Elections: May 2021

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 13th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chloe Smith]

Labour Members here today are so keen to paint a picture of delay that they are not seeing the wood for the trees. The point is that a whole set of preparation has already been laid. If the hon. Member were to speak to her colleagues in the Welsh Labour Government, she would know that those colleagues and I have already had extensive discussions about the merits of, for example, early voting. I have also had those conversations with administrators across the relevant area, who do not necessarily share the merits of that argument. I do not think there is a clear case for early voting, because it introduces extra complexity at a time when what voters need is polls delivered safely and easily.

I also take this opportunity to emphasise that I have considered the case for all-postal ballots, which has occasionally been raised in the House, but there are some drawbacks to that—namely, that it would prevent people from being able to exercise their preference of how they vote at elections. As I said at the outset, it is important to help people to take their preferred choice in how they vote. That is why our comprehensive set of preparations gives rise to people being able to apply as early as they wish for a postal vote, and I encourage people to do so; to take advantage of new arrangements for a slightly extended proxy scheme, which makes sure that nobody would be excluded; and, finally, to vote in person if they wish, at which point polling stations will be covid-secure.

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

May I say how delighted I am to see my hon. Friend in her usual robust style with a good grip on her brief? Following on from the previous question, in terms of those who are pushing for a full postal vote election, what would be the lead time to put that in place? I assume that quite a lot would have to be done to make everybody vote by post in this election.

[Chloe Smith]

Yes, there is a lengthy lead time, and it would require a lot to be done. I do not think it is the right thing to do, so I can confirm to the House that any such preparation has not been laid for that.

Public Health

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2020 Commons Chamber

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

I hate this. I hate the whole situation, as do many people in the country. We are all trying to stay positive, but it is hard. I wake up every morning feeling angry, thinking why do we have to do this? But after 10 minutes, I think, “What else can we do?” because fundamentally the disease is the same today as it was at the beginning of the year. I have seen my parents for three hours since February. I was hoping to be able to meet them for Christmas— I was longing for it—but, as with so many other families now, that cannot happen. It cannot happen because the global pandemic has fundamentally not changed.

I hear people say that excess deaths are only slightly higher than normal. I remind them that that is with a lockdown. Pressures on A&E have been reduced. Numbers out this week show that because hospitality is closed alcohol-related emergencies in A&E are down significantly. That is the point: when you are unwell, the NHS needs to be able to treat you. There has been a lot of debate this afternoon about figures, one way or the other, but the reality is that in Leeds the numbers last week were 480 per 100,000. Yesterday, they were 220 per 100,000 and today there are 200 cases per 100,000. NHS capacity, however, is at 95% to 98%. That is unchanged and that is the key. We all need to make sacrifices to ensure sick people get the healthcare they need.

The tragedy of people dying, however, cannot overshadow the tragedy of businesses dying across many sectors, not least in hospitality, especially in December, its bumper month. I am afraid that I have to say that the Prime Minister’s announcement today for wet pubs is risible. It is not good enough. Many people have contacted me, including Michelle Dwan from the Victoria Hotel in Allerton Bywater. Justine Gregory of Salute at the White Swan in Rothwell, who I am speaking to later today, contacted me very politely and said: “We’ve spent thousands of pounds on hygiene and cleanliness measures. Every year we rely on the significant cash boost from Christmas. I know this is a big ask from the Government that has already spent billions, but ultimately we are a viable, profitable business that the Government has closed.” Please, Minister, people need more support than they are getting. I have a huge amount of respect for the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill) and I know she will feed this back, but it has not gone unnoticed on the Government Back Benches that, a little over two hours into this debate, we are on our third Minister on the Front Bench. Is the message going back clearly from the points that are being made today?

I do not believe we have any choice but to back the restrictions—if we do not, at one minute past midnight tonight there will be a free-for-all—but we have to stop playing jeopardy by saying, “If we don’t back them for the health measures there is a problem and we will think about what we are doing for businesses.” The hospitality industry desperately needs our support, but if we do not back the measures and there is a free-for-all, we will be in a very difficult situation and—to use a term appropriate to the time of year—the NHS will say, “Sorry, no room at the inn,” and will send people away to die at home. We need to get control ASAP. We need to stop businesses dying; we need to put them on life support. We are taking away their lifeblood, and we have not heard enough about that today. If we keep the numbers down for when the vaccine is ready, we can get our country up and running as quickly as possible, but when we do that there will be more everyday demand on the NHS, so we have to make sure covid patients are at a minimum.

I have had a huge amount of correspondence threatening me and calling me every name under the sun if I vote for these restrictions tonight, but being Member of Parliament is about taking holistic, tough decisions. It is not about hiding away and dodging leadership, as we are seeing from the Opposition; it is about saying, “We don’t like it, but we have got to make these decisions.” I ask my hon. Friend the Minister please to take this back to the Government: I will be voting for the restrictions tonight, but the package that has been put in place for the hospitality industry at the most profitable time of the year is just not good enough.

Oral Answers to Questions

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I think that he is raising the 1983 miners’ strike—or the early 1980s at any rate. I would be obliged to him if he could send me further particulars of his concerns, which I will do my best to address.

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

Will my right hon. Friend join me in thanking teachers across Elmet and Rothwell for keeping the schools open this term, and does he share my frustration that half of the laptops that he provided to Leeds City Council for distribution to the city’s most vulnerable learners remain in the storeroom at Leeds Civic Hall? What can be done to get the Labour council to pull their socks up?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. That is indeed disappointing, because over 2,500 laptops and tablets and 400 routers were delivered to Leeds City Council for disadvantaged 10-year-old pupils. I will do whatever I can to spring those laptops from the cupboard as fast as I can.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Eighth sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith]

My hon. Friend makes a good and articulate point with his own local geography. Indeed, if constituents are perhaps struggling to see the identity of the communities around them, that may lead to people feeling disconnected from what their local MP is doing, because they are not perceived to be a local MP. Constituents may feel that the MP represents a different area, because of the size of some of those constituencies.

My example, also from Wales, is the constituency of Aberavon. The previous boundary review, which was on the 5% variants, proposed to cut through the heart of Port Talbot, separating the town’s shopping centre from its high street and cutting the steel works off from the housing estate that was built for its workforce. I spoke to my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) just before we came into the Committee this afternoon. He recalled that when he told his constituents about what the commission had proposed for his community, they fell about laughing and struggled to believe that this was actually true. It was incomprehensible to them that this proposal to split their community down the middle would come from the boundary commission.

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

For my own clarity, was that on the 600 proposal?

[Cat Smith]

It was. Obviously, the proposals that come out of this boundary review will look different because of the 650 figure. The tight 5% quota, however, still gives the commissioners a great deal of trouble in trying to keep those communities together, to ensure that people can believe that the constituency they are in represents a community.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I thank the hon. Lady for her remarks on her new clause.

Let me start by being controversial: I believe that the plus or minus 5% should be seen as a matter of last resort, and that the boundary commission should try to do everything in its power to be bang on the money in the middle. Let me develop that argument, and I am willing to take interventions on it.

These figures are not correct, because I have not messed around with the numbers. I am using them just as illustrations. If we take that figure to be 72,165—that is not the exact figure, but I am using it for illustrative purposes—in less than 600 seats, that figure would have been 78,198, of which another 5% would be 3,909 electors. Five per cent. of 72,165 is 3,609, whereas another 7.5% of 72,165 is 5,413. I make those illustrative points because the difference between the 5% on 600 seats and the 7.5% on 650 seats is 1,500 electors more. The difference between 5% and 7.5% on the 650 seats is roughly 1,800 voters. I wanted to lay that out at the start; please do not talk about the inaccuracy of the figures because I know that they are inaccurate, but they are in the ball park.

The Bill provides for the boundaries to be reviewed and set every eight years. We know that there are several cycles going on, with local government reviews, polling district reviews and ward reviews. As my right hon. Friend the Member for—I have already forgotten her constituency.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

Basingstoke.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I was going to say Billericay, but I think that is your constituency, Sir David, or was at some point—I am losing my thread. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke has on several occasions drawn our attention to the planned housebuilding population changes that we all know are going to happen in constituencies. The plus 5% and plus 7.5% variances are open to interpretation about what they actually mean. Are we using them as a starting point, with constituencies at the absolute minimum or maximum to start with, knowing that within a certain time, they are going to be out of the equation?

In Wetherby, which is one part of my constituency, 800 houses are being built, and more are being built further down—a considerable number of houses. Some 5,000 are due to be built in the Leeds East constituency, which neighbours mine. The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood mentioned North Yorkshire as a council that would not have to cross county boundaries if we went to a 7.5% tolerance. Some 10,000 houses are due to go in just on the boundary with my constituency—that is in just one small part of North Yorkshire—so we know that there will be a large shift in populations in a relatively short period, and certainly in that eight-year window.

Mr Bellringer said in his oral evidence—I think to a certain extent the Committee accepted his argument—that we have to draw the line at some point, so we cannot use in the figures new housing and so on. He was talking about potential ward boundaries; the point being that you have to draw the line with ward boundaries that have already been drawn, and not those that might be drawn.

Over the eight years, we will see considerable change in population in constituencies. Indeed, the driving force behind a lot of the Committee’s conversation has been that the data will be almost a quarter of a century out of date by the next election. That was always going to mean a significant movement in constituency boundaries because of the amount of time that has passed. Should the boundary commission be trying to construct seats within the plus 5% or minus 5% tolerance when, maybe with a year, that seat could be bigger than plus 5% or smaller than minus 5%?

I am not saying that we should change the Bill, but in my view, the boundary commission should try to be bang on the money at around 72,000 or 73,000, depending on the final figures. Surely, if we want a balanced electorate, we should look at how we can make that work over the cycle, so that when large housing developments are built, we tinker and make minor changes in an area every eight years, rather than the huge changes that we are making now.

