Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Goldsmith Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith]

My Lords, it is an enormous privilege to speak immediately after the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, who, with scholarship, erudition and experience has made an extraordinarily powerful case for a reduction in the number of Ministers. But there are two matters before your Lordships’ House on these two amendments. The first is whether to maintain, as the amendment in the name of my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton would do, the number of Ministers at least proportionate to the number of MPs. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, would go further.

I support the amendment in the name of my noble and learned friend to the extent that that amendment at least ought to be accepted. The Government have come with great and, in many ways, worthy protestations of a desire to reform politics, in particular to reduce the power of the Executive—I look particularly at those on the Liberal Democrat part of the Government Benches. I do not understand how they can be content when that is not what will happen under this Bill. Indeed, it will be quite the opposite, as my noble and learned friend has said.

Lest there be any misunderstanding outside this Chamber as to the significance of the payroll vote, let me try to spell it out. First, if you are on the payroll vote, which means those who are paid or unpaid for these purposes, including Parliamentary Private Secretaries as well as full Ministers, you cannot vote against the Government without resigning. It is as simple as that. If a piece of legislation is put forward that a number of Ministers do not like, they cannot stay as Ministers and vote against it. That automatically means that the Government have a greater number of Members of Parliament able and willing to support what they want.

Secondly, as noble Lords have said, the Government cannot be held to account. When I was a Minister I could not ask questions of the Government through the mechanisms which exist in this House, let alone those in the other place. One can do what one can behind the scenes, but one cannot in an open way hold the Government to account.

On 17 January, I drew attention to the statement made by the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Clegg, that the unambiguous judgment on the part of the Government was,

“that reducing the power of the executive, seeking to boost the power of the legislature, making the legislatures more accountable to people ... collectively introduces the mechanisms by which people can exercise greater control over politicians”.

I will listen intently to what the Minister—if it be the Leader of the House—says as to how that statement can be reconciled with a position which does not accept that at the very least the number of Ministers must be reduced proportionately to the number of Back-Benchers. Otherwise, the power of the Executive will not be reduced. The power of the legislature will not be boosted. Quite the opposite will take place.

[Lord Tyler]

I wonder whether the noble and learned Lord will take his argument a step further. There is a powerful case here for looking at this issue. With his great experience as a very senior member of the previous Administration, but as a Member of this House, he will immediately acknowledge that this is also related to the issue of how many Ministers should sit in this House.

In the past, I have heard a powerful argument that, if and when this House is reformed, it may well be that there should be a proper separation of powers and that there should not be any Members of the Executive who are voting Members of this House. Will he acknowledge therefore that there is a good case for this issue to be addressed in the context of the future role of this House, which, as we know, this House and the other place will consider in a matter of weeks? Therefore, it may be premature for this issue to be addressed in this Bill when the relationship of the two Houses and, in particular, the relationship of this House to the Executive will be in front of this House in weeks.

[Lord Goldsmith]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his intervention and for his kind remarks, because he makes my point. The problem is that the Government have chosen to introduce in this Bill not only the referendum, which they need as a matter of urgency because of their political deal, and with which I have no difficulty, as I have said before, but also the reduction in the number of MPs.

A part of this change is in this Bill. My concern is that this Bill does not deal with the whole of it. I do not find it acceptable for the Government, with respect to the noble Lord who will answer this point, to say, “Well, don’t worry, something will be looked at later”. I am going to ask the Minister three questions now and he can think about them. What are the Government going to do about this? I have already drawn attention to the fact that on the Constitution Committee, when we asked Mr Clegg and Mr Mark Harper, the Minister, about the risk of increasing the power of the Executive, Mr Clegg said:

“There is a strong argument that says that you must look at this and adapt the number of people who are on the government payroll so that you do not get a lopsided imbalance between those on the payroll and those holding them to account”.

If there is a strong argument—and I agree with him that there is—what is going to be done to deal with it?

