Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Third sitting)

Cat Smith Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

Q Thank you so much, Professor Hazell and Dr Renwick, for giving evidence to the Committee this morning. I want to thank you for your blogpost on 5 June, which was in response to our Second Reading debate, and explore some of the issues that you raise, including that the

“safeguards against a government that wanted to interfere are relatively weak.”

Of course I am not suggesting that that is the position of the current Government, but obviously when we legislate we need to safeguard against any interference by future Governments who may wish to interfere with the process.

You explained that you have various concerns about the Bill and you suggest various solutions to strengthen it. What action do you think could be taken to improve the Bill, in order to safeguard us from political interference? Also, can you expand slightly on some of the solutions that you outlined in that blog, for example an amendment perhaps to legislate to bar members of or donors to political parties from appointment to the commission, as is the case with local government?

Professor Hazell: Shall I answer that question? The first point to make is that the greatest risk of political interference is the one that Alan Renwick referred to in his first answer—namely, the ability of Parliament at the final stage to vote down the orders made by the boundary commissioners for their proposed changes. The strongest single point in our submission to the Committee is that in future the boundary commissions’ reports should be implemented automatically, without any opportunity for Parliament to intervene at that final stage.

As we also argue in our submission, however, there is a risk that once Parliament loses the ability to control the final decision, the Government may seek to influence the work of the boundary commissions prior to that final stage. I think, Ms Smith, that was the burden of your question, and in our submission we propose four ways in which the independence of the commission in future should be strengthened, mainly through tightening up the appointments process.

Briefly, those four ways are as follows: first, that in future the commissioners should be appointed for a single, non-renewable term, as with many other constitutional watchdogs, which I can enumerate if you want further details; secondly, that they should be subject to the same political restrictions as members of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, which performs a very similar boundary defining function; thirdly, that the deputy chair of each commission should sit on the appointments panel, as indeed they did last year in the selection of two new boundary commissioners; and fourthly, that the appointing Minister should be required to appoint only from the names recommended by the panel.

Therefore, we are recommending that paragraphs 3.2 and 3.3 of the “Governance Code on Public Appointments” should be disapplied for these appointments. I remind members of the Committee that those paragraphs allow Ministers in some cases to appoint someone who has not been deemed appointable by the assessment panel, and in exceptional cases Ministers may decide to appoint a candidate without holding a competition.

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[Chloe Smith]

Q Mr Williams, thank you for joining us this morning. I thank all the political parties that have given some technical engagement with the Bill in its development. Please set out what you think of the Bill and any particular characteristics you would point to.

Chris Williams: I can run through our thoughts briefly. Thank you for the involvement we have been invited to have with yourself and civil servants.

We are supportive of the change to 650 MPs. We are also pleased that the electoral register data to be used has moved back to March 2020. A minor improvement would have been to move it to December 2019, but that is still a good move. Changing the future reviews to every eight years is positive.

I have some concerns around how the constituencies will end up looking in terms of representation of the communities that we want to see well represented as part of the system we operate within. The 5% tolerance limit is potentially challenging. We have some concerns around how all this will be perceived in Wales. The last speakers spoke about automaticity. I have commented on perception and the perception that any involvement from the Government could be seen as problematic without the ability for Back Benchers to stop any recommendations once they come back from the commissions.

Finally, if I have understood things correctly, in future reviews, the Bill says the deadline in any year for the commissions to report back to the Government or the Speaker is 1 October. In future, there would not be very long before a general election—just seven months. That does not give a great deal of time for reselection and candidate selection to take place and for smaller parties and independents to get their act together, so to speak. I think moving the date forward to something more like July before a general election would provide a bit of protection there.

[Cat Smith]

Q Mr Williams, thank you for coming to give evidence before the Committee. To push you slightly further on something you have already alluded to, what are your views on the very tight tolerance limit of 5% in the legislation that we will be moving into scrutiny of on Thursday? How does it relate to those community links, and what issues do you think that very tight tolerance will throw up when it comes to the realities for communities?

Chris Williams: That is a good question. I guess I should say—I appreciate it is beyond the scope of this Bill—that the Green party does not support the first-past-the-post system, but one of the benefits of it is the very strong link between Members of Parliament and the communities they represent. If members of a community perceive that their constituency is of a very bizarre make-up, or that they have been stuck together for some convenience, that breaks down that benefit that currently exists with MPs.

Certainly from my experience last time around, when we were seeking 600 constituencies with a 5% tolerance limit, some very bizarre constituencies were put together. I looked at the west midlands make-up in some detail, and some of the constituencies were incredibly bizarre, with an awful lot of complaints. One was effectively a sausage-shaped constituency that was very, very long—I think it was the Birmingham Selly Oak and Halesowen constituency. The only thing that the boundary commission, bless them, could find to operate within the tolerance limit that had a community tie was a canal, but of course if you take that to its extremity, you will end up connecting some places that are very far away from each other. Giving the Commission the flexibility to have a 7.5% variance in extreme circumstances, where it is necessary, would help avoid some of those problems. I can see some real problems in rural areas as well, where I think a greater tolerance would really help.

[The Chair]

Just before I turn to Mrs Miller, I want colleagues who are sitting in the Public Gallery to realise that I am aware that they are part of the Committee. If they want to ask a question, they should indicate to me and then speak from the microphone, as Mrs Miller has done.

