Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Lipsey

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

I understand why those on the Lib Dem Benches do not rise to their feet to dispute the amendments. But, as one who, on the AV referendum, agrees with them, I shall do and speak for a minute or two. I think that thresholds are a bad idea in referendums. I supported the amendment proposed earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, because it seems to me that, generally, a pre-legislative vote is a good thing, but I do not support a threshold.

If there is a vote on this, if the threshold proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, is to be reached, it will require 264 Peers to vote in the Content Lobby for it to be carried. If that of the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, is to be reached, we will need a total turnout of 316 Peers. And if that of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is to be reached—50 per cent, and 25 per cent yes— we need 395 peers to vote with 198 saying yes. I do not see why we should have a different test for the legitimacy of the vote in the country than we have for the legitimacy of the vote in our own House. Thresholds are arbitrary, they introduce bias, they distort debate and they have absurd consequences. I deal very briefly with each of these. As regards them being arbitrary, look at the range of numbers before us. They could be nice round numbers. As Sir Patrick Nairne, chairman of the independent Commission on the Conduct of Referendums, said, the main difficulty in specifying a threshold lies in determining what figure is sufficient to confer legitimacy. There is no answer to that. On the bias aspect, one side has to achieve only one thing—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I find that my amendment inadvertently has provoked a rather interesting discussion on this matter. I am listening to my noble friend with great attention. Of course, there is no scientific way of determining what the particular figure might be, but is my noble friend arguing that even if a major constitutional amendment is, say, passed by 6 per cent voting in favour, out of 10 per cent who vote altogether, that that would be an adequate degree of legitimacy justifying constitutional change?

[Lord Lipsey]

It is a good point that my noble friend makes. The answer to it is that that is why I want a pre-legislative referendum, so that the judgment can be made in the light of all the facts after the referendum and not be made in advance in what is necessarily an arbitrary way.

On bias, one side has to achieve only one thing: it has to prevent a majority voting against the change it opposes. However, the yes campaign has to do two things: it has to win more votes and to do better it has to make sure that the turnout is up. This also raises questions about legitimacy of the result. Would the side against which this bias exists really regard a result achieved in this biased way as legitimate? In my view, it would not, although it might rely on a verdict of Parliament after a referendum as a legitimate verdict in the circumstances.

My third point is that the threshold distorts debate. What we want in this referendum is both sides putting their strongest possible case in front of the electorate either for the proposed change or against it—whichever they want. But this case gives the no campaign an incentive to put two different arguments: “Vote no if you must vote, but we’ll get just as many votes if you just don’t bother to turn out”. It is the sit-and-watch-telly no campaign. That does not seem to be a very good idea. The experience of Italy—I will not go into it in great detail—where abstentions are not a vote does not reflect well on this practice. Nor indeed does the consequences of the introduction of the threshold in the first Scottish referendum on devolution, which led to the issue being completely unresolved in fact until the 1997 referendum finally settled it. The referendum did not have the effect that everybody wanted it to have of settling the devolution process.

Finally, my noble friend Lord Grocott has just described one absurd result where two people vote for and one against. I accept that that is an absurd result. But it is no more absurd than the result that would stem—I am sure he was not intending this—from the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, where 32 per cent vote yes, 1 per cent vote no, and yet the referendum automatically, and without further debate in Parliament, falls. That would be at least as absurd a result as the one my noble friend Lord Grocott predicates.

I have rattled through an argument that deserves more probing and profundity, because the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, came out with a perfectly viable solution to these competing considerations. I was, therefore, very glad to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, was not going to press his views to a vote. However, I think that the House should briefly be exposed to the case against these thresholds as well as the case for them, if only to reinforce itself in its wisdom.

At one stage I thought about abstaining on my noble friend Lord Rooker’s amendment because of my dislike of thresholds, which for once in my entire time in the House of Lords would have affected the result. It is a good thing I did not, so phew. The House of Lords might consider the argument that I have briefly developed and decide that, in view of it, we made a wise decision earlier this afternoon, albeit narrowly.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Lipsey

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, may not have expected me to rise to my feet to support his amendment, but I do so willingly. I shall also do so briefly. The effect of his amendment, as I see it, would be to create a bias in favour of not changing existing constituency boundaries. It would in fact be, for the first time in our system, recognition of the costs of change. There are costs of all kinds: costs in disruption, costs to the political parties and to local authorities and, above all, the unquantifiable but very real cost that we have discussed throughout our proceedings of individuals feeling less attached to the constituency that they thought they were a part of.

As I understand it, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has taken into account all these considerations and said, “Surely, when in doubt, don’t make a change”—or even if there is a small doubt, do not make a change. He has not attempted to quantify the instructions that we would be giving to the Boundary Commission if we accepted this amendment. He has left it to the judgment of the Boundary Commission, which is right. However, he has alerted it to what the view of Parliament would be if his amendment were adopted—the view that it is important, whenever possible, not to change existing loyalties and perceptions of local constituencies and much better to preserve the status quo. It is a very sensible amendment. The noble Lord is to be applauded for having conceived it and brought it forward. I hope that it meets with the approval of the whole House.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, this is not only a sensible amendment but a very important one. Because the noble Lord moved it very briefly—he was right to do that, given that he knows that the House is sitting very late tonight and is keen to make further progress—its full significance could not be brought home to us. It is important for what it does, because it is obviously right that this should be one of the factors that the Boundary Commission takes into account. It is more important for what it symbolises—the fact that there is, on all sides of the House, recognition that we should be very chary about going into this situation of a permanent revolution in constituency changes.

