Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and Lord Lipsey

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of Straight Statistics, a group working against statistical abuse by the media, companies, advertisers and the Government. The Minister, in an earlier debate, used in justification for the cut in the number of Members of Parliament by 50 an alleged saving of £12.5 million—he will correct me if I have this figure wrong, as my hearing is not as good as it was. He is nodding in approval, but I cannot approve of that statistic.

If you take the average cost of each MP and multiply it by 50, you get to the figure of £12.5 million or thereabouts. However, that is of course an entirely phoney way to do it. There will be more constituency cases and more people for each MP to write letters to. The workload will not change. The only thing that you save by having 50 fewer MPs is the MPs’ salaries, with a total saving of about £3 million. Perhaps the difference between £12.5 million and £3 million is regarded as insignificant—

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I wonder if my noble friend would take that a little further. If the Government want to save £12.5 million, they have to make sure that costs elsewhere do not rise. The level of work needed to be done by the Electoral Commission will involve the employment of more staff—a recurrent expense year on year. I do not think that the Government have thought about that. If they are going to tell us what this measure is going to save—and the only argument that I have heard from the Government is that this will save money—I think that we have the right to know precisely what it will cost in other areas, so that we can see the real costs.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. There are bags of extra costs in this Bill, including £80 million well spent on the AV referendum—well spent, that is, if it gets the result that both the noble Baroness and I would like to see. I am, however, confining myself to the saving on MPs, because that is the one argument that the Minister has made this afternoon. My point is that he has used a totally bogus figure—inadvertently, I am sure. If he wants to dispute this later, he can put a letter in the Library and we can no doubt correspond about it. It is extremely worrying if a Minister has inadvertently misled—