a good reputation inside”. I thought of all the votes that I was not going to get and I then lost my seat.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I should perhaps say that I am president of the Citizenship Foundation, although I do not speak for it. Surely we could deal with the point raised in this amendment by an amendment to the Bill that says simply that prisoners serving a term of four years or less shall be entitled to vote. That would take care of the point that the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, seeks to address in this amendment. I should be interested to know whether the Minister would be amenable to that being brought forward at the next stage of the Bill.
This is a very important issue. For years we have put off grappling with the question of the prisoner vote. I think we would all say that one of the main badges of citizenship is the right to vote. We in this House all agree that rehabilitation is essential and that we do it rather badly in this country. To that extent—I shall finish on this point—we talk about punishing prisoners by denying them the vote, but I think that we punish ourselves much more by, in effect, outlawing prisoners from normal citizenship and thus, in my view, destroying any real prospect of any effective rehabilitation. Therefore, I hope that something can be done about this and that it can be done in time for it to be part of the Bill.
Lord Anderson of Swansea
I hope the Minister will concede that this is an important point, and perhaps he can truncate this debate by offering to have a cup of tea with his officials and my noble friend. I see that there are problems, but it is clear that the Government will have to respond in some way to the determination of the European Court of Human Rights, which has said, in terms, that the matter cannot be delayed for much longer. Indeed, the Government have said that they will respond. We know that there could be substantial expenditure implications if they do not respond and a multitude of applications. However, I see some problems in practice.
Once upon a time I was a barrister and I did a fair amount of work on the criminal side. All too often one’s clients were of no fixed abode, so how is one going to determine the constituency in which the prisoner votes? That is one obvious problem. Equally, prisoners are more likely to come from socioeconomic groups that might be determined among the population but are not on the electoral register because they are alienated and do not bother to put themselves on the register. Therefore, there are problems in deciding which will be the relevant constituency in this matter.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, from the information that the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, has given the Committee this evening, it sounds as though my noble friend is going to have to have a cup of tea with Mr Jack Straw if any advance is to be made on this matter.
Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke
My Lords, I had not intended to speak on this amendment. I have to be absolutely honest and say that I have not followed in great detail the question of prisoners and voting, although the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, very succinctly put the issues into context. I should say that I have a bit of an interest, having been a former non-executive director of the Scottish Prison Service and having a major prison with a secure unit in my constituency. I suppose that I have also just spent almost five years in a form of penal colony, so these are issues in which I tend to take an interest.
However, there is a very specific point to be made on where the vote of a prisoner is held. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, does not know that one of the most heinous crimes that a Member of Parliament can commit is to take up an issue for someone who is the constituent of another Member of Parliament. It is a problem that Ministers in particular face. I do not know what other former Members of the other place did. I had a sign in my office, and I know that many Members of Parliament have an attachment to their e-mail saying that they cannot take up the issue of someone who is a constituent of another Member of Parliament. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord McNally, would address the consequences of an increased number of people on the electoral register from prisons. Presumably they would have postal votes. If their prison is within a particular constituency, what would be the impact of that on the overall size of the constituency? There should be clarity for Members of Parliament who wish to know whether they are taking up an issue for someone from another constituency.
Lord Soley
I will be even briefer than my noble friend. I agree very much with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay. This is not the time to go into detail; that will happen when the Bill arrives. Like my noble friend Lord Dubs, I agree with the principle. There is no great problem in deciding who deals with this. Normally the home address should be used for registration, otherwise it is a matter for the local MP and occasionally for a solicitor.
There is a more important issue to address. Perhaps the Minister should refer this to the Electoral Commission. If it is the Government’s intention to give the vote to prisoners, there is a case for instructing the Electoral Commission to look at the problems of registering to vote. The registration process needs to be thought about in advance. In one sense, the problem is like that of other groups who cannot easily register. Prisoners are a captive population. Complications will come over where their home addresses are. There will be particular complications for the fairly small number of very large prisons that have a large percentage of people with no fixed address. I remember that when my noble friend Lord Rooker was a Minister, he arranged for people to give a non-registered street address so that they could have the vote.
