Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Anderson of Swansea

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

I apologise for the vagaries of the Marshalled List, which mean that I am on my feet twice running. This, again, is a slightly exploratory amendment but it has a serious purpose. The intention behind it is to suggest that, if we are to equalise anything, there is quite a strong case for equalising not electorates but population of voting age. This issue has come up from time to time during our discussions. It is not necessarily a question of either/or; it would be possible to arrive at a figure for equalising which contained an element of both. I may well put down a formula to that effect on Report but I shall not try it out now because I think that it would be a little hard on the Hansard writers.

First, I should say that there are big differences between large constituencies in terms of population and large constituencies in terms of electorate. To take an obvious example, which noble Lords will be able to relate to after our earlier discussion, the Isle of Wight is by a long way the biggest constituency in terms of electorate but it is only the third largest in terms of population. In Regent’s Park and Kensington North, the population of the relevant age was 146,000, which is nearly double the number of registered voters. For Kensington and Chelsea the figure is 135,000 compared with 65,000 registered voters—that is, more than double the electorate. There are 45 seats in which the electorate is less than two-thirds of the population.

Of course, an MP represents everyone who lives in a constituency and not just those who have a vote, so it would seem fair that some allowance should be made for that in terms of workload. This is particularly the case as lower registration tends to be correlated with people with particular kinds of problems, the most obvious being black and ethnic minorities, who are about 30 per cent less likely to be registered but are likely to give rise to a great many problems, such as immigration matters relating to their families. Therefore, there really is a case for taking population into account. The second thing—

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Does my noble friend agree that certain constituencies have a disproportionate amount of asylum seekers because they are designated by the Government as areas to which asylum seekers will go? I will give an example. I found that in my constituency surgery perhaps two-thirds of the people who came to me were not on the electoral register because they were asylum seekers. I concede that many of them were sent to me by solicitors, who no doubt hoped to obtain some form of financial assistance for them. Be that as it may, it means that certain constituencies have a far greater workload for their MP.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. It says a lot for his assiduity, and for that of most Members of another place, that they are prepared to work very hard for people who will never have the chance to vote for them. Those who are cynical about Members of Parliament should bear in mind that remarkable and cheering thought.

I turn to another fact that I had not realised before I prepared for this debate. The system that I propose for discussion in this amendment, whereby constituencies are equalised by virtue of population rather than electorate, is more common in other countries than the use of electorates. Britain has a jolly good constitution; we love it very much and certainly I am not knocking it. However, we should consider this. It is not a silly idea for a system that no country uses. Lewis Baston of Democratic Audit states:

“Most countries use some measure of total population to serve as the basic measure of constituency size, either total population or a modified population such as voting age population … or citizen population. Britain is a member of a minority, albeit a significant minority, of countries that use registered electorate”.

He states that the ACE Project shows that half the countries of the world use total population and one-third use registered voters as the population base. No doubt there are all sorts of ingenious combinations of the two. Countries that use population include decent democracies such as Germany, perhaps slightly less decent democracies such as Italy, and Hungary and the Czech Republic. That is a pretty good list of countries that think the population measure is right. If we are internationalists, we should consider whether we could learn from them, as my other argument suggested that we could.

I see that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will reply to this debate. I should be astonished if he did not stand up and say that estimates of population are to a degree inaccurate, which of course is right, and are to a degree out of date. That is also true, although it does not mean that if we decided to go down the population route, it would be beyond the wit of the Office for National Statistics and others to produce more up-to-date estimates of population for this purpose than they do at the moment.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Anderson of Swansea

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I should like to bring to light some of the facts that should come to bear on this decision. I do not think that anybody on the government side has yet spelled out a very good reason for thinking that 600 is the magic number and that 650 is the wrong number. That is a subject on which a judgment can be reached only in the light of all the facts about what is going on and what is likely to happen if we do not do anything about it.

One of the underlying assumptions made by the Government in all their speeches on prior clauses of the Bill is that there has been a tendency for the number of Members of Parliament to increase. Let us look at the facts. Yes, it is true that if you choose as your base date 1950 there has been a small increase from 625 Members of the Commons then to 650 today. It is an increase. But why take 1950? You might, for example, take 1983, which is, after all, more than a quarter of a century ago. Since 1983, the number of Members of the House of Commons has not changed; it has remained at 650. Alternatively, and this is a historically-minded House, one might go back to 1918, when the number of Members of the House of Commons was 707. I readily accept that there are explanations both for the increases and decreases, to some of which I shall come shortly, but this is a case not of an upwards trend ad infinitum but of fluctuations based on various things. One of those things which has tended to force the number perhaps to be higher than might be essential is Welsh representation—we shall come to that later in the Bill; I think that the proposal to cut it from 40 to 30 is too draconian, but, equally, 40 may be rather too many and there might be a saving to be made there.

It has to be accepted that, in the previous rules of the Boundary Commission, which have to be put right, there has been a contradiction which has caused some small change in the rise in the number of Members of the House of Commons. As I understand it, rule 1 requires that the House of Commons does not grow in total size, and rule 5 requires indivisible units—for example, counties—to be allocated the number of seats which makes each constituency as near as possible to the desired quota. This, in technical language, requires rounding-off at the harmonic mean, which is always beyond the arithmetic mean. If anyone wants me to go into that in more detail, I can guarantee to take up all day and all night in doing so, but I very much doubt that it would greatly be for the elucidation of the Committee. I am sure that the noble and learned Lord on the Front Bench would suggest that I do not do any such thing since it would cut across our desire to give this Bill the correct scrutiny in the minimum time that is necessary. Without going into those conflicts in the rules, I suggest that it would be possible to amend the rules in a quite a minor way to reduce that inflating factor in so far as it exists.

I have said that the number of MPs has not increased much. What has indisputably and hugely increased is the number of electors each MP has to service. Let us take 1950, which is the basis for comparison that is most favourable to the Government’s case. As my noble and learned friend said, the number of MPs is up 3 per cent and the electorate is up 25 per cent. If my schoolboy arithmetic is correct, electorate per MP is up 22 per cent. Let us again, because this is a historic House, take the longer perspective. In 1918, the average MP represented 30,000 electors. In 1950, the number was 55,000 electors. In 1983, it was 65,000 and, in 2005, it was 68,000. Under this Bill, that will go up to 75,000 electors. That is an increase two-and-a-half times over. It is possible that that is not right, but it seems a pretty big increase, the last bit of which is entirely due to the reduction brought about by this Bill.

That of course is electors per MP. However, the MP’s workload—and there are many former Members of another place who will no doubt give the House the benefit of their own experience—does not just depend on the number of electors, it depends on how many people live in their constituency. There are some very large discrepancies between the number of people and the number of electors. I have not been able to find, given the truncated timetable we are working to, an actual figure of number of people per electorate since 1918, but I can absolutely guarantee, I think, that it will have grown faster than the number of electors per MP, with immigration and the lack of people registering as a result. It is population that is the generator of workload.

Then, workload per person in your electorate has increased. Last time I spoke on a related matter in this House I mentioned that when I started work for Tony Crosland back in 1972 we got 30 letters a week from his Grimsby constituents and they could all be happily dealt with by an excellent part-time secretary in consultation with the local party. The situation today is nothing like that. It is not just numbers—the 300 letters my noble friend cited—but it is the sheer complexity of the cases. The complexity of an immigration case is enormous, which is of course why the cost to the Commons has gone up. It is not that there are more MPs—that has been a trivial factor. In order to perform the services that the people of this country expect them to perform, MPs need far more caseworkers to help them with constituency cases.

