Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

That is not what we are trying to do. We are saying that there should be a certain number of constituencies, there is a variance of 10 per cent between the smallest and the largest, there is a Boundary Commission, and there will be an appeals process. I know it is not an appeals process that the noble Baroness likes, but people’s views will be heard and taken into account.

I always like to be positive when replying to noble Lords, but it is hard to find a way to be positive on all this. My noble friend Lord Roberts of Conwy made a point about Ynys Môn extremely well. I would have said the same thing about the bridges. It is a different kind of island from those in Orkney and the Western Isles. I hope that noble Lords opposite feel that I have tried to do justice on this Bill. Of all parts of the country, I think there is a genuine feeling in Cornwall. There is a unified view from the four MPs. However, we reject the argument made in Cornwall because we want clarity and similarity to stretch right across the country. Cornwall has many links and communities of interest which stretch across the Cornish border. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Myners, will agree that a large number of Cornish residents work in Plymouth in Devon. Therefore, there is a transfer of people on a daily basis which crosses local authority and county borders, and I do not see why that should not work in Westminster representation.

[Baroness Corston]

Is the Leader of the House aware that if one wants to upset someone in Cornwall, one should suggest that they have an affinity with Plymouth, or with Devon in general?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

It was a rather complex set of decisions, simply because there is a significant number of these chapels. They had been listed rather unsystematically over some years, and English Heritage and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport thought that it was time to take a more systematic look at them. In many cases, we raised the listed status of these chapels. However, I do not wish to detain the House further on that point. I simply use it to illustrate something important, which I regret to say is that this Government are apt to ignore and underestimate its value.

It is insensitive and foolish of the Government to legislate to bring about a system whereby parliamentary constituency boundaries are to be drawn through slavish adherence to rigid mathematical formulae, with a minimal tolerance of 5 per cent on either side of a quota of 76,000 electors. That does not leave adequate scope for the boundary commissioners to take account of very important considerations of community, history, tradition, identity and local ties. In this debate on Cornwall—as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Goss Moor, suggested —we are talking not simply about a particular set of circumstances there, although those considerations are very important, but about the unwisdom of a policy that discounts and effectively disparages a passionately held sense of identity on the part of people living in particular communities. That is not a wise thing to do in politics. It is the course that the Government appear determined to persist in. It is foolish and I hope that they will agree to the amendment of my noble friend Lord Myners, not only in deference and respectful response to views that are unanimously and vigorously presented across the political parties and across the communities of Cornwall, but in recognition that throughout the country people believe and insist that their local identity should be respected and expressed in the patterns of their parliamentary representation.

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, I support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Myners. Thirty-five years ago I was the regional organiser of the Labour Party in the south-west of England. I spent a lot of time in Cornwall. What struck me was that whenever I went there, I would be asked one question: what is the weather like in England? People would talk about driving through Devon to get to God's own country. When I was in Devon, they would say that you have to drive through God's own country to get to Cornwall. That illustrates the tension between the two counties.

During the boundary reviews of the 1970s and 1980s, I assisted on behalf of the Labour Party. One thing that was always said was: “We don't even care if we are underrepresented so long as we keep the county of Cornwall”. I noted that the two noble Lords who spoke in this debate who have represented Cornwall in the other place—as I represented Bristol—addressed themselves to whether there should be five or six constituencies, but did not acknowledge the truth of what they must know: that their county would not wish its border to be crossed. That was my experience then. On subsequent visits to Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, I have seen no evidence that there has been any change of view. Given the antagonism between Devon and Cornwall, it would be profoundly misguided to have any constituency crossing that boundary.