Oral Answers to Questions
Cat Smith Excerpts(4 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Amanda Milling
I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing that issue to the attention of the House. I recognise that the proposed River Thames scheme might have the potential to better protect thousands of homes, contribute to the local economy and increase the social and environmental value of the river. I understand that the Environment Agency has offered to brief him on the progress of the scheme, and I encourage him to take up that offer.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
During the pandemic, certain sectors and regions have been disproportionately hit by this economic downturn. In many cases, this is falling on the shoulders of those who are least able to carry it. In Lancashire, 82 businesses have collapsed in May alone and almost 19,000 jobs in the county have been lost during the pandemic. A failure to provide sector-specific, regionally focused support to those most at risk could end up costing many more jobs. What steps are the Government taking to apply a regional lens to this crisis and, in particular, to provide vital investment to counties such as Lancashire?
Amanda Milling
Mr Speaker, you will know that I know Lancashire very well, having lived there for 15 years myself. We recognise that every region and community will be feeling the impact of covid-19. That is why the Government have introduced unprecedented support for businesses and workers across the country to support them through this economic crisis.
Parliamentary Constituencies Bill
Cat Smith ExcerptsTuesday 14th July 2020
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Consideration of Bill Amendments as at 14 July 2020 - (14 Jul 2020)
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
With this it will be convenient to consider the following:
New clause 2—Allocation of constituencies—
‘(1) Rule 8 of Schedule 2 to the 1986 Act (the allocation method) is amended as follows.
(2) After rule 8(5) insert—
“(6) Notwithstanding the allocation of constituencies according to the allocation method set out in rule 8(2)(5), there must be a minimum allocation of constituencies as follows—
(a) Wales must be allocated at least 40 constituencies (including the protected constituency);
(b) Scotland must be allocated at least 59 constituencies (including the two protected constituencies);
(c) Northern Ireland must be allocated at least 18 constituencies; and
(d) the allocation of constituencies must be adjusted accordingly.”’
This new clause seeks to protect representation in the devolved nations by securing a minimum number of constituencies in each of the devolved nations.
New clause 3—Definition of “electorate”—
‘In rule 9(2) of Schedule 2 to the 1986 Act, for “whose names appear on the relevant version of a register of parliamentary electors” substitute “who are estimated by the Electoral Commission to be eligible to vote in an election, were they to register”’.
This new clause would change the definition of ‘electorate’ to include all potential electors, both those who are on an electoral roll and those who are not.
Amendment 1, page 2, line 19, leave out clause 2.
This amendment aims to maintain the status quo of parliamentary oversight within the boundary review process.
Cat Smith
It is a pleasure to speak again on the Bill, as it gives me the opportunity to put on the record the Labour party’s support for the boundary review in time for the next general election. I would like to start by thanking all the right hon. and hon. Members who served on the Bill Committee—in particular my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson), who regrets that he cannot be with us this afternoon.
Our current constituencies were drawn up on electorate data that is now nearly two decades old; we cannot go into the next election with constituencies based on data that will, by then, be a quarter of a century out of date. Our country and our communities look very different, and the review will take into account new electors as well as significant demographic shifts. A review is urgently needed, and the Opposition do not stand in the way of that.
Throughout the Bill’s passage, we have worked constructively to improve it for the good of our democracy, and there have been areas of distinct improvement along the way. The size of the House of Commons has varied massively over the centuries. The largest Commons, in 1918, came in at 707 MPs—they really would have struggled with the social distancing measures we are adhering to. However, certainly in the last two centuries, we have not dropped below 615 MPs. Reducing the number of MPs while maintaining the size of the Executive was always an affront to democracy, and I welcome the Minister’s U-turn on that matter. Given our departure from the European Union and this Government’s chaotic handling of the current pandemic, it is clear that there will be plenty of work for 650 MPs.
We supported and welcomed the amendment in Committee to use the March 2020 register for the new boundary review. It is important that we use the most accurate snapshot of our country to draw up our electoral boundaries. The inclusion of Ynys Môn as a protected constituency is something that the Labour party has long campaigned for, although I was surprised to see the Minister support it in Committee, given her party’s previous firm opposition to it. But then I remembered that the Tories may have an alternative motivation for suddenly recognising the island’s unique status. I welcome that recognition all the same.
Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)
I have been listening intently to what the hon. Lady has been saying, and at the very beginning of her speech she lamented the fact that it has been so long since we implemented the recommendations of a boundary review. The explanatory note to amendment 1, to which she is now speaking, says that the amendment
“aims to maintain the status quo”.
Does what she said not prove that the status quo has not been working, hence why we have brought forward this Bill?
Cat Smith
Quite the opposite: I am arguing that under the status quo the only blockage to the passing of a boundary review has been the Government, and they would, under this Bill, still have the power to put up the same block as they have the past two times that a boundary review has failed to go through this House. It is worth noting that if it was not for parliamentary oversight, we would have a 600-seat Parliament today. Perhaps that is an example of parliamentary scrutiny at its best.
John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is getting to the nub of the issue. The reason why the Government failed to put the past two boundary commission reviews to the House of Commons was that their stubbornness in sticking to 600 seats meant that they would not be carried. The fault lay with the Prime Minister rather than with the House of Commons. That is the real problem.
Cat Smith
My right hon. Friend made some thoughtful and interesting contributions in Committee and continues to do so on Report. The points he raised are entirely correct. The Government would do away with Parliament’s role in the process—a role that Parliament has always had. In short, the Bill removes the power from Parliament and hands it to the Executive. The Government’s justification for the change simply does not stack up. The Minister says that her Government are removing Parliament from the process to prevent delay and interference from MPs, but according to Professor Sir John Curtice—and who are we to challenge him?—delay and interference by the Executive will still be “perfectly possible”.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
I apologise for interrupting the shadow Minister’s train of thought, but she keeps repeating this “fact”, which is not a fact at all. The Bill actually takes away power from the Executive; it does not give the Executive more power, because it removes the reserve powers of Government to amend the boundaries. The hon. Lady needs to set the record straight; otherwise, she risks misinterpreting the Bill for a wider audience.
Cat Smith
I thank the right hon. Lady for her intervention, but I am afraid that I quite simply disagree. This Bill takes power away from the whole of Parliament and hands it to the Executive. After all, they are the ones who can table primary legislation and choose to bring forward or not to bring forward the report for a vote. The power has been in their hands, which is why we are in the mess that we are in today with boundaries that are 20 years out of date, and looking to be a quarter of a century out of date by the next election if we do not make progress with this Bill.
In her speech on Second Reading, the Minister stated that the removal of parliamentary oversight and approval would quicken the process, thereby avoiding wasting public time and money. If she is so concerned about wasting public time and money, why did she allow the commissioners to carry on with their sixth periodic review and then not bring it to Parliament for a vote?
New clause 1, which stands in my name and in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, is a pragmatic and constructive amendment. I very much hope that Members will consider supporting it. It seeks to alleviate the inevitable break-up of communities resulting from the too narrow 5% quota. While the commissioners should always aim to hit electoral quota, in some particularly challenging cases this new clause would allow them to have a greater flexibility of 7.5%. This 5% variance from electoral quota was first introduced at the sixth periodic review, and it was introduced alongside reducing the number of constituencies to 600. That is important because, at 600 constituencies, a 5% variance is approximately 4,000 electors either side of quota, but at 650 constituencies, which is what we have before us today, a 5% variance narrows and is approximately just 3,500 electors either side of quota, making it even more difficult to keep wards whole and communities together. The 5% variance needs to be adjusted in line with the number of constituencies. When we consider that the average urban ward in England is around 8,000 electors, we can appreciate the significance of needing at least 4,000 electors either side of quota to prevent the breaking up of wards and communities.
Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab)
A further point about the need for this 7.5% is that it would particularly help seats in Wales, where the geography of seats, including my own, covers three or four valley communities. The extra flex would allow communities to stay together, especially where the physical geography means that people cannot travel from one valley to another without going up and down the other. These sorts of changes, therefore, really do make a difference in lots of rural and ex-industrial communities that have, shall we say, not-flat land masses.
Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)
The hon. Lady talks about keeping communities together and about breaking up wards. Why does it matter if a ward is broken up? Surely communities are created through small building blocks. By discarding this almost obsession the Boundary Commission has had with entire wards, huge changes could be avoided and communities could stay together. Will she not support the idea that smaller building blocks are the way to create better constituencies that are community based, rather than artificial communities based on entire wards?
Cat Smith
I would argue that the wards, which are obviously drawn by the Local Government Boundary Commission, do actually reflect communities to a great extent. If we are to go down the path of splitting wards, we will end up with the ridiculous situation, like we did at the previous review, where constituencies such as Port Talbot had a shopping centre in one constituency and the high street in another constituency. My new clause seeks to minimise the chances of such ridiculous situations occurring again. Under the current Bill, the Commission will struggle to respect the factors laid out in rule five, which, of course, Members will know, are the existing constituencies, local government boundaries, local ties and geography.
During the evidence sessions of this Bill, the secretariat for the Boundary Commission for England spoke about the difficulties caused by this small tolerance, which makes it
“much harder to have regard to the other factors…such as the importance of not breaking local ties, and having regard to local authority boundaries and features of natural geography.”
He said:
“Basically, the smaller you make the tolerance, the fewer options we have…The larger you make it, the more options we have and the more flexibility…to have regard to the other factors”.––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 7, Q3.]
So while the Government keep saying the boundary commissions will listen to the views of communities in the drawing of the boundaries, some communities will literally be wasting their time putting forward those arguments if the restrictive quota will mathematically prevent the commissioners from respecting their views and the community ties.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
The hon. Lady raises the case of Port Talbot in a previous review. Does she not accept that this was actually one of the reasons why it should be easier for the boundary commissions to split wards, because the whole point of the Port Talbot proposals was that they have to come to those combinations because they are working with entire wards?
Cat Smith
I think in the case of Port Talbot it was the 5% quota that meant that that decision had to be reached. When we are talking about quotas, we know that internationally a larger quota is used and promoted as best practice for securing fair representation. Indeed, the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission’s code of good practice in electoral matters recommends allowing a standard permissible tolerance of an average of plus or minus 10%.
As the Minister knows, there is a consensus amongst respected experts such as David Rosser and Professor Charles Pattie who agree that the 5% rule causes significant disruption to community boundaries.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)
We have heard from the other side a suggestion that we should use polling districts as the building blocks, not wards, but is there not a problem with deviating from wards? Wards are agreed by an independent commission, whereas polling districts are decided based on the location of the local church hall for use as the polling station. Surely we need independent commissions that create the building blocks of wards that then form the building blocks of constituencies. The only way to do that is with the 10% or 7.5% variance.
Cat Smith
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the legal standing of polling districts. Wards that are drawn up by the local government boundary commission have that independence in terms of the boundaries that they represent, whereas polling districts are for administration of elections done by local councils and, as he says, can be decided basically on their proximity to a church hall.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) mentioned Wales earlier, and this restrictive quota will disproportionately impact Wales. I know that many more Welsh colleagues will express their concern about the geographical challenges that the quota will throw up in Wales. With mountains and valleys dividing communities, the task of creating constituencies that make sense to those communities becomes extremely difficult.
I shall conclude by highlighting the fatal flaw in the Government’s arguments on the 5% quota. Throughout the Bill’s progress, the Minister has argued that a robust boundary review with a 5% quota will magically ensure that every vote carries the same weight. But the Government’s central argument turns on the ludicrous suggestion that the 5% quota will achieve parity of representation for all electors across the United Kingdom. On what planet does every vote count equally in this country? Leaving aside the fact that there are so-called safe seats, which effectively disenfranchise huge swathes of the population at every election, it simply is not true that every vote would count equally as a result of the Bill. At any given election, in the region of 9 million eligible voters are incorrectly registered and lose out on their chance to vote, and millions more will join them with the Government’s voter ID plan set to lock more people out of democracy simply for not having the right form of ID.
The new boundaries will not be based on the reality of the British electorate, with millions of eligible voters missing from the register, so can the Minister stop rolling out the line that somehow a 5% quota will revolutionise our electoral system and suddenly make every vote count equally? The truth is that she knows exactly what measures will make our electoral system more equal, because 11 months ago the Electoral Commission made clear recommendations, including encouraging the introduction of automatic voter registration. The Government still have not responded to those recommendations, meaning that the electoral register to be used as the basis for these boundaries is incomplete and patchy at best. When will the Government start to prioritise democratic engagement?
It is clear that the Government’s central argument about making every vote count falls at the first hurdle and that their secondary argument about the removal of Parliament’s role preventing delays to the process just does not hold water. As Professor Sir John Curtice pointed out, the Government can easily delay the process. The Labour party fundamentally rejects the Government’s attempt to end parliamentary approval for new constituency boundaries, and we ask that Members think hard and long about the impact of removing Parliament from the process. In its current form, this Bill is an insult to the House.
Chloe Smith
I agree with my right hon. Friend. He knows that the Conservative party and the Government are absolutely committed to strengthening our Union and we do not believe that that would be achieved through new clause 2, which would undermine in many ways what ought to be an equality in the assessment of the voices in the Union and an equality between citizens that can be enjoyed across the nation.
I absolutely recognise the wider debate about what our nations and our Union consist of, although the hon. Member for Glasgow East would love to have nothing more to do with that debate—he would love to be nowhere near here today, and that breaks my heart. As much as I may say that I would love to see the back of him, of course I would not. I cannot wait to spend even more time discussing exactly this point with him and with anybody else who would like to join me in the debate about how to strengthen our Union, how to maintain excellent intergovernmental relations, how to help our nations work best together and how to help people across the nation to be as prosperous as they can. But new clause 2 is not the place to do that.
I thank the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) for tabling new clause 3. She was honest and sincere about what she is seeking to do with the amendment, which is to open up a valuable broader debate. I will talk a little about why the new clause would not quite do what is right, but let me say that the hon. Member’s instincts are admirable. We should all share the goal of being able to do the utmost for our constituents, whether they are registered to vote or not. Furthermore, we should all share the goal of wanting as many people on our electoral registers as possible. That is notwithstanding the fact that the Government believe that it is an important principle that our constituencies are based on the electoral registers.
