Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Ben Lake

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

[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)

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Ben Lake

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

[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.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Ben Lake

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

The right hon. Gentleman made a very good point earlier about representation and what it means, and the importance of working the patch. I agree with the point that the right hon. Member for Basingstoke made about the different nature of our constituencies. I would point out, however, that during the summer months the population of my constituency doubles, in part because of the very large proportion of second homers. When they come to me, they have an address in my constituency. I do not ask them whether they are registered to vote in Ceredigion; I serve them, because they have come to me for help. I make that point as a note of caution. We should bear in mind that more factors are at play than purely the electoral register.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. That moves us on to clauses and amendments later in the Bill that we will be able to debate further. My constituency is a county constituency. I am in the city of Leeds, but the other seven seats are borough constituencies, so it is not fair to compare me directly. There is some argument over how big Leeds Central is. It varies from 78,000 voters to 94,000 because it has such a transient population. However, the seat of Leeds East has only 66,000. I know that some Opposition Members might not particularly miss the seat of Leeds East today, but I will not ask them to comment on that. Those are the differences in just one city, among neighbouring seats. Leeds West, on the other side, is a different size to Leeds North East. Seats vary hugely within just one city by tens of thousands of votes, not necessarily just a few. However, I take on board the hon. Gentleman’s point.

I have two final points to make. The right hon. Member for Warley mentioned the OSCE report earlier in his point of order, and I picked up on it as well. The report says that

“making members of parliament (MPs) accountable to their electorate and creating a link between the MP and voters…is undermined when MPs know that they will acquire new voters with new constituencies before each election.”

I do not necessarily agree. I think that we are honourable enough to represent the people we represent right until the end. I am sure that everybody in this room, as soon as they are elected, pays no regard whatever to the voting intentions in areas of their constituency. I have worked every single area of my seat, which had a traditional mining area. The village of Allerton Bywater was a colliery. It was at the frontline of the miners’ strike. I stood in local government for it in 2002 and received 8% of the vote. In the last general election, I received 52% of the vote. It changes. We go in and work an area, and none of us takes any of our constituents for granted.

I therefore think that that is a slightly disingenuous comment, but it points to the fact that at some point things have to happen, and political events may happen towards the end of a Parliament. If we want just to delay the change and kick it forward, we are running into the fact that we could say, “Let’s have it come into effect straight after a general election, so that we all know what we’re doing next time and there’s time to adjust,” which plays into that argument. When is a good time to do it? From our point of view, I do not think that there is one. There is an automaticity point here.

I understand the amendment that Opposition Members have tabled; in fact, I think that the hon. Member for City of Chester made a very reasoned and well placed argument. My view, though, is that we have not removed Parliament’s ability to have its say in the process for two fundamental reasons. First, Parliament is having its say at the very beginning, in the criteria laid out. Secondly, there is still nothing really—we can argue about technicalities, but they have all been overcome in the past two or three years—preventing Parliament from stopping the change, if it wanted to, before it came into effect.

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Ben Lake

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

[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 ---

[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.