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[The Chair]

There we are: the Bill introduced by the hon. Member for Wellingborough inadvertently got some further scrutiny from the Committee.

[Cat Smith]

Q I direct my question to Professor Sir John Curtice. I would like to ask about the mathematical accuracy of the boundaries that we are drawing up. Obviously, I do not think anyone would disagree that we would like constituencies to be as equally represented as possible, but I have quite a lot of concern that the data that we are using is not accurate, because the electoral register, as you said in your previous answer, is about 85% complete. A huge proportion of people are missing from electoral registers. Can you see any opportunity in the Bill, Sir John, to increase the accuracy of the data that we are working from? Do you have an opinion about the best source of data to use in drawing up constituencies, so that they could be sized most accurately?

Professor Sir John Curtice: The short answer is that the Bill is not concerned with the process of electoral administration. The process of electoral registration deals with electoral administration. As Professor McLean has just pointed out, frankly the Bill does nothing material to change the rules on redistribution, including on the basis on which the electorate is used to do that. I simply pointed out in my response to the Minister that there are limitations to the data. We know that those limitations are somewhat greater in, for example, inner-city constituencies with a highly mobile population, than in constituencies with lots of older voters and a more stable population. That, undoubtedly, is correlated to some degree with the political proclivity of constituencies.

As I indicated earlier, as long as we wish to make a distinction between permanent residence and the right to vote, and as long as we do not wish to have a national identity card system, it is difficult to think of an alternative to the system we have. The question therefore is whether there are ways of improving the accuracy of the register. One thing we can note is that although we moved from household registration to individual registration—a somewhat controversial move—it is not obvious that it has fundamentally changed the character of the problem before us.

[Cat Smith]

Q For the purpose of drawing boundaries, where it is most important that there be as much accuracy as possible, would combining other sources of information be a way of improving the accuracy of the electoral roll? Perhaps, for example, data held by the Department for Work and Pensions could be added to that on a register, to ensure that it was more accurate. Obviously, that would not be applied in elections; it would just be for the purpose of drawing constituency boundaries, so that the original data source could be made more accurate.

Professor Sir John Curtice: The answer to that question, to be honest, is technically beyond my competence, in the sense that I guess the question that the boundary commissioners would ask is whether it is possible to get DWP data—which refers to the right to work, not necessarily to the right to vote—at the level of local government wards, which are the principal building block used by the boundary commissioners in building parliamentary constituencies. I would not be surprised to be told that the answer is no, but I do not know. Again, DWP data might rely on whether people have a national insurance record, but that is not the same thing as citizenship.

[Cat Smith]

Q I will direct a question to Professor McLean, who I hope now has the right Bill in front of him. Back in 2010, Professor, you wrote an article for The Guardian about the boundary review commencing then. I was interested to see that in it, you progressed the argument that the most accurate way to ensure that every vote counted equally would be to move towards proportional representation. That is outside the scope of the Bill, but it shows up the conflict that we have. Would not the way for every vote in the United Kingdom to count equally be to have just one constituency—the United Kingdom—and a system of proportional representation, even though that comes into conflict with the communities that we represent? Ultimately, if we are to maintain the constituency link, we have to have a percentage variance between seats; we cannot have every single seat with exactly the same number of electors. It is a question of where we draw the line.

How can that balance be struck? Is the 5% tolerance most appropriate, or if we are not moving towards a system of proportional representation, should there be a larger tolerance, so that community ties are considered more important?

Professor McLean: For clarity, it is important to separate the question of proportional representation from that of the 5% tolerance, because they are different questions. As I evidently said in 2010—you have better recall of what I said than I do—a single-member district system cannot be proportional. That is a mathematical truth. Legislators must make a choice, and the choice that the UK Parliament has made is reflected in this Bill and many others: the single-member district system.

I do not think that it would be a good use of this Committee’s time to talk about whether the UK should switch to proportional representation; with your permission, Chair, I would rather duck that part of the Member’s question.

On equality, the Member poses an important question: is it correct that the equality criterion should override the other ones—the ones on local ties, and on the constituency boundaries following local government ones where possible? My view, which is an arithmetical view, not a political one, is that it is right for the equality criterion to override the others.

Becoming somewhat more political, my observation of boundary inquiries is that since local ties are not further defined in the Act, I have observed on several occasions that for a number of very shrewd operators, who will be well known to members of this Committee, Conservative local ties go one way, Labour local ties go another, and Liberal Democrat local ties go yet another. Each of them, because they are paid to do so, makes a plausible case before a commissioner, who in England is deliberately chosen not to be from the area. Moving on from the mathematics, my view as a political scientist is that the local ties criterion is eminently manipulable, whereas the plus or minus 5% criterion is not.

Is the criterion wide enough? In the United States the courts have said that as near as possible to 0%— not 5%—is the accepted tolerance for US congressional districts. So, it is possible to have a tolerance lower than 5%, but that is not in this Bill and it is not in the earlier Acts.

[John Spellar]

Q Should we have districts?

Professor McLean: Well, since we have more time than we thought, we could have a discussion about US congressional districts, but Members may wish to move on.