There are many complications inherent in what the Government are proposing. I will support them and when the Bill arrives I will spell out some of the issues. At this stage, I simply say that there is a lot of sense in warning the Electoral Commission. As an adviser to the commission, I should do that too, and I will, but it would help if it came from the Government too. If the Government are going to do this, they should start to think about the complexities of registration.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I have one question for the noble Lord, Lord McNally. Would it be possible through secondary legislation to put an enabling power in the Bill whereby this section of the Bill could be amended in the event that the wider law on the right of prisoners to vote was to come into being?
Lord Bach
My Lords, I shall be brief. I thank my noble friends for raising the issue. Of course, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, gave the Committee a proper warning about the issue. The announcement was made through the Cabinet Office. We regret that it was not made in Parliament, because it is important. The point that my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon made about the intention of the Government to legislate in time for the 2015 general election under redrawn boundaries, and perhaps on an alternative vote electoral system, is relevant today. We would like to know the Government’s thinking on these matters. When do they intend to legislate and how will they deal with some of the issues raised by the decision that they have made?
One issue that particularly fascinates me is that of prisoners who have their voting rights denied by sentencing judges. Will they have the right to appeal against the judge's decision? Under the proposals, the judge will have discretion in certain cases. That does not strike me as sensible, or something that judges would want. The amendment asks some questions that the House—
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe
It strikes me that it might also be useful if we could have any information that you may have on the amount of research that has been undertaken in this area on the number who are registered. It seems that the problem may not be on quite the scale that some people think, given that earlier we were debating the problems relating to 3.5 million people who are denied votes—I do not want to go over the issue—because they are not registered. If there is any information that could be supplied in this area, it would help us all.
Lord Bach
I am grateful to my noble friend. He is quite right. There are a number of questions the Minister can bring us up to date with when he responds on this important amendment. This is a matter that has concentrated the minds of this House a great deal over a long period of time. I think the Committee would like to be brought up to date with how the Government see the relationship between this Bill and giving prisoners the right to vote and how that would be legislated for.
Lord McNally
My Lords, this has been an extremely interesting debate. Whether it is within the scope of the Bill is very debatable indeed. Nevertheless, a number of very valuable contributions have been made, not the least the fact that the noble Lords, Lord Corbett and Lord Knight, disagree about whether prisoners should have the vote. That is part of the dilemma that we have in Parliament. When I have answered Questions at this Dispatch Box as a Ministry of Justice Minister, it has been very clear that there are strong opinions on both sides. I have never concealed my view that, like the noble Baroness, I believe that giving certain prisoners the vote would be a very useful part of rehabilitation. The prospect of being—did the noble Baroness not say that? Sorry, I thought she had. For some prisoners who have perhaps never participated in any aspect of what my noble friend Lord Phillips referred to as civic life, it might be the thing that gets them thinking about their role in society when they leave prison. I have never found the concept of prisoner voting so horrific.
Although my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay sits where a PPS usually sits, he is not my Parliamentary Private Secretary although, my God, I wish he was because he comes in with a number of interventions that are genuinely to the benefit of the whole House, if occasionally to the discomfort of the Minister at the Dispatch Box at the time.
To take the last intervention by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, the numbers we are dealing with will be small. If you gave every prisoner the vote, you would be talking about 85,000, so you would be talking about a much smaller number spread across the whole of the country because, to clarify, the Government have already indicated that when they bring forward their proposals they will be on the basis of prisoners being able to vote in their home constituency. The issues that were raised about proxy and postal voting and the other matters relating to this could, with great value, be looked at by the Electoral Commission. I know that it is looking very closely—
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
The Minister has used the expression “home constituency”. Could he be a little more specific about that? I have represented constituencies for a long time with several prisons in them. My understanding is that many of these men—my experience was exclusive with men—did not have homes. One of the problems that they had as individuals in society was that they were totally rootless. The idea that they could be identified as belonging to a particular place was very difficult to establish. To use expressions such as “home constituency” in this loose and glib way creates an impression that it can be very simply dealt with. It is rather more complex than that. He should talk to the people in the Box and get some better advice.
