Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

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

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The Government’s commitment to ensure that the House has updated and equal parliamentary constituencies has been reflected in the tenacity of my hon. Friend the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution. I apologise to the House that I am a mere stand-in for her today, because her efforts to legislate to that effect have been unstinting throughout this Parliament.

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

Does my right hon. Friend think it appropriate just to take this moment to send our best wishes to the Minister, our hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), who is suffering very bad ill health at this moment?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Yes; my hon. Friend has momentarily pre-empted me, because that is exactly what I was about to do. The whole House has noted our hon. Friend’s positive approach to the challenge that prevents her from being here today. She is a wonderfully popular and singularly effective Minister, and I know that Members across the House wish her the speediest of recoveries. None the less, she is continuing to work very hard, and I have therefore had the opportunity to discuss the Bill with her. I am pleased to report to the House that she is delighted, as am I, that the principle of updated and equal constituencies is shared by both Houses and across parties. That is in no small part down to the efforts of my noble Friends Lord True and Baroness Scott of Bybrook, and I extend our thanks for their sterling efforts in taking the Bill through the other place.

It is of course right that this short but important Bill has enjoyed extensive debate and scrutiny in both Houses, and we will always welcome the thoughts of their lordships, but it is important to remember that this is a Commons Bill about the composition of the House of Commons based on the mandate of the elected Government. This is an area in which I have taken a great interest during my years as a Member of Parliament, so it is with a spirit of gusto that I now roll up my sleeves and prepare to delve into the detail of their lordships’ amendments. I will speak to each amendment in turn.

Lords amendments 1 and 2 provide that a boundary review would be carried out every 10 years. This is a significant change from the current legal requirement for a review every five years. The Government’s approach, as in the Bill before it was amended, is to mandate a boundary review every eight years. The Government’s aim, as set out in our manifesto, is to ensure that parliamentary constituencies are updated regularly, but without the disruption to local communities and their representatives that might occur with the current five-year reviews.

While developing this Bill, my hon. Friend the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution discussed the Government’s proposal for an eight-year cycle with parliamentary parties and electoral administrators and shared with them our broad plans for the Bill. Concerns were expressed about the importance of up-to-date data—particularly local government boundary data, hence clause 8—but the Labour, Liberal Democrat, Plaid Cymru and Scottish National party representatives from the parliamentary parties panel were among those content with our approach.

If reviews were to happen only every 10 years, as these amendments propose, the data used in boundary reviews would be older and less reflective of current local government boundaries and demographic change. That would also create an unfair situation for electors, because where boundaries were not regularly updated to ensure that they more accurately represented changing demographics, there is a risk that some would feel that their vote was not of equal value to the votes cast in a neighbouring constituency. We believe that the middle ground of eight-year cycles, as proposed in the unamended Bill, is the right way forward. It removes the disruption of a review happening roughly each time an election occurs, but as not too much time will pass between reviews, it also delivers boundaries that are up to date and fair. I therefore trust that the House will disagree with these Lords amendments.

Under Lords amendment 6, members of the Boundary Commission would be chosen using a bespoke appointments procedure that would sit entirely outside the existing public appointments process. The Bill as originally drafted did not make changes to the current processes, and there has been no dispute or controversy to date with the manner in which the commissioners have been appointed. The automatic implementation of the boundary commissioners’ final recommendations is crucial to achieving regular and effective boundary reviews.

Automatic implementation also shines a light on the boundary commissioners themselves. As parliamentary scrutiny is not involved in the process, we must be able to trust that the commissions are effective and independent. We need to be able to satisfy ourselves that the process of appointing all Boundary Commission members is thorough, independent and fair and that there is no room for any undue influence of any kind. I can reassure the House that our current processes fulfil all those criteria. Let me first outline how the deputy chairman and the ordinary members of the commission are appointed at present and then look at how the amendment would change the status quo.

The deputy chairman position in each Boundary Commission must be filled by a High Court judge. The amendment is unnecessary for two reasons. First, the judges appointed to the Boundary Commission have already undergone a rigorous recruitment procedure that gives reassurance that they are able to act independently and impartially. Secondly, the Lord Chancellor consults the Lord Chief Justice over these appointments in any case. This provides the views of the head of the English and Welsh judiciary. The appointment of ordinary members of the Boundary Commissions are public appointments. The four commissions are listed alongside many other public bodies and independent offices in the Public Appointments Order in Council 2019. The order is the legal basis for the governance code on public appointments and the independent Commissioner for Public Appointments, who regulates appointments processes.

