Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I sat on the committee with the Speaker in which we discussed those matters, and I remember the setting up of the informal committee. Since then a Bill has been passed which allows former politicians to sit on it. Happily, your Lordships have answered all the questions so I have not been put in the embarrassing position of doing that which I am not allowed to do, which is to press the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, because he is supposed to be pressing me in the course of this debate.

I have set out the reasons for this amendment. It is a very important amendment because it requires a justification as to why it is two and a half years, why we should not wait for an up-to-date register, and why gaps of five years are suggested. Those are the questions that this amendment raises. I beg to move.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble and learned friend is absolutely right that this is a very important amendment. It is double-barrelled in that it deals with two things. It deals with the redistribution to make sure that it is based on the real number as near as possible of people eligible to vote in a constituency, and it encourages people to register and to vote. It is important from the point of view of the redistribution of boundaries, but it also has a wider and more beneficial effect.

For the first aspect of this, I have an amendment, Amendment 89C, which I hope we will come to later this evening. I hesitate to say that it is better than my noble and learned friend’s amendment, but it is simpler because it just says that,

“for the purpose of this Act”,

the electorate will be taken as the number of people eligible to vote, not registered to vote. We can always find out the number of people who are eligible to vote through the census or whatever. I hope, in anticipation of that—which is why I am giving the Minister a bit of extra notice—he will look at his briefing. It is a simpler amendment and I hope it is one that the Government might accept.

However, my noble and learned friend’s amendment has the double advantage of getting people on to the register and, as my noble friend Lord Desai said, encouraging people to vote. There are lots of ways of doing that which we have discussed previously. One of those is compulsory voting. A number of colleagues were a bit doubtful and unsure about that, and with good reason. I say that because I have just been reading about the compulsory vote in Belgium, but because that country has a daft proportional representation system, which my noble friend Lord Grocott will particularly appreciate, it has not been able to form a Government for seven months, and the guy who was appointed to mediate between the various parties in order to try to get a government has just resigned. That is the sort of thing that happens when you have daft systems of proportional representation. Someone asked me who is running the Government in Belgium, and I said that I supposed it was the civil servants. They answered, “What’s different? Doesn’t that always happen?”. I hope that is not the case, but it is worrying that you can get to that position even with proportional representation and compulsory voting. You would think that that might improve the situation.

[Lord Grocott]

My noble friend referred to it as a “daft” system of proportional representation. For the benefit of the Committee, I wonder if he could list for us the good systems of proportional representation.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

No, I cannot; there are not any. It is an even dafter system than the one included in the Bill.

What is proposed in the amendment has a very important aspect to it; that is, getting people on to the register. We should do everything that we can to achieve that. I am a little worried about the current situation, because, with public expenditure cuts, local authorities will spend less money on canvassing people to get on to the register. They will take the cheapest option of sending out letters once and hoping that they will be returned, instead of going round, knocking on doors, returning if they do not get a reply and really making sure that everyone in a household is on the register, which is vital.

It is not being party political or fighting the class war to say that it is much easier to get people to register when they are living in detached houses or houses that are easy to access. It is much more difficult to get to houses in multiple occupation; for example, tenements in Glasgow. Sometimes, you cannot get in through the main door to get up to the front door of the flat concerned to get people to register. It is therefore vital that we put in place a system or series of systems that encourage people to get their name on to the register and local authorities to get out and make sure that they reach as many people as possible. That is why the amendment needs our support.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said that it is not a responsibility of the Electoral Commission. Well, if it is not the Electoral Commission’s responsibility, who is charged with it? It seems obvious that it should be the Electoral Commission, which has extended its responsibilities during the past few years. As my noble friend said, the commission now has on it political party representatives, including my noble friend Lord Kennedy, who understand what they are talking about in relation to these matters. The Electoral Commission should therefore be able to take on this extra responsibility.

The amendment would put a constraint on the Electoral Commission to certify that all reasonable steps had been taken and on government not to be able to progress until such certification was obtained. I hope that the Minister will understand the importance of getting as many people on the register as possible.