On what we are doing to ensure that the registers are as accurate and complete as possible, the introduction of online registration has made it simpler and faster for people to register to vote; it takes as little as five minutes. This benefits everybody, including anybody who may previously have found it harder to make an application to register. We have developed a range of resources to promote engagement with our democracy and to encourage people to register to vote, all of which are available on gov.uk and are aimed widely—at registration officers, civil society groups, teachers and more.
We are also in the process of implementing changes to the annual canvass of all residential properties in Great Britain, which will improve its efficiency greatly and will allow officers to focus their efforts on those who they may traditionally have found harder to get to register. That is important for accuracy and completeness. Since the introduction of individual electoral registration, the registers in Great Britain are as complete and more accurate than before; that is an important base of the record.
I share the intentions of the hon. Member for North East Fife of wanting to see more people registered and to see us listening to all in our community, so let me turn to why new clause 3 would not necessarily work as well as might be wished. Its core problem is that it deals with estimates and moves away from facts. It asks the Electoral Commission to do a very large job of estimation when, in fact, we already have firm data that the process can be based on. It would be a huge and unnecessary task to set off, bringing further elements of risk and challenge to the work of the Boundary Commissions.
The work of the Boundary Commissions should be based on those who have registered as electors. That principle counts those who want to have their views represented in Parliament. That is what a Member of Parliament is for and that is what voting for Parliament is for. It is a good principle that that is the basis on which we work, and it is not new, having been the case since 1944.
We should encourage more people to register to vote. I think the new clause does a slightly different thing. I welcome the fact that the hon. Lady referred to it as a probing amendment, and I hope she will not press it to a Division. Before I move on, I welcome her support for our overseas voters. She will know that there is much work to do to enable more overseas voters to register The Government are committed, as I hope she is, to ending the injustice of the abrupt disenfranchisement that they face after 15 years overseas.
Finally, I cannot support the intention of amendment 1. The effect of clause 2, which amendment 1 would remove, is to bring much-needed certainty to the boundary review process. It gives confidence that the recommendations of the independent boundary commissions will be brought into effect without interference or delay. They develop their proposal through a robust process that lasts over a two to three-year period with extensive public consultation. Those impartial recommendations ought to be brought into effect promptly without any further wastage of public money and without any question of their independence. Clause 2 provides for that, and it does so by a very normal mechanism.
I just want to pick up one point that was made. The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood tried to go to town on the nature of an Order in Council. Let me break it to her, in case she is not aware, that the last Labour Government used more than 300 of them between 1997 and 2010. They are a normal constitutional legislative instrument. They should be recognised as being part of the status quo. She is either misreading the Bill or wilfully misrepresenting it—I do not know which. She did so in Committee, and she is doing so again today.
The Order in Council is not the villain that the hon. Lady makes it out to be, and nor is there an increase in powers in the Bill for the Executive. The opposite is the case. Countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand use similar approaches. A string of respected academics voiced their support for this change during Committee when giving evidence. Memorably, one in particular said:
“It is probably better that MPs set the terms of the exercise for the Boundary Commission behind a veil of ignorance…without knowing exactly what the particular outcomes would be for them as individual MPs.”––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 57, Q117.]
The Government believe that clause 2 is an important and principled change. It will ensure that expert recommendations are brought into effect independently with no further delay.
It provides a better outcome for people, and I urge the hon. Lady not to press the amendment to a Division.
Cat Smith
I did not think it was possible to have as much fun as we had in Committee, but this afternoon has perhaps run it quite close. Of course, there is no comparison between three hours and four days. I put on record my thanks to the members of the Committee who have also made contributions to today’s debate.
The Labour party supports the democratic principles of the boundary review. We recognise that this review is urgently needed, given the out-of-date boundaries we currently have. The idea of constituencies being of broadly equal size and the idea of constituencies also taking account of local community ties are not mutually exclusive, and I urge Members to support that amendment. Labour’s new clause would provide for the flexibility needed to create constituencies that communities can have confidence in and identify with.
Most critically, I encourage Members across the House to support amendment 1. The Government must not use the Bill to strengthen their own power at the expense of parliamentary power. It is an insult to this House, and it sets a dangerous precedent for future legislation.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Cat Smith
I will keep my comments brief, as I covered the Labour party’s stance in my speech on Report. I put on the record that I am disappointed that the Government rejected the new clause and amendment that would have improved the Bill. The process of requiring MPs to vote on the final report from the commission is an important safety net, without which we would have just 600 MPs today.
We do not seek to delay the progress of the Bill. As I said in my opening remarks, we need new boundaries at the next election; the data on which our constituencies are built looks to be a quarter of a century old. We certainly hope their lordships will look again at clause 2, as we still have significant concerns about the Government’s approach to that matter.
With that, I draw my remarks to a close. I thank Committee members for their useful contributions and for how much fun I had taking the Bill through the House on behalf of the Opposition.
Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Eighth sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsTuesday 30th June 2020
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 June 2020 - (30 Jun 2020)
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
I will speak to both new clause 4, which stands in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester, and Government new clause 1.
I welcome new clause 1, which corrects what I feel would be the error of using December of this year as the basis for the register for our boundary review. Clearly, the covid-19 situation has put huge strain on all our councils and local authorities, which at present are working to support some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. It would be ludicrous to ask them to undertake an annual canvass at a time of such stretched capacity in local government. However, after 20 years of delay, the boundaries must reflect the electorate, with the best possible accuracy, and that means selecting the register that best reflects the reality of the general population of our country.
I would like to use this opportunity to probe the Minister on her choice of the March 2020 register. We are in a unique position, in that just six months ago we had a general election, and before that election we saw a huge spike in voter registration. Indeed, we can see that, since the introduction of individual electoral registration, there tends to be a spike in electoral registrations before major electoral events—the most notable recently being referendums and general elections, of which we seem to have had an awful lot. The Office for National Statistics data for the period between 1 and 12 December 2019 showed that approximately half a million people registered to vote, and electoral registrations increased in 94% of our constituencies. The number of electoral registrations was at its highest level, surpassing the previous peak in December 2012.
I have some concern about the drop-off in registrations between 12 December 2019 and 2 March 2020. We heard evidence that potentially hundreds of thousands of people have fallen off the electoral register during that period. Indeed, in the current context, in which the Government have been very clear that we will not be having by-elections or scheduled elections this year because of the coronavirus, there is not the same impetus for individuals to register to vote.
This is part of a much wider problem around electoral registration, with the Electoral Commission recently—actually, it was almost a year ago—making recommendations to the Government to plug the huge gaps in our electoral rolls. I look forward to hearing the Government’s response when that is forthcoming, but we know that about 9 million people in this country are missing from the electoral registers. My concern is to find the most accurate and most complete register possible in order to ensure that every one of our citizens is included within the boundaries that we have at the next general election. New clause 4, in my name, suggests that that register would be the one from the general election, for the reason that I have set out, which is the spike in electoral registrations that we see before major electoral events, in order to ensure that every single citizen in this country who should be counted in the review is counted.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
My hon. Friend has covered most of the points, so I will be very brief. In a sense, I will be asking the Minister only a couple of questions.
My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that we hit the high water mark at the general election. The Minister has corrected me when I have perhaps claimed too high an increase for the 2017 general election. Nevertheless, there is a surge in registrations that makes a general election register, as I have said, the high water mark and, if we are asking for a snapshot, the most accurate snapshot within, perhaps, a period of nine months or a year either side. In that respect, it is the most accurate register on which to base a set of boundaries.
I wonder whether the Minister can answer a couple of questions—I am not trying to catch her out. First, can she say, given that there is that rush at a general election, what measures a Government might put in place to maintain that high water mark level of registrations? For example, in the past year there was a proposal to downgrade the annual canvass. That proposal actually went through, which I was not happy with at the time, but the Minister was confident it was achievable. We are not going to see that this year, rightly, but what measures could be put in place to maintain that high water mark around a general election? Can the Minister also explain—I think this was touched upon during the evidence sessions—whether any assessment has been made of the numerical difference between the general election register and the register in March that we are going to base this on, and why that difference exists?
Using the March register, as opposed to waiting for more people to drop off the register at the end of this year—potentially 200,000 people—is a very sensible move. I have praised the Minister in the past when she has earned it; this was the right thing to do, and I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood in welcoming the change to maintain as high a water mark as possible in the number of people registered. As she has said, there is a broader debate about automatic registration, but I do not think that is covered in this new clause.
Chloe Smith
As a matter of common sense, that swelling is likely, and I agree with the hon. Gentleman that people have an incentive to register before an election. It is evidently the case that the demands of an election, where people have the chance to cast their vote and have their say, are an encouragement to registration. I do not argue against that at all; I welcome that. As I said in my earlier remarks, we want to encourage people to register year round, but there is that particular incentive with an election. These facts remain, however, and they drive holes through the Opposition’s argument right now.
I am afraid that there is one further point that I need to drive home hard: the hon. Member for the City of Chester should know better than to rehearse the really poor arguments he made about canvass reform when this time last year we discussed the statutory instrument that he mentioned. It was not a downgrade of the annual canvass. He had not done his homework at the time. It was an upgrade of the annual canvass, whereby resources can be focused on the hardest to identify, who, from Labour Members’ discourse, we might think they wished to go after. The upgrade also involved looking at where resources should be focused, rather than taxpayers’ money being put to poorer use where those resources are not needed. In other words, canvass reform allows registration officers to do a more targeted job of the canvass. That is a good thing. It allows citizens to have a better experience of canvassing, because they are being asked to fill out fewer forms. It allows taxpayers to save money. As the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood rightly pointed out, every pound in local government is sorely needed at the moment. There should never be an argument for wasting money in local government on an exercise that could be better targeted than it has been in the past. Those are the facts about canvass reform. Furthermore, I am afraid the hon. Member for the City of Chester is incorrect to say that we will not see that this year. We will. If he were in touch with his Welsh Labour colleagues in Cardiff, for example, he would know that it is going ahead this year, and that they rightly support it. Indeed, so do the devolved Government in Scotland, because it is the right thing to do. But enough on the annual canvass; that is not our subject matter here.
The Government strongly believe that the use of the electoral register in the way for which the Bill provides is the right thing to do. I have given comprehensive reasons why the idea of doing it from a general election register is not strong. I urge the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood not to press new clause 4 to a vote.
Cat Smith
We will be pressing new clause 4 to a vote. The Minister made some good points, and this is an area where we have spent many a happy day discussing the annual canvass and the inaccuracy of electoral registers. In the current cycle, I concede that the difference between the general election register and the March 2020 register is quite narrow because of the timing of the recent general election. However, new clause 4 is designed to deal with future boundary reviews. When a large amount of time has elapsed between the date of the snapshot and a general election, there may be significantly more than hundreds of thousands of people missing from the electoral register, therefore I will press new clause 4 to a vote.
The Chair
Just to clarify, that is not now.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 1 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 2
Electorate per constituency
“(1) In rule 2(1)(a) of Schedule 2 to the 1986 Act (electorate per constituency) for “95%” substitute “92.5%”.
(2) In rule 2(1)(b) of Schedule 2 to the 1986 Act (electorate per constituency) for “105%” substitute “107.5%”.”—(Cat Smith.)
This new clause seeks to widen the permissible range in a constituency‘s electorate, which may be up to 7.5% above or below the electoral quota calculated in accordance with Schedule 2, paragraph 2(3) of the 1986 Act.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Cat Smith
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Moving on from which register to use, new clause 2 is about the percentage variants between constituencies of different sizes. The Bill must proceed by ensuring a fair and democratic review. We want all the new boundaries to reflect the country as it is today, and to ensure that all communities get fair representation. Those boundaries must also take into consideration local ties and identities. Communities have never been stronger than in the recent troubling months. Right across the country, we see communities pulling together to support vulnerable residents. Now more than ever, those community connections must be valued and respected. However, the restrictive 5% quota tolerance in the Bill flies in the face of protecting those community ties.
During the evidence sessions, the secretary to the Boundary Commission for England spoke about the difficulty caused by the smaller tolerance, which makes it
“much harder to have regard to the other factors that you specify in the legislation, such as the importance of not breaking local ties, and having regard to local authority boundaries and features of natural geography. Basically, the smaller you make the tolerance, the fewer options we have.”
He went on:
“The only real way to mitigate it is to make the tolerance figure slightly larger. The larger you make it, the more options we have and the more flexibility we have to have regard to the other factors”. —[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 7. Q3.]
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
To illustrate the hon. Lady’s point, the old boundary review proposed a new boundary for Ceredigion, north Pembrokeshire and south Montgomeryshire, which would have been 97 miles from one point to the other. I want to emphasise not only the distance, but that there is a continuous range of communities throughout that 97-mile distance. It is very difficult for whoever represents that seat to really represent the constituents in the way they have grown accustomed to.
Cat Smith
My hon. Friend makes a good and articulate point with his own local geography. Indeed, if constituents are perhaps struggling to see the identity of the communities around them, that may lead to people feeling disconnected from what their local MP is doing, because they are not perceived to be a local MP. Constituents may feel that the MP represents a different area, because of the size of some of those constituencies.
My example, also from Wales, is the constituency of Aberavon. The previous boundary review, which was on the 5% variants, proposed to cut through the heart of Port Talbot, separating the town’s shopping centre from its high street and cutting the steel works off from the housing estate that was built for its workforce. I spoke to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) just before we came into the Committee this afternoon. He recalled that when he told his constituents about what the commission had proposed for his community, they fell about laughing and struggled to believe that this was actually true. It was incomprehensible to them that this proposal to split their community down the middle would come from the boundary commission.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
For my own clarity, was that on the 600 proposal?
Cat Smith
It was. Obviously, the proposals that come out of this boundary review will look different because of the 650 figure. The tight 5% quota, however, still gives the commissioners a great deal of trouble in trying to keep those communities together, to ensure that people can believe that the constituency they are in represents a community.
