Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Graham Allen Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

It is a great privilege to make my first contribution as the newly elected Chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. A great number of the Select Committee’s members are in the Chamber today, and I look forward to listening to their speeches later.

I would like to refer you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to the work of the Select Committee, to the evidence taken at length, to a large document to which many of the key academics and most of the important people had contributed their views, and to a widespread consultation that had taken place. I would also like to refer you to the racy and readable summary of that Select Committee report, because if parliamentarians on the Select Committee do not do their job and lay down basic, agreed and impartial facts, the debate might get partisan and a little tribal.

I would like to do those things, but I cannot do them. My Select Committee has had a grand total of two sessions to discuss and take evidence on the Bill, which is arguably the most important that the House will pass in this Session—the most far-reaching and fundamental Bill. It changes our electoral system, it changes the number of Members of Parliament, it changes the balance between the Executive and legislature—for the worse, because fewer Members will mean that a larger percentage of us will represent either the alternative Executive or the Executive themselves, making it even harder to hold the Government to account—and it changes the relationship of individual Members to their constituents.

My Select Committee has a good bunch of people on it, from different parties, who are independent-minded and who speak their minds. One thing that unites them, in the sliver of a report that we have had a chance to put before the House, is the belief that we have not been adequately consulted during discussions about the Bill.

The Leader of the House, whose statement I welcomed, said that if we were to take the House of Commons seriously, we must have proper pre-legislative scrutiny. There must be a period, before any Bill comes to the House for its Second Reading, that would allow us to say, “We have studied this Bill, and here are some of our conclusions.” The Leader of the House wrote to the Liaison Committee—which consists of all the Chairs of all the Select Committees—stating in terms that he believed that 12 weeks constituted the minimum amount of time that we should spend on each Bill before it came to the House for Second Reading, but I am afraid that he has had to eat his words.

This is not some small order or statutory instrument, but potentially the biggest Bill that the House will consider in five years, and my Committee has been given just two sessions in which to consider it. I do not regard that as the new politics. I do not regard it as involving all Members in the House. I am not making a partisan point on behalf of one party or another; I am making a point on behalf of my Committee, which believes that it is inappropriate for a Bill of such magnitude to receive such cursory attention from the House before its Second Reading.

I hope very much—and I hope that the Minister of State will take my words away with him—that it will never be possible for this to happen again, but my hopes may be forlorn. The Fixed Term Parliaments Bill will come down the tracks next Monday, and again we shall have only two sessions in which to consider it. That must strike at the heart of every Member of Parliament. It must cause all Members to ask themselves what they really feel is their role in this place. Of course they must support their Government or their Opposition, but they must ask themselves whether this is the way in which we want to pursue our politics over the next five years. I ask them please to find it within themselves to say, “We can do better.”

Let me make a more personal observation about the boundaries provisions. As other Members have already pointed out, the population in our constituencies has risen by 25% since 1950. The expectation of what we should do has massively increased the work load of Members, particularly those in deprived constituencies such as mine. If we proceed with these proposals and make no effort to change them, we shall be voting to give our constituents a poorer service, and that is not why we came here.