Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I should like to bring to light some of the facts that should come to bear on this decision. I do not think that anybody on the government side has yet spelled out a very good reason for thinking that 600 is the magic number and that 650 is the wrong number. That is a subject on which a judgment can be reached only in the light of all the facts about what is going on and what is likely to happen if we do not do anything about it.

One of the underlying assumptions made by the Government in all their speeches on prior clauses of the Bill is that there has been a tendency for the number of Members of Parliament to increase. Let us look at the facts. Yes, it is true that if you choose as your base date 1950 there has been a small increase from 625 Members of the Commons then to 650 today. It is an increase. But why take 1950? You might, for example, take 1983, which is, after all, more than a quarter of a century ago. Since 1983, the number of Members of the House of Commons has not changed; it has remained at 650. Alternatively, and this is a historically-minded House, one might go back to 1918, when the number of Members of the House of Commons was 707. I readily accept that there are explanations both for the increases and decreases, to some of which I shall come shortly, but this is a case not of an upwards trend ad infinitum but of fluctuations based on various things. One of those things which has tended to force the number perhaps to be higher than might be essential is Welsh representation—we shall come to that later in the Bill; I think that the proposal to cut it from 40 to 30 is too draconian, but, equally, 40 may be rather too many and there might be a saving to be made there.

It has to be accepted that, in the previous rules of the Boundary Commission, which have to be put right, there has been a contradiction which has caused some small change in the rise in the number of Members of the House of Commons. As I understand it, rule 1 requires that the House of Commons does not grow in total size, and rule 5 requires indivisible units—for example, counties—to be allocated the number of seats which makes each constituency as near as possible to the desired quota. This, in technical language, requires rounding-off at the harmonic mean, which is always beyond the arithmetic mean. If anyone wants me to go into that in more detail, I can guarantee to take up all day and all night in doing so, but I very much doubt that it would greatly be for the elucidation of the Committee. I am sure that the noble and learned Lord on the Front Bench would suggest that I do not do any such thing since it would cut across our desire to give this Bill the correct scrutiny in the minimum time that is necessary. Without going into those conflicts in the rules, I suggest that it would be possible to amend the rules in a quite a minor way to reduce that inflating factor in so far as it exists.

I have said that the number of MPs has not increased much. What has indisputably and hugely increased is the number of electors each MP has to service. Let us take 1950, which is the basis for comparison that is most favourable to the Government’s case. As my noble and learned friend said, the number of MPs is up 3 per cent and the electorate is up 25 per cent. If my schoolboy arithmetic is correct, electorate per MP is up 22 per cent. Let us again, because this is a historic House, take the longer perspective. In 1918, the average MP represented 30,000 electors. In 1950, the number was 55,000 electors. In 1983, it was 65,000 and, in 2005, it was 68,000. Under this Bill, that will go up to 75,000 electors. That is an increase two-and-a-half times over. It is possible that that is not right, but it seems a pretty big increase, the last bit of which is entirely due to the reduction brought about by this Bill.

That of course is electors per MP. However, the MP’s workload—and there are many former Members of another place who will no doubt give the House the benefit of their own experience—does not just depend on the number of electors, it depends on how many people live in their constituency. There are some very large discrepancies between the number of people and the number of electors. I have not been able to find, given the truncated timetable we are working to, an actual figure of number of people per electorate since 1918, but I can absolutely guarantee, I think, that it will have grown faster than the number of electors per MP, with immigration and the lack of people registering as a result. It is population that is the generator of workload.

Then, workload per person in your electorate has increased. Last time I spoke on a related matter in this House I mentioned that when I started work for Tony Crosland back in 1972 we got 30 letters a week from his Grimsby constituents and they could all be happily dealt with by an excellent part-time secretary in consultation with the local party. The situation today is nothing like that. It is not just numbers—the 300 letters my noble friend cited—but it is the sheer complexity of the cases. The complexity of an immigration case is enormous, which is of course why the cost to the Commons has gone up. It is not that there are more MPs—that has been a trivial factor. In order to perform the services that the people of this country expect them to perform, MPs need far more caseworkers to help them with constituency cases.

There is another factor which is much less remarked on but I think is quite important. The psephological evidence, until reasonably recently, was unambiguous. It did not matter how hard an MP worked or how lazy he was; there was practically no incumbent effect on subsequent general elections. Whether you won or not depended nearly entirely on the popularity of your party and not on how good a job you did. I hate saying it because I know it might offend some people who were MPs many years ago when that was so. However, I am afraid that the psephological evidence is unambiguous. That evidence has now changed. I will not go into the full detail—I would advise noble Lords that they can read the Curtice appendix to the Cowley and Kavanagh book on the 2010 general election. You will find that even MPs who had been at the heart of expenses scandals did better than new candidates who had not been in the House before. It is absolutely unambiguous evidence. I do not think that anybody in this Chamber would doubt for a minute that the great majority, even near to saying all, Members of Parliament, whatever their other faults and virtues, are deeply assiduous in servicing the needs of their constituencies and constituents. It is a plus factor for me that they get a bit of appreciation for that. I have known Members who lost their seats who were deeply upset for years afterwards because they thought their constituents had not shown them the gratitude they felt they had earned. Well now, their constituents are starting to show gratitude and that is a great thing.

