Rough Sleeping

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, is right to raise this—it is a serious issue—but the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, is I think addressing homelessness rather than rough sleeping. They are somewhat different. However, I am certainly on record as saying, and say again, that we need more social housing for rent. That is part of the issue regarding homelessness but, as I said, that is different from rough sleeping, which is much more complex.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister told us proudly that the Government have set themselves the target of halving the number of rough sleepers by 2022. That would bring it back down to the number they inherited from the Labour Government in 2010. Whose fault is the doubling in the number of rough sleepers? Is it a consequence of government policy on housing benefit and of other cuts in social care and mental health provision?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

I am not really interested in a knockabout. The statistics were previously produced on a very different basis, so that is one factor to be taken into account. I am also on record as saying that it is a very complex issue. It is a problem across Europe, with the exception of Finland, and we have a Finnish adviser on the advisory committee. The Secretary of State has been to Finland to study what is happening there so that we can get to grips with what is a very serious problem across the country. It is also a problem in Wales and Scotland, which, the last time I looked, were not controlled by the Conservative Party.

Surrey County Council: Financial Issues

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Wednesday 8th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I am not here to fling accusations about. That is a matter for him to deal with. I am willing to take questions that are put to me but I cannot take questions that are properly a matter for Surrey County Council and its leader to deal with.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, the question has to be answered. Either the leader of Surrey County Council was lying or he completely misunderstood his conversations with the Secretary of State and all those others to whom he spoke. Therefore, the Government are suggesting either one or the other. I am sure that the Minister will decline to comment on either of those but can he tell us categorically whether anyone in No. 10 was involved in the discussions with Surrey County Council?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, the discussions with Surrey County Council were conducted quite properly by officials in the department and by the Secretary of State, as you would expect with local authorities and local authority leaders. We are having discussions across the board with Norfolk, Hampshire, Lincolnshire—I think—and Suffolk. They are not unique to the position of Surrey. I want to make that absolutely clear. There is nothing special about a single local authority leader having discussions with the Department for Communities and Local Government or with the Secretary of State. That is absolutely right and we would be criticised if that did not happen.

Directly Elected Mayors

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, it is the case that the most important strategic powers on transport, planning, investment and adult education go with having a directly elected mayor via the combined authorities. The noble Lord will know that there are lesser powers in Cornwall, for example. It is also important to note that the mayor is the voice for the area in terms of gaining investment and representing industry. This role is significant and important on the continent and in America and will, I believe, be important here.

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I think I am probably more of an enthusiast for directly elected mayors than my noble friend Lord Grocott. However, the significant point is that in London, where there is a very successful mayoralty, the local people voted in a referendum to have such a system. Given that the Minister is talking about this being a grass-roots-led process, why do the Government not allow the communities concerned to decide whether they wish to have a directly elected mayor, rather than imposing the conditions centrally from Whitehall?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, as I indicated, it is the directly elected representatives of cities such as Liverpool and Manchester—not necessarily Conservative areas—who bring forward the idea and then it is for the people to make their choice on the mayor. All the evidence on the continent, in the United States and, as the noble Lord rightly said, in London, shows that this is the way forward for ambitious deals.

Electricity System Resilience (S&T Committee Report)

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest regarding the work that I am currently doing with the Electric Infrastructure Security Council. I congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and the Science and Technology Committee on producing an interesting and extremely important report. The report is interesting for me because when I was very young, more than 30 years ago, I was deputy director of an organisation then called the Electricity Consumers’ Council. It used to produce all sorts of papers on electricity supply questions that were no doubt deeply irritating to the noble Lord, Lord Tombs, who is not in his place today but who then led the electricity supply industry as chair of the Electricity Council. This was, of course, pre-privatisation.