My constituency has 82,000 electors and Leeds East has 66,000. Those are roundabout figures that vary quite a lot, and 10,000 houses will be built during the next five years. By definition, there will have to be a major change in eight years’ time. If we have already bumped right up to the 5% window when forming the initial boundary for the 2024 election, we are talking about elections after 2032. I cannot remember the exact phrase in the Bill regarding when the next review would come into effect. It could be 15 years from now before the next set of figures come in. There would be a lot of time in which there could be huge variation.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar]

Thank you, Sir David. I am sure that like me you were trying to cut your way through all the contradictions and inconsistencies that were in the right hon. Gentleman’s contribution. Many of the points had considerable value, except that they were not consistent. They were not even consistent with this morning’s business. We were talking about being as close as we can be—except, of course, when the seat of Ynys Môn has been won for the Conservative party. I never noticed such interest when it was a battle between Welsh nationalists and Labour for that constituency. An exception, of course, is the Isle of Wight. It is perfectly possible to visit it by ferry, and MPs can go back and forth to it. We need to get as close as possible and we can split wards, and everything else, except of course when it comes to the Isle of Wight, which, on the basis of previous electoral trends—okay, it did go Lib Dem at one stage—is probably going to leave with two Conservative seats.

Then the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell talked about taking account—which, of course, the boundary commission cannot do—of future building development. I think it is appropriate to be able to look forward. However, with a widened area of discretion, constituency A would be able to say, “We will build fairly close to the line.” Constituency B might be a bit smaller, because of the reasonable expectation, as long as builders do not sit on the land, that there would be a large number of additional people. Of course, it could not know how many of those would be eligible for parliamentary representation, because in many areas the size of the population does not necessarily match the size of the electoral register, because of the number of people who would not be eligible to be on it.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

On the point about house building going in, it goes back to the evidence that the boundary commission draws the line at that particular moment; but, again, if it is known that it is coming in, at the moment nothing stops that plus 5% being right up at the limits. Even though building the housing is in a city council’s plans, it will, within a year, almost immediately go over the limit.

[John Spellar]

That is rather my point—exactly. With a wider area of appreciation, it is possible to take account of that. It becomes much more difficult the narrower it is. It also comes down to the size of the building blocks. I think the right hon. Gentleman mentioned that some of his wards are in Leeds and some are in the country. For those MPs who represent rural areas or small towns the wards are quite often 1,000, 1,500 or 2,000. In most of the metropolitan areas they are in the 8,000 to 10,000 mark. In certain areas—not Birmingham, any more, since the change in the boundaries and all-up elections—including in Leeds, for example, my under- standing is that the number is somewhere around 16,000 to 19,000. That makes, again, for a sizeable building block.

There is, frankly—and with all due respect to our colleague the hon. Member for Glasgow East—no point talking about Scottish wards, because they are much larger, being based on a single transferable vote system, If, heaven forbid, Conservative Members now seek to move towards STV in the United Kingdom, that will be another issue entirely. However, there is not the same identity of ward members as we have when we must have much wider wards. The idea is to keep, as far as possible, structural organisation for a ward, although there may need to be some minor exceptions. The boundary commission initially crossed borough boundaries as an exception, to deal with problems in London, as I recall. Now, it seems to almost totally disregard such boundaries. That is one reason why the Labour party, unsuccessfully, still wanted to allow Parliament to act as a constraint on the self-fulfilling activities of the boundary commission.

It is enormously important to maintain some sort of coherence and identity. It is not just constituencies that should have geographic and community coherence, but wards as well. There should not be gerrymander-style wards, similar to some American constituencies, which get close to having exact mathematic equivalence but end up being utterly extraordinary shapes and sizes. That is why we should not take note of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe recommendation to look at size of population, as the United States does, rather than electoral registers. The United States bases its wards on census figures, not electoral registration. In some areas, authorities might be encouraged if they had to focus on electoral registration rather than registration suppression, as happens in a number of states, whipped on by Donald Trump.

For that reason, one probably has to have slight, and probably unjustified and unworthy, suspicions, about the vehemence with which the argument for 5% is being mounted by Government Members. We have been told, both by the Conservative party witness and by Members, that the OSCE report firmly says that the total variation should be 10%—in other words, 5% on either side. They prayed that in aid as justification for their case, but that is not what the OSCE says in its recommendation. It clearly states:

“The maximum admissible departure from the distribution criterion…should seldom exceed 10% and never 15%, except”—

it even says this—

“in really exceptional circumstances”.

There are practical reasons in favour of the proposal. We need to ensure the maintenance of communities and prevent considerable inconvenience similar to that experienced as a result of the previous boundary changes. We have heard evidence that 650 seats may or may not make it easier, but these very tight margins make it more difficult for the boundary commission, parliamentarians and, most importantly, the electorate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I support the new clause, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood. I think that we need to go back and listen to some of the arguments that we have heard in this Committee before, but also some of the evidence that we have taken. People have highlighted the problems with 5% and the rigid use of 5%. The hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden, who just spoke, really made an argument in favour of more flexibility for the boundary commission, because he was saying, “Let’s trust the boundary commission. Let’s set the parameters and let it get on with the job.”

What the boundary commission clearly said in evidence to us was this. Mr Bellringer, when asked about tolerance of 5% plus or minus, said:

“It is something that we always used to be able to do in the past and did do on occasion. Prior to 2011, there was not this hard maximum and minimum, but we would still be aiming to keep constituencies within a broad range. Occasionally we would breach that if we needed to, to provide a better holistic solution.”––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 17, Q30.]

The boundary commission was clearly saying to us that it tried to keep within or close to the average, but on the rare occasions on which the local circumstances required this, it would use more flexibility. The argument from the boundary commission is clearly that it would like that flexibility in order to do a good job, and I think we should listen to it.

We have had experience of the 5%. We have just been through two reviews, and the complications and difficulties that the 5% created have given us the opportunity to have experience of that without having to implement it, fortunately, because Parliament saw reason. We have the opportunity now to correct that flaw in the process and increase the figure. I would suggest 10%, as the OSCE report suggests, but my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood has found a different solution to the problem.

We also heard from Dr Rossiter, who has investigated this issue. He talks about the situation where these tight tolerances force the boundary commission to go over local authority boundaries, and he respects the difficulties that that creates for Members of Parliament when representing different local authorities. He also made the point that the discretion of the boundary commission enables it to avoid those situations when putting forward proposals. We thus have evidence from an expert that such difficulties may be forced on the boundary commission the tighter we make the plus or minus above the average.

Dr Rossiter went on to say:

“I have noticed, when we have been looking at this, the significant help that increasing that tolerance by very small amounts will provide. As soon as you go from 5% to 6%, you have a big payback from going up by that one percentage point. That payback increases to around 8%, which is why we came to the conclusion in our previous report that a figure of 8% would be much more helpful.”––[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 140, Q269.]

My hon. Friend’s proposal is 7.5%, which takes us close to the recommendation. That recommendation is based on expert review of the process of creating boundaries and its impact on local communities.

Returning to a point that I made in a previous debate, I firmly believe that we represent communities as much as numbers of people. Obviously, that has to be met within a certain tolerance. We cannot have a situation in which there is one enormous constituency of more than 100,000 people and one such as mine that is below the average. I also entirely accept that we cannot continue with constituencies that are 20 years out of date, which has led to some of the fluctuations in numbers.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman said, I think, that he would be happy to go to 10% or 15% on either side. At 20% or 30% difference, these boundaries work, so there would be no need to change them within his preferred tolerances every 20 years.

[Clive Efford]

I am not sure that that is correct. We have examples of differences in constituency numbers that go well beyond 10%. I would not go beyond 10%, but I accept the 7.5% that my hon. Friend the Members for Lancaster and Fleetwood is putting forward. That is an acceptable figure that would give the boundary commission the flexibility it needs.

We have all experienced elections, in various numbers. I am on my ninth general election now. I do not want to put years on you, Sir David, but you have been through many more. It is clear that sections of our constituencies vote in similar patterns. I would say that that is because there is a commonality about the experience of those communities. When we start to subdivide those communities, their ability to affect an election and gain representation through their vote is diminished. That eats away at the root of the democratic process.

Those who wrongly focus virtually on numbers alone are in danger of undermining that part of the democratic process. More emphasis needs to be placed on location, community and all the common characteristics that make a community, over and above the numbers. However, I accept that there has to be a limit. I would say that my hon. Friend’s recommendation is about right.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the types of community, and Mr Bellringer has given evidence that wards generally reflect communities in an area, and that to split them therefore risks splitting local ties. However, I think the argument falls down around extending the parameters and not splitting wards. We have seen in the past that in order to stay within wards, and to get the constituency to fit within a number, some very strange constituencies get built that do not represent those communities. It comes back to the question: is it about the plus or minus figure, or is it about going sub-ward level to keep communities together, as wards are described as doing? If wards are described as doing that, why would we then bunch a lot of different, disparate wards together to make one constituency? Surely they should be the same.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Seventh sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 30th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley. I rise to support the arguments made by the hon. Member for Ceredigion about the ties that are the Welsh language. I do not think it is possible to overstate the fact that the Welsh language is a cornerstone of Welsh identity. Although in the past we have seen a decline in the Welsh language, that is now reversing with the Welsh Government’s target of 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050. The hon. Gentleman’s arguments may one day become quite irrelevant if Wales is entirely full of Welsh speakers.

We have previously referred to the Council of Europe’s Venice commission, which recommends that boundaries be drawn

“without detriment to national minorities”.

Welsh language speakers are a national minority who require protection within this legislation. Welsh language ties are an important part of identity, and I would like the Minister to provide some clarity about the use of the Welsh language as a factor in the commission’s decisions. Language is an indicator of local ties. Although I do not speak Welsh myself—dwi ddim yn gallu siarad Cymraeg—and my life is probably all the poorer for it, I recognise the importance of the Welsh language to the Welsh identity, as does the Labour party. I therefore congratulate the hon. Member for Ceredigion on having tabled this amendment.

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr Paisley. I congratulate the hon. Member for Ceredigion on having tabled this probing amendment, because our whole debate about clause 6 has emphasised the point about local ties and local communities. We must use this Committee to emphasise to the boundary commissions that although we do not necessarily need to legislate—the hon. Member for Ceredigion presented this amendment as a probing amendment, to spark that debate—we are discussing a very important section of this Bill, as I said last week, and it is incumbent on the boundary commissions to take notice of what has been said.

Rule 5 in the 1986 Act is exceptionally important. One can only draw on one’s local experience, so I come back to Leeds, because that is my area; it is where I live in Yorkshire, but there is a world of difference between inner Leeds and outer Leeds. The communities are very different. I have made reference to the long-serving previous Member for Leeds East, George Mudie, who was horrified at the thought of such different communities coming into an area that he had represented for so long. I hope that when the boundary commissions do the reviews, they take real notice of the debates about clause 6. Intelligent and sensible points have been made by Committee members on both sides of the Committee during this debate, which should act as the key guidance. Rather than us putting things on the face of the Bill, the commissions should consider the over-driving will and well-thought-out arguments in all the areas we have debated.

