Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of Straight Statistics, a group working against statistical abuse by the media, companies, advertisers and the Government. The Minister, in an earlier debate, used in justification for the cut in the number of Members of Parliament by 50 an alleged saving of £12.5 million—he will correct me if I have this figure wrong, as my hearing is not as good as it was. He is nodding in approval, but I cannot approve of that statistic.

If you take the average cost of each MP and multiply it by 50, you get to the figure of £12.5 million or thereabouts. However, that is of course an entirely phoney way to do it. There will be more constituency cases and more people for each MP to write letters to. The workload will not change. The only thing that you save by having 50 fewer MPs is the MPs’ salaries, with a total saving of about £3 million. Perhaps the difference between £12.5 million and £3 million is regarded as insignificant—

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My Lords, I wonder if my noble friend would take that a little further. If the Government want to save £12.5 million, they have to make sure that costs elsewhere do not rise. The level of work needed to be done by the Electoral Commission will involve the employment of more staff—a recurrent expense year on year. I do not think that the Government have thought about that. If they are going to tell us what this measure is going to save—and the only argument that I have heard from the Government is that this will save money—I think that we have the right to know precisely what it will cost in other areas, so that we can see the real costs.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. There are bags of extra costs in this Bill, including £80 million well spent on the AV referendum—well spent, that is, if it gets the result that both the noble Baroness and I would like to see. I am, however, confining myself to the saving on MPs, because that is the one argument that the Minister has made this afternoon. My point is that he has used a totally bogus figure—inadvertently, I am sure. If he wants to dispute this later, he can put a letter in the Library and we can no doubt correspond about it. It is extremely worrying if a Minister has inadvertently misled—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that clarification. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, as a former government Chief Whip, espouses the free vote. On the whole I agree with him, but not all the time; in fact, probably not most of the time and probably not on this Bill. The noble Lord said that I should demonstrate publicly why we are doing these things and I shall try to do that. Noble Lords opposite came forward with what I thought were entirely rational arguments. However, I will try to demonstrate that, however rational they were, they start from a false premise. I will not say to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, that his amendment is defective. I do not know whether it is or not. It is of no interest to me whether it is defective or not. I know what he was trying to achieve and I accept that he had limited time to get it right, and so I think it is unnecessary to say that. I greatly admire the quality of the research done by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton. He went all the way back to 2003 and found a quotation from the Prime Minister himself, saying something that he would no doubt now regret. That shows just how far he has come over the past few years.

A number of amendments have been tabled to change the number of constituencies required by the Bill to more than 600. We discussed this issue at length on the ninth day of Committee, and I can understand why. I shall set out the Government’s thinking for today’s debate and explain why we are clear that there is a case for making what we consider to be a modest reduction in the size of the House. First, our proposal simply aims to end the upward pressure on the number of MPs and to make a modest reduction in the overall number. With the exception of the review after the creation of the Scottish Parliament, which took effect in 2005, all other boundary reviews since 1950 have seen an increase of between four and 15 seats. The fourth and fifth reviews of the Boundary Commission for England noted that the rules are currently drafted in the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986, which contributed to this problem. The fifth general review laid out the details of the issue and noted:

“We illustrate, in paragraph 2.11, how the consequence of the interplay of the existing Rules, other than Rule 1, is a tendency for an ever increasing allocation of constituencies in England in future reviews. This could be changed if the Rules were altered”.

The Boundary Commissions have no formal role in advising on the rules that they must apply. However, as the bodies which have extensive experience of the practical result of applying these rules, their views are clearly important. The changes proposed in this Bill will address those concerns, a point underlined by the British Academy which notes that the revised rules were a very substantial improvement on those currently implemented by the Boundary Commissions, have a clear hierarchy and are not contradictory.

Secondly, making a modest reduction in the overall number of MPs will allow a saving to the public purse. We feel that it is right to lead by example at a time when the whole of the public sector is being asked to make savings. We estimate that reducing the size of the other place will save £12.2 million annually, made up of a reduced salary cost of £4.1 million and £8.1 million in reduced expenditure on MPs’ expenses. I shall turn in a moment to the increased workload raised by many noble Lords. The fundamental point here is that at a time when the whole public sector is being asked to do more with less, this is a relatively modest saving but one which we think is worth making. There is no reason why MPs and the House of Commons should not be more efficient. These amendments would wipe out any prospect of reducing the cost of politics, while we believe that we should lead by example.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

Will the noble Lord tell us what the Government’s estimate is of the increased costs in the Electoral Commission?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I have three amendments in this group: Amendments 27AA, 27BA and 27BB. These are technical amendments and I do not think that they have any political implications at all. Certainly I do not think that they do anything to challenge what the Government regard as the principles of this Bill. I am rather puzzled that in the definitions of local government boundaries on page 12 in Clause 10(3)(a), reference is made to the boundaries of each county, each district and each London borough, but no reference is made to the boundaries of other unitary authorities. If the noble Lord is able to tell me that other unitary authorities are covered by these definitions as already stated in the Bill, I have no problem; but I do not think that they are. There are unitary authorities that are not counties or London boroughs. Surely it would be desirable in principle if the Boundary Commissions, in applying rule 5(1)(b) on page 10, were to seek to avoid crossing the boundaries of other unitary authorities when drawing up the boundaries of constituencies. Professor Ron Johnston made that point in his evidence to the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform of another place. He suggested that it was no more than an oversight that other unitary authorities had not been included within the clarification of terms in the Bill.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

My noble friend might like to know that a couple of years ago Durham County became a new unitary authority and is no longer counted as either a county or as being in any of the other categories. There is, none the less, a real pride in being the new unitary authority within the old county of Durham. It would be very weird if we had to stray from wards within that area into Tyneside, Wearside or, indeed, into Cumbria, at the top of the county, and Northumberland. It seems to me that my noble friend has hit on something important—certainly in Durham we would take it as very important indeed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top]

We are God's own country.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Technically, perhaps the county of Durham is no longer a county council as such; I do not know. It seems to me all the more important that there should be recognition in the Bill of the important contemporary reality of unitary authorities.

Among his observations in debate on a previous amendment, the noble Lord noted that parliamentary constituency boundaries crossed the boundaries of a significant proportion of unitary authorities. That is not a good reason to surrender those unitary authorities, assuming that there will be no concern among the people who live within them that their integrity should be preserved when drawing parliamentary constituency boundaries—and, very importantly, the working relationship between Members of Parliament and the local authorities governing the areas, the communities, which they represent. It must be desirable that Members of Parliament deal with the smallest possible number of local authorities. The complexity, the multiplication of tasks, the time-wasting and the cost involved in Members of Parliament having to deal with a proliferation of different local authorities overlapping with their constituencies is clearly undesirable. I hope that the Government will accept that the Bill should be amended on the lines of my amendments.

I say just a word on the question of wards as building blocks. If it has to be accepted that, with the tight tolerance around the electoral quota, it will be more commonly the case than it has been hitherto that individual wards will be bisected in the drawing up of constituencies, some administrative questions follow. What is to be the subdivision of wards that the Boundary Commission will need to take account of? If it is to be polling districts, how can we be sure that local authorities will not redefine polling districts so as to frustrate the purposes of the Boundary Commission?

Those administrative processes ought to be sensibly related to each other. If we are to see the fragmentation of wards, we need some sub-unit which the Boundary Commission will respect. If it is to be the polling district within the ward—which it could be—we need a guarantee that the polling districts will not be arbitrarily chopped and changed. I beg to move.