Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

There are all sorts of possibilities. Happily, the Government’s business managers have ensured that we will not be excessively constrained for time as we debate these issues, so we can look forward to many noble Lords opposite helping us to understand, if they will, the case for what the Government are doing.

It is perplexing. Ministers have suggested that the size of the House of Commons has crept up—that phrase was used in previous debates. One hundred years ago, the House of Commons consisted of 670 Members of Parliament; it now consists of only 650, and a few years back, it was 659, as some of my noble friends have already mentioned. It is particularly interesting to see how the ratio of Members of Parliament to electors has deteriorated since 1950. There are now 25 more Members sitting in the House of Commons than in 1950, but in that period the size of the electorate has increased by no less than 10 million. The average electorate per constituency, which was 55,000 in 1950, is 70,000 now.

I do not know how Ministers can with a straight face tell the House of Commons and this House that the number of Members of Parliament has crept up and suggest that we are overrepresented. We are not democratically overrepresented in this country. Unlike the Federal Republic of Germany, we have no länder; unlike in United States of America, there are no states. Indeed, in all of our political lifetime, we have seen a weakening in local government in this country and a diminution in the number of local authorities. If, as the Liberal Democrats have proposed, there should be a large-scale redesign of patterns of representation at the different tiers of government in this country, you could make a serious case for reducing the size of the House of Commons. Unless and until that is done, you cannot.

The Government are setting about reducing the size of the House of Commons in a manner that will be to the party political interest of the dominant party in the coalition, the Conservatives, and, at the same time, increasing the size of the House of Lords in order to increase the majority on which they believe they can rely in this House, with no serious attempt to explain to us what the sound democratic principle can be in those processes. That is to let members of the Government open to the kind of criticism that we are more accustomed to hearing levelled at those who wield power in countries such as Kenya, Rwanda or even Zimbabwe. It will be very interesting as we begin to hear what international observers and professional and academic students of democracy in foundations and think tanks in this country and across the world have to say about the policies that we are experiencing at the hands of this Government.

It is absolutely right to ask two basic questions to try to establish a ground of principle on which to evaluate the Government’s propositions. We should ask: what are the requirements of a properly functioning House of Commons and how many people does it need serving in it to acquit itself of those responsibilities; and what are the properties of a Member of Parliament in his or her constituency? Until there has been a serious, rational and, as far as possible, objective analysis of both those issues, we should resist the suggestion that the number of Members of Parliament should be reduced. As we start to examine those issues, I think that we will find that, so far from there being a decent case for reducing the number of Members of Parliament, there is actually quite a strong case for increasing their number.

I do not want to speak for excessive length at this stage of the evening. We will have further opportunities to examine these matters as our discussion develops so, for the time being, I will not weary the House any longer.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I have listened to the debate on the amendment, and it is the amendment to which I wish to speak, not the Bill in its entirety, although I have expressed concern about some parts of the Bill. I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Maples. We shared membership of the House of Commons around the same time. He mentioned finance, the cost of the running of the House of Commons. It might be worth mentioning that when he came into the House in 1983, Denis Healey, now the noble Lord, Lord Healey, was the deputy leader of the Labour Party. The funds available to him were such that he had to share one researcher with another member of the shadow Cabinet. Everyone agreed that that was unjust, and the Short money has now been increased to a fantastic amount.

That Short money goes on to the costs of the House of Commons. When I left, the Conservative Party in opposition benefited greatly from Short money—I think that the noble Lord would acknowledge that. That was so much so that when the coalition was created, there was deep concern among members of the Liberal party that they would not get a share of the Short money, because that would have a profound effect on how they got researchers for their Front-Benchers. I do not know how they got on with that argument. When noble Members talk about the cost of the House of Commons increasing, they cannot have it every way. You do not get democracy for nothing. Everybody praises the great Portcullis House.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Perhaps I may give an illustration of the poverty of the Opposition at that time. When my noble friend Lord Foulkes and I were in Denis Healey's team, I once travelled with my noble friend Lord Healey, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for Defence. We wanted to go to South Africa, which was highly in the news. My noble friend had to travel in economy class with Air Zambia. Those were the straits we were in at the time.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I agree with the noble Lord: it was ridiculous, and it has improved, especially for the Leader of the Opposition.

When we talk about finance, it should be remembered that in the other place, every honourable Member has the equivalent of two and a half members of staff. That does not come cheaply. Then there are premises. If we were to supply Members’ staff with premises here in Westminster, the most expensive square mile in the world, it would be far more costly than allowing them to go to their constituencies to get premises. They cannot get any old premises; there must be security because we have already had members of staff attacked. There has even been a fatality, as one noble Lord on the Liberal Benches will be able to testify. When we talk about the cost of computers and broadband, it should be remembered that it is not free.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rooker]

I am reluctant to intervene on a former Speaker, but I can assure the noble Lord that when my majority was 495, I dealt with everything. I answered everything and I did not use any subcontractors whatever because that is what people expected. I still did that when my majority was 18,000 because that was how I worked. Every MP does the job in a different way. I do not think that rules can be laid down in the way in which the noble Lord is setting out. However, I agree that I am 10 years out of date now.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I agree with the noble Lord, but if a Member of a devolved Parliament was paid to deal with health, prisons and social work, while the noble Lord quite rightly would not turn a person away he would find a way of notifying his constituent that the democratic process meant that some matters were devolved to another elected Member. That is the point I wanted to make.

As a trade union officer I noted that no two officers worked in the same way, and it is the same with Members of Parliament. What I am trying to say is that there are ridiculous practices and that I have highlighted one of them. There is no point in honourable Members saying that they are overburdened when they create rods for their own backs.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I have to say to my noble friend that I am slightly disturbed by his comments about petitions. If I remember rightly, my noble friend’s constituency was an inner city seat in Glasgow, but what if he had been in a seat in rural Scotland and the village school was about to close and 500 constituents wrote to him about that closure? It would be a highly contested issue in that part of the constituency. Does my noble friend not feel that perhaps in those circumstances each of the 500 petitioners should receive a communication from their Member of Parliament? It makes them feel that they are participating in the debate and that their Member of Parliament is actually responding and not just taking them for granted.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

All I can say to my noble friend, as he has called me, is that if three of the names on the petition were from the same household and they were sent three individual letters, something would be wrong. I say as well that something would be wrong if £13,000-worth of envelopes were being used. The point I wanted to make was that something was wrong with that.

Let me make another point about pressure. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the noble Lord, Lord Graham. As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, will remember, he was our Chief Whip between 1979 and 1981. I was sad to see him leave the House. He kept us until 10 o’clock on a Thursday night in the Commons. I know that to be the case because a whole load of us went up to Glasgow on the sleeper train. For years now, unless it has changed since the last election, debates on a Thursday are non-voting. That begs the question: is every Member of Parliament right there in the House of Commons, to which they were elected, on a Thursday, or are they elsewhere? I would hazard a guess that they are elsewhere. I am not criticising them because that is their business, but the case has been put that there are more pressures on this generation of Members of Parliament than there were on the old.

There was a fairly hefty pressure on Members of Parliament, if they were lucky, to leave on a Thursday. The Minister could not even take the sleeper train because of the distance to his constituency. He would not have been able to get back by the Friday. I was lucky enough to get to mine by the following morning. Also, constituency engagements were such that it was not pleasant to travel overnight. You would have surgeries and meetings with various organisations.

There are other amendments that I can comfortably support, and I know that this is a probing amendment, but there is no point in us being here if we do not express our views. I do not see that we need great academic bodies to do a study on whether we should have a reduction of 10 per cent.