Secondly, when is it going to be done? Vague statements about the boundary changes not coming into effect for some time and having been able to look at this by then are all very well—but when is this going to happen? Thirdly, will the Minister tonight in his reply commit to some method by which the reduction in the number of Members, if this House or Parliament adopts the proposals in the end, does not come into effect until there has been a satisfactory reduction in the number of Ministers, either as suggested in the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, or by that of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth? I would prefer to see that being dealt with in this Bill. I do not think it should be put off, which is why I support the amendment. At the very least, the Government should ask themselves what they are going to do, if the new politics are to have any credibility, in their proposals for increasing the power of the legislature, reducing the power of the Executive and giving more power to the people. So long as they do not give a clear, unconditional commitment on this question, that statement will appear just a mirage and a charade. Having got into power, they are happy, as many Governments have been in the past, simply to retain the reins of power and the patronage and ability to get their legislation through by having as many of their people as possible on the government Benches. For those reasons, I support the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, the manifesto on which the Conservative Party fought the last election stated on page 63 said that,

“we plan to change Britain with a sweeping redistribution of power … from the government to Parliament”.

The power and size of the Executive vis-à-vis the House of Commons has grown over the years. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, suggested that there might be some justification for that in terms of the growing demands of modern government. On the other hand, one might say that with the appropriation—if I can put it that way—of significant powers of government over this country by the European Union and the devolution of significant responsibilities for government to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there is an argument that there is a need for fewer Ministers rather than more. The reality is, however, that numbers have grown and grown. One reason in recent times why the numbers of ministerial appointments and members of the payroll vote have grown yet again is because it has been found expedient in the formation of the coalition to provide more jobs for more of the boys and girls.

Mr Christopher Chope, an admirably robust and courageous Member of Parliament and someone who has never had any time for the excuses and the self-justification that big government makes for itself, said:

“This Government have a record number of Ministers—more than at any time since the 1975 legislation was passed. When I was first elected in 1983”—

that is the year in which I was also first elected to the other place—

“there were about 83 House of Commons Ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s Government. We now have 95, five more than we had at the height of the last Labour Government”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 103.]

He went on to observe that the number of government Whips is now at an all-time high.

The payroll has grown and grown, and as my noble and learned friend has just said, it is not paid ministerial positions alone that have grown; the number of parliamentary private secretaries has soared. I understand that in the 1950s only a very small number of extremely senior Cabinet Ministers had a PPS. Nowadays, every member of the Cabinet has at least one PPS, and some have two, while every Minister of State has a PPS. In this way, the House of Commons has been progressively debilitated. Not for nothing is the Chief Whip known as the “patronage secretary”. If this Bill is unamended, the patronage exercised by the government Chief Whip in the other place will become more significant still.

Professor Philip Cowley of the University of Nottingham has noted that, contrary to the folklore, in recent years there have been increasing numbers of rebellions as more and more Back-Bench Members of the other place have found themselves rebelling from time to time. The Executive’s response has been to create more jobs and, through this Bill, to reduce the number of Back-Benchers in proportion to the size of the House of Commons. Not only the Government do this. The Opposition and other parties have to do it as well, or at least they persuade themselves that they, too, must stock their Front Benches with increasingly numerous appointments. We have reached the point where approaching half the membership of the House of Commons is on one Front Bench or another. What proportion of independent Back-Benchers does that leave? By the time you discount the ambitious who are not truly independent and the disappointed whose votes are not as independent as they might suppose, how many Back-Benchers enjoy in every sense of the term the freedom of the Back Benches? Not very many.

The Executive, via the legitimate day-to-day operations of the Whips—who have a proper job to do, and it is entirely appropriate for them to appeal to their party members for loyalty and support in the Division Lobbies—via the growth of patronage, via the exploitation of the ambitions of an increasingly professional political class, via pressures that can be exerted on Back-Bench Members through their local parties and via the fear, possibly, of deselection, one way or another continue to increase their dominance of the House of Commons.

I shall quote again from the Conservative Party manifesto for the last election, this time from page 67:

“Because we are serious about redistributing power, we will restore the balance between the government and Parliament by … allowing MPs the time to scrutinise law effectively”.

Rarely in the history of manifesto betrayals can there have been such a quick retreat from the position taken in the manifesto to the practice adopted by the Government in their handling of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill in the House of Commons. The coalition, in the metaphorical smoke-filled room—metaphorical because I do not suppose for a second that there was any real smoke in it—devised a scheme, which we see expressed in this Bill, to seize yet more power for the Executive over the House of Commons. Bogus justifications were produced. It was noted that Members of Parliament were unpopular as a consequence of the expenses scandal; it was noted that there was a deficit that needed to be corrected; so the justification was contrived for reducing the number of Members of the House of Commons.

One of the justifications offered was on the grounds of saving public expenditure. We are told that if you reduce the size of the House of Commons by 50 Members of Parliament, you will save £12 million. On that basis, if you reduce the size of the House of Commons by 100 Members of Parliament, you will save £24 million. A reduction of 200 Members will save £48 million. But what price an effective House of Commons, and what price a representative democracy that enables the people of this country, through their representatives, to hold their Government to account? I think that that is worth more than £12 million.

The result of this legislation, if we fail to amend it with one or other of these amendments or something on Report, will be an even smaller proportion of Back-Benchers who are even less capable, in an already enfeebled House of Commons, of holding the Executive to account. One of the consequences of the enfeeblement of the House of Commons is that Members of your Lordships’ House feel that they have an increased responsibility to step in where the House of Commons has emasculated itself and denied itself the capacity to do the job that those who elected it expected it to do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Soley]

I rise not only to support my noble friend with or without the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Norton—I think there is an interesting debate to be had there—but to say above all that I regard this as a very important proposed new clause, which I hope and expect the Government to indicate some degree of willingness to move on. The reality is that, like the figure of 600, this discussion takes us back quite a few years. That discussion, as I have said in previous debates, has been around at least since 2004, when Andrew Tyrie MP wrote about it in his pamphlet, but it goes further back than that. Some noble Lords may have heard the noble Lord, Lord Baker, on the Conservative side, and me saying that we had discussed the reduction in the size of the House of Commons in the 1980s or possibly the early 1990s. We always said—this was said on both sides of the House by people who took this view—that if you reduced the size of the House of Commons, two things had to be at the forefront of our minds. First, it should be by all-party agreement; and, secondly, there must be a reduction in the number of Ministers in the House of Commons.

There were two reasons for that predominantly. One has been well spelled out. I shall not dwell on it in great detail, but it is glaringly obvious that if you keep the same number of Ministers and the payroll vote is exactly the same, you reduce the number of MPs, give greater power and influence to the Executive, and reduce the power and influence of the legislature. That is why this is so important.

I had not thought of the other reason until I heard Professor King of Essex University explain it. He is right that if you reduce what he calls the gene pool from which Ministers are pulled—the Back-Benchers—the gene pool that is available for new Ministers will be reduced. That is important, too. The noble Lord, Lord Norton, talked about the importance of the quality of Ministers. If you do not reduce the number of Ministers but simply reduce the number of Back-Benchers, that will inevitably affect the quality as well as the quantity available to a Prime Minister from which to draw.

As I say, the argument goes back many years. I am frustrated and angry about our current position because we have been crying out for these reforms for some years, but they can be done only in a consensual and thoughtful manner. The Bill leaves bits out, rushes things and tries to do it without all-party agreement, which makes it difficult. Many on the Conservative Front Bench, when in opposition or in government, have said that they recognise the importance of dealing with the number of Ministers. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and others have said, “We must wait for House of Lords reform”, but that is a very dangerous philosophy. Reform of the House of Lords will not be easy, not least because of strong feelings on the government Benches. Even if they think it will be easier than I do, the chances of getting this through at the same time will not necessarily be good. There will be that sort of battle all the time. This is so important that it ought to be linked in a Bill with the reduction in the size of the House of Commons. I do not know anyone either in the House of Commons in the past 20 years or in this House who has not recognised that if you reduce the size of the House of Commons, you ought to reduce the number of Ministers. I do not see how you can argue against that. If you are going to do it you should do it together, and in the same Bill.

