Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Tyler and Lord Myners

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Myners]

My Lords, I have sympathy with some of the sentiments expressed by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours about where electoral stations should be located. There is clearly sense in using school-houses for this purpose, not least because, in the past, each village and town would have its own school. I speak with the experience of coming from a rural constituency in Cornwall, where the schools are getting bigger; local village schools are being closed and our children have to travel longer distances to school. This probably makes sense because we are able to give them a better education and ensure that the schools are better resourced with technology.

However, it means that people in rural communities who tend to use schools as voting centres will now have to travel a greater distance to the school. This has always been a problem in rural constituencies. My mother never voted until quite late in the day. At about nine o’clock in the evening people would knock on the door and say that she had not voted, and the Conservatives and Liberals would offer cars to take her to the voting station. She always went with the Conservatives because they tended to have rather big cars and she quite liked that. She always voted Labour but she felt that it was a part of the joy of the constitutional process to go in the kind of large car in which, no doubt, the Leader of the House is accustomed to travelling, both in his ministerial office and in his private life.

A school is not the obvious place to hold an election and there is an opportunity here which resonates with the big society. Like many people, I have been wrestling to understand the big society. It is like trying to put together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and I have now got 15 pieces on the board to help me work out what it is. I am not unattracted by creating a part of the complex of our social life which is not dominated by governmental or quasi-governmental institutions and where a sense of community is fostered. One of the things I suggest to the Leader of the House is that we should give real consideration to looking at nodal and communication points, where people cluster in communities, and see if we can put polling stations in those centres. People clearly now gravitate towards urban shopping centres and out-of-town shopping centres; perhaps we should at least experiment with putting polling stations closer to where people go in their day-by-day life. The local post office is the obvious place, for instance, to have a polling station in a village that has for many years not had a school-house. This observation tends to point me in the direction of supporting the sentiment expressed on this point by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours.

I wonder if I could also just delay the House for a brief moment to pick up a point made by my noble friend Lord Soley: why the application for a postal vote requires the date of birth at all. Can the Leader of the House explain this? We now operate in a society where it is increasingly regarded as inappropriate to ask people their dates of birth. Indeed, when you interview somebody you are no longer allowed to ask their date of birth; you have to deduce it from their education and their appearance. It seems quite extraordinary that this is a requirement of the postal voting form. There must be a suspicion that, perhaps if one misrepresents one’s age—one perhaps becomes accustomed to taking a couple of years off in polite conversation—you might complete the form incorrectly and in so doing prejudice your vote and conceivably the outcome of the whole election. I ask the Leader of the House if he can tell us why it is necessary that people should still be embarrassed by having to disclose their date of birth.

[Lord Tyler]

I will respond briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Liddell, because she has a good point about the way in which the whole of these arrangements should be looked at on a non-partisan basis. However, I am frankly mystified as to why this debate is taking place at 9 pm in your Lordships’ House. That does not seem to be the appropriate place. The discussion that she is seeking would be much more appropriately done within a different context. I cannot understand from any of the contributions—

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Tyler and Lord Myners

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Myners]

I said “in great detail”. I knew how to spot the tricky words. I tended to skip over the salutations at the beginning and the end but I read the meaty bit in the middle. However, to be more serious, the decisions that one took as a Minister were of a very modest order compared with the decisions that we would expect the leader of a large corporation to take. That seems to me to support the view that, regardless of this amendment or the Bill, we simply have too many Ministers and they create work; they get in the way.

My final observation relates to the role of this House. When I was first appointed, I was terrified—I really was—and I made a complete fool of myself at my first debate when I was given a speech by my officials which I should, in all honesty, have reviewed more carefully. It was clearly a cut-and-paste job from the other place; it had numerous references to “the honourable Member” and “the Speaker” and so it did not take long before the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, rose to his feet from the Benches to my left. I had no idea what I was meant to do; nobody had briefed me, but I had watched it on television so I thought I ought to sit down. I think I was intervened on about eight times in five minutes before the Chief Whip came to my protection.

In my preparation for the ordeal of the House, whenever there was a Statement, I tried to go to the other place in order to see how it was handled there and then scuttle back here. What I observed from that experience was that the challenge for Ministers in the other place was simply of a much lower order than in this place. I think that that is an observable and unchallengeable truth. The questions that I was asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and by the noble Lord, Lord Newby, who is not in his place, but who was an excellent spokesman on Treasury matters for the Liberal Democrat Party and, I believe, continues to perform that role, were of a different order. I look across now and I see the noble Lord, Lord Higgins. There are very few people in the other place who can ask a penetrating, focused, accurate and informed question with the degree of precision and understanding that the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, can. There is a question of accountability. We have too many Ministers and they do not seem to be sufficiently accountable.

Finally—I said that I would cover four points and I believe that this is the fourth—I think that this is evident in the work of some Select Committees. The Treasury Select Committee, to which I had to report on numerous occasions, was mixed in its understanding of the issues. There were a number of good members—Mr Andrew Tyrie has already been mentioned; let me mention him again, an excellent chairman of that committee with a very good understanding of the issues—but I cannot say that about every member of the committee, nor can I say that they always showed evidence that they had thoroughly studied and understood the issues. Again, accountability is at the heart of this—it is an issue that stands apart from the Bill and needs to be addressed. There are too many Ministers making too much work, doing too many modest things and not subject to appropriate scrutiny, particularly by the other place.

I see the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, about to spring to his feet. I seem to produce a Pavlovian reaction in the noble Lord, who is, no doubt, about to tell me that some ancestor of his, several generations ago, had some involvement which shows that he knows more about this than I ever will. That seems to be his normal response to me. I now give him the opportunity to see whether he can approach me in a courteous and constructive way. We have too many Ministers and, to my mind, they are not sufficiently accountable. I look forward, therefore, to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, telling us how the Tory-led coalition will deliver on the promises made before the election to reduce the number of Ministers, regardless of where we end up on the Bill.

[Lord Tyler]

I am extremely grateful to my fellow Cornishman. I was going to say that the past few minutes have given us a fascinating insight into the workings of government and have actually proved the point that we should have more Ministers in this House and fewer in the other.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Tyler and Lord Myners

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Myners]

I would have been more than happy to have given way to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, who was my local Member of Parliament for many years. I look forward with great interest to his later contribution to the discussion on this amendment.

I was bringing my remarks to a close. I am sure that Members of the House realise that I can talk about Cornwall for some considerable time, but I will not delay the House further than to say that an approach that is based upon arithmetic simply will not be acceptable to the people of Cornwall. In an earlier debate the question was asked: “Would the people of Cornwall prefer to have five constituencies, none of which went across the boundary into Devon, or six representatives in the other place, one or more of whom had seats that went into Devon?”. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, answered correctly, I believe, that the people of Cornwall would much prefer to have five committed Members of Parliament who stood for Cornish seats rather than someone who stretched across into a part of the world that the Cornish people regard as a different country. They look at Devon as part of a different country and they would not be able to understand why a constituency strayed across the Tamar into a country with totally different economic and social circumstances.

The obvious place where that would happen would be into Plymouth, yet the European Union, through the granting of Objective 1 and follow-on status, has recognised the acute poverty of Cornwall, which is very different from Plymouth. Indeed, one of the reasons why Cornwall was slow in getting support from Europe for its manifest poverty was that it was originally co-joined with Plymouth and Torbay, which had the effect of giving an illusion that Cornwall was more prosperous than is the reality. That is why my Amendment 88 proposes that Cornwall should retain six parliamentary constituencies and that they should remain within what is now the county of Cornwall.

[Lord Tyler]

I yield to no one in my pride at my Cornish ancestry. I am a direct descendant of Bishop Jonathan Trelawny, on whose behalf 20,000 Cornishmen threatened to march on London. Of course London gave way, so they did not have to march.

I have great affection for the noble Lord, Lord Myners. It is great to have him here fighting for Cornwall. I wish he had been more effective in doing so when he was a member of the previous Administration. However, I have to correct several of his misapprehensions. First, the reason why there were so many seats in Cornwall had nothing to do with good representation, unfortunately. It was simply that they were rotten seats, rotten boroughs, effectively owned by the Crown through the Duchy of Cornwall—it was a way of bolstering their majority in the other place. In my own north North Cornwall constituency, for instance, Bossiney had a notable Member representing it: Francis Drake. I am not aware that he ever went there, and there were only about three electors if he did.

Secondly, and much more seriously, if the noble Lord thinks that it was somehow through the advocacy of we who represented Cornwall that we managed to increase the number of seats from five to six, that is simply untrue. It was arithmetic—just as now, quite rightly, we are looking at the arithmetic. My noble friend Lord Taylor of Goss Moor and I can guarantee that because of the increase in population in Cornwall, the Boundary Commission had to give us another seat.

I will also take the noble Lord up on his history. I know, for example, that when miners went over the border into Devon—it having been found that, as a result of the running down of the mining industry in Cornwall, there were more jobs in west Devon, as it now is—they allocated to themselves the description of working in greater Cornwall. That enabled them to say proudly that they were still Cornish miners. They could then emigrate to New South Wales, for example, knowing that they would not have to mix with Welsh, Scottish or Yorkshire miners. There would be only the real thing—Cornish miners.

I have a great deal of sympathy with this amendment—a great deal more, I am sorry to say, than with the selection we considered earlier. The big difference is that many of the other exceptions claim to be able to have overrepresentation. Their reasons are understandable; I do not deny the special claims that have been made. The Isle of Wight and Cornwall are, as far as I can see, the only areas of the country that may be prepared to accept underrepresentation. The case for six seats in Cornwall is not very strong. It makes a real difference if the people of Cornwall are prepared to accept underrepresentation with five seats, as was the case when my noble friend and I were Members in the other House and had very large electorates. The difficulty is of how to test that. Even if a referendum in Cornwall showed that people were prepared to accept a level of underrepresentation at the moment—which would be very persuasive to me, as a good democrat—what about the future? What about a year or two hence, when people say, “Why should we have less effective representation than other parts of the country?”? It is a real dilemma.

I do not know whether the noble Lord intends to press his amendment to a vote—perhaps he does—but we must give very careful consideration to that issue. In the mean time, it is much better that we treat Cornwall as a special case and examine it as such, as in the case of the Isle of Wight. It would have been wrong to put it into a longer list of exceptions, as I said at some unearthly hour last week.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Myners]

I am most grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, has—

[Lord Tyler]

Ditto to that. Would the noble Lord like to conclude by putting his amendment and testing the opinion of the House? Then he could stop talking.

[Lord Myners]

I find the discourtesy of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, which seems to be present at any time that I speak in this House, quite extraordinary and contrary to what I understood to be the custom and practice of this House. That is reprehensible. Fortunately—and I am closing my remarks now—it will not be long before the noble Lord, Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames, will be able to speak on matters relating to Cornwall. The noble Lord is a recent and most welcome addition to our House. He has previously contested seats in Cornwall and I know that he has a great affection for Cornwall. I also know him as a man of considerable courtesy and look forward to his interventions rather more than I can look forward to those from one or two others who sit with him.

In closing, and before inviting the House to take a position on the amendment, I take considerable encouragement from the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that Cornwall is worthy of special consideration and from the endorsement given to that view from my own Front Bench by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton. I hope, notwithstanding the somewhat dismissive approach to the case for Cornwall from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, that careful consideration will be given to the issue of Cornwall and that the Government will bring forward their own amendments at a later stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.