Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Newton of Braintree Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig]

I am more likely to find someone recruiting for the band of hope in hell than to find anyone in my part of Wales who supported it. It will not happen, frankly.

The point that I am trying to get across is that there is not the community of interest that has to exist if we are to have huge constituencies based on numbers. If the Bill is enacted as it stands we will not need to employ the Boundary Commission to do this work. Anybody with a map, a pencil and an abacus will be able to draw up the new parliamentary boundaries. We might as well hand it over to the Flat Earth Society for all the good it will do for locally based parliamentary representation.

This is so important and fundamental, and it is a matter that I will return to perhaps at greater length when we debate the amendments affecting Wales that are in my name and those of other noble Lords. It is important to recognise that there are particular difficulties, especially across the south Wales valleys where simply having constituencies based on numbers will not work in terms of the community of interest. There will be no link whatever between the Member of Parliament and the constituent. That will be a retrograde step, so I hope that with those few remarks the Minister will get the impression of how strongly I feel, as do many people in Wales. I know how people on all sides, including Cross-Benchers, feel about this. Wales will be adversely affected in that 20 per cent of all the reductions in the number of parliamentary seats in Britain will be in Wales. It will lose one in four of its parliamentary seats as the Bill stands. That cannot be right and I will return to that debate later.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

The last thing I want to do is extend the debate but somebody needs to say that the picture of idealised perfection that the Boundary Commission arrangements have had up until now, implicitly presented by some of the things that have been said, is simply not the case, especially in an area of rapidly expanding populations.

I happen to have been a Member of Parliament a lot longer ago, admittedly, in the county of Essex which has had a rapidly expanding population and went through several boundary changes. I am bound to say that the constituency I represented included parts of two districts, Chelmsford and Braintree; it would have included parts of two PCTs, had they existed at the time; it related to two police divisions, to quote examples used earlier; and indeed, it had three different postal districts in its geography. I found not the slightest difficulty in representing all those parts and strands to the best of my ability. My former constituents might have views on whether I did it well or badly overall, but I found no difficulty at all in relating to both Chelmsford and Braintree councils and all the other bodies to which I referred. I do not think that we should have it presented, as some have, that the situation is a dreamworld without the Bill.

My other point is that the constituency that I represented has now been split into two and the two main towns within it are separate. Frankly, I think they probably like it as they were about the same size and there was a degree of rivalry so they are happy to be split up, even though they are still in the same local government district. One of them is now part of the constituency consisting of parts of three districts: Braintree, Colchester and Maldon. I do not believe that the new MP is having any difficulty representing all those parts of her new constituency. Let us not overplay our hand on this and recognise that there will be difficulties whatever system we have. There is a degree of flexibility in the Bill’s proposals. Last week there were discussions about increasing that degree of flexibility. There is already enough flexibility to make it quite possible not to have the abacus concept that the noble Lord talked about just now.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

Does the noble Lord agree that in the case of both the boundary reviews he spoke about, local people had the opportunity to say whether they were happy or whether, for example, they wanted the two towns to be split, whereas this Bill would not allow that?

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

I understand the point made by the noble Baroness, and it is yet another point that has been done to death. The suggestions that community is all, regardless of other circumstances, which has been implicit in quite a lot of what has been said, and that somehow this is death and disaster compared with the situation at present, are complete and absolute poppycock.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I have the highest regard for the noble Lord, Lord Newton, and I listened, as I always do, with great interest. However, I was not sure what central point he was trying to make. Was he saying that basically we should not worry about any of these things—to hell with local government boundaries, local loyalties and identities, and let us just have a computer divide the country into blocks of a certain identical number and spew out whatever the result is, irrespective of those things? Is that what he was saying?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

That was not what I said. I indicated specifically that the flexibility in the Bill, and the possibly greater flexibility that has been the subject of one discussion, would allow those factors to be taken into account. Of course, they are not to be dismissed but equally, with a reasonably fair voting system, they are not the be-all and end-all.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

In that case the noble Lord is saying what I totally believe, which is that the present system is not all bad; it could be a great deal worse; and flexibility is of the essence in the role of the Boundary Commission. If those are the three principles that he was setting forth I could not have put it better myself. That is exactly what I think is the view of the majority of people in all corners of this House.

The Government have come in for a great deal of criticism over the past 90 hours, or whatever it is. I do not think we should have too much sympathy for them because they brought it on their head by going ahead with this Bill without pre-legislative scrutiny, as my noble friend Lady Hughes has just said. There was no attempt to consult local people at any stage. It is not an excuse to say that they had a deadline of 5 May and needed to make rapid progress because it was an arbitrary decision of the coalition to put the two Bills together. We have been over that several times. The Government have been subject to a lot of criticism but I do not feel sorry for them. However, I shall not add to that now. I want to be much more positive and move on.

The public would expect us in the Committee stage of such a Bill to do two things.