Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Baroness Boothroyd Excerpts

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs]

I am grateful to my noble friend for that intervention. There are so many quotes that one could bring to bear. Let me offer the House another one:

“votes should have an equal value, an equal weight, whether you are in the farthest reaches of rural Cornwall or in the inner cities, and whether you are in England, Wales, Northern Ireland or Scotland”.—[Official Report, 15/11/2010; col. 592.]

I hope the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, does not mind me quoting his words; they are very fine words and I agree with him entirely.

There is another one; I wonder whether noble Lords can guess who said this:

“It is barmy to have general elections on the basis of boundary reviews that, by the time they come to be tested, are nine years out of date”.—[Official Report, 16/11/2010; col. 764.]

I suspect that the earthiness of that approach gives the game away. I am sad that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is not in his place to stand up and take a bow for it.

Let me go to the words of the Deputy Prime Minister, because he has talked endlessly on the matter, talking about the package of coalition reforms and the crucial linkage between Lords reform and boundaries. Speaking about the coalition’s commitment to Lords reform, he said it was,

“a commitment to deliver legislation, and indeed elections, come 2015”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/9/2012; col. 38.]

It may seem petty of me, but if you go back to the coalition agreement and bother to read what it says on the tin, you will find that no such commitment ever existed. The agreement talked about many things—about setting up a committee and bringing forward proposals—but unlike many other parts of the coalition agreement, there was absolutely no commitment to legislation. There was no mention of whipping the vote and not a whisper of a date like 2015. I have the coalition agreement here. It is very clear about what it says and what it does not say—unless any of my noble friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches want to draw my attention to any other part of the coalition agreement which says otherwise. No, I did not think so.

However, the agreement does talk about legislation, and I am going to be petty and quote the wretched thing again. It talks about legislation—wait for it—

“for the creation of fewer and more equal sized constituencies”.

It is illuminating stuff—this little booklet—when you read it. There was the linkage, a very direct linkage, but not with Lords reform. The linkage was with the referendum Bill. It was in the same sentence; there was not even a full stop between those commitments, which is why I and my colleagues held our noses and eventually helped pass that referendum Bill. I personally crawled through that Lobby to support it. So where now is the other side of the deal?

Nevertheless, the Deputy Prime Minister keeps going on, and on, and on, about some linkage with Lords reform. Where did that linkage come from? In my search for enlightenment, I decided to put down a Written Question, in which I asked the Government,

“whether they envisage a direct link between proposals for reform of the House of Lords and proposals for the revision of constituency boundaries”.

I thought that was sure to clarify things, particularly as the Answer came from my noble friend Lord McNally. His signature was on it. I always enjoy getting notes from my noble friend Lord McNally; they are unfailingly kind and helpful, and this was no exception. This is what it said:

“These are different elements of the Government’s constitutional and political reform agenda and there is no formal link between them”.—[Official Report, 21/3/2012; cols. WA 167-68]

I may be too dull to understand what that means because it seems to me that the Answer is that there is no formal link. If my noble friend were here, I would thank him for his characteristic honesty. So I think we have reached the truth of this matter: there is no linkage and there never was. It is a distraction, an excuse, an alibi and an invention. The truth is that this is solely, sadly and cynically because the Deputy Prime Minister did not get his way on Lords reform. Now he wants to exact a little retribution. It is nothing less than a great political sulk.

Those on the Benches beside me are my noble friends. Of course they are; many of them are dear personal friends. They are men and women of principle, but right now you would need the telescope at Jodrell Bank to discover where those principles are hiding. I do not blame them. This one came from the top, but the Deputy Prime Minister has form. He tried to fix the voting system to his own advantage with the referendum, and he failed. He tried to fix the House of Lords, and he failed at that, too. Now, once again in pursuit of his own advantage, he is trying to fix the next election. I have to say that if he were a plumber, I would never let him anywhere near my bathroom.

The issue before us underpins all our freedoms: one voter, one vote, one equal vote. It does not get simpler than that. That is all we are asking for. The Liberal Democrats were asking for that too until ambition and their leader’s manipulation got in the way. A lot can be said about his manoeuvre. Perhaps we might use the language that he used about this House, the House of Lords. It was so unnecessary. We could say that his manipulation is cynical, illegitimate, disgraceful and, to use his own words, “an affront to democracy”.

This should not be about partisan advantage: we should be concerned about creating a level playing field for the voters. That is what fair votes are all about. That is what I hoped Liberal Democrats believed in. We fight for what we believe in with a passion but when in politics we come to fight for what we do not believe in, we hold ourselves hostage. This is not the coalition’s finest hour. I hope that it gets better than this.

