Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Jack Straw Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:

“this House, whilst affirming its belief that there should be a referendum on moving to the Alternative Vote system for elections to the House of Commons, declines to give a Second Reading to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill because it combines that objective with entirely unrelated provisions designed to gerrymander constituencies by imposing a top-down, hasty and undemocratic review of boundaries, the effect of which would be to exclude millions of eligible but unregistered voters from the calculation of the electoral average and to deprive local communities of their long-established right to trigger open and transparent public inquiries into the recommendations of a Boundary Commission, thereby destroying a bi-partisan system of drawing boundaries which has been the envy of countries across the world; and is strongly of the opinion that the publication of such a Bill should have been preceded by a full process of pre-legislative scrutiny of a draft Bill.”

May I begin by thanking the Deputy Prime Minister for his generous remarks about my voluntary decision to move to the Back Benches after 30 years on one or other of the Front Benches? I felt that 30 years was enough and it may be that after I have spoken that view will be shared by this House.

Over the period of the previous Labour Government more significant constitutional reform was carried out in 13 years than had taken place in the previous 70 years. Although some of those reforms initially generated controversy, we actively sought, and were able to achieve, a wide cross-party consensus as the proposals went through, and they will stand the test of time.

Last year, with the crisis of confidence in British politics caused by the expenses scandal, to which the Deputy Prime Minister referred, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), the then Prime Minister, rightly judged that the British people should have an opportunity to decide for themselves whether there should be a change in voting systems. Legislation to that effect was agreed by this House in early February, by a majority of 188. The Liberal Democrats voted with the then Government and I am grateful for their support, notwithstanding the faint praise for the referendum from the Deputy Prime Minister, who at the time—February was a long time ago—described an alternative vote referendum as a “miserable little compromise”. He is now going to support the “miserable little compromise” actively—there are many other bigger miserable compromises that he has supported since then. The proposals failed to become law only when they were blocked in the other place by the Conservative party.

The Labour party remains committed to that referendum on the alternative vote. Of course, opinions on the merits of voting systems differ within parties and across them; I am in favour of AV, but many of my colleagues take a different view. Regardless of our personal preferences, the Labour party is united in its belief that the people should decide how their Parliament should be elected. Our plans were to hold a referendum no later than October next year and for there to be extensive consultation before we decided on the exact date. The right hon. Gentleman proposes by this Bill that the referendum should take place with a date set, without any prior consultation, for next May, to coincide with local and national elections. I urge him to consider carefully the legitimate concerns expressed by people of all political persuasions, inside and outside this House, about clashing the referendum with local and national elections.

The exact date of the referendum, although important, is a Committee matter. If it had been our only concern with this Bill, Labour Members would have enthusiastically supported it on Second Reading and left such matters to the Committee stage. However, in the four months since he took office, the right hon. Gentleman has shown an extraordinary capacity for making the wrong call and for maximising opposition to himself and his policies when with a little wisdom—this certainly applies in this case—he could have minimised it. He could and should have made the AV referendum the subject of a single-issue Bill. Instead he either chose to join, or was suborned into joining, that measure with one that is not directly related to it and which could and should have been put in a separate Bill.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

rose—

[Mr Leigh]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

I began my contribution at about 4.40 pm and, as Mr Speaker said, more than 70 hon. and right hon. Members wish to speak, so I am going to break the habit of 30 years and try to make a short speech. I therefore need the assistance of Members on both sides, but I give way.

[Mr Leigh]

To which one?

[Mr Straw]

The tall one.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The right hon. Gentleman says that he is in favour of AV, but can he answer one simple question—the bedrock of why I am so opposed to it? I believe in one man, one vote. Under AV, some people will have two votes while others will have only one. How can that be fair?

[Mr Straw]

I am afraid I do not follow the hon. Gentleman’s argument. I accept and respect the fact that people have many different views on this matter. He and I may be on different sides on first past the post, but we are on the same side in opposing any idea of proportional representation, or such nonsense, for elections to this House. Those are issues that can be debated during the referendum campaign and it is for the people to decide.

[Mr Leigh]

I agree, as is so often the case, with the right hon. Gentleman on the necessity of having this vital referendum on its own day, but as a matter of interest, as a supporter of AV does he think it will be more likely to get through if the referendum is on the same day as other elections?

[Mr Straw]

My opinion is that if it were combined with the local elections and the national elections in Scotland and Wales—it is a timeless truth about governance—they will be entering a period of—

[Kevin Brennan]

Deep unpopularity.

[Mr Straw]

Indeed. I suspect it would be far better to have the referendum as a single-issue referendum on a separate, dedicated day. That is not about whether the British public can cope with one or two issues at a time, but about ensuring that the issues are properly aired. There are all sorts of incredible complications about the funding limits for the parties and for the referendum campaigns when the polls take place on the same day.

[Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

Can my right hon. Friend shed any light on the latest budget for the referendum? I believe that before the election the Government made it clear that the referendum would cost £40 million. On 27 July, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) said it would cost £9.7 million, representing a saving of £17 million, because it was being held on the same day as the other elections. On 18 August, the Deputy Prime Minister told the press that it would cost between £80 million and £100 million. Can my right hon. Friend shed any light, or are we just looking at a random selection of numbers?

[Mr Straw]

The parliamentary answers I gave were that the costs, on a variety of assumptions, would be somewhere between £80 million and £100 million. That was not plucked from the air and of course, if I had stayed in office, as I wish I had, we would have sought to refine the costs.

Part 2 of the Bill is one of the most partisan proposals we have seen in recent years. It proposes arbitrarily to cut the number of Members to 600, to redraw parliamentary boundaries according to inflexible new arithmetical rules based on an electoral register from which millions of eligible voters are missing and, extraordinarily, as we have heard, under clause 10 public inquiries by the Boundary Commission into the Government’s preliminary proposals are explicitly to be prohibited.

If enacted, those proposals would represent the very antithesis of the high ideals that the Deputy Prime Minister initially set out for his political reforms. They have nothing whatever to do with those high ideals. Instead, they represent the worst kind of political skulduggery for narrow party advantage. There is no need for Members on the Government Benches to take that from me. All they need to do is to look at the ConservativeHome website and the detailed statement put there today by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field)—to coincide with this debate, I assume. He says that

“the current proposals for AV and the reduction in number of parliamentary constituencies are being promoted by Party managers as an expedient way to prevent our principal political opponents from recapturing office.”

That is the truth and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for saying it.

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I entirely stand by those words. I believe that is one of the problems with what is being proposed. However, as a matter of context, and to put the record straight, it is also fair to say that the current boundaries are entirely unacceptable and were maintained, particularly in relation to the over-representation of Wales and Scotland, by the Labour Government. Both sides have pretty dirty hands on the matter, but I very much agree with what the right hon. Gentleman said. It is quite wrong for any constitutional changes to be promoted, as traditionally they have been on both sides, simply for the narrow advantage of one side of the House.

[Mr Straw]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for accepting that what he said this morning is what he still believes this afternoon.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

I will give way briefly to my hon. Friend, but then I must make progress.

[Meg Hillier]

Today we heard from the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) that the number of people on the electoral register went down after 1997; it actually went up by 2 million. At Question Time in June, the Deputy Prime Minister cited a figure for my constituency that was 18,000 short of the 72,920 people who actually voted on election day. With figures like that, can we trust anything that Government Members say when it comes to the Bill, which breaks the accountability link between voters and their MPs, who could change at every election?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Straw]

As I shall point out, the Deputy Prime Minister is rather forgetful of some of the facts, but let me deal with the issue of the size of constituencies, which the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster mentioned. We agree that constituencies should be of broadly equal size; that is the main purpose of the Boundary Commissions’ work. That principle is written into electoral law, which derives not from our Government, but from Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1986.

Further legislation, designed to speed the system up, was introduced in 1992, in John Major’s Administration, by the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), now the Justice Secretary. We supported that 1992 legislation, and did not divide the House on it, but it will come as no surprise to students of the Liberal Democrats’ approach to life that—guess what?—they opposed that legislation. They divided the House on it, with Robert Maclennan—now Lord Maclennan—saying:

“The Bill is partisan and the way in which it has been introduced is proof enough for citizens of objectivity who are concerned about such matters.”—[Official Report, 15 June 1992; Vol. 209, c. 696.]

He then called for discussions between the Government and the other parties.

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Straw]

No. If I may, I shall make some progress.

We left the Conservative laws in place. To deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, we never sought, and would never have sought, to change the laws relating to boundaries without broad cross-party agreement. The insinuation that we somehow contrived to secure a large gap between the average size of Labour seats and Conservative seats is wholly ill-founded. Six of 10 of the largest constituencies are now Labour, and only three of the 10 smallest are. As I say, we would have been happy to discuss with the Deputy Prime Minister sensible and fair ways of speeding up the timetable for drawing boundaries, just as we did in 1992. Unfortunately, he has put political self-interest way ahead of democratic principles. That is especially evident in his proposals to reduce the size of this House to 600 Members.

The justification for that proposal, which we heard yet again today, is that the House is allegedly too large. That claim does not withstand examination. Our ratio of elected parliamentary representatives per head of population is roughly the same as that in France and Italy; the ratio is much smaller for other EU partners such as Ireland, Sweden, Greece and Poland. Of course, our House is larger than theirs because the population is greater here, and we are not a federal state. That said, we have only 20 more Members than the Bundestag in Germany.

In any event, a more sensible basis on which to decide is to ask what level of representation is right for the United Kingdom, and to examine how the electorate and the House of Commons have changed over time. If the number of Members of Parliament had grown out of all proportion to the size of the electorate, there would clearly be a problem, but that is not the case. Today, there are 650 Members, an increase of less than 4% in 60 years. Over the same period, the electorate have grown by 25%, and the work load of Members on both sides of the House has increased exponentially; that is both the work that arises from constituents, and the work that arises from responsibilities in the House.

Perhaps that is why, in 2003, the man who today is Prime Minister argued to preserve the boundaries of his west Oxfordshire seat and made a strong plea for the size of the House of Commons to stay as it was. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), now the Prime Minister, said in his oral evidence to an independent local public inquiry, which existed then and existed under us, but which will no longer exist:

“Somebody might take the view that at 659 there are already too many Members of Parliament at Westminster. They may take the view . . . that Westminster has less to do, with less MPs—I certainly hope that is not the case.”

I quote from the Boundary Commission for England: Transcript of Oxfordshire Boundary Inquiry, 2003.

The Deputy Prime Minister—this was another error by him—said that the number of Members in the House had crept inexorably up. That is not the case. If he had bothered to examine the House of Commons Library research note on the Bill, he would have seen that on the back. The numbers went up to 659 under the Conservatives. They were put at 659 in 1992. They were at 659 in the 1997 election. They are now down to 650. Of course we would have been happy to discuss sensible and agreed reductions in the total size, as indeed we did when we were in office.

[Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)]

Is it not the case that we have 650 Members of Parliament because we draw the Executive from Parliament? At any given time there are at least 300 Members of Parliament serving in the Executive or the shadow Executive. That leaves only 350 Members of Parliament to hold the Government to account.

[Mr Straw]

I had not thought of that before, but I commend the strength of that point. It is why the banal comparisons that the Deputy Prime Minister makes are so false.

[Mr Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I am obliged to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. The point just made is crucial to the equation. Clearly, if we reduce the number of Members of the House of Commons, and not the size of the Administration, their control over the size of the House of Commons increases. That is the very thing that the House is struggling to address in the wider context of constitutional reform.

[Mr Straw]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I recall that when that point was put to the Deputy Prime Minister in the debate on the Queen’s Speech and he was asked whether he accepted that there should be a pro rata reduction in the number of Ministers and aides, he refused to give any commitment at all.

Let me return to the issue of public inquiries. Back in 2003, when the present Prime Minister supported the system, he had an opportunity to have his case put before a local inquiry. Under the Bill, no such right will exist in the future. Instead, all that the public are offered is a longer period for written representations, which is no substitute whatever for a proper examination, including oral evidence, before a judicially qualified chairman.

The Deputy Prime Minister said in the House a few minutes ago that there was no evidence that such local inquiries had changed the original proposals from the Boundary Commission. Again, he is not woefully ill-briefed, because he has a fine set of officials, but he is woefully ill-informed. The Boundary Commission’s fifth report for 2007 reported that local public inquiries had led to change in the original recommendations in 64% —two thirds—of the cases where proposals had initially been made. The right hon. Gentleman shakes his head. That happens to be the case, and the source for that is the Boundary Commission.

[Mr David Davis]

I put exactly that point to the Deputy Prime Minister earlier. If we are not careful and the Bill goes ahead as it is currently drafted, instead of public inquiries, will we end up with a series of local judicial challenges on the basis of reflection of community interests?

[Mr Straw]

Yes, I agree.

Let me pick up on something that the Deputy Prime Minister mentioned parenthetically when he said that the timetable motion had been agreed by the usual channels. I am not responsible for negotiations with the usual channels, but I can tell the House that we are adopting the same approach to the programme motion that was always adopted by the Conservatives when they were in opposition. We do not believe that sufficient time has been allocated to this Bill, and we shall vote against the programme motion.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

Allow me to make progress.

Every single other constitutional measure that I can recall has been considered within a time scale that allowed for proper pre-legislative scrutiny, but the man who came to office preening himself on how he was to raise the standards of our politics has brushed all that aside—so much so that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, to which he is answerable, denounced his approach in unusually strong terms. It said:

“The Deputy Prime Minister has accurately described the Bill as ‘fundamental to this House and to our democracy’. We regret that the Government’s timetable has denied us an adequate opportunity to scrutinise the Bill before second reading.”

Had the Select Committee had time, it might have been able to prise from the right hon. Gentleman some better explanation for clause 9, which can only be described as the Liberal Democrat protection clause.

The essence of the Bill is that arithmetic trumps all—that it trumps community loyalties, historical ties, long-established county boundaries, mountains, and, indeed, the sea. In pursuit of arithmetic, for example, the views of the people of the Isle of Wight are wholly to be ignored. It is all in the name of an arithmetical formula, except in one area of the United Kingdom—the north of Scotland. There will be two protected constituencies: Orkney and Shetland, with 37,000 voters, and the Western Isles, with 22,000 voters—a third of the standard size. Our objection is not that Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles should have special considerations taken into account, but that they are the only areas that will be allowed to put their case about local needs and concerns.

Then we have the most bare-faced and partisan exemption of all: a new rule to allow seats that are more than 12,000 sq km in size—where this figure came from, I do not know—to exist even without the required quota of electors. Alongside that, another rule prevents any seat from exceeding 13,000 sq km. At present, only one seat on the mainland is bigger than 12,000 sq km—Ross, Skye and Lochaber, the seat of the former leader of the Liberal Democrats. Contrary to what the Deputy Prime Minister intimated, this is to protect a small seat with 24,000 voters—fewer than the average at which all other seats will be aimed. The only other seats that could conceivably be assisted by that rule are located in the Scottish highlands, and they are also Liberal Democrat-held.

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Straw]

If the hon. Gentleman does not mind, I need to make some progress so that others can get in.

The Deputy Prime Minister labours under the delusion that arithmetic equals fairness and that—the north of Scotland excepted, of course—human and natural factors should be cast aside. The strength of that delusion was recently spelt out by the Electoral Reform Society, which said:

“Conservative proposals”—

we now, of course, have to add Liberal Democrat ones—

“mean that most constituencies will pay less regard to what most voters think of as community and natural boundaries, and change more frequently, destabilising the link between MPs and constituents. The United States has rigorous requirements for arithmetical equality of population in congressional districts, but the worst gerrymandering in the developed world.”

[Mr MacNeil]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Straw]

If the hon. Gentleman will excuse me, no.

In contrast, Margaret Thatcher’s 1986 system recognised the need for balance, which allowed local commissioners and the commission to take account of historical and natural boundaries, and density as well as sparsity of population, and to do so with the widest public acceptability. That ability to achieve balance has also meant that long-standing problems such as the under-registration of voters has had less impact on the final outcome. The problem of under-registration goes back to the 1990 poll tax. We sought to stabilise registration levels, but that poll tax legacy remains. The right hon. Gentleman must recognise that his reliance on arithmetic above all makes the problem of under-registration so acute and so potentially unfair.

[Mrs Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

I shall break my undertaking and give way to the hon. Lady.

[Mrs Laing]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman very much for giving way. He knows what I am going to say because we have had this argument so many times across the Dispatch Box. He knows, as does the rest of the House, that under-registration will be put right to a very great extent by the introduction of individual voter registration, which was proposed by the Conservative party way back in 2005 and which the right hon. Gentleman’s Government delayed for five years before they introduced it.

[Mr Straw]

The hon. Lady will recognise that we introduced agreed legislation on the phasing-in of individual registration. She will also know—and she is on the record as recognising—that although there were potential benefits from individual registration, there were dangers too, which were clear from the Northern Ireland experience. It had to be phased in carefully, with a large amount of resources—not rushed, as the Deputy Prime Minister now proposes.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

I am coming to the close of my remarks.

The right hon. Gentleman has repeatedly acknowledged that some 3.5 million people are missing from the register; the figure is from the Electoral Commission. Yet as he told the House today, and did in July, the boundary review will be based on the register published in the beginning of December. Millions will be missing from that register and, as he admitted, they will not be randomly spread. Instead, they will be concentrated among the young, private sector tenants and black and ethnic minority British residents and will be most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities and coastal areas with significant population turnover.

Given those facts, which are accepted by all, why is the right hon. Gentleman rushing to redraw all the boundaries according to an entirely new set of rules whose effect cannot be challenged in public inquiries before these missing voters are put on the electoral roll?

I should have said to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) that I accept his point that there are likely to be many more judicial reviews, including successful judicial reviews, of the Boundary Commission proposals. The Boundary Commission will have to wade through a large number of written representations; there is no way in the world that it can give them the proper concern that would be given if there were an independent, legally qualified chair for each of the boundary inquiries.

Yes, boundaries have been reviewed in recent times on the existing registers, but that did not happen according to a rigid new electoral quota involving an arbitrary cut of 50 seats. Furthermore, those reviews were always balanced by the ability to hold public inquiries, so that account could be taken of issues such as population movement, natural boundaries and, yes, voter registration.

When this issue was debated before the election, Liberal Democrats took a very different view from the one that they now take; no surprise there. Their then spokesman, David Howarth, then the hon. Member for Cambridge, said:

“The idea that fiddling with boundaries based on out-of-date information can make the first-past-the-post system fairer is absurd.”—[Official Report, 8 April 2010; Vol. 508, c. 1217.]

Is that no longer the view of the Liberal Democrats and their leader? Are they now willing to concede a “fiddling of boundaries”—Liberal Democrat words, not mine—provided that they get a referendum on electoral reform in return?

The Liberal Democrats hawk their democratic consciences around, yet they are happy to ignore the democratic rights of millions of eligible voters who will not be part of this boundary review process. Every day in opposition they were speaking as loudly as we are about the problems of under-registration.

[Chris Ruane]

Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Mr Straw]

I am about to close.

In his excellent blog on the ConservativeHome website, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster wrote today:

“Reform to our constitution should never be made as a short term, tactical gambit.”

This is a deeply flawed and partisan Bill. It will do much harm and sow a great deal of division. I urge the Deputy Prime Minister to return to the democratic principles that his party’s Front Benchers articulated before the election and to remove the unfair boundary clauses from the Bill. If he splits the Bill, he will have our support. In the meantime, I commend our amendment to the House and urge the House to give that amendment its full support.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

I rise to support the Bill. I am a supporter of first past the post, but frankly the system will not work unless there are regular reviews of electorates by the Boundary Commission. I helped and participated in the last boundary review, which was really a kind of 18th-century procession around the country. The commissions managed to do inquiries for north and south London, and for west and south Yorkshire, but did each individual area on its own, which took such a long time. There is no reason why the process cannot be speeded up and yet remain impartial and allow for representations.

There are five days to discuss the Bill on the Floor of the House, which is ample opportunity to make further representations regarding some form of public inquiry, but we do not need barristers and others to turn up to give evidence in each individual county of three, four or five constituencies. That is too slow. As we have heard from a number of my hon. Friends, we have just fought an election that is already 10 years out of date. Unfortunately in the modern age, people move, which causes disparities and unfairnesses. That has to be addressed by this House. If it is not addressed, we will end up in a situation in which one party wins most of the votes and another party wins most of the seats. That sometimes happens because of bizarre quirks in the electoral system—for example, in 1951 Labour had more votes and we had more seats—but broadly speaking people get what they vote for, if the boundary system is up to date. So reform is necessary.

It is sensible to proceed on the basis of the Bill. No one can argue that this is being railroaded through, as it will have five days on the Floor of the House. At times, in opposition, we pleaded for more time to discuss constitutional Bills, but we were given no more time, we faced guillotines and we could not discuss them. The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) was his most genial and persuasive self this afternoon and I agreed with much of what he said, but I sat on the other side of the House when we discussed electoral reform for the European elections—a list system that was introduced without a referendum, and without even the boundary commissions looking at how the regions were drawn up. We had massive disparities between Wales and Scotland and the south-east of England. That change was railroaded through by the Government. The right hon. Gentleman’s case would be more persuasive if he had not put that legislation on the statute book.

[Mr Straw]

I was trying to keep my remarks brief, but I did point out in the Queen’s Speech debate that one blemish—for which I was responsible—on the previous Administration’s otherwise good record in seeking all-party consensus on constitutional issues was the European elections system. I regret that. It was not a good chapter for the Labour Government, although no one could claim that we did it for party advantage, because it worked against our party and helped small and fringe parties.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

I hope that my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not. I have a great deal to do, and not much time in which to do it.

The Labour party’s position on the referendum on the alternative vote strikes me as ridiculous. Labour supported an AV referendum before the election—it was in the party manifesto—but Labour Members are not supporting it now. They are hiding their opportunism behind the fig leaf that the proposal is contained in a Bill that plans a boundary review to provide more equally sized constituencies and more equal votes.

The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) has criticised us for not presenting our proposals in a stand-alone Bill. Given that both our measures concern the election of Members of Parliament to the House of Commons, it seems perfectly sensible to link them. I remind him that he presented proposals for an AV referendum in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. That was hardly a stand-alone Bill. It also included measures relating to the civil service commission, the civil service code of conduct, the ratification of treaties, amendments to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, the tax status of Members of Parliament, financial reporting to Parliament, freedom of information, counting of votes and the Act of Settlement.

[Mr Straw]

The difference is that all of those had been subject to extensive pre-legislative scrutiny and were agreed across the House, whereas one part of this is agreed but the other is a wholly partisan measure. The political purpose behind it has been well exposed by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr Field) in his excellent blog on the ConservativeHome website.

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman has just demonstrated that on this issue the Opposition have put opportunism before principle, and it will not get them very far.

The boundaries argument is straightforward. The Government believe seats should be of more equal size so that votes are of more equal value. Indeed, the right hon. Gentleman and his colleague the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain) have both said at different times that they agree with that principle. They say that, in theory, they believe in it; however, they oppose it in practice. That is not, of course, on principle; it is because they believe our proposals correct a bias in favour of them in the current system—another example of opportunism.

