Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting)

Laura Farris Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[David Linden]

Q My final question follows on from what the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton said about the size of constituencies. You may have seen from some of the questions that I have asked in previous sittings of this Committee that a lot of people in Scotland were frankly outraged at the proposal for a Highland North constituency, which would have been utterly unmanageable for any MP; I mean, the current Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency is already far, far too big. Does the ERS have any views about reducing the current 12,000 sq km guideline to try to ensure slightly more manageable constituencies and a slightly closer relationship between the electors and their MP?

Darren Hughes: I think that is exactly right. These processes give us the opportunity to say, “What would the rules be and how would they apply in the majority of cases?”, and then, “Where are the outliers, whereby if we did apply the rules we could congratulate ourselves on the consistency?”, but actually we are creating a brand new representation injury, by making politics and representation so distant from people.

As we were discussing with the last set of questions, if we had multi-Member wards, these things could be addressed. Obviously, you cannot change the geographic challenges of some areas—they simply cannot be addressed by any system—but you can make decisions to make the situation worse, and sometimes that is what tends to happen.

If there was a multi-Member system, that would be of assistance, but it is also important to carve out the ability for the commissioners to look at a particular constituency and say, “This just doesn’t make sense.” Equally, you could not make a decision based on those examples and then necessarily apply it to the rest of the UK, because that would create further injustices as well. Until we know more about the effect of the new regime, given that by the time we get to the next election it will be nearly a quarter of a century since the 2000 dataset that is being used, that needs to be part of the consideration. But you point to examples or rules that you could use that would minimise that.

[Laura Farris (Newbury) (Con)]

Q Thank you, Darren, for giving evidence to us.

One of the things we heard this morning was that US congressional districts had close to zero margin of deviation around population size, and one of the points that you made was that when people buy a house, or look on Zoopla, they are not given information about their political constituency, but they are given other very local information, for example school proximity. I just wondered whether there was any sort of empirical basis that you had in mind when you said that you thought that the 5% range, if I can call it that, was not sufficient.

Darren Hughes: Sure. The American examples are obviously the extreme ones, but they are ones to bear in mind, because they are examples of what can happen if you set hard and fast rules, so they apply everywhere no matter what, and then you also allow for a rampant politicisation of the process.

There is an author called David Daley who has written a couple of books, which are incredibly readable and accessible, about how the boundary system in American got to the state it is in. Unfortunately, one of them has such a colourful title that you will need to google it; I could not possibly say it in this forum.

However, regarding your point about the 5% versus the 10% range, these are the areas where you can go round in a lot of circles, because there are arguments in favour of each range. I just feel that if you could offer reasonable flexibility to the commission, what you would hope is that the practice would develop and that it gives them an extra tool when a particular geographic situation confronts them, as opposed to just starting out by saying, “We’ll flex our muscles wherever we can.” The thinking on that was that they are the final line in the arguments, but because you are not having that final parliamentary vote and you are not getting the commissions to do the work, it might make sense to offer them those tools.

[Laura Farris]

Q We heard evidence from Professor Iain McLean this morning, who said that one of the risks of the local ties argument is that, depending on whose hands that argument is in, it can be politicised in a different way, and what the Conservatives, Labour party or Liberal Democrats might determine to be local ties would vary according to which of them you ask. Do you agree with that analysis? If you do, do you think it supports the idea of a threshold being set somewhere?

Darren Hughes: I do agree with that analysis. Sometimes things are important but not very popular, or not very—[Inaudible]— or not very engaging. When we conduct elections, they are very important to millions of people, which is why around two thirds of people on the register turn out. We all wish that that was higher, but there is still a lot of interest in elections. Some of the mechanics of how we build the demographic architecture does not result in a huge amount of engagement. I think that on parliamentary boundaries, if you were wanting to involve them in a submission process, you either hire somebody to run that for you or you ensure that tweets and letters go out and so on. As I said before, it takes on an incredible cloak of authority for that community, even though it might not be entitled to the status that it receives. I agree that it is possible to happen, and I think in some cases the community argument is very strong, but in a lot of cases it is a shield for more of a partisan argument for that particular electoral cycle, which, as I say, is the sort of thing we should avoid.

Being able to have things like citizens’ juries or —[Inaudible]—citizens who are asked to come together to assist the commissions with information, with their feelings and the values of that area, and with people saying what they think the community interests really are, might be a more real way of being able to include the community, getting better quality information and ensuring that the final decisions reflect the reasonable view of the public, as opposed to those who knew that the consultation was on.

[Clive Efford]

Q Thanks, Darren, for giving evidence this afternoon. Following on from that, do you think that the Boundary Commission is incapable of telling the difference between political opportunism and genuine community concern about parliamentary boundaries and local representation?

Darren Hughes: I do not know, is the answer to that. I assume not, but sometimes when these processes are going on for a long period of time, and if people are appointed who might not have a lot of experience in dealing with active organised citizens pushing a particular view, these are the risks you run. It might not be the case in every cycle, but you would want to make sure that organised political activity dressed up as the concerned citizen was not able to take hold. That is an important thing. Secondly, if there are mechanisms to get very good quality information about what the general public think, like deliberative consultation processes enable you to do, that is pretty rich information for the commissioners to receive in addition to the demography data that they would be using as well.