St Albans and Welwyn Hatfield (Boundary Change) Order 2012

Lord Beecham Excerpts

Tuesday 14th February 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I welcome this order and want to proclaim that at last common sense reigns. I come from Hertfordshire, although not this part, and know the councillors for the London Colney area, which will receive the houses that are being transferred. I am delighted that this anomaly has been corrected. I had personal experience of it when I went to help during a hotly contested by-election in the village of Welham Green over Christmas some five years ago. Finishing canvassing in the village, I offered to do the last few houses on the remaining canvass sheet. “Yes”, said our Welwyn Hatfield councillor, “but I would not walk if I were you”. The reason was because the journey to get from the village to these houses is across a number of fields and past the entrance to the M25, the dual carriageway and a whole string of new industrial estates. This whole area is a complete anomaly. Luckily, the Welwyn Hatfield councillor said that the local London Colney councillor would do the canvassing for us. It is bizarre how history manages to make a small number of houses in completely the wrong place for local government purposes. I suspect that the change will not be visible to the residents of the up to 14 properties, who probably feel as if they have always been in London Colney anyway. I urge the Committee to free the Welwyn Hatfield 14 and their occupants and let them move to their natural home of London Colney in the city of St Albans.

[Lord Beecham]

Well, my Lords, I begin as I began the last debate with a reference to where we are. I am pleased to say that we have moved from the 10 commandments to 14 houses being relocated in what must pass for something like the transposition of Clochemerle to rural Hertfordshire. We have gone through an extraordinarily convoluted process to accommodate the perfectly reasonable request of a handful of residents. They were supported, I understand, by the local Member of Parliament, Mr Grant Shapps, with whom I have occasional disagreements but whom I congratulate on his efforts on this particular occasion in meeting the needs of his constituents.

I cannot quibble with these changes, but I rather contrast the work of the whole machinery of state to produce this splendid result for the residents of this patch with what is going on in respect of other boundaries. Presumably, this boundary change will also shift these voters from one parliamentary constituency to another, unless of course these are two constituencies that may be combined. At the moment, we have some extraordinary propositions that make this look even more minuscule by comparison. We have boundary changes to which all political parties seem to have profound objections.

For example, there is to be a boundary change in Merseyside creating a Mersey Bank constituency with part of it in Wirral and part of it Liverpool divided by the River Mersey—with no crossing at that point. We have a parliamentary constituency in my part of world, which is a diagonal stripe across Northumberland down to Barnard Castle in Durham from Haltwhistle. We have constituencies in Cumbria divided by the Pennines. We have Gloucester city with the centre, town hall, markets and so forth transposed to another constituency whose name currently escapes me but is certainly outside the traditional city of Gloucester, and so on and so forth.

By comparison, this is a straightforward and simple matter. It is only a pity that the Government's decision to force a change of boundaries on a radical scale with limited discretion in terms of the size of constituencies will lead to much more of a problem for many more people up and down the country. But I appreciate that that is beyond the scope of the Minister, who I am sure would be only too willing to adjust the instructions given to the Boundary Commission had she the power to do so. In the circumstances, of course, I can only endorse these proposals and give them the blessing that we will not be conferring on the regulations that we discussed previously.

[Baroness Hanham]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their support for this order. I guess that the local authority has to ask the Boundary Commission for a review. Since it has only just got this one done from 2010, it will take a little while to do the others.