Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Falconer of Thoroton Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

It would be madness to risk that coalition to stop the British people having a say in how they choose their Members of Parliament.

I know that many of my noble friends do not like or want the alternative vote system. Frankly, I am inclined to agree. As this Bill allows your Lordships to vote in the proposed referendum, I can let you into a secret: I will vote no.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

You will not have a vote.

[Lord Strathclyde]

I will have a vote in the referendum.

I can let your Lordships into another secret: my noble friend Lord McNally will vote yes. Some might think, as our votes will cancel each other out, we should just stay at home and have a quiet dinner together, but we will not, because both of us are agreed that the British people should have this choice, and we will each campaign for the answer we seek.

How odd it would be if this unelected House, which lately voted overwhelmingly against the very idea that your Lordships should be elected, should have the temerity to tell the elected House how to proceed on its own election or to deny its wish to give the people their say.

The Lords Constitution Committee has now published its report on the Bill. It states that there has not been enough consultation on it. Respectfully, I disagree. The proposals in this Bill apply entirely to the other place. It has been rigorously examined there over eight days on the Floor of the House and through 35 Divisions. It reflects the settled will of the elected House.

On the referendum, the Government have worked closely with the Electoral Commission and administrators, and the commission has declared itself broadly satisfied that sufficient progress has been made to enable the local returning and counting officers to run the polls well and that voters will be able to participate in them.

The provisions in the Bill are sound, and Members of this House should consider carefully the clear signal from the elected House before making major changes in it.

There has been speculation about the last possible date for Royal Assent to allow the referendum to happen on 5 May. I believe there is more than adequate time. It is certainly important that, commensurate withfull scrutiny in this House, we give participants and campaigners in the referendum as much time as possible to prepare for a full and informed campaign. We owe that to the electorate, but it is possible to do that and allow enough time to examine the Bill, which I hope will complete its passage as soon as possible in January 2011.

I do not want to make unnecessary political points, but I remind noble Lords opposite of a forgotten document: A Future Fair for All, the manifesto of the party opposite only this spring, written by their current leader. On page 62, it talks of, “A New Politics”. It continues:

“To ensure that every MP is supported by a majority of their constituents voting at each election, we will hold a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for elections to the House of Commons”.

That was what Mr Miliband thought then, so I take it that we will have full support from the party opposite for the part of the Bill that provides for what it itself promised at the general election.

There is a small quibble: the party opposite promised a referendum by October 2011. The Bill proposes it in May 2011—one year into this Parliament, but that is a far slower timetable than the six-month one used by the party opposite for the referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997.

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[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, together with my noble friend Lord Bach, I shall pick up the baton so expertly carried by my right honourable friend Mr Sadiq Khan and my honourable friend Mr Chris Bryant in another place. We have heard two speeches today from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, the Leader of the House. In the first, he refused to engage with the issue at all, and in the second, he said that we should not think about amending the Bill because the House of Commons has approved it. I regard this House as responsible for improving legislation so, if the noble Lord does not mind, we will reject his second invitation.

This has been described as the most important constitutional Bill since 1832. Those are not my words but a description of the Bill by the right honourable Mr Nicholas Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, who came to office stressing that his job is to raise what he described as the hitherto lamentable standards of our politics. As he put it on 19 May 2010,

“This government is going to persuade you to put your faith in politics once again”.

The Deputy Prime Minister had the opportunity in this Bill, the most important constitutional change since 1832, to put his sanctimonious mouth where his money is. Instead, there has been no Green Paper, no public consultation and no pre-legislative scrutiny, which are all things that over the years we became so used to hearing the Tories and the Liberal Democrats demanding. At the first opportunity, they have disappointed us and they have disappointed the public out there. This is hypocrisy, and hypocrisy does not help to restore trust.

This Bill spent nine days being debated in another place, the place to which it is most important. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the Commons said of the process:

“The Deputy Prime Minister has accurately described the Bill as ‘fundamental to this House and to our democracy’. We regret that the Government’s timetable has denied us an adequate opportunity to scrutinise the Bill”.