Then there is the question of workload other than constituency work. There are 240 places now to be filled on departmental Select Committees—they did not exist really when I started in business—and 227 other places in committees. There is the sheer volume of legislation, I admit often guillotined down the other end, but you have to read the thing if you are going to take any part. The size of Bills has increased exponentially, largely as a result of the demise of the typewriter and the growth of the word processor which means there is no incentive whatever for draftsmen to cut anything out and every incentive to put things in because nothing has to be retyped. There is the huge effort of looking after our demanding press. There is the huge effort of dealing with the new profession of public affairs consultants, all of whom have good reason to come and see you about matters of one kind of another. The average MP today works far, far harder than the average MP did in the past. That is not going to change and it is the reason why most MPs today have to be full-time Members of Parliament. It makes me wonder whether it is a good idea to cut their numbers when they are having to work very much harder.

Then there is the question, which was again raised by the noble Lord, Lord Maples, of the ratio of members of the Government to Back-Benchers. This measure would make that ratio worse at a stroke. At the moment, the number of Ministers and Whips in the lower House is roughly just over a third of the number of Back-Benchers. This legislation would change that to 40 per cent. Among the remaining Back-Benchers there are some who are essentially the equivalent of Ministers, in the sense that they will do whatever the Government ask, however awful, in the hope of getting promotion out of the Prime Minister. Therefore, the number of independent Back-Benchers in another place, on whom we rely so much to hold the Government to account, is going to diminish. We have heard airy words that perhaps Prime Ministers in future will appoint fewer Ministers. I have been hearing them for 25 years too and of course it never happens because by appointing somebody a Minister a Prime Minister can bind them to him. On top of that there is the increased number of victims these days of sexual scandal or alleged blunder of one kind or another appearing in the newspapers. There is a greater turnover of Ministers as a result and, in my opinion, the Prime Minister will continue to appoint just as many. Whether all of them have full jobs to do is another matter, but there are good reasons to do it. He also has to maintain party balance and now, coalition balance, because some of the most fed up people with the emergence of this coalition Government are those people, mostly in the Tory party, who thought before they would get jobs and now find themselves on the Back Benches. Disgruntled does not begin to describe their mood. So there will not be fewer Ministers; it is a pity therefore that there will be fewer Back-Benchers. It also reduces what Professor Anthony King in a notable phrase has called the “gene pool” that is available. The fewer Back-Benchers available to promote the less possibility there is of new and excellent talent emerging to replace talent that is exhausted, talent that has destroyed itself and so on. That is another cost of the diminution.

Finally, we come back to the last argument which is extant of those who say that there is an evident case for reducing the number of MPs—and that is money. They say they will save money by doing it. That is not obvious to me because if the work has still to be done, it has still to be paid for. You may have fewer MPs but you are going to have more constituency workers per MP. You must do in order for them to cope with the sheer volume of correspondence and so on. The only saving I can see is that there will be the saving of 50 MPs’ salaries—that comes to a little over £3 million a year. Of that, £1 million will be lost in income tax so that is about £2 million. You could raise that by a decent tax on one banker’s bonus. This makes me feel that the money argument is really just a populist argument, as indeed is the whole argument for reducing the number of MPs. It is not based on fact, it is not based on analysis, it was pulled out of a hat in an attempt to satisfy a popular anti-MP mood, and it is your Lordships’ duty, and a duty in which we should take pleasure, to say hold on, let us look at the facts, let us see whether this decrease is really justified. If it is not, we are entitled to ask the House of Commons to think again.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Is there not a danger that if the workload remains the same and the number of MPs is reduced there will be an increase in the number of Members’ staff, which will in itself almost certainly lead to less of a direct contact between the Member and those he seeks to represent, which cannot be a good thing for democracy.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is absolutely right about that. It will also mean that the queue of people waiting to become MPs will be even longer since in my experience most of these MPs’ staff are waiting only for the moment when they can jump into the shoes of the man whom they so loyally serve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

I want to contribute only very briefly. I echo what my noble friend Lord Baker said earlier about the experience that some of us had some years ago. I do not go back as far as he does in parliamentary experience, but when I was elected in 1974 there was very limited support for the Back-Bench Member. I remember that well.

What has been interesting about this debate is that a number of colleagues—from both sides of the House, as it happens—have contributed on the basis of their experience of the other place. With the exception, I think, of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, every one of the speakers has spoken with that experience and authority.

[Lord Lipsey]

May I correct the noble Lord? I was never in another place.

[Lord Tyler]

I am so apologetic. My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace of Tankerness made this point earlier: we have all experienced the noble Lord’s considerable contribution so we have all assumed that he must have had such influence in the other place behind the scenes that he was, in effect, an ex officio Member.

My point is that over the past two hours and 46 minutes I have taken the opportunity to read the Third Reading debate in the other place. These are the real, live witnesses of the experiences of current Members of Parliament, and they have been able directly to influence the Bill, taking up the big issues, as they see them, on the basis of their practical experience. They did not spend two hours and 46 minutes discussing the reduction—