Lord McNally
I am trying to make an intelligent response. The noble Lord talks about glib responses. Would he like to suggest a term other than home constituency? The point has already been made in this debate that of course there are going to be difficulties about prisoners with no fixed abode. One of the other problems that we are looking at on rehabilitation is that too many of our prisoners leave prison with no fixed abode, which is almost an invitation to further offences.
Lord Maxton
Could I raise almost the opposite point of view? Many people who are in prison are already registered to vote at their home address. What is to stop them using the postal vote system to cast their vote, even though they are in prison? All it requires is for them to apply for it from that home address. The postal vote arrives at their home. Some relative takes it in to them, they cast their vote, the relative takes it back, puts it in the post and they have voted. Or are we going to use prison records as part of the access data?
Lord McNally
The noble Lord is right. That may already be going on. I must say that smuggling ballot papers in and out of prison is the least of the problems that we have at the moment.
Lord Grenfell
I seem to remember that just before the general election, at about one in the morning, we had a very interesting debate on this question. I regret greatly that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, is not in his place, because we rehearsed all of this before and he had some very interesting statistics. It might be worth going back and looking at Hansard to see what he said and what the responses were.
Lord McNally
I am quite sure that we will refer back to that. Indeed, I am sure that if the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, knew that we were going to go down this byway this evening, he would have been here. I know how assiduous he is on these matters. But the fact is that these matters will be covered in that—
Lord Thomas of Gresford
Does the Minister agree that if the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is right, the absence of a vote is not the only problem that prisoners have to face? If they do not belong to any particular constituency, they have no parliamentary representation and nobody who can act on their behalf in dealing with the Government.
Lord McNally
Each Member has to make their own decision. It is interesting, though, going back to another issue—
Lord McNally
Deferential as I am to the noble Lord, Lord Reid, I have just been asked one question and I had not even got to the third word. It is about that, is it? Go on, then.
Lord Reid of Cardowan
I was about to give the Minister the answer. He will know that prisoners can be represented by the local Member of Parliament. I did it very often for Shotts prison. I would go and meet them occasionally. On one occasion, I offered three dates to the Shotts lifers association; none of them was convenient for it. There is a manner of representation for those in prison, whether or not they vote.
Lord McNally
Now that the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, is safely out of the way, I am able to say that I hope some of the people below the Bar are keeping careful note, because some really good advice is being given here. It illustrates a point that was made earlier: that different Members of Parliament face different problems. Surely the Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight will have a caseload that reflects the existence of major prisons on the island.
The boundary review will be based on the register as of 1 December 2010, which will be before any legislation concerning prisoner voting rights is in place. We have determined that we will deal with this matter. I am not in the habit of scoring cheap party political points—your Lordships know that it is not my style—but in less than eight months we have addressed a problem that the previous Government sat on for six years. It will require careful study. I hope that the Electoral Commission will look at some of the issues that have been raised. I do not believe that this amendment is the place to deal with them. There will be a full and final statement of the Government’s intention in these matters. However, I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, and others, and underlined by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, that we are accepting the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights. To continue to defy it exposes us possibly to being sued on quite a grand scale and to enormous cost to the taxpayer. Even those who grit their teeth at the thought of giving prisoners voting rights might like to put that in their calculations. However, it cannot be in the current calculations of this Bill. It is an important matter to raise and it will be drawn to the attention of the Electoral Commission. I hope that, before they have their debate down the corridor, members of all parties will read the contributions that have been made this evening, because they will be a valuable contribution to the debate that Mr Jack Straw and Mr Davis are planning in Westminster Hall. In the mean time, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Corbett of Castle Vale
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this important debate. I said in moving the amendment that this was not the time and place for a long debate about the merits or otherwise of giving certain categories of prisoner the vote. I also take on board what many noble friends on this side of the Committee have intimated about some of the perils of getting involved in this area.