The governance code and oversight of the commissioner ensure that appointments are made openly, fairly and on merit to the Boundary Commission and many hundreds of other public bodies. The governance code includes robust safeguards to ensure the political impartiality of the two ordinary members of the Boundary Commissions. These members are appointed by Ministers, having been assessed by an advisory assessment panel that includes a representative of the organisation in question. For Boundary Commissions, the representative is the deputy chairman or an ordinary member if the deputy chairman cannot attend. It is the job of the panel to assess which candidates are appointable, so that Ministers may make an informed and appropriate decision. At the application stage, all candidates are asked to declare political activity over the previous five years. Future advisory assessment panel decisions should not be prejudged, but it would seem likely that recent significant political activity would present a degree of conflict that would be incompatible with the panel finding a candidate appointable as a boundary commissioner.

The Bill, as amended, creates a bespoke system for Boundary Commission appointments in primary legislation. There are three main reasons to oppose that amendment. First, the existing public appointments system has secured dedicated and expert members for the Boundary Commission for decades; in simple terms, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Secondly, a separate appointments regime could cast doubt on those appointed to public office under the current system. That doubt would be unjustified, as the current system is independently regulated and ensures that talented individuals with the right skills and experience are appointed to many hundreds of bodies across government to carry out vital public work. We should use it wherever possible and resist the urge to create new, niche systems.

Thirdly, I have already mentioned that the deputy chairman’s previous appointment as a High Court judge will have been sufficiently robust to ensure their ability to act impartially. The Government are also unconvinced by the argument that the Lord Chancellor cannot be trusted to act impartially when making such appointments. The role of the Lord Chancellor—the Lord High Chancellor—occupies a unique and significant position in our constitutional firmament, defending the judiciary and its independence through a duty to rise above party politics where required.

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Let us remind ourselves of the numbers involved. Using electoral figures from 2019, a 15% tolerance range would allow one constituency to have 78,000 electors—actually, 78,059—and its neighbour to have 67,167, or almost 11,000 fewer. I cannot think of any arguments that justify the manifestly unfair situation of constituencies varying by 11,000 electors at the point at which a review is done. That is simply not just. More important than numbers is the principle of equality on which our manifesto commitment is based. The Government have been clear from the outset on that point. Equal and updated constituencies are a cornerstone of our democratic system and it is a matter of fundamental fairness that all votes should count the same regardless of where the elector lives. A 10% tolerance range achieves that aim. It allows the boundary commissioners to take into account factors such as geography and community ties, but it also puts equality and fairness centre stage. For something as important as our right to choose the Government of the day, that is the right order of priorities.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it should be the aim of the boundary commissions to try to hit the electoral quota number as closely as they can and that the tolerance is, as he outlined, merely for circumstances that may be out of their control? The message from the House to the boundary commissions should be true equality and please try to hit the number as well as they can.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My right hon. Friend makes a fair point. We all recognise that the numbers will diverge from the moment the commission finishes its work as people move around the country. Therefore, the tolerance of 5% either way—10% in total—gets the balance about right in the knowledge that, by the time of an election, it will inevitably have changed regardless A 15% tolerance range has been thoroughly debated in both Houses and twice rejected by this one—in Committee and on Report—so the settled view of the elected Chamber, to which, after all, the Bill relates most directly, should prevail. I therefore urge the House to disagree with the amendment.

As I turn to amendment 8, I will first pay tribute to Lord Shutt of Greetland, who tabled the amendment in the other place and sadly died recently. Lord Shutt was a stalwart campaigner and advocate on electoral issues, as reflected in his recent excellent chairmanship of the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 Committee. I am sure I speak for the whole House when I say he will be much missed and offer my condolences to his family on behalf of the House. The amendment would require the Government to make proposals for improving the completeness of electoral registers for the purposes of boundary reviews. It suggests two possible ways in which the issuing of national insurance numbers could trigger 16 and 17-year-olds being included on the registers. I will look first at the completeness of the registers and then discuss how the amendment proposes to register 16 and 17-year-olds. It is important to note that recent elections have been run on the largest ever electoral registers, despite the removal of 1 million ghost entries from the register when the transition from household registration to individual registration was completed in December 2015. People who want and are eligible to register to vote find it easy to do so.

