Draft House of Lords Reform Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Tuesday 1st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

The noble Baroness is right, but there is no proposal yet on the table. I am illustrating the cost implications of the Joint Committee’s report. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has generously already cut his cost estimate by £100 million at least. In fact, the year one extra cost might be—

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, my patience is great but has now been exhausted. I prepared the best costing possible of the Government’s proposals. It is perfectly true, as I said in my speech yesterday, that the Joint Committee’s proposals will cost slightly less because they make wholly unrealistic assumptions about what it is possible to do for transitional Members, but I have not cut my costs by £100 million. I stand by my costs. Until the Government or the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, find some better criticism than he puts forward this morning, I shall stand by them to the last.

[Lord Tyler]

I hope the noble Lord will now read the Joint Committee report, because there are specific recommendations in it that do not concur with his conclusions.

The second issue is the media myth that somehow or other the public are completely opposed to any reform of your Lordships’ House. I draw particular attention to paragraph 17 of the report and the footnote. The 2010 British Social Attitudes Survey shows that 59 per cent are in support of wholly or partly elected Members and 22 per cent are in favour of abolition—completely sweeping the House of Lords away and having a unicameral system. That is the real danger. Only 6 per cent wish to continue as a wholly appointed House. That is endorsed by the January 2012 YouGov poll, where 71 per cent support wholly or partly elected Members and 10 per cent support wholly appointed Members. Last week, two more polls showed insignificant figures for a wholly appointed House. Those who—

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. There are bags of extra costs in this Bill, including £80 million well spent on the AV referendum—well spent, that is, if it gets the result that both the noble Baroness and I would like to see. I am, however, confining myself to the saving on MPs, because that is the one argument that the Minister has made this afternoon. My point is that he has used a totally bogus figure—inadvertently, I am sure. If he wants to dispute this later, he can put a letter in the Library and we can no doubt correspond about it. It is extremely worrying if a Minister has inadvertently misled—

[Lord Tyler]

I know that in the past we have assumed that the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has been a Member of the other place, but I can assure him from my own experience that he is mistaken if he thinks that Members of Parliament are paid by results. You do not get paid more because you have more constituents; the payment is standard. I had an electorate of 87,000 constituents at one point; that constituency is now much reduced, but my successor does not get paid less just because he has fewer constituents. The whole basis of his calculation should be taken back to his statistician friends and looked at again.

[Lord Lipsey]

I am sorry that the noble Lord’s long experience in another place has not enabled him easily to absorb points being put by people who are, no doubt, less articulate than he is.

[Lord Lipsey]

The point I hope to make clear is that I am not claiming that there will not be a saving in salary; I am claiming that the workload will remain the same but that there will be fewer people to do it. You will still need people to deal with that workload and letters will still need to be sent. Is the noble Lord saying that if his constituency had increased in size by 10 per cent, he would not have written to anyone in that 10 per cent; that their problems could go fly because he had not got the money to pay for it?

[Lord Tyler]

But the allowance—

[Lord Lipsey]

If the noble Lord will forgive me, we should not have multiple interventions on Report. The last intervention did not take the debate forward in the way that the House would desire.

[Lord Tyler]

But the allowance is not increased. The staffing allowance is not increased simply because there are more constituents.

[Lord Lipsey]

This often happens in this life. I was just coming to that. What will happen is that MPs will come back and find that they have got an increasing workload. Their staff are worked to the bone, anyway, and they will suddenly see that they have an opportunity to put in an irresistible bid for yet more of them. It will be impossible for a Government to resist that pressure from their own Members, and so the extra staff will be granted and staff allowances will go up. The probability is that this will swamp, dwarf and completely eliminate any saving made by having 50 fewer MPs.

The proof of this particular pudding will lie in the eating. I therefore ask the Leader of the House to put his calculations in the Library so that we can look at the facts when they emerge after the next general election. It would be a nice subject for the independent inquiry into the number of MPs to consider and would give it a good factual basis for saying that this huge error, justified on the grounds of cost, is a statistical howler of the utmost proportions.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

Does the noble Lord accept that, if the amendment were added to the Bill, it would not even preserve the integrity of the present seat of Brecon and Radnor? All it would do is apply a new rule, under rule 4, to every part of the United Kingdom. However, you could still find the boundary changes in mid-Wales all too damaging to the communities to which other noble Lords have referred, because the amendment only talks about a size issue; it does not talk about the existing constituency of Brecon and Radnor. If I may say so, I think that the noble Lord has misled the Committee—I would not normally say that because he is usually absolutely meticulous—by saying that the amendment would in some way defend the present integrity of the seat; it would not.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I was going to go on to refer to the noble Lord and I will do so in a minute but that is yet another nitpicking point. It is up to the Boundary Commission to decide whether to preserve Brecon and Radnor. I said that in my speech. I did not mislead the Committee on that point. The chances of the Boundary Commission deciding to preserve Brecon and Radnor and then saying, “Perhaps we’ll have a little bit of that in or take a little bit of that away” is so absurd a notion as to cast doubt on what could be going on in the mind of the person who did it. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, does indeed have a close relationship with the constituency of Brecon and Radnor. The people of Brecon and Radnor were very pleased to see him make the long journey to attend Lord Livsey’s funeral service and it was good to see him there. Frankly, I am surprised that he has not fallen in love with it and that he wants to see it dismembered by this Government.