I had one of the two national youth treatment centres in my former constituency of Birmingham Erdington, Glenthorne. It did a magnificent job with some of the most disturbed and chaotic young people in the country—14 year-olds convicted of murder, rape and offences of that kind. During one general election, each of the candidates was invited to go in and talk to some of the inmates and answer questions. The first question that I was asked came from a 15 year-old and was about income tax levels. I thought that this showed a very commendable interest in current affairs. On the Friday, about a week ahead of the election, the governor of Glenthorne phoned me and said, “I have got some very good news for you, Robin: you came top of the poll”. I immediately said to him, “Eugene, do me a favour, please, will you keep this quiet?”.
I thank the Minister for his assurance that he will draw the attention of the Electoral Commission to this matter but I am unconvinced about his reasons for not wanting to do something about it in the Bill. I understand what he said about the register last year being used as the basis for the Electoral Commission’s considerations under the Bill but, nevertheless, provision could be made for what we anticipate is going to come. The Government have the votes in both Houses now to get their will, as we know, so surely it is sensible to make the provision now rather than having to do so later.
None the less, I again thank noble Lords for their interest in this matter. We will return to it in good time and I seek the leave of the House to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Maples, I beg to move Amendment 66C.My noble friend has not vouchsafed to me the precise rationale behind his deceptively attractively simple amendment but I shall draw to his attention any answer in Hansard which my noble friend the Minister gives to him, if such a reply is given.
Now that Amendment 66C has been moved, I shall speak to Amendment 78B, which stands in my name and the names of my noble friends Lord Jenkin of Roding and Lord Newby. In introducing the amendment I should refer to my personal association with the City as the parliamentary constituency which I had the privilege to represent as Member for the City of London and Westminster South, as it then was, between 1977 and 1997, and then for the Cities of London and Westminster between 1997 and 2001.
The amendment aims to recognise the position of special authorities. It is aimed at the City of London, which has failed to make it into a very short list of constituencies subject to special provision on account of their particular characteristics even though the City’s individuality has been recognised throughout history. The Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986, which currently governs boundary reviews, continued that recognition. This Bill does not. The effect of the amendment is to require the whole of the City of London to be contained within one parliamentary constituency, as provided for by the current legislation.
As your Lordships will not need reminding, the City of London has existed as a discrete community for a very long time. It had evolved a legal personality by 1189 which, as noble Lords may recall, is the beginning of legal memory. Accordingly, the City Corporation which administers the square mile does not owe its existence to Parliament. Parliament has, however, underwritten the City’s rights and privileges. One of the very few remaining statutory provisions confirming the Magna Carta still in force is Chapter 9 of an Act of 1297 confirming the City’s liberties and customs under the charter.
The current legislation on parliamentary constituencies affecting the City is largely the product of the past 75 years. It is particularly relevant because the Bill marks a substantial departure in the electoral treatment of the City of London.
Permanent Boundary Commissions were established by the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 1944. At that time the City of London had no less than two Members of Parliament, and that situation was preserved by the 1944 Act. There was then a business vote in parliamentary elections, as well as a voting entitlement of husbands or wives of occupiers of business premises, entitlements which were removed by the Representation of the People Act 1948. In consequence of those changes, the City of London’s electorate diminished to 4,542. The City was then linked up with the former seat of Westminster Abbey and called the Cities of London and Westminster constituency. To complete the picture, during the period of my incumbency between the February 1974 and 1997 general elections it was named the City of London and Westminster South constituency. Noble Lords will note that the one constant throughout has been its reference to the City of London.
When the changes were made in 1948, it was never suggested that splitting up the City’s relatively tiny parliamentary electorate between different constituencies would be an appropriate option. More than that, there was a specific provision in that Act and the further one which followed soon afterwards, the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 1949, which required the whole of the City to be contained in one constituency. That is echoed by the supportive Amendment 85C in this group tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town. Although that amendment goes further than our amendment, the concept is therefore potentially bipartisan. That provision has been repeated in the legislation since and is included in Rule 3 set out in Schedule 2 to the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986.