Christian Matheson
My hon. Friend will recall that two academics in the evidence sessions suggested that the problems in drawing up the constituencies—linking the constituency to reflect its communities—were as much, if not more, because of the tight 5% limit as because of the reduction by 50 seats.
Cat Smith
His apology is very much accepted, but my hon. Friend draws me back to the point that I was hoping to make. From the evidence that we heard, experts such as David Rossiter and Charles Pattie agreed that the 5% rule caused significant disruption to community boundaries. Indeed, they concluded that the substantial disruption on the back of the constituencies to be brought in by the sixth review is not entirely due to the reduction in the number of MPs. Their report shows in detail that disruption was caused by the introduction of this new form of national quota with a 5% tolerance.
In addition, many members of the Committee have referred to the Council of Europe Venice Commission “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters”, which states that good practice is to allow a standard permissible tolerance from the electoral quota of 10%. Internationally, a larger quota is viewed as promoting best practice to secure fair representation. This code also recommends that boundaries are drawn without detriment to national minorities, but the Government’s restrictive quota could have serious consequences for national minorities in this country. Councillor Dick Cole from Cornwall stated in his written evidence:
“The UK Government has recognised the Cornish as a national minority. This alone should lead MPs to ensure that the new legislation includes a clause…to protect Cornish territoriality.”
We do not have an amendment tabled to do that, but a larger quota allows flexibility for English commissioners to ensure that their proposals respect Cornish identity. Places such as Cornwall might then be able to identify with their seat, instead of the ludicrous Devonwall seat proposal of the previous review, which was met with much ridicule in the Cornish community and, I suspect, in Devon.
That is not just an issue for the Cornish. The UK Government recognise the Scottish, Welsh and Irish alongside the Cornish people as national minorities under the Council of Europe framework convention for the protection of national minorities, which the UK signed in 1985. The act of respecting those minorities will be made all the more difficult by a restrictive 5% quota, which could prevent the boundary commission from being able to keep those communities together. My Welsh colleagues feel very strongly that Welsh-speaking communities ought to be held together, and this would be made easier by having the larger flexibility for the commissioners.
We recognise the need for constituencies to be as broadly equal as possible, but anyone who claims that they truly believe that all constituencies should be equal means that every single constituency must be exactly the same size. I do not believe that anyone in Committee believes that, not least because this morning we had unanimous support for the protection of Ynys Môn, which will come in with a much smaller population than many other constituencies.
The evidence is strong: having wider electoral tolerance will create constituencies that are more representative of the communities that they seek to represent. A move from a 5% variance to about a 7.5% variance is a difference worth about 2,000 electors per constituency. That is a reasonable compromise to ensure that communities are kept together and that constituencies are as broadly equal as possible.
Cat Smith
I thank the Committee for the exchange of views on the new clause. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham made the point that OSCE recommended a quota variance of 10% either way as reasonable. My new clause, which would provide for a variance of 7.5%, is a compromise. It is reasonable; I am reaching out to the Government in the spirit of working together to come out of the boundary review with equalised constituencies. There is no doubt that they will be more equal, although obviously not bang-on equal, because that would mean that every constituency was of exactly the same size.
The new clause would mean a move towards the equality for which I know we all strive. I do not believe that the Electoral Commission should be drawing constituencies that bump up against the top or the bottom of the quota. Indeed, it should aim to make constituencies as close as possible to bang on the quota, but by doing that, we would not be keeping communities together, but dividing them up. By tabling my new clause with the 7.5% variance, I am striving to find a middle ground where we can balance community ties and constituencies of equal size.
It is not that we do not trust the boundary commission to get that right. It is quite the opposite: we are trying to give the boundary commission the framework to get it right. With a restriction of 5%, we make its job much harder, and we are much more likely to end up with constituencies that divide communities rather than uniting constituencies. The new clause is reasonable. I am striving to compromise—I would be very happy with 10%, but I recognise that the Government’s position is 5%. I aim to meet in the middle, and the new clause is a reasonable attempt to get all parties to recognise the balance between equalising constituencies and recognising that community ties are incredibly important in our one member, first-past-the-post electoral system.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Chloe Smith
I thank you, Sir David, and Mr Paisley for all of your work in chairing this Committee. We have all appreciated your clear chairmanship and good humour. I also thank the Clerks and all House staff who have made it possible to do a Bill Committee in these new circumstances. They have been most diligent. Also, many thanks to the witnesses who joined us and gave helpful evidence on our journey in Committee.
Finally, I thank all our colleagues in this room. I will pick on my two silent Friends who do not normally get a great deal to say in Committee, but I say it for them, so I thank my hon. Friends the Members for Walsall North and for Loughborough for their contributions. I thank all the parties represented here for the excellent quality of their debate and for the probing discussions we have had—in the witness sessions, as well, when we heard from other parties.
We have covered all the issues in the Bill comprehensively, with ample time to do so. I am pleased that we found common ground on the need to provide equal and updated boundaries for the representation of all the communities in our land.
Cat Smith
I want to put on the record my thanks to you, Sir David, and to Mr Paisley for chairing our proceedings in this Bill Committee. I also thank the officials for supporting our work, and members of the Committee for their contributions. I thank the Minister for her positive and thoughtful contributions.
This has been a first for me—the first time that I have made it to the end of a Bill Committee without giving birth. It is a great pleasure that this Committee did not go on as long as some of the others that I have briefly taken part in. I thank the Committee.
The Chair
I thank the three colleagues who have just spoken. Mr Paisley and I are both extremely susceptible to flattery, so we are very grateful for your kind remarks. I extend my thanks to all the officials, the Hansard writers and the Doorkeepers for all their support throughout the Bill. I thank all members of the Committee who have scrutinised the Bill to their full ability and who have coped with these rather unusual proceedings extremely well. Most of all, I thank our Clerk, whose wise counsels have prevailed throughout our proceedings.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill, as amended, accordingly to be reported.
Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Seventh sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsTuesday 30th June 2020
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 30 June 2020 - (30 Jun 2020)
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Paisley, in a much cooler room.
I commend the hon. Member for Ceredigion on his amendment. He has made an extremely strong case for the importance of recognising language. I know how important the Welsh language is. I was brought up in south Wales, albeit not west Wales, and we all have views on the parts of Wales we know and love well. Now, more than when I was at school, Welsh is a living language. I commend everybody who has made that possible.
Within the rules that are already set out in schedule 2 to the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986, “local ties” can take account of language. Indeed, in the hon. Gentleman’s own advocacy for his amendment, he set out clearly that the boundary commission is already receptive to arguments made with regard to the Welsh language and it has already been shown that Welsh can be taken into account in the local ties.
The reason I have chosen to speak to this amendment is that I want to share with the Committee a way that we might think about this. There are lots of different ties that can be called local ties, including language. My concern about specifying language on the face of the Bill would be the impact that that might inadvertently have on other local ties. By having language on the face of the Bill, it might imply that other local ties that are not specified in that way may not be taken into account, or not be treated as well as they might have been in the past.
I understand the hon. Gentleman’s argument and why he wants to put it forward, but my concern is that that might inadvertently affect the way the boundary commission views other local ties. I hope that the Minister, while listening to the point, will see that the Government should not accept the amendment at this point.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I rise to support the arguments made by the hon. Member for Ceredigion about the ties that are the Welsh language. I do not think it is possible to overstate the fact that the Welsh language is a cornerstone of Welsh identity. Although in the past we have seen a decline in the Welsh language, that is now reversing with the Welsh Government’s target of 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. The hon. Gentleman’s arguments may one day become quite irrelevant if Wales is entirely full of Welsh speakers.
We have previously referred to the Council of Europe’s Venice commission, which recommends that boundaries be drawn
“without detriment to national minorities”.
Welsh language speakers are a national minority who require protection within this legislation. Welsh language ties are an important part of identity, and I would like the Minister to provide some clarity about the use of the Welsh language as a factor in the commission’s decisions. Language is an indicator of local ties. Although I do not speak Welsh myself—dwi ddim yn gallu siarad Cymraeg—and my life is probably all the poorer for it, I recognise the importance of the Welsh language to the Welsh identity, as does the Labour party. I therefore congratulate the hon. Member for Ceredigion on having tabled this amendment.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Paisley. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ceredigion on having tabled this probing amendment, because our whole debate about clause 6 has emphasised the point about local ties and local communities. We must use this Committee to emphasise to the boundary commissions that although we do not necessarily need to legislate—the hon. Member for Ceredigion presented this amendment as a probing amendment, to spark that debate—we are discussing a very important section of this Bill, as I said last week, and it is incumbent on the boundary commissions to take notice of what has been said.
Rule 5 in the 1986 Act is exceptionally important. One can only draw on one’s local experience, so I come back to Leeds, because that is my area; it is where I live in Yorkshire, but there is a world of difference between inner Leeds and outer Leeds. The communities are very different. I have made reference to the long-serving previous Member for Leeds East, George Mudie, who was horrified at the thought of such different communities coming into an area that he had represented for so long. I hope that when the boundary commissions do the reviews, they take real notice of the debates about clause 6. Intelligent and sensible points have been made by Committee members on both sides of the Committee during this debate, which should act as the key guidance. Rather than us putting things on the face of the Bill, the commissions should consider the over-driving will and well-thought-out arguments in all the areas we have debated.
Again, I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on having tabled a thought-provoking and important probing amendment to this Bill, because it is important that we probe all of its aspects. Everything that has been said during this debate—even on the comical side, such as the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, on the other side of the Pennines, and I joshing last week about the wars of the roses—shows the importance of local identities and how they are put together. That is a very important aspect, and I hope the boundary commissions will take notice of it when they are drawing up their first draft.
Chloe Smith
What does clause 8 do? It removes the legal obligation to implement the 2018 boundary review. As hon. Members will recall from when we discussed clause 5, the Bill will amend the existing legislation to ensure that we continue to have 650 parliamentary constituencies, as we do now. In order to achieve that, clause 5 set the number of constituencies at 650 for future reviews. That in itself does not resolve the current legal obligation on the Government to implement the 2018 boundary review, which was based on 600.
The boundary commissions have submitted their final reports for that review, but the recommendations have yet to be brought into legal effect. Clause 8 therefore brings the 2018 boundary review to a close without implementation. It removes the Government’s obligation to bring the recommendations of the 2018 review into effect, because those proposals would take us down to 600 constituencies at the next election, which this Committee has already agreed is undesirable.
Under this clause, that obligation would be removed retrospectively, with effect from 24 March of this year. I can explain that specific date to the Committee: it is the date on which the Government announced their intention to retain 650 constituencies in the written ministerial statement that I laid before the House. Without this clause, there would be a very irregular situation. We would be legally required to implement the 2018 review and implement the reduction to 600 constituencies at the next general election. I think that this Committee would agree, having already taken the decision to move from 600 back to 650, that that situation would be confusing and undesirable. Therefore this clause, although technical, is important and I urge that it stand part of the Bill.
Cat Smith
I will make a brief comment, not least to give the Minister a breather and a chance to get some water as she rattles through the clauses. I just ask her whether she is pleased to be able to have clause 8 in the Bill because the 2018 review did not have the automaticity clause that future reviews will have.
Chloe Smith
The debate would not have been complete had the hon. Lady not raised that point. I think it is fair to say that we have answered that one comprehensively in the course of these Committee proceedings so far; and given that we have also already agreed that automaticity is the right thing to do in this Bill, I am not going to entertain the argument any further.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 8 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 9
Removal of duty to review reduction in number of constituencies
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Chair
For clarity, this debate is about amendment 14, in the name of Maria Miller. I said at the commencement that it would also be convenient to consider amendment 11, new clause 6 and new clause 10. If amendment 14 is agreed to, the subsequent one, namely amendment 11, will not be called.
Cat Smith
The grouping of amendments and new clauses on Ynys Môn gave me cause to think about the nature of island communities. I have enjoyed hearing the exchanges across the Committee Room this morning. Indeed, my father was born on an island and my mother was raised on one—the Isle of Walney, which was only connected to the mainland by a bridge in 1908 so, arguably, has a stronger case for special consideration even than Ynys Môn. The arguments about identity apply to any island community in the British Isles. For anyone born or raised on an island, that sense of community runs so deep that unless someone has lived or experienced it, it is hard to explain how that can forge identity.
Ynys Môn also has a strong Welsh identity, which we have not really touched on so far in this debate, but with a 57% prevalence of being able to speak Welsh, it has the second highest proportion of Welsh speakers by local authority in Wales. That just adds to the evidence that Anglesey is indeed a special place, which is why we believe that it should be awarded protected status. It also has the village with the longest place name in Britain —if anyone wishes to make any intervention to tell us what that is, I would be happy to give way.
Cat Smith
Unfortunately the hon. Member for Pudsey is not taking part in proceedings. The amendments are about recognising the fundamental and distinct identity of Ynys Môn and awarding it protected constituency status. Although the Labour party will certainly support that, it throws up a debate about the potential conflict between the idea of protecting communities and identity, and equally sized constituencies. Creating another protected constituency makes it more difficult to have equally sized constituencies right across the British Isles.
I find many of the ideas that the Committee has discussed very contradictory. On the one hand, hon. Members argue for equally sized constituencies, and on the other, they argue for more protected constituencies, which ingrain unequal size. I am very clear that we should respect community ties and acknowledge that some constituencies will be larger than others to reflect those ties, but as far as possible, we should try to have constituencies that are as equal as they can be. The amendments highlight the challenge that that throws up, in recognising that communities should be included together when it comes to parliamentary constituencies.
Chloe Smith
I am really pleased that we have had this discussion, which, in formal terms, complements my opening remarks on clause 11 stand part.
Following on from the arguments articulated by the hon. Members for Ceredigion and for City of Chester, as well as by the shadow Minister, I can confirm that the Government will accept amendment 14, tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, and give Ynys Môn protected constituency status. I will go through the reasons for that.
