Future of Seaside Towns
Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, like other members of the committee, I thank my noble friend Lord Bassam—briefly, but with feeling—for the wonderful way in which he chaired the committee, and I thank the staff and the other members of the committee for giving me an enjoyable nine months exploring this subject and for a useful report that does the House some credit. It is also a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Best, who brings his great expertise in housing and saves me from having to talk about it, because he has said it all. As a committee, we all had his insights from his visit to Blackpool. I want to underline his comments for the Minister, who I could see was listening carefully, and who I hope will pass those insights back to the department.
Around two years ago, my son told me that he had received messages on Facebook from his former classmates at Wey Valley School in Weymouth. They had left 10 years prior to that. There was an attempt to get a class reunion going, using a private group on Facebook. Fergus said that this gave him a chance to find out what all his classmates were doing. He said that everyone who, like him, had done A-levels over the hill in Dorchester had now gone on to university and left Dorset, and they were not coming back. I asked about the others. The person who had instigated this was one of the more enterprising young men in his class, and, like all the other enterprising men who were still in Weymouth, he was a personal fitness trainer—the enterprising job of choice. The other young men, who were slightly less enterprising, were dead, in prison or on benefits. The young women who did not get over the hill to do A-levels in Dorchester were all mums with two or three kids, and they did not have a class reunion, because £10 was more than they could afford for an evening out.
That told me a story, fairly graphically, of the social mobility problem in a town such as Weymouth, where, incidentally, as the report says, all the secondary schools are now in a below-average Ofsted category and are struggling. It has reinforced a sense that we need to focus more on community-level social mobility rather than just focusing on what education can do for individuals. At heart, that is what this committee was trying to get at. To achieve that, you need more population diversity than we get in a place such as Weymouth, where those struggling with disadvantage are to some extent crowded out statistically by an elderly, asset-rich population; they have their own problems, which I do not want to belittle, but they skew some of the statistics. That community and others like them around our coast also need economic diversity, away from the old bucket-and-spade, stag-night economy into something that, in the end, offers graduate-level employment. We will not regenerate these places without an offer that will entice some of Fergus’s classmates back to Dorset, or people like them back to Weymouth.
The problem is that these places are on the periphery of the economy and their problems are dispersed. My noble friend Lady Bakewell talked about the string of pearls—whatever they are, they are a string of issues. If they were concentrated together, we would all know about them a lot more. To some extent, they are concentrated in Blackpool, which is why the media picks on Blackpool unfairly. But that dispersal makes them easy to ignore. How will we get those aspirational, graduate-level jobs and careers? It is about culture, decent coffee and places to get nice food, a night-time economy that suits such people, and—if they are then going to have families—decent schools and health facilities.
These areas have a positive offer for quality of life. There is a fantastic quality of life in Weymouth and those other communities around the country. They also have cheap housing, but that is also a negative, because that is what has brought in those rogue landlords the noble Lord, Lord Best, talked about. From my experience as a constituency MP in South Dorset, what follows for the people living in those concentrations of houses in multiple occupancy is a terrible quality of life due to neighbourhood nuisance caused by some of the problems of those places that spill out. The classic regeneration solutions of residential planning gain or getting an anchor retail development do not quite cut it because of the periphery and because in a lot of these places the land values are not there to drive much commercial development.
To my mind, the answer is around the place-based approach that the report talks about, but led by education. Of course, I am biased—your Lordships will be aware of my interests in education, particularly as I work for TES Global. But I see the future—we are talking about the future of these places, not the halcyon days of the past—and it is in human capital development. That is what education is all about; the future economy will value human capital. We need to build talent pipelines in these places and not have education systems that are funnels which filter people out. The disadvantaged will always lose out from that filter. Bear in mind what employers are now starting to do when they hire; they are moving away from filtering on the basis of educational qualifications and starting to use talent analytics to work out what people can do, not accepting certificates as proxies for what they can do. That presents opportunities as well as challenges for the established status quo of education.
Where should we go in education? First and foremost, we need to focus on adult skills. There are great talents latent in these communities that need to be brought back in through a proper adult skill system. I would love to see a return to individual learning accounts—obviously, on a fraud-free basis.