One of our concerns was the financial burden borne by consumers of what then seemed like an excessive margin of overcapacity. If I recall correctly, the margin was something like 40% over maximum likely demand. The late Lord Marshall of Goring, whom the noble Lord, Lord Howell, just referred to, described that as a strategy of belt, braces and string as regards protecting the country from power outages. However, the pendulum has now swung very far the other way, with, as the report says, capacity margins of potentially 3% or 4%. It is no longer belt, braces and string but a wish and a prayer. I therefore welcome the central conclusion of the report that the Government must play a greater role in managing the electricity system. However, I will focus on one very narrow part of the report, which I would have liked to be much larger, although I am sure that the pressures on the committee made it much more difficult to do that. That is the focus on what happens if, or perhaps when, something goes seriously wrong. I am talking here not about a short-term power outage but a catastrophic failure—one that goes on for more than a short period.

Chapter 4 talks about the threats to the resilience of the electricity system. It identifies four areas: technical failures; extreme weather, including flooding; terrorism—both physical attack and cyberattack—and space weather. Not included of course is earthquake, which is fortunately a very low-probability event in the UK. Therefore, when the report talks about a variety of technical failures—the fires at Ferrybridge, Ironbridge and Didcot—and the precautionary shutdown of four nuclear reactors at Hartlepool and Heysham, these incidents all call into question the capacity margins now available. Let us consider those technical failures coupled with other things that might happen.

There is extreme weather and flooding. Christmas two years ago saw storms that resulted in 750,000 households being without power and, as the report notes, the incidence of severe weather is likely to rise as a result of climate change. Then there is threat of physical attack—such as the IRA’s planned attack in 1996 to cut off the electricity supply to London—or cyberattack. For serious and sustained disruption to take place, clearly there would have to be multiple attacks, which we know terrorist groups have in the past envisaged or contemplated. Perhaps it may be beyond them at the moment, but one should certainly consider that possibility.

On the cyber side, as the Institution of Engineering and Technology has pointed out, the UK electricity system is heavily reliant on ICT systems, and that reliance is increasing, with more and more automated systems increasing the vulnerability. The IET also warns—I am well aware of this from the interest I have taken in security over the years—that foreign states and others have been identified as probing the systems that underpin our critical national infrastructure. Imperial College, as quoted in the report, highlighted the vulnerability of SCADA systems and the reliance on legacy unsupported software platforms. My noble friend Lord O’Neill talked about the reassuring absence of complacency in looking at these issues and recognising that these threats are real and significant. I am pleased that there is no complacency, but the very fact that there is a reassuring lack of complacency indicates that these matters must be taken very seriously, which concurs with the private discussions I have had. Let us therefore be quite clear that there would be catastrophic consequences in the event of something significant happening.

I should just mention the risk of adverse space weather or solar storms. I think the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, suggested that this was perhaps less likely than some of the other risks. Such solar storms can generate geomagnetically-induced currents into power systems. In 1859, solar flares were so intense as to produce red, green and purple auroras all round the world. At that time it made the telegraph systems go haywire and fail catastrophically, with spark discharges that gave telegraph operators electric shocks and set telegraph paper alight. That was in 1859; our reliance on electrical systems is rather greater now than it was then. More recently, in 1989, a geomagnetic storm knocked out power in large sections of Canada. These are things that happen which could have catastrophic consequences.

The report acknowledges the importance of these threats, but what about these low-probability events which would have a very high impact? How well prepared are we as a nation to deal with them? It is a characteristic of complex integrated systems that we now have, such as the United Kingdom’s critical national infrastructure, that a combination of low-probability events coupled with those integrated systems may produce a catastrophic domino effect—a catastrophic failure—which becomes more likely rather than diminishingly rare in prospect. It might be one of the threats already discussed or a combination, or it might be some incident or issue not previously encountered. However, let us consider what might happen and how ready we would be to respond as a nation.

Most vital services have contingency plans in place to deal with power outages; most have emergency or standby generators. Usually—although not always—they work. The reason I add that caveat is that I am well aware of the incident a few years ago when some overenthusiastic workmen cut through a cable in Victoria Street, cutting off the power to New Scotland Yard. When the Metropolitan Police said, “This isn’t going to be a problem—we have two back-up generators and, what is more, every day somebody checks that the fuel gauges are still working”. They had not taken into account that both fuel gauges were faulty, and in fact they did not have sufficient fuel. Fortunately, the Metropolitan Police has a back-up control room that is not in New Scotland Yard, and the issue was rapidly rectified.

