Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, the House is greatly indebted to my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for bring this matter before it today. I shall talk about only some of it. That is to say, I am not going to talk about individual registration because my noble friend Lord Wills has said clearly everything that needs to be said about that. I am not going to talk about the still undealt with disaster whereby people who went to the polls in 2010 were not able to cast their vote because of failures in electoral law. I will instead confine myself to the matters included in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act which occupied your Lordships’ House for a few hours in 2010-11. Those few hours were criticised on some sides and they have been criticised again today. Now, as the car crash that legislation is presenting us with becomes clearer, my regret is that we did not spend longer and were not more successful in persuading the Government that what they planned was bad for Parliament, bad for democracy and bad for our country. We told you so, o Government, but you did not listen.

As Members of another place are slowly coming to realise, the Government’s Act and the boundary review it has set off are having consequences more serious than it is easy to imagine. They come about as a result of three features of the Government’s scheme, each in themselves damaging but, taken together, representing a perfect storm which undermines the very basis of our democracy. The three are: equal-sized constituencies within a very tight 5% margin either way; a reduction of 50 in the size of the House of Commons; and the decision that reviews of boundaries should take place every five years.

Each of these proposals, taken individually and pushed less far, can be defended. Yes, of course, we want more or less equal constituencies; yes, of course, if we can manage with fewer MPs, great; yes, of course, we do not want ossified constituencies, but those were not the reasons the Bill was introduced. It was introduced for one main purpose: to reduce the bias in the electoral system towards Labour. As it happens, although I am a Labour Peer, I applaud that purpose. I do not think electoral systems should be biased and I do not think my party should need bias in the electoral system to help it win elections, but the Bill was frightfully ill designed for the purpose. According to most psephologists, having constituencies all the same size deals with only a third or less of the bias. If you really want to deal with bias, you have to do something quite different.

Anyway, that is what was done, and the Boundary Commissions are now seeking to work to these new, absurd rules under the truncated consultation procedures also introduced by the Act. They have not helped themselves, in England at any rate, by the self-imposed constraint of respecting all ward boundaries. The results are, in many cases, absurd. My noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours dealt with individuals, and I will deal with some individual cases. Gloucester Cathedral is no longer part of that proud city but has been mysteriously relocated to the Forest of Dean. My God, not since Birnam Wood marched on Macbeth’s castle has there been such a takeover. Sheffield seats cease to be Sheffield seats—have you noticed, Mr Clegg?—as you get seats which are part Sheffield, part Rotherham and cross the Ml. I will not go on, although I could. If the House did not forbid visual aids—I am not sure whether they are forbidden on electronic aids—I could wave before Members present a sheaf of constituency maps. At least, I am assured that they are constituency maps, but they look more like the shapeless, pointless scribblings of a one year-old or a Rorschach ink blot test. The existing constituency map of our country is a map of recognisable communities; the new map represents no recognisable communities whatever.

Many more electors than usual after a boundary review will find themselves with a new constituency and a new MP. Without getting too techie, psephologists use an index of change to measure the extent of differences, based on what percentage of constituents after a review has changed and what has remained the same. According to the definitive paper by David Rossiter, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie in Parliamentary Affairs, after this review, 204 English—only English—constituencies will be changed by 50% of voters or more, compared with just 77 in the previous review in 2007. That is to say, there will be three times as many utter upheavals in constituencies and communities. This matters. What keeps our people attached to Parliament? When you ask people what they think of politicians in general, they say they are rubbish, but when they are asked about their MP, who has helped them with their problems and has worked for them day in, day out, they take a very different view. They respect their local Member although they deny respect to Parliament generally.

It gets worse. Originally, there was at least the hope that this would be a one-off. However, another review starts as soon as the next election is over. It will be based on the numbers on the new registers, which will be based, if the Government get their way, on individual registration, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, pointed out. The numbers are going to be different. We do not know how different, but they will pretty different from the present numbers. What you have to understand is that it takes only a very small shift in the numbers to require a very large upheaval in the constituency. Constituency A goes a little bit under quota because not many people have registered there, so it needs to pinch a ward from constituency B, which needs to pinch a ward from constituency C. In the end, the whole map is up in the air, there is chaos before the next general election and, thanks to this domino effect, new chaos after it.

A study by Mclean and Johnston for the British Academy concludes that in Britain until now, a majority of constituencies remained substantially unchanged, giving continuity of representation, that in future there will be much less of a sense of place with which a constituency’s MP can identify and that that will be disadvantageous—this is academic understatement—to MPs, parties, electoral administrators and the electorate. In other words, the grassroots of democracy are being destroyed by this coalition Government. That is loony.