The Bill before your Lordships' House today is an ill-thought-through, partisan muddle of a piece of legislation that, in truth, seems to be more about ensuring the longevity of the coalition than about nobler aims of equality of representation. As the Minister has told us, the Government seek to hold a referendum to ask the British public whether they would like to adopt the alternative vote system for Westminster elections. The intended date for the referendum is 5 May 2011, a day on which more than 80 per cent of the population will, in addition, be asked to vote in local council, devolved Assembly or mayoral elections. The Bill is being rushed through to meet this desired target date.

However, can the Minister explain to the House why the rush with Part 2? The independent boundary commissions of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are being asked to redraw every single parliamentary constituency in three years, which is less than half the time that previous periodic boundary reviews have taken. They are being asked to do so before the electoral register, on which the new constituencies are to be based, can be brought up to date to correct for the estimated 3.5 million voters who are currently missing from it. Under-representation is the real scandal, but this Government feel that that can wait to be addressed until after they have railroaded through new constituencies based on flawed data that will inevitably punish the people to which my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours referred. This is not fair but nonsensical.

If all that were not illogical enough, the Government—and the noble Lord did not even mention this—seek to take away any serious public say in the redesign of constituencies. Public inquiries, which are the democratic life-blood of boundary reviews and which allow local people a say in what happens to their local representation, are being removed. Why? Obviously, to fit in with the timetable. There is no rational justification for this haste, which is born of a wish to hold the next general election in 2015 and subsequent elections every five years after that using the favoured electoral boundaries. The Bill before us proposes five-yearly boundary reviews in future to match this election cycle. As our all-party Constitution Committee noted in its excellent report on this Bill,

“the provisions of this Bill and the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill are interrelated”.

The damning conclusion of that all-party committee was that,

“the constitutional relationship between the provisions of this Bill and the Government's other proposals for constitutional reform have not been adequately thought through”.

We wholeheartedly agree.

The committee’s criticism of the process is all the more heated—rightly so, we would argue—for the lack of any pre-legislative consultation. It is an insult to democracy and to the principles that we in this House hold so highly that a measure to enact constitutional change of such lasting significance has not been subject to pre-legislative scrutiny and public consultation. Only last month, the Leader of the House said that the Government are committed to pre-legislative scrutiny because,

“it improves the quality of legislation and provides an opportunity for public engagement”.—[Official Report, 28/10/10; col. 1306.].

What was wrong with this Bill, the most important constitutional Bill since 1832, that it did not require that? The Constitution Committee concluded:

“This is an unsatisfactory basis on which to embark on fundamental reform of the legislature”.

[Lord Strathclyde]

I do not like to overquibble with the noble and learned Lord, but I went on to say that early Bills in a Session could hardly be subject to pre-legislative scrutiny because they were early Bills in the Session.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

What a load of nonsense. Of course they could be subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny. I shall tell the noble Lord what you do. You say, “Let’s have pre-legislative scrutiny first”, as I understand the Government are doing in relation to House of Lords reform. Why could that not have been done in relation to Part 2 of the Bill?

[Lord Tyler]

The noble and learned Lord was a very distinguished member of the previous Administration. Does he recall that it took two years to bring forward any proposals on the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill and that, when the Bill came forward, it acquired a completely new clause on AV that had not been subject to any pre-legislative scrutiny? Was that not just the same thing as what he is now suggesting?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, exemplifies the attitude of the Liberal Democrats, who seem to think that the Bill is splendid and marvellous. Look at them. The moment that they have the most important constitutional Bill since 1832, they simply ignore the—if I may say so—entirely admirable approach to which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, refers. I do not know why he is looking at me. He should be looking at the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde.

This is an unsatisfactory Bill. As its specific proposals are not to be found in either of the coalition party’s general election manifestos, we must conclude that not only is it an unsatisfactory Bill but, as the noble Lord appeared to be conceding, it has no mandate. This is truly a shame. We on this side of the House support the holding of a referendum on the electoral system for elections to the House of Commons and we approve of the stated intention to bring the size of Westminster constituencies more into line with each other than they are at present, but the way in which the Government articulated their proposals and rammed them through in another place quite hypocritically—as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has demonstrated—was shoddy. Then they say, “We can’t change it because the other House has approved it”. I should say to the noble Lord that this has succeeded in uniting opposition to their plans.