The effect of this Bill through the replacement of Schedule 2 to the 1986 Act by a new schedule is to remove the provision requiring the City to be contained within one parliamentary constituency. It is perhaps a little surprising that the provision has been removed without a specific repeal. Magna Carta is without doubt a constitutional measure, and so therefore is the Act of 1297 which preserves the City’s liberties and customs. The Bill your Lordships are considering is also a constitutional measure. There is modern legal authority which has been much referred to by academic lawyers giving evidence to the EU Scrutiny Committee in the other place on the European Union Bill suggesting that a constitutional provision requires specific statutory repeal.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Will the noble Lord give way? We are having trouble hearing him, but that might just be the audio arrangements in the Chamber. Can he explain in one sentence what he is actually trying to do? We think that his amendment is a nimby amendment, but we are not quite sure.
Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, with whom I have duelled on a number of occasions. I shall try to move closer to some form of microphone. I hope that that is better. By the time that I have concluded my remarks, he will recognise exactly what I am seeking to do and why I am doing it in so discreet a manner.
Schedule 11 to the Bill includes in Part 2 the provisions to be repealed, but the 1297 Act does not feature there or in Parts 2 and 3 of Schedule 10, which deal with amendments to existing legislation. I do not wish to make too much of this because a great deal, not least interpretation, is uncertain when dealing with statutes of such antiquity. In the City of London context, significant elements of the franchise are, however, covered by the law of custom, which the 1297 Act protects. This prompts me to query whether the existing very specific provision relating to the City of London, which has been included in the legislation governing parliamentary constituencies until the appearance of this Bill, was inserted in deference to the Act of 1297. Perhaps the Minister might be prepared to offer an observation on the provenance of the existing provision when he replies.
I do not think that I need to exercise any great powers of persuasion to convince your Lordships that the City is demographically atypical. Its administration is quite different from that of the London boroughs. It has a local business franchise as well as a residential one, and business dominates. It currently has 5,939 parliamentary electors, which is slightly more than in 1948 but still very small in comparative terms. For example, a typical ward in the City of Westminster—the other half of my former constituency—has between 7,000 and 8,000 voters.
Having said all this about the constituency and the manner of representing it, I recognise that the Bill before your Lordships’ House lays down precise rules for the conduct of future boundary reviews. I also appreciate that there is a strong desire on the part of the Government to avoid special cases other than those which the Bill itself identifies. Recognising the constraints, I believe that the amendment does not simply seek to reimpose the requirements in the current Act that the City should be part of a single constituency. Rather, it proposes such an outcome where “practicable” —to quote from the amendment—with wording that has been specifically devised to avoid special pleading and to rely on uniqueness.
The amendment would create a strong presumption that this will be the result without making it an absolute. That is the effect of paragraph (1) in the amendment, which also relates the requirement to a “special authority”, a term defined in paragraph (3) in the amendment. In the Local Government Finance Act 1988, which is referred to there, the term “special authority” is defined as an authority covering an area with a population of less than 10,000 whose gross rateable value divided by its population is more than £10,000. In other words, the reference is to an area that is primarily commercial and not residential. The only geographical location to satisfy that definition is the City of London, which simply goes to reinforce how exceptional it is; hence my claim for uniqueness.
Avoiding specific reference to the City of London in the amendment avoids any suggestion of potential hybridity and, therefore, any need for me to discuss it. Paragraph (2) in the amendment is modelled on Schedule 2 to the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986, which requires the City of London to appear in the name of the constituency that includes the City. As noble Lords would expect, I believe the continuation of this practice to be entirely appropriate. I hope that the Minister feels that I have given enough to provide him with the encouragement to look favourably on the City's treatment under future boundary reviews. I beg to move.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
The amendment in my name is, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, has said, slightly firmer in that it leaves out the words “where practicable”, and asks that a constituency shall exist,
“which shall include the whole of the City of London”.
