Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I think that I was under the same misapprehension as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, until I actually heard precisely what the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said. I should say that I know the constituency in question extremely well. My brother has lived there for many years, and of course Richard Livsey was one of my closest colleagues; I campaigned for him, I worked with him and for him both in the other House and in this House, and I was privileged to attend his funeral service, which was one of the most moving I have ever attended.

We should be clear, however: this amendment is not proposing that this constituency should be made an exception. It does not add to the list of exceptions. The amendment would change rule 4 for every constituency in the country. I do not understand why the noble Lord, who is usually meticulous in preparing amendments, moved it in totally different terms. It may or may not apply to the constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire but it certainly introduces a completely new rule for the whole country. Therefore, if I may say so, the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, should look very carefully at the amendment. It changes rule 4. I understand that it may or may not apply to this constituency, but the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is making sure that there is a completely new set of criteria for every constituency—in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and Wales. It does not provide for an exemption.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I put it to the noble Lord that it is surely sensible, as my noble friend proposes, to develop sensible rules of general application, rather than to proceed by amending the Bill here, there and elsewhere by adding new clauses to create anomalies and exceptions to unsatisfactory rules, as we have them at the moment in the draft Bill. That is why my noble friend’s amendment is very sensible.

[Lord Tyler]

It does not do that; it provides completely new criteria, which would presumably change over time. That is not clear from the amendment. The amendment is defective, even in the terms in which the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has proposed it.

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[Lord Davies of Stamford]

We touched on this matter before, but it seems to me important to make the point quite clearly that there seems to me to be all the difference in the world between “may take into account” and “should take into account”. I ask noble Lords to put themselves in the position of members of the Boundary Commission—or members of any commission charged by Parliament to undertake an important task. If you have a criterion that says that you “may” do something, that is not a positive criterion; that is not guidance that this is a value on which Parliament sets some store; that is not a message from the people via Parliament to respect certain considerations or to take them into account. It is not a positive criterion at all—it is the absence of a negative criterion. The phrase “may take into account” means that, if you are minded to do so, if you really want to do so, we do not prevent you from doing so. We do not deny you the opportunity of doing so. However, there is no positive suggestion whatever that these considerations should be taken into account. Can that seriously be the Government’s intention? Is it seriously the intention of anyone in this Committee that some positive value should not be ascribed to considerations such as local government boundaries, for example, or, going back to our former debates, a sense of local community and so on? Surely the whole tone of our debates has been that these are genuine values, and the question is: what sort of trade-off should we make between these considerations and the desiderata, which are genuine, as I have always admitted, in terms of uniformity of numbers? I give way to my noble friend.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

When the Bill says “may take into account”, is it not either disingenuous or simply confused? In reality, the 5 per cent limit in tolerance around 76,000 voters means that in practical terms it will be impossible for the Boundary Commission to take these other factors of geography and local government alignments and so forth into account, should it wish to do so. It can perhaps take them into account but there is nothing it can do about them.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My noble friend makes a very important point. It is a separate point but it is obviously clearly related. If you allow someone to do something or if you provide a purely permissive criterion—what I would call the lack of a prohibition; that is all it is—the question is whether they will have the slightest motivation in the first place to use that permissive ability that they have been granted. As my noble friend says, there is no suggestion at all in the Bill that these matters should be given any consideration or value whatever.

It is perfectly true that, until now, historically the Boundary Commission has in practice tried to respect local government boundaries and county boundaries in almost all cases, although I gather from our earlier debate this evening that there may be some exceptions in respect of ward boundaries, for example. Nevertheless, we are now giving the Boundary Commission new instructions which do not set any explicit value on these things at all. The Bill says, almost reluctantly, “Well, you can take account of these things if you really insist on doing so”. However, as my noble friend said, we then provide other constraints—particularly that of the 5 per cent rule and the requirement to reduce the number of MPs by 50 to 600, which we know will produce a very large number of boundary changes. In practice, that will make it certain that, even if the Boundary Commission is minded to take advantage of its ability under the Bill to consider matters of local boundaries, it will not be able to do so. The commission is receiving no indication whatever from Parliament in the Bill as it currently stands that it might be desirable to retain the tradition which it has long maintained of respecting these boundaries. Therefore, I think that there is all the difference in the world between “may” and “should”, and I congratulate my noble friend on bringing this dilemma to the fore. It is something that we really do need to discuss.

