Elections Bill

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, much has already been said, but I wanted to speak on Second Reading—not least because it is the tradition of this House that if noble Lords wish to speak at further stages of a Bill, one should speak at Second Reading.

This is an important Bill. I judge it by a simple test, and a very personal one, for I am a believer in active participatory democracy and that active political parties at the grass roots are the custodians of that tradition. I want to know how the Bill strengthens that tradition.

I believe that our democracy and our parties are not just for election day. They should provide a corpus of political opinion to shape policies and political ideas within communities. I join the welcome and tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham. He pointed out the way in which there has been a considerable decline in the membership of local political parties. I am a strong believer in participatory democracy. Some will analyse that mass voluntary political parties were a response to the enfranchisement of the last century. Some will say that, in modern times, they are largely irrelevant. If that is so, I regret it. I find that it is not sufficient for parties to rely on a world of opinion polling and modern communication.

Many of us on these Benches go back a long way in our commitment to voluntary party activism. You can hear my noble friend Lord Cormack talk of these times, including when I succeeded him as the chairman of Lincolnshire Young Conservatives—we all have to start somewhere. My noble friend Lord Hodgson and I went on a tour as senior volunteers in the general election of 1997. We went to 63 key seats, and we lost them all. Given this background, it is not surprising that I will be judging the Bill by the contribution it makes to preserving community focus in politics—

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

No more, no more.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

Oh, I have a few more minutes.

It is essential that we have grass-roots activism, grass-roots fundraising and grass-roots presence as a political party on policy-making. I do not believe that this House would wish to see pop-up party machines dominated by centralised political structures.

In his opening remarks, the Minister mentioned the large number of speakers—this reflects the importance of the Bill to our participating democracy. Regardless of party, we all have an interest to ensure that our methods of elections are honest, fair and seen to be fair. That is what this Bill seeks to achieve.

Northern Ireland: Supply of Medicines

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

Thursday 9th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I repeat that the Government will not allow there to be any disruption to supply of medicines to Northern Ireland; that is an absolute obligation on us. Of course, medicines are only one of many problems that we have put on the table. They are a special case, if you like, of the issue of supply of goods more generally to Northern Ireland, so the matter cannot be seen entirely in isolation but needs to be solved as part of many of the other difficulties on the protocol.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister will be mindful of the fact that I have a family horticultural business. Before the House met today, I was on a call with the National Office of Animal Health, which emphasised to me that animal health medicines are also part and parcel of this package. Is he similarly negotiating for those?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My noble friend is absolutely right to raise this important aspect of the question. Although veterinary medicines are part of the general discussions that we are having with the EU, they are by no means as far advanced as those on broader medicines. Unfortunately, we are some way from a solution on that matter.

Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 30th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con)]

My Lords, some speeches come more easily than others and following my noble friend Lord Leicester’s maiden speech, I feel I have only one principal task and that is to congratulate him on his excellent first speech to this House and tell him how welcome he is here. Not even the arguments of the coming Friday debate can take away the sense that this House, and our Benches in particular, have gained by the active membership of the noble Earl. Those of us who live nearby know the impact that he has made on Holkham Hall and its estate. For 30 years, as he said, he has been a director of Coke Estates and for the past 15 years he has been very much in control of what is a real community asset for those in Norfolk and beyond. His hands-on approach to the great house and the estate means that we have a real expert who is able to speak with experience and authority about the responsibility that we have to the past of maintaining buildings in the best condition and at the same time making them relevant to the present and the future. Perhaps I can illustrate that by referring to the work he has done on one of the finest houses in England and on the Victoria, which he referred to in his speech, maintaining its function but creating one of the best restaurants with rooms in the country. We would expect the president of the Caravan and Motorhome Club to provide facilities for them together with the cottages and holiday facilities he talked of. Holkham is the model of how to restore and engineer amenity and of how to combine modern farming with nature conservation, and we have a chance to learn from a man who has done it and knows how to do it. Not for nothing is he president of Visit East of England. As chairman of the Midlands Engine APPG Visitor Economy subgroup, I share that interest in a key economic sector.

Perhaps I should now turn to the Bill. My first reaction was to go to the Library of the House, a source of great strength to all of us who find ourselves faced with legislation we know too little about. I was particularly interested to explore further the Second Reading of the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, which I thought might be useful, for at the time I was the Whip in this House responsible for Cabinet Office matters and I thought I might find that I had words for eating—it can happen in politics, can it not, particularly if you have ministerial responsibilities? As it turned out, that role was left not to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is in his place, but to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who took the Bill through the House.

The principle of this Bill is to repeal that Fixed-term Parliaments Act and restore the prerogative procedure. I think that we are all agreed about that. However, I sense that Clause 3 is going to lead to considerable debate on how that procedure should be resolved. I am not entirely sure that I can agree with noble Lords who feel that just leaving it to the Commons to vote on the matter is to restore the constitutional convention to the status quo ante, but I believe that we have an opportunity in the Bill at least to discuss these matters, and it is good that we have noble Lords here who have experience of them from all different aspects.

Prerogative powers and constitutional conventions are a particular part of our constitution. They provide the necessary flexibility and agility for its delivery. We in this House have a welcome role in discussing the Bill, and I hope that the debates on it in Committee and further on will provide an opportunity for the interesting notions that have been presented to the House today to be further discussed and resolved. This House has a particular role to play on the shared understanding of the convention and I hope it continues to do so.

EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

Friday 8th January 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con) [V]]

My Lords, my interests are listed in the register. I will speak on matters of concern to my family’s business interests. Along with other noble Lords, I am very much relieved to be able to welcome a deal. As a horticultural businessman growing and trading in bulbs and flowers, principally with the Netherlands, I have a feeling of déjà vu about pre-membership days when I started in the business—a return to the bureaucracy of data-inputting and inspections. This is not what Brexit was about. In particular, I do not want our business to lose its trade with an important part of the UK—Northern Ireland—nor, for that matter, with the Republic. However, a combination of the Northern Ireland protocol and phytosanitary regulations may make that inevitable.

We all know of the problems with Scotch certified seed potatoes, Lincolnshire sausages and wooden furniture from Cwmbran, and shoppers on the island of Ireland are rightly worried that suppliers and distributors based in Great Britain may find it impractical to serve their market. The added paradox is that EU suppliers will have the right of unimpeded transit, free of inspection, across Great Britain to deliver to Ireland, north and south.

If the agreement with the EU is truly about trade and co-operation, we have now designed an over-elaborate system. It is not sufficient to input customs papers; we also need to provide phytosanitary documentation. Why cannot the two be combined? Inspections of already-inspected produce add costs to business. To remain competitive, an answer might well be for us to change our business model and transfer some activity to Holland, but this will be of little comfort to the 150 people who work for us in Holbeach.

Pressures such as this will exist throughout the horticultural industry. I accept that some change is inevitable, but we owe it to British horticultural businesses to work with them to ensure that they retain their role as a key employer in rural areas. Brexit should be and can be about putting British business and British jobs first.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 8th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, the Bill sets out a system for reviewing constituency boundaries which will result in changes much more dramatic than those of any previous reviews ever put in place.

I would like you to imagine the position of a newly elected MP in a general election in 2025. They will have won a seat with new boundaries, but just four years later a new boundary revision process will begin. From 2029 they will be engaged, over a two-year period, in arguments about whether the constituency might exist again, or whether it should be redrawn in a very different form. They will not know the decision of the boundary commissioners until the end of September 2031.

Under these rules, Parliament will no longer have a say over whether the proposals are implemented. The new boundaries will therefore take effect in any general election from February 2032. There will be just four months between the Boundary Commissions’ reports being finalised and their proposals automatically taking effect in any general election. All that is certain is that the proposed constituencies will be very different from those at the previous election.