It does not mean only that, but it should certainly include the City of London. I have to confess that when I read the amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Brooke, Lord Jenkin and Lord Newby. I did not understand it, which is why I tabled this amendment. I wondered at that time, “Dick Whittington, where are you when we need you? What is happening to the City of London?”. I was then taken to one side and it was explained that the amendment that has just been spoken to is in effect the same and is to preserve the City of London.
As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, has said, the City of London has been a special case for longer than anyone’s memory, even in this sage House. Its rights and privileges, including its entitlement to parliamentary representation, were provided for in the Magna Carta, a copy of which I believe hangs behind where the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, is sitting—or not quite; I have just been corrected on the geography. The Magna Carta specifically allowed for the City of London’s privileges, which were preserved by an Act in the thirteenth century.
The present Bill removes the current bit of legislation that is set out in the 1986 Act, which requires there to be a constituency that includes the whole of the City of London and the name of which shall refer to the City of London. It has continued for centuries, not just more recently, as a constituency. Recently, however, the words “City of London” have to form part of the name of a parliamentary constituency. Even these words were inserted into the name of the GLA division, which is now, I think, City and East London. More recently, as has been mentioned, in 2000 the rules for redistribution of seats again preserved the constituency.
There is also the interesting constitutional point, which has been touched on, that the current Bill has been characterised as a constitutional measure and accepted as such by being taken on the Floor of the House in the other place. The early 1297 Act is also a constitutional measure, as has been mentioned, but there has been no provision to amend that.
There are, as has been referred to, many legal arguments. I will spare the House the details that I have here. What is interesting, as far as it affects this House, this Committee and the Bill in front of us, is that the existing provision for a constituency that will include the whole of the City of London, as well as the name, will cease to exist if the Bill is passed. It will not automatically mean that the City as we know it will be split, but it allows for that as an outcome, because there will be no preservation of the boundaries around that. It is important for this House to consider some of the same comments that were made earlier, in the case of the Isle of Wight, of an island surrounded by water.
Lord Winston
I am finding it quite difficult to understand the noble Baroness’s argument, simply because there is so much chatter around her. I am sure that it would be courteous to her if we listened to the argument that she is presenting to the House.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I am grateful for that bit of advice, because I was finding it extremely hard to speak.
Historically, there has been a recognition, including in the boundaries, that the City of London is a special geographical area, that its boundaries are special and that that uniqueness should be recognised in the way in which the boundaries and the name of the constituency exist for election to the other place. The Bill would put an end to that and to the special nature of the City, which it is recognised should be a special part of the voice in the other place.
It is as important to take account of locality and the commonality of interests, which we have discussed, in this particular locality as in many others—as with the Isle of Wight. In the City we have an area with very special sorts of employers, its own police force and mayor. It has its own museums and theatres, too. When I was a member of the Financial Services Consumer Panel, I worked very closely with the financial world and took great recognition of how the City plays host to and is an ambassador for that financial part of our community. Of course, it has a small electorate, but for local elections it has a much larger one that is not recognised in the parliamentary boundaries. There is a recognition that, with the number of people who travel to work there and the identity of interests—it often has to talk to the Government—it is a very special area. It is also special in that it talks to the European Union, particularly on some of the negotiations over solvency or other things that different parts of your Lordships' House discuss at other times. This needs its own political representation.
Noble Lords might not expect to hear any of that from someone from this side of the House, but the issue is one of locality. It is similar to the commonality of interests, which I believe the drawing of boundaries for parliamentary representation should respect. I tabled Amendment 85C to recognise that special area at the very centre of the capital—of this great city of ours. We would be wise to preserve those boundaries, not necessarily as a single constituency but to ensure that the whole of the City is within the same boundary and that the name “City of London” remains with that constituency.
