Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Ian C. Lucas Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman referred to hearings that took place following the latest boundary review. Does he agree that one of the most pernicious aspects of the Bill is that those hearings will no longer exist? The very worthwhile, and I am sure powerful, representations that were made in his community will be denied the rest of us.

[Mr Kennedy]

I absolutely agree and endorse entirely the sentiment and substance of what the hon. Gentleman says. I think it represents a negation of democracy to go about something so fundamental in this way.

I will explain specifically what we propose in the amendments. There are a range of options, as we all know, and nobody has the philosopher’s stone. However, the Government are trying to introduce the artificial construct of a capped number of constituencies for the whole UK. Leaving aside party politics, I think the House would agree that there are distinct and unique geographical considerations in places such as the Isle of Wight, in Cornwall, with its relationships between places on each side of the Tamar, and in the highlands and islands, a vast area that is bigger than Belgium. I think the House recognises that in such circumstances, a degree of sensible flexibility is called for. This is not gerrymandering; in fact the seats that tend to be involved could not be gerrymandered in a political sense, because they are not those kinds of communities. Largely because of their sheer disparity and diversity, the individual who happens to be their Member will, irrespective of their party affiliation, represent a significant link between those communities and officialdom at the regional, national and even European level. That is being dissipated and completely overlooked in the crazy approach that is being applied, which simply is not suitable and does not make sense given the communities involved.

--- Later in debate ---

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am not calling merely for kindness from Her Majesty’s Government; I am calling for decent, adequate representation for my home nation of Wales within my other home nation of the United Kingdom, of which the nation of Wales is part. It is ironic that tomorrow, in the United States, millions upon millions of people across that large and expansive land will elect their senators, and regardless of the size of the states from which they come, they will each elect two senators. Theirs was a constitution that developed over centuries, and those Americans realised that we ought not to enter into such changes lightly. How different from those on the Government Benches.

Once upon a time, in the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”, there were the words, “For Wales, see England”. That is what Government Members are saying today, because they do not understand—or perhaps they do, and this really is just gerrymandering, in which case I am being kind to Her Majesty’s Government—that we cannot get rid of 25% of the representatives of a nation within the nation of which it is part, and expect there to be no repercussions. Some Government Members will hop up and down and say, “Isn’t this a bit unfair? Aren’t some bits not truly equal?”, but that is not the point. This is about the devolution settlement, which was granted in a referendum. My party was in favour of devolution, but so-called Unionists on the Government Benches were against it—well, some sort of Unionism that shows itself to be this evening!

This is a Government who have already decided that Chesham and Amersham is part of Wales, and who decided in the past that Wokingham was too—and the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) could not even sing the national anthem. They decided that a representative for Worcester could stand up for the people of Wales.

[Ian Lucas]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Susan Elan Jones]

I would be delighted to, and I will give way to any Government Members if they have any points to raise.

[Ian Lucas]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and neighbour for giving way. Does she agree that the contempt in which the Conservative party holds Wales was evidenced only last week, when a Secretary of State responded to a parliamentary question by saying that the fact that Herefordshire had been given broadband services should be sufficient for Wales? What sort of Government treat an essential part of our nation in that way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sadiq Khan]

I will go one better. In a few moments, I will cite for the hon. Gentleman not what I think, but what assistant commissioner Nicholas Elliot QC concluded after he had heard evidence from political parties.

In the fifth review, both Labour and the Conservatives presented carefully researched and reasoned cases to the boundary commissions. That enabled proper arguments and options to be presented to the assistant commissioners. That was hardly illicit manipulation of the process; rather, it was open and transparent, and there was an inquiry. I ask the question: how open and transparent will the process be if people only get to write in and do not have an inquiry, where the public can see what representations are made? It is far better for political parties to get involved than just to have a rigid mathematical formula to decide how seats are drawn up.

[Ian Lucas]

It is important to highlight the fact that oral representations in a public inquiry will be taken away. Like me, my right hon. Friend is a solicitor. Do oral hearings not very often illuminate far more than written representations ever would, so that all parties, including the person who holds the inquiry, learn much more through that process?

[Sadiq Khan]

I advise my hon. Friend to be very careful with this coalition Government. In five months, they have got rid of the local public inquiry for the sake of expediency. God knows, next year they may get rid of the right of appeal to the Court of Appeal and just rely on written representations. They may think, “This democracy malarkey is just too expensive. Let’s just have written submissions and then have a vote in our constituencies rather than turning up and having a debate and arguing the pros and cons of an issue.” I am astonished that hon. and right hon. Members on the Government Benches, who should know better, are taking through this shabby piece of legislation.

Another criticism, which came from the hon. Member for Epping Forest, is that the local inquiry takes too long. The final and most lengthy inquiry, the fifth review, was in Greater Manchester and took more than two weeks. The assistant commissioner, Nicholas Elliot QC, made the following observation:

“The advantage, sitting as an Assistant Boundary Commissioner, is that one gets from the two major political parties that they equally look at the overall picture in somewhere like Greater Manchester where it has to be done, whereas others examine it from their own perspective. The difficulty of the Assistant Commissioner is that you do have to look at the overall picture, and it is only those two major political parties who do provide very, very great assistance in trying to come to what may be the best or worst answer.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Whitehead]

Almost all of us are aware of the purpose of the abolition of inquiries into boundary changes. It is about expediency, getting the process through as rapidly as possible, and airbrushing out a particularly important part of the process in order to do that.

