Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Maples Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Viscount Simon)]

I must advise your Lordships that, if Amendment 58A is agreed to, I cannot call Amendments 59 to 63ZA inclusive and Amendment 66B due to pre-emption.

[Lord Maples]

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, asks why it should fall to Parliament to make this decision. It seems to me that it must, and that ultimately the will of the House of Commons should prevail but that obviously our views should be sought too. The nature of the rules that the Boundary Commission operates at present involves an inevitable escalation of the number of Members of Parliament at every Boundary Commission review.

I completely agree with the noble and learned Lord that there is no magic number. Those of us who sat in the House of Commons probably would not be able to agree what the optimum number should be. However, there are now 650 Members. I think that there were 625 when I first got in in 1983—or perhaps that was the figure in 1979—and there were 659 in 1997. Therefore, there has been quite a variety in the number of MPs. In the 20th century, the number rose from 615 to 659, but of course that does not take account of the fact that the number of Scottish seats fell by, I think, 13 at the time of devolution. If those are added as well, we are still talking about a number around the 660 mark.

With 600 seats, the average number of voters would be 75,000 per Member of Parliament. I should like to speak—

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

Before the noble Lord moves on to that specific point, does he not agree that, on all those occasions, the figures arose from decisions made by the Boundary Commission and were never imposed by Parliament?

[Lord Maples]

That is not correct. The boundary commissions legislation states the number of seats in Scotland and Wales. In fact, the legislation says that there will be a minimum of 35 seats for Wales, whereas there are actually 40, and it also gives minimum numbers for Northern Ireland and Scotland. Therefore, I do not think that it is right to say that the matter has been left entirely to the boundary commissions.

I revert to my point that there has been an escalation in the Boundary Commission process. With 600 seats, there would be about 75,000 voters per Member of Parliament. I have tabled an amendment—Amendment 63ZA—that suggests that the House should be reduced in size progressively over the next three boundary reviews to 600 MPs at the next election, 550 at the one after that and 500 at the one after that. If the number got to 500, there would be 90,000 electors per Member of Parliament. I had very nearly 90,000 electors when I was a Member of Parliament and it was not an unmanageable constituency at all. For those with very small constituencies—mostly in Scotland and Wales—frankly I wonder how theirs can be a full-time job, because it was perfectly easy for me to handle an electorate of about 85,000. It is a matter of the number of staff—a point that I shall come to in a minute.

[Lord Touhig]

My Lords—

[Lord Maples]

I should like to progress. This is like making a speech in the House of Commons, where people intervene the whole time. The noble Lord can make his own speech in his own time about the number of seats in Wales. Following on from my Amendment 63ZA, I have tabled another—Amendment 66B—which would reduce the denominator and the fraction for deciding the electorate for each seat.

There are several reasons for making such a change. First, we are moving towards a general feeling that the Government should be smaller. I think that the number of Ministers has got too high. Certainly, if the size of the House of Commons were to be reduced, the number of Ministers in it would also have to decrease. Secondly, there is a wide perception—this is based only on anecdotal evidence—that there are too many politicians who cost too much money. I agree that the cost of the House of Commons will not necessarily fall a lot as a result of the proposed change, but the cost has doubled in the past 13 years. The cost doubled under Labour largely because we were all given an enormously increased number of staff. That has to come to an end. Members of the House of Commons are not the most popular people in the country. If people knew that MPs were costing more, they would not be happy about it.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, said that we should not be too swayed by international comparisons, and I rather agree that we should make up our own minds. He then said that one should take account of other countries’ devolved layers of government—for example, Germany is a federal state and France, as the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, pointed out, has elected representatives at all sorts of other levels. If that is so, that is an argument for the quota for Wales and Scotland being lower than for England because England does not have a devolved Assembly. To many of us, it seems that the numerical advantage was taken away from Scotland by the devolution Act. If that argument is to hold sway, it should result in fewer Members of Parliament at Westminster for Wales and Scotland on a quota basis than for England. However, politicians in other countries find themselves perfectly capable of dealing with constituencies that are much larger than 75,000 voters. I think that constituencies in Germany have about 140,000 voters and those in France about 100,000 voters, whereas here, even under my proposal for reducing the House of Commons to 500 Members, the figure would be 90,000.

Let us look at some of the changes that have taken place and the work that is required of Members of Parliament. The devolved Assemblies have, frankly, reduced the workload of the Members of Parliament for those areas for which there are devolved Assemblies, because the work is now split between more people. It may be that Parkinson’s law is in operation and that demand is rising to meet supply, but, in objective terms, there are more elected representatives theoretically doing the same work.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, referred to the increase in constituency work, which is undoubtedly true, but an awful lot of that can be, and is, dealt with by Members’ staff. In most of the run-of-the-mill cases with which Members of Parliament have to deal—which they should not have to sort out, as the bureaucracy should be more responsive than it needing a letter from a Member of Parliament to break some bureaucratic impasse—all that they need to do is sign the letter. They do not have to involve themselves in the details of every case.

We have moved to a House of Commons in which the vast majority of its Members are now professional politicians—it is a full-time job for MPs, who do not do anything else—but the Chamber has become less relevant in holding the Government to account. I suppose that the Chamber is where politicians make their reputation, but, apart from that, the game is so heavily skewed in the Government’s favour that the Chamber is not really where the Government are held to account; that is in Select Committees.

If the House of Commons is to develop, as I hope, in a way that makes it as constitutionally important in the future as it has been in the past, it will be through the work of Select Committees. We do not need a 600 or 650-Member House to staff those. It is my experience from the past 13 years that an enormous number of Members of Parliament, particularly those with marginal seats, have been encouraged to spend less time at Westminster and more in their constituencies. That is another area in which work has expanded to fill the time available in which to do it.

What do you need in the House of Commons? Well, you need a Government. At present, there are 95 Members of the House of Commons in the Government. If the House of Commons were reduced in size along the lines that I suggest, that number should be reduced. However, let us say that you would still need 85 Members in the Government. You would need a similar number in the Opposition to shadow them. You would need some alternatives in both the Opposition and the Government, so that when people either want to resign or have resignation forced upon them, there would be somebody else to take their place. There will be new people at each election. If you add all that up, you come to about 300 people.

Then you need Select Committees, of which there are 17 at the moment. I do not think that 12 or 14 Members are needed on a Select Committee; I have sat on committees of various sizes and would have thought that 10 is about right. Some of the people who sit on Select Committees would also be in one of the other categories in the House of Commons. Opposition spokesmen do not sit on Select Committees, nor do Ministers, but people in the other place who hope to become opposition spokesmen or Ministers are very often on Select Committees—only about 150 people are precluded from being on them.

I would have thought, therefore, that a House of Commons of 500 would be more than enough to satisfy those requirements. That is too big a reduction for one Parliament—it may be too big a reduction for three—but I would be grateful if my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench could respond. Particularly in light of how painful and time-consuming it has been to get this reduction through, perhaps it would be a good idea to build in future reductions as well.