Lord Jenkin of Roding
After that eloquent speech, I can be extremely brief. I very much appreciate what the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, has said on this subject. She obviously knows a great deal about it. I had Epping Forest in my constituency, and the Conservatives represented the City as the body that ran Epping Forest. I add one thing. The noble Baroness made the point that this should be a completely non-party issue. I have a long quotation, but at this hour of the night I shall keep it very short. I shall quote what Mr Herbert Morrison said at the time of the 1944 Act, when there was some suggestion that perhaps the City organisations should disappear. He said:
“the City of London occupies an extraordinary and unique place in British history and in the history of British local government”.
He went on:
“it is such a special place that, if we can possibly help it, we will not destroy its Parliamentary identity”.—[Official Report, Commons, 12/10/44; col. 1993-94.].
The noble Baroness has adumbrated what might happen if the City were redistributed among its neighbouring authorities. That could cause great difficulty for those who seek to represent those areas and the City in the other place. It could make for considerable complications when determining priorities and matters of that sort.
Of course, this does not affect the City's government of its own. It is a bicameral legislature. It is sometimes argued by historians that our Parliament was based originally on the bicameral legislature of the City, which is why my noble friend who moved this amendment said that the City does not owe itself to this House; we owe ourselves to the City.
I hope that noble Lords on all sides of the House will recognise that this is a strong case. As my noble friend pointed out, this is a body that is less than the size of a normal ward in London. With its tremendous historic and constitutional position, it really should not be split up but should be added as a single entity to another constituency—whether Westminster or one of the others. So be it. That is for the Boundary Commissioners. We seek to argue—I say this with some force to my noble friend—that it would be an act of constitutional outrage if the City were split up between a number of local authorities. I strongly support the amendment spoken to by my noble friend and by the noble Baroness.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Amendment 80 is in this group so it would be appropriate for me to say a few words in relation to that now. With no disrespect to the previous three speakers, who talked about the City of London and the capital city, I am not a nationalist, as everyone here knows, but I must point out that London is only one of the capital cities in the United Kingdom. Edinburgh is the second capital city of the United Kingdom.
I will be accused of special-case pleading, but a lot of the arguments put forward in relation to the Isle of Wight, which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, dealt with in his usual careful way, apply to other areas as well. I do not have the Hansard yet, but I could quote from the eloquent arguments put forward by the noble Lords, Lord Fowler and Lord Forsyth, about the Isle of Wight and relate them to other parts of the United Kingdom. However, I want to argue a wider range in relation to the capital city of Edinburgh.
Amendment 80 would have five preserved constituencies in the city of Edinburgh council area. When I stood in West Edinburgh in 1970 and in Pentlands in 1974 we had seven constituencies in the city of Edinburgh. I never won Pentlands or West Edinburgh on those occasions and had to move down to Ayrshire ultimately to get elected. I gave a graphic description of the constituency that I used to represent at about six in the morning on Monday or Tuesday; I think it was Tuesday for normal human beings outside but Monday for parliamentarians. Then, prior to 2005 Edinburgh was reduced to having six constituencies. My noble friend Lady Liddell of Coatdyke was responsible. I do not blame her in any way, but she was the Secretary of State who had the duty and the responsibility to reduce the number to six on that occasion. Subsequently, from 2005, the number of constituencies has now been reduced to five. Yet, during all this time, the population of Edinburgh has been rising substantially while that of Glasgow has been going down.
In Edinburgh East, represented brilliantly now by Sheila Gilmore, there are 74,505 electors; in Edinburgh North and Leith, represented—brilliantly, I had better say also—by Mark Lazarowicz there are 74,762 electors; in Edinburgh South, which Ian Murray now represents, again brilliantly, there are 68,884 electors; and, in Edinburgh South West, which is represented by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, even more brilliantly—or had I better say, equally brilliantly?
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
With distinction, then. There are 75,787 constituents there. In Edinburgh West, which is represented currently by a Liberal Democrat—equally brilliantly, I had better say, since the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, is replying to this debate and I seek his support on this—there are 70,603 constituents represented by Mike Crockart.