I do not accept the idea that because boundary commissions have not changed an enormous amount in the past, that is likely to be the case in future. Because of the wholesale changes that are being made in the rest of the Bill, boundary commission public local inquiries will probably be more important in future than was the case in the past.

In the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986, the most recent iteration of the rules for the redistribution of seats, we see, as other hon. Members have mentioned, a balancing arrangement between the idea of equality in representation, between various local considerations, and between representation and decision making. As a result of that relatively balanced mechanism, it is fair to say that the boundary commission process has worked pretty well, without enormous public outcry at its past decisions.

Looking ahead, we find that the Government are removing not only most of the checks and balances that were in the boundary commission arrangement, but the very last check and balance whereby, after that whole process has taken place, the public have an opportunity to question, have their say and find out why those changes are taking place in the way that has been suggested. The idea that that should be replaced with a procedure that is simply not transparent is a complete rejection of all those previous checks and balances, and a rejection of the principles put forward—I am sorry if this sounds ad hominem—by a Minister, the Deputy Leader of the House, for whom I have a great deal of respect, but who would have made exactly the same arguments about public representation, the public’s say and the due process of democracy until one day before the election.

I do not know whether a particular event in Greece, and the electoral practices there, caused the hon. Gentleman to change his mind on the matter, but over the years a large number of Liberal Democrat constituency parties have been active participants in those processes, and he will have to go to them and say, “Actually, you can’t do this any more, because I’ve thrown this out of the window as part of a deal to get something else through.” They will be aghast at what has happened to the principles that they previously put forward.

[Ian Lucas]

Does my hon. Friend know whether any party standing at the last general election had as a manifesto commitment the abolition of public inquiries by the boundary commission?

[Dr Whitehead]

As my hon. Friend will know, peruse though one might, it is not possible to find such a pledge. If any party had put such a pledge in its manifesto at the last election, that itself would have been the subject of an internal public inquiry, because of what it would have said about that party’s commitment to the process of electoral change.

On the differences that the boundary reviews will make, I refer to the Isle of Wight, which is close to my constituency but separated by a substantial body of water, the Solent. The proposal, which is likely to come to pass, is that 40,000 people will be taken out of that constituency and distributed somewhere else in Hampshire—they know not where. [Interruption.] They will stay on the Isle of Wight, but for the purposes of political representation they will join another constituency.

The Boundary Commission will have a certain say in the process, because it will have to decide which 40,000 people on the island go to various other parts for their representation. It may decide that they will go to Portsmouth, to Southampton or to the New Forest. Each area has a connecting ferry service to the island, but I am not sure whether the commission can even take into account whether the people and the ferry service should be connected, given the changes that will be made and the Government’s conditions for the new arrangements.

All that will be done on the basis of a boundary commission decision—no public inquiry, some representations and no explanation. That represents a serious and fundamental change to the representation of, admittedly, just one constituency, but the process will be repeated throughout the country in a substantial if not such an extreme way, and if that is not a negation of the public’s right to understand what is happening to their own political processes, I do not what is or will be.

We must vote for amendment 15, which would reintroduce the idea of a public inquiry within particular boundaries and for particular concerns to ensure that it was conducted seriously and not frivolously. The idea that the public should have their say in who they are represented by, how they are represented and where their representation takes place has been a fundamental part of our electoral system for many years, and to throw it out of the window for expediency is a move that will be regretted and a move that we should reject.

--- Later in debate ---

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

rose—

[Ian Lucas]

Will the Deputy Leader of the House give way?

[Mr Heath]

No, I have got to make progress.

The third reason for abolishing inquiries is that they rarely lead to significant changes in recommendations. The statistics that are often prayed in aid of local inquiries usually group together many different constituencies and include changes solely to the names of constituencies, to inflate the figure of the proportion that lead to change. The truth, as Professor Johnston told the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, is:

“Public inquiries often have no impact.”

The changes are frequently minor. For example, at the time of the fifth general review in England, only 2% of wards in counties where inquiries were held were moved between constituencies as a result.

What the Bill does—[Interruption.] No, let us deal with what the Bill actually does. It improves the process of public consultation, so that the public will be better able to have their say on proposals. That is why we are extending the period for representations on proposals from one month to three. Where a boundary commission revises proposed recommendations, the period of consultation on the revised proposals will be the same.

In making that decision, the Government have considered the approach taken in other nations. We looked at the example of Australia, which has a 28-day consultation period for proposed recommendations, followed by 14 days for comments. The Government propose a longer consultation period of three months.

[Mr Heath]

I would answer the hon. Gentleman in two ways, and I know that he takes a serious interest in these matters. The second inquiry, as he puts it, does not happen now. Once a boundary commission makes its final conclusions, that is the end of the story—and there has to be an end to the process. In the Bill, we are establishing a longer and more thorough process of consultation, all of which will be in the open, rather than in secret, because it will all be published and available for people to see. That is a fairer way of doing things than having highly paid QCs representing two big parties simply making partisan points in front of an assistant commissioner.

[Ian Lucas]

If the Minister believes that abolishing public inquiries into boundary reforms is such a good idea, will he tell me whether he proposed them before the general election?

[Mr Heath]

We did not propose legislation on the Boundary Commission at that point, but we are doing so now, and those are the proposals before the hon. Gentleman. He must look at them and see whether they make sense. I believe that they do.

During our discussions, we have had a flavour of some of the arguments that are put before commissioners in public inquiries. We have had people claiming that constituencies can never cross a river. We have had Members complaining that they cannot have a connection to more than one local authority in their constituency. Those are the sorts of spurious argument that a public inquiry throws out of court every time.