Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments & Ping Pong & Ping Pong: House of Commons
Tuesday 10th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[Kate Osborne (Jarrow) (Lab)]

I welcome the Government’s decision to agree to Labour’s call to scrap plans to reduce the number of MPs to 600. The pandemic has shown us that strong and constructive scrutiny of the Government has never been more important, and the plans to remove 50 seats would have weakened our democracy to the advantage of the Executive. I stood in this place four or five months ago to stress my concerns about how the original proposals would have impacted heavily on the Jarrow constituency, which would have gained more wards from neighbouring Gateshead and lost the Cleadon and East Boldon ward to the neighbouring constituency of South Shields.

I fully support Lords amendment 7, with my reasoning very different from that of the hon. Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden), who I see is no longer in his place. It would widen the deviation from the quota for constituency electorates from 5% to 7.5%—not 10%. During the Bill’s evidence session, the secretariat of the Boundary Commission for England stated that it makes it

“much harder to have regard to the other factors…such as the importance of not breaking local ties, and having regard to local authority boundaries and features of natural geography. Basically, the smaller you make the tolerance, the fewer options we have…The larger you make it, the more options we have and the more flexibility we have to have regard to the other factors”.––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 7, Q3.]

I am a firm believer that constituency boundaries should mirror the communities they represent. We know that boundaries that cut across several councils and geographical borders, including valleys, mountains and rivers, do not fit local people’s community ties and make it difficult for us to represent our areas effectively.

An increase in the tolerance size is supported by international best practice, which recommends that flexibility should be worked into the system to allow for consideration of geography and community ties. Based on an algorithm prediction by Electoral Calculus—I know it is a prediction—my seat would be redrawn to have a ridiculous divide between parts of Jarrow south of the River Tyne and parts of North Tyneside north of the River Tyne. That would affect not just my constituency but neighbouring constituencies as well. Those predictions aim to satisfy the main legislative constraints of 250 parliamentary seats, with each of those seats having an electorate within 5% of the national average. That is a prime example of what the secretariat of the Boundary Commission for England meant when it stated

“the smaller…the tolerance, the fewer options we have”.

I will also support Lords amendment 8, which, while not giving 16 and 17-year-olds a vote, would take a big step towards improving registration rates among young people, increasing electoral engagement and hopefully ensuring that more young voices are heard. It would also increase the likelihood that young people participate in political life from an early age because they would be registered to vote, regardless of whether they choose to exercise their right to vote, as many Opposition Members have said.

I will also support Lords amendments 1 and 2, which require a boundary commission report every 10 years rather than the eight envisaged in the unamended Bill. Boundary reviews cause uncertainty for councils, councillors, local organisations, MPs and—of course—their constituents and could mean that most MPs would face a review in every second Parliament. Finally, I will also support Lords amendment 6 as it would put measures in place to mitigate the dangerous consequences of ending parliamentary scrutiny and oversight.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne), and I join Members from all around the House in sending my best wishes to the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith). She is not only a fantastic Minister, but an exceptionally kind Member of the House, and she has been very kind to lots of new Members in particular.

Tragically, I was not on the Bill Committee, but the Whips have seen me right on the Order Paper tonight, as I will be on the Joint Committee on the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, in which I look forward to engaging with the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), who is not in his place, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller). However, like the Bill Committee, I have spent the last few weeks studying maps with arbitrary boundaries, straight lines cutting through the middle of cities, districts drawn in extraordinary shapes and parts of marginal areas split up by huge lakes. At the end of all that, we do seem to have a clear result, so I warmly congratulate President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris on their triumph and achievement, and particularly Kamala Harris’s achievement as the first woman and first woman of colour to succeed to the vice-presidency.

I do not make this point just as a joke, but because the present US experience demonstrates some of the real concerns about legislating in this area and the politicisation of boundaries and electoral arrangements. Politicising these things undermines the independence of the process. It undermines its integrity, transparency and fairness and, as we have regrettably seen in the States, it also tends to undermine the acceptance of the result, which is absolutely fundamental to any democracy.

Here in the UK we have much to be proud of, but we should not be self-satisfied, because the boundaries on which I, my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden) and many others were elected were set in 2006 for England, and that was based on data that was even older than that. When I was elected last December, the boundaries were already 13 years out of date. Two subsequent reviews have had to be abandoned. The first was abandoned, very clearly, on political grounds, I regret to say—not that it did the Liberal Democrats much good, but there we go.

I strongly welcome the Bill. I particularly welcome its automaticity and Lords amendments 3, 4 and 5, which strengthen that automaticity. I hope that this will be the last time that I need to debate these matters in the Chamber. Parliament is ultimately sovereign and it needs to lay out a framework for elections for parliamentary constituencies, but once we have a framework, I think that process should proceed by clockwork. There should be no parliamentary vote to stop the process that has been put in place.

I shall briefly speak to a couple of amendments with which I and the Government disagree. Amendments 1 and 2 are about the number of years. I think that eight years is a reasonable cycle length, for the reasons that many of my hon. Friends have given today, and it also means that there should be no need for interim reviews. They are a complication of the process that I do not think we need, but given the population growth that we are seeing, eight years allows us to get reviews on a reasonable cycle length.

So many Members have spoken to amendment 7, on tolerance. I am a tolerant man, but I think that 7,000 votes is more than enough tolerance between the smallest and largest constituencies in the country. An 11,000 difference when we have the opportunity to make it less than that seems over the top to me. I fundamentally believe in equal voting power for all Members in this place, as far as possible.

I will try to be brief—I also disagree with the other Lords amendments but I will not elaborate on the reasons why; they are basically the reasons that the Leader of the House set out in his excellent opening speech. Finally, just to reiterate my points on automaticity, let this Bill be the last time for a very long time that this House needs to legislate on these matters. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) said that this is our last chance and that once we pass the Bill, it is done. Well, I say: good, that is how it should be. Let the convention be re-established that boundary changes are a process that should not be interfered with by MPs.

[David Linden]

The hon. Gentleman talks about the House not interfering with the Boundary Commission’s process going forward. Why, then, did the Government not table the Orders in Council that allowed the last Parliament to have a vote on those boundary proposals?

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. There are two points. The one from my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke about the EU referendum was well made, and I regret to say that the Government—I was not a Member at the time—probably felt that there were not the votes in the House to get the proposals through. That is principally the same reason that the previous review was abandoned. I am trying to make the point that we should not rely on votes in the House to get a boundary review through. A boundary review will undoubtedly be bad news for certain Members and good news for others. The hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) might get a lovely SNP ward added to his seat, whereas I might lose a lovely rural ward, but it should not be for me to vote on that with my self-interest at heart. We need to create a fair, independent process, which is what the Bill does. I therefore commend it to the House and urge us to reject the Lords amendments, with the exception of the ones on automaticity.