The problem with eight-yearly reviews, a fixed number of seats in each state or region and very limited flexibility from the quota of electors in each seat is that they will involve major changes to more than 300 constituencies every time. Not many more than 100 constituencies are likely to have unchanged boundaries. This is not a one-off problem but is what will happen with every boundary review in future.

The frequency of reviews involving dramatic changes to boundaries does not make sense if the link between MPs and their constituencies is to be valued. Unfortunately, little consideration was allowed in the other place for the question as to how frequently reviews should take place. Over the past 50 years, we have had 14 general elections. That is an average of one every three and a half years. Therefore, with a boundary review every eight years, and with the rules as proposed, we can expect that only one in five constituencies will exist with the same boundaries for two consecutive general elections.

Somebody winning a seat shortly after a boundary review will know that they will get the chance to fight that same seat just one more time. There will then be a 50% chance that it is reorganised in a major way, and an 80% chance of the boundaries being changed in some way. But somebody winning a seat more than four years after a boundary review will immediately face a 50% chance that the constituency boundaries will change in a major way at the very next election, and an 80% chance that the constituency boundaries will be changed. It may be that some people welcome this kind of disruption to constituencies. Internal selection battles may be a great joy for some people but constantly having to engage in them cannot be good for anyone who wants to serve the people of a constituency or to demonstrate that they could do so in future. Party HQs may welcome frequent reorganisations so that awkward MPs might find themselves forced out and without a seat, while more obliging loyalists could be rewarded with new opportunities.

One of my friends on the Cross Benches, the noble Lord, Lord Alton, was an excellent constituency MP, but he twice found that a constituency that elected him with large majorities was effectively abolished by the boundary review process. Constituents cannot be well served in a system in which constituencies are likely to exist for only two general elections.

The late and much missed Professor Ron Johnston, has been quoted by all sides many times in our debates on the issue of boundary reviews. In Grand Committee, the Minister, referred to his “respect and appreciation” for him. Professor Johnston felt that a constituency should exist for three general elections before its boundaries could be redrawn. The only way in which to make that more likely while keeping boundaries reasonably up to date is to make the reviews every 10 years, not every eight.

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I apologise for not participating in Committee, having spoken at Second Reading, but I followed the three days of debate in Committee. I saw the feed on the first day, in which the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, raised his proposal for a 10-year cycle for reviews. I was surprised at his persistence in bringing back the issue on Report. Not only has he gathered comrades in arms from the opposition coalition, he has the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, and the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, as co-signatories to his proposals. However, where are the interests of parliamentary democracy served by another example of foot-dragging on boundaries? I excuse the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, because I suspect, from listening to the views of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and Lib Dems generally, he would wish to do away with single-member constituencies altogether, in the hope of achieving something more advantageous to the Lib Dem cause of proportional representation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I think parliamentary language allows me to use the term, balderdash. In a stroke, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, dismisses the constituency link and the identity that people have in communities with one another, speaking to their Member of Parliament and expecting that Member to speak for them. That is why dividing communities, which so often happens with the narrow range, is not about the Member of Parliament and whether people hold them in contempt or could not give a damn about the boundaries, but about the community of interest that people have in their area and the expectation of a voice to speak for them.

All of us know that political parties put forward the best possible case to the Boundary Commissions to ensure they maximise their success in parliamentary elections and local elections. However, to dismiss the notion of a small additional variation in the way that the noble Lord just did is to be contemptuous of the electorate, citizenship and identity. If we want equality in the numerics, as the Minister said in response to Amendments 2 and 3, then let us have a national list system—the noble Lord has actually made a good case for it. Let us have total equality in a crude form of proportionality: the political parties put up their list, the electorate vote, and they get straight down the line the number of seats that the electorate have allocated themselves. None of us wants that, do we? Even the Liberal Democrats do not want a national list system, because they accept the importance of the community link and the identity that goes with it.