Again, I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on having tabled a thought-provoking and important probing amendment to this Bill, because it is important that we probe all of its aspects. Everything that has been said during this debate—even on the comical side, such as the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, on the other side of the Pennines, and I joshing last week about the wars of the roses—shows the importance of local identities and how they are put together. That is a very important aspect, and I hope the boundary commissions will take notice of it when they are drawing up their first draft.

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

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

This will probably be a slightly longer speech than I would have hoped given the note that we received from the boundary commission last night. Now might be a relevant point to discuss the content of that note, although it will not necessarily be easy given that we have had it for such a short period. The reason why it is relevant to discuss it at this point is that clause 6 refers to the rules to achieve the overall objective in the Bill, which is to create constituencies of equal size, and those rules are set out in schedule 2 of the 1986 Act. Therefore, in this stand part debate I would like to talk about three different points so that the Minister might be able to respond and so that they are on the record for the boundary commission to understand the importance of these things to getting this right.

The first point is the content of the boundary commission’s note, which will help us create equal-sized constituencies by looking at sub-ward level. The second point is about protected constituencies, which I know we will come on to when we consider my string of amendments to the schedule, but I will briefly touch on it. The third point is how we take into account future growth, which I raised in an evidence session, but it was interesting that nobody really answered the question, so I am going to raise it again for the Minister to perhaps respond to.

Looking at the first issue, the number of electorates per constituency at sub-ward level, I put on record my thanks—and I am sure the thanks of the whole Committee —to Mr Bellringer of the Boundary Commission for England and his team for the note of 29 June and such a rapid response to the issues raised when he gave evidence. The lengthy note we received uncovers that we have hit upon something important. My right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell and others made the point several times that it is important that, first and foremost, we look at equality in the context of local ties. I think the only issue I take with the note from the boundary commission is the assertion that wards always—they say generally—

“reflect communities of broad common interest in an area”.

I think they mostly, but not always, do that. We could all give great examples of where wards even in our own constituencies do not particularly reflect communities of broad common interest.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I thought I would intervene on my right hon. Friend rather than make a speech later because she is making absolutely the right points to sum up this stand part debate. A very important line that I picked up in the letter said that,

“wards generally reflect communities of broad common interest in an area, and to split them therefore risks splitting local ties”.

My right hon. Friend will agree that we do not want to argue with that statement, but that should also be the guidance for forming the constituencies: if the commissioners recognise that at ward level, they must recognise it at constituency level as well when choosing the wards that they are going to build constituencies from.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Miller]

My hon. Friend is right. It feels to me that the issue needs further consideration by the boundary commission. It is a great shame that even though it has already done an extensive piece of work with Ordnance Survey, surveying polling districts between 2013 and 2018—at a cost of a quarter of a million pounds, according to the note—there still seems to be resistance to looking at that in more detail or, as my hon. Friend suggested, at other data sources, which are presumably much more readily available. I understand that the Post Office delivers post every day, and therefore must update its information on a regular basis—particularly when new houses are built. Many of us will have had constituency casework on that issue.

Perhaps individual political parties might want to pick that issue up with the boundary commission. My feeling is that the Committee would want to press further for it to look at it in more detail.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Is not the point—and the thing that we are trying to avoid—the fact that in previous boundary reviews there have been significant changes from draft 1 to draft 2, when things have moved to the evidence stages? Is not it better for the boundary commission to approach the matter with the advice and thought provided by the Committee, to try to get draft 1 right, so that there will just be minor changes in draft 2?

[Mrs Miller]

There is an old adage in the business world about doing the right thing right. Yes, the commission should do the right thing right first time, and not create re-work. I note from the letter that the Boundary Commission for England wrote to the Committee that it recommends that it should give priority to mapping metropolitan areas, given the late stage we are at, and the concerns it might have about being able to map the whole country at this stage. I think that that is part of the answer, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Heywood and Middleton said, there is also room for it to look at other datasets, so that it will not be quite so focused on just one solution. I note from the submission that one member of staff was given the matter as a project. Perhaps if a little more resource was put into it, it could be turned around a little more quickly.

I am not quite sure how the Committee can put further pressure on to the boundary commission, but my ask to it would be why it is not looking at other datasets and why it cannot resource the matter more. Surely the Government, for whom the project is important, would want to look at any suggestion of additional resources that are needed to complete the work in a reasonable timeframe so that such data could be available, whether that is only for metropolitan areas or for a broader cross-section of the country.

The second issue that I wanted to turn to, briefly, is protected constituencies. Clause 6 touches on the rules in schedule 2 and I think we can be more ambitious for the Bill, in relation to using the concept of protected constituencies not just in England and Scotland but Wales. We will discuss two amendments on that later in our proceedings, when we can pick up on some of the issues raised by the hon. Member for Ceredigion and show our understanding of the importance of community. As a kingdom of islands, sometimes we need rules in place to respect that unique nature of the United Kingdom. We will come on to that shortly.

My final point is on taking into account future growth, which I raised with a couple of our evidence givers. I suppose I am thinking about constituencies like my own, Basingstoke, which has grown significantly in the past three decades, from being a sleepy market town predominantly surrounded by the most amazing and beautiful Hampshire countryside, when it was the constituency of David Mitchell, the father of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), to what it is today, which is one of the top 10 centres of employment in the south-east—still surrounded by the most amazing and beautiful Hampshire countryside.

To the west of the town is a major development area by the name of Manydown, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse). No houses have yet been built, but they will be, and to stop unnecessary change in the future it will be important for that in some way to be taken into account geographically in the setting of the boundaries.

Please do not get me wrong: I am not asking for that to be taken into account in the quotas, but surely with such major areas, which have already had many hundreds of thousands if not millions of pounds-worth of development put into planning for the future, it would be an unnecessary change pending in the future for it not to be taken into account. I am sure every single Committee member can think of somewhere in or near their own constituency where that would be the case.

Given that one of the factors in the rules—I think I have this right—is that we can look at such things for the future, I hope that the boundary commissions will be able to think about the geographical nature of what they do, not just the numerical population-based nature of it. However, I did not get a sense from their response, or from others, that that was something they were focused on yet. I hope that we can register that with them at this early stage, to stop what my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell said in his intervention on planning for the future and instead to get things right first time.

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There is consensus that we need to equalise, as far as possible, the size of constituencies, and that the disparities in size are clearly undesirable and unacceptable. However, even if the proposal to bring us down from 10% to 7.5%—the Committee has already considered that, so I will not stray too far, Mr Paisley—would give us some level of parity and equalisation, we are tying the hands of the boundary commissions far too much. Every other consideration that hon. Members keep mentioning frankly becomes irrelevant. It is the same argument as it was for the Welsh language. It is a great idea, but unless we show a little more flexibility on the tolerance around the national average it is, frankly, unachievable.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

We are almost straying into new clause 2, which I think we will debate this afternoon. The hon. Gentleman is talking about how much easier it is with the 7.5%, and I hope that we can explore that further. In Leeds and in Kirklees, two West Yorkshire constituencies, 7.5% does not do it; we still have to split wards. Perhaps he can challenge my argument this afternoon.

[Christian Matheson]

I would not challenge the right hon. Gentleman. I take the advice that his local knowledge makes him an expert to give. We listen to each other and say, “Actually, in those circumstances it wouldn’t work.” However, the number of areas where we would not need to do that would be far fewer. I think that the Leeds issue, with wards of 17,000, is quite an extreme one. I suspect that some of those will have to be split anyway, but we make heavy weather by making the number of those instances, and their frequency, much greater as a result.

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[Ben Lake]

I am sure that it is in Hansard somewhere, but just so it is on the record, it is Llanfairpwllgwyngyll-gogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I cannot do that, but I will tell the hon. Lady who can: my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), who was born there.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Sixth sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Minister of State, Cabinet Office (Chloe Smith)]

It is an absolute pleasure, Sir David, to serve under your chairmanship, as it was to serve under Mr Paisley’s this morning. I shall in my remarks cover clauses 1 and 2 stand part, and amendments 2 to 4, and respond where I can to what right hon. and hon. Members have said.

Clause 1 deals with the timing of boundary reviews and the submission of the final reports by the boundary commissions. First, the clause provides for the next boundary review to take place according to a slightly shortened timetable. The clause sets 1 July 2023 as the date by which the four boundary commissions must submit their final reports. That means that they will have two years and seven months from the review date—the formal start of a boundary review—to complete the process and submit their recommendations. Usually, they would have two years and 10 months.

I will deal straight away here with a point raised by the hon. Member for Glasgow East. He mentioned the question raised by Professor Sir John Curtice about why there should be a difference between the period for the immediate next review that for future reviews. I hate to say it, but there is no great conspiracy. It was set out clearly in the pages of the Conservative party manifesto, which I know the hon. Gentleman will have had as his bedside reading day in, day out since 2019. He will know from it that we have made a commitment to repealing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. There is no secret. That legislation is inadequate and we are committed to repealing it. I will not go into further detail about that in this Committee—you would not want me to, Sir David—but it squarely answers the point. It is no great secret that according to that scheme there should then be the flexibility for the next general election to be called at the right time after July 2023, which is what is in the Bill.

The purpose of clause 1 is to give the best chance of having new constituency boundaries in place ahead of the next general election, whenever that may come. As witnesses such as Mr Peter Stanyon and Mr Chris Williams of the Green party reminded us, once the recommendations of a boundary review have been brought into effect, it takes some time for returning officers to implement the new boundaries, and for all others involved, including political parties, to make the necessary preparations to field candidates and communicate with voters. So we have to allow for that period before new constituencies will be put into use. It is not a fixed amount of time, but, as a general principle, we aspire to ensure that legislation is in place six months before a poll.. That was discussed in the evidence sessions.

As the Committee is aware, it is over a decade since the results of a boundary review have been implemented. Our existing Westminster constituencies are based on electoral data from the very early 2000s. That means that our current constituencies take no account of today’s youngest voters, which is beginning to get ridiculous, nor do they reflect nearly two decades of democratic shift, house building and all the things we want a boundary review to consider. The purpose of the provision in clause 1 is to ensure that the next boundary review, which is due to begin next year, finishes as promptly as possible, without compromising the processes of the boundary commissions, including the extensive public consultation they conduct, which I will make a brief point about. We will discuss public consultation further as we go through the clauses.