There is another factor which is much less remarked on but I think is quite important. The psephological evidence, until reasonably recently, was unambiguous. It did not matter how hard an MP worked or how lazy he was; there was practically no incumbent effect on subsequent general elections. Whether you won or not depended nearly entirely on the popularity of your party and not on how good a job you did. I hate saying it because I know it might offend some people who were MPs many years ago when that was so. However, I am afraid that the psephological evidence is unambiguous. That evidence has now changed. I will not go into the full detail—I would advise noble Lords that they can read the Curtice appendix to the Cowley and Kavanagh book on the 2010 general election. You will find that even MPs who had been at the heart of expenses scandals did better than new candidates who had not been in the House before. It is absolutely unambiguous evidence. I do not think that anybody in this Chamber would doubt for a minute that the great majority, even near to saying all, Members of Parliament, whatever their other faults and virtues, are deeply assiduous in servicing the needs of their constituencies and constituents. It is a plus factor for me that they get a bit of appreciation for that. I have known Members who lost their seats who were deeply upset for years afterwards because they thought their constituents had not shown them the gratitude they felt they had earned. Well now, their constituents are starting to show gratitude and that is a great thing.

Then there is the question of workload other than constituency work. There are 240 places now to be filled on departmental Select Committees—they did not exist really when I started in business—and 227 other places in committees. There is the sheer volume of legislation, I admit often guillotined down the other end, but you have to read the thing if you are going to take any part. The size of Bills has increased exponentially, largely as a result of the demise of the typewriter and the growth of the word processor which means there is no incentive whatever for draftsmen to cut anything out and every incentive to put things in because nothing has to be retyped. There is the huge effort of looking after our demanding press. There is the huge effort of dealing with the new profession of public affairs consultants, all of whom have good reason to come and see you about matters of one kind of another. The average MP today works far, far harder than the average MP did in the past. That is not going to change and it is the reason why most MPs today have to be full-time Members of Parliament. It makes me wonder whether it is a good idea to cut their numbers when they are having to work very much harder.

Then there is the question, which was again raised by the noble Lord, Lord Maples, of the ratio of members of the Government to Back-Benchers. This measure would make that ratio worse at a stroke. At the moment, the number of Ministers and Whips in the lower House is roughly just over a third of the number of Back-Benchers. This legislation would change that to 40 per cent. Among the remaining Back-Benchers there are some who are essentially the equivalent of Ministers, in the sense that they will do whatever the Government ask, however awful, in the hope of getting promotion out of the Prime Minister. Therefore, the number of independent Back-Benchers in another place, on whom we rely so much to hold the Government to account, is going to diminish. We have heard airy words that perhaps Prime Ministers in future will appoint fewer Ministers. I have been hearing them for 25 years too and of course it never happens because by appointing somebody a Minister a Prime Minister can bind them to him. On top of that there is the increased number of victims these days of sexual scandal or alleged blunder of one kind or another appearing in the newspapers. There is a greater turnover of Ministers as a result and, in my opinion, the Prime Minister will continue to appoint just as many. Whether all of them have full jobs to do is another matter, but there are good reasons to do it. He also has to maintain party balance and now, coalition balance, because some of the most fed up people with the emergence of this coalition Government are those people, mostly in the Tory party, who thought before they would get jobs and now find themselves on the Back Benches. Disgruntled does not begin to describe their mood. So there will not be fewer Ministers; it is a pity therefore that there will be fewer Back-Benchers. It also reduces what Professor Anthony King in a notable phrase has called the “gene pool” that is available. The fewer Back-Benchers available to promote the less possibility there is of new and excellent talent emerging to replace talent that is exhausted, talent that has destroyed itself and so on. That is another cost of the diminution.

Finally, we come back to the last argument which is extant of those who say that there is an evident case for reducing the number of MPs—and that is money. They say they will save money by doing it. That is not obvious to me because if the work has still to be done, it has still to be paid for. You may have fewer MPs but you are going to have more constituency workers per MP. You must do in order for them to cope with the sheer volume of correspondence and so on. The only saving I can see is that there will be the saving of 50 MPs’ salaries—that comes to a little over £3 million a year. Of that, £1 million will be lost in income tax so that is about £2 million. You could raise that by a decent tax on one banker’s bonus. This makes me feel that the money argument is really just a populist argument, as indeed is the whole argument for reducing the number of MPs. It is not based on fact, it is not based on analysis, it was pulled out of a hat in an attempt to satisfy a popular anti-MP mood, and it is your Lordships’ duty, and a duty in which we should take pleasure, to say hold on, let us look at the facts, let us see whether this decrease is really justified. If it is not, we are entitled to ask the House of Commons to think again.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Is there not a danger that if the workload remains the same and the number of MPs is reduced there will be an increase in the number of Members’ staff, which will in itself almost certainly lead to less of a direct contact between the Member and those he seeks to represent, which cannot be a good thing for democracy.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is absolutely right about that. It will also mean that the queue of people waiting to become MPs will be even longer since in my experience most of these MPs’ staff are waiting only for the moment when they can jump into the shoes of the man whom they so loyally serve.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Anderson of Swansea