The way in which we have started to debate this gets off the point, which is that the Government have accepted that there are five exceptions. At a stroke, they have accepted that it is important to recognise difference, identity and geography. Those who had previously pressed for a larger variation have accepted that getting as close as possible to numeric values does matter—without employing a dreadful algorithm that could do the job for us, leaving us to pick up the mess afterwards. Therefore, 5% to 7.5% gives a greater ability to the Boundary Commission and those working for it to use common sense and ensure that people do not have a boat to get across the Mersey or, in the case of Iain Duncan Smith in the last proposal, to spend three hours going around a reservoir. It is about identifying what really matters, which is common sense, and the proposal of 7.5% in Amendment 13 does that.

I will say one word on Wales. I said in the Grand Committee that I was deeply impressed with the case that was made in relation to what the proposals would mean for Wales. It would matter in terms of the valley identity; it matters greatly. People made the case that, although they had travelled well out of Wales, many people had not actually travelled between the two adjoining valleys because of the nature of the geography. As I said in Grand Committee, my great-grandfather was born on the edge of Brecon and Radnorshire, and I was impressed, again, by the way the description of the travelling time and the size of that constituency affected the ability of the Member to do their job on behalf of constituents.

If we get back to constituents, identity, citizenship and the reason we have elections and the link represented by that crucial Member of Parliament with a voice for, speaking on behalf of and understanding their community, as well as the role of Parliament, we might just take a deep breath and say “When we start arguing on the head of a pin, that is when we turn off the electorate for good.”

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I am entering the debate on this group of amendments and speaking to them because I am afraid I disagree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I find his emphasis on community and the sense in which that plays a critical part in the function of a Member of Parliament a somewhat flawed idea.

The truth is that I live in the house I was brought up in; I have had three Members of Parliament and lived in three different constituencies. My constituency has not changed, but other bits have been added on or taken away during my lifetime. They were never part of the community, which is, after all, in the fens and surrounded not by mountains but great unpopulated areas; they are no more part of a community than Welsh valley communities that may, perhaps, have been connected to communities over the mountains. However, it was fair, and it is fairness that my noble friend Lord Blencathra managed to convey in his excellent speech. There is a huge difference in the way constituencies are distributed in this country, and this is unfair to the voter. It means that, if you start off with a variation with a wide spread, you end up with an enormous variation. I believe that the top 20% of constituencies total the same as, or more than, the constituencies that make up the city of Sheffield. That cannot be right.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Taylor of Holbeach Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taylor of Holbeach (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. It gives impetus to the long overdue process of revising the current constituency boundaries. MPs are representing constituencies that were drawn up on data that is now 20 years old. Election night and the incoming results show the consequences, as the different sizes of constituencies have such variable electorates.

The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, does not like to be reminded of his birthday, but I seem to remember that I was the Whip on a previous Bill in this House, which became the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. Its flaws have been pointed out by many speakers before me, but to address the failings of the situation that arose, the Conservative Party manifesto in 2019 made a commitment to ensure

“updated and equal Parliamentary boundaries, making sure that every vote counts the same”.

The abortive 2018 Boundary Commission proposal is cancelled under this Bill as we revert to 650 constituencies, and it ensures an automatic system for the commission to implement its recommendation. It avoids further procrastination by the Government or Parliament after the commission has made its final report, and the final report is to the Speaker of the House of Commons. He is the agency for delivering the commission’s report into law, and the Secretary of State and Parliament lose—in my view, quite rightly—the ability to amend by Order in Council.

None the less, the commission has a challenging task. As so many noble Lords have pointed out, fitting community cohesion with the power that it will need for equal-value voting within a range no greater than 5% either way is what the Bill provides for, but that is a 10% variation in constituency size. That is why I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, about the importance of the independence of the Boundary Commission. That is why it is so vital to preserve its integrity.

The first target is to implement these changes by 2023. I support the creation of excluded status for the four constituencies, which will now include a fifth, Ynys Môn. My noble friend the Lord Speaker will be delighted to see two Members for the Isle of Wight at last.