Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

I do not think that that was unreasonable. I hope that the noble Baroness will look at those remarks and understand then that what was going on was not, as I fear she was trying to insinuate, that I was plotting in some nefarious way to filibuster and to derail this legislation. I am not, because, as I have said, I am perhaps unusual in this House—on both sides of this Chamber—in supporting the Government’s broad objectives in both parts of the Bill. I have no wish to see the referendum on AV derailed. I know that many of my colleagues disagree but I want to support it and, again, have expressed before my broad support for it. I am afraid that I take exception to being accused of somehow trying to derail and filibuster this legislation.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My noble friend will know that I was one of those who were pressing him to have a vote. I have indeed changed my mind because he was, quite rightly, arguing privately that there was a need for the House to have the time to gestate and understand the implications of that amendment. Another reason for changing my mind was that there were a lot of Cross-Benchers in the House—more during that debate than on any other issue that we have discussed on the whole Bill. Some of us realised that it was important that we gathered their support over the following days, this being one of them. I am sorry that my noble friend was criticised as he was.

[Lord Wills]

I am extremely grateful to my noble friend. All that I ask the Government to reflect on in approaching this is that these issues are profoundly important. They are difficult and complex and there will, inevitably, be valid points of view on all sides on all these issues. If they will not listen to me, I hope that they will take an example from the admirable speech of the noble Lord, Lord Maples. That was the sort of debate of which we could have had far more thus far from the other Benches. In whatever time is left for us to debate the Bill, I hope that we will see more contributions such as the noble Lord’s from his colleagues on those Benches.

Any responsible legislative process would have set out these and all the other relevant issues and then consulted on them and come to a decision on the optimum size of a constituency and so of the House of Commons. Allowing the British people themselves to have a say in this would have been desirable, but the Government have not done that. Instead, they have determined a figure, for which they have failed so far to produce any good reason, and then shaped everything else around it. This is not just a wasted opportunity but a lazy and irresponsible way in which to approach legislation of such importance. It is also damaging to our democratic process—all the more so, I have to say in passing, because of the way in which the Government seem intent on getting this legislation nodded through this Chamber.

Why have the Government failed to produce any coherent explanation for how they arrived at this figure of 600? It is curious, as other noble Lords have pointed out, that before the election both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats had decided on a figure lower than 600 and had arguments for doing so, which we have heard today from the noble Lord, Lord Maples. So why did they change their minds? There is a coherent case for keeping to the pledges that they made to the electorate before the election. That coherent case was made by the noble Lord, Lord Maples, today. Why did they not stick to it? They will not say.

In an attempt to elucidate this information, I put in a freedom of information request, as I have already told the House. The last time I mentioned this in the House, I mentioned that I had not yet had a response, but such is the power and influence of this House that the next day I got a response, for which I am delighted. The response that I received from the Cabinet Office, dated 11 January, confirmed that the modelling that I was looking for on the impact of a reduction to 600 and to lower figures exists but that some of that information is being withheld under Section 35(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act. I think that the Government have ignored the existence of Section 35(2) of the Freedom of Information Act, which would remove their justification for exempting the information that I requested, so I have put in a request for an internal review of the Cabinet Office’s decision and I look forward with great interest to seeing the results of that review.

Leaving aside the legislative niceties of this, I believe that the public should know how and why the Government went back on the promises that they made to the electorate at the election and decided to increase the size of their reconstituted House of Commons to 600. The public want to know how the Government think this will affect their relationship as voters with their MPs. I think—and I say this in kindness to Ministers—that the public want to be reassured that, in reaching that figure of 600, the Government were not motivated in any way by the pursuit of partisan advantage. They will want to be reassured about that. The Government must realise that, as long as they fail to come up with any coherent argument for why that figure of 600 was arrived at, the suspicion must remain. They cannot avoid this. I know that it is unwelcome.

