Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Third sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Clive Efford]

Q In order to achieve making sure that communities are kept intact, is it desirable that the Boundary Commission has flexibility and is not kept to a maximum of 5%?

Dr Renwick: I think there should be a maximum, but there is a good case for saying that the maximum could be extended a little bit without undue cost to the equality of the vote.

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

Q It is always dangerous to go head to head with an academic, but in terms of the 5% and the 10%, my reading of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe report is that it is a 10% variation between seats, not a 20% variation. May I clarify, Dr Renwick, that when you talk about the 5% difference, that actually gives an overall difference of 10% between seats, whereas a 10% difference would give an overall difference of 20% between seats?

Dr Renwick: What I am referring to is the guidance from the Venice Commission. My reading of that is that it implies a 10% deviation from the average. If we look at other countries, we see that in New Zealand the deviation is permitted as 5% from the average, and in Australia it is, so far as possible, 3% from the average, and not more than 10%. Therefore, numbers around 5% to 10% seem to be fairly standard. There is no answer that an academic can give you as to what is the correct number, but something in that region is appropriate.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q To follow that up, given that we are talking about keeping communities together, as the hon. Member for Eltham has said, does the Bill need to give more clarification to the Boundary Commission for England? In Scotland, the system is much more in-depth, with smaller building blocks. I believe that Scottish constituencies do not have as many arguments as the English ones. Do we need to give more guidance about how the constituencies are built, taking into account communities, rather than change the boundary limits based on the electorate?

Dr Renwick: The difference between Scotland and England is in the practice of the Boundary Commissions with respect to splitting wards. The Boundary Commission for Scotland is much more willing to split wards than the Boundary Commission for England. As I understand it—and you heard evidence on this last week from Tony Bellringer—it is very difficult for the Boundary Commission for England to split wards, because it does not have sufficient evidence to do that. It seems clear to me that, if you can split wards in a way that does not break community ties, that is a better way of achieving the balance between the principles of equality of votes and maintaining community ties than by increasing the margin. If the Boundary Commission for England were able to split wards more often, that would certainly help the overall process.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Q Dr Renwick and Professor Hazell, good morning. I have two quick questions. First, the two previous Boundary Commission inquiries, which were not voted on in the end, lacked political support because, I believe, they reduced the number of constituencies from 650 to 600. That did not have overall political support. The proposals would also have meant that some constituencies would simply not have reflected the communities that MPs represented. The Government have now recognised that by reverting back to the number of 650. Is it not therefore a good thing that we have that safety valve of final approval from Parliament to reflect the lack of community cohesion that might be introduced by boundaries that do not reflect community needs?

Dr Renwick: No, I do not think so. I think the principle should be that Parliament sets up the rules in the first place that will allow the boundary commissions to produce a satisfactory set of recommendations, and that those recommendations should then be implemented.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar]

Q Should we have districts?

Professor McLean: Well, since we have more time than we thought, we could have a discussion about US congressional districts, but Members may wish to move on.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Gentlemen, thank you for giving your time today. As you have probably picked up from reading previous reports, one of the issues this evidence inquiry is trying to get to the bottom of is how we are going to advise the commissions about the best way to do these boundaries.

Building on what you have just said, Professor McLean, about keeping the right size and in terms of communities, about which one can always argue, can we look at rule 5(1)(c) in the 1986 Act, which is about keeping boundaries in existing constituencies? My question, to both witnesses, is about whether the Bill needs to have some clarifications put in it, especially around what we are struggling with regarding the Boundary Commission for England. The evidence from the Boundary Commission for England was pretty much, “We are always going to try and do it with wards, and we will just get the numbers to work.” That overrides almost all the rules in clause 5, including geographic considerations. I gave the example of a North Yorkshire ward that one can only get to by completely leaving the constituency and spending a considerable amount of time on the road, but it would make the numbers work.

Can I probe your minds on the resistance to building outside of the wards, or, in other words, splitting wards down, as they do in Scotland, in order to try to keep existing communities together? What are your views on the different definitions of county constituencies and borough constituencies? How does that play into the building of constituencies? Does the Bill need further guidance to try to equalise the United Kingdom’s approach to how it builds constituencies, with the gold standard of Scotland being a good example?

[The Chair]

Would you like to ask that to both witnesses?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Yes or whoever feels it is more appropriate for them to answer it.

Professor McLean: If John is willing, I will go first, but John will wish to add something about the practicalities of the Boundary Commission for Scotland, which he has written about in academic articles.