The three-month reduction in timetable, in the case referred to in the clause, will be made possible by shortening the sum of the boundary commissions’ internal operational processes. In addition, we propose to shorten the public consultation time for the next boundary review only from 24 to 18 weeks. I will address that in greater detail when we discuss clause 4, where that is laid out. I can say at this point that we have tested the proposition—a timetable of two years and seven months—with stakeholders, including electoral administrators, the parliamentary parties and representatives of other parties. There was a cross-party consensus that in this instance the change is beneficial and the right thing to do.

The second change introduced by clause 1 is to extend the boundary review cycle, moving the review from every five years to every eight. The intention here—my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell touched on this—is to ensure that parliamentary constituencies are updated sufficiently regularly without the disruption to local communities and their representation that might occur if there was a review every election period.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, as several colleagues have mentioned, it is really important that the boundary commissions takes notice of what is being said here? Hopefully, they will look at the arguments being made, whatever the outcomes are. It is all about communities and getting it right in the first instance—I refer to the comments made by the right hon. Member for Warley. If they can do that, they can shorten the timeframe and take notice, so communities can stay together.

[Chloe Smith]

That is very important indeed. I am confident that all four of the boundary commissions have been listening closely to the proceedings of the Committee since our evidence sessions, which they joined, and since then in our proceedings clause by clause. I know they will want to take into account comments made by hon. Members across the Committee, including how we can keep communities together and ensure that the public has that strong voice, which was the point I was making with regard to clause 1.

Clause 1 sets out that in future the boundary commissions will submit their final reports to the Speaker of the House of Commons. Mr Speaker is the ex officio chair of the boundary commissions. The reports will go to him rather than to the Secretary of State, as the commissions do now. The Speaker, not the Secretary of State, will lay the reports before Parliament.

We think that is the right change. It underlines the independence of the boundary commissions—a theme we will return to many times. It is right that the chair of those commissions—in other words, Mr Speaker—should receive and lay the reports just as they also currently receive the progress reports made by the boundary commissions. It is also right that the Government’s only role is to implement the recommendations without needing to have any hand in the process by which they are submitted.

In summary, clause 1 makes technical but important changes to the conduct of boundary reviews. It sets the cycle of eight years, establishes the Speaker as the appropriate recipient of the final report and shortens the boundary review timetable in the way that I have explained, to give us and citizens the best chance of knowing that what they have asked for—the general election being conducted on the basis of updated and equal constituencies—will happen. For those reasons, I think the clause should stand part of the Bill.

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[David Linden]

Can I say what a pleasure it is to see clause 5 in the Bill? I spent about 30 sittings of my life in the last Parliament on the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill Committee, brought forward by the wonderful hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan). On that Committee were me, the Minister, the hon. Member for Coventry North East, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood and the hon. Member for City of Chester, with whom I have grown incredibly close over this issue and through the armed forces parliamentary scheme. It is a genuine delight to be on the Committee.

I used to trot along the corridor every Wednesday morning to come and argue that there should be 650 seats. At the time, the Minister, only six months ago, was resolutely opposed to that. So it is with a degree of glee that I hear her talk about that 5% population growth. I know that, on the Committee, I, the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood and the Minister have had children, but I can safely say that we have not contributed 5% population growth in the last six months. Therefore, the U-turn is quite remarkable.

There is also an argument based on Britain leaving the European Union. I accept that. It will be a travesty and bad for Scotland, which is probably why people in Scotland voted against it, but if we follow to its logical conclusion the argument about losing 73 MEPs who used to go to Brussels and debate and legislate on our behalf, and all those laws coming back to the UK Parliament—by and large they are coming back to it as a result of a power grab by the UK Government who are not devolving the powers on to institutions such as the Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament—presumably we should increase the number of seats, commensurately with MPs’ increased workload. Like the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood I am perplexed that the number remains at 650.

I want to pick up on the Minister’s point about cutting the cost of politics. One of the things that I tried to bring up in those enlightening Wednesday morning Committee sittings—with more ease some weeks than others—was that the Government’s argument that they are cutting the cost of politics is problematic because of the other place.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Hear, hear!

[David Linden]

I am grateful that that revolutionary from Yorkshire, the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell, agrees that we should abolish their lordships. The Government need to be consistent if they make the argument about cutting costs. Even this week we hear that the Prime Minister’s chief aide Eddie Lister is off to join the House of Lords, with £305 a day tax-free for the rest of his life, without ever being subject to a vote.

The House of Lords is an utterly undemocratic institution. There are only two places in the world where hereditary chieftains retain the right to make law. One is the United Kingdom and other is Lesotho. There are only three parts of the world where clerics retain the right to legislate. We have 26 bishops, the Lords Spiritual, who legislate by virtue of their religion. The other countries, of course, are Iran and the Isle of Man. If the Minister, therefore, wants, as she has said today, to talk about cutting the cost of politics, may I gently suggest that in the previous Parliament the Bill was starting at the wrong end, with the election of MPs? Perhaps if we want to cut the cost of politics we should end the circus down the other side of the building.

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[David Linden]

I have watched the hon. Lady in the last couple of weeks in the Chamber and she has been incredibly thoughtful. I suspect that the Government Whip is probably wincing slightly but the House is all the richer for people who are willing to stand up and say, “If we are going to talk about the future of the UK constitution we need to address the fact that in 2020 we still have people who have been there many years and have never been subject to a vote.” She is right to say that.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

As the hon. Gentleman has picked up, there is quite a lot of agreement about the other place. However, I do not think it is particularly fair on the Minister to be talking about it when we are trying to deal with a constitutional Bill on the House of Commons, and on how we vote. I say to him gently that I understand the arguments that he makes, and there is merit in them. He has some cross-party agreement. Voting on the other place has always tended to be a free vote, and it has always fallen at the last hurdle. I would be more than happy to have discussions with the hon. Gentleman if he could find positive ways to move forward on the subject. I am just not sure today is the right moment.

[The Chair]

Order. I have been biding by time about when to intervene. We have now had two interventions that were long speeches. Can we stick to the Bill? The Bill has nothing to do with reform of the House of Lords.

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[Mrs Miller]

I wanted to make a couple of short comments on amendments 8 and 9, and commend the hon. Member for Glasgow East—he confesses to being a “cheeky chappie”—for tabling them. The amendments may be probing amendments, as I do not necessarily think they would apply in his neck of the woods, but they would certainly apply in England and Wales. I can see why he has tabled them, following our discussions, because they would put on the face of the Bill a requirement that polling district mapping be available for use. It became clear in our evidence that that was not the case; that is why evidence sessions are so useful. I am sure that hon. Members will, like me, be paying quite particular attention to their constituency information, and indeed their polling district information, not least because we are often asked to comment on where polling stations are, and our in-depth knowledge of our constituencies is an important part of our job. We know where the polling stations are and where the polling district boundaries are.

I was quite blown away by some of the responses to the questions I put to Mr Bellringer from the English boundary commission. Returning to amendment 9 before I go into exactly what he said, I understand why the hon. Member for Glasgow East tabled it. If we are going to really do what the Bill requires, which is to create equal-sized constituencies, going to a sub-ward level, whether that is, as he suggested, through polling districts, or—as in my line of questioning to the boundary commission—through postcodes, as in the part of the United Kingdom from which the hon. Member for Glasgow East comes, we need to be able to manipulate the data and the constituency information we have on a very refined level. It seemed odd that that has not been explored in the detail that hon. Members might have expected.

Sir Iain McLean, when he gave evidence, talked about the tension between getting equal-sized constituencies and the issues around local ties, which we discussed in earlier strings of amendments. The importance of equal size is clearly pre-eminent in the Bill and the amendment we are talking about now is important to deliver that important strategic focus of the legislation.

I was perplexed first by the inconsistent approach to the use of sub-ward level data in England, Scotland and Wales, and the fact that postcode data is used in Scotland and Wales but not in England. When I pressed that with Mr Bellringer, he very clearly said on the record that that information was very difficult for the boundary commission to come by; it would take a long time to access the data in the detail required. I was then perplexed by my further lines of questioning to Mr Bellringer, which made me think that, frankly, sub-ward level data had been put into the box marked “too difficult” and it was not necessarily going to be revisited. I would like to send a clear message from the Committee: that that must be revisited.

Although I am not sure I would necessarily support the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Glasgow East at this point, not least because we are still waiting for a note from the boundary commission on how it might handle this, I hope it is listening to the debate to hear the strength of feeling on the matter. For postcodes, Mr Bellringer said,

“we do not have the postcode areas in England. We would have to create them; they could be created, but it would take an awfully long time to do.”—[Official Report, Parliamentary Constituencies Public Bill Committee, 18 June 2020; c. 12, Q14.]

We can wait until that data is ready, if it takes six months or 12 months. The boundary commission needs to start setting the bar a little higher than it has to date on the sort of information it has to hand. Sir Iain McLean suggested that the boundary commission should invest in geographical information systems. I do not profess to be an expert in that and I do not know whether that is what is needed. However, if it is, it should be forthcoming because it is important that we deliver the heart of the Bill, which is about equal constituencies. At the moment, I am unclear about how the boundary commission in England is going to do that. I hope the paper it sends us will edify me on that point.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

It is, indeed, unfortunate that we have made such quick progress that we have come to this clause before we have had the note from the Boundary Commission for England. The discussion we are having links into every single part of the Bill. This is an important moment. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow East for bringing this amendment—even as a probing amendment, if that is what it is—because it allows us to open up some very important arguments.

We had conversations this morning about whether we should hold the final vote on the Floor of the House. Opposition Members have made some powerful arguments about what would result if the boundary commission got it wrong. We should endeavour—especially with this clause today—to use the knowledge and expertise on the Committee and the evidence that we have taken to steer the boundary commission to get this right first time around. Some of the examples that were given in the past, which were then overturned when communities—not politicians—were able to make the points as to why particular suggestions were wrong, show that these things are not difficult to do, if time and attention is given to them.

I do not like to tie the hands of a body that we have asked to do a job. Being as prescriptive as the amendment would probably go too far, but it sends an important message. One of the problems with past boundary reviews has been that in order to get the numbers right, they have kept wards whole and created some very odd-looking constituencies that do not have anything in common with the areas they represent and their history.

I return to this point about communities all the time. One piece of evidence said that politicians very cleverly argue the “communities” point to get what they want in their seat, but it is an important point; it is not a political argument, and it is not about us. We represent areas: they are our communities. When the original proposal for 600 seats came out—I think it was in 2012—it was proposed that my constituency would run from my solid rural areas right into the centre of Leeds, in the Leeds East constituency. The previous MP there was George Mudie, a man who a lot of people know—certainly in Leeds and in this House—and for whom I have immense respect. He had been in public office for over four decades, I think; he was a leader of Leeds City Council, and a very distinguished one. I do not say that lightly.

He said, “This is appalling. I am an inner-city Member of Parliament. I represent the inner city; my whole professional career has been spent representing these communities.” He was wholly opposed to the Conservative areas of my seat coming into his constituency. Believe me, he would have won; more interestingly, he was more vociferously opposed to the proposals than I was. What it came down to, George Mudie was saying, was that these communities were not like communities, and the proposals broke the bond he had. I cannot remember exactly how long he served for, but I think he had been in some form of public office in those areas of that seat for over 40 years. As I said, he was a very well-respected man, who is missed in this House and in his communities.

When the boundary commission is constructing these seats, it needs to be very careful that it has regard to rule 5 of the 1968 Act, and the five sub-parts of that. That rule is very important when it comes to geography and trying to keep constituencies roughly as they are. I know that is not possible 20 years down the line—there have to be big changes—but one way in which the commission can try to achieve these objectives is to go below ward level. I do not believe we need to prescribe that—to say, “You must start with polling districts”—but in response to the questions that we asked in the evidence sessions, the evidence that we received was legitimately, “I think you need to go below ward level to get this right.” That is not the same as “You must start below ward level”—that is probably not the best approach, anyway. We would want to start with the easiest building blocks we have, and a lot of constituencies will already have those building blocks and communities within them. However, if we go below ward level, when we need to do things with the numbers, there are ways to do so.

There is a very strange little piece of my constituency, in a ward called Kippax and Methley. It is a stand-alone ward of Leeds City Council, where there are a couple of villages called Methley and Mickletown. The odd thing is that until 2010, a person would have to leave the constituency to get to those villages. They still would have to leave the ward to get to them, because the River Aire runs right through that ward and cuts it off, so they would have to go through the Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford constituency or through a different ward. Before I had Rothwell in the constituency, they would either have to go through the Morley and Rothwell constituency or through Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford. The communities are very similar: they were mining communities and the River Aire runs through them, so it is never a straightforward argument. There are some tweaks and twists around it, but the point I am making is that polling districts can be used to solve some of these slight problems.

I appreciate the amendment that the hon. Member for Glasgow East has tabled. It is an important probing amendment to get on the record why we in this Committee think it appropriate for the boundary commission to use polling districts to split wards. One of the reasons why I was persuaded that we should not prescribe polling districts as the starting point was the strength of the evidence about how those polling districts were themselves put together. I doubt it would happen, but it could create a gerrymandering situation later if those were the building blocks. That came out in the evidence. I am not saying that is what would happen, but it gives the potential for that to happen. It is therefore not right to bind the hands and to give temptation in that area, but it is important that the boundary commissions listen to the evidence. We shall explore this further when we come to the plus and minus 5% amendments later. This will be an important facet of that argument.

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[Christian Matheson]

I will briefly make two observations and pose a question that the Minister might be able to answer. On the amendment tabled my the hon. Member for Glasgow East, I think we heard in evidence that the Scottish building blocks reflect the reorganisation of local government in Scotland. As such, they are slightly different from those in England and Wales—perhaps in terms of size, although the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell has talked about wards of 17,000 people in Leeds, which are extremely large. I hope that we do not take our own experiences of wards in our areas—although I might do just that in a moment—and impose them on other parts of the United Kingdom where they are not appropriate.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Just to quickly address the hon. Gentleman’s point—it is something that I did not say—he is quite right to say that there are 17,000, 18,000 or 19,000 people in a ward in Leeds. We have similar issues in Kirklees, and I think Birmingham has been mentioned. I am thinking about specific areas where there are huge wards, created from a bunch of wards—in order to reach the right number—that contain totally disparate communities. That is the area we need to look at. In the metropolitan constituencies and councils, that is really important. That might help the hon. Gentleman.

[Christian Matheson]

I am grateful for that clarity. I am less keen on formally using polling districts as building blocks—we will come to this issue when we debate a different amendment—on the basis that they lack the formality of a consulted-on review by an independent body.

I have a question for the Committee that might be within the expertise of an hon. Member or the Minister. In my constituency, I already have split wards. I share one ward with my hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) and another with the hon. Member for Eddisbury (Edward Timpson). Split wards already exist, and it is not clear why there needs to be consideration of introducing them into the legislation now, if they are already possible.

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[Christian Matheson]

I am most grateful for that. That might well be the case, although the boundary review area was Cheshire as a whole. I suspect the boundary commission would not want to go over the boundary review area, but that might well be a possibility.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman is being most generous in giving way. There is a split polling district between me and the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon). I have about 26 houses from one of his large polling districts in my constituency; there is also the M1 motorway between my constituency and his. It makes no sense at all and creates some issues. It is noticeable that, in constituencies where there has been a local boundary change afterwards and there is a split across constituencies, the public are not really affected by that. That point was made in relation to what happens when we split wards and look at polling districts. The public are interested in who their MP, councillor and local authority are. I do not think they particularly mind if a different part of the constituency uses a different local authority.

[Christian Matheson]

With the greatest of respect to the right hon. Gentleman, he is now talking about split polling districts—he is doing my head in. My head is fried. I might just jump out the window.

On the contribution of the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton, it might be, as the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell said, that previous local government boundaries were superimposed on pre-existing parliamentary boundaries. That is entirely possible. If there is some clarification, that is fine. If split wards are permissible, that may go some way towards achieving our aims. I am grateful for that contribution.

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[The Chair]

I am not minded to pause the proceedings, because I do know what I am doing. I am trying to help everyone. If the Chair had lost control, we could do that, but we would have to have a long discussion. I ask the Committee to accept that, when we meet again on Tuesday, I will ensure that there is greater clarity to help Her Majesty’s Opposition and the different parties as they wish to scrutinise the Bill, and the Government as well.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Further to that point of order, Sir David. I am completely lost. Can you clarify whether we are debating amendments 6 and 7 now?

[The Chair]

I can clarify that very easily. I am not being rude, but, if hon. Members listen carefully, at the start of the proceedings I said, “We now come to amendment 8 to clause 6, with which it will be convenient to discuss amendment 9 and new clause 9,” and I then called Mr Linden. What I said at the start was correct; it is just finessing the process. Hon. Members rightly get confused about when they can move amendments and when they can withdraw them.

I say again to the Committee that next Tuesday, we will ensure that things run more smoothly. I have just been advised that it is worth stating the simple principle that the selection list is available in the room and shows the order of debate. As a Member of Parliament, I understand that, although that is available, it is a bit like finding out that we were physically looking at the wrong Bill in our evidence session. We are all human beings and we can all make mistakes.

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[Chloe Smith]

I am happy to do so, Sir David. I thank the hon. Lady for raising this interesting issue, which touches on some of the broader themes that were raised in the witness session, which we may not necessarily come to in the rest of our consideration.

As the hon. Lady explained, this proposal would insert a new clause into rule 5(1) of schedule 2 to the 1986 Act—the factors set I mentioned earlier—to add an additional factor that the commissions may take into consideration. As I understand it, she thinks there ought to be

“data from the Department for Work and Pensions about non-registered voters”

who are eligible to vote, should they choose to register.

We have already discussed, and no doubt will again, the fact that boundary reviews are conducted on the basis of the electorate. That is a major principle. The electorate are defined at paragraph 9(2) of schedule 2 to the 1986 Act as being

“the total number of persons whose names appear on the relevant version of a register of parliamentary electors.”

The register of electors is used, and has always been used, because it is the most up-to-date, verified and accurate source of information we have on those who are eligible to vote. Hon. Members who enjoyed the witness sessions will recall that we had some discussion about what it means to talk in terms of completeness and accuracy. These are the signal terms we use when we talk about the electoral register.

This proposal goes beyond that because it talks about those who are not registered. I understand the desire to catch and reflect those who are eligible to vote but who, for whatever reason, have not registered to do so. However, I have to tell the Committee that there are some significant practical considerations that argue against this proposal, because it does not take them into account.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am listening carefully to the debate. Is one of the important points that we represent everybody, as the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood said? We are using a set of data taken from a set point in time and collected in a set way, but we do not just represent the people on the electoral register. We represent everybody who is in our community, including everybody under the age of 18, who are not on the electoral register. Whether there are more people or not, we are not disenfranchising them from the service they may receive from a Member of Parliament. That is an important distinction.

[Chloe Smith]

Yes, I think that is right; I agree with my right hon. Friend’s characterisation. Certainly, I aspire to that in my work, and I know that will be true across the Committee. The fact of the matter is that when constructing a review, and the framework that sits around it, we need to make a definition somewhere. If we believe in equal constituencies, we have to believe in an ability to find a number to define equality, and that has always been taken to be those who are registered as voters.

[Chloe Smith]

May I put on the record how much I appreciated the illustration the hon. Gentleman made to the Committee earlier about those who have second homes in his constituency? He gave a powerful illustration of the problem at hand for those who have their second homes in his constituency, perhaps in a slightly different direction in income terms from the thinking in this proposal.

Let me come to what is being asked in this proposed measure. My principal, practical point, which I make to the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, is that the DWP does not actually have such a dataset. It does not have a dataset that specifically identifies eligible electors who are not registered to vote. In keeping with its purpose and powers, the Department holds data on those who pay tax or are in receipt of a benefit. That will certainly include individuals who are eligible to vote but not registered, and perhaps even the majority of such people—who knows?

My point is that we do not know that. However, those people would not be identifiable as such, because that is not the purpose of the DWP data. To create such a dataset, the Department would need to match its records with the electoral register, eliminate registered electors and generate a fresh, accurate list of those from its first dataset who are not registered but who are eligible to be. That would require a new data-matching process and a new power to share data for that purpose and place a new duty on the DWP. I think that the Committee will understand that I am not in a position today to accept such a new clause and argue that the DWP should proceed in that way. That is not within the scope of the Bill.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I assume that I am right, although I stand to be corrected, in saying that not all voters who are registered can vote in a general election. There are voters who can vote in a local but not a general election. That is another factor that would have to be taken into account.