We are going now through a series of issues which ought not to be party political and on which we all ought to find common ground. The noble Lords, Lord Strathclyde and Lord McNally, are very old friends of mine—the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has been for many years, and the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, used to be one of my constituents—but I somehow get the impression that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, listens more to the arguments that are being put forward, picks them up and responds to them. I hope that that is a presage for his feeling able, on some of these issues which are not really party political, to say, “I’ll have a look at that. I’ll pick it up. I’ll go back and talk with my colleagues about it and then come back at Report stage”. The coalition Government would find the passage of this Bill, which has been difficult for them, a lot easier if they were to do that. I know that that is difficult for two reasons: first, because there is a coalition, with differences of opinion between the two parties, I am led to believe, on certain aspects of the Bill. I have no inside information—the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is shaking his head—but I still think that there might be some differences of opinion. I know that that takes some time. I know also that Ministers in the other place have principal responsibility for this; Ministers in the Lords do not necessarily have ministerial and departmental responsibility and they therefore have to consult with Ministers in another place.

The third thing that will make it difficult for them is that there are two departments dealing with the Bill. There is the Ministry of Justice in which the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is a Minister, and the Deputy Prime Minister within the Cabinet Office also has responsibility. There are some differences of accountability there. Notwithstanding that—I am using this amendment but it will come up a lot in others and I hope I can be excused special pleading in relation to Amendment 89C—I hope that the noble and learned Lord will not just come up with an argument against everything that we put forward. I hope that as time goes on and we go through the Bill this week, next week and the week after that, on issue after issue, he will look at this carefully. If he gives it that kind of positive response, he will find a lot more sympathy on this side of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

The nearest that any noble Lord comes to being economical with the truth is when they stand up and say they are going to be brief. Let me try, for once, to ignore that rule and be brief.

First, we all agree that we need a better electoral register—that is common ground. Secondly, and slightly less obviously, the accuracy of the electoral register matters far more under the system that the Government are proposing for constituency boundary drawing than it does at the moment. The Boundary Commission now has reasonably wide discretion. If there is an extra elector here, the commission can make an adjustment there. It cannot do that under the Bill. If there is one voter more than the 5 per cent threshold, all the boundaries of that seat, and in consequence the boundaries of all the surrounding seats, need to be redrawn. An upheaval can rest on whether a single voter is registered.

I have a third point, and given that we are at Committee stage, perhaps we are allowed to inject new ideas into the debate. I can see why the Government are reluctant to go along with the excellent amendment moved by my noble and learned friend, because they think that it will delay the process. However, there is an alternative. Instead of the Boundary Commission trying to equalise the actual number of registered electors, it should try to equalise something different: notional registered electors—that is, the electorate as it would be if there was 100 per cent registration everywhere. That is perfectly achievable.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

That is exactly what my Amendment 89C proposes. The easiest solution would be for the three wise men on the Front Bench opposite to agree now to accept that amendment later when I move it.

[Lord Lipsey]

The noble Lord has led me to be even briefer, because I was about to refer to his Amendment 89C and to a similar amendment that I myself proposed. It is quite easy statistically to equalise notional electorates. It depends on, for example, the proportion of rented tenure in the given constituency. Perfectly good equations can be developed that pretty accurately project the notional electorate from the actual electorate. Equalise those within whatever limit the House may decide and you have a much more sensible approach than that which is in the current draft of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I know that it is a shock to see somebody rise from this side but perhaps I, too, may make a speculative intervention following what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has said. I have not thought this through, but it seems to me that if it were possible to take the number of potential electors—let us call them that—as the governing yardstick for the size of constituencies, then Amendment 54A becomes unnecessary because one would then be in the position that all one needed to be satisfied about is that the local authorities had done their work properly in time for the election concerned. If, however, you take the system as it currently prevails, then the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, is the way to go. But, as I say, it would take away one of the time constraints if one was to go down the Lipsey-Foulkes line, if I can call it that.

The other thing that is worth not forgetting—because a lot has been said about the difficulty, or more than difficulty, of having everything sorted out by 1 October 2013; a number of noble Lords opposite have made that point—is that paragraph 37 of the report of the Select Committee on the Constitution, to which a number of noble Lords have referred, states:

“The Boundary Commissions have confirmed that this timetable is achievable”.

That is to say, things will be sorted out by 1 October 2013. It, after all, should know what it is talking about. With that assurance, and with a new method of calculating the mean, it seems to me that Amendment 54A may not be necessary.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

First, I welcome greatly the fact that someone on the other side is actually participating properly in the debate—genuinely debating and listening to the debate. I can reassure him. Just in case the Government are preparing to say, “We cannot work out, or we do not know, what the notional figure, or the actual electorate, is”, how can they say that 91 per cent are registered here, or 85 per cent are registered there? There is no way of calculating the percentage unless they know the number of people eligible to vote.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes.