Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Jack Straw and Mark Field

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[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.