Parliamentary Constituencies bill (First sitting)

Clive Efford Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 18th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q Do you agree with that, Mr Bellringer?

Tony Bellringer: Yes.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

Q I think it is the first time in all these years that I have been on a Committee that you have been chairing, Mr Paisley, so it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship.

My question is about electoral registration. Do you find that it fluctuates between general elections? Do we get a higher registration level at the time of a general election, and should that be the point at which we count the population for future reviews?

Tony Bellringer: One of the few things that we do in between reviews is collect the electorates and see how they change from year to year, but we get only an annual snapshot. If it is around the time of a general election, the electorate numbers tend to go up. Unsurprisingly, people are encouraged to join the register and are motivated more to do so. I know there are arguments about the accuracy of the register at any given point in time. I do not feel qualified to comment on that, but it is certainly true that the numbers go up around the time of elections.

[Clive Efford]

Q You might not want to comment on this, but would it then make sense to calculate from a high point like that, so that it is perhaps more accurate at the next general election?

Tony Bellringer: If you are sure about the accuracy at that high point.

[Clive Efford]

Q Could I ask about your relationship with the Minister’s office when you are carrying out a review? The Minister said in her opening remarks that she was looking forward to working with you. How much information do you share with the Minister’s office? The Bill removes the final approval from Parliament, and we would want to scrutinise how much influence the Minister’s office can have on the process.

Tony Bellringer: I am very pleased to say that we hold ourselves up as a model of independence in the process. During the substance of a review, we do not share with the Government, Government officials or Ministers any information about the substance of what we are working on that is not communicated to the public at large.

[Clive Efford]

Q Were you consulted on the drafting of the Bill?

Tony Bellringer: They did communicate and trial some of the proposals in the Bill with us in advance. They sought our views, specifically on administrative points and on deliverability.

[Clive Efford]

Q Is what you provided to the Government publicly available?

Tony Bellringer: Those are not published, generally.

[Clive Efford]

Q Perhaps you could add them to the notes that you are sending us. May I ask about consultation? There was a lot of consultation in my area that seemed to go reasonably well. Then one individual did a mathematical calculation, not taking any heed of all the local arguments made about common interests and geographical areas, and the Boundary Commission plumped for that at the last minute after all the consultation. That makes the consultation very frustrating. How much weight do you put on local input into consultations over the interests of somebody doing a disconnected mathematical calculation on a map?

Tony Bellringer: We have been very clear in the past that we do recognise strength of local feeling. If there are lots of people locally saying a particular thing, that carries a lot of weight with us. However, it will not be an instant knockout if somebody comes up with what we feel is a very well argued solution that might not have been proposed by anybody else previously that in our view respects more of the different factors and across a wider area and provides a better solution overall—maybe not for an individual constituency, but overall.

[Clive Efford]

Q Could I add a last bit on the consultation and the issue of flexibility? When you hear the arguments about local ties and suchlike, are there occasions when, perhaps in a minority of cases, you would want to go beyond 5% and would want that flexibility in order to address that local concern?

Tony Bellringer: It is something that we always used to be able to do in the past and did do on occasion. Prior to 2011, there was not this hard maximum and minimum, but we would still be aiming to keep constituencies within a broad range. Occasionally we would breach that if we needed to, to provide a better holistic solution.

[The Chair]

Chris, you have time for one quick question.