I will pray in aid the hon. Member for Glasgow East, who occasionally helps me out in this respect. He was so kind to say earlier that I am a considered Minister who takes arguments on merit, which is what I am seeking to do today. That starts with reflecting on what the current legislation sets out. It sets out four protected constituencies, the boundaries of which are fixed and do not change at boundary reviews. They are all islands: Orkney and Shetland, Na h-Eileanan an Iar, and the two constituencies on the Isle of Wight. Currently, there are no protected constituencies in Wales.
During debate on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, arguments were made that Ynys Môn should also be a protected constituency. Those arguments centred on the fact that the constituency covers a relatively large island geographically and has a sizeable electorate—and they still have merit today. Indeed, we heard witnesses and hon. Members of all stripes make the case for Ynys Môn, including Tom Adams of the Labour party, Geraint Day from Plaid Cymru and Chris Williams from the Green party, in addition to the parties represented on the Committee. Dr Larner from the Wales Governance Centre added his thoughts to the argument, too. Of course, hon. Members outside the Committee have also joined the argument via amendment 14, including the hon. Member for the Isle of Wight (Bob Seely), whose support is, I think telling.
I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn, who is sitting in the Public Gallery. She has campaigned and worked very hard on this matter, on top of being a most assiduous constituency MP on other matters. If I remember rightly, her swearing in to the House was done in Welsh, which shows her commitment to the characteristics of her constituency. Since she entered the House, she has argued that local people sent her here to do just that, and I am glad that she is here to listen.
As the hon. Member for Ceredigion explained, Ynys Môn, which covers 715 sq km, is the fourth largest island in Great Britain in terms of geographical size, excluding the mainland—to be precise, that is including Holy island to the west. With an electorate of approximately 50,000, based on 2019 data, Ynys Môn is comparable to other islands that enjoy protected constituency status.
I am of course mindful that each additional exception slightly chips away at the underlying principle of equally sized constituencies—I will bring that argument into my own remarks before anyone else makes it. It is a consideration that we have to include in this decision. However, I am persuaded that the creation of Ynys Môn as a protected constituency would address an anomaly. It is the only island in the UK whose electorate and geographical area fall squarely within the range of the currently protected constituencies. It has a considerable electorate, sitting between those of the other protected constituencies: Na h-Eileanan an Iar is at one end, with an electorate of just over 21,000, and the Isle of Wight is at the other, with 111,000. The argument that Ynys Môn belongs among the protected constituencies is compelling.
Amendment 14 also responds in part to something else we have heard in this Committee, which is that Wales is likely to see a reduction in the number of its constituencies. For a variety of historical reasons, which we have discussed already and may discuss later when debating other amendments, Welsh constituencies are slightly smaller on average than most UK constituencies. Given that the next boundary review will seek to create constituencies that are equal in size, it is likely to result in fewer constituencies in Wales. It is relevant to note that the creation of an appropriate protected constituency on Ynys Môn will mean that the electorate of that island will not be included in any calculation relating to the number of constituencies in Wales.
This amendment also means that there will be at least one protected constituency in each part of Great Britain, which helps demonstrate the importance with which we regard those component parts of the Union, and that we think these are important, relevant considerations. We believe that Ynys Môn, with its sizable electorate and particular geography, would make an appropriate protected constituency to sit alongside the others. As I have already confirmed, we intend to accept amendment 14.
Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Sixth sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsThursday 25th June 2020
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 25 June 2020 - (25 Jun 2020)
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
It is lovely to see you in the Chair on this warm afternoon, Sir David. My amendments to clause 1 ask the Committee whether Parliament should vote on the review of the boundaries. As it happens, Parliament has not had the opportunity to vote on the last two reviews because they were never tabled for debate by the Government. This is a safety valve: us as parliamentarians being able to check the homework of the boundary commissions. This is not marking our own homework; this is us ensuring that the boundary commissions have executed the criteria we have given them accurately and that we are happy to proceed. I have seen it pointed out often on social media recently that the Government have an 80-seat majority. If they are so confident in their 80-seat majority, they have nothing to worry about in bringing the review that we are about to have back to Parliament for a vote.
I draw the Committee’s attention to the written evidence submitted by Dr Renwick and Professor Hazell, particularly points 15 and 16. They say that although the boundary commission has only very rarely been questioned to be biased—that would not be the case at all; we all have confidence in its independence—
“there are grounds to worry that this could change”
if the automaticity is implemented. In point 16, they set out some safeguards that could protect against that. I have some concerns that while the independence of the boundary commission is not questioned at the moment, the change could have future consequences that are foreseeable, as set out by Dr Renwick and Professor Hazell, and safeguards could be put in place.
Cat Smith
Speaking to amendment 10, the hon. Member for Glasgow East made a very good point about the way in which the Bill must be able to be applied effectively in every part of the United Kingdom. In some of the regions where the commissioners will be doing their work, the geography and landscape are very different from those of other regions. In that sense, I am minded to support the amendment if chooses to push it to a vote. It would give the commissioners more flexibility to be able to respond to the needs of communities, and if we are to have communities that are confident in the boundaries that the commissioners draw, they must have had an adequate say in how the constituencies are formed.
Christian Matheson
First, I welcome the Minister’s explanation of the clause. I have been through a few of these boundary reviews now. I remember attending one in the mid-1990s for Cheshire, which was held in Winsford, in the geographical centre of Cheshire, along with my old mentor Lord Hoyle—as he is now is—and Mike Hall, another former MP, and the late and much-missed Andrew Miller, another former MP.
More recently, the Cheshire review was held in my own constituency in Chester, in The Queen hotel, and in that circumstance I found myself speaking against my own party’s recommendations, because the numbers had forced the party to exclude a part of the constituency from Chester that I felt rightfully belonged to it. It was a strange and uncomfortable situation, but I did what I did because it was right.
Having heard the hon. Member for Glasgow East speak to his amendment, I think there is a principle that flows throughout the Bill, which is the importance of taking into account geography, in terms of the overall impact of the Bill and its overall implications. I could easily get from Chester to Winsford and from Chester to Warrington; that would not be a problem. Speaking from my own experience, I think that Cheshire could get away with having one public inquiry.
If I think about parts of rural northern England, the far south-west, or large parts of Scotland and Wales, the sparsity of population makes it less easy to hold public inquiries than in Cheshire or in large boroughs. It is the same principle and the same argument that we will discuss later in the Bill—I do not want to wander too far off the subject of this clause—where we have numbers overriding geographical considerations. There are parts of the country that need to be treated differently because sparsity of population and geographical features make it more difficult for individuals to take part
The hon. Member for Ceredigion asked the Minister a question that had also occurred to me, about whether, in principle, she may consider a slightly different amendment, if she accepts that some areas need more attention because of their geography and sparsity of population. Obviously, the Minister cannot speak to a hypothetical amendment, but I would support that suggestion. The principle that flows through the Bill is that we cannot simply go on bare numbers. Geography, population density and the ease of people getting to, and taking part in, consultations need to be considered. I have a lot of sympathy with the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Glasgow East.
Chloe Smith
I am grateful for that example. My right hon. Friend is correct, particularly about the principle that ought to underpin what we do here. After all, we are looking at public money, in terms of what we might call the cost of politics—the number of salaries multiplied by 600 or 650—and how we ask the boundary commissions to do their work. Those things are underpinned by public money and public time, so we should consider them in Committee . There is nothing more extensive to say about clause 5, so I commend it to the Committee.
Cat Smith
The Opposition welcome clause 5. We have argued to keep the number of MPs at 650. I also welcome the Minister’s explanation of why the Government have U-turned and returned to the idea of having 650 Members of Parliament.
The Minister made the argument that the UK population has grown by 5% since 2011. I ask her, and she is welcome to intervene, whether that is an indication that we should expect the 650 figure to increase in subsequent reviews if the UK population were to increase in that time.
I also ask why the number is fixed. We heard in our evidence sessions that one of the difficulties that commissioners have in drawing seats is that they must finally reach the 650 figure. Is there not a strong case for having a target number of MPs that the commissioners should reach within a percentage range? Overall, the Opposition welcome the clause and the decision to maintain 650 MPs.
John Spellar
Briefly, several of the factors that the Minister outlined were blindingly obviously after 2015 as well. The population in this country was going up and there had been a referendum to leave the European Union. Was it not, frankly, the shallowness of David Cameron and the stubbornness of the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) that meant that the Government have had to make the change now that they could have made before? We would then have been here representing different constituencies. There is no shame in saying that the former leadership of the party—it is probably unwise to attack the current leadership—got it wrong and that is why they have done a U-turn.
The Chair
Order. I want to say to the Committee that our proceedings are confusing at the best of times, and this is not the best of times. Normally, we would have civil servants to my right with the Parliamentary Private Secretary close by. Notes would be helpfully passed to the Minister. We would normally have a couple of Clerks to my left, helping the Opposition with the order of our proceedings.
These are difficult circumstances and it is more than understandable that there is a bit of confusion. I ask the Minister not to respond at this point, so we can allow Cat Smith to speak to new clause 9, and then the Minister may wish to come back with her comments.
Mrs Miller
On a point of order, Sir David. I apologise for interrupting the shadow Minister. Can you clarify whether you are taking clause 6 stand part as part of this group? I am a little confused. I thought that we were discussing amendments 8 and 9. Are we doing the stand part debate as well?
The Chair
I am now much better in the picture than I was before. To answer Mr Shelbrooke’s question, once we have dealt with the group that I announced at the start of the proceedings, we will go on to Mr Linden and deal with amendment 6 to clause 6, with which it will be convenient to discuss amendment 7.
Cat Smith
I must admit that I am still quite confused, if I am honest, but hopefully all will become apparent.
I am speaking to new clause 9, which is about the electoral registers that are used to compile the boundaries that we draw. In the written evidence submitted by Professor Toby James, a professor of politics and public policy at the University of East Anglia, it was eminently clear that in the latest estimates from the Electoral Commission there were between 8.3 million and 9.4 million people in Great Britain who were eligible to be on the registers but were not correctly registered on the December 2018 register. Since the introduction of individual electoral registration, we have seen registration become increasingly seasonal, and in his written evidence the professor outlined some of the reasons that that might be. His suggestions to the Committee are slightly outside the scope of the Bill, but I draw the Committee’s attention to his paragraph 12, which suggests ways to improve the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register.
New clause 9 would include Department for Work and Pensions data to correct the electoral registers and make sure that the data that the commissioners draw on to draw our constituency boundaries are fuller and more complete than the data they currently work with.
Ben Lake
The hon. Lady makes an important point, particularly when we consider that many constituencies will be drawn on the basis of the electoral register on a particular date. I know from my own constituency that at least 6,000 students are not registered, even though, when it comes to constituency casework, I answer their queries and try to serve them, so this is an important consideration. We should try to get as full a picture as possible because, after all, that gets to the heart of representation.
Cat Smith
I thank the hon. Gentleman for making that intervention. The points that he has made during our proceedings today about the nature of his Ceredigion constituency, where the population can fluctuate, highlight the point that the data that we use have to come from a snapshot in time. However, that snapshot is often inaccurate for various reasons, including people moving house. They can delay registering or perhaps they do not register if there is no election imminent.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned students who may or may not register in one or two locations, which means that often the register is inaccurate. When we as constituency MPs hold our advice surgeries, we often support members of our community who do not fill in paperwork, which is how they can find themselves before us. One of the things that they might not fill in, because it does not feature in their lives is the form to register to vote. And yet, as Members of Parliament, we will stand up for them in a tribunal situation or we make representations to various Government bodies because we count them as our constituents and we represent them.
New clause 9 would make the data that the boundaries are drawn on fuller and more accurate than the data that they are currently drawn on. As Professor James outlines in his written evidence, different countries use different data to draw their electoral constituencies, including population data, population estimates and electoral registers that have been made more accurate by using local government data.
The Chair
It has been admitted that I was given the wrong script. Like a barrister, of course, I insisted that that was a point. However, I have powers to change the order, and that is why I have allowed Cat Smith, who was right to be confused, to make a point. The Minister has also agreed to respond to new clause 9.
Cat Smith
I thank the honourable Yorkshireman for giving way. [Laughter.] On that point, the case has been made by Cornish people that they do not wish to see a seat cross the Cornish-Devon border; I think that view is clear and unanimous in Cornwall. I support Cornish people in that. As a Lancashire lass, I would be very disappointed to see a constituency drawn up that crossed into the white rose county from my red rose county.
Alec Shelbrooke
I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. I have often said that if God had wanted Yorkshire and Lancashire to meet, he would not have put a huge lump of granite between us.
However, there is an important point here, namely that the arbitrary nature of local authority boundaries is a strange thing. In 1974, Leeds was the only authority that got bigger; all the other authorities got smaller but the Leeds metropolitan authority swept way out of what had been the Leeds City Council area and took in areas such as Pudsey, West Riding Council and all those areas.
My constituents generally do not consider themselves to be part of Leeds. However, I am a Leeds city MP, in a county constituency and a borough constituency, which gives some idea of how that is defined in the geography of election expenses. Equally, I remember a particular opponent in one of the elections who was trying to establish their credibility to stand in the area. They went to certain parts of my constituency waving the flag about what a strong Leeds Rhinos fan they were, in rugby league. I am not a rugby league fan, and am clear that I am not, but I do know that in the areas that said opponent was talking about being a Leeds Rhinos fan, the people were all Castleford Tigers fans, so I was quite pleased with that bit of electioneering.
Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Third sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsTuesday 23rd June 2020
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 23 June 2020 - (23 Jun 2020)
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Q
“safeguards against a government that wanted to interfere are relatively weak.”
Of course I am not suggesting that that is the position of the current Government, but obviously when we legislate we need to safeguard against any interference by future Governments who may wish to interfere with the process.
You explained that you have various concerns about the Bill and you suggest various solutions to strengthen it. What action do you think could be taken to improve the Bill, in order to safeguard us from political interference? Also, can you expand slightly on some of the solutions that you outlined in that blog, for example an amendment perhaps to legislate to bar members of or donors to political parties from appointment to the commission, as is the case with local government?