[Chloe Smith]

Here we go on the discussion of the franchise, which is a very large discussion, and I think, Sir David, you would rightly suggest we stay off it and remain within the matter in hand; but my right hon. Friend makes the point well that there are a number of different franchises in operation in this country, and there are a number of arguments for other groups to be added to the franchise. There are common arguments that those under 18, or European Union electors, should be added, but they are not in the scope of the Bill before the Committee, and in my opinion that is right. We have the correct data set, identified under the 1986 Act, as amended, and upheld in the Bill .

I hope that hon. Members will agree that the requirement that the new clause would put on the Department for Work and Pensions would not be technically correct or proportionate to its aim. I might add—although it is perhaps unwise as it might reopen the debate that we had about how the boundary commissions use data—that there is a further step that needs to be thought through, about how any such data could be used by the commissions. To use an example that I know hon. Members will appreciate, DWP records are not broken down by electoral ward—the very thing that we just spent some time discussing as the primary building block for parliamentary constituencies. A quite complex matching process would be required. That would take some time and of course doing it would have a price tag attached.

That is not the principal subject that the Committee is considering. I welcome the interest of the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood in how to include all people in our democratic process—the process represented in the Bill. She is coming from an admirable, principled place in tabling the new clause, and I have great sympathy with it, because I, like her, want as many people as possible to be registered to vote and take part, and to be counted within the purview of the Bill. However, I do not think that the new clause is a correct or proportionate way to achieve the goal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ben Lake]

That is a good question. I am talking about amendments 6 and 7 in terms of the ability not to hold too tightly to local government boundaries. Of course, at the moment Cornwall Council is a local government boundary, and the amendments could allow for the Boundary Commission for England to introduce a cross-Tamar constituency, if it deemed that necessary.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am once again most grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow East for taking the time to table these probing amendments, because this is an important part of the Bill and we should discuss whether we can assist the boundary commission when it goes about its work in England. As we know, when the quotas come out, they are based on regions, with certain regions having to lose seats and other regions having to gain seats. It seems odd that regions are broken down into specific local government authority boundaries.

I was born in 1976 and I still get grief on my doorsteps in Wetherby about the 1974 redistribution of councils, and the fact that people are now in West Yorkshire and not North Yorkshire. People tend not to ever forgive local government boundary changes even when they are long ago.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

I thank the honourable Yorkshireman for giving way. [Laughter.] On that point, the case has been made by Cornish people that they do not wish to see a seat cross the Cornish-Devon border; I think that view is clear and unanimous in Cornwall. I support Cornish people in that. As a Lancashire lass, I would be very disappointed to see a constituency drawn up that crossed into the white rose county from my red rose county.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for that intervention. I have often said that if God had wanted Yorkshire and Lancashire to meet, he would not have put a huge lump of granite between us.

However, there is an important point here, namely that the arbitrary nature of local authority boundaries is a strange thing. In 1974, Leeds was the only authority that got bigger; all the other authorities got smaller but the Leeds metropolitan authority swept way out of what had been the Leeds City Council area and took in areas such as Pudsey, West Riding Council and all those areas.

My constituents generally do not consider themselves to be part of Leeds. However, I am a Leeds city MP, in a county constituency and a borough constituency, which gives some idea of how that is defined in the geography of election expenses. Equally, I remember a particular opponent in one of the elections who was trying to establish their credibility to stand in the area. They went to certain parts of my constituency waving the flag about what a strong Leeds Rhinos fan they were, in rugby league. I am not a rugby league fan, and am clear that I am not, but I do know that in the areas that said opponent was talking about being a Leeds Rhinos fan, the people were all Castleford Tigers fans, so I was quite pleased with that bit of electioneering.

[John Spellar]

Will the right hon. Gentleman tell us which football team he does support?

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

That is well on the record in my constituency.

[Mrs Miller]

Hon. Members are making important points about their parts of the country, which is underlining the fact that it is different in different areas. For example, the original boundaries of my own constituency of Basingstoke went very near the Berkshire border—not a million miles away from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury—and parts of that part of Hampshire used to be in Berkshire and have Berkshire postcodes. People who live in that part of Hampshire think they live in Berkshire, but they do not; they live in Hampshire. There might be a little less rivalry between Hampshire and Berkshire than between Lancashire and Yorkshire, which is why sensitivity on the ground is so important.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am not a historian, but there was no war between Berkshire and Hampshire—no wars of the roses.

[Christian Matheson]

I am listening to the points being made by the right hon. Gentleman and the right hon. Member for Basingstoke, but I am not quite clear where the consensus lies. There is an administrative issue that I would ask him to consider when making his argument. He might not want parliamentary boundaries to reflect local government boundaries—no, to be fair, he does not want that to be a primary concern—but there has to be administration of elections, and the fewer local authorities that a constituency is spread across the better.

Once those elections have taken place, there is also less of a workload for a Member of Parliament when he or she represents one local authority, or in some cases two. It becomes difficult to represent more than two local authorities, and the level of service given to constituents is less. Will the right hon. Gentleman take that into account?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making those points, because I have done some research into that. My constituency is covered only by Leeds City Council, and only five wards of it, because we have such big wards—I have 15 councillors in my constituency. In fact, in most of the Leeds constituencies, there are only four wards, which might give him some idea of where we are. In the Morley and Outwood constituency, the Outwood wards are under the Wakefield authority. The Selby and Ainsty constituency, which is in North Yorkshire, has North Yorkshire County Council, Selby District Council and parts of Harrogate Borough Council and Craven District Council. Many seats are spread over more than one local authority.

I have spoken to my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty (Nigel Adams)—he is my neighbour—and asked him about the specifics, such as whether it creates problems. He says that, overall, he is able to deal with those areas. There is a distinction between spreading across authorities in rural areas and in joint metropolitan areas, or things like that. Perhaps that is what the hon. Member for City of Chester refers to.

[Christian Matheson]

The right hon. Gentleman is being generous in giving way. I am concerned about constituencies spread across more than two council areas. Two is manageable, but I do not believe that three would be, which is why I disagree with his view that we should ignore local authority boundaries.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

As I said, my hon. Friend the Member for Selby and Ainsty has four local authorities in his constituency, but I seriously take on board what the hon. Gentleman says about more than two authorities. That still comes back to the point that I am making—a constituency does not have to stay within one local authority. We can keep like communities together and make that work—people want the communities that they understand—especially when a region has a situation: North Yorkshire is half a seat short and West Yorkshire is half a seat short, so there will have to be that crossover. It should not just be an arbitrary line drawn on a map; it is about having regard to like communities.

The only point that I am trying to bring out through this probing amendment—I hope the Boundary Commission for England will look at a way to do it—is that, although some of these things seem obvious, actually in communities they are not so obvious. That is why I used the example of the people of Sherburn in Elmet, who are in North Yorkshire and are covered by Selby District Council and North Yorkshire County Council. They are in a different constituency from me in West Yorkshire and the Leeds City Council area, but they think I am their MP because my constituency has the word “Elmet” in it.

There are local considerations that cannot be defined by the local boundaries. I hope that this probing amendment is able to bring out the need for guidance and advice, which we can give to the Boundary Commission and say, “These things are not as vital.” I am sure that it will have heard the hon. Member for City of Chester, who said that two authorities do not seem to be a problem, but it is stretching it when we start to move beyond that.

[Chris Clarkson]

I will start by disappointing the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, because there are actually a number of seats that cross the Lancashire county boundary into Yorkshire, including Ribble Valley, and Oldham East and Saddleworth. If she wants to hear how strongly people can feel about it, she should ask my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) what happened when he put a red rose on Earby library.

I completely understand the depth of feeling about crossing the Tamar. Actually, Cornwall is about the right size for six seats, so that is unlikely to happen. There are actually four seats in the north-west that cross the Mersey.

We need to look at the fact that local government boundaries, as they are currently constituted after Redcliffe-Maud, are actually fairly arbitrary. Bits were hived off from one area to another based on things such as local transport links and who went to work in what area. I think that a little more attention needs to be paid to natural community boundaries when we have to look at crossing county boundaries, which will inevitably have to happen in some areas.

The hon. Member for City of Chester makes a very important point about trying to limit it to as few local government areas as possible. To the best of my knowledge, in the north-west there is only one seat that contains areas from three councils: Penrith and the Border, which is geographically massive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way. There is something that I forgot to say, and it might add strength to his argument. There is a planning application that got kicked out by the Secretary of State that would have led to hundreds of houses being built right on the border of Wetherby, but in the Harrogate Borough Council area and North Yorkshire. Not a single person moving into one of those houses would have thought that they lived in Harrogate; they would have thought that they lived in Wetherby. That is one of the reasons why it got kicked out. Again, it is an arbitrary boundary. If someone knocks on the door of the people who live there, who are literally a 10-minute walk from Wetherby town centre, they will not say that they live in Harrogate.

[Chris Clarkson]

My right hon. Friend makes an extremely important point. Every Monday morning, my office sends a load of casework to the hon. Member for Rochdale (Tony Lloyd), because 30% of my seat is Rochdale and people do not automatically think that I am their MP. The reality is that if we are too prescriptive about local government boundaries, we will go back to having these odd Frankenstein seats where we are trying to conform with electoral boundaries. I do not think that being too prescriptive is the right approach.

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith]

Q On registers and their accuracy and completeness, we know that no electoral register is either 100% accurate or 100% complete. Obviously, there is a discrepancy between the numbers in the December 2019 register and those in the March 2020 register. Can you say something about that? We have heard different figures, but the difference between the number of people on the December 2019 register, at the time of the general election, and the number on the March 2020 register may be in the hundreds of thousands. People will have fallen off the register between December and March, so could you explain why that might be? [Interruption.] Did you hear the end of my question, Peter? I was just finishing when the bell started.

Peter Stanyon: Yes, I did. Ironically, the most accurate register of electors is arguably the register that is published with the additions the month after a major poll. In the case of the December 2019 general election, applications were flooding in, but what happens over the elections process is that people are deleted from the register as a result of returned poll cards information coming through to registration officers. Ironically, it is usually the month after an election, when the updates are made, that we have the most accurate version of the register. You may well see drop-offs from the register because your processing-through information has been returned to registration officers as part of poll cards going out, postal votes for deceased electors being returned, and other such issues.

