Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between David Linden and Laura Farris

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman picks up where I was cut off by the time limit in my Second Reading speech, and I could not agree with him more. When I was preparing my Second Reading speech I looked at the Hansard report of the debate from the late 1990s on reform of the House of Lords under Tony Blair. I was struck to see such familiar names as Ted Heath. Giants of the British political scene made arguments that we make in exactly the same form today. I looked into the cost of the House of Lords, and it is not the same as the cost of House of Commons, but it is not far off. There is no right of removal, and we avert our eyes from what is inappropriately still a hereditary principle, when we all know that is not a good enough reason for anyone to hold status in public life any more. I hope that a bold, reforming one nation Government will have, at some point in the next five to 10 years, an eye on that, because it is the elephant in the Palace.

[David Linden]

I have watched the hon. Lady in the last couple of weeks in the Chamber and she has been incredibly thoughtful. I suspect that the Government Whip is probably wincing slightly but the House is all the richer for people who are willing to stand up and say, “If we are going to talk about the future of the UK constitution we need to address the fact that in 2020 we still have people who have been there many years and have never been subject to a vote.” She is right to say that.

Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between David Linden and Laura Farris

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[David Linden]

Q My final question follows on from what the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton said about the size of constituencies. You may have seen from some of the questions that I have asked in previous sittings of this Committee that a lot of people in Scotland were frankly outraged at the proposal for a Highland North constituency, which would have been utterly unmanageable for any MP; I mean, the current Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency is already far, far too big. Does the ERS have any views about reducing the current 12,000 sq km guideline to try to ensure slightly more manageable constituencies and a slightly closer relationship between the electors and their MP?

Darren Hughes: I think that is exactly right. These processes give us the opportunity to say, “What would the rules be and how would they apply in the majority of cases?”, and then, “Where are the outliers, whereby if we did apply the rules we could congratulate ourselves on the consistency?”, but actually we are creating a brand new representation injury, by making politics and representation so distant from people.

As we were discussing with the last set of questions, if we had multi-Member wards, these things could be addressed. Obviously, you cannot change the geographic challenges of some areas—they simply cannot be addressed by any system—but you can make decisions to make the situation worse, and sometimes that is what tends to happen.

If there was a multi-Member system, that would be of assistance, but it is also important to carve out the ability for the commissioners to look at a particular constituency and say, “This just doesn’t make sense.” Equally, you could not make a decision based on those examples and then necessarily apply it to the rest of the UK, because that would create further injustices as well. Until we know more about the effect of the new regime, given that by the time we get to the next election it will be nearly a quarter of a century since the 2000 dataset that is being used, that needs to be part of the consideration. But you point to examples or rules that you could use that would minimise that.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Darren, for giving evidence to us.

One of the things we heard this morning was that US congressional districts had close to zero margin of deviation around population size, and one of the points that you made was that when people buy a house, or look on Zoopla, they are not given information about their political constituency, but they are given other very local information, for example school proximity. I just wondered whether there was any sort of empirical basis that you had in mind when you said that you thought that the 5% range, if I can call it that, was not sufficient.

Darren Hughes: Sure. The American examples are obviously the extreme ones, but they are ones to bear in mind, because they are examples of what can happen if you set hard and fast rules, so they apply everywhere no matter what, and then you also allow for a rampant politicisation of the process.

There is an author called David Daley who has written a couple of books, which are incredibly readable and accessible, about how the boundary system in American got to the state it is in. Unfortunately, one of them has such a colourful title that you will need to google it; I could not possibly say it in this forum.

However, regarding your point about the 5% versus the 10% range, these are the areas where you can go round in a lot of circles, because there are arguments in favour of each range. I just feel that if you could offer reasonable flexibility to the commission, what you would hope is that the practice would develop and that it gives them an extra tool when a particular geographic situation confronts them, as opposed to just starting out by saying, “We’ll flex our muscles wherever we can.” The thinking on that was that they are the final line in the arguments, but because you are not having that final parliamentary vote and you are not getting the commissions to do the work, it might make sense to offer them those tools.