Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Davies of Stamford

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Technically, perhaps the county of Durham is no longer a county council as such; I do not know. It seems to me all the more important that there should be recognition in the Bill of the important contemporary reality of unitary authorities.

Among his observations in debate on a previous amendment, the noble Lord noted that parliamentary constituency boundaries crossed the boundaries of a significant proportion of unitary authorities. That is not a good reason to surrender those unitary authorities, assuming that there will be no concern among the people who live within them that their integrity should be preserved when drawing parliamentary constituency boundaries—and, very importantly, the working relationship between Members of Parliament and the local authorities governing the areas, the communities, which they represent. It must be desirable that Members of Parliament deal with the smallest possible number of local authorities. The complexity, the multiplication of tasks, the time-wasting and the cost involved in Members of Parliament having to deal with a proliferation of different local authorities overlapping with their constituencies is clearly undesirable. I hope that the Government will accept that the Bill should be amended on the lines of my amendments.

I say just a word on the question of wards as building blocks. If it has to be accepted that, with the tight tolerance around the electoral quota, it will be more commonly the case than it has been hitherto that individual wards will be bisected in the drawing up of constituencies, some administrative questions follow. What is to be the subdivision of wards that the Boundary Commission will need to take account of? If it is to be polling districts, how can we be sure that local authorities will not redefine polling districts so as to frustrate the purposes of the Boundary Commission?

Those administrative processes ought to be sensibly related to each other. If we are to see the fragmentation of wards, we need some sub-unit which the Boundary Commission will respect. If it is to be the polling district within the ward—which it could be—we need a guarantee that the polling districts will not be arbitrarily chopped and changed. I beg to move.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I suspect that at this stage in the proceedings and at this time of night, there is not a great appetite in the House for a long speech. I want to speak briefly to my amendment, Amendment 22, which is grouped and is about wards.

It would be churlish not to start off by saying that I recognise—and am grateful and appreciative—that the Government have moved some way in our direction. The Minister will recall that I pressed him on the matter of wards at some length in Committee. After quite a long discussion, he ended up by saying that there may be,

“some merit in placing discretionary consideration”—[Official Report; 24/1/11; 713.]—

of wards in the Bill. I place on record that I recognise that the noble and learned Lord has done what he promised to do and has tabled an amendment, which he has not yet had a chance to move, Amendment 27A, which puts wards in the same category as other local authority boundaries for the purposes of the Bill.

Your Lordships may say: why are you rising at all to speak to the amendment? The reason is that there is a significant difference between what the Government propose—I recognise that they have taken steps in the right direction—and what I propose. The essential phrase in Clause 5, which all of us will remember, is that the Boundary Commission “may, if it sees fit” take into account local government boundaries. Wards are now included for the first time as a local government boundary.

“May, if it sees fit,” is a very weak indication or encouragement to the Boundary Commission to take ward boundaries seriously.

I have a greater degree of optimism in practice, because I have a great respect for the Boundary Commission and it is as familiar as we are with the strong arguments for respecting wards made very well by my noble friend Lord Bach. They are that wards are the building blocks of both local government and the major political parties in this country. To break them up or cut across them would be an attack on democracy at the grassroots. I am quite sure that neither the Tory party nor the Liberal Democrat party really want to do that. However, there is considerable merit in having a stronger formulation as in my amendment:

“Except in circumstances they judge to be exceptional, a Boundary Commission may not allow a ward to form part of more than one constituency”.

The obligation is placed on the Boundary Commission to make a case of exceptional circumstances if it decides to split a ward. That seems a much stronger formulation and I would be grateful if the Minister could say why he cannot accept an amendment which seems to encapsulate the spirit of the debate we had in Committee.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Davies of Stamford

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

It must be wise to learn from the experience of other countries that have been ahead of us in considering these matters. I contend that STV, above all, should be a major option. My own amendment simply would have added it to the question that is set out in Clause 1 of the Bill: do you want first past the post?; do you want AV? I would have added the option: do you want the single transferable vote system?

