Private Members’ Bills: Money Resolutions

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Monday 21st May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Valerie Vaz]

It is an arbitrary figure—it was plucked out of thin air without reference to any evidence. It might have been agreed by the House, but there was no evidence. The Bill would retain the status quo. It would also require the quota to be based on the total number of voters derived from registers of parliamentary electors published for the 2017 general election, or the most recent election thereafter. This would allow the 2.1 million electors registered after 1 December 2015 to be included in the review.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

On the hon. Lady’s point about using the register from the last general election, if the Bill were to go through and further delay matters—it might be another two years before proposals or policies come forward—would she still want to use a register that by then would be three or four years old?

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[Pete Wishart]

That is an absurd argument. This is what it comes to. The Conservatives want to abolish the House of Lords not because it is an absurd circus and an embarrassment; they want to abolish it because it is doing the right thing. That is how absurd this is.

This Government apparently want to cut the number of directly elected Members of Parliament in this House just at the point when our workload is about to dramatically increase as we get rid of our 73 Members of the European Parliament as a result of this Government’s clueless Brexit. The responsibilities that are currently exercised by our MEPs will have to be dealt with by an even smaller pool of Members of Parliament.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

May I clarify a point that the hon. Gentleman has just made? Is he suggesting that, even after the vote for Brexit, we should keep our MEPs?

[Pete Wishart]

Of course I am not saying that. I am not sure what the hon. Gentleman is missing in all this. We have 73 members of the European Parliament just now, but they will soon be gone. He and I, and all other Members of this House, will therefore have an increased workload. There will be more scrutiny work for Select Committees, for example. The size of the Executive will be the same, because there are no proposals to cut the size of the Government—

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[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

This has been a wide-ranging debate. The hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan)—I congratulate him on introducing the debate—spoke about the reduction of the number of seats and directly about his private Member’s Bill bringing the number to 650, which has slightly muddied the waters when we look at money resolutions.

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) put it better than I possibly could when he quoted the facts. There is a responsibility on the Government to put in place the checks and balances on how legislation comes forward. As has already been said, we are but weeks away from a boundary review decision being taken in this House. The Government’s position is not to dismiss out of hand the Bill of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, but to say that now is not the time to bring it forward, as we should wait until this decision has been made.

We are a very long way down the line. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act was first debated in 2011. I was elected in 2010, so it seems to have travelled through my eight years in this Parliament. Obviously, there is much doubt about whether the order will pass with the proposal to reduce the size of the House to 600 seats. It is a crying shame that, among all other things, we may still end up in a situation whereby we have such unequal seats.

Those who have done election monitoring with the OSCE will know from the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe that the maximum difference between seats should seldom exceed 10% and should never exceed 15%. Of course, we are in a situation whereby there are such differences. Let us look at two seats that I picked at random: Wirral West has an electorate of 55,995 and East Ham has an electorate of 83,827. That is a difference of 33%. This is not the time to debate the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. Amending the legislation to review the situation every 10 years does not really sit with the point about updating the registers every five years, but I do not want to get too involved with actually debating the Bill.

[David Linden]

This is the first speech from the Conservative Benches that has actually touched on what is contained in the Bill. The whole reason that Opposition Members want the Bill to go to Committee is so that we can consider it clause by clause. At the moment, we do not have the power to do that because of the Government’s actions.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I say very gently to the hon. Gentleman: patience. Later this autumn, the House will vote on the proposal for 600 seats, as was laid down in statute when the review was pushed forward to 2018. There remains to be very significant work, which may or may not have to be done depending on the outcome of that result. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has intervened a couple of times to ask what happens if that proposal is voted down. I believe the point he is making is that it is laid down in statute that the number of seats has to be reduced to 600 so, even if it is voted down, what are we going to do?

