Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Touhig and Lord Tyler

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig]

This is the ninth day of the debate and a pattern is developing. We have a Minister who will speak on behalf of the Government and usually, if we are lucky, one Back-Bencher who will speak on behalf of all the rest. Indeed, until the noble Lord, Lord Baker, decided to leave his computer and enhance our democracy by coming to the Chamber and taking part, we had only the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Maples, who made a superb contribution. I may not have agreed with many things that he said, but it was certainly a contribution that was not only worthy of him, but worthy of the other side and worthy of the House. It is important that we engage in a proper discourse on this important matter.

[Lord Tyler]

If the noble Lord does not take too long, I will, I hope, be able to make my usual very terse, succinct and very relevant contribution to this debate. Therefore I am relying on him not to be too lengthy.

[Lord Touhig]

I am overwhelmed by the noble Lord’s modesty and I shall try to reciprocate by keeping my remarks as brief as possible.

I will chide the noble Lord, Lord Maples, in one way—he displayed an extraordinary ignorance of post-devolution Wales in terms of the work of Members of Parliament. I am sure that he did a fantastic job as a Member of Parliament representing 90,000 people. I did not represent that number, but I can tell him that my workload was no less. Like many who sat in the House of Commons, I worked 70 or 80 hours a week and there was very often a huge amount of sudden extra work. When the miners were successful in winning their case for compensation for diseases acquired working underground, I had 500 constituency cases out of the blue that had built up over a period.

The work of a Member of Parliament is not being taken into account in terms of the way that the Bill has been constructed. We heard some discussions earlier today about pre-legislative scrutiny. If the Government had engaged in pre-legislative scrutiny, they might have had a better understanding of the workload of Members of Parliament. When I entered the other place in a by-election in 1995, I was told that there was one Member of Parliament who never replied to any letters from his constituents. It was perfectly logical—he said that only a minority wrote to him and it was grossly unfair to the majority, who never troubled him, to write back to those who did.

That might have been the case then, but it certainly is not the case at the present time. Members of Parliament have huge constituency workloads as well as a huge amount of work in the House as well. Because of the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny, I fear that the Bill does not take account of that. I do not know whether any noble Lords on the Government Benches have done any pre-legislative scrutiny, but when I was Wales Minister I often came to your Lordships’ House with a draft Bill to discuss with your Lordships. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, from the Cross Benches, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, and the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, a former Welsh Secretary, always made important contributions to help us improve the quality of legislation. That is what pre-legislative scrutiny allowed us to do and it is sadly lacking in this legislation.

At the end of last week there was a brief debate on a Question from the noble Viscount, Lord Montgomery, about the conventions in this House. I think it is right, from time to time, to remind ourselves that there are proper ways to behave and to discuss and debate in this House and I have no complaints about the points that he raised. What greater convention can there be than the role of this House to defend and safeguard the constitution? That must, surely, be the most important of conventions and must be what we ought to do. I refer noble Lords to the Companion, where it says:

“The House of Lords is the second Chamber of the United Kingdom Parliament”.

That is a bit of news, perhaps, to one or two Members on the other side. The Companion continues:

“As a constituent part of Parliament, the House of Lords makes laws, holds government to account, and debates issues of public interest”.

That is why we are giving the Bill the kind of scrutiny that we are. This is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; it is not Zimbabwe, and we do not need a Government who act like Robert Mugabe in pushing through legislation on which there has been no consultation and for which there was no widespread support across the country before it was put to Parliament.

The Bill will mean that almost boundary of every constituency in the United Kingdom will be withdrawn, and is a triumph of arithmetic over accountable democracy. Those who say that the only way to have a proper and fair electoral system is to have equal-sized constituencies are missing the point. Why is that the only argument? There are all sorts of others. We will go into the issues relating to Wales later, but the Government have already accepted that there should be exceptions to that with Orkney and Shetland and the Western Isles. I will make a case later on—I do not know at what hour—about consideration for Wales.

The fundamental point that has been missed but that is coming out from a number of speakers in this debate is that, because of a lack of pre-legislative scrutiny, no proper account has been taken of the workload of Members of Parliament. I am not against reducing the number of Members of Parliament if that is appropriate. That is proper and fair. It is right that we should take stock and judge from time to time whether the numbers are right. Without any proper consultation and discussion, the figure of 600 is flawed—we have no scientific basis or proper research to show how it has been arrived at. That is a folly and a great disrespect to our democracy.

I can only echo the point made by my noble friend Lord Boateng when he spoke last week very powerfully about what we would say if one of the countries of the British Commonwealth had a newly elected Government that used their power in that country’s Parliament to reduce the number of seats in that Parliament and thereby harm that nation’s democracy. We would have plenty to say, and rightly so.

[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.