We need a revival of part-time higher education. What has happened to the Open University, thanks to the way the funding system has been constructed, is a tragedy for such places. We need decent connectivity so that online learning, such as FutureLearn, run by the OU, can help in those places. We need integration with further education. We need apprenticeship ladders into the sectors that can offer aspirational graduate-level employment, so that a degree apprenticeship can be developed for sectors such as tourism and energy production with a sense of pace.
We also need a balanced curriculum in our schools, because employers are frustrated by our narrow focus in the school system. There is an obsession with the academic, with cognitive development at the expense of social and emotional development. That comes from study of the humanities and creative subjects, from more application of knowledge as well as its development. That is what employers want. We see that in the UTCs—the Scarborough UTC is mentioned in the report—and some of the innovative higher education development in places such as Coventry and Scarborough. That is very much to be welcomed.
The Government will say—I have read their response—that they are doing some of that place-based work in education through the opportunity areas. I was disappointed by the copy-and-paste approach from the Department for Education in the government response. It read just like a bunch of lines to feed to Ministers for questions. Instead, we need something that tries properly to understand what the committee was getting at.
There is freedom to innovate and I would love to see that deployed in our coastal areas to build collaboration, more vertical integration between school and further and higher education, an opportunity to remodel our teaching workforce around a different, more practical curriculum, that workforce enhanced by technology and able to do things previously inconceivable pedagogically, because they are being fed the raft of information that technology can now give teachers in the classroom. That innovation—that freedom from regulation and the stranglehold of our accountability system—in places such as Weymouth, where all our secondary schools are fundamentally struggling, would be a real liberation and a basis for the sort of coastal challenge strategy that the committee is after.
All that needs leadership, and others have talked about the need for leadership vision. Teach First was kind enough to bring some teachers up to Westminster to meet us, and we met one from Weymouth, who has come back to Weymouth having been brought up there. That is the only reason she came back as a graduate: she came to work in that seaside town because that is where she grew up. She was familiar with it, she knew about the quality of life, she knew she could get cheap housing and had already bought her first house. She was an example of the great offer for professionals, but she came back only because there was public sector employment.
We can get this right for seaside towns. We have a hugely divided nation at the moment. We need to give people on our periphery hope. If we can get it right for our seaside towns, we can get it right everywhere. Let us deliver the place-based approach and devolve power to leadership—be it private, voluntary or public sector—in those places so that they can get on and lift their communities.
Natural Resources Body for Wales (Consequential Provision) Order 2013
Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts(11 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Wales Office (Baroness Randerson)
This order was laid before the House on 3 June 2013. First, I apologise to noble Lords for an error that appeared in paragraph 3.2 of the Explanatory Memorandum. The memorandum omitted to note that Part 7 of the draft order will apply retrospectively from 1 April 2013. Part 7 concerns transitional and savings provisions. This is in line with the provisions for Parts 1 to 5, and Articles 29 to 31. This administrative error has been amended, and corrected versions are now available.
The order is made under Section 150 of the Government of Wales Act 2006, which allows for consequential amendments to primary and secondary legislation in consequence of provisions made by an Assembly Act or subordinate legislation. The order is made as a consequence of the Natural Resources Body for Wales (Functions) Order 2013, brought forward by the Welsh Ministers, which was approved by the National Assembly on 19 March 2013. I shall refer to this as the functions order. The order transferred functions in relation to Wales from the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission to the new body, Natural Resources Wales. It also abolished the Countryside Council for Wales and transferred its functions to the new Natural Resources Body for Wales.
This consequential order provides for the completion of legal arrangements for the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission and Natural Resources Wales to operate together in their respective areas in the most effective and efficient manner. For example, it makes provision to remove Welsh Ministers from the appointment and funding of the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission. It also amends the Environment Act 1995 to ensure that the new Natural Resources Body for Wales can make appropriate charging schemes in relation to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, and that the Environment Agency and the Natural Resources Body for Wales can make cross-border arrangements for cost recovery and charging for water abstracting licences.
In preparing this consequential order, the Wales Office worked closely with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and other key UK government departments, as well as the Welsh Government. We are all agreed that the provisions in this order are necessary to ensure that Natural Resources Wales can exercise its functions to fulfil its remit and co-operate effectively with its counterpart organisations across the UK.