By itself, the amendment would contribute only modestly to avoiding that malign outcome, because it has to be combined with what is at the moment the 5 per cent rule in the Bill, which, as we have seen so often, causes knock-on effects. One constituency grows slightly, which changes the next one and the next until, in the end, it is very difficult to preserve boundaries. It also has to be combined with the five-yearly review—another unwise feature of the permanent revolution. Nevertheless, a chink of light has seeped under the door on to the true nature of this Bill and the true changes that need to be made to it. Given that it comes from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I cannot believe that the Government will not wish to recognise this and support the amendment that he has laid before us tonight.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Lipsey

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

That would be a possible outcome of a Speaker’s Conference. It might also decide that the way to deal with the particular problem that he is advancing is by increasing the tolerance allowed in the size of constituencies, and that is a matter to which this House will return.

In order to have a look at whether a Speaker’s Conference is the right way forward, I devoted a happy Sunday to examining the records of past Speaker’s Conferences. Funnily enough, that is not as easy a task as you might think, partly because there is no agreement on how many Speaker’s Conferences there are. I started off with British Political Facts, which is the bible on all these matters, and it said six, but I then found a speech made by Jack Straw in another place—Official Report, Commons, 12/3/98; col. 781—in which he listed two Speaker’s Conferences not listed by British Political Facts in 1908-10 and 1930. There is also the ambiguous case of the 1919 Speaker’s Conference on devolution, which was chaired by Mr Speaker Lowther, and nobody seems to be able decide whether it was a Speaker’s Conference. Let me confine myself to the six Speaker’s Conferences that everybody agrees on and the progress that they made.

There was the Speaker’s Conference on electoral reform of 1917, which is my favourite. It not only advocated extending votes to women but—prize of prizes for the Lib Dems—it recommended STV. This, alas, was subsequently voted down by seven votes in the House of Commons. There was a Speaker’s Conference on electoral reform in 1943-44, which dealt, for example, with Welsh representation. The 1944 Speaker’s Conference was notable, incidentally, for including three Peers of the realm. It set out lasting principles for redistribution and directions to the Boundary Commission, which endured well. Sixty of 71 quite controversial recommendations by the 1965-68 conference on electoral law and procedure, under Mr Speaker Hylton-Foster, were accepted.

The 1973-74 Speaker’s Conference was under Mr Speaker Selwyn Lloyd. I am sorry the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, is not present because I believe he sat on that as an MP, as did the noble Lord, Lord Pendry. That brought about an increase in election expenses, which otherwise would not have come about, for the February 1974 election. There was the 1977-78 Speaker’s Conference, under Mr Speaker Thomas, on Northern Ireland representation. I see my noble friend Lord Radice is with us evening but the noble Lord, Lord Molyneaux, who also sat on that conference, is not present. That managed to solve the question of increased representation for Northern Ireland, although not everyone got everything they hoped for out of that. Then there was Gordon Brown’s Speaker’s Conference on electoral turnout and women and ethnic minorities in Parliament. It is not a flawless record but it is a considerable one, covering some of the most difficult problems that have faced this country’s constitution.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Does the conference on the future of home rule, which took place in the summer of 1914 at Buckingham Palace, and was certainly presided over by the Speaker, not count as a Speaker’s Conference?

[Lord Lipsey]

I do not know whether it should but it does not count in Mr Straw’s list or in British Political Facts. If my noble friend wishes to inform the House further about that, I am sure it would be immensely valuable to our proceedings this evening.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Lipsey

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, with this amendment, we pick up some of the debates that we were having on Monday night—I fear that we must have done something on Monday night that made noble Lords feel that they did not wish to remain in the Chamber for the whole of the subsequent debate.

In that debate, we were discussing the timetable for the re-warding of constituencies. The word that was used for the Government’s timetable, which means that this will be done by 2013, was “achievable”. I agree with that; that timetable is achievable. I have checked with experts in the matter and there is no doubt that, if the right resources are applied to the Boundary Commission, it can be achieved. However, I understand from reading the newspapers that a man recently achieved the feat of rolling a marble up a 12,000-foot mountain with his nose, so that feat is achievable too, but it does not make it sensible or a very good way to climb mountains. In the same way, I am going to argue that 2013 is not a sensible date by which to seek to conclude the first boundary review.

We have to understand that there is a toxic blend of two elements in this first review. The first is well understood—the reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600. We will come back to whether that is a good or bad move later, but that is the Government’s policy and it is part of what has to be dealt with in the boundary review. The second element in the toxic blend going forward is the five-yearly review, which means that reviews are going to happen every five years and cause upheaval.