The presumption against disturbing existing constituencies is no longer sustainable because these are based on electorates in 2000. Population movements, in what will be 24 years before the new constituencies are implemented, will make it impossible, in more than the odd coincidental case, to give any priority to the maintaining of existing constituencies preference. I think 5% plus or minus should be enough for the boundary commissions and the county-by-county inquiries to deal with difficult situations, such as the one the Member mentioned of a large, empty area in the middle of a constituency. I take it that that is the geographical problem that the Member mentions.

There are other well-known problems of estuaries, such as the problems in the Wirral area last time. Plus or minus 5% should be enough to cope with that. At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, I think it is right that in the 2011 Act, which this Bill importantly does not modify, the plus or minus 5% is given priority over the other local ties rules.

As to whether local government wards are the essential building blocks, that is non-statutory. It is the practice of the English commission, but it has not been the practice of the Scottish commission. I will now hand the floor to John to answer that part of the question.

Professor Sir John Curtice: There is a crucial difference these days between local government wards in Scotland and those in England. Scottish local government is run under the single transferable vote in multiple constituencies system. When that system was introduced, it was introduced without changing the number of local government councillors significantly. All the wards elect three or four members. As a result, every ward in Scotland was increased by three or four. That means, therefore, that the building blocks in Scotland are large, making it difficult for the Boundary Commission to respect more badges. There are one or two instances in England, such as Birmingham, where that issue can also arise, but it is relatively limited.

It is also true—this is not the area of my own expertise—that some entrepreneurial past secretaries of the Boundary Commission for Scotland have ensured that the Boundary Commission has a much better geographically-referenced database than the one in England. I was reading some of the evidence given to the Committee last week and that came out. I am tempted to say that that is one of the advantages of living in a small country: it becomes possible to administer things in finer detail. We have referred to county and borough constituencies. That only relates to the rules for expenditure. It does not otherwise make a great deal of difference.

Beyond that, I simply observe that in this conversation and this morning, and in much of what the Committee seemed to be talking about last night, seems to be about what this Bill is not about, as opposed to what it is about. The Bill does not fundamentally change the rules of redistribution that were introduced by the 2011 Act and implemented by the Boundary Commissions in their 2013 and 2018 reviews—sadly, neither of which were implemented. Apart from changing the number of MPs, it does nothing to change that—apart from a minor and perfectly sensible change with the rules about respected local government boundaries. I suggest that at some point the Committee might want to focus on the significant changes the Bill does introduce as opposed to the areas that the Bill does not propose to change at all. I understand, of course, that some Members may wish to unpick the provisions of the 2011 Act.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q One reason we are probing how constituencies are built is because there is removal of parliamentary oversight. It needs to be done properly the first time. You rightly referenced the size of the wards in Birmingham. I am a West Yorkshire MP. There are two councils in West Yorkshire, Kirklees and Leeds—out of the five councils—where the wards are far too big not to be split.

This comes down to guidance. As you pointed out, the large wards and the way they are managed in Scotland has allowed a more detailed approach. When you get to the arguments of whether it should be plus or minus 10% or 5%, I am seeking your view as to whether the arguments about the variations can be overcome by the guidance, which goes more explicitly to the Boundary Commission for England in splitting wards.

In the past, there has been a habit of them trying to form some strange shapes, like American congressional districts, just to get the numbers right, forming very strange communities. They have almost always then changed the first draft significantly in the second draft. The guidance that will go in this Bill, especially for the Boundary Commission for England, should try to avoid that situation.

The parliamentary oversight is going, which I believe is the correct thing to do. But we must get this right the first time and use this Bill to iron out these issues. Is this Bill strong enough, in terms of the Boundary Commission for England, to construct constituencies, which have an eye to what has gone on in the past, but do not end up with peculiar shapes and communities just to make the numbers work?

Professor Sir John Curtice: Can I respond to that? It is true that the current arrangements for parliamentary oversight do not make it very easy for the House of Commons to change the detail of the provisions. It basically has to say yes or no, and only after it has said no can the Government attempt to change the provisions of the Commission. That is the first point; otherwise, it is a guess on my part, but I would anticipate that now we are going to a House of 650 seats rather than one of 600, some of the difficulties with supposedly major constituencies may be less sharp.

The final thing to say is that even with us going for 650 seats rather than 600, the next boundary revision is bound to be a major one. Because Parliament has blocked both of the last two redistributions that it ordered, we now have boundaries that are 20 years out of date. We are also finally getting around to dealing with the differences in the allocation of constituencies to England, Scotland and Wales, so this is bound to be a disruptive redistribution. It will be somewhat less disruptive than it would have been with 600 seats, but it is bound to be disruptive, in much the same way as the one that was introduced in 1983, because that got affected by the direction of local government.