This order is also important to the UK. Without it, the Environment Agency and Forestry Commission in England will be unable to delegate their functions to the Natural Resources Body for Wales and similar bodies across the border, and would therefore be unable to fulfil their remit efficiently and cost-effectively. For example, in the event of a pollution incident in Wales that impacted on England, the Environment Agency in England would not be able to delegate the clean-up to the Natural Resources Body for Wales. This could result in unnecessary duplication of decision-making and deployment of staff, and a waste of Environment Agency resources. That is just one example of the importance of this order to both the UK and Welsh Governments.
This order demonstrates the UK Government’s continued commitment to working with the Welsh Government to make the devolution settlement work. I hope that noble Lords will agree that this order is a sensible use of the powers in the Government of Wales Act 2006 and that the practical result is something to be welcomed. I commend this order to the Committee.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing the order so clearly. She will perhaps be relieved to know that I have not suddenly taken on shadow Welsh Office responsibilities but that in the comradely spirit of the Front Bench I am helping out and using my experience in shadowing Defra to have a look at the order and make sure that everything is as it should be from our point of view.
I can say from the outset that we are supportive of the order. From my reading of the Explanatory Notes and the other documentation, it appears that all the consultations have been carried out well by the Welsh Office and the Government. Obviously, the order brings forward measures that have come from the Welsh Assembly Government and we would not want to get in the way of their fine work.
Therefore, my only question to the Minister—and not wanting to delay the Committee—is that the merging of the devolved functions of the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission with the Natural Resources Body for Wales will produce some interesting learning for the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of joined-up working in this area. Does the Minister know of any mechanisms that the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission or indeed Defra will be putting in place to ensure that we can learn those lessons and see whether or not there are aspects of joint working that we could do better here as this new body proceeds in Wales? It is not always fashionable, I know, for us in England to learn from Wales—sometimes it is more likely for Ministers to be sent to New Zealand than across the Severn Bridge—but there are things that we could learn from our friends in the devolved Assembly and I would be interested in the Minister’s response.
Baroness Randerson
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his positive words in support of this order. Referring specifically to the noble Lord’s question, it is very much the case that close and co-operative working will continue between the Environment Agency, the Forestry Commission and the new Natural Resources Body for Wales. It is essential that that close co-operation will continue, from the perspective of both England and Wales.
First, there will be training co-operation, which will greatly benefit the new body in Wales because it will be able to call upon training opportunities in England, where the numbers undertaking training are very much larger and therefore there is a wider range of opportunities. Close working is also very important because, of course, rivers do not follow national boundaries. The organisations concerned—the predecessor organisation in Wales and the continuing organisations in England—are used to working together and co-operatively in order to reduce costs. They work across border when there is agreement and it is essential that that kind of co-operation continue. I think that so long as there is co-operation, both in operational working and in training, there will be ample opportunities for the organisations which continue to exist in England to learn and to observe what is taking place in Wales.
Perhaps I may also briefly mention to the noble Lords that there was recently a triennial review of the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission in England which looked at whether those bodies should continue in their current form, should be reformed or should be merged. That triennial review concluded that the bodies should continue but that there should be reforms. I think it is important that the lessons from that review be taken. By the time of the next triennial review, which will be in 2016, there will of course be ample opportunity to have learnt from the experience in Wales. With those comments, I commend the order to the House.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, Amendment 5, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Boateng, seeks to remove subsection (1) from Clause 4 and returns us to our debate in Committee on whether it is appropriate to combine the referendum with other voting: in this case, local authority elections in England, a local referendum in England or a mayoral election in England. I confess that I am currently not sure how I would choose to vote in the referendum. In many ways, I would like more time to consider the issues and balance up my feeling that the current system is probably not that fair with my unwillingness to get that worked up about it. Probably, therefore, I should just let the status quo ride, given that I am not that fussed about the change, but I need to think about that.
That is one basic, straightforward argument for not having this on 5 May, but we have had that debate already. There are specific problems with combining the poll with other elections that come down to two principal things—confusion in the campaign and confusion at the ballot box. Taking the first, I put a scenario to your Lordships, many of whom are familiar with political campaigning and the process on the ground—for many of us, that is partly how we got here. We are dependent these days on a large number of volunteers delivering leaflets, knocking on doors, phoning people up, tweeting and doing whatever else we do in modern campaigning and being, by necessity, partisan about how they do it when they are fighting things like local government elections here in England.