I should warn my noble friends that when they go into the Lobby this afternoon, into what will become that hall of shame, they had better not do so with their heads held high. There is a better chance that they will be recognised as Liberal Democrats. That fact will be taken down, and at the next election it will be used as evidence against them in every constituency in this country.

[Baroness Boothroyd]

My Lords, as I have been mentioned in earlier exchanges, perhaps I might have a word, which will be very brief because I commented at length on this matter in mid-November. Not wishing to be tedious or repetitious, I shall make only a couple of points. If there was any success in the Speakership of the Commons during my period of office, much of it was due to the advice and support that I received from the clerks. I have to admit that there were a couple of occasions when I overruled that advice, one of which was against convention. But I did so because I thought that it was right to provide an opportunity for debate on a contentious issue which was of public interest and of concern. The roof did not fall in.

We have no such arbitrator with authority to make a decision in your Lordships’ House but we are often reminded that we are a self-regulating House. While, of course, we must examine the advice of the Public Bill Office and the clerk, there can be no authority that can in advance rule an amendment out of order. The bottom line is that the admissibility or otherwise of an amendment ultimately can be determined only by the House itself. When I spoke last year, I suggested that the Government allow this House to determine the issue for itself and I am delighted that we have the opportunity of so doing today.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I will be brief but I want to make one point on admissibility before turning to my main points concerning the substance of this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hill, who we are delighted to see in his place, made a moving appeal to my noble friend Lord Hart to withdraw his amendment. All of us will have felt the force of that even if we cannot go with him.

However, at the end, he put it as if it was down to my noble friend Lord Hart to decide this and that no one else could have stopped the situation that we are in today. After our last debate, when this Bill was withdrawn by the Government, it would have been perfectly easy for Ministers to put down a Motion in another place or in this House saying that they wanted to proceed with the electoral review and that if it was lost they would agree that they would not introduce the orders in November. It would have been perfectly easy, perfectly in order and there would have been no difficulty about it. It would have been a clear decision.

They did not do so and we all suspect their motives for not doing so. As we read in the papers, the Prime Minister was determined to see whether he could get the various minority parties in the other place to back the change and carry it through but it was going to take a little while. That is fine, but we should be careful about getting on too many high horses on this matter without checking that our girths are properly tightened.

My second point concerns the substance. I have heard a lot about fair votes this afternoon and the Chartists and all that. When you draw constituency boundaries you have to weigh off various things against each other. Equal weight for every vote is important but so is community integrity and so is the need to disrupt as little as possible the relationship between a Member of Parliament and his constituents: when you take one lot away and put another lot in it takes time for the relationship to form. These are matters of balance: the balance was entirely wrong for 5%. In a sentence: Gloucester Cathedral now sits in the middle of the Forest of Dean.

Intrinsic to the original Bill were the combination of moving from 650 to 600, the decision that the boundaries were going to be changed after every single election and the dreaded 5%. If it had been 10% we would not have had any difficulties in the first place. I am not saying that this is why some Members of this House may have changed their mind, but the argument has moved on and it has got much worse for the proponents of these boundary changes.

In these debates we have often heard from the leading academics in the field—David Rossiter, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie. They wrote on the subject in Parliamentary Affairs in 2012 and I need not add to what they said:

“Those recommendations—

that is to say the recommendations of the Boundary Commission which we are about to put into force if we pass the Government’s Bill unamended—

“were much more disruptive to the pre-existing constituency map than many had anticipated, and the outcome—should the proposed constituencies (or some variant of them) be finally adopted—will see much less continuity and reflection of community identities … As it stands, the outcome suggests that the underpinning theory of British representative democracy—that Members of Parliament represent places with clear identities—is being undermined”.

That is the constitutional case against this Bill and it is a case that has only come to light since we passed the previous Bill in those long winter nights two years ago. They also have something to say on the subject of individual electoral registration—the subject of this Bill—and tie individual registration closely with it. They say:

“If the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration is successful and the electoral rolls are more complete, the allocation of seats could change considerably”.

That is to say that the brand new registers we are getting under this are going to be another wholesale upheaval. As we get to grips with electoral registration and the electoral rolls are changed again and again and again as a result, there will be more upheavals to come. If we pass the Bill into law we will set a fire to the electoral map of Great Britain, to all the constituency and personal loyalties that have been incorporated within it and pledge ourselves to do the same thing again at every single election for all eternity. That is why I hope the amendment will be carried.