Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

As with many other such endeavours, the issue cannot be reduced to a simple mathematical equation when you are dealing with people and their sense of place and community, and when geographical barriers and idiosyncratic issues of history and geography are involved. I shall reserve my other arguments for later when further amendments come forward. I support the amendment.

[Lord Touhig]

I do not intend detaining your Lordships very long but I should like to refer to the impact that the legislation is having on Wales. As a Welsh Member of your Lordships’ House I feel strongly about this because not one amendment about Wales was debated in the other place. The use of the guillotine ensured that none was debated and yet Wales is the part of the United Kingdom that is most adversely affected by the Bill.

Paul Wood, a member of the Boundary Commission for Wales, in evidence to the Welsh Affairs Select Committee in the other place, produced a report on the Bill and said that,

“issues such as local ties and historical ties, which may have had more weight previously, are clearly subsumed in the legislation to the numerical issues”.

In other words, community-based representation will fail and disappear if the Bill is not amended. Indeed, the creation of large, rigidly defined constituencies based on numbers will put an end to it.

I think of my part of Wales, and the south Wales valleys in particular, as being like a hand: the valleys are the fingers and the palms are the cities of Newport, Cardiff and Swansea. There is movement from the valleys to the cities, but there is hardly any movement across valleys from one valley to another. That is historical and something that we have understood for many decades.

Perhaps I can relate my concerns on how Bill will impact on my former constituency of Islwyn. The Electoral Reform Society has produced a paper in which it has redrawn the electoral map of Wales based on 30 parliamentary seats. In its proposals my former parliamentary constituency of Islwyn would disappear, which would have certain consequences. Under the Electoral Reform Society’s proposals, which could be a blueprint for whichever body follows, the community of Abercarn will be put into the new constituency of Caerphilly. Abercarn is in the Ebbw valley and Caerphilly is in the Rhymney valley, separated by two mountain chains and three rivers. They are distinct and separate and there is no community interest across the valleys. It is proposed that the community of Cefn Fforest will become part of the new constituency of Merthyr Tydfil. They are in separate counties and there is no community of interest whatever between the two.

[Lord Grocott]

I assume that the Electoral Reform Society’s map was applied to the whole country, as we had the same in Shropshire. Was there anyone at any level of representation in the noble Lord’s part of Wales, such as a local authority, who thought that the proposals made any sense whatever? No elected representative or official in Shropshire thought there was any sense at all in what the Electoral Reform Society proposed.

[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.