The Government believe that every eligible elector who wants to be included should be on the electoral register, but that it should be up to each individual to decide whether to engage with the democratic process. The Government seek to make registration as easy as possible and to work with many others to reduce any barriers to registration. For example, we introduced online registration. As a result, it became simpler and faster to register to vote; it now takes as little as five minutes to register. Similarly, we are focused on ensuring that electoral registration officers—with whom the statutory responsibility for maintaining complete and accurate registers lies—have the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. For example, the Government have made many resources to promote democratic engagement and voter registration freely available on gov.uk. Furthermore, our changes to the annual canvass of all residential properties in Great Britain will improve its overall efficiency considerably. The data-matching element of the initiative allows electoral registration officers to focus their efforts on hard-to-reach groups. This is the first year of the reformed canvass, and anecdotal reports so far suggest that administrators have found the new processes much less bureaucratic.

The amendment makes two suggestions on what the Government may include in the proposals they would be required to lay before Parliament to improve the completeness of the registers. The first would see a form of automatic registration introduced for attainers—16 and 17-year-olds who can register to vote in preparation for attaining voting age—and their inclusion in the electorate data used in boundary reviews. We are opposed to automatic registration for attainers or any other group, in both principle and practice, as we believe that registering to vote and voting are civic duties. People should not have these duties done for them or be compelled to do them. That was one reason why we introduced individual electoral registration in 2014. The evidence shows that an individual system drives up registration figures. After individual registration was launched, the registers for the 2017 and 2019 general elections were the largest ever. Electoral registration has worked.

There are a number of practical concerns about automatic registration. Among others, it is almost certain that an automatic registration system would lead to a single, centralised database of electors. We are opposed to this on the grounds of the significant security and privacy implications of holding that much personal data in one place, as well as the significant cost that such a system would impose.

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[David Linden]

What I am trying to make sure is that I and my hon. Friend are made unemployed fairly soon—but that is a separate matter. The point is that it was previously enshrined in legislation that Scotland would have 73 seats and then it would rightly be reduced to 59 in the light of devolution. Government Members cannot have their cake and eat it; in one respect they are enshrining in legislation a certain number of seats, but locking that down in legislation means that there will be a degree of difference. However, I have a huge amount of respect for my hon. Friend, and he has put his point on the record.

I return to the point made by Mr Bellringer in the evidence session that there is a need to move towards a tolerance rate of, say, 7.5%. That is why I urge the Government to increase it to give commissioners the wider discretion that they asked for when they gave us that evidence. I know that the Government are not particularly fond of listening to experts these days, but I am very hopeful that this afternoon they could just make a wee exception for the Boundary Commission for England.

Finally, I want to make reference to Lords amendment 8. Before doing so, I offer my sincere condolences, on behalf of my party, to the family of Lord Shutt, who, as we have heard, passed away only in the past couple of weeks, but was responsible for securing this amendment in the other place. By using the electoral registers as the data source to draw parliamentary constituencies, the Bill also seeks to disadvantage young people, as the data is less likely to include the names of young people than it is older people, since young people are often not registered to vote. Registration rates for eligible 16 and 17-year-olds were estimated to be 25% in 2018—a drop from 45% in 2015. In contrast, 94% of those aged 65-plus were estimated to be registered. The SNP therefore supports this amendment, which requires the Government to bring forward proposals to improve the completeness of the electoral register in relation to attainers. Only then can we ensure that we are not disadvantaging young people in the electoral process.

The Leader of the House has spent the majority of his time in this House on the Back Benches advocating Brexit and talking about Parliament taking back control from an all-powerful Executive—something this Bill makes worse. I therefore want to finish by paraphrasing something a wise man once said in this House many years ago about standing up for democracy:

 “’Stiffen your sinews, summon up the blood and imitate the action of a tiger, for that is how you should behave towards our European partners, not like Bagpuss.’” —[Official Report, 24 October 2011; Vol. 534, c. 109.]