As I said, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, did not seek to address the specific questions that I raised but just made some general points, the main one of which was wholly spurious. It is believed—we have heard this from other Ministers as well—that this Bill creates votes of equal weight. It is possible to have a system in which all votes have equal weight. It is called PR and most of us are against it. However, in our system all votes do not have equal weight. The only votes that determine the result of a British general election are those cast in marginal seats, so the great majority of voters cannot hope to have any impact on the eventual result. That is why politicians of all parties pay particular court to the middle England voters, as they used to be called—sometimes it is Worcester man or Essex woman or whatever. Theirs are the only votes that count because they are in marginal constituencies. In using that argument, I fear that the Minister merely illustrates the vacuity of the Government’s general case, and it is only a general case that he has put up against the particular factors, which I believe to be of some force.

We have learnt quite a bit from this debate—I hope that the Government’s supporters have learnt something from it—which is that the Bill needs to be looked at in detail and improved to reflect the realities of the electoral geography of our country, not theoretical concepts dreamed up by backroom boys who have no experience of the geographical realities of the great country in which we live. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

I shall follow directly on from what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, and I shall be extremely brief, so my noble friend will not be kept waiting long. In one way, I shall go further than the noble Lord did and say that many of the principles incorporated in the amendments are already present in the Bill in the rules under Clause 11. For example, it states, more explicitly than the present rules, that

“local government boundaries as they exist”,

on the most recent council elections, should be a special factor that the Boundary Commission can take into account. It states that a special factor that the Boundary Commission can take into account is local ties. County boundaries, as we know, most famously in the case of Cornwall, are exactly the sort of local tie that it can take explicit regard of. So those principles are in the Bill. The trouble is that they do not amount to a row of beans because of the 5 per cent limit. That is the problem. Otherwise we would not face this difficulty.

[Lord Tyler]

The impression seems to be given by Members opposite that somehow the existing situation is that a constituency never crosses a county boundary. That is of course not true. In the historic case of Lancashire and Yorkshire—I can think of no part of the country where counties have a more historic rivalry—the constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth crosses the county boundary.

[Lord Lipsey]

I cannot think what it was in my remarks—because no doubt the noble Lord intervened on me seeking clarification—which contravened what he just said. When he makes his speech in a minute, no doubt he will be able to develop his point, but I do not think that it arises from my remarks to the House, with great respect.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

I want to contribute only very briefly. I echo what my noble friend Lord Baker said earlier about the experience that some of us had some years ago. I do not go back as far as he does in parliamentary experience, but when I was elected in 1974 there was very limited support for the Back-Bench Member. I remember that well.

What has been interesting about this debate is that a number of colleagues—from both sides of the House, as it happens—have contributed on the basis of their experience of the other place. With the exception, I think, of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, every one of the speakers has spoken with that experience and authority.

[Lord Lipsey]

May I correct the noble Lord? I was never in another place.

[Lord Tyler]

I am so apologetic. My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness made this point earlier: we have all experienced the noble Lord’s considerable contribution so we have all assumed that he must have had such influence in the other place behind the scenes that he was, in effect, an ex officio Member.

My point is that over the past two hours and 46 minutes I have taken the opportunity to read the Third Reading debate in the other place. These are the real, live witnesses of the experiences of current Members of Parliament, and they have been able directly to influence the Bill, taking up the big issues, as they see them, on the basis of their practical experience. They did not spend two hours and 46 minutes discussing the reduction—

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

Goodness, you hardly get to sit down before you have to stand up again.

I am not sure that this amendment is right. It suggests a seven-year periodicity of reviews instead of five years. I am not sure whether seven years is the right answer. At the moment we have reviews broadly every 10 years, which is broadly every two elections. Seven years would not sustain that, although there is a case that it should be sustained. I am sure, however, that five years is daft. It is strange coming from a coalition Government led by a Conservative Party, but five years is a recipe for permanent revolution. It will mean much upheaval; you will hardly have finished with one review of boundaries before settling into another. It means that there will be no stability in the system and many people will only just have discovered who their MP is when it changes, not as a result of their decision at a general election but a Boundary Commission decision. That is the result of a combination, which I believe is toxic, of the 5 per cent variance in the size of constituencies and the five-yearly reviews of constituency boundaries.