I see Ministers sitting on the Benches opposite and I know that they are without exception decent and honourable men and women. It is with some trepidation that I keep coming back to this point, but they must realise the cynicism that exists about all politicians at the moment. They must realise that the suspicion that they are motivated by nothing but partisan self-interest exists and they should be doing everything that they possibly can to dispel it, so I hope that when the Minister concludes the debate on this amendment he can provide some reassurance about that.

On Thursday last week, I wrote to the noble and learned Lord’s colleague, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, asking whether he could release the information that I had requested. When you put in a freedom of information request, it refers only to work that has been done within the Executive by government, not to work that clearly feeds into the process of formulating legislation that is done by special advisers and Conservative and Liberal Democrat party officials. I have therefore also asked the noble Lord, Lord McNally, in the interests of openness and transparency and of reassuring the public about the Government’s motivation in alighting on this figure, whether he can confirm—it may be that the Minister can confirm this in his remarks at the end of this debate—whether any modelling has been done on the differential impacts of different sizes of the House of Commons on the party composition of the House of Commons, either within government or by the Liberal party, the Conservative Party or special advisers. He can confirm or deny it. I very much hope that he will take this opportunity to start clearing up this issue once and for all. It is an important issue and we need to move forward from it. We can do so only if he can provide us with the reassurance for which I am asking.

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[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My noble friend is, as always, very wise. It would have been greatly for the convenience of both Houses of Parliament had this legislation been segmented and introduced on the sensible basis suggested by my noble friend.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, was very interesting, because that is the question that is being asked by many Members on that side of the House, but they never intervene during the course of debate. We would welcome an intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. Perhaps he would like to embroider his comments, because he would be speaking on behalf of all his colleagues on the Back Benches.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I think I could even be persuaded by the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran, to sit down a little earlier than I otherwise would in anticipation of hearing him develop his thoughts at rather ampler length. I think that the whole House will look forward to that.

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[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I agree with the noble Lord, but if a Member of a devolved Parliament was paid to deal with health, prisons and social work, while the noble Lord quite rightly would not turn a person away he would find a way of notifying his constituent that the democratic process meant that some matters were devolved to another elected Member. That is the point I wanted to make.

As a trade union officer I noted that no two officers worked in the same way, and it is the same with Members of Parliament. What I am trying to say is that there are ridiculous practices and that I have highlighted one of them. There is no point in honourable Members saying that they are overburdened when they create rods for their own backs.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I have to say to my noble friend that I am slightly disturbed by his comments about petitions. If I remember rightly, my noble friend’s constituency was an inner city seat in Glasgow, but what if he had been in a seat in rural Scotland and the village school was about to close and 500 constituents wrote to him about that closure? It would be a highly contested issue in that part of the constituency. Does my noble friend not feel that perhaps in those circumstances each of the 500 petitioners should receive a communication from their Member of Parliament? It makes them feel that they are participating in the debate and that their Member of Parliament is actually responding and not just taking them for granted.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

All I can say to my noble friend, as he has called me, is that if three of the names on the petition were from the same household and they were sent three individual letters, something would be wrong. I say as well that something would be wrong if £13,000-worth of envelopes were being used. The point I wanted to make was that something was wrong with that.

Let me make another point about pressure. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the noble Lord, Lord Graham. As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will remember, he was our Chief Whip between 1979 and 1981. I was sad to see him leave the House. He kept us until 10 o’clock on a Thursday night in the Commons. I know that to be the case because a whole load of us went up to Glasgow on the sleeper train. For years now, unless it has changed since the last election, debates on a Thursday are non-voting. That begs the question: is every Member of Parliament right there in the House of Commons, to which they were elected, on a Thursday, or are they elsewhere? I would hazard a guess that they are elsewhere. I am not criticising them because that is their business, but the case has been put that there are more pressures on this generation of Members of Parliament than there were on the old.