First, on the Liberal Democrat part of the Bill, the AV referendum, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that the provisions in Part 1 are not in reality a referendum Bill. The Bill seeks to change our system of voting from first past the post to an alternative vote system, but it makes the introduction of those changes subject to a yes vote in a referendum. The referendum in this Bill is not advisory, as in all previous referendum Bills in this country, but binding. There is a requirement on the Minister to lay the order that will introduce the changes. It is totally unclear from the Bill whether it will be a negative or an affirmative order that will fundamentally change our electoral system. We need therefore to scrutinise very carefully the provisions concerning the new system.

The Bill proposes that the referendum will take place on the same day as elections already scheduled in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and most local authorities in England. The Government have failed to consult with the devolved institutions on the timing of the referendum. The plans have been condemned by the devolved Assemblies, but the Government have arrogantly ploughed ahead regardless and have not explained the magic of this date. We need to ensure that, if there is a referendum, it is one that best addresses the development of the electoral system in our country.

The following are points that we will explore in the next stages of this Bill. First, the referendum should be advisory and not binding. Secondly, the referendum should give voters the opportunity to vote on other systems apart from just first past the post or AV. Thirdly, the date should be moved to a date when there are no other elections. Fourthly, there should be a threshold of yes votes measured against a total number of those who can vote in the referendum.

Part 2 proposes a reduction in the size of the House of Commons by 50 MPs and a redrawing of constituency boundaries that—give or take 5 per cent—will prioritise the equal size of parliamentary seats above all other factors. Considerations of community, local ties, shape and accessibility of constituencies and geographical and natural boundaries are all to be subordinate to achieving the numerical ideal. On this side of the House, first, we ask the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, where the magic total of 600 constituencies has come from. I apologise for asking that because he has answered that question. He said that it came “from the air”. It certainly does not derive from either of the—

[Lord Strathclyde]

I did not say that the figure came from the air. I said that the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, had grabbed it from the air. I said that it was a nice round figure.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I apologise. The noble Lord is absolutely right. It was the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who said that the figure was plucked from the air. The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, said that it was “a nice round figure”. Thank you very much. Does the 600 figure have anything to do with research from the University of Liverpool, conducted for “Newsnight”, which clearly demonstrates that Labour will be the net losers in this situation? Labour would lose 25 seats to the Tories’ 13 and the Lib Dems’ seven.

[Lord Dubs]

I did not say anything. I just waved my arm a bit and I have become the centre of the debate. I am sitting quite quietly, behaving myself.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

Perhaps I may say that the unspoken interventions of my noble friend Lord Dubs are more powerful than the words of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde. What is the effect of removing 7.7 per cent—some 50—of the total of MPs? According to Professor King, the respected psephologist, the average constituency size will go up from 66,000, which it was at the end of the Second World War, to around 105,000 by the time of the next election.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

Does the noble and learned Lord appreciate that the figure given by Professor King was not of electors but of the total population?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I appreciate that. The reason why I refer to that figure is because that is the group of people that the MP has to deal with. If someone comes in and says, “I want some help”, I do not think that you say, “Can you prove to me that you are a voter?”.

MPs provide the pool from which Ministers are chosen. That pool would be reduced. The removal of 50 MPs would reduce at a stroke the number of MPs available to scrutinise legislation and to hold the Government to account. Professor King said:

“The House of Commons, compared with other national legislatures, is already a feeble affair. The present proposal would enfeeble it further”.

I hope that, in the five days that it cobbled together this agreement, the coalition thought about what effect this number—to quote the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, “a nice round number”—would have on our democracy.