However, even assuming that the standby generators are functional and working, they have fuel to last only 12 or, at most, 24 hours. What if the high-impact event leads to a widespread outage that lasts longer than that? What plans are in place then? How will the consequential domino effects be managed? Who, for example, will take responsibility for arranging and prioritising the distribution of emergency fuel to the standby generators? Who will have priority, and who will determine that priority? Will it be the emergency services, the hospitals, the water industry and the sewerage system, food warehouses or supermarkets? Eleven years ago, MI5 warned that Britain was four meals away from anarchy—that is just as true now as it was then. Our systems are based on the assumption that if something goes wrong, it will be rectified in most areas within 12 hours. That is not necessarily the case.

The report talks about the importance of the single emergency number, but that will not help very much because our landline telephones will not work without mains electricity and our mobiles will run out of charge. If there is no power to pump water underground, in London the pipes underneath the ground will probably collapse because in many cases they have not been repaired since the Victorian era, and without water going through them the ground pressure will cause them to collapse. Therefore, even if the power is restored, water supplies will remain disrupted. Without power, the sewerage system cannot function and, without being too graphic, the contents of the sewers are likely to solidify and will not be easily cleared. Food refrigeration cannot work without power, and supermarkets relying on just-in-time distribution will run out of stock. We are not equipped in this country to run our medical services without electrical power.

Therefore my questions to the Minister are the following. We are told in the report that the Secretary of State has been involved in exercises on these issues. For how long was it assumed in those exercises that the power would be off, and over how widespread an area? With local authorities already having made budget cuts of up to 40%, and with more to come when the CSR is published later this month, how resilient are the contingency plans for managing this sort of emergency? Do the authorities have a prioritised list of service providers that will need emergency fuel to keep their standby generators going? What arrangements are in place to distribute emergency fuel under such circumstances? How will food supplies be maintained? What steps are in place to ensure that water and sewerage systems continue to function, and how will communications be maintained to a no doubt increasingly panicked population with no power to maintain telephone systems, charge mobiles or power televisions or radios?

Individually, these threats may have low probability; each threat might be a once-in-50-years event, but any one of them could have a high, not to say devastating, impact. Our chances of avoiding all of them over the next few years are not necessarily as reassuring as one might hope. The nature and complexity of integrated systems and an increasingly power-reliant and ICT-reliant world mean that we ultimately depend on those services and that we are all the more vulnerable.

The report warns us that the Government must play a bigger role in managing the electricity system, given the narrowing of capacity margins. Can we be reassured also that the Government are actively preparing for the handling of a significant outage that turns out to stretch beyond 24 hours?

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Harris of Haringey Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I support Amendment 54ZA, in the name of my noble friend Lord Wills, because it would give us an opportunity to put together the bigger picture of constitutional reform, in the absence of such a picture from the Government. The amendment would help the Government greatly if it offered us an insight into their thinking across the range of constitutional reform proposals and how all the measures that we are debating might fit together. Indeed, the amendment would allow that picture to be put together in such a way that no one would even voice a suspicion that the measures were being put together in any kind of partisan political interest.

For such significant constitutional reforms, I believe that it would be in the interests of the country for us to start by setting out the roles and responsibilities—as mentioned in subsection (2)(b) of the new clause that Amendment 54ZA would insert—of all our representative bodies, starting with Parliament. Starting with the relationship between the legislative and executive functions in both Chambers and taking into account the representative function of the other place, we could then go on to examine, in the language of subsection (2)(b) of the proposed new clause,

“the proper role of MPs in their constituencies and in Parliament”.

Having established that point and having had some consultation and agreement on those very basic issues around how Parliament and our democracy should work, we could then work through the issue of Parliament’s relationship with other Parliaments and Assemblies, including the European Parliament, as mentioned by my noble friend Lady Hayter, and the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Touhig and others. The role of local authorities could also be considered, as my noble friend Lord Beecham set out.

Once we had established those sorts of relationships, we could then discuss what a sensible fixed term for Parliament might be. Instead, we are to consider in due course the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill in isolation. Such a piecemeal approach to legislation does not enable us to see the bigger picture.

