Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Bim Afolami Excerpts

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

[Mrs Miller]

Q Thank you, Dr Larner, for your evidence today. It is incredibly helpful in the Committee’s deliberations.

Under these provisions there are four protected constituencies, as you know: two are on the Isle of Wight, near my own constituency of Basingstoke, and two are in Scotland, but there are none in Wales. When the proposal was to reduce to 600 constituencies, it was difficult to give protection to Ynys Môn, yet under this proposal it is easier to do so and stay closer to the potential threshold for constituency sizes. I have tabled an amendment to that affect, which I do not know whether you have had a chance to look at. Can you see any problems with introducing such an amendment into this legislation? I declare an interest as I was brought up in south Wales.

Dr Larner: On the face of it, I certainly do not see any problems. I have also seen some people discussing the idea of some of the constituencies on the west coast of Wales, where there are far more Welsh speakers and very rural constituencies, being considered for something like that. Obviously, Ynys Môn is not as isolated geographically as some of the Scottish constituencies, but, when you consider that the Isle of Wight is involved in these protections, it is reasonable to suggest that Ynys Môn should be too.

[Bim Afolami (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)]

Q Dr Larner, you mentioned at the beginning that you studied electoral and voting behaviour. In the evidence sessions we have heard a lot about the impact on people when they feel that local ties are not respected or that their community is being broken up by a constituency boundary.

Have you come across any evidence from the last few boundary reviews on what a more disruptive boundary review does to voting behaviour, as regards the parties or candidates people vote for, or whether they vote at all?

Dr Larner: Not necessarily in the way you put it, but there is interesting evidence if you compare strategic voting in Scotland and Wales, especially at devolved elections. In Wales, constituency boundaries for devolved and UK general election elections are coterminous, which is a silly word meaning the same, and in Scotland, they are different; they do not overlap. There is a lot of very interesting evidence on those elections. When people are faced with different boundaries, how do they calculate who they will vote for? There is some evidence from Scotland that there is more confusion when faced with different boundaries and boundary changes. For example, people are not always sure which is the strongest candidate, or which is the favourite or second favourite candidate. There is evidence that those boundary changes, which are consistent and repeated—they are not one-off events—cause some confusion among voters.

[The Chair]

Dr Larner, you waited a long time, but the Committee had plenty of questions for you, and we are very grateful for the time you spent with us. Thank you.

Examination of witnesses

Dr David Rossiter and Professor Charles Pattie gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

Q Finally, are there any other opportunities to strengthen or improve the Bill in Committee?

Professor Pattie: One of the areas that I was quite pleased to see in the Bill was a re-examination of how the inquiry and hearings are held, because that is problematic.

However, there is still a bit of a challenge for the public hearing process, because the areas in which those hearings now operate are just so incredibly large. There was some discussion earlier in your deliberations about ways in which the process might be improved to allow greater flexibility in local discussion. But you must remember that you are talking about entire regions, and about entire countries in Scotland and Wales, and people can turn up at a hearing in one corner of the region or country to talk about a seat in quite another part, and the chances of having a meaningful conversation about those proposals are remarkably small.

I am not sure that I have a clever proposal for you, but I think that is something to worry about; the extent to which those hearings really produce helpful information in all bar a few cases would be a concern that I have. I cannot suggest a fix for you, but if you want to look at something, that is another area that it is worth just having a bit more thought given to it.

[Bim Afolami]

Q I suppose that this question is for both of you. If you think back to previous reviews that have taken place—admittedly, obviously, under different rules—to what degree of magnitude do you think this review will end up changing the existing constituencies?

Professor Pattie: Big is the very short answer. This is liable to be one of the most disruptive reviews that we have seen for quite some time. As Dave mentioned earlier, on our estimates you are looking at major disruption again, and again, and again, into the future, especially if you hang on to that 5% tolerance. So, this will be big. Further reviews will also be big, so this will become a feature of the system going forward.

Dr Rossiter: If I can just add to what Charles has said, when we did our 2014 exercise we estimated that approximately half of seats would experience major change at this first review, but we based that on 2010 data, because that was the data that was available at that time. So, we were looking at rectifying changes that had taken place over 10 years, plus the change to the rules. We will now be looking at an exercise that has to rectify the changes over 20 years and I think that we will be looking at something like two thirds to three quarters of seats experiencing very significant change at this coming review.