However, what has to be understood is that this first re-warding is going to create greater upheaval than any review before because it will have the whole of the 50-seat reduction as well as having to adhere to the 5 per cent margin. It is hard to exaggerate how radical this review is going to be and how much upheaval it is going to cause. Just to take one example from the many that I could go into, Democratic Audit, an independent think tank, calculates that if these provisions on 600 seats and 5 per cent tolerance go through, there will be only nine counties out of the 46 in England where county boundaries are still respected in the drawing of constituencies. If my arithmetic is right, that means that there are 37 counties where county boundaries will cease to exist. That applies again for local authority ward boundaries. This is a complete redrawing of the electoral map, yet it has to be done not in five years, which will be the timetable for subsequent reviews, but in just over two years. This extraordinary upheaval has to be crammed into two years.

This decision has not been made out of a desire to get the task done well or anything like that; it has been made, quite frankly, because the Tories believe that they will win more seats under this disposition. The really peculiar thing, which I find almost impossible to believe, is that no independent person who has looked at it thinks that this is likely to be true. For example, Democratic Audit, which has done the most detailed analysis, says that of the 50 seats lost under the Bill, 17 will be Tory and 18 will be Labour. There will not be much difference and that is well within the margin of error. On seeing the 300 pages of legislation before the House, I think that that is an awful lot of trouble to go to to win one extra seat. Still, politicians will be politicians.

One has to think also of the side effects. For example, in order to get this job done in just over two years, public inquiries are to be abolished. We will come to the case for and against public inquiries later in our debate, but this seems a curious reason to abolish public inquiries—not because they are good or bad things, or because they contribute or do not contribute, or whatever, but in order to get to an arbitrary, politically imposed timetable for the new boundaries to be placed. When you take into account the fact that the political advantage is illusory, the proposal beggars belief.

Therefore, I propose the year 2015 for the completion of the first review under this Bill. It would allow a less hurried approach and, should the House decide so to rule later, would mean that public inquiries could be restored and that we would get more sensible boundaries at the end of the process. My amendment would not change what will happen; it would just change the time at which it will happen. I believe that I am proposing a more sensible pace for what is a fundamental reform.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords, I think that this clause is deeply suspect. I support the amendment of my noble friend and I should happily vote for other amendments giving slightly more time for a Boundary Commission to undertake its task. It is quite extraordinary that it is now felt responsible to compress the time available for a Boundary Commission to undertake its work into about the half the time that it traditionally takes, while imposing on it quite unprecedented constraints—the need at the same time to achieve the maximum 5 per cent limit and to reduce the total number of MPs by the arbitrary figure of 50.

If you have a contractor or several contractors bidding for your business and one says that he can build your house, motorway, piece of machinery, factory or whatever in half the time that it has always taken in the past, and in half the time that the competitors say that they need, you would be sensible to be alert at least to the possibility that serious corners are being cut. It is clear that serious corners, including any sense of public inquiries or appeals, are being cut.

Such inquiries are essential in the democratic process. I have given evidence in a public inquiry on a Boundary Commission report. We did not carry the day, but I and those who supported the same point of view all felt at the end of the process that we had had a thorough and fair hearing and that it was an essential part of democracy that such a debate should take place in public about proposed new constituency boundaries. That is the only way in which the public can be reassured that nothing surreptitious is going on and that there is no hanky-panky on the part of the Government covertly trying to influence the result of what should be obviously an entirely objective non-party-political process. Those things are terribly important. All those safeguards are going out of the window.

If I was a member of the Boundary Commission, I should like to have the mechanism of the public inquiry and the appeal process preserved. I would feel it much more likely that I did a good and proper job if there was that check and balance in the system. I should welcome the opportunity to listen openly and frankly to the expression of other views on a particular determination that I might make and to think again in the light of that. I should feel that I was doing a much better job having had that opportunity and that there was much less of a possibility that there might be some angle or consideration that had been neglected.

I do not think that it is a matter of dispute that a corner is being cut in this case and I do not think that it can really be a matter of dispute that this is a very serious corner that is being cut. It is more than a corner because it is something quite fundamental to the process and to public confidence in it. What is being cut out is, if you like, the dialogue between the bureaucracy, or the agency in the form of the Boundary Commission, on the one side and the general public on the other. It is a serious matter.

I have listened to a lot of the debates, although I have not contributed before, but I have yet to hear from the government side a cogent reason as to why this has to take place. The only answer that we get is that it has to happen by the time of the next election. That takes us back to the gerrymandering issue that has been raised on many occasions. Why does it have to happen by the next election? We are trying to get the electoral process right, so if we are going to make substantial changes let us go through the process carefully and thoroughly so as to make sure that we take the public with us. We should make sure that we have something that is valid not just for the next election but for generations to come. We cannot keep coming back to this matter.

Frankly, the haste is unworthy of the democratic process and unworthy of the way that constitutional changes should be carefully deliberated in this place. I intend to support amendments along the lines of those put forward by my noble friends that would extend the time available to the Boundary Commissions to complete the deeply delicate task with which they are now going to be confronted if this Bill gets on to the statute book.