Professor Hazell: Shall I answer that question? The first point to make is that the greatest risk of political interference is the one that Alan Renwick referred to in his first answer—namely, the ability of Parliament at the final stage to vote down the orders made by the boundary commissioners for their proposed changes. The strongest single point in our submission to the Committee is that in future the boundary commissions’ reports should be implemented automatically, without any opportunity for Parliament to intervene at that final stage.
As we also argue in our submission, however, there is a risk that once Parliament loses the ability to control the final decision, the Government may seek to influence the work of the boundary commissions prior to that final stage. I think, Ms Smith, that was the burden of your question, and in our submission we propose four ways in which the independence of the commission in future should be strengthened, mainly through tightening up the appointments process.
Briefly, those four ways are as follows: first, that in future the commissioners should be appointed for a single, non-renewable term, as with many other constitutional watchdogs, which I can enumerate if you want further details; secondly, that they should be subject to the same political restrictions as members of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, which performs a very similar boundary defining function; thirdly, that the deputy chair of each commission should sit on the appointments panel, as indeed they did last year in the selection of two new boundary commissioners; and fourthly, that the appointing Minister should be required to appoint only from the names recommended by the panel.
Therefore, we are recommending that paragraphs 3.2 and 3.3 of the “Governance Code on Public Appointments” should be disapplied for these appointments. I remind members of the Committee that those paragraphs allow Ministers in some cases to appoint someone who has not been deemed appointable by the assessment panel, and in exceptional cases Ministers may decide to appoint a candidate without holding a competition.
Chloe Smith
Q
Chris Williams: I can run through our thoughts briefly. Thank you for the involvement we have been invited to have with yourself and civil servants.
We are supportive of the change to 650 MPs. We are also pleased that the electoral register data to be used has moved back to March 2020. A minor improvement would have been to move it to December 2019, but that is still a good move. Changing the future reviews to every eight years is positive.
I have some concerns around how the constituencies will end up looking in terms of representation of the communities that we want to see well represented as part of the system we operate within. The 5% tolerance limit is potentially challenging. We have some concerns around how all this will be perceived in Wales. The last speakers spoke about automaticity. I have commented on perception and the perception that any involvement from the Government could be seen as problematic without the ability for Back Benchers to stop any recommendations once they come back from the commissions.
Finally, if I have understood things correctly, in future reviews, the Bill says the deadline in any year for the commissions to report back to the Government or the Speaker is 1 October. In future, there would not be very long before a general election—just seven months. That does not give a great deal of time for reselection and candidate selection to take place and for smaller parties and independents to get their act together, so to speak. I think moving the date forward to something more like July before a general election would provide a bit of protection there.
Cat Smith
Q
Chris Williams: That is a good question. I guess I should say—I appreciate it is beyond the scope of this Bill—that the Green party does not support the first-past-the-post system, but one of the benefits of it is the very strong link between Members of Parliament and the communities they represent. If members of a community perceive that their constituency is of a very bizarre make-up, or that they have been stuck together for some convenience, that breaks down that benefit that currently exists with MPs.
Certainly from my experience last time around, when we were seeking 600 constituencies with a 5% tolerance limit, some very bizarre constituencies were put together. I looked at the west midlands make-up in some detail, and some of the constituencies were incredibly bizarre, with an awful lot of complaints. One was effectively a sausage-shaped constituency that was very, very long—I think it was the Birmingham Selly Oak and Halesowen constituency. The only thing that the boundary commission, bless them, could find to operate within the tolerance limit that had a community tie was a canal, but of course if you take that to its extremity, you will end up connecting some places that are very far away from each other. Giving the Commission the flexibility to have a 7.5% variance in extreme circumstances, where it is necessary, would help avoid some of those problems. I can see some real problems in rural areas as well, where I think a greater tolerance would really help.
The Chair
Just before I turn to Mrs Miller, I want colleagues who are sitting in the Public Gallery to realise that I am aware that they are part of the Committee. If they want to ask a question, they should indicate to me and then speak from the microphone, as Mrs Miller has done.
The Chair
There we are: the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Wellingborough inadvertently got some further scrutiny from the Committee.
Cat Smith
Q
Professor Sir John Curtice: The short answer is that the Bill is not concerned with the process of electoral administration. The process of electoral registration deals with electoral administration. As Professor McLean has just pointed out, frankly the Bill does nothing material to change the rules on redistribution, including on the basis on which the electorate is used to do that. I simply pointed out in my response to the Minister that there are limitations to the data. We know that those limitations are somewhat greater in, for example, inner-city constituencies with a highly mobile population, than in constituencies with lots of older voters and a more stable population. That, undoubtedly, is correlated to some degree with the political proclivity of constituencies.
As I indicated earlier, as long as we wish to make a distinction between permanent residence and the right to vote, and as long as we do not wish to have a national identity card system, it is difficult to think of an alternative to the system we have. The question therefore is whether there are ways of improving the accuracy of the register. One thing we can note is that although we moved from household registration to individual registration—a somewhat controversial move—it is not obvious that it has fundamentally changed the character of the problem before us.
Cat Smith
Q
Professor Sir John Curtice: The answer to that question, to be honest, is technically beyond my competence, in the sense that I guess the question that the boundary commissioners would ask is whether it is possible to get DWP data—which refers to the right to work, not necessarily to the right to vote—at the level of local government wards, which are the principal building block used by the boundary commissioners in building parliamentary constituencies. I would not be surprised to be told that the answer is no, but I do not know. Again, DWP data might rely on whether people have a national insurance record, but that is not the same thing as citizenship.
Cat Smith
Q
How can that balance be struck? Is the 5% tolerance most appropriate, or if we are not moving towards a system of proportional representation, should there be a larger tolerance, so that community ties are considered more important?
Professor McLean: For clarity, it is important to separate the question of proportional representation from that of the 5% tolerance, because they are different questions. As I evidently said in 2010—you have better recall of what I said than I do—a single-member district system cannot be proportional. That is a mathematical truth. Legislators must make a choice, and the choice that the UK Parliament has made is reflected in this Bill and many others: the single-member district system.
I do not think that it would be a good use of this Committee’s time to talk about whether the UK should switch to proportional representation; with your permission, Chair, I would rather duck that part of the Member’s question.
On equality, the Member poses an important question: is it correct that the equality criterion should override the other ones—the ones on local ties, and on the constituency boundaries following local government ones where possible? My view, which is an arithmetical view, not a political one, is that it is right for the equality criterion to override the others.
Becoming somewhat more political, my observation of boundary inquiries is that since local ties are not further defined in the Act, I have observed on several occasions that for a number of very shrewd operators, who will be well known to members of this Committee, Conservative local ties go one way, Labour local ties go another, and Liberal Democrat local ties go yet another. Each of them, because they are paid to do so, makes a plausible case before a commissioner, who in England is deliberately chosen not to be from the area. Moving on from the mathematics, my view as a political scientist is that the local ties criterion is eminently manipulable, whereas the plus or minus 5% criterion is not.
Is the criterion wide enough? In the United States the courts have said that as near as possible to 0%— not 5%—is the accepted tolerance for US congressional districts. So, it is possible to have a tolerance lower than 5%, but that is not in this Bill and it is not in the earlier Acts.
John Spellar
Q
Professor McLean: Well, since we have more time than we thought, we could have a discussion about US congressional districts, but Members may wish to move on.
Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsTuesday 23rd June 2020
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 23 June 2020 - (23 Jun 2020)
Chloe Smith
Q
Peter Stanyon: Absolutely. That came from Sir Ron Gould, who did an investigation into—I think, from memory—the Scottish independence referendum, where there had been some very late changes to legislation. Anything can be planned for. With elections, as you all know, the period ahead of the polls becomes very pressurised. A longer lead-in to any significant change—a constituency boundary change would be significant—is welcome, and six months is certainly the minimum that an election administrator would want.
In the case of these boundaries, the fundamental point to bear in mind is that the electoral registers will need to be reshaped and put into their new building blocks. Whatever the case, we have 1 December as the date the revised versions of registers are published. That is often the logical date at which we would want parliamentary constituencies to be reflected in the electoral roll, simply because it means a full change in the register, which helps political parties and candidates. It can be changed later on but, again, that makes it more complicated. The sooner it is said—the Gould principle is six months—makes it far easier for that communication and working across boundaries with different administrators. De-risking the process is far easier if we have that lead-in time.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Q
Peter Stanyon: If I were to ask for tomorrow, that would be helpful, but I am not sure that is going to happen. In terms of the lead-in periods, we welcome the proposed spring timescale for boundary commissions to submit their reports to the Speaker. An ideal timescale would be elections taking place in May 2023, with preparations for an electoral registration cavass kicking on immediately after those May elections finish. We would then certainly look to have something by early summer at the very latest, so that, over that autumn period, as the canvass takes place, the amendments can be introduced to registers in the time for the revisions to be published on or by 1 December 2023.
Cat Smith
Q
Peter Stanyon: Yes, I did. Ironically, the most accurate register of electors is arguably the register that is published with the additions the month after a major poll. In the case of the December 2019 general election, applications were flooding in, but what happens over the elections process is that people are deleted from the register as a result of returned poll cards information coming through to registration officers. Ironically, it is usually the month after an election, when the updates are made, that we have the most accurate version of the register. You may well see drop-offs from the register because your processing-through information has been returned to registration officers as part of poll cards going out, postal votes for deceased electors being returned, and other such issues.
One of the huge things with regards to the 1 December register is that it is not the most accurate and complete register—any registration officer will tell you that. Since the introduction of individual elector registration, the canvass does not register people any longer; it identifies potential applicants. As a result, whereas prior to individual registration everything took place during the canvass period and the register was as complete as it could be on 1 December, now the canvassing process seeps into January, February and March as it runs towards the traditional May dates. You will see fluctuations in registers that mean that the snapshot taken in December is not necessarily the most complete or accurate register; it is more likely to be among the ones that you mentioned.
The register on 2 March, which is being proposed, would provide a more accurate figure than that provided by the register in December, simply because it has taken account of all the additions that were made through the canvass and that went through as part of rolling registration ahead of the general election, and then cleansed the register as a result of the information gleaned from both the canvass and the fall-out from the general election. I hope that answers your question. I am not sure whether I got everything covered there.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
Q
Peter Stanyon: Yes, certainly. The legislative background is that a local authority must subdivide every constituency in its area into polling districts, and then designate a polling place for polling stations. If there are changes to boundaries within a local authority area, they might not replicate the situation that is currently in place, so there would need to be a review of the provision to ensure that the newly defined constituencies and the building blocks within them are still applicable to the electorate at that stage.
We have just come to the conclusion of the statutory period for polling district review. The next one is due during the period between 1 October 2023 and 31 January 2025, when every single local authority must do this job. If a significant change to constituency boundaries meant that it was sensible to make those changes, there would be an additional layer to be done. Those same polling district boundaries are generally used for local government elections as well. It is about trying to get all the different layers of boundaries together so that the elector is, generally speaking, always going to the same polling station. If there is a combined poll, it is about getting the ballot papers for them in that particular station.
Chloe Smith
Q
Andrew Scallan: It depends on how you define prospective, because for us it is our work in hand. We anticipate that 19 reviews covering 3.3 million people will be made before 1 December. Our work programme, at the moment, includes a range of reviews that will not be completed by 1 December. There are around 13 reviews covering 2.1 million people that will be close to completion but will not be ready by 1 December.
Cat Smith
Q
Andrew Scallan: Yes, we think that is exactly the case. It presents the opportunity to challenge; since 2010, there have been three discussions about our orders, but none has been overturned. They are either accepted or overturned, and the 214 that we have done since 2010 have all been approved.
Cat Smith
Q
Andrew Scallan: No. The polling districts are a very useful tool. Our relationship is very different from the parliamentary process. We engage with the local authority, and, as you will know, a feature of our work is forecasting five years from the date of our final recommendations, which is not a feature of the parliamentary boundary commissions’ work. We engage very closely with local authorities and talk through the methodology for doing that forecasting, and the polling districts are a useful building block. When people come to us with proposals, they will often use the existing polling districts to shuffle around, either to create new wards or consolidate thoughts on what ward proposals should be.
Polling districts can change—I know Peter Stanyon was explaining to you the process—but for us it is very rare that we have a change of polling district during our review process. Once we have come up with our new wards, there is the need for new polling districts to be created.
Alec Shelbrooke
Q
Andrew Scallan: From my previous life, the reasons for changing polling districts vary a lot. Sometimes councils take a policy that they do not want schools to be used for polling districts, which then requires other public buildings or even locations for temporary buildings to be thought through.
In terms of what goes through our mind, the legislation is clear that we can carry out a range of reviews. Some are periodic, and those are the ones where we try to go around the country, bearing in mind the number of authorities that we deal with. We also include two-tier county councils, which do not feature in the stats that the parliamentary boundary commission will use, but they are nevertheless a feature of our workload. We have periodic reviews, we have those that can be asked for by Ministers, and local authorities can sometimes request a review because they have chosen, for example—perhaps as part of an election manifesto—to reduce the size of the council. We will go in and start the review process, which for us has a series of starting points.
First, what will the council size be? Unlike with the parliamentary boundary commissions, that is a local discussion that takes place, during which we invite local authorities to think about what their governance arrangements should be. A figure is then arrived at, and we use that to divide the forecast electorate to work out what the average number of electors per councillor should be. That sets the ball rolling.
The other features involved will be whether a local authority has one, two or three-member wards, or a mixture of those. In the starting of our process, we invite local authorities and others to put in their suggestions about what the warding arrangements might be using those divisors, because we cannot claim to know every local authority in detail. We invite wide representation for local authority-wide schemes, but also from residents’ groups and community groups, who are only concerned about their own particular patch within their local authority.
Chloe Smith
Q
Can I round off my international comparison questions by checking whether New Zealand or any other countries that you are aware of also run with a judge-led process, securing a high level of independence, as we do in this country?
Darren Hughes: That has been a feature in New Zealand, and I know it is in other jurisdictions as well. One of the dilemmas to resolve is whether you draw up a list of positions you want to serve on the commission and to make the decisions—and in that sense you are blind to whoever the postholder happens to be when the review is done—or whether there are particular people who you think have the skills and strength and integrity to run the decision process for that particular round. That is something for the Committee to think about, because if you nominate particular positions, you always know who will be responsible for the decision, seeing as there will not be that final parliamentary vote, and that may have an impact on recruitment decisions, because those extra responsibilities are thought about. Alternatively, if there are particular people deemed appropriate for that time, that might reflect on whether or not it is judge-led, or whether there is some other structure that might be important.
Rounding off on that point, what you have to have at the back of your mind when coming up with these systems is what happens if they fall into the hands of a bad actor or a disruptive actor, or somebody who says, “This is just a bunch of conventions. It’s not really written down anywhere. We can drive a lorry through this.” The UK system is so trusted and has not gone down the Americanised gerrymander system, so that has got to be protected at all costs. That might lead you to want to be a little bit more prescriptive at the beginning, seeing that you are conceding that final vote at the end.
Cat Smith
Q
Darren Hughes: There are so many strong arguments on the threshold question. We would come down in favour of a higher threshold than the plus or minus 5%, to be able to offer some flexibility in that sense. There are two competing ways of looking at this. On the one hand, who are the people for whom communities of interest are important with respect to parliamentary boundaries? The answer is: every single Member of Parliament and all the people who are in that orbit of representation, democratic work and politics. Outside of the campaign periods, the boundaries themselves, for the most part, do not have enduring appeal or identity. It has always struck me that, on a basic thing that people need to do all the time—think about where they are going to rent or buy a property—Zoopla does not make a big thing of telling you what parliamentary constituency you will be in if you move to this particular accommodation, whereas it will talk about the borough, the schools and the other services that are available. It makes sense to, as best as possible, come up with sensible communities for a constituency because the Member of Parliament will need to be doing a lot of important work there. However, I do not think you want to stretch it too far to pretend that people’s connection to a particular constituency is the most important thing. One way of dealing with that might be to look at the threshold question.
Chris Clarkson
Q
I want to pick up on a couple of points that have been raised. In terms of the 5% electoral quota and splitting communities, going back to the Maori electorates—which I think are arrived at by dividing the South Island’s population by 16 and then applying to the Maori electoral register—they do lead to some splitting of communities and they still stay within the 5% boundary. Is that correct? I am thinking, for example, of Te Tai Tonga, which covers the entire South Island and only part of Wellington.
Darren Hughes: That is mostly right. The number of constituencies for the South Island is set: the population on the census is taken, divided by 16, and that gives you your quota for North Island seats, plus or minus. That number is demand driven by the number of Maori New Zealanders who decide to register on the Maori electorate. For a long time, only about 50% of people did that. It has gone up a lot more in recent times and that is why it has gone from only four seats up to seven, because it is demand driven. It comes off the back of that quota formula that you quote. Therefore—remembering that New Zealand is the same geographic size as the UK—one constituency is the entire South Island plus Wellington in the North Island.
Chloe Smith
Q
Gavin Robinson: The particular rule that we can rely on in Northern Ireland is rule 7. That rule is important for us, given the geographical nature of Northern Ireland, with the urban dimensions and restrictiveness of our small part of the United Kingdom. Rule 7 allows us, where there is unreasonable infringement, to go beyond the 5% tolerance. We wish to see that important rule maintained. That is maintained.
We are mildly concerned that the consequence of the judicial review that just emerged from the Court of Appeal may inject a level of chill in the Boundary Commission’s ability to rely on rule 7. It is an important flexibility that it should use, with the need ultimately to demonstrate the rationale for doing so.
Cat Smith
Q
Gavin Robinson: I do not think it compromises the integrity of the Union in the longer term, but I do see that some of the arguments that could be used for retaining 18 seats in Northern Ireland could naturally apply to some of the other devolved Administrations. Fundamentally, the Northern Ireland Act 1998 provides for Assembly constituencies to be contiguous with our parliamentary constituencies. Without elections occurring at the same time, you could have a situation where you have representatives for a parliamentary constituency that no longer exists remaining in the Northern Ireland Assembly. I assume that unless there was some co-ordination between election times and reviews, that anomalous situation could occur, with representation for areas that no longer exist, depending on a boundary change and the configuration at that time. That is important for us.
You cannot really go beyond our boundaries unless you are prepared to go into extraterritorial application or the sea. Land boundaries with Scotland and Wales are obviously a little less constrained, but when you consider the impact on the devolved Administrations, I do think there is an argument that you can extrapolate from Northern Ireland to others.
Cat Smith
Q
Gavin Robinson: I believe it is wrong to move away from parliamentary approval. I see the proposal is to remove the ministerial ability for amendment and to remove the ability for Parliament ultimately to approve the proposals. Parliamentary approval is an important constitutional dimension that should be retained. It is a bulwark against proposals that do not rest well with our body politic, and I do not think the removal from Ministers of the ability to amend is in any way commensurate with the removal of Parliament’s ability to approve the proposals. The Minister will know better than I, but I am unaware of any fundamental use of the Minister’s ability to amend. We are all aware, however, of Parliament’s ability to inject itself and determine one way or another whether proposals should proceed. So we are concerned about the loss of parliamentary approval in the process.
David Linden
Q
Gavin Robinson: Arguments can be made for solidifying the number of constituencies in other parts of the United Kingdom, but I do not think there should be any rationale that precludes me from advancing an argument that is important for Northern Ireland on our political context and make-up. On our number of electors, at this moment in time we have sufficient electors for 17.63 constituencies, leading to the 18 constituencies, and we have that additional flexibility on rule 7.
Mr Linden, you are more than capable of advancing arguments that are important for Scotland, as indeed is Mr Lake for Wales. I think it is appropriate that the concerns highlighted about a cyclical reduction that could potentially arise through future reviews—a cyclical reduction or increase of parliamentary boundaries, and the knock-on consequence that would have for devolved Administrations—should be considered more generally, but I will advance the argument on Northern Ireland’s behalf.
Chloe Smith
Q
Dr Larner: The Bill has particularly drastic changes and implications for future elections in Wales. The planned change to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 has now obviously been rethought, but proportionally, that does not really make much difference in the reduction for Wales. If we have 600 MPs, there is a planned reduction of around 12 seats. In the new plan to stay at 650, Wales’ seats will drop by eight. Either way, the proportional representation of Wales in the Commons will be around the 5% mark. That is obviously of concern.
Wales is the biggest loser here. At the same time, it is also worth bearing in mind that, in pretty much any set-up, Wales will always be, proportionally, a very small part of the representation in the Commons. It might also be important to consider things such as really strengthening intergovernmental relations between the devolved Administrations and Westminster going forward.
On whether I outrightly support the Bill or disapprove of it, that is slightly more complicated. I will leave my answer at that, if that is okay.
Cat Smith
Q
Dr Larner: That is a very important question, and particularly relevant where I am from, for example, in south Wales. People talk about the valleys as one block, but I can assure you that people from one valley to the next, no matter how small, consider themselves quite different. There is the importance of people feeling that their community is being represented, without being interfered with by what they might see as people from other, different communities.
There is also the important uniqueness of Wales’s being particularly rural in its population. Given the tolerance at the moment, doing some quick maths, at the lower bound of what is being suggested at the moment— around the 69,000 voter mark—depending on which data source you use, there are only either two or four constituencies in Wales larger than that lower bound. That would necessitate really big boundary changes, and we know from some of our research that people like do not like the idea of constituencies being merged in different areas. It is really a balancing act in terms of how much importance you give to that kind of intuitive feeling of, “Oh no, I want boundaries to stay as they are,” versus the idea of fairness in the size of constituencies.
Cat Smith
Q
Dr Larner: Don’t get me wrong, not everyone will feel like this, but there is a certain feeling that yes, the Rhymney valley is very different from the Rhondda. There is that kind of feeling—although, when confronted with anyone from north Wales, you are from the valleys, the whole thing. It changes depending on who you are talking to, of course.
Cat Smith
Q
Dr Larner: Absolutely. There is a lot of very well-backed-up evidence in Wales that Welsh speakers, particularly fluent, first language Welsh speakers, tend to hold slightly different opinions on a whole range of ideas. They see themselves slightly differently from other people; they tend to identify not particularly as British, but more overwhelmingly as Welsh-only, whereas in more English-speaking areas there is more of a mix of Welsh and British identity. I would absolutely say that the ability to speak Welsh is a really important part of some people’s identity.
Ben Lake
Q
Dr Larner: In terms of those who are interested in a solid Welsh representation in the Commons, I would not say that this Bill is particularly good news. On the other hand, if we took a hypothetical situation where the number of Welsh MPs was increased by 10, you would still be looking at a very small proportion of the total representation in the Commons.
Specifically with the Bill, it is tricky to see how that can be fixed. More broadly, if we want to take the nations approach seriously, we need to think about how we do devolution. We need to think about doing that properly in Wales, which has had what my colleague Ed Poole likes to call salami-sliced devolution, as opposed to Scotland. We need proper inter-governmental relations baked into Whitehall processes. Another idea commonly talked about is House of Lords reform. I know that is far beyond the scope of the Bill, but those are the things we need to think and talk about.
Chloe Smith
Q
Dr Rossiter: Yes.
Professor Pattie: Absolutely.
Cat Smith
Q
Professor Pattie: I guess we can break that down into two constituent parts. One is whether we should have a principle of priority within the rules, as in the 2011 Act and in the Bill, with some notion of equalisation of electorates being the top criterion rather than the medium criterion, to avoid some of the confusion and tension of the earlier rules. To that extent—Dave may feel differently about this—I would certainly endorse the notion of having an equalisation rule as the top priority.
The second element of this is where to draw the tolerance. Should it be 5%, 1% or 10%? On that point, I think you have a rather more open debate on your hands. Dave referred, when introducing himself, to the work that we did for the McDougall Trust in 2014, looking at the process around the sixth review—the first under the 2011 legislation. In that work, we tried to estimate how much disruption different tolerances would cause in the system—how much breaking of ties and breaking up of existing seats there would be. Inevitably, there will be quite a lot, both in the first review under the new rules and in any subsequent revision. However, on our estimates, if you set the tolerance at around 7%, 8% or 9%, disruption is reduced, and you do a better job of maintaining existing ties and links.
Yes, equalisation is important, but the question is what tolerance you should work to, and how wide you set that tolerance. Our estimates suggested that 8% starts to get you into the compromise zone and makes life a bit easier.
Cat Smith
Q
Dr Rossiter: Yes. I am afraid that it is probably a rather technical point, but it is quite important, in terms of the effect that the rules will have on future reviews. The 2011 Act created the UK quota and laid down the rules for allocations to countries and regions, but if we look at registration statistics over the last 20 years, we can see how those national and regional entitlements vary over time. We know that in an average eight-year period, we would be likely to see about eight changes to either national or English regional entitlements—that is between each pair of reviews. With a fixed Parliament size, that would necessarily mean that four new seats would be created in the UK and four abolished.
In the case of an abolished seat, you will have to redistribute 60-odd thousand electors to neighbouring constituencies. That in itself will take most, if not all, of those neighbours over quota. Any seat over quota will need to lose one or more wards to compensate for the addition. The process continues in this way, much like ripples on a pond, until all seats are within the 5% tolerance. Several of the affected seats will need to become participants in the process, even though they were within quota; they act merely as transit stations.
You can think of the scale of the impact of this process, which is required by the 2011 rules, as inversely proportional to the level of tolerance. As a rule of thumb, which is always useful in such circumstances, dividing 100 by the level of tolerance give you a rough idea of the number of seats that will be affected. By contrast, under the previous rules, which allowed the commissions far more discretion, the process would affect just a handful of seats and would typically be contained within a county. In the fifth review, Cornwall gained a seat, but that had no knock-on effect whatever on Devon. That is simply not possible under the current rules.
If we assume eight changes of entitlement in eight years, and if we take the existing 5% tolerance, the rule of thumb would suggest that, every eight years, 160 seats will require significant and often major change. To that has to be added the 100-plus other seats that have drifted outside what is a much tighter quota than has ever existed before. This is something that I have not heard mentioned as part of what the 2011 Act effectively ensured. The critical point to take away is that the interplay of the rules with such a tight tolerance will effectively guarantee a major redrawing of constituency boundaries at every subsequent review.
Cat Smith
Q
Dr Rossiter: Back in 1998, we wrote a proposed new set of rules that would have achieved what I think would have been a rather better way to work—I would say that, wouldn’t I? We felt at the time that the differences between national quotas, and the discrepancies between constituencies across England, were too large. We suggested that a new set of rules could say, “Yes, we’ll have a UK-wide quota, and we will have a target size for Parliament of whatever number of seats you wish.” It is 650 in the present case. We then said that a commission should be restricted to no more than 10% variance around the UK-wide quota, but that it should aim to get constituencies as near to that quota as was practical. That would give commissions the extra latitude that they would need to avoid many of the difficulties that were so evident in the 2013 and 2018 exercises.
At the same time, we would make it clear that electoral equality is a very important thing to aim for, and it should be the goal in all circumstances. I believe that having a degree of flexibility is extremely important, and I fear that not having it will inevitably cause consequences further down the line.
Cat Smith
Q
Professor Pattie: One of the areas that I was quite pleased to see in the Bill was a re-examination of how the inquiry and hearings are held, because that is problematic.
However, there is still a bit of a challenge for the public hearing process, because the areas in which those hearings now operate are just so incredibly large. There was some discussion earlier in your deliberations about ways in which the process might be improved to allow greater flexibility in local discussion. But you must remember that you are talking about entire regions, and about entire countries in Scotland and Wales, and people can turn up at a hearing in one corner of the region or country to talk about a seat in quite another part, and the chances of having a meaningful conversation about those proposals are remarkably small.
I am not sure that I have a clever proposal for you, but I think that is something to worry about; the extent to which those hearings really produce helpful information in all bar a few cases would be a concern that I have. I cannot suggest a fix for you, but if you want to look at something, that is another area that it is worth just having a bit more thought given to it.
Bim Afolami
Q
Professor Pattie: Big is the very short answer. This is liable to be one of the most disruptive reviews that we have seen for quite some time. As Dave mentioned earlier, on our estimates you are looking at major disruption again, and again, and again, into the future, especially if you hang on to that 5% tolerance. So, this will be big. Further reviews will also be big, so this will become a feature of the system going forward.
Dr Rossiter: If I can just add to what Charles has said, when we did our 2014 exercise we estimated that approximately half of seats would experience major change at this first review, but we based that on 2010 data, because that was the data that was available at that time. So, we were looking at rectifying changes that had taken place over 10 years, plus the change to the rules. We will now be looking at an exercise that has to rectify the changes over 20 years and I think that we will be looking at something like two thirds to three quarters of seats experiencing very significant change at this coming review.
Contrary to what I think are some of the optimistic views that were expressed earlier in proceedings, I see little chance of county boundaries remaining intact in large parts of the country. I think that most county and unitary authority boundaries will need to be breached. I also think that many more constituencies will be split across local authorities, and vice versa, and many more seats will have orphan wards in them.
Again, looking at this in an historical context, there have not been that many reviews that have had to deal with 20 years of changes, so it is probably not too helpful to concentrate on the disruption this time round; it was always going to be like this. I think that what is much more worthy of consideration in terms of legislation is realising the longer-term implications of it, because the danger is that if these changes are not realised, you only have to go back to the 1954-55 debates in Parliament, when MPs suddenly realised what had happened in the previous legislation and said, “We do not want our constituencies changed on this basis. Why are we having all this change?” Four years later, legislation was introduced to reduce the need to change to meet an arithmetical standard. My fear, obviously, is that that will be repeated.
Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Second sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsThursday 18th June 2020
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Notices of Amendments as at 16 June 2020 - (17 Jun 2020)
The Chair
We will now make our way around the group leaders, unless I signal otherwise. If anyone else wishes to speak, just catch my eye.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Thank you, Roger, for coming to give evidence. Are there any specific circumstances in which electoral quota could be relaxed in order to avoid splitting an electoral ward? For example, even though the vast majority of seats were within the 5%, if in one or two very localised examples a 6% variance would prevent a ward splitting, would you find that preferable?
Roger Pratt: No, I would not: I think we have to stick to the quota. There are already exceptions in the Bill—four constituencies are clearly protected, Northern Ireland has special rules for the quota and there are rules about the area of a constituency, which in effect affects only northern Scotland. Those exceptions are in the Bill. Otherwise, it is right to have the 5% tolerance and, within the 5% tolerance, we can get constituencies that meet quota but also respect communities.
The best opportunity, as was said in the report by Mr Pattie and others, is split wards, which make a considerable difference. Splitting wards is the opportunity to make sure that constituencies are in the right place in terms of communities. I know you are to speak to Mr Pattie later—very sadly, Ron Johnston died recently—but, just so you know, in their report, they said:
“The Boundary Commissions for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales were prepared to split wards where they considered that sensible; the Boundary Commission for England was extremely reluctant to do so, and many of the problems that emerged in its recommendations resulted from this.”
They went on:
“With ward-splitting, it is possible to have substantially more unchanged constituencies—and, as a corollary, substantially fewer undergoing major change—especially with the tighter tolerances. The advantages are particularly pronounced at lower tolerances with 650 seats but, as the tolerance is relaxed, ward-splitting is needed in fewer areas”.
So I believe in ward splitting, rather than in relaxing the tolerance.
The 5% tolerance—10%, either way—is right. Otherwise, we could have one constituency that is 67,000 next to another that is 78,000, so ward splitting is right. There are those few exceptions in the Bill, as is correct.
Cat Smith
One of those exceptions would be the Isle of Wight, which looks set to get two MPs under the Bill. On current figures, that would come in at about 55,000 electors in each, which is about the size of many Welsh constituencies, in particular if we look at the Welsh valleys and their geography, where mountains divide communities. How do you explain the difference between those geographical features that make the Isle of Wight the exception but not necessarily the Welsh valleys?
Roger Pratt: The Welsh valleys—I actually live in one, so I have some experience of this—are totally different from the Isle of Wight. You suggested that the Isle of Wight had similarities with the Welsh valleys, but the Isle of Wight is an island without any direct link to the mainland; all the Welsh valleys have links to the rest of Wales, and so on. It is not sensible to link the Welsh valleys with the Isle of Wight.
The treatment of the Welsh valleys is absolutely right. Unfortunately, Wales will take a hit—one has to say that—but the position is that just before 2005, Scotland was required to reduce the number of seats to the English quota. They were required to use the English quota prior to 2005 with the Scottish Parliament. That was not required in Wales with the Welsh Assembly—Wales now has a Welsh Parliament—but unfortunately that means that Wales will take a hit.
However, I think it is right that my vote in Monmouthshire should equal a vote in another part of the country. Monmouthshire is one of the largest, but my doctor’s surgery is in Blaenau Gwent, one of the Welsh valleys to which you refer. Is it right that Blaenau Gwent has 50,736 electors whereas just over the Severn bridge in Bristol West, they have 99,253? I do not think that is right, and Wales will take a hit—there is no doubt about that. However, it is right that you have a standard quota throughout the United Kingdom. That is fair and that is equal.
Cat Smith
My final question. We have the representative of the Conservative and Unionist party before us, and you have acknowledged that Wales looks set to take a hit. It looks to be the most badly affected of all the nations of the United Kingdom in the review. What assessment do you make about the integrity of the Union in terms of the consequences of this boundary review and Welsh voices in this place?
Roger Pratt: I think the Union is intact. The whole of the Union will have the same quota. It is absolutely right that everywhere in the United Kingdom has a quota and so every person in the United Kingdom has the same representation. The difference in Scotland and Wales is that they have a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Parliament. They still have equal representation in the UK Parliament, which I think is absolutely right, but clearly the Members for Glasgow East and Ceredigion do not have responsibility in this place for health and education, whereas all the other Members on the Committee do.
Scotland has a slight advantage over the rest of the United Kingdom, quite rightly in terms of the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland. I fully support that. However, it means that—slightly—Scotland has an advantage over the rest of the United Kingdom because those are very small seats. I do not object to that in any way. The Union is intact because everybody’s vote counts equally whatever part of the United Kingdom they come from.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
Q
Roger Pratt: Correct, yes. I am fully supportive of 650.
Chloe Smith
Q
Tom Adams: That is true, but if a Labour Government were proposing this Bill, there might be slightly different thresholds, for example, so clearly the Government still have quite a lot of influence over what is put in the Bill in terms of these boundaries, which obviously will persist for at least—possibly—two general elections. That is why I think it is right that it does come back to Parliament at the end.
Cat Smith
Q
Tom Adams: Broadly, yes, having a constituency that varies by 5.5% from the quota makes more sense than having a split ward or, indeed, an orphan ward added to a constituency, where you have one ward from a different local authority. I think that makes more sense from the perspective of maintaining community ties and having constituencies that the public understand and have trust in. It is a question of having some flexibility in specific areas. Obviously, some wards in the country are very, very large in terms of electors, particularly in the west midlands, where some wards in Birmingham have 20,000. That obviously makes it very hard, in those areas, to come up with arrangements, so having additional flexibility on the 5% figure would make that easier. The same applies to some bits of Wales, for example, where the geography obviously makes it much more challenging.
Cat Smith
Q
Tom Adams: Yes, I think wards should be the building blocks for this. Obviously, where a decision is taken to split a ward, if that is absolutely necessary, it should be along the existing polling district lines, but as you say, polling districts do not have a clear legal status. Councils can amend them, basically, as and when they want. There is not a clear process for how that happens in the same way as there is for how wards are done by the Local Government Boundary Commission. Polling districts are at the discretion of the councils, and although in some areas they are based on parishes, in many others they change quite frequently.
We saw, for example, in the general election some councils that created polling districts just for the purposes of helping them to administer the general election, and then they got rid of them afterwards again. Things like that make it very hard to have a consistent process that is based on using polling district boundaries. Using wards would be much preferable, and avoiding splitting where possible; and where that is necessary, that is when you can use the polling district boundaries to do that. I do not think polling districts should be the primary building block for this process.
Cat Smith
Q
Tom Adams: I very much welcome the move from December 2020 to March 2020. Obviously, the Minister will be aware that we have raised significant concerns about this, in the earlier engagement with political parties. We still have some concerns about the impact of people dropping off the register even between 12 December 2019 and March. Obviously that will be less significant compared with December 2020, but just in our rough estimations looking at it now, it does look likely that a few hundred thousand people will have dropped off the register in that time, because obviously there are areas where people move a lot and there is high turnover of population.
On 12 December there was a general election, so that register will be the most complete a register is going to be. To my mind, it makes sense to use that one, although obviously I strongly welcome the use of 2 March as compared with December 2020, when I think the impact on the annual canvass of coronavirus will have been quite significant. I think the 12 December one would be better: it will be more complete and a better representation of the actual electorates in these places. But 2 March is certainly preferred to December 2020.
David Linden
Q
Tom Adams: Obviously, the commissions did publish the numbers on this, but broadly, there is likely to be a loss of three seats for Scotland and a loss of eight seats for Wales. Obviously, that might change slightly, depending on exactly which register you use, but it is going to be in that region of change.
Chloe Smith
Thank you very much. I am happy to leave that line of questioning there and allow other colleagues to come in.
Cat Smith
Q
Dave McCobb: Thanks very much. Our primary concern is about the restrictiveness of the 5% threshold in terms of equalising the electorates in constituencies. There have been widespread reports of the degree of under-registration of electors in many parts of the country and of the number of people who are not correctly registered. Setting a very restrictive threshold at 5% reduces the commission’s flexibility to recognise that significant under-registration is likely in some parts of the country.
It also means that constituencies could be constructed incredibly arbitrarily. In the previous round of the review —the proposals that were ultimately never implemented— many constituencies were constructed that really bore no reference to identifiable communities with which people who lived there would identify. That impacted cities in England particularly, where, due to the size of local government wards, the number of wards that needed to be added together could not be done within local authority boundaries. So very arbitrary constituencies were constructed including chunks of some local authorities, and they really bore no reference to communities that people would identify with. That could be eliminated by having a higher threshold of 10%, for example. That would be the No. 1 concern about the proposals as they are currently outlined.
David Linden
Q
Dave McCobb: I have not personally, no. That would be done by a colleague who is not currently in work. In terms of the overall distribution of seats between the four nations, that is something that I would not want to comment on until we actually see the registered totals that will be published for the electoral register that will be used for this.
I would like to bring it back to the 5% threshold. When I have been involved in cross-party talks on this, colleagues from the SNP have rightly raised concerns that the 5% threshold would require the creation of some geographically enormous constituencies in the highlands of Scotland and potentially in other parts of rural England and Wales.
Anyone who knows otherwise may correct me if I am wrong, but someone once told me that the constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire is larger than Luxembourg. It would require a constituency that is already that geographically large—the same applies to parts of the highlands of Scotland, too—to be 25-30% bigger to meet the 5% threshold. That is likely to make it very difficult to represent or campaign in a constituency on that scale.
The Chair
Talk about getting your retaliation in last, there, Scott.
Scott Martin: I am sure Mr Linden will be invited to the celebration of his unemployment.
Cat Smith
Q
Scott Martin: I suppose our view on the integrity of the Union may be different from that of other political parties that are represented there. I suspect that it may be two rather than three seats that will be lost, with the current formulas. It rather depends, I think. The numbers we have so far do not include attainers. By my calculation, the percentage of attainers in Scotland is roughly 0.957%, whereas in England it is 0.644%. When the attainers are added in, it may be that Scotland will only lose two seats, rather than three. However, as people have identified, we will not know that until all the final figures are collated after March. I suspect the reason why there are more attainers in Scotland will be questions of life expectancy. Also, because we have voting at 16 in Scotland, it is likely that we manage to get more people on as attainers than other parts of the UK.
Cat Smith
Q
Scott Martin: I certainly think that work could be done on changing the variance, which is effectively half the gains I talked about as a permissible departure in relation to the Venice Commission “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters”. The question of wards is rather different in Scotland than in England. Parliamentary constituencies in Scotland are based on wards, with no ward splitting. Of course, before the 2007 Scottish Parliament and local government elections in Scotland, we moved to three or four-member wards. The consequence is that you cannot get sensible constituencies without splitting wards, particularly with the hard limit put in place as a result of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. It is a rather different situation in Scotland, for practical reasons, as a consequence of the size of wards we have.
David Linden
Q
I want to ask about parliamentary approval. You will note that in the Bill, Parliament’s approval role is being removed. Can you share your view on that?
Scott Martin: That is, in a sense, a highly political question. Do you want politicised districting—everyone has difficulty with that word—or independent districting? Do you want the model they have in the United States, where the word “gerrymander” comes from? The logic is that if you have an independent commission model, which we have had here since the commissions were put on a permanent footing, the ability for political interference is minimised. Automaticity, as it has been described, is a sensible approach to take on that—although clearly, as we have seen from a variety of reviews, including the last two, ultimately, if Parliament wants to stop a review, or wants to proceed or another basis, that can happen, but unless we move to having a written constitution, which I would obviously support, that is not something that we can legislate for.
Cat Smith
Q
Geraint Day: We do not believe that Wales should lose any MPs. The previous review, which would have reduced the number to 600, has in effect been scrapped, and the number has gone back to 650, yet Wales is losing Members of Parliament and England is gaining Members of Parliament. That seems like a strange place to be. It will appear very strange to the Welsh electorate when they look at this and say, “Where is the UK headed? Is it becoming more and more England-dominant?” We believe that would be incorrect, and that Wales should keep the same level of representation.
Cat Smith
Q
Geraint Day: Absolutely. The figure of 7.5% that has been suggested would help. I think it would still leave challenges, but it would certainly reduce the negative impact of the suggestion.
