Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Third sitting)

John Spellar Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

To my great relief, our next witness is here in person.

[John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Chair, before we come on to that, we have had several references in evidence to the OSCE report. Would it be possible for the Clerks to get the link for that and send it through to members of the Committee?

[The Chair]

That is a splendid idea. Thank you for that suggestion. It will be done sooner rather than later.

I am delighted that Chris Williams is here in person. He is the head of elections and field operations for the Green party. We have until 10.20 am for this session, not as was indicated on the Order Paper. Mr Williams, please briefly introduce yourself.

Chris Williams: I am Chris Williams. I work for the Green party of England and Wales as head of elections and field operations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

Q I will direct a question to Professor McLean, who I hope now has the right Bill in front of him. Back in 2010, Professor, you wrote an article for The Guardian about the boundary review commencing then. I was interested to see that in it, you progressed the argument that the most accurate way to ensure that every vote counted equally would be to move towards proportional representation. That is outside the scope of the Bill, but it shows up the conflict that we have. Would not the way for every vote in the United Kingdom to count equally be to have just one constituency—the United Kingdom—and a system of proportional representation, even though that comes into conflict with the communities that we represent? Ultimately, if we are to maintain the constituency link, we have to have a percentage variance between seats; we cannot have every single seat with exactly the same number of electors. It is a question of where we draw the line.

How can that balance be struck? Is the 5% tolerance most appropriate, or if we are not moving towards a system of proportional representation, should there be a larger tolerance, so that community ties are considered more important?

Professor McLean: For clarity, it is important to separate the question of proportional representation from that of the 5% tolerance, because they are different questions. As I evidently said in 2010—you have better recall of what I said than I do—a single-member district system cannot be proportional. That is a mathematical truth. Legislators must make a choice, and the choice that the UK Parliament has made is reflected in this Bill and many others: the single-member district system.

I do not think that it would be a good use of this Committee’s time to talk about whether the UK should switch to proportional representation; with your permission, Chair, I would rather duck that part of the Member’s question.

On equality, the Member poses an important question: is it correct that the equality criterion should override the other ones—the ones on local ties, and on the constituency boundaries following local government ones where possible? My view, which is an arithmetical view, not a political one, is that it is right for the equality criterion to override the others.

Becoming somewhat more political, my observation of boundary inquiries is that since local ties are not further defined in the Act, I have observed on several occasions that for a number of very shrewd operators, who will be well known to members of this Committee, Conservative local ties go one way, Labour local ties go another, and Liberal Democrat local ties go yet another. Each of them, because they are paid to do so, makes a plausible case before a commissioner, who in England is deliberately chosen not to be from the area. Moving on from the mathematics, my view as a political scientist is that the local ties criterion is eminently manipulable, whereas the plus or minus 5% criterion is not.

Is the criterion wide enough? In the United States the courts have said that as near as possible to 0%— not 5%—is the accepted tolerance for US congressional districts. So, it is possible to have a tolerance lower than 5%, but that is not in this Bill and it is not in the earlier Acts.

[John Spellar]

Q Should we have districts?

Professor McLean: Well, since we have more time than we thought, we could have a discussion about US congressional districts, but Members may wish to move on.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

Q Gentlemen, thank you for giving your time today. As you have probably picked up from reading previous reports, one of the issues this evidence inquiry is trying to get to the bottom of is how we are going to advise the commissions about the best way to do these boundaries.

Building on what you have just said, Professor McLean, about keeping the right size and in terms of communities, about which one can always argue, can we look at rule 5(1)(c) in the 1986 Act, which is about keeping boundaries in existing constituencies? My question, to both witnesses, is about whether the Bill needs to have some clarifications put in it, especially around what we are struggling with regarding the Boundary Commission for England. The evidence from the Boundary Commission for England was pretty much, “We are always going to try and do it with wards, and we will just get the numbers to work.” That overrides almost all the rules in clause 5, including geographic considerations. I gave the example of a North Yorkshire ward that one can only get to by completely leaving the constituency and spending a considerable amount of time on the road, but it would make the numbers work.

Can I probe your minds on the resistance to building outside of the wards, or, in other words, splitting wards down, as they do in Scotland, in order to try to keep existing communities together? What are your views on the different definitions of county constituencies and borough constituencies? How does that play into the building of constituencies? Does the Bill need further guidance to try to equalise the United Kingdom’s approach to how it builds constituencies, with the gold standard of Scotland being a good example?