All this activity is geared towards polling day, when electors are to be turned out in one’s cause behind the candidate of one’s choice. I am concerned as to how, if there is a referendum on the same day as all that activity, political activists on the ground can simultaneously campaign on one or the other side of a very important question about how MPs get into the House of Commons and for their political party. They will be simultaneously what we might describe as comrades and opponents. It is very difficult to understand how that will work in practice.
I know that he is not in his place, but the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, told us that he does not pay too much attention to Members on this side of your Lordships’ House trying to be helpful to the Liberal Democrats. I do not believe that this combination is at all in the interests of the Liberal Democrats. Among political activists, those volunteers on the ground who one would expect by and large to do a lot of the work in a referendum campaign, I do not believe there will be so many in the Conservative ranks or massive numbers in the Labour ranks—I do not believe that the majority of Labour activists will be campaigning for a yes vote. That will leave the Liberal Democrat activist base having to carry a substantial part of the workload in the yes camp in an AV referendum, and it will simultaneously have to defend actions that I will not go into but which have proved slightly controversial in their association with this coalition Government. I do not think, therefore, that this gives this question the chance to be properly debated and put to the country, because I do not think we will have a sufficiently resourced and balanced set of campaigns on both sides. Thinking through the practical implications, noble Lords, with their understanding of how elections and referendum campaigns work, will see that this is not very practical.
My noble friend Lord Bach of Lutterworth raised the Leicester mayoral election on 5 May. The same issues will arise there—this is not just about trying to combine local council elections on the same day as the referendum. Mayoral candidates might be asked to take a position on the referendum, and their political parties feel that it is appropriate to put on leaflets what their position is on the referendum question. We then get into complicated questions as to how election expenses are accounted for on those leaflets. Should a mayoral candidate be endorsed, we could continue to go on and on about the consequentials, and that is not the order of the day.
There is a fundamental danger that the referendum will be ignored by electors in terms of thinking about it, but they will participate in the end because they will turn out to the poll, the paper will be given to them and they will feel that it is their duty to vote. They will not have had the opportunity to give the proper consideration that this question deserves. Like me, at the moment, they are probably pretty much undecided, although they might have a bit of a gut feeling about which way they will go, and they need more time to think about it.
The second question is confusion for electors in the ballot box itself. Most of us are not used to referenda. I voted in the referendum—no, I did not; I was not old enough to vote in the referendum for membership of the European Union, and I do not think that a referendum question has been put to me since in any of the areas where I have lived, so I have never taken part in a referendum and I am not used to that scenario. It is probably straightforward enough to work out how the mechanism of the ballot paper works, but I am familiar with the scenario of being given quite a few ballot papers on polling day.
I live in a wonderful area of Dorset where we have both a borough council and a county council, and I have lived in areas where I have served on a town council. On 5 May, in parts of the constituency in Dorset that I used to represent—Purbeck—there will be town council elections and district council elections. I do not think that there will be any local referendum questions, but I would not put it beyond the wit of the people of Swanage to want to have a referendum on whether or not they want a free school in the town, because there are some people campaigning for that, so they might already have been given a third ballot paper. To add a fourth starts to create logistical challenges for the people who are administering the elections. How many ballot boxes do you need? Should you separate them off at the point of the votes being cast? In that case, you will need four in each of the polling stations. Should you go for one ballot box and then separate them all out, with all the potential for error that goes with that? Doing this creates all sorts of logistical problems for running an election and, most importantly, it has the potential to confuse electors with all these different pieces of paper that they will have to express their opinion with.
Clearly, this referendum should go ahead. It is very important that the question should be properly debated, with a well informed campaign. I do not believe that we can have that well informed campaign by 5 May. Thanks to the excellent work of my noble friend Lord Rooker, we now have the possibility of being able to have it between now and 31 October, with a whole set of amendments voted on by this House to make that feasible. I encourage the House to say that as a matter of principle it is too confusing to combine the polls. I beg to move.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth. The issue at the referendum is simply too important for it to be right to confuse it with all the other campaigning issues that will be abroad in the land on 5 May. Campaigning armies stir up a great deal of dust, and we should not cloud this issue. It is a most important moment in the national life when people have the opportunity to decide whether they wish to change the electoral system for returning Members of Parliament. They should be allowed to consider that question in isolation, calmly and at reasonable length.