You might want to investigate the forces that have resulted in boundaries going out of date—that is, population movements, which historically for most of the post-war period meant people moving out of the inner city into more suburban and rural areas. The last analysis of this I read, which was by the expert Tony Champion, indicates that this has been going on to a lesser extent; it is notable that somewhere like London is now gaining population and is certainly not going to lose out from the current redistribution. Of course, nobody knows what is going to happen in the wake of the pandemic, but it is worth being aware that some of the demographic forces that have given rise to the kinds of inequalities we have been used to may no longer have quite the same force as in the past.

Professor McLean: If time permits, Chair, may I come in on part of the Member’s question, which was to do with whether the guidance in the Bill should be more explicit than this current draft? My view is no, for the following reasons.

The legislation is UK-wide, as you all know. As this discussion has revealed, the English and Scottish—and, may I say, Northern Irish—commissions have all taken different approaches to the local government boundary question. Those different approaches are all legitimate within the text of the Act that this Bill amends, and it does not amend that Act in any material way. Therefore, I do not think there is any need to give guidance to the Boundary Commission for England that, if it wishes, it can be more flexible in Birmingham and West Yorkshire than its predecessors have been. It already has that discretion; that discretion is exercised by the Boundary Commission for Scotland, and to pick up a point of John’s, if at the last review the Boundary Commission for England had invested in geographic information systems that were as up to date as the Scottish commission’s, some of the problems that the Member mentioned—which I know concern a lot of Members—could have been avoided. My view is that as the existing statutory framework gives the commission the authority to ignore local government boundaries if it has to, there is no need to change the draft Bill in that respect.

[Clive Efford]

Q Professor Sir John, how much does locality and shared common experience in a community influence how individuals vote?

Professor Sir John Curtice: The research on this goes back quite a way, and the answer is “to a degree”. For the purposes of answering this question, I will go back 20 years psephologically, because the psephology of party support has changed so much over the past 20 years that this is not necessarily true now. If we go back 20 years, to an era when a middle-class person was markedly more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, and the opposite was true of someone who was working class—that, by the way, is not currently the case—historically, it had long been demonstrated that if you were a middle-class person living in an area that was predominantly populated by people in working-class occupations, you were more likely to vote Labour than if you were a middle-class person living in a more middle-class area.

There were two potential forces going on there. One is that, to some degree, middle-class people who choose to live in a more working-class area may actually already be rather more of a Labour disposition, but equally, it has certainly long been argued that to some degree, you are influenced by the social interaction to which you are exposed, so if you are living in a working-class community, you are more likely to be exposed to pro-Labour arguments than if you were living in a Conservative one.

Of course, the world has moved on in terms of the demography of party support, which is much less clearly structured by class, and social interaction is no longer as geographically bound as it once was and can now take place over social media. Iain may know more than me, but it has certainly been a while since I have seen anybody doing anything major on the extent to which community makes a difference. The only thing that I would say is that, undoubtedly, one of the reasons why MPs will always be concerned about any redistribution is that it upsets the connection between them and their existing electorate.

One of the things that we certainly do know—again, this may also be relevant to your question—is that if somebody has been elected for the first time at the last election and defeated the incumbent MP from another party, there is a fairly consistent tendency now whereby, in view of the next election, that new Member, who has probably just won a marginal seat, has a great deal of incentive to be representing their community and to be visible and so on, to get something of a personal bonus. You can see that in the way that the Labour party defended some seats in 2019, with newly incumbent, first-term Labour MPs doing well, and it was similar for the Conservative party in 2017. To that extent at least, yes, you can certainly also argue that a minority of voters—in some instances a crucial minority—will vote for their individual MP rather than for the party, but of course, if you get a boundary redistribution that carves up an individual MP’s constituency, that link is broken.

In truth, in our electoral system, there is a continuous and perpetual tension. We want our electoral system to do two things: on the one hand, we want it to provide local representation, and on the other, we want it to be a system that provides a means by which the electorate can choose between alternative Governments. I am afraid that I have spent the last 40 years pointing out the potential conflict between those two objectives and that, if you wish to ensure that the system is fair in the ability of voters to choose between alternative Governments, at some point you have to let go of the emphasis on local representation.

In a sense, the debate that we are having now about mathematical equality versus respecting community ties is a sub-part of that broader debate. Decide what your elections are about: if they are about the election of individual MPs and less to do with Governments, you can focus on representing communities; if you think that it is a system for enabling us to choose between alternative Governments, which is the traditional defence of the single member plurality system, I am afraid that local representation has to be given a lower priority.