Why does the coalition propose the reduction? The Deputy Prime Minister, whom I mentioned earlier, said that it was because the legislation underpinning reviews had meant that the number of MPs had crept up. That is what he said in the House of Commons, but it is not so. The number of MPs is lower than it was a decade ago and no higher than it was 20 years ago. It is virtually impossible to discern any principle underlying the proposal to reduce the number of MPs. We will oppose the reduction and we will in any event make any reduction conditional on a proportionate reduction in the number of Ministers in the Commons.

Crucial in the Bill is the method for determining new constituency boundaries. With the exception of Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles, a new system will apply to all constituencies. The crux of the new system is that the driving factor will be the number of constituents in a constituency. We agree with the need for substantially greater equalisation of constituency size and that there should be a small number of exceptions to the process, but we consider that the constituencies to be treated as exceptions to the system should be identified and chosen in a fair way. Why not choose the Isle of Wight? Why not recognise the importance of keeping Cornish and Devonian constituencies separate from each other? We support the inclusion of the two exceptions that are already there, but we think that there should be more and that their selection should be entrusted to someone other than a politician. Let there be a fair process. If the hybridity route has been rejected by this House, perhaps there should be an inquiry conducted by the boundary commissions, which have proved themselves over very many years to be above politics.

As regional, council and even ward boundaries are crossed in the onward march to perfectly sized constituencies, representation will become more strained and harder to navigate. For instance, the Government’s insistence on only 5 per cent leniency in constituency size would require 385 extra electors to be found for the Forest of Dean and 59 electors to be expelled from Warrington. The prospect is ridiculous.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My noble and learned friend has mentioned the report of the Constitution Committee. Is he also aware of the recommendation of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in the other place, which is a Conservative-dominated committee? It said:

“in terms of … geography, culture and history … We recommend that the Government brings forward amendments to the Bill to permit the Boundary Commission to give greater weight to these factors when drawing up new constituencies than it is currently allowed under the current proposals”.

Again, a committee of this Parliament rejects what the Government are doing.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, I was not aware of that. There seems to be a trend that any independent body within Parliament that looks at this matter criticises the way in which it has been done and criticises the conclusions. The only way in which we can give effect to that is by this House introducing amendments to the Bill.

The prospect of the sort of fiddling around with constituencies to which I have referred is ridiculous and unnecessary. It can be removed by increasing the leeway to 10 per cent either side of the standard constituency size, which would give considerable equalisation but at the same time give the ability to reflect local needs. Mathematical purity should not be allowed to carve up communities. We advise the Government that they should seek a balance between equalisation and recognition of tradition, culture, and local authority boundaries rather than aim for bland uniformity.

To add insult to injury, the Bill plans to remove public inquiries from the boundary process. The proposals in the Bill have been described by Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg of Democratic Audit as,

“the most ambitious attempt to redraw the UK’s electoral geography in six decades”.

As acknowledged by the chairs of the boundary commissions, every constituency will have to change. If this is not an ideal moment to include the public, who will be most affected by these changes, in a meaningful way, I cannot think what is. The Government talk—just as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has talked—of the big society and of a new politics where power is handed to the people, but they stubbornly ignore the calls of the constituencies of the Isle of Wight or Argyll and Bute to special recognition of their communities. The Government may talk of the big society, but with the abolition of public inquiries they will remove the one meaningful mechanism that allows ordinary people to have their say. I hope that the coalition Government will realise their mistake, but I am not optimistic.

The Electoral Reform Society has described the coalition’s proposals as meaning that,

“most constituencies will pay less regard to what most voters think of as community and natural boundaries, and change more frequently, destabilising the link between MPs and constituents”.

The United States, notes the Electoral Reform Society,

“has rigorous requirements for arithmetical equality of population in congressional districts, but the worst gerrymandering in the developed world”.

We want to support proposals for greater equalisation and we would welcome discussions with the coalition to achieve it. This sort of Bill is a classic vehicle for seeking consensus rather than ramming things through in this way. We will not support operating in this overly hasty way, which places the power to influence constituency boundaries out of reach of local people and which in the short-term will disfranchise 3.5 million people in the country, the vast majority of whom are young, living in private rented accommodation, in poverty and from the BME communities.