Fortunately, there is ray of hope, an unconvenanted bonus of the omnishambles which is Lords election, whose end was, I trust, signalled with the Prime Minister’s address to the 1922 Committee last night. It is possible, just possible, that not only has Lords election been prevented but so, too, has this catastrophic boundary reform. It is a double whammy for the coalition, but a frabjous day for all those who care for Britain’s democracy.

Let me explain. For the boundary changes to happen, both Houses of Parliament have to pass the necessary orders. These have to be laid before those Houses. The Act states that the Boundary Commission must submit reports setting out its proposals before 1 October 2013 and that:

“As soon as may be after the submission of a report ... the Secretary of State shall lay the report before Parliament”.

It should be with us in November 2013. Now, as we have heard, we have had threats in the run up to the Commons Second Reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill that the Lib Dems will refuse to vote for those orders, which would be very strongly in their interests. The previous local elections showed one crucial fact about Lib Dem performance, which will have been noted by every member of the party in another place: they did much better in areas where the local MP was a Lib Dem, and much worse where he was not. If the next election is fought on current boundaries and that phenomenon is repeated, Lib Dem MPs could hope to hold even seats that they look sure to lose on present polling. However, if it is fought on the new boundaries, more of those MPs will face voters who are not the same as those who backed them in the past—wipe-out looms. From my long experience in politics, I note that when self-interest beckons and, as in this case, it accords with sensible principles, the results are generally predictable.

We have, thank God, an emerging coalition in another place against the boundary changes. It includes Labour, of course for entirely principled reasons, the Lib Dems, because it will mean the likely decimation of their party, and many Tories who face the prospect of spending the next couple of years squabbling with colleagues over selection for new seats. A no vote to boundary changes now looks more likely than ever before.

Even in the unlikely event that David Cameron revives his dead parrot, the boundary change orders are not safe. I make no threats but this House must also approve the orders and it will by then be doomed. It might decide—no threats, as I say—as a last favour to our democracy to refuse to pass the orders when they are laid before it. Therefore, it is possible—I am a dreamer—that boundary reform will go down the pan. Aside from any connection to Lords reform, a very good thing that would be too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I was not saying that, I was simply saying that we would need to discuss it further in that context, because we will be spending a good deal of time on the Bill. However, I was saying that a number of continuing experiments are under way with the government statistics authority and with the Electoral Commission about how best to ensure that, as we move to a new register, we maximise the number of people on it. He will know, as we have rehearsed it before, that the argument in respect of the December 2015 register is that maintaining a carryover from a register made over two years before risks carrying over a large number of additional names, particularly in the inner cities, of highly mobile people and those from multiple-occupation residences. There will be a post-May 2015 canvass of all of those who are in doubt on this. We think that the occurrence of a general election in May 2015 should produce the maximum registration available then, but that the question of accuracy and completeness is not best served by maintaining, even after the election, names that have not responded to several attempts personally to canvass them.

The joy and passion that members of the Opposition have for the single-Member constituency is striking. I remind them that the single-Member constituency and the electoral system that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, went for are not necessarily part of the ancient British constitution. The official with whom I travelled to a conference last weekend admitted to me that his grandfather had been one of the two Labour MPs for Blackburn between 1945 and 1950. That was one of the last two-Member constituencies. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is perhaps not quite old enough to remember the three-Member combined Scottish university seat, which was there until 1950. However, I am sure he remembers the electoral system used for that, which was of course the single transferable vote. We now regard the single-Member constituency as the only possible thing for Britain, but other things have been tried before and might be tried again in the future. This Government’s commitment to decentralisation and the revival of local democracy means that we see casework in future more often going to the local councillor, and not always, perhaps, all the way up to the MP.

There have been suggestions of gerrymandering. Looking through my preparatory notes on this, I see that in 1978-79, the then Labour Government postponed the introduction of boundary changes. There were accusations in the right-wing press that this was “jimmymandering” by the then Prime Minister, as a means of ensuring that Labour should not lose those relevant seats. I am conscious, as we all are, that the integrity, accuracy and completeness of the register, for the next election and beyond it, matters to all of us. We are also concerned that some of the underlying causes for the decline in the completeness of the register—political disillusionment and disengagement—need to be addressed, and on an all-party basis.

[Lord Lipsey]

I do not want the noble Lord to get the records wrong. It was 1968-69 and Jim Callaghan was not Prime Minister at the time, he was Home Secretary. Other than that, the Minister’s point is absolutely right.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I stand corrected.