As we have noted again and again, there has simply been too little earlier and wider debate as a prelude to holding this referendum. There was no Green Paper or White Paper and no adequate scrutiny in the other place, while Select Committees of both Houses were obliged to produce their reports in some considerable haste. The quality of journalistic discussion of the issues of the referendum remains poor; as my noble friend Lord Foulkes observed just now, it is still being trotted out as a commonplace that the virtue of the optional preference system of the alternative vote will be that at any rate every Member of Parliament will be returned with no less than 50 per cent of the vote. That is not true, but journalists keep on recycling this inaccurate account of what the optional preference system of the alternative vote will provide, so we and the Electoral Commission will need longer to inform the people about what is at issue. If the people are distracted and confused by a whole lot of busy, energetic vocal contention about a series of other electoral issues, I do not think that they will be able to reflect with the care that they need and gain the clarity of view that they ought to have when they take this immensely important decision.
One of the Government’s justifications for holding the referendum on the same day as other elections on 5 May is that it will improve turnout. I question that. There will of course be plenty of voters willy-nilly in the polling booths—they may or may not wish to use all the different bits of paper that are handed to them as they go towards the booths—but I am not sure that, not having had the opportunity to consider with the care and thoroughness that responsible citizens would wish, they will necessarily be disposed to vote in the referendum as well as in the other elections. In all events, we will get a better quality of turnout and a more thoughtful one if we have the referendum on a separate date.
It seems wrong in principle and particularly inappropriate that the case should be made that having a referendum on the same date as other polls will cause a higher turnout when in London, this capital city, there will be no local elections on that day. There will be differential turnout and there will be the most detrimental effect; if the proponents of the argument that it should be held on the same day in order to improve turnout are correct, it will follow that Londoners will have less of a voice in this crucial decision.
Additionally, there is the question of respect to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The Scots have expressed themselves already in no uncertain terms; they consider that it was disrespectful to them that the coalition Government simply decided that they were going to impose a requirement to hold a referendum on the same day as the elections to the Scottish Parliament, and your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution was also censorious on that point. The Welsh, similarly, do not like it; they had already decided that the other referendum to be held in Wales in the early months of this year, on the question of whether there should be an extension of primary legislative powers to the Assembly, should be held separately in March so that it should not be confused and clouded by the other campaigns and the other voting on 5 May.
There will be problems at a practical level for returning officers and counters, and in determining what expenditure is to be attributable to which campaign. These are not negligible considerations either. Even at this stage, it would be the right thing for the House to recognise that it would be detrimental to all the campaigns—detrimental to the clarity of conduct of the referendum campaign, but equally so to the clarity of conduct of the local, Scottish parliamentary and Welsh Assembly election campaigns—if they were all to be cluttered and confused on the same day. It would be better to draw back, have a better quality of campaign over a more sensible timescale for the referendum and hold it on any of the dates that are now made possible in consequence of the amendment that the House made in Committee about the requirement regarding the date on which the referendum should be held.
Lord Strathclyde
My Lords, noble Lords opposite have expressed a clear and consistent view about combining these elections on the same day. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, used the word “confusing”. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, used the word “swamping”. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, also said that it was confusing and so on. There is this thought—this idea that I have picked up loud and clear—that it will be difficult and awkward for the electorate to take a view and for the various organisations to campaign effectively. I am not saying that noble Lords opposite do not have a point, but I think that we have dealt with them. Indeed, the Electoral Commission said recently:
“We have always recognised that there would be both advantages and disadvantages associated with holding elections and referendums on the same day … On balance, we believe that it should be possible to deliver the different polls proposed for 5 May 2011 if the key practical risks to the successful conduct of the scheduled elections and a UK-wide referendum are properly managed”.
We have worked with the Electoral Commission and others in government on the combination of provisions in this Bill to make sure that the combination rules are conducive to well run polls on 5 May.
There are good reasons to combine them all on the same day. It is significant that we will increase turnout. That is one of the many good reasons for holding a referendum on this date. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, mentioned London. It is true that there will be no elections in London. However, in other parts of the country, there will be, which means that 84 per cent of the electorate of the United Kingdom will be going to the polls on 5 May. This strikes me as an important and significant reason to have them on that day.