Stability matters tremendously to MPs. Under this system, they will hardly get back into the other end before they will be wondering which seat to look to represent next time. Will your present seat continue to exist or, if its population is growing, is it about to be dismembered and replaced by another constituency? Every Member of another place will, under this system, be carrying a permanent carpet bag, ready to find himself or herself a new seat.

I do not think that that is a good recipe for anything, including the good governance of this country. If you are thinking the whole time about where your seat is going to be, you are not going to be thinking the whole time about what policy should be. Some of us believe that there has been a dangerous development in our politics, whereby the sheer degree of constituency issues which every MP must consider—I defer to those who have been Members of another place; I may be quite wrong about this—and the sheer weight of constituency work which they face, make it extremely hard to give attention to the wider national issues for which, in a sense, they are elected.

That has been a substantial change over the years. If you read the biography of Gladstone by Roy Jenkins, you will find that he hopped constituencies every few years and had no constituency work or contact at all. Nowadays, any MP has to be deeply embedded in their constituency—a bit like bishops. The ones who are doing a good job really know their areas, their patch, and their people. They will not get embedded in that way if, at the next general election, they know that their patch and their people may be completely changed and that they may be starting again on fresh turf, as Gladstone did. Gladstone ran the Midlothian campaign, but I did not hear of him running many campaigns for the repair of drains in the constituencies that he represented.

That instability for MPs is not the main problem. Anyone who seeks a sympathy vote for MPs is on a losing wicket these days. The main point is the effect that it can have on constituents. Constituents come in all shapes and sizes. I am sure that every Member of this House who has been a Member of another place had many constituents that they would have been delighted never to see again at their surgery doors, but they built up a relationship with their people and people built up a relationship with their Member.

When I was working as a political journalist, I found, when I had conversations with a Member of another place about the great issues of politics, that I was often not wholly overwhelmed by the breadth of knowledge and vision that they had on world problems, and so on. Where I always learnt from any conversation that I had with a Member of another place was when they turned to the issues in their constituency. That is how I understood the reality of the decline of manufacturing industry. It is there where you understand the dilemmas involved in what services you improve and what services you have to hold back on. That was the whole basis of what they brought to our national government and governance.

We had a wonderful example from the noble Lord, Lord Dixon, this afternoon. Could that knowledge be picked up by anyone who happened to be passing through Jarrow on a Sunday afternoon? Would that knowledge be held by the civil servants sitting in Whitehall, or even in the north-east? No, it was detailed constituency knowledge based, as the noble Lord said, on 50 years of living there and representing people there. That is a terrible thing to throw lightly aside, and it is the constituents who will lose. They will not know who to write to; they will not know whether to trust who they write to; they will not know what they are hoping to achieve when they do; and they will not have that intimate relationship that both they and MPs value so much.

It is very noticeable from opinion polling that if you ask people what they think of MPs in general, it is unspeakable. They think that they are nasty, self-seeking men and women on the take. I think they are wrong, mostly, but that is what they think. However, if you ask people what they think about their MP, you get a very different picture of affection and respect that is, in most cases, earned by hard work based on the knowledge that the MP wishes to retain the relationship between him and the constituency he represents for many years ahead. That will go under this Bill, and part of the mechanism by which it will go is the demand that the constituency boundaries be revised every five years.

Whatever we decide on the right variance between constituencies, and we may well make a decision, and whatever we decide about the number of MPs, and we may well make a decision, I hope that between now and the final passage of the Bill, it will not be totally impossible for the Government to think again on this issue and to space the reviews more widely so that this relationship can survive. Not much rope now attaches the people to our politics. It has grown thinner and thinner. The people’s confidence in politics has diminished, as, I fear, has their confidence in Parliament, but it is the constituency relationship and a consistent constituency relationship—

[Lord Tyler]

Before he completes his speech, will the noble Lord explain the rationale behind the selection of seven years for the review? By definition, that would mean that more constituencies would be subject to change than if it was five years. If he went for a longer period, presumably even more constituencies would be subject to change, so all the arguments that he has been advancing, which I entirely endorse as someone who was very proud to represent an interesting part of the country, would fall by the wayside if more constituencies were changed as a result of his proposal.