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

I defer absolutely to my noble friend. Indeed, I was quailing in my seat at the thought of the intervention he might make, which might have sent me back to the classroom on this matter.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

On the Speaker’s Conferences, I genuinely am ignorant about this one question. To what extent was there a clear remit to each of these Speaker’s Conferences? From this debate, it is rather important that there should be flexibility and that a number of principles should be put to the Speaker’s Conference to decide. Has it been the practice to give a very broad remit or to set out in extenso the various principles on which the Speaker’s Conference should decide? Since my noble friend has devoted all of one Sunday to the study of this subject, I am sure he can enlighten us.

[Lord Lipsey]

Noble Lords will find that a range of experiences are set out in a Speaker’s Conference Standard Note, House of Commons document, SN/PC/04426, which has in it most of the knowledge that I have tried to impart. In some ways we should learn from the shortcomings of past Speaker’s Conferences in setting up this new one. They have tended to be rather big, often having 27 members. Not all of them have included Members of this House. For very good reasons I am sure that this time we would want to include Members of this House this time. In particular—this deals with the point that the Government might make against them—this one will need a speedy timetable as it is no part of the purpose of this side of the House to delay a decision or to make it impossible to introduce these changes for the next general election, if that is the desire of Parliament. Indeed, it would speed the passage of this bit of the legislation through this House if there was such a speedy conference. I really do not think this issue is so complicated that two or three months of hard work would not get us a good verdict which would enable the whole process to go forward on a sound basis of consensus, and therefore to endure.

The Government have rushed us into a bad place and now they are complaining that we are rushing willingly into that place. The figure they have come up with may be right, but if it is right it is by sheer fluke, not by plan or consideration. This House, of the parliamentary Houses, stands for a reasoned approach to public policy, and in particular to public policy on our constitution. I therefore commend this amendment to the House.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Anderson of Swansea

Monday 20th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I apologise for my eagerness to get on with the House’s consideration of the Bill. I know we have a lot of work to do and that the House is eager to do it. With this amendment, to which my noble friend Lord Bach and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer have appended their names and added a complementary amendment, we come to the political heart of the Bill. This is the buckle that ties together the two bits of the Bill—the AV referendum on the one hand and the reduction of MPs and redrawing of constituency boundaries on the other. The first bit is the fervent wish of the Lib Dem partners in the coalition; the second is the fervent wish of the Conservative partners in the coalition.

Before I explain why I believe that to be misguided, I will get my retaliation in first to an intervention that I would otherwise expect. My objection is not to both measures being in one Bill. I know that there is a case to be made that the Government I supported included many more than two measures in their Constitutional Reform and Governance Act before the general election. It is interesting to speculate about what the full purpose of that Bill was since it clearly could not pass before the general election. Partly, no doubt, we felt that the wise British people would be very appreciative of all the proposals that we were putting forward, but we were particularly interested in the reaction of the Liberal Democrats. We realised that we might have to form some kind of agreement with them after a general election and we wanted to show that we shared their views. After a few months of observing the Lib Dems in government, I think we were totally wrong about what their views were. We thought they were constitutional and economic liberals; it turns out that they are constitutional conservatives and economic reactionaries.

