Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Fifth sitting)

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Shaun Bailey]

My right hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely correct in her analysis. Although equality is obviously the foremost consideration, it does not eliminate those links with communities either. I think she definitely said that in her contribution. She has made the point time and again. I represent a seat with 65,500 constituents and she represents a seat with 83,000. The figures speak for themselves, so I do not think I can add to what my right hon. Friend has said.

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

I want to pick up on the point made about the review allowing local input. The hon. Member for City of Chester described the notorious case of Mersey Banks, which was corrected after a review. Furthermore, to pick up on the point made by the right hon. Member for Warley about the lack of imagination of the boundary commission, does my hon. Friend agree that if the Boundary Commission for England were willing to take the same approach as, for example, the Boundary Commissions for Scotland, for Wales and for Northern Ireland, where wards can be split, that would correct some of the more eccentric seats that have been come up with?

[Shaun Bailey]

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point on these matters in his usual expert way. We cannot treat this exercise as arbitrary; we have to give the commission some credit. It has intelligent people, who have a degree of imagination about what they can do within the scope of these rules, and they are boundaries or guidelines; they are not so arbitrary that there is no room for manoeuvre, which I appreciate is part of the argument that Opposition Members are making.

I will try to round off my comments as quickly as I can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I apologise, Mr Paisley, for missing part of the debate, but I was in the main Chamber for business questions and came here as soon as I could.

I sympathise with the idea that we should set the parameters for this process, and then remove the politics from it and allow a clean process to come to its conclusion. That is a very attractive proposal and it is easy to see the strength of that argument, on the surface. However, when we listened to the evidence from the experts, one of the things that came across absolutely clearly —I should say that I am speaking in favour of the amendment—was that they do not understand the role of parliamentarians and they do not understand the relationship that parliamentarians have with their constituencies. That came out loud and clear, even from those who were more sympathetic to the argument that place is important in people’s minds in how they vote.

My fear grew as I listened to the evidence that if we hand this process over to bureaucrats or academics, in the absence of understanding of that relationship between MPs and the communities they represent, and of the affinity that MPs develop with those communities, we will end up with a mathematical exercise. We have set the parameters at 5% and basically we just draw rings around the population across the country 650 times, and then we will satisfy the criteria. And by the way, within that, we will do a bit of manipulation to try to meet some community needs.

For me, that hits fundamentally at the heart of what the democratic process is all about. I mean, the origin of politics is the marketplace—the agora—where the popular view would prevail. That is really where the roots of democracy lie. What happens in that marketplace—in that common place within a community—is that people discuss and debate matters, and express views about their common experiences. And eventually, they come to a collective view.

To look at what happened at the last election, in many communities up and down the country, people were sick and tired of being left behind and felt that their communities were forever in decline while others were benefitting from being part of the European Union, the globalisation of the economy or whatever it was. Collectively, they came to the same conclusion and there was a seismic shift within those communities.

That shift moved against the Labour party in what have been called the red wall seats. Some common experience within those communities caused a large body of people to come to a collective view. Place and common experience are important factors in the way people form views about how they want to be represented. To undermine the connection between place and the most common experiences of the community hits at the root of the democratic process.

[Chris Clarkson]

The point about place is fair and important, but the reality is that even under the current boundaries there are many seats that simply do not represent a cohesive or coherent grouping of population. I look at my own constituency, which is one of the red wall seats. I have Middleton, which is Manchester-facing; Heywood, which is Lancashire-facing; and a third of the town of Rochdale, where the people are deeply embittered about the fact that they are not in the Rochdale constituency. Whatever process is used, there are going to be some communities that are either split, orphaned or combined with areas they do not necessarily look to, purely because of the electoral mathematics and geography. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that?

[Clive Efford]

Yes, there has to be, within this process, some degree of equalisation as to the weight of people’s votes and we have to try to achieve that as much as possible. I am arguing that, within that, we have to respect the importance of place, location and community in the democratic process. If we start to pick those apart just to meet a numerical requirement, we will diminish and undermine the ability of those people to seek representation that makes their views known collectively—how they feel about their area and their collective experience—through a democratic process. It is important that we understand them.

Why I feel that this is important comes back to us. I will move on to that point further this afternoon, but it is about how accountable we are, for what we do, to our communities. That was dismissed in the evidence we had from the experts. They did not value or feel that we value the views of our constituents. Actually, that is how we get re-elected. If we ignore our constituents, we will find ourselves unemployed very quickly. We have to show, as much as we humanly can, that we are listening and sympathetic, or empathetic, to the views of the people we seek to represent, and that we will take those views and seek to get answers. Even if we cannot get the answers that they want, we will get them a decent answer to the questions they are posing. That accountability of MPs to their communities is important.

In this process, we are accountable too. We cannot just go to a boundary commission and say, as one former Member of Parliament for my constituency said once, although not to the commission itself, that it would be fine to draw a line down the middle of Eltham High Street. The constituency goes into Bromley on the south and Greenwich on the north. People in my community were up in arms that our community should be divided between two constituencies in that way and that the integral centre of our community—the High Street—should be divided.

People value place. They feel that it is important that representation bears some resemblance to place and takes into account the entirety of the community, and its common characteristics. That is an important process. If I were to advocate such a split, at the election I would not expect many people who valued the area to vote for me. If I was going around saying, “Well, it doesn’t really matter. Draw the line at the High Street. It’s all fine,” it would not be fine. The hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton has rightly pointed out that we represent many communities. My constituency could be called Eltham, Plumstead South, Shooter’s Hill, Charlton South and Kidbrooke. Many different communities and villages have come together in the conglomeration of the suburb of south London. People do identify with those areas. I could even add Eltham Heights and New Eltham; I could name every street.