This Bill will promote rapid and damaging changes to our constitution in order to have the new boundaries in place by the next election. It will do so at great cost to local communities and to the unregistered voter, and it will do long-term damage to faith in our politics. We can achieve the goal of equalisation without the damage that this Bill will cause. I hope that the fact that there is now a coalition embracing the Tories and the Liberal Democrats does not mean that this House loses its reputation for amending Bills when they need amending. I hope that the House will join together to make this Bill a much better Bill than the poor, partisan Bill that it is at the moment. It can be done, and I ask your Lordships’ House to help us to do that.

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[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Yes, and I enjoyed that enormously. I do not see where that comes into it. The constituency eventually disappeared altogether, it was so small. But if you think generally of all the other, great constituencies in the country—I would not want to make a personal matter of it—that is the plain fact. There has to be a greater equality.

Labour’s attitude, from what the noble and learned Lord the former Lord Chancellor was saying tonight, is that this Bill should not proceed because a large number of people are unregistered in our inner cities. The general comment was that it was not fair to do it until registration had gone up. I find that rather an astonishing argument. Some electoral scholars call the people who do not register non-people, although they are not non-people but actual people. It is quite possible for people to register if they are interested in politics; if they are interested in affecting society, they can register. It is their duty and responsibility if they wish to have it. If the Labour Party wishes to pursue that argument very far, it should ask itself what it did in office about registration of the electorate.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

We introduced individual registration and it drove up registration to more than 90 per cent. It is completely wrong to say that people do not want to register because they are not interested in politics. If you have a registration drive, registration goes up. The noble Lord is talking rubbish.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

With great respect, I ask the noble and learned Lord to address the figures. That is a total exaggeration, which is not unknown from the former Lord Chancellor. In fact, very little was done, and I have read apologies from those on the former government Front Bench in the other House saying that they did not do enough. I ask the noble and learned Lord to read Hansard occasionally.

Among the other things I favour in this Bill is the proposal that the Boundary Commission should do five-yearly reviews. We have been accused of just looking after the Conservative interests in this Bill, but I have seen situations when Labour in office has deliberately delayed boundary reviews. Let me give an example. Before the 1970 election I had won a by-election in Acton, which was a Labour seat. We were coming up to the 1970 election and a boundary review was published, which was going to make my seat a safe seat, so I had a vested interest in it. Alas, the Home Secretary of the day, Jim Callaghan, did not share that interest and did everything that he possibly could to manoeuvre to prevent the Boundary Commission proposals coming before Parliament. It was a shameful process; he tried to jiggle a few seats here and a few seats there, and it had to be withdrawn. So for electoral advantage the Labour Party rigged the system in the 1970 election, and it has done it before.

Successive Governments have always been rather slow to introduce Boundary Commission reports. As a result, you had the electorate of 2000 for the 2010 election, while the 2005 election was on the electorate of 1991. Successive Governments have delayed. So I welcome the fact that this will be done on a five-yearly basis.

I am also glad that public inquiries are going to be scrapped. I do not know how many Members of this House have attended a public inquiry of the commission, but they will all agree that it is a misnomer to call it a public inquiry. At the ones I attended, no ordinary citizens turned up at all. The only people who turned up were the ward councillors and their wives—I suppose they are ordinary citizens—the sitting Member of Parliament, the various candidates and their election agents. It was really a rehearsal of all the submissions they had made to the Boundary Commission. Those with the small interests of the locality were not there at all. Moreover, with regard to the findings of those inquiries, the greatest changes that they have ever instituted were to change the name of the new constituency. In the whole history of the Boundary Commission there have been three inquiries leading to significant changes in the boundaries.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

The Boundary Commission report for England and Wales in 2007 said that 64 per cent of public inquiries affected a change in the initial proposal of the Boundary Commission.

[Lord Baker of Dorking]

Those changes are as modest as the change that the noble and learned Lord was speaking about earlier concerning the movement of Charlwood from Surrey to Sussex. That happened to be in my constituency. They are very minor changes on the edge.

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[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Sorry, they campaigned on having a referendum on AV. To be fair, it was a post-legislative referendum.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

Pre-legislative.