Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill: Committee Stage

David Drew Excerpts

Tuesday 19th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I am grateful, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will be mindful of your injunction and try hard to stick to it.

I am going to do something radical—I will try to stick to the motion—but first, since this is a debate, I want to deal with a number of points that Members have made. I should declare my interest as a member of the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Public Bill Committee. We spend very pleasant Wednesday mornings in Committee Room 11, where civilised discussions take place between the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan), myself and the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) for the Scottish National party. We gambol around the issues as far as we are able to, staying in order of the motion to adjourn. It is certainly not purgatory.

I will repeat, albeit at greater length, what I said in an intervention on the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz). We have received a message from the Boundary Commission for England. I received it as a Member representing an English seat, and I presume that the other boundary commissions will write to Members who represent other parts of the United Kingdom, if they have not already, to confirm the process that they have undertaken. The Boundary Commission for England carried out a consultation that was widely publicised. It received more than 35,000 individual responses, which represents a great deal of interest from members of the public. The commission has confirmed that it will report its recommendations to the Leader of the House on or shortly before 5 September to give her the opportunity to lay the report in Parliament before the conference recess. I raise that point because it sits squarely with the timing issue.

I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), but I have to confess that even when I was the Minister taking through the Bill that became the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, I was not overrun by constituents grabbing me to discuss the finer details of that legislation. Clearly his constituents are different, taking a massive interest in these constitutional matters, but it was not my experience that people were hanging on to every detail of such matters.

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank my near neighbour for giving way. If his constituency was emasculated, as mine was, a different number of issues might have been raised by those said constituents.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, but the point about the Boundary Commission review is that there has been clear public consultation, with 35,000 responses from participants, meaning that this was a democratic process. The Boundary Commission has undertaken a clear process in coming to its conclusions.

People outside the House may think that September is a long way away, but it is only four full sitting weeks away, so it is sensible that we do what the Government suggest and wait for the Boundary Commission reports to be produced, for the Government to have an opportunity to introduces Orders in Council, and for the House to make a decision. I listened carefully to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire, who did not take an intervention from me, but he was factually wrong in saying that a motion in the House should trump what the boundary commissions are doing. I fundamentally disagree, because the commissions obey an Act of Parliament—the law of the land passed by both Houses of Parliament. I know that he does not accept the other end of the building as a legitimate part of Parliament, but it is until that is changed. Parliament passed an Act and that is the law of the land. That is what the boundary commissions are following, and a motion of the House does not trump an Act of Parliament; only another Act of Parliament can trump it. Fundamentally, I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s premise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

I hear what the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) says, but I do not agree with her. However, I do agree with the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double). The problem is that the House needs an early indication from the Government of what they propose to do with the boundary review’s proposal, as laid by the Government, to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600.

I know that enough Conservatives feel unhappy with what the proposal implies. It was always going to be controversial, notwithstanding the fact that the Government thought that they had the majority of the House behind them. My contribution will be short, because I just want the Government to test the will of the House to see whether they have the support to reduce the number of MPs to 600. I do not believe that they have that support. It would be much better to clear that matter out of the way and avoid the boundary commissions ending up in a stramash, with them feeling that they have wasted a lot of time in trying to take forward something that is unacceptable to the House. I hope that they will be able to start again and carry out a process that they would find a lot easier without being under the imprimatur of having to reduce the number of MPs by a ridiculous amount.

The boundary review could not achieve the 600 figure without doing things to my seat and to that of the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay whereby we would end up with something that is fundamentally flawed. The House has always understood that the constituencies are based on not just number, but location.

[Steve Double]

rose—

[Dr Drew]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, who may help me.

[Steve Double]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s comments. I used to feel very much like him, but does he agree that we are now so close to the boundary commissions’ reports—only four sitting weeks—that we as may well wait? Voting on the commissions’ submissions will be the test that he talks about.

[Dr Drew]

That might well be true but, to be fair, the boundary commissions must to some extent try to pre-empt things and read into what has happened in successive debates and discussions—not necessarily just in the Chamber, but as result of what has happened in the Chamber. We should have an early vote and clear away some of the unnecessary disagreement.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock) said, this is entirely based on the idea that we can just chop 50 people out of this House without making a difference, but that is fundamentally flawed. This is either gerrymandering for party political advantage or it is just about cost saving. As I said on Monday, the easiest way to save costs would be to get rid of the other place. That might be controversial, but it would be more democratically acceptable to many of our constituents who feel that this primary Chamber should be protected. Some of our constituents will unfairly end up in a constituency that they do not know, despite coming from one in which they had at least some idea of what the location meant, with the knowledge of who their MP was and that they could feel some confidence in them.

Let us get on with it and have an early vote, let us dump the notion that we can just chop 50 MPs, and let us go back to 650 MPs. We can then move forward. Whether we do that through the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) or some other device, let us do it. That is the fair approach, and I think it is what the vast majority of our constituents want.

I hope that the Government will take notice and that we can have a clear system in which we stick to 650 MPs, with constituency boundaries that mean something, rather than what we would end up with if we went to 600 MPs. I think that everyone would be largely satisfied with that.