[Lord Goldsmith]

I wonder whether my noble friend with his great experience in the other place can help the House. I have been puzzling about the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, since he made it. I do not understand how changes in this House will increase the ability of Back-Benchers in the other place to hold the Government to account. Can my noble friend tell us whether it has anything at all to do with holding the Government to account in the democratically elected House of Commons?

[Lord Soley]

My noble and learned friend anticipates me to some extent. He is exactly right. I recognise the political reality that the two parties—the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives—have formed a coalition and have to agree to somehow stitch the Bill together. Of course, things get left out or it is difficult to change it. However, even the Liberal Democrats were arguing—and arguing strongly as I understand it—for a reduction in the number of Ministers, which makes it very hard to understand why it is not in this Bill now. It is not impossible. Instead, it is somehow being left to a change in the House of Lords; you get the feeling that one party or the other in the coalition is hoping that this will not happen or that will not happen and that then maybe they can get another part of the deal, and so on. If the coalition is that unstable, it is not going to last. My advice would be to try and get this in the Bill now or get a very strong commitment from the Government that it will be brought forward in another form before the House of Commons is reduced.

I want to go back to something that has already been said which is also very important. We tend to look at this simply in terms of the number of people on the government Front Bench. My noble friend Lord Howarth made the very important point that you have Front Benches in the other parties. All the other parties have Front-Bench speakers. All of them are thinking to their future to some extent. Inevitably, again, this reduces the power of the legislature to hold the Executive to account.

It will probably alarm some of my friends, but I considered at one stage that there was quite a strong case for having Ministers drawn from outside the House who could be brought into the House and cross-examined and questioned. That would really put the cat among the pigeons—an almost presidential system. You can make a number of interesting innovations with our constitution, although I certainly would not go too far down this road right now. I want to say and emphasise as strongly as I can that to reduce the size of the House of Commons without simultaneously reducing the size of the Government is an invitation to the Government to increase their power at the expense of the legislature. Whatever the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, thinks, there is no guarantee that he will get what he spoke about at a later stage when the House of Lords is changed, as my noble and learned friend Lord Goldsmith indicated in his intervention.

We have to bite on this bullet. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, recognises the importance of this argument because, when I was talking about where the figure of 600 came from in the previous debates about this, he indicated that we would come to this under this proposed new clause. I am waiting with anticipation for him to say, “Yes, you’re all right, I’ll accept it”. There is no reason why ideally he could not accept the proposed new clause or redraft it in some way, maybe coming back to the House with some variation which we would all look at, and there is absolutely no reason why he should not stand up and say, “I guarantee that we will bring in a reduction in the number of Ministers in the House of Commons before the figure of 600 is imposed on the House of Commons”. That is what this House is waiting to hear. It is what, as other people have said, has been promised all along about reducing the power of the Executive and so on, and it will not be delivered without a very strong commitment that the number of Ministers will be reduced before the figure of 600 is brought into the House of Commons.

I have been saying for some time that the two reasons given by a number of people from the Conservative Party over the years for the reduction to 600 has been, first, saving money and, secondly, the belief that the Labour Party gets too many seats in Parliament and the Conservative Party would get more. This is in a number of speeches, press statements and booklets written by Conservative Members which I quoted the other week. Andrew Tyrie wrote a good document back in 2004 for the Conservative Party—although, as I say, I did not agree with his statistics—saying that the figure should be reduced to either 600 or 550 over a period of five to 10 years. He had the good grace—as did most of the Conservative commentators—to say that this should be done in co-operation with the Labour Party, although the phrase I would prefer to see used is “after all-party agreement”, probably in a Speaker’s Conference. However, Andrew Tyrie also made the point, as have other Members on the Conservative side as well as the Labour side, that any reduction in the size of the House of Commons had to be matched by a reduction in the size of the payroll vote. In our new-found spirit of co-operation, I hope that the Minister—we have not quite got round to the negotiations yet, but I know that he is thinking about it—will indicate very strongly that everybody wants this measure really. To put it off until some hopeful date when the House of Lords is reformed is, frankly, at best the triumph of hope over experience and at worst disruptive and will not achieve the aim that most of us want.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I am delighted to have been encouraged to leap to my feet. I was so enjoying the noble Lord, Lord Myners, who was in danger of slipping into his anecdotage, but it was great fun and he made some good, serious points as well, which I enjoyed. Some of what he said about his time in government should be taken up as a specialist seminar in itself, which some noble Lords wanted to encourage. The noble Lord demonstrated his experience and knowledge of Government because of course my brief says “resist”. But noble Lords should not be too disappointed by that because I hope to demonstrate that although it says “resist” what it means is “resist but”, and I shall get to the “but” in a moment.

