Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I am delighted and slightly stunned to have stimulated such debate on day 13 of this Committee that I managed to get four interventions on the trot without being able to respond to them—and here comes another.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The reason why my noble friend is getting interventions is that this is precisely an issue that would arise at any public inquiry on boundaries: the dilemma of whether you export votes to another county or confine your constituencies within your county boundaries. What has just happened is very interesting. Everyone suddenly is alight; and it is only because this is the central issue in our inquiries today.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Can I help?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My noble friend can help me in a moment, once I have had a chance to help myself. The noble Lord, Lord Thomas, raises a question that is right at the heart of the legal case as I understand it and as interpreted by the BBC. John Hirst, who took the case to the European Court said:

“I’d read books that said if you want to change something you start up a pressure group, and then you put pressure on MPs and then you get things changed in parliament. Well that’s alright if you’ve got the vote and you’ve got some clout behind you. When you’re a prisoner, the only thing you can do if you want to complain and no-one listens is riot and lift the roof off—which isn’t the best way of going about things. Because we didn’t have a vote, there was no will in parliament to change anything”.

That is at the root of why he brought the case and, I guess, why he won it.

If a prisoner who had been a constituent of mine, or whose address was in my constituency, had written to me with a case when I was a Member of Parliament, I would have taken it up on their behalf, but I was unwilling to do so for people who happened to be resident in my constituency at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That was most difficult in respect of the large number of foreign nationals who were in Verne prison in my constituency. It was very difficult for them to get anyone to listen to them. It would have been a significant resourcing issue for me if word had got around the prison that they had a local MP who was willing to do all their legal work for them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I would not have been happy if that situation had existed. I sought to do my duty, as I saw it, to my constituents, whether they were in prison in other constituencies or not. The local prison for my constituency was Dorchester. The right honourable Oliver Letwin would, I am sure, have wanted me, rather than him, to deal with my constituents. I am sure that prisoners will have listened to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, and will now be writing to him at the House of Lords to take up their issues if they seek representation.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I had a fairly large prisoner mailbag. Prisoners get full service from Members of Parliament. Not only did they get full service, I visited prisoners from outside my own constituency on several occasions, including some of the most violent of offenders. Their stories were absolutely fascinating. It is a very interesting area of political representation.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

That intervention by my noble friend is extremely significant. That matter has not been taken into account by the Government. I know that there were problems in Glasgow, because I have been reading about them. There was a huge campaign that was referred to a few weeks ago by my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock to deal with the whole issue of registration, which threw up the particular problem to which my noble friend referred. Indeed, the Democratic Audit paper on further findings on equalisation, which no doubt most Members of the House will either have read or will want to read prior to our debates in the future, deals precisely with this issue of population. Mr Lewis Baston says:

“Approximately half of the countries that delimit districts use ‘total population’ as the population base for determining equality across electoral districts. Another third of the countries employ registered voters as the population base”.

Several European countries use citizen population as the relevant base for determining population equality. Lesotho uses the voting age population as the base and Belarus uses the number of voters in the previous election, although that would not be particularly helpful here, would it?

The facts are that countries can use census material and population statistics as against registered electors, particularly when we know that the registered electorate, as far as the purposes of this Bill are concerned, are based on a register that is effectively out of date and which excludes, as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton was saying only a few weeks ago, some 3.5 million people. Some 3.5 million people are excluded from the register. Why cannot the great proportion of those be included on a register by changing the basis on which the register is drawn by moving it over to a more population-based system?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Has my noble friend seen the Electoral Commission’s excellent report published in March this year entitled The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain? Not only are there that number missing from the electoral register, they are not missing in a proportionate way. There are areas where there are numbers missing disproportionately and Glasgow particularly comes to mind. With an average in Scotland of 92.1 per cent completeness, Glasgow is only 67.8 per cent complete.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I have not read that report although it is on my reading list. There are a number of reports I have to read next weekend in preparation for the debates that will take place next week.

The point is that this is not the peg on which to argue the basis on which people register. My noble friend’s amendment simply says, “Let us have an inquiry that does precisely that”. He is saying, “Let someone, somewhere, do some homework on this whole area before Parliament is required to carry any particular piece of legislation”. That is my case.