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I would like to start by commenting on Lords amendment 7 and the flexibility. We keep hearing this mathematical argument, but we seem to be getting away from the overarching principle. Already this afternoon, we have heard that it is difficult to keep local communities together unless we move to a tolerance of 7.5%, which strikes me as odd when it would mean going from a difference of roughly 7,500 voters to one of 11,000. Many electoral wards in this country have fewer than 7,500 voters, so are we now making the argument that wards themselves split communities and that they are wrong as well? There is a fundamental principle: if we went to 7.5%, one vote could be worth one 67,000th and another could be worth one 77,000th. That is quite a significant difference.

I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden). I very much enjoyed working with him in Committee and having the debates that we had, and I have a huge amount of respect for him. He made a very important point about equal representation. He said that by losing seats, Scotland will not have equal representation. I would argue that the exact opposite is true: it is equal representation—and of course there are two protected seats in Scotland; recognition has been made of the geographical reasons why the Outer Hebrides and Orkney and Shetland are separate. It is not fair to say that Scotland is getting less representation and that it needs to be equally represented, because there will be equal United Kingdom representation. That is what this is about: the United Kingdom’s Government.

The hon. Gentleman and I are never going to agree on his nationalistic views and my Union views—that is why I sit on the Conservative Benches and he sits on the SNP Benches—but we just seem to be plucking figures out of the air for the 7.5% and the 5%. Again, I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) and I have a huge deal of respect for her. She made an argument about the 600 seats and how that changed the number of voters when dealing with the 5%. However, away from the numbers, the fundamental principle must be to get as close as possible.

I made the point in intervening on my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House about trying to get as close to the quota as possible. It should be possible to do that if the Boundary Commission for England, especially, takes the approach that the Boundary Commission for Scotland takes and decides that it does not have to draw some very strange shapes and lines using ward boundaries, but that it can work with smaller electoral segments.

We heard the argument in Committee that polling districts can be changed by local authorities and can lose that representation—that they could be gerrymandered —but of course there will come a point when the Electoral Commission looks at where they are today. It has already said that it will go on where they are today; it is using the March 2020 register and those units as they exist today. If, in eight years’ time, there have been changes to those polling districts, for whatever reason, that can be taken into account at that time, and the Electoral Commission is an independent body.

I will happily support the Government in disagreeing with Lords amendment 7. Fundamentally, we cannot lose sight of the fact that we are trying to give equality of vote. In my mind, the tolerance is there not to try to draw the most convenient shape using wards, but purely to allow the flexibility for which a need will inevitably build up over the eight years, as my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said, with new housing developments and so on. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) has made the point many times that development, especially in certain parts of the country, is huge, and it leads to such housing developments. That is what the tolerance should be about; it should not be about trying to draw the shapes to have one just creeping in at the bottom end and one just meeting the higher end. The flexibility should allow a 5% tolerance of the share of that vote over the eight years; it should not get there straight away. If a constituency is made at the higher end, within eight years, it will almost certainly be above that number and we will be back in the same situation.

My constituency of Elmet and Rothwell has 79,316 electors. The neighbouring constituency of Leeds East has 65,693. The neighbouring constituency to that of Leeds Central has 82,211. It simply cannot be right to have such variation within less than 10 miles as the crow flies.

My hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) is in his place and cannot speak in the debate. [Interruption.] I can still smell and taste; it’s all right. He and I have represented Leeds electors since the early 2000s. We have seen great differences in the city and how it is set up. His constituency is on the higher side of the number of electors in Leeds. My voters are getting almost one 80,000th of a vote, whereas in the neighbouring seat they are getting one 65,000th of a vote. It is right to reject Lords amendment 7 simply because we should see it not as a way to fill the gap and make constituencies work, but purely as a way to give people a vote that will change plus or minus 5% over the eight-year period to try to keep things roughly similar.

Lords amendment 1 is about moving from eight to 10 years. The reality is that that means we would probably go through three general elections on those boundaries. We have heard a lot in these debates about how big the boundary changes are probably going to be when they come through, but that is because nothing has happened for a quarter of a century. The changes will be of that size; they will be disruptive.