Once we had established all those matters, we might then be able to think about what the appropriate size of each Chamber in Parliament should be. Having established the appropriate size of each Chamber, as referred to in subsection (2)(c) of the new clause proposed by Amendment 54ZA—indeed, we will discuss later tonight if we are lucky, or on Wednesday otherwise, my Amendment 63YA that also deals with the relationship between the size of the membership of this place and that of the other place—we could then discuss, in the context of the committee of inquiry that my noble friend Lord Wills proposes, the size and composition of each House and how each House would get there. Unfortunately, Part 1 of the Bill, which we have already debated, anticipates the need to ask the question about the alternative vote through a referendum, but that is a piecemeal approach. We should be doing this as part of a much wider picture that we could all understand, so that we can all make judgments accordingly.

Of course, in thinking about the composition of both Chambers, we could then get into some of the more interesting and thorny issues, such as that which came up in Questions today on whether a reformed Second Chamber should include a place for the Lords spiritual and what value is provided by having the voice of independent expertise of the Cross-Benchers, whom we all know and respect. In a radio programme that was broadcast last night, I was fortunate enough to be able to discuss these matters with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and all three of us agreed that there is an absence of that bigger picture at the moment. We are having to discuss and debate—at great length, I am afraid—these issues in isolation. If we had a more coherent vision of where things are going on constitutional reform, perhaps that would save time. The phrase “more haste, less speed” comes to mind in the context of the Government’s approach to these matters.

I have one or two things to say about the phrase,

“the proper role of MPs in their constituencies”,

in subsection (2)(b) of the proposed new clause, because there has been some debate from some on this side—they would be on this side, as there has not been much debate from anywhere else, except for an important pair of contributions from the Cross Benches—about the characteristics of different constituencies for Members of Parliament. For two Parliaments, I was fortunate enough to represent the constituency of South Dorset, which has both very urban areas, some of which were quite deprived, and very rural areas. It was notable to me that the characteristics of the caseload that I had in the different parts of my constituency were profoundly different.

When I was holding surgeries in the borough of Weymouth and Portland, I predominantly had housing cases. I also had a fair amount of immigration cases and a fair amount relating to problems with the tax credit system and the child support system. I had far fewer of those sorts of cases over in the Purbeck end of my constituency, where things such as planning would come up much more regularly along with fundamental issues about the rurality and isolation of that part of the country, including the islands that I represented. Brownsea and one or two others were a real struggle for me to get to because I had to go through several constituencies to catch the ferry to visit my constituents.

That leads me to make some final comments about subsection (2)(g) of this proposed new clause, on examining,

“the arguments surrounding the statistical basis on which electoral areas are … constructed”.

I could seek to detain the Committee by talking through some of the excellent arguments in the Electoral Commission document that I referred to earlier when I intervened on my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, but I will save that. Suffice it to say that in my own experience, having represented that seat of South Dorset for two Parliaments, drawing boundaries in such a way that they do not take account of such basic things as the ability of people to get around creates problems.

For me to visit Brownsea, which I was able to do on only a few occasions during the time I represented that constituency given that it had only about six electors on it, I had to travel about an hour and a half from my home at one end of the constituency to get a ferry. The ferry would go every now and then and ultimately I would get there. It took all day to meet one or two constituents who might have issues that they wanted me to address. Thank goodness for the telephone, and in this case for e-mail, although some of the comments that we have had about the amount of correspondence that Members of Parliament have show how much is generated by e-mail now. It is quite astonishing.

Equally, the main industrial estate where the vast majority of my constituents in Weymouth worked was not in my constituency but in the neighbouring constituency of West Dorset, because it sat just the wrong side of the local authority boundary. I certainly welcome some of the freedom that the Bill might offer the Boundary Commission to cut across local authority boundaries. Brownsea Island is in Dorset and Poole is in Poole. That is why Brownsea Island was lumped into South Dorset. Making some sense of all of that would certainly be welcome, but to have some kind of very crude system that is based only on numbers and not on constituencies of interest would be very retrograde.