I certainly do not intend to discuss at any length the merits and the demerits of STV. The virtues of proportional representation are that it is perceived by some as being fairer and that it tackles the problem—which I think is a very real problem and one of the explanations for the disaffection with our parliamentary system and our political culture that is so widely felt in this country—of the feeling that most people’s votes are wasted, that elections are determined by small minorities of voters in small minorities of constituencies, and that other voters hardly need to take the trouble to vote because it is not going to make any difference to the eventual outcome as to who forms a Government. That feeling of unfairness—the feeling that the system at the moment does not give adequate and equal force to everyone’s vote—is a real problem. To that extent, there is a case for STV.

People will not, however, agree about what fairness is. Some will say that a fair system is a system that creates representation in Parliament that is in exact proportion to the distribution of votes between the parties in the country as a whole. Others say that a fair and representative system is one that expresses and represents communities in Parliament. That has been our tradition. The defect of PR is, of course, that it ignores people’s sense of identity in their constituency. It means that you no longer have the single member constituency—the constituency in which one person of whatever party is elected to represent and serve all the constituents—which is a very precious and valuable part of our system.

Another unfortunate consequence of STV can be that it leads to a great deal of fratricide within parties as candidates seek to persuade people to vote for them rather than for other candidates in their own parties. I will not go on about the pros and cons, except to say simply that they are numerous on both sides.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Before my noble friend leaves the disadvantages of proportional representation in any form, does he agree that among its most serious problems is, first, that it dilutes individual responsibility, and secondly, that it greatly enhances the power of party bosses because of their power to move an individual around in the list on which the party is elected?

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I agree entirely with my noble friend that these are further defects. PR condemns us to a perpetuity of coalition Governments and gives disproportionate power to third and lesser parties, as we have seen for many years with the Free Democratic Party in Germany. I would not wish to vote for it, but my point is that people should be allowed the opportunity to vote on all the serious choices that ought to be considered when we are contemplating the possibility of changing the electoral system. I am confident that first past the post would prevail and I would campaign for it, but it would be a salutary exercise in our democracy if we were to reconsider what our electoral system should be, with every reasonable option being available to the people.

I am surprised, therefore, that what Mr Clegg thought of as a “miserable little compromise” in offering the option of voting only for AV now appears to him to be a happy little compromise. I fear that he regards it as a stepping stone towards another referendum, which he hopes will not be long delayed, in which people, finding that they have been sold a pig in a poke with AV, decide that they do wish to move on to STV after all. In an earlier debate I quoted the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House, which deprecated the resort to referendums. Indeed, I think that to lead us from one referendum to the next because the first referendum offers an inadequate choice to the people that they quickly find unsatisfactory would be a thoroughly bad thing.

For these reasons, I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, and I hope that he will want to pursue it with all the vigour he can muster.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Davies of Stamford

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I shall speak briefly, but with strong conviction, in support of the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Myners. I have never been resident in Cornwall, nor have I had the privilege to represent a Cornish constituency in the other place. However, I have frequently visited Cornwall, it has been an important part of my life, and it has been a source of deep pleasure to me.

I had the opportunity to gain some insight into the distinctive culture of the people of Cornwall when I was a Minister responsible for heritage. I spent two days in Cornwall at a time when we were reconsidering the listed status of nonconformist chapels in the county of Cornwall. That is a remarkable heritage. They are beautiful buildings whose main fabric and furniture were constructed with extraordinary craftsmanship that derived from the boat-building skills of local people. Those skills are something of which Cornish people are very proud indeed, and are emblematic of a distinctive vigorous culture that ought to be respected.

It is not that the people of Cornwall have been introverted. It is not that they are seeking to retreat into some kind of bunker by demanding that their parliamentary representation should be contained in whole constituencies in the county of Cornwall. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, spoke of incursions by Cornishmen into Devon. I believe that it was Cornish miners who brought football to Mexico. The influence of Cornwall throughout the world has been powerful and beneficent. I simply make the point again in this context, as I have in many others.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Before my noble friend leaves his personal reminiscences of Cornwall, will he tell the House—we are all full of suspense—what ministerial decision he ultimately took on the heritage status of the nonconformist chapels of Cornwall?

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Howarth of Newport and Lord Davies of Stamford

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[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?