This is not just about the south Wales valleys, although it is interesting that in the last review, the first proposal from the Boundary Commission about the Rhondda constituency was to include part of Cynon Valley in it. To get there, you have to cross over the Rhigos mountain, which features heavily on winter travel reports on Radio Wales when the mountain road is closed because of bad weather. That is a common occurrence in Wales, due to its geography, and not just south Wales; it happens even more in the north, where you have the mountain ranges of Snowdonia and the Clwydian hills. They are big barriers to building constituencies, and taking a ward on the other side of a mountain away from its natural community has a big impact and is very unpopular with the local electorate.
A larger variance—7.5%, or something akin to it—would allow greater flexibility for the Boundary Commission. It must be said that the commission generally does a good job and is very open to other suggestions, but has its hands tied by the 5% rule. Giving it extra freedom to determine the best fit is a very sensible suggestion.
Ben Lake
Q
Geraint Day: The biggest difference in local ties between Wales and England is the Welsh language. A large percentage of Welsh language speakers are down the west coast, but they are also in some of the upland areas in north and south Wales. Local ties do not necessarily go down the same route as that. The Boundary Commission is looking at geographical ties—shopping centres, travel-to-work areas and those types of things—whereas at times the Welsh language communities do not fit into that local-tie element.
In the past, the Boundary Commission has made attempts to address this; where it has originally proposed splitting Welsh language communities, it has made efforts to put them back together. However, I suggest that it would be better to specifically state that in the Bill, rather than just lump it in with “local ties”. If you look at the Welsh Government’s planning process and the advice it gives to local government about local development plans, those plans are required to have a language impact assessment, a requirement that originates from the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011. The way the Boundary Commission operates is perfectly bilingual and it deserves great praise for the way it operates. However, it is not required under the current local ties rule to specifically consider the impact on the Welsh language. I think that should be included as a specific item in the Bill.
Chloe Smith
I salute the crystal clarity of your thinking and the way you have put it to us. Thank you.
Cat Smith
My question is about devolution, which looks very different in different parts of the United Kingdom. It looks a certain way in Wales and, even within England, there are huge variations. To what extent do you think that the Senedd boundaries should be taken into consideration, as opposed to ward boundaries? What do you think makes the best building blocks for Welsh constituencies that truly represent the communities and keep the communities together, while obviously striving to have constituencies as equal as practically possible?
Professor Wyn Jones: Thank you for the question. One of the things we tend to focus on, especially in these kinds of conversations, is the relative number of MPs from each of the constituent nations, but I think it is important to point out that within Wales, the boundaries are now so out of date that we have very large differences in constituency sizes in Wales.
If you take Arfon at one end of the spectrum and Cardiff South and Penarth at the other, there are very large differences in terms of size. To the extent that the boundaries of the Senedd, or parts of the Senedd electoral system, remain tied to those of Westminster, having relatively equal constituency sizes for Westminster will probably make the Senedd electoral system a little bit fairer, too. We miss the fact that the differences within Wales are now very substantial indeed.
If you will permit me to widen the optic a bit, you are right to say that we have distinct dispensations for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They now look more alike than they did in 1999, but they are still different. England has an incredibly complex—I would say pathologically complex—internal devolution system. My view is that that should be separated out from the issue of representation in Westminster.
There is room, I think, for variation within the state, but in terms of representation in the House of Commons, it seems to make sense to have a kind of equality, not least because I have never heard a good justification for the level of variation that we have. As I said earlier, why should Wales have 6% of MPs when we have 5% of the population? Why not 8% or 10%? There is no obvious logic to the current system. Equality makes more sense.
Cat Smith
Q
Professor Wyn Jones: I think we all recognise that commissioners always have a terribly difficult job to do, because there will be particular communities that feel a sense of association with some communities and less so with others.
Assuming this legislation reaches the statute book, the challenge for the Welsh commissioners is particularly daunting, because Wales would see the biggest level of change. That will be an enormous challenge, and there will be communities in Wales that feel that the changes being imposed are unwelcome; there is no doubt about that. I am an Anglesey boy, an Ynys Môn boy—I can well foresee that people at home will be extremely unhappy. I am sure that there will be different valleys and different communities thinking, “Well, we don’t really have much in common with the people over the other side of the ridge”, and so on and so forth.
So the challenge will be substantial. I think that my predecessor on this call, Geraint Day, pointed to a recent example around Ceredigion, where people felt that the commissioners had got it wrong, and fair play to the commissioners—they went back and changed things in a way that was regarded as being more acceptable. And I have no doubt that there will be lots of that.
David Linden
Q
Professor Wyn Jones: I do not really have that level of insight into the minds of the people involved. All I would say is that I spoke to Conservative MPs in Wales about this—I spoke to many of them because, as you probably have guessed, my views about this issue are not always particularly popular among Welsh MPs, and several of them were very keen to put me right. But it was very clear from a very early point that the reduction from 650 was not politically viable and that the Conservatives would have real issues, in terms of whipping their own MPs to support it.
It was certainly made clear to me very early on that, in all likelihood, the last attempt at reform would fail and that we would be coming back to this issue, and that we would be coming back to it with 650 MPs as the aim. And the people who I spoke to at that time were correct.
Parliamentary Constituencies bill (First sitting)
Cat Smith ExcerptsThursday 18th June 2020
(4 years, 5 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 View all Parliamentary Constituencies Act 2020 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Notices of Amendments as at 16 June 2020 - (17 Jun 2020)
The Chair
Q
Isabel Drummond-Murray: I think that Tony has covered the legislative framework pretty well, so, no, there is nothing I would add to that.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Q
“One of the most testing issues in the context of the revised statutory framework has been the requirement to reconcile the need to adhere to a fixed electorate tolerance (i.e. within 5% of the electoral quota) with the need to respect local ties and/or existing constituency boundaries.”
Do those concerns still stand and, if so, is there any way of alleviating the difficulties that the commission will face?
Tony Bellringer: Yes, the problem still exists. It is essentially a pragmatic problem. The smaller the tolerance level you allow, the closer you get to the pure principle of electorate equality between constituencies, and that is all to the good. The problem is that that makes it very much harder to have regard to the other factors that you specify in the legislation, such as the importance of not breaking local ties, and having regard to local authority boundaries and features of natural geography. Basically, the smaller you make the tolerance, the fewer options we have. That is what it boils down to.
How could you mitigate the problem? The only real way to mitigate it is to make the tolerance figure slightly larger. The larger you make it, the more options we have and the more flexibility we have to have regard to the other factors—but obviously, the further away you are moving from the pure principle of electorate equality. You do need to strike the balance somewhere.
The commission itself does not have a view on what the correct figure should be—before anybody tries to ask me that question. However, we would highlight the fact that some academic work has been done on this. I believe that you are due to interview Charles Pattie, who was one of the authors of a report in 2014 that looked specifically at the issue. He is more qualified to say than I am.
Cat Smith
Q
Tony Bellringer: Yes is the short answer. As you say, particularly in England we work or we have traditionally worked on the basis of using wards as our building blocks—I am sure there will be some discussion about that in due course. But as you say, a number of wards, particularly in urban authorities in England, are larger than the entire possible range that you are permitted—the difference, I should say—so by moving one ward, you will move from being too big as a constituency to being too small, with nothing in between, so you then have to start looking at splitting the wards, which becomes more problematic for us, for reasons that I am sure we will get on to.
David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)
Q
Isabel Drummond-Murray: It is not possible to give an answer to that until we have the electorate data that the review will be based on. I think, informally, we did look at the December ’19 register, and if that were the one being used, it did suggest a reduction in seats in Scotland. Clearly, the Bill as drafted suggests the December ’20 register. Until we get those figures published, from whichever data is finally proposed by the Bill, we cannot tell you exactly how many seats there would be. We would have to run the formula that Tony referred to, and that would allocate between the four countries.
Chris Clarkson
Q
Tony Bellringer: We use the same distribution formula that is used to allocate the seats across the UK initially. We do that for the regions, and within the region we work out what we call a theoretical entitlement: if you use this agglomeration of a couple of counties, it would be allocated this many seats on the face of it.
Cat Smith
Q
Tony Bellringer: I do not think that it makes a huge difference to us if they do not have a legal standing. They are a recognised administrative unit, as you say, that is used by electoral administrators in the delivery of an election. That is another reason why at the moment we use wards, because, although they have more of a legal status in law, they are used as a unit by the electoral administrators to deliver elections. One thing that we do have a mind to is that somebody has to use this constituency in delivering the election, and we want to make that process as smooth as possible for the people actually running the election as well.
The Chair
I am afraid that that brings us to the end of this session. As usual, it got more interesting as time went along. We probably could have had much more time, although I am sure that our two witnesses are very pleased that there is no additional time. However, it shows that there is considerable interest in this issue. More expert witnesses will come along now, so we will be able to continue some of these lines of questioning. I thank our two witnesses for coming today—you have been brilliant, informative and very helpful to the Committee. I thank you for your efforts.
Examination of Witnesses
Shereen Williams MBE gave evidence.
Chloe Smith
Thank you, Shereen. I will pause there and let other colleagues take over.
Cat Smith
Q
Shereen Williams: The challenge that we have in Wales is that whether we go with 600 seats or 650, Wales will take the biggest hit in terms of loss of constituencies. It would mean, I think, a massive change: across the whole country, I cannot guarantee that even seats that fit within the current limits will be able to remain intact. That is the challenge we have in Wales; the 5% does give a very tight range for us to work around.
I think the valleys will present a unique challenge for us, because you do not really want to split a valley and have half in one seat and the other half in another seat. It will require us to look at our building blocks and how we work on that, getting input from local communities and from local authorities—from our stakeholders—and asking, “If we had to go down the route of splitting a valley, what is the best combination to work?” I am aware that we had the exact same problem at the last review.
Cat Smith
Q
Shereen Williams: It would give us more flexibility, yes, to put communities together, but again, I think it is very clear that, as an independent body, we do not have a view as such on the electoral quota; that is something for our MPs to make.
Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)
Q
Shereen Williams: From the commission’s perspective, it is about communities that are together. We look at your electoral wards and communities that are linked through joint programmes and projects. Also, quite uniquely, in Wales, as you are very aware, is the Welsh language. We take it into account that you have constituencies where there are lots of links to the Welsh language. That is something we would like to keep together. That, for us as a commission, is what we would consider a community tie as well.
Cat Smith
Q
Eamonn McConville: The most pressing impact of covid-19 for ourselves in Northern Ireland is in relation to the recruitment and training of staff ahead of the commencement of the next review. There are obviously practical implications of being face to face while still maintaining social distancing, but there is the added difficulty that commission staff are seconded from other Departments. That is our normal practice. Those Departments are under pressure to resource their response to covid-19 and to Brexit, which is coming down the line. There is a real difficulty facing us at the moment in terms of getting staff in and trained in time for the next review, but we are working with Departments on that.
Cat Smith
Q
Eamonn McConville: We had hoped to recruit the first of the staff by September. We are a small team, so we plan to get the remaining two staff in by December of this year. We are still within a reasonable window, but time marches on fairly quickly when dealing with recruitment processes and getting staff released, so we are keen to get that work under way.
Cat Smith
Q
Eamonn McConville: During our public consultations, people are free to put forward whatever local issues or local ties pertain to themselves and their local areas. The one thing that we cannot take into account—this applies across the UK, to all of the commissions—is anything that would affect or is influenced by electoral trends, electoral outcomes and things like that. Anything that would fall under a local tie is valid, in terms of what we would consider.
The second part of your question was on the electoral quota range. Again, as my colleagues have told you, the 5% presents issues in terms of accommodating local ties more roundly across Northern Ireland. As I said earlier to the Minister, we have the flexibility in rule 7 in terms of geographical limitations, because of the particular circumstances in Northern Ireland. It is interesting to note that the flexibility in the 2018 review would actually have come within the plus or minus 7.5% that has been discussed previously by other people. It is not a huge degree of flexibility, but it does allow us—when we are restricted in circumstances under rule 2—to have a certain degree of flexibility.
Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)
Q
Eamonn McConville: You are absolutely right that we now have the 11 local government areas, but we are working with different factors. In the last review, the 2018 review, we had 17 constituencies. While our considerations would have included trying to fit as many whole parts of local government areas into the 17 constituencies, the mathematics just do not allow for that, so we then take on board the other factors, which include local ties.
In Northern Ireland—it is similar across the UK—we have more major towns with satellite towns and villages around them. That is one thing that came to the fore in our consultation process, and we tried to accommodate that in our proposals as they went through the various consultation stages. There are similarities, but clear differences, simply because of the rules that we operate under.
Oral Answers to Questions
Cat Smith Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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Chloe Smith
Yes, that is exactly what they will do. That range in constituency sizes is unacceptable, and the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill will achieve not only updated but equal constituencies and fair votes. A vote cast in any part of Manchester should be just as good as one cast anywhere else in that city or the UK.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
As a result of the Bill, England looks set to increase its number of constituencies at the expense of Scotland and Wales. What action are the Government taking to prevent the weakening of Scottish and Welsh voices in this place and to both strengthen and defend the Union?
Chloe Smith
There is an awful lot of action on those scores. The boundaries Bill does an important thing first—paying equal respect to all nations of our United Kingdom—because we on the Government side believe in the Union. We believe it is incredibly important, and we believe that people’s voices ought to be equal between and within the countries of our United Kingdom.
Cat Smith
It is interesting that the Minister talks about the importance of equality and ensuring that every vote counts equally when her Government is pushing a policy that could see some votes count more equally than others. In the light of the Windrush scandal, where we discovered that some communities find it harder to access proof of identification than others, in the days following the Black Lives Matter protests, and knowing that, for instance, 76% of the white population hold a driving licence compared with 52% of black people, if she really wants to ensure that every vote counts equally, will she ask herself: why continue with these discriminatory policies?
Chloe Smith
Because they are not discriminatory. The hon. Lady sees evils where they do not exist. Everyone on the Government side of the House, and I hope everyone in the House, agrees that black lives matter. She is wrong and has been wrong every time she has tried to run that argument about voter identification. It is a reasonable thing that many other countries do, and it will improve the security of our voting. The evidence shows there is no impact on any particular demographic group.