It is better to go in a cycle of two general elections so that, hopefully, from this point on, with the Government amendments to try to make the whole system more robust and far less open to political shenanigans in the House, we will not see such major changes in future. It is better that the system can be, for want of a better word, tinkered with to make sure that we get back to roughly within those tolerances. We all accept that there will be demographic change and housing change. Big things are happening, including the ambition to build so many houses, which will cause change.

What seems like a small amendment would have a huge impact. Very large changes would have to be made simply by adding those two years and getting into a three-general-election cycle.

Lords amendment 8 is about registrations. It is a fundamental right of people in this country to choose whether they want to register for a vote or not.

[John Spellar]

It is absolutely, certainly not. It is actually a criminal offence not to return a registration form.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The reality is that people who do not want to register to vote can do that. They have to register for council tax and those processes.

[John Spellar]

That is absolutely wrong. It is an offence not to return the electoral registration form. The fact that councils do not enforce that and do not think it is worth it may be another matter, but it is a prosecutable offence not to return a registration form.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Well, the right hon. Gentleman has made a point there that I stand to be corrected on.

I also stand to be corrected on this point. I do not want to mislead the House; these figures can be checked. For the European referendum, in my constituency, 1,500 extra people went on the register and have now come off. They chose to register to take part in that ballot, which meant a lot to them, but they do not want to take part in other ballots. They worked out how to register; they registered; they legally took part in the ballot; they have not registered going forward. It has to be right that people have that choice. As my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House said, the amendments would lead to a far greater complication of the system, and centralised data, which has not exactly worked well in other areas—including, quite frankly, some of the things that people are trying to achieve at the moment in this crisis. We have seen some of the problems and weaknesses that can occur.

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[John Spellar]

I join others in paying tribute to and sending condolences to the Minister for the Constitution and Devolution, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith). There is, however, one upside to her absence, which is that, with the Leader of the House, we have the Conservative Trumpist philosophy, red in tooth and claw, absolutely out there in the open. We had it again just now on ghost voters on the register. At the same time, the Government reject any attempt to make a more rational, accurate and comprehensive registration process. We have seen that all the way through, with attempts on voter suppression and attempts to make things more difficult at the polling station, in spite of the complete lack of evidence—in the same way that Donald Trump has been trying to discredit the American election, claiming that there are fraudulent voters, particularly in postal voting. It is the same old song. For those on the Government Benches, here is a breaking news story: Donald Trump has lost the election.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I do not think anybody on these Benches will disagree that Donald Trump has lost the election.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which many of us have taken part in, produced its report. It is not fair of the right hon. Gentleman to cast aspersions on the Government about suppressing voter registration. The changes that were made to the postal voting system in this country were made as a direct result of OSCE reports on previous elections. I have a huge amount of respect for the right hon. Gentleman —I consider him a friend—and I know he would not wish to cast such an aspersion. I hope he will reflect on that.

[John Spellar]

It may not be fair, but it is perfectly accurate. The reality is that in neither country has there been a shred of evidence of fraud in postal voting or personation at the ballot box.

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[Alec Shelbrooke]

Nine proved.

[Chris Clarkson]

Quite right. Someone’s choice to exercise their franchise should be a positive affirmation and a conscious choice. If we want more people to vote, we should be increasing awareness and improving education. Simply adding names to a register will not increase participation and could lead to a form of stealth malapportionment, whereby certain constituencies would appear on paper to have an on-quota electorate, only for the number of people actively voting to be akin to a rotten borough.

Extrapolating, estimating or automatically registering people is not an answer. We know from countries such as Canada—which, by any measure, we must consider a mature democracy and one with which we would like to be compared—that automatic registration has not been effective and there are high levels of dissatisfaction with the accuracy of preliminary lists.

I have no doubt that their lordships have sent us back a Bill that they consider to be improved. Some of them will be drawing on their own experiences as Members of this place, and I must thank them for their time and consideration, while politely disagreeing with all but new clause 2. The Bill will enable a much-needed review of constituencies, some of which are 20 years out of date, and it will do so in a fair and robust way. The next general election should take place on the basis of boundaries that lend equal weight to every voter, and we have the means before us to enable that now.