Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Earl of Onslow and Lord Howarth of Newport

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My noble friend speaks with feeling about the area that he knows and has served so well.

I do not want to detain the House but want to complete my point on local government. That map of local government became so intolerable to tidy-minded bureaucrats in the 1960s that it was judged that it had to be reformed and redesigned. We had the Redcliffe-Maud report and the 1972 legislation that created all kinds of new entities of local government that had never corresponded to people’s sense of reality of where they lived. Many have been abolished and we have never succeeded in designing a new map of local government because you cannot impose it from on high.

[The Earl of Onslow]

The Minister has already gone quite far. He said that he will draw attention to it. Do we need what is basically a Boundary Commission argument on these little things? This is nothing other than wasting your Lordships’ time, and it is a disgrace for the Opposition to go on behaving like this.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I am sorry that the noble Earl thinks that. He is being a little too impatient, if I may say so. The point that I am making is that the relationship between the structures of local government and the system of parliamentary representation is very important. It needs to be intimate. Members of Parliament and elected members of local authorities need to work together. This system should be an organic whole, which is one more very important reason why the rules that the Government propose to govern the designing and drawing of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies need to be sensitive to the realities of local government. I say no more than that, but these considerations genuinely matter.

I welcome the Minister’s tone and hope that his department will examine the practical implications of not moving beyond the 5 per cent tolerance either side of the norm, and consider whether it would produce anomalies and offensive manifestations in the way in which our constituencies are drawn that we would be very much wiser to avoid.