Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and David Hamilton

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I cannot give any explanation for that. All I know in relation to the Secretary of State for Wales is that, with regard to another matter, I asked on the Floor of the House in June for a meeting with her on a cross-party basis and she said she was quite happy to have one as soon as possible. The first date that was provided was this afternoon. The Secretary of State did not turn up and her officials had booked the wrong room. It is therefore quite possible that if any consultation on the matter under discussion had been planned, it would not have actually taken place.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that nowhere will he find a requirement that a discussion should be held if the boundaries in Scotland have to change—yet again? There should also have been a discussion with MSPs about the Scottish boundaries, and about local authority areas. That would have made more sense in terms of our working together and coming up with a solution that is not a patchwork quilt.

[Chris Bryant]

Or, indeed, just a muddle. One of the things that Welsh Members have been trying to say during the discussion of this Bill is that on the combination of polls, lessons need to be learned from the situation in Scotland, where the boundaries for MSPs are no longer coterminous with those of Members of Parliament. In addition, in Scotland but not in England or in Wales, wards are being split between constituencies because of the local government arrangements that have been made as a result of large single transferable vote wards.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Chris Bryant and David Hamilton

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Well, my point remains. Neither in 1815 nor in 1850 were miners able to vote, because they did not qualify under the franchise. In 1885, they were allowed to, but women were not. One can make significant changes to the system, although I think the hon. Gentleman holds a different view from me about reform of the House of Lords. That is where I agree more with the Government Front-Bench team. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman had any particular tadpoles or nincompoops in mind—I can see some images flitting across his mind now, which suggests he had some specific people in mind.

The hon. Member for Broxbourne referred directly to the argument that the Deputy Prime Minister made in January in favour of cutting the House of Commons to 500 Members and the number of Ministers to 73, but of course that is not at all the proposal before us. The right hon. Gentleman has adopted neither measure. It might be that having picked one tune on “Desert Island Discs” on Sunday, he changes his tune entirely when it is replayed on Thursday. That is clearly the situation we have at the moment.

Our system has changed over the generations because it has not been considered right and proper that Ministers thought of their salary or pension as just a tiny part of their remuneration for being in hock to the Crown and that all the other monopolies and benefits accruing by virtue of how they operated their ministerial office brought in far more money. It was Edmund Burke who, in 1782, first introduced changes that meant that Ministers of the Crown had to rely on the properly arrived at financial provisions, rather than on the previous system which was completely and utterly corrupt. As Macaulay said of the 18th century:

“From the noblemen who held the white staff and the great seal, down to the humblest tidewaiter and gauger, what would now be called gross corruption was practiced without disguise and without reproach.”

Many in previous generations exercised their ministerial functions solely on the basis of financial corruption. Ministers accumulated enormous fortunes by virtue of being Ministers. It is right and proper that we do not have that system today, and if anybody in the British political system does accumulate, by virtue of their political office, an enormous fortune, there is something going wrong—IPSA must have allocated everything that we have all claimed to just one individual Member.

There was substantial change in 1831 through the Select Committee on the Reduction of Salaries. It suggested a completely different structure, which ended up with William Pitt the Younger, when he was First Lord of the Treasury, earning just £5,000 by virtue of that post, although he had other posts that earned him some £4,300. Today, that would be a considerable amount of money for ministerial office, but at the time MPs were not paid at all.

Today’s system relies on two pieces of legislation from 1975, the Ministerial and other Salaries Act, and the House of Commons Disqualification Act, to which the new clause in the name of the hon. Member for Broxbourne refers. Both specify that the number of Ministers shall be 95. The Ministerial and other Salaries Act also lays out how many Cabinet Ministers, Ministers of State, Whips and so on there can be, and it is my simple contention that if one wants to limit the number of Members and ensure that the proper legislative scrutiny function of this House is performed, one has to cut the number of Ministers.

[Mr David Hamilton (Midlothian) (Lab)]

When the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) spoke to his new clause, he made the very good point that, at a time when we are talking about reducing not the number of councillors throughout the UK, but the administrative costs, the chief executives, the directors and so on, it is incumbent on us to talk about changing the Executive and reducing the Executive’s power.

[Chris Bryant]

That is right. If we really are to have new politics—that rather amorphous term to which the coalition agreement alludes—it must accept something that we the Opposition were too reluctant to accept when we sat on the Government Benches: that Parliament, when it is free to do its job, does its job better than when it is constrained.

The constraints are multiplying. The number of parliamentary secretaries is not quite growing daily, as the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle suggested. He made it sound as if they were breeding and reproducing. The number is not growing daily. However, it is certainly true—