[Lord Lipsey]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. I have been on my feet in successive speeches, and he must have missed the beginning of my speech when I said that I was not sure that seven years was right. I was simply sure that five years was not right. That is why we have a Committee stage in this place: so that we can explore these things and come to a correct decision when we get to Report. If the decision was made for 10 years, I certainly would see no reason to suppose that it was wrong. I think that five years has a particular defect that seven years avoids, which is that in five years you know exactly the time. If we have fixed-term Parliaments, the chicken run starts two years before each general election, so there are only three years in which it does not start. Seven years would avoid that, so at least you would get another election after you were first elected, and then you would have a period of uncertainty. However, if the noble Lord wished to move an amendment that proposed 10 years, I should be an enthusiastic supporter of it, and it would be good to see him doing it. All I am saying to the House this afternoon, and I am not sure whether he disagrees, is that a five-year permanent revolution under the Conservatives is too short a period.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

The noble Lord has led me to be even briefer, because I was about to refer to his Amendment 89C and to a similar amendment that I myself proposed. It is quite easy statistically to equalise notional electorates. It depends on, for example, the proportion of rented tenure in the given constituency. Perfectly good equations can be developed that pretty accurately project the notional electorate from the actual electorate. Equalise those within whatever limit the House may decide and you have a much more sensible approach than that which is in the current draft of the Bill.

[Lord Tyler]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Will he accept, even if some of his colleagues would not, that one of the disincentives to registration is that people—perhaps particularly if they are transient through the area—think that if it is a very safe seat, their vote simply will not matter? It is the correlation between safe seats under the first past the post system and the disincentive not just to register but to bother to vote even if they do register. I think that at least he will accept that that is one other reason. How does he propose to tackle that problem if, as seems to be his colleagues’ wont, they want to resist any improvement to the electoral system?

[Lord Lipsey]

I am proposing to tackle it in the very same way as I hope he is proposing to tackle it—by voting yes to AV whenever we get round to the referendum, whether on 5 May or, as I hope, a later date.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Lipsey and Lord Tyler

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, with this amendment, we move from Part 1 to Part 2. I shall make one important observation relevant to the case that my noble friend Lord Wills has made. In the case of Part 1, there was an inquiry—I know, because I sat on it. It was the Jenkins inquiry. It is perfectly true that the referendum will be not on the recommendation of Jenkins but on half of it; namely, the alternative vote. That inquiry did not completely crack the problem, but it moved the debate forward. As we found when we debated Part 1, all the speeches made were informed by the famously articulate report of Lord Jenkins and the analysis that it contained. Some agreed with it and some did not, but it shaped the analysis and therefore enabled us to have a much better debate.

The second advantage to flow from having a prior report is that, between the setting up of Jenkins and the introduction of this Bill, many people, whether mostly or wholly, changed their minds. There are many people, particularly in my own party, who are adamant first-past-the-posters and can still see the arguments for it today, but they are prepared to contemplate the argument set out in Jenkins for moving a little way in the other direction by having the alternative vote, which is an improvement on first past the post in the view of many of them.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords—

[Lord Tyler]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for giving way. He was a very distinguished member of the commission that was set up and chaired by Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. Why does he think that, 10 years afterwards, we have had no action on its report? Does he not share our cynicism that the proposal of his noble friend is simply a way of privatising, pushing out and delegating responsibility for these important decisions so that nothing should happen? The experience that he and I have had of the complete failure of the Government whom he supported to do anything on the basis of that commission’s recommendation, makes us very cynical about asking somebody other than Parliament to take decisions on this matter.

[Lord Lipsey]

The noble Lord was very grateful that I gave way, but I am even more grateful to see him popping up to speak. The silence is broken—omertà is finished with. I am sure that we will have many contributions from him in the future.

There is no intention among anyone, I think, to stop this legislation, as considered properly, going through. Let us be clear that what will destroy the legislation is not the danger of delay but the danger of haste. The danger is that this ramshackle legislation, half considered, will be forced into law and that a subsequent Government, seeing that it is half baked, will force it out of law and we will have achieved nothing. That is the plan that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, is urging on the Committee. I beg this House, which is a great example of the benefit of the rational consideration, to reject that way forward.

I was saying before I gave way to the noble Lord that many first-past-the-posters have been converted to the alternative vote, but I take more pleasure in another form of conversion that has taken place. There were many people, and the Electoral Reform Society was in their hands, who believed in wholesale, immediate electoral reform and full-scale proportional representation. I have never been persuaded of the case made for proportional representation; I do not believe in it and I do not agree with it—nor did Jenkins. However, during those years since Jenkins, and in months and years of debate, those people have moved their position so that now the Electoral Reform Society is a very strong backer of the yes campaign in this referendum. I think that it sensibly sees that a consensus reform that goes half way is better than a wholesale reform that later gets reversed, and that it is more likely to get reform by settling for a halfway house than by holding out for ever for the whole cake.

Through the post-Jenkins process has emerged a greater level of consensus on where we are going. It is not a wholesale consensus—that would require the verdict of the people in a referendum—but there is a greater level of consensus and a greater clarity on the arguments. That makes a hugely strong and powerful case for proceeding by reflection.