Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

David Winnick Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 18th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bone]

I absolutely agree that as a matter of fairness we should try to equalise the seats, but it is absolutely wrong to reduce the number of MPs and to say that it is being done on the basis of cost. Democracy cannot have a cost put on it. We could of course have a dictator—that would be very cheap! But that is not how it works. In fact, the Government have tended to go a little way towards being a dictatorship. We have had sofa decisions that were not made in Cabinet, and at times it has been really difficult for us in this House to vote on certain issues because of these wretched programme motions. My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering and I spent a lot of our time during the coalition Government voting against programme motions on every occasion, because we had said in our manifesto that that was what we were going to do.

The former Prime Minister made a great speech on Parliamentary sovereignty, and if those proposals had been enforced, MPs would have been encouraged to have a free vote in Committees—although the Government would have been able to change things on Report—and we would have had more open debates without programme motions. That all fell by the wayside, however, because the Government do not really want that to happen; and, to be honest, the shadow Government do not want it either. That is why we have never made progress on that. Hon. Members will remember that the timetable for this House was going to be run by a parliamentary business Committee within two years of us coming into power. I remember talking to the then Chief Whip, who said that that would happen over his dead body, and of course it never did happen. So please do not talk to me about manifesto commitments.

[Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)]

May I take the hon. Gentleman back to his point about the number of Members of Parliament who are on the payroll? Any Government—those whom I support and those whom I oppose—will have not only Members who are on the payroll but Members who want to be on the payroll. Reducing the number of MPs to 600 will inevitably mean fewer independent-minded MPs. Those on both our Front Benches would probably welcome that, but we should not do so. It will be a retrograde step, to say the least, if that happens, but it seems inevitable that it will.

[Mr Bone]

The independent Member is entirely right. Of course, I have to be really careful about what I say today because this could ruin my chances of getting on to the Front Bench. This is a serious and important matter, however. I say gently that there has been a tendency for some Members to come to this House not because they want to be Members of Parliament but because they want to be Ministers. They are not interested in the role of scrutiny. We cannot scrutinise the Government properly if nearly half those on our side are on the payroll. Equally, there will be Opposition Members who are on the “payroll”, even though they do not get paid, unless they are Whips. I have never understood why Whips get paid. We should do away with that, but that is another issue.

The role of scrutiny is really important. I have seen in a recent email that about six Select Committees have vacancies for Conservative Members. If we are having problems filling Select Committees now, what will it be like when there are 50 fewer MPs? Those 50 MPs will not, by their nature, have been in the Executive. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, there are absolutely no proposals to reduce the size of the Executive in parallel with the reduction in the number of MPs, although there should be.

I want to deal with the question of timing. In my view, it is more than likely that we will have a general election in May, if not before. Such an election would of course be fought on the current boundaries. The argument that we have to get all these boundary changes in place before 2020 is therefore nonsense. Also, it is not good for a Conservative to say that something is out of date just because it is 20 years old. It might be time to start looking at it if it is 120 years out of date, but not after just 20 years.

I want to speak briefly about something that I feel passionately about, which is the other side of our role. We spend a lot of our time here in Parliament from Monday to Thursday—or Monday to Friday if it is one of the 13 weeks in which the House sits on a Friday—doing exactly what we are doing today. The rest of the time, we are looking after our constituents. I have been looking back, and I can tell the House that in the last 100 years, we have never had fewer than 615 Members of Parliament. Way back then, however, they did not have the constituency workload that we have now. I am not complaining about this; constituency work is a very important part of our role. For example, my Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden campaign generates an enormous amount of work. Most Members hold a surgery every week, and my estimate is that I receive at least 1,000 emails, letters and phone calls a week. We have a limited number of staff to help us with that. That workload is going to increase because we are getting rid of MEPs, and it will also increase if we reduce the number of MPs and make the constituencies larger.

I also want to look at how busy Members of Parliament are and what we have to put up with. I am going to touch on an area that does not get a lot of coverage because we do not like to talk about it, for very sensible reasons—namely, the question of security. I doubt that there is a Member in this House who has not been threatened in the last few years. We have seen the terrible death of a colleague. Other colleagues have been attacked. Only recently, I had death threats. My wife has had death threats. The police have intervened. In my first 11 years in this House, I had to dial 999 once from my constituency office because we were worried. Since the referendum, I have had to call 999 three times. I had someone outside chained to the gates of Parliament who had threatened me. I have had two bullet holes—admittedly from air pellets—put in the windows of my office. I have had my house attacked. I have had the office windows smashed. The vile stuff that we get on Twitter is unbelievable. One of the worst things that happened is that some months ago, there was a picture of my youngest son being executed by Isis. They had actually taken another child’s photo and mocked it up, but the police rang me up to say, “Where is your son?” I said, “Well, I think he’s at school”, and they said, “Well, you’d better check.”

We have to put up with all that. We have to have contact with our constituents, and I would not change any of that. Some of us will be getting enhanced security, and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is doing its best to help with that. We have to deal with that sort of stuff. We have to deal with constituents’ problems. Some of them are just run of the mill things where we can help out. A lot of the stuff we deal with relates to local government. A lot of it is social care issues, which this House really needs to look at from a bipartisan point of view.

Some of the stuff we deal with, however, is exceptionally serious. I can remember at least two occasions where we campaigned on such matters in this House. As a result of one of those, thanks to Gordon Brown, the NHS position on some treatment changed, and a little boy who would have died got a few years extra life out of it. That sort of thing is worth while, but it is time-consuming. The fact is that if we are going to put more work on ourselves because of leaving the EU while at the same time reducing the number of MPs, we will not do the scrutiny properly, and I am afraid that our service to our constituents will go down. I feel passionately about that, and that is why we should not reduce the number of MPs.

I will tell the House about the effect that the current reforms will have in Northamptonshire. Under the scheme, we are entitled to 6.5 MPs. It is proposed that the seat of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) goes all the way up to the borders of Leicester. There is no logic in that and no consistency. My seat will be divided between the constituencies of four different MPs, who will all be representing one council. It does not make any sense. The Boundary Commission proposals move people around willy-nilly. I would have 6,000 coming in from the Corby constituency, 3,000 going into Kettering, another 3,000 going into Northampton South and the northern villages going into the new Daventry seat, which will go up into Leicestershire. If we had the same number of MPs, Northamptonshire would be entitled to seven MPs and we would not have those problems.

I know that there are party political issues about numbers. I urge all Members to put that to one side and to think about Parliament, the Executive and why we are here. I urge everyone to support the Bill. There obviously will be issues that will need to be looked at in Committee. If the hon. Member for North West Durham would like me to, I volunteer to serve on the Committee.