This issue was substantially debated in another place, but the noble and learned Lord who introduced the amendment here has given us an opportunity to have another fine debate in this House. Therein lies the point, because as some noble Lords have spotted, the Government have never objected to the spirit behind the amendment. As the noble and learned Lord said and others such as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, spotted, this Government are committed to passing power from the Executive to Parliament. That much was witnessed by the swift moves to implement the Wright committee’s recommendations for the other place to establish the Back-Bench Business Committee passing control of much more parliamentary time to Back-Bench Members of Parliament and the power to elect the chairs and members of Select Committees. That is not letting any grass grow under the feet of the Government—fast action straight away.

My right honourable friend the Prime Minister has also become the first Prime Minister in history to give up the power to call a general election at the time of his choosing, so noble Lords will know that this Government are not looking to extend their own influence. This Government believe on principle that power should be dispersed.

In this particular instance, we do not see the need to rush to legislate. There are four and a half years until the provisions of the Bill will take effect. If we want to have new boundaries based on smaller number of seats at the next general election, we have to legislate now to give the boundary commissions the time to carry out their reviews and the parties time to prepare for the election. If we want to have fewer Ministers after the next election, we do not have to legislate now. In fact, we do not necessarily have to legislate at all. In any case, the heart of the matter appears to be not the number of Ministers in the House of Commons but the size of the Government’s payroll vote in the House of Commons. That includes Parliamentary Private Secretaries who are not covered by the current legislation and would not be covered by the amendment that we are discussing. As my honourable friend the Deputy Leader of the House of Commons has said, it is only by “self-denying ordinance” that the number of PPSs is limited.

Clearly, the Government have been capable of self-restraint. That self-restraint will still be necessary should the amendment be adopted. So if the intention of the amendment is to try to limit that influence and bind future Governments, it would fail on that count alone. In addition, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, realised, the legislation would not cover the number of opposition Front-Benchers. Although they are of a different type of influence and a different type of patronage, it is also relevant if the concern is that there are too few independent voices from the Back-Benches. The Government's position is that it is not—

[Lord Goldsmith]

I am very interested in the noble Lord’s observation about the defect in my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer’s amendment. Can we look forward to a government amendment on Report which will correct that by making sure that it controls the number of PPSs as well as that of Ministers in the same proportionate manner?

[Lord Strathclyde]

I am going to come to that but the noble and learned Lord should not hold his breath for me making a commitment to return on Report, because we need to look at the ramifications of doing all of this. The Government’s position is that it is not desirable that the payroll vote should be expanded as a proportion of the House’s membership. We have said that we will look at how to address this, and we will do so. I wonder whether that was the ringing and unconditional commitment that the noble and learned Lord was looking for. I think that it probably was not—I think that he wanted a bit more than that—but it was pretty good.

[Lord Goldsmith]

The noble Lord has spotted that quite correctly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Goldsmith]

My Lords, I was going to support this amendment even before hearing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, but his point, which I had not considered before, is one that the Minister really ought to consider. Speaking from experience of having to deal with inquiries and judicial review against government, the fact is that if you do not provide any form of outlet for local opinion and for people who are unhappy about decisions that are being taken, they will look for other ways. The legal profession is sufficiently innovative and able, as the noble and learned Lord knows, to find ways of doing it if we do not provide it. That is an enormously important point.