There was a fairly hefty pressure on Members of Parliament, if they were lucky, to leave on a Thursday. The Minister could not even take the sleeper train because of the distance to his constituency. He would not have been able to get back by the Friday. I was lucky enough to get to mine by the following morning. Also, constituency engagements were such that it was not pleasant to travel overnight. You would have surgeries and meetings with various organisations.

There are other amendments that I can comfortably support, and I know that this is a probing amendment, but there is no point in us being here if we do not express our views. I do not see that we need great academic bodies to do a study on whether we should have a reduction of 10 per cent.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

My Lords, I am goaded to intervene in this debate because the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said that no one had spoken from this side of the Committee today, or that very few had done so apart from my noble friend Lord Maples. I made it clear at Second Reading that I support this Bill largely because of Part 2. I have not been in the Chamber, but I have heard every speech made during this debate because I have been watching it on my computer. I have heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, the noble Lords, Lord Lipsey, Lord Anderson and Lord Graham, who are not in their places, the noble Lord, Lord Wills, who is in his place, and the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, in the flesh. I can recommend to colleagues that watching the debate on one’s computer is a very good way of keeping up with the debate. I find that each speaker has a good first five minutes. There is no question about that; they put their arguments succinctly. But after that—I must choose my words carefully—there is what I would say is an elaboration of those first five minutes. Very little new is added, so you can switch to doing other things on your computer and return when the next speaker turns up. That way, you get the general thrust of the debate.

When it comes to a reduction in the size of the House of Commons, I have something approaching an impeccable pedigree in that even when I was a Member of the House, I felt that it was too large. In the 1990s, I made speeches and wrote articles about it, but they, like most of my speeches and articles, have disappeared into the mists of history. Some Members may recall that three years ago I introduced a Bill in this House that sought to reduce the number in the House of Commons by 10 per cent, which would have meant a reduction of 65 Members, not the 50 Members we are considering today. It went through this House with great ease. It got to the other place and was debated, but of course private Bills from Peers die in the House of Commons after a debate.

During the debate, people asked why there should be a reduction of 10 per cent. Here the noble Lord, Lord Wills, asked why there should be 500 rather than 65 and so forth. When I introduced my Bill, some Members of this House said that a 10 per cent reduction was not enough and that they want to see a 20 per cent reduction, which would have involved 130 MPs.

I believe that one of the reasons the House of Commons became too large was this. When I was first elected back in 1960, the Commons then comprised 623 or 624 Members. It then grew exponentially for only one reason: the Speaker’s Conference of 1917. The conference was held to discuss a reduction in the size of the House to 500. Unfortunately, I should say to the former Speaker that his predecessor at that time was not as particular as he could have been. No minutes were taken of the Speaker’s Conference so no one knows what actually occurred. The only thing that did emerge was that as society developed and the population expanded, it was thought to move to an average of about 70,000 constituents per seat. That was why, in my time, the number of seats grew from 623 to just over 650. So I believe that we are over-represented in the House of Commons.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, when the noble Lord talks about the need to reduce the number of constituencies, I suggest that he would have had a very different experience in his constituency of Mole Valley compared with that of a Member of Parliament with an inner city seat, like my noble friend Lord Martin of Springburn. The intense nature of representation of an inner seat is very different indeed from what the noble Lord would have experienced in Mole Valley. I am sure he served his constituents very well, but he should remember that when he is thinking of cutting seats.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

I wish that the noble Lord had considered my political career with more care. If he had, he would have known that I represented two inner city London seats, both of which were quite small. I represented Acton, which was very much a working class seat, and St Marylebone, which was not. Both constituencies were quite small, with populations of around 40,000. I then went to Mole Valley which at one time had over 75,000 constituents. I have therefore had experience of representing both an inner city seat with considerable problems, which was the case in Acton, and a large county seat in Surrey.

The noble Lord, Lord Graham, made the point that MPs are now much more stretched than they were in the past. Both the noble Lord, Lord Graham, and I were Members of the House of Commons in the late 1960s, as I believe was my noble friend Lord Howell. We had no secretarial assistance, no research assistance, no desk and no telephone. We had to sit on the green Benches in the galleries opposite to conduct our affairs, and the only free telephone call we had was to our town clerk. We were also given 800 free sheets of parliamentary paper. After that we had to buy them, as we had to pay for all our post.