We have heard time and again from the Government and elsewhere on the government side that, other things being equal, they believe it is inherently desirable that local boundaries are respected. Can they not, if they wish to do so, come up with different wording which at least reflects the value that they acknowledge we should be attributing to these considerations? Can they not send a signal to the Boundary Commission which says in effect, “If you possibly could, we would be delighted if you were to take account of local boundaries”? Can we not send some signal or instruction to the Boundary Commission saying, “For generations”—ever since 1949, I believe—“you’ve been right to take account of these considerations. Please don’t drop that now. We aren’t trying to tell you that that was wrong. We aren’t trying to tell you that you should go back on that tradition or those values and ignore them. We’re not just giving you a reluctant permission if you really insist on taking account of these things; we would like you to do so if you can somehow manage it”.

That surely is the sense of the message that Parliament wants to send to the Boundary Commission—the sense of the message that has been articulated in different ways from all parts of House, including from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who has taken an important part in these debates. Surely the Government cannot really, on reflection, be entirely satisfied with this very negative formulation of “may”. I hope they can accept the proposal of my noble friend that the text should be changed to “should”. If not, can they not find some better way of encapsulating the message which, I am sure, in good faith, they themselves have been delivering to us, not just tonight but throughout our deliberations on this Bill?

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[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Is it not unfortunately true that people who are significantly less well off than those in the affluent constituencies that my noble friend was just talking of will be even less likely to be able to afford to resort to electronic means of communication given the cuts in benefit that the coalition is planning? At least, until now, they might have had the opportunity to go to the public library to find a computer to communicate with my noble friend’s successor as Member of Parliament, but that, too, will be less likely to be available for them as a result of the cuts to public library provision.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble friend is again right. I sat through about half of the debate on housing benefit and was really impressed by the speeches from all sides, particularly from the Liberal Democrats— including my old friend the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope—all arguing against the cuts in housing benefit. The cuts will certainly make it more difficult for poor people to access their elected representatives. As my noble friend said, cuts to library services will have the same effect.

To illustrate the increasing demand in MPs’ casework, I quote a couple of examples that I hope, since they do not come particularly from Labour, might convince Members opposite. According to Wilks-Heeg and Clayton, authors of Whose Town is it Anyway? The State of Local Democracy in Two Northern Towns, published in 2006 by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, an MP in the 1950s or 1960s, which is even before I was a Member of Parliament and probably even before my noble friend Lord Kinnock was—

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[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble friend is absolutely right. I found it starkly revealing to sit next to colleagues in the House of Commons who represented constituencies in Bradford or Birmingham, where more than half the people whom they represented were from immigrant families. They may not have been immediate immigrants—they might have been second or third generation—but there were a huge number of them. It was a real revelation to me to find out about the huge workload arising from that. Repatriation of some of the money that they raised was one way in which their spending income was reduced. My noble friend Lady Liddell was in the same situation as me, representing a former mining constituency. We had a huge case load of former miners, after the previous Conservative Government under Mrs Thatcher forced the closure of the mines in Scotland and elsewhere. They were getting compensation for pneumoconiosis, silicosis and vibration white finger. I had not dozens but hundreds and hundreds of people coming to see me and each of them had a huge problem to raise. So we learnt that from each other.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My noble friend draws attention to the large volume of casework that falls to be carried out by Members of Parliament representing, for example, former mining constituencies or constituencies with a high proportion of immigrants resident in them. In doing so, does he not highlight the fancifulness of the Government’s contention that they will save £12 million by reducing the size of the House of Commons from 650 to 600? I understand that that £12 million is compounded of £4 million for MPs’ salaries and £8 million for their office costs. In light of the factors that my noble friend has just mentioned, they are plainly not going to save the office costs component of that. In fact, those costs would have to rise for individual Members of Parliament to enable them to carry out their duties. Would not it therefore be better to be done with it and stay with at least the existing number of Members of Parliament?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I absolutely agree. The more that we go through this Bill, paragraph by paragraph, the more it unravels—and the more it becomes clear that the original contention that we should reduce the number from 650 to 600 is absolutely crazy. The initial premise forces the Government into all the other crazy things in the Bill, such as preserved constituencies and the figure of 13,000 square kilometres.

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[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Sometimes, also, actions have consequences that are unseen and unpredicted. It is only when we examine collectively the provisions that these unintended consequences become obvious. It is our duty and responsibility to point them out. But before the noble Viscount intervened, I was coming to the end of what I was saying.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Might the implication of the intervention by the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, really be that we have not tabled enough amendments to enable us to scrutinise every aspect of the Bill point by point? Indeed, I suggest to my noble friend that he is being remarkably constrained. For example, we should consider the fact that in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1997 the opposition parties tabled 11,500 amendments to a Bill intended by the Progressive Conservative Government in Ontario to amalgamate metropolitan Toronto with the city of Toronto. Does that not make my noble friends on this side of the House appear to have been remarkably self-disciplined and restrained in their tabling of amendments?

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

I certainly agree. I feel almost inadequate in terms of our scrutiny in the light of what my noble friend has said, but I finish—

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I would like to have heard in the debate more references to the distinction between targets and caps, because that is essentially what we are debating. I agree with my noble friend. I was listening to the intervention of my noble friend who moved the amendment, and the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who referred to the new constituency that would be created being the maximum. It would be a huge constituency that would be utterly unmanageable, where the issue of accessibility would simply have gone out of the window, which is why I asked the noble Lord, Lord McNally, how he understands the relevance of accessibility. That constituency would have no proper representation. It would not be possible in the context of the size of the constituency that would be created. It could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have proper representation.

However, I wish to use paragraph 5(b) to the proposed new schedule, referring to,

“local government boundaries as they exist on the most recent ordinary council-election day before the review date”,

as a peg to draw attention to the conversation that took place at one of my dinner engagements last week. Someone raised an issue, and I suddenly thought, “That is particularly relevant to what we are discussing in this House”. The whole process in which we are involved is, we are told, essentially about equalisation. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, keeps referring to votes of equal value. That is a very interesting principle. The question is: where, when and in what circumstances do you apply that principle? I want to draw attention to other circumstances where that should equally apply, if you take the word that everyone is using, “localism”, into account. I want to see whether this localism—a sort of bottom-up principle—applies to this area.

I want to give as an example what is going on in Westminster, where we now sit. We are within the area of the Westminster local authority. I have here a list of all the wards within that authority. I was wondering how far this principle of equal votes of equal value applied in Westminster. I simply draw the attention of the House to what is going here. If we are prepared to have flexibility here in Westminster, why can we not apply the same flexibility throughout the whole of the United Kingdom? In every ward in Westminster there are three councillors. There are 20 wards. I want to draw attention to the variation in electorates within the council area where the Houses of Parliament stand. Knightsbridge and Belgravia has an electorate of 6,400, Tatchbrook has 6,400, Churchill 6,500, West End 6,600, Marylebone High Street 6,700, Little Venice 7,100, Maida Vale 7,200, Warwick 7,200, Vincent Square 7,300, Abbey Road 7,300, Bayswater 7,400, Church Street 7,500, Regent’s Park 7,600, Hyde Park 7,700, Bryanston and Dorset Square 7,800, St James’s 7,900, Harrow Road 7,900, Queen’s Park 8,100, Lancaster Gate 8,200 and Westbourne 8,300.

It seems that in Westbourne, the 8,300 electors voted in three councillors; but if you live in Knightsbridge or Belgravia, the 6,400 electors vote for three councillors. Where are votes for equal value there? We are dealing with the budget of one the largest local authorities in the country. I understand that Westminster’s budget is greater than those of some government departments. What about votes of equal value? Councillors elected to those wards are taking decisions on the use of these vast resources. I find it incredible that—guess what?—the largest electorates to elect the three councillors are in the Labour wards. So, built in to the arrangements for this votes-of-equal-value principle is an arrangement in Westminster whereby Labour voters are penalised and the individual voter has less influence on the expenditure of Westminster City Council. So much for votes of equal value.

Someone else told me that this is going on all over the country.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

The situation in the constituency of the Cities of London and Westminster is even worse than my noble friend has suggested. It is a constituency where underregistration is particularly extreme. It is thought that the registered electorate in that constituency is only some 60 per cent of the 16-plus population. So we are talking about extremely skewed patterns of electoral representation in both local government and the Westminster constituency of this part of London.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My noble friend has referred to an issue that I intend to raise. I do not know whether we will be going at eight o’clock or nine o’clock tomorrow morning, but we may well get to the amendment where I wish to raise that issue. I have some important information to place on the public record about the population of the Westminster area and we can perhaps deal with those matters later on.

On the Westminster statistics, when I was in conversation today with others I was told that Westminster has by no means the worse differential in its electorate; there are parts of the country where some councillors are elected in wards with half that number of people on the register. I give way to the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones.