Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Rennard

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 10th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I am speaking to your Lordships from the far end of the Room. It is not that I consider noble Lords extra-contagious, and I hope they do not consider me so, and I am not extra-social distancing; it is just the only place that I can get into in my wheelchair. It was an absolute delight to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, speak, and I agree with every word she said. I hope that that does not do irreparable damage to her reputation, but there you have it.

First, I did not intervene at the end of the Minister’s last speech, but I was very surprised by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, for whom I have the utmost respect. I thought she was treated abysmally by Jeremy Corbyn, and I am glad she is back in position. I say simply that I recall from 1997 onwards that Tony Blair stuffed every single quango full of Labour Party apparatchiks and the Tory party is a bit slow in catching up.

I go back to the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth. I am afraid that I disagree profoundly with him. There are too many MPs already. I regret that we have gone back to 650 from 600, but I can live with that—I am okay with it. We will come to this later, under the next amendment but, in my opinion, Scotland is heavily overrepresented. Scottish MPs at Westminster have little to do and are earning money on false pretences. English MPs have to deal with all political matters, but Scots at Westminster have MSPs who do the bulk of the work. However, I shall say more about that under the next amendment.

The answer is not to have more MPs or Peers but to increase the powers of parish councils, district councils, county councils, unitary authorities and elected mayors, and to devolve authority down. I agree entirely that the House of Lords should not be larger than the House of Commons, but the answer is to cut the number of Lords and not increase the number of MPs. I am afraid that we have seen, as I said in my detailed report to the committee looking into the size of the Lords, that Prime Ministers will not play ball with recommendations voluntarily to restrict the number of Peers they create. They cannot and will not do it, for many well-known reasons. Like it or not, we are going to have to take matters into our own hands and, at some point, invent a system to have retirement of Peers over a certain age—whatever that may be—and chuck out those who attend less than 20% or 25% of our sittings. But that is for another occasion.

I will also say that MPs do not have a heavier workload now there are no longer MEPs. I am not sure that I ever had any constituents who went to an MEP to handle local problems. They expected the MP to do it. In my experience, most constituents who had a complaint about an EU proposal came to the MP.

I know that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, said that, with email, people expect instant answers. That is the case, but there is also instant availability of the answers on government websites, and on information supplied by the political parties and by the House of Commons and House of Lords Libraries. I do not accept that the workload is so exceptionally increased that we need to increase the number of MPs. I hope my noble friend the Minister will reject the amendment. Admittedly, it was well argued by my noble friend Lord Norton, but I hope he will still reject it.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, made an interesting speech and made points that the Minister might find hard to answer, but he did not make a case for this amendment. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris, made an argument in support of it because he wants there to be more Welsh MPs, even if this means more MPs in every other part of the UK. However, I doubt that this proposal would ever make it into a serious party manifesto.

The key question for the Minister is whether the Government accept the principles of the Burns committee and agree with the House of Lords, which wants to reduce the number of its Members. The amendment is clearly born out of frustration that the Prime Minister has just appointed more than 30 new Peers. Perhaps the Minister will explain why.