Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Ian Mearns Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 1st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Prentis]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and he makes the point I was going on to make: while we do not, of course, agree with everything in the people’s charter—for example, it provides only for votes for men, and Conservative Members are passionately in favour of votes for women—we do adopt the more far-reaching ideas in it, and we believe very firmly that votes must count equally.

[Ian Mearns (Gateshead) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Victoria Prentis]

I think I had better make progress for a minute.

The independent Committee on Standards in Public Life also endorsed the idea of fairness of votes for our constituents in 2007. One vote, one value must be a vital democratic principle. To make that happen, boundary reform was a key pledge in the manifesto on which I stood in 2015 and again in 2017. The Boundary Commission is already well on its way to making that a reality. It has been working hard on drawing up proposals, consulting, analysing responses and revising its plans. My own association, like that of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak), has taken considerable time and effort to engage with the Boundary Commission’s recommendations, to gauge the thoughts of constituents and to draw up responses.

While my constituency, under the new proposals, will remain one of the largest in the country—I think it will still be the fourth largest—I will lose a chunk of my electorate as it drops to 78,250. Just as a parent loves all their children equally, I of course love all the areas I represent equally—I would be sad to lose any of them. I could no more choose between Hook Norton and Finmere than I could between my daughters, but my belief in democracy is stronger. Ensuring fair representation and that a vote in north Oxfordshire counts the same as it does anywhere else is extremely important to me.