Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I took my title as being “of Kentish Town” but it could easily have been “of Ystradgynlais”. However, I felt that spending the rest of life explaining how to spell that would be even harder than it is for my noble friends to learn how to pronounce Scottish names. However, I come not just from Ystradgynlais but from Brecon Road in Ystradgynlais. It is from that point of view that I speak today. This is part of an ongoing concern. I spoke on Second Reading of the memories, which I was taught about as a child, of people in the Empire dividing up in pencil on a flat map boundaries that were going to have enormous implications for the local community. Part of this debate is undoubtedly about that, and a geographical area like Brecon and Radnor is a good example of the furthest extent to which you can describe a community in any sense of that.

The particular interest in a sense follows beautifully from the last speech, because in Wales, looking at this very much from the point of view of the people who live there rather than from the point of view of the person who represents them, we have lower car use than in other parts of the kingdom. Indeed, car use among women in Wales is much lower. The idea of being able to travel to meet your Member of Parliament is important. It is not simply a question of the Member of Parliament going to meet the constituents; the constituents want to travel either separately or as a group to meet their Member of Parliament.

Ystradgynlais, for example, very much has its own culture, its own feeling and its own identity. We have our own male voice choir, our own banks, solicitors’ firms, our Co-op, post office, citizen’s advice, library, our miners’ welfare and our own cottage hospital. There is an identity there. People share a commonality of concerns as well as of experience. Indeed, although unusually for my family I am not a Welsh speaker, there is a bit of our own Welsh there as well, which will not be recognised everywhere. I am sorry that the Reading Clerk has left; he is a great expert on this. Certainly when I lived in Anglesey for a time, my grandmother’s Welsh was not even understood up there. We, of course, reckoned that our Welsh was the best.

The issue in Wales is not simply of a community that feels its identity but of travel. My noble friend Lord Lipsey described very well the issue of driving, but imagine being a woman with no access to a car and therefore travelling by bus and trying to see her Member of Parliament. It is almost impossible to do. I have a great fear that boundaries are being drawn for numerical reasons rather than from understanding a community—particularly in the valleys, although it will be the same with water, and there will be others, as I argued for the City of London—and that ignore a recognisable community in which one can travel within a reasonable time and can have that joint representation. If we draw boundaries that ignore geographical size, we will not let down the Member of Parliament, because they will rise to the challenge; we will let down the constituents.

Brecon and Radnor only just works now. It may be at the limit of what you could call a community. It does cope, but if it were any larger it would be impossible and very sad for the people who live there.