Many of my right hon. and hon. Friends spoke powerfully in favour of our proposals, including my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Greg Hands) in an excellent speech and my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South.

The right hon. Member for Blackburn cannot have it both ways. He tried to argue that our boundary proposals were purely arithmetic and did not take anything else into account, and simultaneously that they were about gerrymandering the system to suit us. Those arguments cannot both be true.

A number of Members, including the right hon. Member for Neath, referred to a likely reduction in the number of seats in Wales from 40 to 30, as did the right hon. Member for Torfaen (Paul Murphy) and the hon. Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams). That simply corrects the fact that at present Wales is over-represented in this House. Once the measures in the Bill come into force, Wales will be treated in exactly the same way as England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It will be represented in exactly the same way as the rest of the United Kingdom, which, it seems to me, is extremely fair. That is my response to the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) as well, who made exactly the same point about Northern Ireland. The reduction in the number of seats simply corrects existing over-representation, which also used to exist in Scotland and was largely corrected at the last election, although there is a little more still to do. Every part of this United Kingdom will be treated in the same way, and most voters will think that that is eminently fair.

The right hon. Member for Belfast North and the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) talked about the linkage between Westminster seats and those for the Northern Ireland Assembly. They will both know that the Assembly is under a statutory duty to consider its operation by 2015, including the size of the Assembly. The Government are committed to bringing forward further legislation during this Parliament to reflect the wishes of the Assembly. The Government have no intention of dictating the size of the future Assembly. We will work closely with the devolved Administrations.

Boundaries will continue to be drawn by the independent boundary commissions in each part of the United Kingdom. As the Deputy Prime Minister said, we will replace local inquiries with a much longer period—increased from one month to three months—for local people to be able to make written representations. The academics’ opinion on this is very clear. They have described oral inquiries as

“very largely an exercise in allowing the political parties to seek influence over the Commission’s recommendations—in which their sole goal is to promote their own electoral interests.”

They also say that

“it would be a major error to assume that the consultation process largely involves the general public having its say on the recommendations.”

That is not a convincing argument, therefore.

Electoral registration was raised by a number of Members, including the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane)—who, I know from the number of written questions of his that I have answered, takes a great interest in the subject. He will know that the registration rate in the UK is about 91 or 92%, which is broadly in line with that of comparable countries. The boundary review will use the electoral register, as it always has in the past. As the Deputy Prime Minister acknowledged, there are issues with the registration system. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that when we announce our plans for speeding up individual registration he will find that the fears that he expressed this afternoon are misplaced. The Government have no intention of worsening the situation—quite the reverse; we plan, by the measures that we will introduce, to reduce the number of people who are not registered to vote and to improve the system.

A number of hon. Members raised the issue about the number of Ministers that will be in the House of Commons after the size of the House has been reduced, and they will know that the Public Administration Committee produced a report on the issue before the general election. That Committee, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex, is undertaking another inquiry to examine what Ministers do. When it reports, the Government and my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will look closely at it to see whether the Government want to take forward any of the proposals about the number of Ministers in this House.

The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) talked about foreign nationals and EU nationals not being able to vote in parliamentary elections and therefore not counting for these purposes. That is not a change introduced by the Bill; that is the existing position. It is perfectly normal in most countries that in order for someone to be able to vote for the national Parliament they have to be a citizen of the country concerned. That is a perfectly normal process and we are not changing it in this Bill. It is the existing system and I feel sure that Mrs Clegg will cope with it perfectly well.

My hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner) spoke powerfully on behalf of his constituents. I know that he received a reply to his letter before today’s Second Reading debate, although I accept that it was unacceptably delayed. An apology has been made to him for that, and I can assure him that either the Deputy Prime Minister or I will visit the Isle of Wight to listen to the concerns of his constituents in person.