That is why the Government are being offered a fantastic opportunity to accept this amendment from my noble friend Lord Wills, which has clearly been thought through in some detail, as demonstrated by its length. It gives them the opportunity to allow us, as a country, to think about these constitutional reforms in their entirety and not to see individual measures rushed through which I am sure we would all live to regret.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Wills has done the Committee an enormous service by presenting this amendment today, because it has enabled those of us who have engaged with the debate at least to consider the conspiracy not to talk about certain matters that really needed to be resolved in advance of taking final decisions on this legislation. I know there has been a lot of comment about an apparent conspiracy among Labour Members of the Committee to spin the discussion out. I have to say to your Lordships that I am not part of that conspiracy. I have not previously intervened in Committee on the Bill to speak on any of the amendments.

[Lord Rennard]

Has the noble Lord just confirmed that there is a conspiracy and that he is not a part of it?

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I am merely saying that some people—the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is clearly one of them—believe that there is such a conspiracy. I can assert that I am not part of any such conspiracy, if one even exists. I wanted to speak today specifically because of the importance of considering the nature and character of representation. This is the issue to which the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, referred, and on which I intervened previously, not in Committee but when we debated in the Chamber the Bill’s potential hybridity and what it is about a locality that underpins the nature of representation.

While we may have had the silence of the lambs on the Benches opposite, with the notable exception of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Lord who has just intervened on me, what has been most notable about the discussion is the dogs that did not bark—the specific issues. The amendment provides an opportunity for those points to be considered in depth. The dogs that have not barked are serious debates about the nature of representation and of Parliament, and about what we want the House of Commons and Members of Parliament to do and how we want them to operate.

The issue of optimum size is critical, but we have not debated or discussed it in any real detail; the number appears to have been offered down from on high without any consideration. I have not had the privilege of being an elected Member of the House of Commons, but I was an elected public representative in London for 26 years. For part of that time I was the directly elected representative of 5,000 people in the Hornsey central ward of the London Borough of Haringey. For part of that time I was the directly elected representative of the people of Brent and Harrow, a constituency with an electorate of something like 400,000. I have therefore had experience of two extremes of the nature of representation, and the 400,000 figure is probably more consistent with the size of the constituencies of the United States Congress.

My point is not that I am advocating one or other as being the norm for the House of Commons; I am simply saying that there is a world of difference between the type of representation at the lower end of that scale and the type at the higher end. To pretend, therefore, that there will be no difference whether Members of the House of Commons represent 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 or 90,000 people is ludicrous. There has to be recognition of the nature of the relationship between constituents and their Member of Parliament, and that seems to be lacking in the Bill.

[Lord Mawhinney]

I have had the privilege of serving in the other place. I started immediately after a boundary redistribution with 60,000 to 65,000 constituents, and finished up with 95,000. I hope the noble Lord is not suggesting that in the latter years my constituents got a worse service.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

No, my Lords, I am suggesting that the noble Lord no doubt had to work 50 per cent harder to deliver the service that he regarded was appropriate at the beginning of his time in the other place. That is fine, but we ought to—

[Lord Tyler]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He is making a very powerful case for equalising the numerical strength of each constituency.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

The case that I am making is that we have to define the appropriate numerical relationship between the electorate and the Member of Parliament. If you want to go down the route of equalisation, you should first define what the appropriate ratio is. If you do not know that, the argument is, frankly, pointless and otiose.

However, I do not necessarily believe that equalisation is the sole point that we should be looking at. One of the dogs that have not barked in this debate has been the question of what other factors are important, and the amendment provides the opportunity to consider the character of localities and their different natures. When I was the elected Member of the London Assembly for Brent and Harrow, I had the privilege of representing the most ethnically diverse local authority area in the country and, separately, the most religiously diverse. To suggest that the characters of those areas did not influence the nature of the work that I did as a public representative is, again, ludicrous. The characteristics of local constituencies matter. You will find that nearly every other jurisdiction recognises that as part of the factors that need to be taken into account when it comes to deciding where to draw boundaries.

The other dog that has not barked has been the size of the House of Commons. The issue has been brought up today but we have not had that debate. What will be the most effective size of the House of Commons to do the work that we believe it should carry out? What is the effective size for both representing constituents and scrutinising legislation? Where is that debate? We are sidestepping it because of the desire to push ahead without proper consideration of these issues.

My noble friend Lord Beecham talked earlier about the relationship with local authorities. My noble friend Lord Knight, who has just spoken, said that he was in favour of this. I have to say that I am against it. The Bill encourages, or at least would make it far easier for, constituency boundaries to cross local government boundaries. I do not believe that that is in the interests of good and effective representation. It will make it more difficult for MPs to cover the ground, and for them to have a relationship with local authorities so that in partnership they can achieve things for their constituents both at local government level and in working with central government in Parliament. Those are the issues that make talking about crossing local government boundaries in this way so inappropriate.

The final issue that I want to refer to, in terms of dogs that have not barked in this debate but that should have been allowed to be considered in detail, is the nature of the electoral data on which all this is based and the frequency with which they change. I have spent all my political life in London. London is an area in which, historically, there has often been underrepresentation because of the number of people who are registered to vote. That underrepresentation was at a particular peak when the community charge—the poll tax—was introduced, and all that went with that. A large number of residents in London chose to drop off the electoral register, as they did in many other urban areas and no doubt elsewhere. That legacy of underrepresentation remains.

We should also consider the turnover in big inner-city populations and the number who come in. At one point when I was leader of my local authority, the collection register for the community charge turned over by one-third each year, indicating a great flow of population dropping into and out of the area. That was partly a consequence of migration and partly because of the mobility of populations at that time, but it also involves the recognition of particular areas. Because the Bill is constructed around drawing up these boundaries and quotas on the basis of an already flawed electoral register, we are building into the system an inappropriate bias against areas with historic underregistration and areas with an historically very high turnover.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Does my noble friend agree that the factor he has just been speaking of will be exacerbated in consequence of the coalition Government’s housing benefit changes?

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

My noble friend is absolutely right. The projections that people have talked about—of the flows of people having to move because they will be displaced by changes to housing benefit—necessarily means that he will be right. I also suspect that we will see more people dropping out of the system and being difficult to pick up. They will be trying to avoid various obligations as a consequence of that. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was moved to intervene again but he has not done so, which is fine.

My point is that these are fundamental issues which should be considered before we make a final judgment as to the direction we are taking in this legislation. It may be that, after proper consideration, a simply numerical allocation would be the most appropriate way forward. It is not one that I would favour but I can see how we could get to that. First, let us debate these issues properly. This legislation is not giving us the opportunity, whereas my noble friend’s amendment would enable that to take place, for the public to be engaged in it and for this to be as transparent a process as possible. If I remember correctly, transparency is one of the objectives of this Conservative-led coalition Government; they believe it is so important. Let us see that importance reflected in this legislation.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My Lords, I make just two brief points, which arise from the debate so far. The first follows what my noble friend described as the dogs that did not bark. I ask Members of this House to imagine a Labour Government proposing an arbitrary number in the House of Commons, without any consultation or a Green Paper, and without any hearing arrangements whatever. What squeals we would hear from the Liberal Democrat Benches. We would have heard lectures from the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill, about how it breached human rights. We would have heard squeals of high dudgeon and moral outrage from the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Rennard, about its being disgraceful and undemocratic. What have we heard in this debate of now two hours and 16 minutes? There have been three interventions from the opposite side, which is not prepared to engage in the argument.

I understood that the House of Lords gave us an opportunity to revise legislation—to debate it, which means to look at both sides of the argument. The situation now appears to be that the coalition is prepared just to sit there on its Benches, waiting for the debate to finish and prepared to use a built-in majority to push the Bill through without any debate. That is a negation of democracy. I do not understand how Liberal Democrats who sat through the Labour Government, attacking and criticising us for such things, can sit there and accept it. My noble friend Lord Grocott will recall that in the Labour Government there were certainly people on the Back Benches of the Labour Party arguing the case, questioning, challenging and making sure that the issues were properly discussed. It is quite astonishing that, apart from Labour Members and two distinguished, excellent contributions from the Cross Benches, no one has entered this debate.

My second and last point is for the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who will reply to this debate and who I know very well and have great respect for. I hope he will reply properly to the debate and deal with the issues that have been raised. I want him to deal specifically with this one. The Scottish Constitutional Convention preceded the setting up of the Scottish Parliament. It involved all the parties, civil society in Scotland, the universities, the trade unions and everyone in Scotland. It discussed what the powers of the Scottish Parliament should be, what should be devolved, how many Members there should be and what the electoral system should be. Before legislation was introduced, the Labour Government allowed that debate to take place. If the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, will not agree to this for a major constitutional change to the House of Commons, he needs to search his conscience very strongly. Those are the only points that I want to make.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)]

My Lords, first I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wills, for introducing a debate that has given rise to a considerable number of important contributions. I am not sure that I can address all of them, but I will do my best to pick up most of the salient points. It is clear that the debate on this amendment has touched on many issues that will inevitably come up as we go through the Bill. Future amendments have already been tabled that deal with some of them. I hope to explain the principles that underlie the proposals that we will debate further. I hope also to explain why the proposals are reasonable and why a committee of inquiry is unnecessary.

It is clear that the amendment would slow down the proposed reform of our political process and system. It is highly unlikely that the proposals in this amendment would be in place in time for the next election. There would be a three-year deadline to report, six months to draft measures giving effect to the recommendations, and then time to legislate. That would be only for the legislation that set new rules for conducting boundary reviews. The reviews themselves would then need to be carried out. Therefore, even if the rules were in place before the next election, the new boundaries could come into effect only at the election after that.

I do not want to suggest that the political purpose of this has been to kick the Government's proposals into touch, although my noble friend Lord Tyler referred to previous committees of inquiry that delayed and postponed for many years what were seen by many as desirable reforms, and there was a general groundswell of support for his point on this side of the House. I also want to knock on the head the idea that I have accused noble Lords opposite of filibustering. The only complaint I would make is about the time taken up by them complaining that I might accuse them of filibustering. I also take great exception to the suggestion that the proposal is partisan. I do not believe that the opposition case stacks up. The noble Baroness, Lady McDonagh, pointed out that the issue of the size of constituencies applied as much to Conservative constituencies as to Labour ones. One cannot on the one hand say that reform will have the same impact on Labour and Conservative constituencies and on the other say that what we are trying to do is partisan.

I will pick up a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, about his freedom of information application. I apologise that the noble Lord has not yet received a reply to his request. I will seek to ensure that he receives one as soon as possible. However, my noble friend Lord McNally, who is sitting with me, has indicated that as far as we are aware no work has been done on any kind of partisan measurement of what a new size of 600 for the House of Commons would bring about. No modelling has been done on that basis. I also say at the outset that amid all the outrage that we have heard from the other side, one would think that it was a constitutional outrage to support the principle of one vote, one value. That is what is enshrined in this part of the Bill; one vote should have one value in all parts of the United Kingdom. I do not believe that to be a constitutional outrage, except in Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles. I am happy to argue that, as the noble Lord's party did in the Scotland Act in the case of Orkney and Shetland.

My second point is that there would not only be a delay. If the 2015 election is to be fought in England on boundaries that took as their electoral registration base the year 2000—15 years previously—can anyone suggest that that is a constitutional principle that we should seek to uphold in this House? We wish to make progress with this so that we can have a boundary review that will deliver its report and be in effect by the 2015 election.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way, albeit slightly after the point that he was making. He said, on behalf of himself and the noble Lord, Lord McNally, that no political modelling had been done on the implications of this reform. I would have been very surprised had he told us that the Civil Service had done an exercise on behalf of Ministers that had demonstrated what the political consequences of these changes would be. However, is he also giving us an assurance that such an exercise was not prepared either by a special adviser—a political adviser in the relevant government department—or by the political parties concerned?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Lord, Lord Harris, is absolutely right about the Civil Service. It would be improper for it to do this, and it has not done it. Nor are the noble Lord, Lord McNally, and I aware of any special adviser who has done it. I cannot speak for the Conservative Party, and while I may be able to speak for the Liberal Democrats, I honestly do not know what the answer is. I simply reaffirm the point that the principle here is one vote, one value. It would be a rash person who would predict the political fallout from this reform.