Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Bishop of Blackburn Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Blackburn]

My Lords, the Church of England has been around for some very considerable time. We have centuries of experience of making changes and we have not always got it right. What we have learnt, though, is that change management is a skill which has to be honed with experience—and my experience still tells me that trying to run two unrelated and non-interdependent changes at the same time is fraught with difficulty.

With regard to the voting system for the other place, noble Lords will know that the established church has for many years adopted the principle of the single transferable vote for election to its own governing body, the General Synod. While the church will not be putting forward a corporate line on the alternative vote, I would comment that there is a danger that under this system the member elected, rather than being “the one whom most people like”, as is often claimed, could better be described as “the one fewest people dislike”. Is this a move to the lowest common denominator rather than the highest common factor? Perversely, this can be less proportional than the first past the post system we currently have.

The redrawing of the constituency boundaries may seem, on the face of it, to be a welcome move in equalising the size of constituencies, but surely we must not forget the law of unintended consequences. If, as we are assured, the revisions are to be speedy and often to ensure that the constituencies remain roughly equal in size as registered voter numbers change, small communities on the edge of larger populations could find themselves being moved in and out of a particular constituency at consecutive elections—a kind of electoral ping pong. A different though related problem could arise for a rural community surrounded by urban communities. The small pockets of population in the rural area could be used similarly to the “makeweight chocolates” that I remember from my youth; they would be added to larger urban areas just to make up the numbers.

An advantage of our present constituency system is that a community of interest develops over a period of time. I would suggest that such communities of interest are important, not only to those who live in them but also to those who represent them. To move parts of communities from one area to another, with no recourse to representation from the members of those communities, is in my view wrong. It may suit the numerical purists to be able to work it out on a spreadsheet, but it is destructive of the very thing that we are trying to produce, which is better accountability.

Noble Lords will note that I referred to “those who live in them”—elected Members of the other place represent all who live in their boundaries, as we have heard this evening, and not just those who are registered to vote. There is strong evidence that the urban, more deprived areas are those that have the highest number of unregistered eligible voters. That view is supported by the Electoral Commission. These are the very areas that are likely to be affected most by the redrawing of the boundaries and the consequent reduction in the number of elected Members.

The north-west as a region has the lowest deviation from the mean electorate in England, based on the election of 6 May 2010. However, under the proposed revisions, it would lose the most representatives of any English region. I hope that these proposals will be looked at again and that a solution will be found that is both locally supported and fairer in impact than the present suggestion. To do less would, I suspect, be to disfranchise large numbers in my diocese.

“Act in haste and repent at leisure”: I fear that that may be the most useful comment with regard to this Bill. The changes proposed are far-reaching and, as the noble and learned Lord said, they are untested—they were not even in an election manifesto. The Bill also has major implications for other constitutional changes that are being talked of, not least in relation to your Lordships’ House. In humility, I ask that we think carefully about separating parts of the Bill and allow time for that community of interest to develop around an agreed way forward.