Crucially, all the amendments seem to misunderstand the nature of combining polls. I know that some noble Lords would rather not have the referendum on 5 May. However, preventing it from being combined with other polls is not the way to express these concerns. The simple administrative process of combination allows polls that are happening on the same date to be taken together, polling cards and polling stations to be shared and so forth. The consequences of these amendments would be that the referendum and scheduled polls could take place on the same day but that they would not be combined administratively. Naturally, this would result in a waste of money, in logistical difficulties for electoral administrators and in inconvenience to voters.
What is the reason for combination? The first is money. It will save the taxpayer approximately £30 million, which is a significant amount of money when compared with the cost of holding the referendum on a day when no other polls are taking place. The savings will be made because the costs of particular relevance can be shared between different polls being held on the same day. For example, costs of providing polling stations, hiring premises and equipment, paying polling station staff, and the savings can and will be shared between the referendum and the other polls taking place on 5 May. I also advise that the referendum will be administered on the same boundaries as the elections that are scheduled to take place across the whole of the UK on 5 May. From an administrative and cost point of view, it therefore makes sense to run them as combined polls.
The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, specifically mentioned the situation in Wales, where, unusually, there will be a referendum and then elections. My understanding is that the coalition Government and the Welsh Assembly Government agree that it would not be to anyone’s advantage to ask electors to vote in three polls—for the Welsh referendum, the AV referendum and the Welsh elections—in the space of a few months. The so-called respect agenda in Scotland is also an important question, but again I think it was right for the Government to make the announcement to Parliament. This showed a respect for Parliament rather than to the devolved Assemblies and Parliaments.
There will be the scope for confusion. However, I believe that those who are running the yes and no campaigns have ability and judgment. In fact, the noble and learned Lord is taking part in one of those campaigns. I am sure that he and his colleagues will be able to see their way through this and run a successful referendum combined with the other elections on 5 May.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My Lords, the Leader of the House has attempted to justify this combination and has tried to respond to some of the points made in the debate. However, his central argument hangs around money and convenience more than anything else. He said that the Electoral Commission considered that the situation we are discussing is just about possible provided all the risks are managed, but we needed to hear more about what those risks are and how they are to be managed. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred to differential turnout, and the noble Lords, Lord Touhig and Lord Foulkes, discussed competing franchises, the problems with the respect agenda in Wales and Scotland and the acute confusion in Northern Ireland. However, I did not hear how those risks, and the ones that I raised, would be managed. Therefore, I am not minded to withdraw the amendment. I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I am grateful to my noble friend. I know a lot about the Ballycastle to Campbeltown ferry, which my former honourable friend Brian Wilson tried to reinstate. When the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell of Coatdyke, was Secretary of State and I was Minister of State at the Scotland Office, we also tried to reinstate it, with some difficulty.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
The noble Lord will be aware that, within the European constituencies, Gibraltar is within the south-west of England. So there is, in a strange way, some sort of precedent for the radical, reforming idea that he wants the beginnings of a debate on. I remain sceptical, however. Has he spoken to the Gibraltarians, for example, about whether they want representation in this Parliament?
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
I have spoken extensively with people from the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and most of the dependent territories about a number of issues, including this one, over a long period. I must say that I am not the most popular person in some of our dependent territories. I would not claim that I was, but I wanted this matter to be raised because it is important. There are precedents. However, I do not want to go on too long. I have argued the case—
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My noble friend is absolutely right. There would be reciprocity. They would come under part of our tax regime. That is part of the purpose of it.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Yes, as my noble friend Lord Knight says, no representation without taxation—to turn something on its head.
Noble Lords have rightly pinpointed some of the practical difficulties. There is an argument in principle for it. Some people, particularly those in the Overseas Territories, find the present arrangements somewhat patronising. We send out middle-rank diplomats to be Governors and lord it over the elected representatives of the islands. Those Foreign Office officials are often insensitive to the concerns of the elected representatives. A number of them have said that they would perhaps prefer independence, or incorporation into the United Kingdom. The proposal has been suggested by some people in the many discussions that I have had, although others are not as enthusiastic about it.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours
That intervention by my noble friend is extremely significant. That matter has not been taken into account by the Government. I know that there were problems in Glasgow, because I have been reading about them. There was a huge campaign that was referred to a few weeks ago by my noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock to deal with the whole issue of registration, which threw up the particular problem to which my noble friend referred. Indeed, the Democratic Audit paper on further findings on equalisation, which no doubt most Members of the House will either have read or will want to read prior to our debates in the future, deals precisely with this issue of population. Mr Lewis Baston says:
“Approximately half of the countries that delimit districts use ‘total population’ as the population base for determining equality across electoral districts. Another third of the countries employ registered voters as the population base”.
