Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

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

Second Reading

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

For the benefit of the House, let me say that a point of order was raised yesterday regarding the publication of the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill, and I think it might be helpful to make a short statement on the matter.

The Bill was initially made available in hard copy and online on Wednesday 29 November. An error was identified on Thursday morning and was brought to the attention of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan), who immediately informed the Public Bill Office. The error identified was not in any way the fault of the hon. Gentleman; it was an error made during the manual inputting of the text into the Bill publishing software. The Public Bill Office is taking steps to improve this process to ensure that such a mistake is not repeated with future Bills.

The corrected version of the Bill was available online within 30 minutes of the error being reported, and hard copies were made available in the Vote Office within one hour, 10 minutes and five seconds. I am satisfied that there was no infringement of the notice requirements for the Bill and, just as importantly, that the error does not affect the debate that will take place on it, so I will not entertain any further points of order on this subject.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I was the Minister who tried to bring in a Bill to ensure that the House of Lords was elected, and of course it was because the Labour party would not support the programme motion that we were not able to make any progress. On the hon. Gentleman’s point about cost, it is true that more Members have been appointed to the House of Lords but, since 2010, the cost of running the other place has actually fallen each year—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The right hon. Gentleman is hoping to catch my eye early in the debate, so I suggest that he saves his speech. As he should know, we need short interventions—we have a long day.

[Afzal Khan]

I understand what the right hon. Gentleman is saying, but the bottom line is that if we are trying to reduce cost, why are the Government putting more and more unelected people into the House of Lords, and appointing more and more special advisers? It does not make sense. I would prefer to have more elected people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady not agree that it is better to represent a large constituency in a single unitary authority area, rather than trying to represent a smaller constituency, as set out in the Boundary Commission proposals, that straddles two borough areas with double the number of borough chief executives, clinical commissioning groups, police and—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. I just suggest that, with a lot of Members wishing to speak in the debate, we have short interventions.