[Chris Bryant]

Well, if the Order in Council is voted down in the autumn, I think that the legislation will remain as it is and we will have 650 seats on very old boundaries and very old registers, until such time as the legislation is changed somehow or other by this House. That is not in the Government’s interest; it is not in the Opposition’s interest; and it is not in the interest of the country. I suspect that the Government will suddenly say, “Hello Mr Member from Manchester, Gorton. We’d like to introduce your Bill ourselves.” That is what is going to happen; we all know it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because that is the point that I am driving at. This has gone on for a long time. The reduction to 600 seats has been talked about in this House for seven years, and we are coming to the vote soon.

In my city of Leeds, I represent 80,000 people. The seat next doors represents 66,000 people—I am rounding the figures. A vote in my constituency is only worth one eighty-thousandth, while just next door a vote is worth one sixty-six-thousandth. That does not actually preach fairness in any way at all, and this goes back to the statistics I mentioned earlier.

My concern is that the politics that come to play in changing the number of seats and the boundaries does not end there. When we arrived at the situation of trying to equalise seats, we said that everybody should be roughly equally represented, which indeed is outlined by the Vienna Commission. But of course, how big seats should be used not to be laid down in law. Instead, it was done by looking at communities and bringing things together. When we move down the road of amending new legislation, we start to hear arguments such as, “Well, actually, let’s not set an arbitrary figure by saying plus or minus 7.5%, 10% or 5%; let’s just base it on communities.” That gives an excuse to have very unevenly sized seats.

The Government are right to hold up the money resolution at this stage, simply because we are at the end of almost seven years of a process and a vote is coming to the House. I hope that the reduction to 600 seats is passed, because this has been long debated. In fact, I believe that it was the hon. Member for Rhondda who was at the Opposition Dispatch Box during our debates on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I do beg his pardon—I think he was actually there for the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill.

[Chris Bryant]

I did both.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Yes, the hon. Gentleman did both. I sat through debates on both pieces of legislation. The issue has been well debated and we have to bring the vote forward.

If the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 falls, my concern is that we will rush into the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, start the process again and spend more public money on a process that has already taken years, got us to this point and may be voted down again. We could then see a Bill go to the House of Lords, probably get amended against the Government because there is such a large majority against the Government up there, and then say, “Actually, we’re going to get rid of the idea of equalising seat sizes. We’re going back to community sizes.” We need to be more sensible when we are thinking about starting another two-year process.

Let us face it—this House is not going to vote for boundary changes 18 months out from a general election. That would be, as the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton said, like turkeys voting Christmas. Somebody said that it is a very esoteric argument; it exercises us here, but it does not exercise the public. If the 2011 Act is voted down—I really hope it is not because this needs to be brought to an end and we do need to equalise seats—we should not just rush in and say, “Right we’ll do 650 and carry on with the process.” Instead, we should look at the whole thing. Is not one of the problems that when we in this House are voting on our boundaries, we have a fundamental clash of interests?

The reality is that we have now taken so long over this that there is barely a seat in the land that will not have a major change, no matter what it is. A few months out from an election, people think, “Hang on a minute. I’ve built this incumbency. I’m not going to change it at this stage.” Once again, we would end up fighting—as I believe will happen if the Act is voted down in October—the 2022 election on the boundaries that we have today. That would be hopelessly out of date.

We have to give serious consideration to what happens if the Act is voted down. We should not just rush into a private Member’s Bill on the basis of having 650 constituencies. We need to have a careful look at whether we should, in fact, enact a change that would always take place following the next general election and, crucially, that Members would not get to vote on. We could keep the decision for the independent Boundary Commission, which we can lobby and make changes to. That was done across the parties in Leeds and there were some matters on which the parties absolutely agreed. We should not rush into any changes if the Act is voted down.

The Government have every right to withhold a money resolution on a Bill that seeks to disrupt a piece of legislation that is seven years in the making and is just weeks away from being voted on in the House. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset said, we could be in a situation whereby we are simply not looking after the public purse, and where we are just spending money willy-nilly on the whim and political argument of the time. That needs to stop. After the vote, if the Government are defeated—I hope they are not—we need time to go away and think very carefully about what we do next. Let us be blunt: as it stands, this system is not fit for purpose.