I would have supported the amendment in any event on the basis of the effect on the population and on localism. He and I have heard much about that in our debates, and rightly so. I look across to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. We come from the same city of Liverpool, where localism for his party might have been born. Certainly I saw it in operation there. It is therefore surprising to see that a critical part of that—the ability of local people to say what they think about this issue—is being removed entirely. Is it not plain, as my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer said, that the real reason the Government are doing this is not because they think it will give more power to the people, which is what their programme is about, but because they are worried about delay? However, my noble and learned friend’s amendment deals with that. If the Government think that they can tighten it a little more but accept the principle, no doubt they can say so.

The really important point is this, and I support the noble and learned Lord in saying it: do not remove all opportunity to have a form of local inquiry that enables people not only to say what they think, but often to provide information and advice that, when it is heard by those who are making the final decision about boundaries, makes a difference. Therefore, I very much hope that the noble and learned Lord will be positive about this amendment. If he tinkers with it and brings back slightly different time limits, those on the Front Bench on this side will no doubt consider those carefully. However, the principle is important.

[Lord Henley]

Oh, come on.

[Lord Goldsmith]

I really must object to that comment from the noble Lord, Lord Henley, who, as far as I can see, has been in the Chamber for only the past five minutes. I have been speaking for less than that. That really was an unhelpful comment. He should know better than that.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, for introducing this amendment and for the very helpful and constructive spirit in which he proposed it. I also thank the other noble Lords who made important contributions to this relatively short but important debate.

The amendment seeks to introduce a public inquiry stage into the boundary review process, allowing the Boundary Commissions to hold a public inquiry where representations are received from any interested local authority or from 100 or more interested electors.

As we made clear in our response to the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, in the previous debate, and in our responses on local government ward boundaries and existing parliamentary constituencies, the Government's position has been that we are open to considering reasonable improvements to the process, provided that they do not compromise the fundamental principles of the Bill, and that still remains our position.

It is not a fundamental principle of the Bill that there should be no oral inquiries. The decision to end the process of oral inquiries, which appears in this Bill, was in fact taken on the basis of the evidence before us, when we came to consider the most effective consultation process for boundary reviews, which is what we are all trying to achieve.

Among the many contributions that we have heard not just this evening but over a number of Committee sittings, the case has been made tonight that local inquiries are an important safety valve because they allow everyone, as we might put it, to have their day in court. The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, made that very point. It allows people to have their say. My view is that this is perhaps the only objective of local inquiries: for which any credible argument can be mounted in their favour. Evidence and academic opinion indicate that local inquiries are perhaps far more effective in principle than in practice.

Local inquiries do not as a rule consist of the general public having their say on boundary proposals. Professor Ron Johnston—whose namechecks in these debates are now getting quite considerable; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer quoted him—and his colleagues have concluded that the public inquiry process is “dominated by political parties”, describing the process as,

“very largely an exercise in allowing the political parties to seek influence over the Commission's recommendations—in which their sole goal is to promote their own electoral interests”.

Of course, he is perfectly right; political parties play a vital role in our democracy, and there is nothing wrong with parties contributing fully to the boundary review process. It is inevitable that they are going to do that, but if we are considering what would be gained by the noble and learned Lord’s amendment, which would restore oral inquiries in some form, we should not imagine that we would necessarily be giving the public a better chance to have their say. We would be looking to restore a potentially long process to which parties will send Queen's Counsel in their attempts to secure the most favourable outcome for their electoral prospects, certainly if history is anything to go by. It may be that the quasi-judicial nature of the local inquiry process could act as a disincentive to public participation by ordinary people who hope to have their say.

Our intention is that a written consultation process, with the existing period for representations extended from one month to three, will actually amount to a much more effective way to allow a level playing field for the general public who wish to have their say. Whatever the merits of the cases that are made for exceptions in this Bill—for example, for the Isle of Wight—I do not think that anyone could doubt that the people involved were very successful in making their voices heard through petitions, campaigns and websites.