If the quota is 76,000 and the plus or minus allowance in relation to it is 5 per cent, all those constituencies will have to be looked at. If it is plus or minus 10 per cent then, if my arithmetic is right, at least three or probably four of the constituencies would be not immutable but able to continue at their present size and with their present boundary, without violating that variation. That would be a sensible thing to do, but in Edinburgh—we were talking earlier on in a debate about taking account of projected increases in population—there are substantial projected population increases. As my noble friend Lord O’Neill will know, because he lives in the area, in Edinburgh North and Leith there is expected to be extensive population growth.
Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan
I am grateful to my noble friend for allowing me to intervene but he very quickly passed over this fact: I do not live in Edinburgh, but live in Leith. I am not a Leith nationalist. Indeed, it could be argued that I live in the village of Newhaven, which was never the subject of a plebiscite, as Leith was in the 1920s—a very controversial plebiscite that the people of Leith have always disputed.
I draw it to my noble friend’s attention, and I do not wish in any way to diminish the strength of his case, that it is fair to say that adjacent to Edinburgh and slightly to the east is the town of Musselburgh. As I am sure he is aware, although it has enjoyed a presence in both the Edinburgh East and East Lothian constituencies, the proud boast—in fact, the chant—of the Musselburghers was that Musselburgh was a borough when Edinburgh was only a town. Therefore, we have to be a wee bit careful here when we start claiming historical precedents, first, in respect of Edinburgh and Leith, where you have to take account of the fact that the Leithers are a significant group within the city; and secondly, if we are to extend the primacy of representation and the boundaries of constituencies, and ignore the claims of the good burghers of Musselburgh, we are getting into rather dangerous waters.
I know that my noble friend spends a lot of time swimming in those waters and that it has always been the hallmark of his political contributions. However, at this stage of the day—or, perhaps, the night—we have to be a wee bit sensitive to some of those feelings, particularly at this time given the fortunes of the football club which resides in Leith. At the moment, we are suffering. We do not need more pain because of his reluctance to give us our proper place in the panoply of Edinburgh constituencies.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
That was a very accurate, rather long and not very helpful intervention from my noble friend. I ask everyone here to forgive him for it. I forgive him as well, because he has gone through a very painful experience. The football club that he supports—the lesser of the two Edinburgh clubs—when we were struggling through debate here the other night was beaten by lowly Second Division Ayr United in the Scottish Cup. So he is suffering a little and we understand that. In his lifetime and my lifetime—that is quite a long time for both of us—Leith and Granton and Newhaven have all been part of the city of Edinburgh. He was a distinguished member of the Edinburgh City Labour Party.
Lord Winston
Surely this is one of the best arguments for the complete separation of Scotland and England.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I will have to be very careful because I am not a nationalist and I do not want to do anything that would argue the case for separation, but the city of Edinburgh has a great history, as I am sure my noble friend would agree. I think there is a very strong case for it having five separate constituencies. My noble friend should take account of the fact that I am currently an elected representative for an area that includes the city of Edinburgh. I am putting forward my argument today because I have been approached by the four Labour Members in the city of Edinburgh, who represent four of the five constituencies and who feel very strongly about this. That includes Mark Lazarowicz, whose constituency includes Leith.
Because of the growth that I was describing in the Leith area we expect about 25,000 additional residents on the waterfront and Newhaven. Creating five constituencies in Edinburgh would in no way breach the plus or minus 5 or 10 per cent thresholds that we have discussed earlier—certainly not 10 per cent and probably not 5 per cent. It would allow those five constituencies to be agreed within the one local government area, the City of Edinburgh Council. Other constituencies in Scotland, apart from the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland, which have already been dealt with, could be dealt with moving out from Edinburgh, creating them one after the other as we move around Scotland.
I hope we can give this kind of guidance to the Boundary Commission. If we are able to take special account of the special needs of the Isle of Wight, I hope we will also take account of the special needs of the city of Edinburgh.