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[Mr Harper]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was responding to the intervention by the hon. Member for Glasgow East, but I do not want to be taken off the point.

It is proper that the Government have that role of financial initiation. It is also clear that there is a convention that the Government will bring forward a money resolution, but it has not been an invariable convention. There have been a number of examples—the Leader of the House set them out—where Ministers have not brought forward money resolutions. I was intrigued by the point made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). The private Member’s Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on a European Union referendum was not given a money resolution despite the fact that the then Prime Minister was very keen on doing so. There have been plenty of examples of private Members’ Bills not being given money resolutions.

I repeat what the Leader of the House said, as did the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith)—that the Government simply want to wait for the Boundary Commission’s report. One of my hon. Friends, I think, asked whether it could report earlier. It cannot do that because the primary legislation means that it can report only between September and October of this year, and that is what it is going to do. Given that we have been having boundary commissioners look at the parliamentary boundaries since, in effect, 2011, I do not think it is unreasonable that we allow one of those reviews to reach completion and allow this House to make a decision before we then consider what to do. The position that the Leader of the House has set out is not unreasonable. I think the central thrust is absolutely right.

I wanted briefly to touch on some of the points that were made in the debate, before you were in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I will not dwell on them at length because they touched on the substance of the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan). The first is about the timing of his proposed review and about the members of the public who are not on the electoral registers under the arrangement that the current boundary review is considering. That sounds superficially like an attractive point. However, detailed analysis of the changes in the registers between the start of that review and a review that he would like to trigger showed that the distribution of voters across the country was fairly consistent, and so there would not actually be a significant impact on the distribution of constituencies across the country.

To Members who find that a huge point, I simply reiterate that the general election last year was carried out with boundaries that were drawn based on electoral registers that date from 2000, which was a point strongly made by the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). If they are worried about voters who were not on the electoral register in the last couple of years, they should surely be concerned that the current boundaries do not take into account voters who have gone on to the register in the last 18 years. That is a much bigger injustice. Allowing the current review to continue and this House to take a view on it is much the best thing to do.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

If Members are worried about the number of people appearing on the register, is that not a flaw in the argument that we should change to 10-year cycles rather than five-year cycles?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. I favour having more frequent reviews—one a Parliament—that are much smaller and less disruptive, rather than less frequent reviews that are much more disruptive because so much population shift has happened. That is a better balance. Indeed, that was what the House decided when it passed the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011.

The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) talked about the House of Lords. The Prime Minister’s nomination of peers was very modest; I think it was 13 in total. If we look at the votes on Brexit legislation, I do not think anybody could suggest that it was anything to do with that, given that most of the votes the Government lost in the other place were by significantly more than that number. They were modest and very reasonable proposals.

There is a very real point about the size of the other place. My understanding is that they themselves recognise that, and I know that work is under way to look at reducing the size of the other place. I hope that some consensus can be reached, so that it can be shrunk. I say somewhat immodestly that I am very pleased when we debate this issue, because as some Members will remember, I made modest proposals to reform the other place by shrinking it quite considerably and making it more democratic, although they did not find favour with the House. Indeed, I do not think we received a huge amount of support from the Scottish National party in getting that legislation through Parliament. As much as SNP Members protest now, they were not supportive when it would have been helpful.

My final point, to come back to the debate at hand, is about what private Members’ Bills should be used for. My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset touched on this. I do not think they should be used for significant constitutional measures. Detailed debate on those should take place on the Floor of the House, as we did with the 2011 Act. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Sir Christopher Chope) put his finger on it when he suggested that most private Members’ Bills do not need money resolutions because they should not be used for significant areas of public policy that involve spending significant amounts of money. That properly should be the role of the Government, not private Members’ Bills. Private Members’ Bills most often should not require money resolutions because they should not require huge amounts of money to be spent; they should properly be for things that do not require the expenditure of huge amounts of money. We would not then be having the sort of argument we are having today.

In conclusion, the Government are right. The Leader of the House’s arguments are very reasonable. She has undertaken to keep this matter under review, and I do not think we can say fairer than that.