I will pass swiftly on. What I object to is not that the two measures appear in one Bill but that they are conditional. They enter the concept of conditionality into our legislation. You can only do the one if you do the other, too. This seems wholly wrong. Either these two proposals—the AV referendum and the constituency redrawing—are justified on their individual merits or they are not. There can be no case whatever for saying, “We’ll only do one if we do the other”, in logic or constitutional parlance, although we understand the political realities of this. It says a lot about the nature of the coalition and, in particular, the atmosphere in which it was formed. This stuff is here because the two coalition partners, when they were negotiating their agreement, did not trust each other. They could see that there was a grubby deal to be made.

The Lib Dems could make some headway on electoral reform. They did not want AV and there was a system they liked more but they understood the realities. The Tories were trying to change the number of constituencies and their boundaries so that they won more seats at the next general election. The deal that was made between them was that they would do both. Because one proposition was likely to lead to fewer Conservative seats and one to more Conservative seats, they decided to bung them together—all that I understand. What is sad, and does not increase one’s confidence in the long-term viability of the coalition, is that the parties so distrusted each other that they wanted it incorporated into legislation in the subsection before the House at the moment.

This is a more political speech than I would like to make in Committee but this is a political clause. We have to understand it. Some bits of the Bill are technical. We will come to those and deal with them in a technical way but this is a political clause. My next observation about this provision is that it says a lot about the balance of power within the coalition. The Lib Dems did not say, “Our condition for giving you the boundary changes that suit you is that we get the electoral system that suits us”. They feebly said, “Our condition for your getting the boundary changes you want is that we get not AV but a go at AV through a referendum”. However, if the referendum is lost, which, as a strong supporter of AV, I hope it will not be, the Conservatives can still have their boundary changes and reduce the number of MPs.

We will come to the substance of the case about the number of MPs later in our debates. Suffice it to say that no case of merit has yet been put forward for reducing the size of the House of Commons. It may be that there is such a case to be made—I look forward to Ministers developing it—but we have not heard a word about it yet. So far we have just heard the Government admit that they got a figure straight out of the air and incorporated it into a Bill. We have seen no case made—not for greater constituency equalisation, which I would grant—for the figure of 5 per cent included in the Bill, which, as we shall see when we get to it, is not a sensible figure for the variance in the size of constituencies. Nor has the case been made that the exemptions in the Bill get anywhere near meeting the very strong case that can be made for further exemptions.

The suspicion must be that the measures in Part 2 of the Bill are entirely designed for the sole purpose of increasing the number of Conservative seats at the next general election. If the Government can produce a statistical analysis from a reputable team of psephologists that says that it will not have that effect, the House will be delighted to see and discuss it. However, I say with no little confidence that they will not be able to do that because the effects are as I have described them.

I do not want to detain the House for too long on this but my third point is about how much the Government must regret the need to link these two measures. How sorry they must be. In any sensible world, if it is true that the coalition wants the referendum to take place on 5 May 2011, it would have introduced two separate pieces of legislation. There would have been one on the alternative vote, which might well have concluded its stage in your Lordships’ House if not tonight then in the first session in the new year, after the good examination that we have given it. The Government could then go ahead with the AV referendum. They could then take a more measured approach to the constituencies bit of the Bill. They could even have allowed it to be subject to some measure of joint scrutiny, without prejudicing their timetable to get it into effect by the next election. They could have allowed, as we propose later in the Bill, that there should be some conference—a royal commission or Speaker’s Conference—on the number of MPs to take a rational view as to what should happen. That consideration could have moved in parallel to your Lordships’ House considering the AV bit of the Bill.

Where are we? Your Lordships have an awful lot of the Bill to consider as yet. We are to do so against the looming timetable; the Electoral Commission has made clear when it requires the Bill to be passed to allow the campaign for 5 May to occur on an orderly path. We are struggling to meet this wholly artificial timetable, imposed by the Government solely because of the political deal that they have done and the fact that neither party trusts the other to abide by its words.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Is it not even worse, from the Liberal Democrat point of view, that they are clearly not very good negotiators? The deal that has emerged is wholly lopsided, as the chances are that their part of the deal—they wanted AV—will not happen and therefore they will have nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend would say that, but I cannot possibly comment because I believe of course that AV will win a referendum whenever it is held.