I ask noble Lords on the Labour Benches to wait. Let me develop this agony column for a while before I am interrupted. I do not believe that, in those days, Members acted in any way less significantly to their constituents. The noble Lord is nodding—of course they did not. Indeed, when I had a larger constituency—Mole Valley, about which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, reminded me—I had more than 75,000. I did not have a research assistant and I had only a part-time secretary. Were my constituents disappointed in what I gave them? Not at all; at every election, they returned me with a larger majority.

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[Lord Tyler]

No, they could have done so if they had wanted to. In the Third Reading debate there was one mention of the reduction from 650 Members to 600. They did not see this as a big issue. The spokesman from the Labour Party’s Front Bench did not mention the issue. Why is it that your Lordships are more conscious of the strain and stress on current MPs than are MPs themselves? I am mystified by this. The only possible rational explanation is, as was pointed out earlier, that this House is enjoying itself and extending debates quite unnecessarily. With that, I am sitting down and finishing.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Before the noble Lord sits down—

[Lord Tyler]

I have sat down.

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[Lord Soley]

My noble friend puts his finger on a critically important point, which I want to cover, along with other related issues, in Amendment 59.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Before my noble friend sits down, will he comment on the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who said that there had been no debate on the figure 600 at Third Reading in the House of Commons? I have with me Hansard from 20 October 2010. It shows that the debate started at 5.29 pm—

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I am intervening on my noble friend; I was asking him to comment on this matter. The debate started at 5.29 pm and ended at 9 pm. That was under a guillotined proceeding on the Bill.

[Lord Soley]

I do not have detailed knowledge of that matter, but I know that my noble friend pays great attention to these things. I also know, not least from letters that I and, I think, others have seen, that Conservative MPs complained that insufficient time had been allowed to discuss issues relating to the size of constituencies. I shall give way to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I just hope that I know enough about this issue to be able to give him an answer.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My noble friend makes a good point. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, said that he honed his skills when answering every petition when he had a majority of about 400, although he said that he also did so when he had a majority of 18,000. That just shows that there are different approaches. I do not think that anyone has the answer for what is absolutely right and what is wrong, but a scientific inquiry would not find an answer either—other than possibly 650 different answers.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

On the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, if the issue is that in safer seats the whole process of representation is conducted in a different way, surely there should be an evaluation as to what extent there would be considerably more safer seats arising out of a reduction to 600. If it could be shown that there would be more safer seats, that may be a very strong argument against the change.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

Even given a very short time to think about that point, I think that that is something of a non sequitur. There may be other ways in which we want to debate having safer seats.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, asked how the gender balance would be affected by the proposals. The equality impact assessment attached in an annexe to the Bill suggests that the effect would be neutral, but it is fair to say for the record—she asked about the commitments of the respective parties to diversity—that the Liberal Democrats have instituted a campaign for gender balance to provide encouragement and support, through a range of training, for women who are standing or considering standing for Parliament. The Conservative Party has a five-point positive action plan based on clear principles to guarantee that more women and ethnic minorities are selected for winnable seats. More pertinently, I recall from debating the Equality Bill in this Chamber before the election—now the Equality Act—that there are now specific duties on political parties.

Someone asked about the timing of the measure and suggested that it was not so urgent. However, if the Boundary Commission is to get on with its work of making proposals and recommendations in a report by 1 October by 2013 so that the 2015 general election can be fought on boundaries using an updated constituency electoral register, clearly there is a timing issue here as well.

I conclude with the words of my noble friend Lord Baker that these proposals to reduce the number of MPs to 600 would not impair the workings of democracy in the United Kingdom by having a smaller House of Commons. I commend that view to your Lordships' House and, on that basis, ask the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.