One of the huge things with regards to the 1 December register is that it is not the most accurate and complete register—any registration officer will tell you that. Since the introduction of individual elector registration, the canvass does not register people any longer; it identifies potential applicants. As a result, whereas prior to individual registration everything took place during the canvass period and the register was as complete as it could be on 1 December, now the canvassing process seeps into January, February and March as it runs towards the traditional May dates. You will see fluctuations in registers that mean that the snapshot taken in December is not necessarily the most complete or accurate register; it is more likely to be among the ones that you mentioned.

The register on 2 March, which is being proposed, would provide a more accurate figure than that provided by the register in December, simply because it has taken account of all the additions that were made through the canvass and that went through as part of rolling registration ahead of the general election, and then cleansed the register as a result of the information gleaned from both the canvass and the fall-out from the general election. I hope that answers your question. I am not sure whether I got everything covered there.

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

Q Peter, I wonder whether you can describe polling districts and polling stations in more detail. You took me slightly by surprise. You said that when you have constituency boundary changes, you then have to do a review of polling stations and polling districts. I am slightly unclear about what that means and why that is. Is it because you might have a split polling district, or is it just par for the course? Can you give us more detail on that part of your statement? How does it play into constituency changes?

Peter Stanyon: Yes, certainly. The legislative background is that a local authority must subdivide every constituency in its area into polling districts, and then designate a polling place for polling stations. If there are changes to boundaries within a local authority area, they might not replicate the situation that is currently in place, so there would need to be a review of the provision to ensure that the newly defined constituencies and the building blocks within them are still applicable to the electorate at that stage.

We have just come to the conclusion of the statutory period for polling district review. The next one is due during the period between 1 October 2023 and 31 January 2025, when every single local authority must do this job. If a significant change to constituency boundaries meant that it was sensible to make those changes, there would be an additional layer to be done. Those same polling district boundaries are generally used for local government elections as well. It is about trying to get all the different layers of boundaries together so that the elector is, generally speaking, always going to the same polling station. If there is a combined poll, it is about getting the ballot papers for them in that particular station.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q To clarify, are you speaking about the review that takes place if a polling district is split in a constituency? Some polling districts might be dropped out of a constituency—some polling districts are coming in and some are being dropped—so you are splitting wards. Is it about redoing polling districts if a polling district is split? I am slightly unclear about the meaning of the exercise if the polling districts have not changed, even if they may have changed constituencies.

Peter Stanyon: There are instances where a review would be needed—whether that is a full review or a light-touch review—to ensure that the scheme is appropriate for the electorate at that stage. There are examples—this is from my personal experience—of where a boundary change has a polling station in one constituency but it moves to another constituency in a shared district because of the nature of the buildings available. That will add a degree of complexity, with two constituencies going in where previously there had been one, so there would be a need to make sure that each of the layers there still related to the constituency.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Thank you, Peter—that makes sense.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

Q I think you would argue that the local government boundary reviews are done in a robust and fair way. That obviously decides the electoral wards for local government, but it is not the same process for polling districts. Do you have any concerns about the idea of using polling districts as a potential building block for parliamentary constituencies?

Andrew Scallan: No. The polling districts are a very useful tool. Our relationship is very different from the parliamentary process. We engage with the local authority, and, as you will know, a feature of our work is forecasting five years from the date of our final recommendations, which is not a feature of the parliamentary boundary commissions’ work. We engage very closely with local authorities and talk through the methodology for doing that forecasting, and the polling districts are a useful building block. When people come to us with proposals, they will often use the existing polling districts to shuffle around, either to create new wards or consolidate thoughts on what ward proposals should be.

Polling districts can change—I know Peter Stanyon was explaining to you the process—but for us it is very rare that we have a change of polling district during our review process. Once we have come up with our new wards, there is the need for new polling districts to be created.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Before I move on to other things, what causes a polling district change? I think you have touched on some areas. What governs your construction of a ward? Why do you do your ward reviews, and what are you looking at when you construct new ward boundaries?

Andrew Scallan: From my previous life, the reasons for changing polling districts vary a lot. Sometimes councils take a policy that they do not want schools to be used for polling districts, which then requires other public buildings or even locations for temporary buildings to be thought through.

In terms of what goes through our mind, the legislation is clear that we can carry out a range of reviews. Some are periodic, and those are the ones where we try to go around the country, bearing in mind the number of authorities that we deal with. We also include two-tier county councils, which do not feature in the stats that the parliamentary boundary commission will use, but they are nevertheless a feature of our workload. We have periodic reviews, we have those that can be asked for by Ministers, and local authorities can sometimes request a review because they have chosen, for example—perhaps as part of an election manifesto—to reduce the size of the council. We will go in and start the review process, which for us has a series of starting points.

First, what will the council size be? Unlike with the parliamentary boundary commissions, that is a local discussion that takes place, during which we invite local authorities to think about what their governance arrangements should be. A figure is then arrived at, and we use that to divide the forecast electorate to work out what the average number of electors per councillor should be. That sets the ball rolling.

The other features involved will be whether a local authority has one, two or three-member wards, or a mixture of those. In the starting of our process, we invite local authorities and others to put in their suggestions about what the warding arrangements might be using those divisors, because we cannot claim to know every local authority in detail. We invite wide representation for local authority-wide schemes, but also from residents’ groups and community groups, who are only concerned about their own particular patch within their local authority.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q My experience in the city of Leeds, which I represent, is that polling district changes have been splitting polling districts when they have become too big, rather than creating new boundaries. Is that your overall experience? What I am really driving at is that there is a lot of discussion in this Committee about the construction of constituencies and using wards, and obviously the Bill allows for the future shape of wards to be taken into account when being built. As you say in paragraph 27 of your written evidence, you are concerned about your timetables not being rushed. You say:

“Whilst we support the concept of using the most up-to-date local government boundaries, the Committee will appreciate our concern that doing so should not, unintentionally, compromise the independence and integrity”

of our review programme, which I entirely agree with. Is it your opinion that it is vital for the boundary commission to try to stick to wards, or do you think that is irrelevant? It is useful, but with your five-year timetable and their eight-year timetable and things moving apart, do you think it really matters to constituents if the ward boundaries change and do not quite match constituency boundaries? Do you think that we are trying to blend a round hole and a square hole together?

Andrew Scallan: I am trying to work out what a round hole and a square hole together might look like. There is a real challenge. I do not wish to complicate matters, but in the work that we do, we also take a strong view about the arrangements that exist for parish councils, which vary enormously in size and scope. As well as polling districts, as part of our test around effective and convenient local government, we try not to cause too much disruption to parish councils.

People’s strength of feeling varies enormously and I would not like to generalise. We know that people are concerned about the names of wards. We often get people very agitated about that, which you would not necessarily expect, given that they are overlaid on the real map of any local authority area.

The important point for any organisation dealing with boundaries is to try to explain why they have arrived at the decisions that they have arrived at. For a ward, it might be entirely appropriate to include a ward that has, for example, a major road down the middle of it. If that ward is split by that major road for parliamentary purposes, that needs to be properly explained in the formulation of it. It may well be that that will cut a community in two, but it may also be the only way to balance the criteria that we always juggle with, which is trying to get the electorate as close as possible to whatever quota we work to.

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

Q Mr Scallan, thank you for giving us your time this afternoon. As you will detect from the accent, I might be about to tread on some unfamiliar territory. I was wondering whether you might be able to comment on something about Cornwall. I appreciate that the work of the Local Government Boundary Commission is unlikely to have to address any cross-Tamar local government wards, but you mentioned that you have inevitably undertaken quite a lot of discussion and consultation with local communities across England as part of your main work. I was wondering whether a strong sentiment, or any sentiment for that matter, to maintain the territorial integrity of Cornwall is something that you have picked up in your work.

Andrew Scallan: The strength of views in Cornwall is well known. In terms of our work, it was all self-contained in Cornwall. We try not to get involved in discussions about parliamentary boundaries when we are doing our reviews, not least because we do not want to confuse anyone, especially the community groups that we are dealing with. We have no view about crossed boundaries. We work to our legislation, which basically tells us to stay within local authority boundaries.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford]

Q Earlier you mentioned that you favoured 650 MPs. You were concerned about going down to 600 and giving the payroll a greater proportional say. You also in answer to the Minister made a reference to political interference. Was Parliament right to stop the number being cut down to 600, or was that political interference—or was trying to go down to 600 actually the political interference? I am not sure what point you were making.

Darren Hughes: I suppose it would be political involvement at both levels, would not it? It was the decision to propose going from 650 to 600, and then another decision to reverse that and go back. I think that there was a political element to that. I guess the other thing is, right at the very beginning, making sure that these things are written for all time, not just one time, one particular cycle or one particular Government or Opposition—just doing these things in a very straight way so that if you are up it works for you and if you are down it works for you as well.

I do not think the decision to go from 650 to 600 was driven by any particular democratic principle. It was part of a response to a crisis at the time, and that has not stood the test of time because it was not grounded in much more than that. Also, probably it is easy to agree to a cut in the number of MPs until you realise that it also involves the boundaries of the remaining 600. That might have focused minds a wee bit.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Why is there an assumption that all adults want to be on the electoral register?

Darren Hughes: That is a good question, because I guess it is philosophical. The duties and responsibilities of being a citizen do not actually require much, but being on the electoral register means that you can, right at the last minute, decide whether you will vote. It also helps us with the way we structure democracy and ensures that the way the boundaries are done is open and transparent. For people who want to be involved in elected politics, it is important to know the number of people in the country for whom they can campaign with their ideas and policies. Those are all some basic responsibilities that just come with the duty of being a citizen.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Have you asked the people who do not want to be registered why they do not want to be registered?

Darren Hughes: Yes, we have. We have done work on that in the past with organisations that try to reach people who are not on the register. Often there is a mixture of reasons. Some people do not know about it and are just oblivious to the fact that it exists or that it is a legal requirement at the present time. Other people have not engaged with the question of why politics matters, which is why we think citizenship education is so important. Once you get people into a discussion on that, it can change things. In a large, dynamic society like this, there are always a lot of people who are in the middle of things. Their hectic lives and situations sometimes mean that registration falls off the bottom of the to-do list. We should be doing positive things, such as showing people that registration is simple and free, to promote politics as being a good thing for the country and a good thing for society.