Contrary to what I think are some of the optimistic views that were expressed earlier in proceedings, I see little chance of county boundaries remaining intact in large parts of the country. I think that most county and unitary authority boundaries will need to be breached. I also think that many more constituencies will be split across local authorities, and vice versa, and many more seats will have orphan wards in them.

Again, looking at this in an historical context, there have not been that many reviews that have had to deal with 20 years of changes, so it is probably not too helpful to concentrate on the disruption this time round; it was always going to be like this. I think that what is much more worthy of consideration in terms of legislation is realising the longer-term implications of it, because the danger is that if these changes are not realised, you only have to go back to the 1954-55 debates in Parliament, when MPs suddenly realised what had happened in the previous legislation and said, “We do not want our constituencies changed on this basis. Why are we having all this change?” Four years later, legislation was introduced to reduce the need to change to meet an arithmetical standard. My fear, obviously, is that that will be repeated.

[Bim Afolami]

Q That is interesting. Out of interest—I could go and check this now, but I do not have it in front of me—on the 2018 review, which obviously did not happen, for various reasons that we have discussed already, what percentage of seats underwent what you would consider major revision?

Dr Rossiter: I do not have that figure to hand. One of the problems is that this affects different parts of the country differently, so, for example, during the 2018 review, the south-east of England was little affected because it was set to lose only one seat during that review. Now that we go back to 650 seats, because of the growth in the south-east of England, the south-east will gain seven seats. Gaining seven seats inevitably results in a huge amount of change.

So, it can be helpful to look at what happened in 2013 and 2018 as exemplars of what results from this, but this is the problem: the devil is always in the detail. It is always in the specific geography of the area. It is always in the specific number of electors—whether a county, for example, has an integer entitlement or a non-integer entitlement. I have near me the example of East Sussex. East Sussex at the moment is entitled to eight and a half seats. With a 5% tolerance either way, that will mean that the East Sussex boundary has to be bridged. Kent is perfectly okay. West Sussex is perfectly okay. Therefore, in sorting out the problem in East Sussex—this is all provisional on 2019 data not changing an awful lot—we will need to see something that goes across the county boundary in one way or another.

Until we know the final figures, we will not be able to be absolutely certain on any of these issues. At least half of seats were changed during the 2013 and 2018 reviews, and when I say that the forthcoming review would be between two thirds and 75%, that is simply a reflection of the fact that it is trying to deal with that extra amount of time. What seems surprising is that maintaining 650 seats does not necessarily help a huge amount. It helps slightly, but not a great deal, in minimising the disruption that is going to happen. I hope that that is helpful.

[David Linden]

Q Thank you very much, Professor Pattie and Dr Rossiter, for coming before the Committee. I have a couple of questions that I want to explore with you. You may have seen in previous oral evidence there has been some discussion of the idea of the building blocks for constituencies, whether those are used by polling districts or wards. Can you offer a view on that? Perhaps Professor Pattie would start off.

Professor Pattie: This is an interesting issue, isn’t it? The issue here again is obviously over, partially, the practice of splitting wards—which clearly can be done—and partially the pragmatics, if you like. I know you have had lots of evidence already about data sources, software availability, etc. I will leave that to people who are more expert in handling those data systems, but clearly that causes an issue. I think I would raise just two points, here. First of all, harking back to our 2014 McDougall Trust report, we did try there to estimate the relative effects on disruption of playing around with the tolerances versus playing around with ward splitting. Ward splitting certainly helped to reduce the amount of disruption, but in our estimates it did not reduce disruption anything like as much as widening the tolerances moderately. The second thing you have to bear in mind here is that we are talking about disruption to communities. Remember how the Boundary Commission’s local government wards operate. It tends to be quite strong on the idea that, in building the ward suggestions, it is trying to represent people, so when you split a ward, arguably you are splitting a community—you are doing the very thing that you are trying to avoid, to avoid the thing that you are trying to avoid, if that makes sense. You end up in a strange circular process in which you disrupt a community to save a community. Where the white line is on that is anyone’s guess, but ward splitting is neither technically a global panacea, nor conceptually a panacea, precisely because in splitting a ward, you might well be splitting a community.