Several European countries use citizen population as the relevant base for determining population equality. Lesotho uses the voting age population as the base and Belarus uses the number of voters in the previous election, although that would not be particularly helpful here, would it?
The facts are that countries can use census material and population statistics as against registered electors, particularly when we know that the registered electorate, as far as the purposes of this Bill are concerned, are based on a register that is effectively out of date and which excludes, as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton was saying only a few weeks ago, some 3.5 million people. Some 3.5 million people are excluded from the register. Why cannot the great proportion of those be included on a register by changing the basis on which the register is drawn by moving it over to a more population-based system?
Lord Knight of Weymouth
Has my noble friend seen the Electoral Commission’s excellent report published in March this year entitled The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain? Not only are there that number missing from the electoral register, they are not missing in a proportionate way. There are areas where there are numbers missing disproportionately and Glasgow particularly comes to mind. With an average in Scotland of 92.1 per cent completeness, Glasgow is only 67.8 per cent complete.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I have not read that report although it is on my reading list. There are a number of reports I have to read next weekend in preparation for the debates that will take place next week.
The point is that this is not the peg on which to argue the basis on which people register. My noble friend’s amendment simply says, “Let us have an inquiry that does precisely that”. He is saying, “Let someone, somewhere, do some homework on this whole area before Parliament is required to carry any particular piece of legislation”. That is my case.
Lord Touhig
I endorse the point made by the noble Lord. As part of the structure of our unwritten constitution—thank God we do not have a written constitution—it is important that we recognise that elements of the Union have to be taken into account. I made the point at Second Reading that in California, tens of millions of people send two senators to the United States’ Senate as does a state like Wyoming which has fewer than half a million people. That needs to be taken into account. If my noble friend’s proposals were accepted, the Government would then have a chance to reflect more sensibly on how we should proceed with these major reforms.
Welsh representation in Parliament goes back to the 16th century, although there is evidence that in 1322 and 1327—700 years ago—Wales was invited to send 24 Members of Parliament to the House of Commons. The Bill as proposed would give Wales just 30 MPs. The regular reviews of parliamentary constituencies have their origins in the House of Commons (Redistribution of Seats) Act 1944. The Act instructed the Boundary Commission for Wales to look initially at abnormally large constituencies but also to conduct a review of all seats with a view to keeping them under constant review. The rules for redistribution for the initial review stated that Wales should have not fewer than 35 seats and that rule remained in place for the first periodical review published in 1954. The second periodical review in 1958 stated that Wales should have not fewer than 35 seats. The fourth and fifth periodical reviews did much the same.
We shall perhaps get into this wider debate as we progress this Bill through Committee. I believe strongly that to treat Wales in this way is a threat to the Union. We will have a referendum in the spring on more powers for the Welsh Assembly. Whatever people’s views—they are entitled to them and I am sure they will express them—it is putting the cart before the horse to say that Wales will have fewer seats whether or not the people of Wales decide to transfer more powers to the Assembly in Cardiff. It is also offensive to people in Wales whose first language is Welsh to say that it does not matter if the Welsh language is well represented in the House of Commons. The point was made in evidence given to the Welsh Affairs Committee in the other place that this would adversely impact upon Welsh-speaking areas.
I urge the Government to take great consideration of my noble friend’s amendment. It would give us a chance to reflect and gain some consensus. I say to the Government that I think that the people of Wales will take offence at being treated in a way in which no other part of the union is being treated. If the Bill is enacted in its present form, one in four Members of Parliament from Wales would cease to go to the other place. That is disgraceful and, I believe, would be injurious to the Union.
Both the Conservative and Unionist Party, which once prided itself on being the party of the union, and the Liberal Democrats, which is the party of Lloyd George—Lloyd George would be turning in his grave at what is being proposed—need time to reflect on the issue. If they would take on board those points in the way that my noble friend’s amendment would allow, we could perhaps reach some consensus. I say to the Government: “Do not be so offensive to the Welsh people”.
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.