Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Tuesday 18th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I perhaps misunderstood what I was being asked to do. I thought that I was being asked to give a commitment to bring back an amendment, which I cannot do. The force of argument on all sides of the House is considerable and I have no doubt that the comments made on this matter will be considered. I do not want to make a commitment which I cannot deliver, but I can honestly say that I will ensure that the forceful comments that have been made from all sides of the House on this point will be acknowledged.

I could give some examples where the present system does not deliver on the principle of not crossing county boundaries, and how I believe that under what we propose, the ward system will, for the most part, be upheld in England. I am not sure that I can elaborate much further. I say to my noble friend Lord Crickhowell that if similar arguments apply in the rest of the United Kingdom, they will apply in Wales. Under what my noble friend proposes, the number of Members from Wales would not increase. I do not think that he was arguing that, but much of the argument in Wales has focused on the number. I would not want the House to be given the impression that somehow my noble friend's amendment would increase the number of Members from Wales.

I have tried to be helpful. We believe that we have imported flexibility, but important contributions have been made to the debate, and we are honour bound to consider them. I also make very clear that I do not want to be misunderstood as making a commitment that I may not be in a position to honour.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I am tempted to be encouraged by the tone of the response from the noble and learned Lord, but I fear that I cannot derive the comfort that I hoped to obtain from the paraphrasical content of what he said. I press him a little more, because I think that there is quite a wide consensus on this around the House—I may overstate the case where Conservative Peers are concerned. We are not alone on these Benches in asking the Minister to consider that an excessively rigid insistence on electoral parity on a fixed arithmetical quota with the minimal latitude of only 5 per cent either side of the norm of 75,800 electors to a constituency will preclude appropriate weight being given to factors that everyone recognises as significant: local ties, geography, community, history and, very importantly, the relationship between parliamentary constituency structures and the structures of local government.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Clinton-Davis]

My experience is not related exclusively to Hackney, where I was born and brought up. Wherever people come from, they are very proud of being involved in the borough in which they live. People in Hackney, whether they come from the West Indies, Turkey or elsewhere, are very proud of being part of the borough. Is that not a very important factor in what my noble friend is arguing?

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My noble friend speaks with feeling about the area that he knows and has served so well.

I do not want to detain the House but want to complete my point on local government. That map of local government became so intolerable to tidy-minded bureaucrats in the 1960s that it was judged that it had to be reformed and redesigned. We had the Redcliffe-Maud report and the 1972 legislation that created all kinds of new entities of local government that had never corresponded to people’s sense of reality of where they lived. Many have been abolished and we have never succeeded in designing a new map of local government because you cannot impose it from on high.

[The Earl of Onslow]

The Minister has already gone quite far. He said that he will draw attention to it. Do we need what is basically a Boundary Commission argument on these little things? This is nothing other than wasting your Lordships’ time, and it is a disgrace for the Opposition to go on behaving like this.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I am sorry that the noble Earl thinks that. He is being a little too impatient, if I may say so. The point that I am making is that the relationship between the structures of local government and the system of parliamentary representation is very important. It needs to be intimate. Members of Parliament and elected members of local authorities need to work together. This system should be an organic whole, which is one more very important reason why the rules that the Government propose to govern the designing and drawing of the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies need to be sensitive to the realities of local government. I say no more than that, but these considerations genuinely matter.

I welcome the Minister’s tone and hope that his department will examine the practical implications of not moving beyond the 5 per cent tolerance either side of the norm, and consider whether it would produce anomalies and offensive manifestations in the way in which our constituencies are drawn that we would be very much wiser to avoid.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, it may assist if I indicate the Opposition’s position. I am grateful for what the noble and learned Lord said. On that basis, I rather read him as saying that he did not rule out—indeed might consider—a 5 per cent barrier with exceptions up to 10 per cent, but 10 per cent being an absolute barrier either way. The Minister is giving no assurances but he is willing to consider it. I am happy with that and I will not press it. Perhaps the appropriate course would be for myself and the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, who rather favoured the argument of my noble friend Lord Lipsey, to come along with us. I am more than happy for the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to come, and if the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, would be kind enough to grace us with his presence, that would be helpful as well. If we could meet quite quickly, that might be of assistance.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I would not like your Lordships to think that I have not been sufficiently assiduous in my preparation to deliver a long speech this afternoon. Who knows, it might have been different if it had been delivered in the middle of last night. However, I think that almost everything that needs and ought to be said on this subject has been said in the debate we have just had. I want to make only two brief points.

I listened with great attention to the admirable response of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. We ought to be aware that at the moment the discrepancy in constituency size is absolutely enormous. It is not 5 per cent on each side, and not 10 per cent. The smallest seat is 31.7 per cent of the average seat, while the largest seat, that of the Isle of Wight, is 156.7 per cent of the average. So it is possible to go a long way towards reducing the disparity without transgressing the line drawn by the Minister.

The other point I want to make in preparation for the discussions I hope we will have is this. There is not just one thing you can change here; there are two. There is the limit of 5 per cent, 10 per cent or whatever turns out to be the right figure, but there is also the degree of attention that the Boundary Commissions are asked to give to their rules as to the circumstances in which they can allow exceptions. I agree with the Minister that, on the whole, the Boundary Commission has perhaps been too slack and paid too much attention to the rules on observing local boundaries and so on compared with its standing instructions on size. This is something on which it will take its instructions from Parliament, and something on which, with the co-operation of the Minister, I am quite sure a number of us can bottom out. I hope most of all, and this is a perfectly genuine remark, that, at the end of what has been a testing period for this House, we can achieve what in my 10 years’ experience here has so often been achieved—that is, we can give the Government their legislation in a form that makes it still better than the form in which it was conceived.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I am not sure whether I can still intervene on my noble friend before he sits down, but I put the point to him: he is right to have said that there needs to be a proper emphasis on numerical equality, and we have to get the question of local boundaries into the right perspective but not jeopardise the highly desirable objectives that the Government have of achieving numerical equality. However, does my noble friend think it acceptable that the tolerances should be so tight around the norm that the system will mean that county boundaries and even ward boundaries are routinely crossed?

[Lord Lipsey]

Absolutely not. Indeed, the 10 per cent rule does not entirely avoid the contravening of county boundaries; there are two cases in which county boundaries would have to be contravened even then.

All this is a matter of getting the right balance in the rules and tolerances to achieve equality of size without trampling over local loyalties. That is what I believe a group of people from this House—and from elsewhere, if necessary—sitting down with good will could readily and easily achieve, to the great benefit of this legislation and of the country.