There is little evidence, too, that local inquiries bring to light evidence that would not otherwise be considered. In an earlier debate in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Snape, gave us an example of when a public inquiry had changed the boundary of the West Bromwich East constituency to reflect local geography, using a dual carriageway in place of a defunct railway line as a point of orientation. I am sure that that was a sensible change, and I wholeheartedly agree with the noble Lord that local knowledge is immensely important in these matters, but I do not see why that could not have been raised as part of an extended consultation period, as proposed by this Bill.

That is why changes that are made following local inquiries are often minor. At the fifth general review in England, for example, only 2 per cent of wards in English counties where inquiries were held were moved between constituencies as a result. Robin Gray, a former boundary commissioner already quoted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, told the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee that Professor Ron Johnston was,

“absolutely right about the impact that public inquiries had on the Commission’s initial recommendations. In a lot of cases there was no change”.

The evidence given by the Boundary Commission for Wales to the Welsh Affairs Committee is also instructive on this point. In evidence to the Welsh Affairs Committee, the secretary of the Welsh commission said that,

“during the fifth general review, there were four issues that the Commission changed its mind on as a result of the consultation process. Perhaps I should say that, while these issues were raised in the local inquiries they were also raised beforehand in the written representations. In one sense, the Commission, before the local inquiries, had in its mind that modifications were required in the draft proposals”.

That brings me to the evidence of Ron Johnston before the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which was quoted by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. Professor Johnston, as we have acknowledged, has been much quoted in these debates. I think that anyone reading his evidence and his previous work will reach the same conclusion that the committee reached in its report that the result of Professor Johnston’s extensive research into the topic, and oral inquiries in particular, led him to,

“generally welcome the abolition of public inquiries”.

I stress that, not because somehow Professor Johnston’s view is the only one that counts, but because it dispels the theory that only we on the government Benches somehow hold the view that oral inquiries are not necessarily the best way to achieve the objective that we all want, which is a robust consultation process at which everyone, including those who are not able to appoint legal counsel on their behalf, can have their say on a commission’s proposals.

However, in the same session, Robin Gray stated that he believed public inquiries added value because they provided assurance that the,

“issues have been looked at and debated”—

perhaps an echo of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke.

One charge that cannot be laid against oral inquiries in the past is that they were anything less than thorough in this regard. This lengthy process, however, goes to the heart of one of the key principles in the Bill, which was identified by the noble and learned Lord when he moved his amendment. If no action is taken the boundaries in force at the next general election will be 15 years out of date, if we do not proceed to get a boundary review and report by October 2013, as set out in the Bill. We believe that it is simply not fair to electors—most notably all those who have come on to the register in the past 15 years. I believe that noble Lords opposite share our concern about this. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, made that very point. I readily acknowledge that the amendment attempts to address it by limiting the triggers for inquiries and placing a limit on their duration, and I very much welcome how that has been presented by the noble and learned Lord.

It is also important that we listen carefully and reflect on what was said by the noble and learned Lords, Lord Woolf and Lord Goldsmith, not least on the question of judicial review—judicial review if you do not have oral inquiries and judicial review if you do have oral inquiries. There is an argument that the proposal in the amendment to give the Boundary Commission the decision on whether to hold an inquiry in each constituency where the requirements in the amendment are met would also lead to a risk of judicial reviews of the Boundary Commission’s decisions on that point.

Important issues have been raised. I have indicated not just in this debate but in others that the principle should be that reviews must be conducted more quickly so that the pattern of representation in the other place represents the reality of where electors live now, not of history. That goes to the heart of fairer and more equally weighted votes throughout the United Kingdom, which is a core objective of the Bill. We will obviously want to consider the noble and learned Lord’s concerns on the issue of judicial reviews—as I have said, if you have them or if you do not have them. Subject to meeting the key principle, which I have indicated, I am content to take the noble and learned Lord’s amendment and consider the thinking behind it to see whether it offers a way in which the advantage that I acknowledge an inquiry can provide—a sense of “a day in court”—can be retained. On that basis, I urge the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.