[Ben Lake]

Q Thank you, Mr Hughes, for your evidence this afternoon. It has been interesting to learn a bit more about the system in New Zealand. On that point, can I briefly clarify one thing? Am I right to understand that when the equivalent of the Boundary Commission in New Zealand approaches establishing boundaries for constituencies, it takes into account the actual population, as opposed to the number of registered electors?

Darren Hughes: Yes, that is correct. It uses the census, so everybody is taken into account for the drawing of the boundaries. There are different qualification rules to being an elector, but the way that the constituencies are put together is based on the number of people who were living in an area when the census was done.

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.

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (First sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 18th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

You are very welcome with us virtually. Thank you both for taking the time to join us and for allowing the panel to proceed.

We are now in public session to hear evidence from Tony Bellringer, secretary to the Boundary Commission for England, and Isabel Drummond-Murray, secretary to the Boundary Commission for Scotland.

Before I call the first Member to ask a question, I remind the Committee that questions should be limited to matters within the scope of the Bill. We will stick to the timings in the programme order. The Committee has agreed that for this panel we will have until 12.20 pm or thereabouts.

I ask any members of the Committee who wish to declare any relevant interests in connection with the Bill to make those declarations now.

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

Isn’t that all of us?

[The Chair]

I call the first witnesses. Will you please introduce yourselves? We will start with you, Isabel.

Isabel Drummond-Murray: I am Isabel Drummond-Murray, secretary to the Boundary Commission for Scotland.

Tony Bellringer: I am Tony Bellringer. I am the acting secretary to the Boundary Commission for England.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

We have four more questions and about 11 minutes on the clock, though I will push it on to get all the questions asked, because the evidence we are getting is very good for the inquiry.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q It is a pleasure to serve under you, Mr Paisley.

Thank you for your evidence, Mr Bellringer. It has been really informative. I want to explore the building blocks further. To pick up on the polling district, you said that you had done a piece of work and commented that it was difficult to stay on top of the reviews that came through—to be able to understand them—but, as you have also just outlined, you cannot build on shifting sands. At some point, you have to draw a line. In terms of using polling districts to build in this review, do you have a set of data sat there that you could use?

Tony Bellringer: Not this time round—because it was so expensive last time, in time and money, in the resource that had to be put in to develop it, and yet it was so instantly out of date. In the actuality, when we came to it, because in the last review we were still using wards as our building blocks—it is still our general policy to use the wards as the basic building blocks—we only split half a dozen in the final recommendations. So the times that that would need to be used under our existing policy are few compared with the amount of time and effort that needs to go into producing it, and given how quickly it goes out of date, we just felt that it was not worth doing this time around.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Your evidence is based on 600, of course, so a much bigger size. I am a West Yorkshire MP, but to look at Yorkshire as a whole region, if I take the situation in North Yorkshire, building as you say on consideration of rivers, mountains and motorways, the constituency in Richmond is knocking almost 85,000—according to the figures up to this point, which we were using in November—and you have to bash around all the North Yorkshire seats to get them roughly into an area. That means, if you are going to go with wards, you cannot get around the fact that you will have big mountain ranges in the way, that people will have to leave the constituency to get to other places in it. I am thinking one of the solutions is the Great Ayton ward in North Yorkshire, which you can look at to come into Thirsk and Malton, to make the numbers add up. The knock-on effect goes down and into West Yorkshire.

It is important that we get some steer on how you could get away from using wards, which is a tradition—it is not legislated that it must be wards—because it negates having to go outside the 5%, which is another Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe recommendation, that for free and fair elections seats should not vary by more than 10%, and would allow the objective of keeping communities together, of keeping county constituencies together and away from borough constituencies. In my city of Leeds, my seat is a county constituency; the other seven seats are borough constituencies. That would be giving regard to keeping those existing seats together.

I am asking both commissions about the practicalities of what recommendations you would make to the Committee before we finalise these laws—how to get to a situation in which you can use the smallest building blocks to cause the minimum disruption, which is what you are really after when looking at constituencies. I am seeking some comment on that. Mrs Miller explored it well, but just outlining—

[The Chair]

I think he has got the question, Alec. We are really appreciative.

Tony Bellringer: The policy of using wards is fairly long standing, and it has always been discussed with the representatives of the political parties in the meetings before each review commences. In the past, they have generally been supportive of that. It goes to the statutory factor of having regard to local authority boundaries, because a ward is a local authority boundary. We view a ward as almost a representation of a local tie; generally speaking, when the Local Government Commission does its work it should try to bring people of the same communities into one ward. We use that almost as a substitute.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q I have one more question for both commissions. When you have a large constituency and perhaps have different authorities within it, has any member of the public ever made a complaint about other parts of the constituency, which may be tens or hundreds of miles away from where they live? Are their complaints based around their local community? Do you get complaints from elected politicians or members of the public about other areas of the constituency in those purer terms, or is it just about their local areas? Does it really matter to a constituent what the rest of the constituency takes in, as long as their local community is kept together?

Isabel Drummond-Murray: We certainly had a number of complaints about large constituencies bringing together communities that did not feel that they had anything in common with each other. Where possible, we made changes to reflect that. The tight tolerance of 5% meant that, initially, we had to come up with some ideas to put out for consultation. For example, we had a constituency in our initial proposal that stretched from rural south Perthshire down to urban Fife. There was very much a feeling that, “We do not have anything in common with that part of the constituency.” So yes, I think people take account of more than just whether their local community is kept together; some people have concerns about other communities that they are associated with.

[The Chair]

Q Do you agree with that, Mr Bellringer?

Tony Bellringer: Yes.

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Second sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 18th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Christian Matheson]

Q This is the same question I asked Mr Pratt: how responsive and flexible has the Labour party previously found the commission, the assistant commissioners and the consultation process, in terms of the representations that the party has made? How flexible are they in responding to the party’s representations?

Tom Adams: The first thing to say is that I am relatively new to this responsibility in the party. However, generally, they are quite flexible and accommodating. Particular MPs clearly have quite a large role in that, and their submissions are often taken quite seriously. The commissioners clearly do an excellent job of trying to balance all the competing priorities, but they are sometimes potentially constrained by things such as the 5% threshold. However, within the guidelines that they have, I think they do a good job of taking everything into account and coming up with proposals that are genuinely reasonable for everyone.

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

Q I am seeking clarification on your justification against the automaticity. You gave the example of its being at 5%, when it could be 7.5%. If the Bill went back for approval by Parliament, is it to be taken as read that, because it is set at 5%, your party would vote this down because you think it should be 7.5%? If that was to happen, the 2024 election would be fought on the current boundaries, which are 25 years out of date. Where does the balance come?

Tom Adams: Whether we would vote it down is probably a question for the politicians in my party, rather than for me; I work in a technical role at head office. Obviously, it is likely that if the Government supported the proposals, they would still pass Parliament, even if Labour voted against them. I think there is a role for Parliament in finally approving those proposals when they come back, as has been the case for previous reviews.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q You rightly point out the size of the metropolitan boroughs in Birmingham and in my city of Leeds, which can easily have 18,000 or 19,000 people. A threshold of 5% or 7.5% will not stop you having to split wards in those big areas—they are enormous. Are we not talking arbitrarily about numbers, when we just need to get down to trying to get within the OSCE boundaries and working out the best way to split these enormous metropolitan wards?

Tom Adams: In the last review, not that many wards were split in the end. I think you are hearing evidence later from academics who have done some research on the difference between 5% and 7.5%, and the better outcomes that 7.5% produces. It is not quite an arbitrary number. Their research found that even the difference between 5% and 7.5% has quite an impact on the outcomes. While there are obviously likely to be occasions when you still need to split wards, clearly any increase in the threshold will improve your ability to maintain community ties and to not have to split wards or create constituencies that seem slightly odd.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I just add that the last time, we were able to form much bigger constituency numbers.

Tom Adams: Yes, that change will have an impact.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

Q I want to pick up on the point about wards and to explore your answer. Is there any particular reason why you do not think that wards should be split? An ordinary member of the public in a city often does not know what ward they live in. Prior to becoming involved in politics, I was not really aware of where I lived. What is the democratic principle?

Tom Adams: It certainly creates challenges from the perspective of political parties and others who are reliant on electoral geography boundaries. Given that wards are created by local Boundary Commissions to have some sense of community ties, and they are created for a reason, if you split them you are further cutting community ties, and potentially creating more challenges, in the sense that people are cut off from people who they would see as firmly part of their community by cutting across a ward. Obviously, you cannot always come up with a perfect arrangement.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Just as a quick point of principle, do you believe that voters in Scotland should have a greater representation than voters in Yorkshire, which has a similar population?

Geraint Day: This is coming down to the constituencies of the United Kingdom vis-à-vis the nations of the United Kingdom. This is one of the consequences of our current constitutional set-up, without a parliament for England, which Plaid Cymru is quite supportive of. The other option if you have equal levels of constituencies in the UK is a reduction in the representation of the Celtic countries of the United Kingdom. Certainly, we do not support the reduction in the number of MPs.

[Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)]

Q Speaking as someone who cut his political teeth in Wales, actually in Ceredigion, the idea of language and culture is quite an important one. I am keen to understand and probe more into the language element. If we take Ceredigion as an example, when you have been faced with scenarios in previous consultations where there has been a crossover and, as in the example given before, there is a predominantly Welsh language community with one that is less so, how would Plaid Cymru engage with that process? What would be the thought process that you would go through in that scenario?

Geraint Day: Under the rules the Boundary Commission operates with, I can give an exact example from the last review. The Boundary Commission originally proposed putting Llandrindod in with Ceredigion. Llandrindod is in Powys on the other side of the Cambrian mountains from Ceredigion. That was a very strange decision. The argument on local links was that the main trunk road to Ceredigion goes right by Llandrindod. The subsequent argument that we put together, which I think was supported by every other contributor to the response, was that that should not be the case because the linguistic links and levels of Welsh speaking in Llandrindod are much different to those in Ceredigion. Instead, we proposed to look north into Machynlleth and the Dyffryn Dyfi area and take that into the proposed constituency of Ceredigion, which was subsequently adopted by the Boundary Commission.

That worked because there was unanimity of view among those giving comments to the Boundary Commission. Where you would find difficulty is where the different parties and individuals who give evidence differ in their approach. If one or two of the parties had said, “No, we want Llandrindod to go in,” we could have ended up with a very different end result from the Boundary Commission. If it had been required to consider the impact on the Welsh language right from the start, it would not even have made the initial proposal. That is the main reasoning behind it and that is where we come from.