Parliamentary Constituencies and Assembly Electoral Regions (Wales) (Amendment) Order 2011

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd November 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Wigley]

My Lords, I apologise for arriving a few minutes late, but I mistimed the matter. I agree very warmly indeed with the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, on having communities coterminous with seats. I believe that that should be fundamental to our approach.

I, too, share some of the mystery that was expressed by the noble Baroness from the Opposition Front Bench with regard to exactly where we are going over the next two or three years with this matter. I noted that the Secretary of State for Wales said in a Written Statement on 11 October that the Silk commission, which is looking into many aspects of these matters in Wales—the Minister will be well familiar with that—will explicitly not be examining,

“in part II, the structure of the National Assembly for Wales, including issues relating to the election of Assembly Members”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/10/11; col. 28WS.]

We know that Silk is not looking at it and that an issue is arising. If this unfortunate legislation which has just been passed regarding the Westminster boundaries will be in place, what therefore will be the process for reviewing—if review is needed—the National Assembly, to try and make sure that there is some coterminosity to the extent that it is possible? I do not think that it is possible to get anything like the coterminosity that I ideally wish to see, but at least there should be some review.

It is therefore right to say that if there is a review, these will not necessarily be the basis for the 2016 election. Some clarification is needed about the future role of the Boundary Commission for Wales which, if we continue with the present system, will be preparing different reports for Westminster and for the Assembly elections. There is a question as to whether there will be an increase in the number of commissioners and in the funding that they will have in order to undertake those dual roles, running in parallel with each other and causing some confusion.

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[Lord Wigley]

As I was saying before we were interrupted, a question remains about the mechanics for sorting out any changes in Wales and whether the Boundary Commission is going to do this itself. Will decisions about National Assembly constituencies be taken solely in Wales or debated in a forum at Westminster? What will the timescale be for this? There needs to be some clarification, because from the media reports in Wales it is clear that there is considerable uncertainty about this. I personally regard 30 Westminster seats for Wales as ridiculous, particularly if they have to be the same size, but that is an issue for another piece of legislation. None the less, that impinges on what we are debating today, as other noble Lords have mentioned, and I hope that the Minister might be in a position to give some clarification. If he is not, perhaps he could find a vehicle by which we could be informed of the Government’s thinking on this matter.

[Lord Jones]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his exposition and the noble Baroness, Lady Gale, for hers and for the information that she gave to your Lordships. I heard the Minister’s stentorian Scottish brogue as he outlined his Welsh intentions, so I drew the appropriate conclusions.

As the draft SI says, the Boundary Commission for Wales has submitted to the Lord President of the Council, Mr Clegg, reports recommending alterations to the boundaries of the parliamentary constituencies into which Wales is divided and of the constituencies of the National Assembly for Wales. Paragraph 4.3 of the Explanatory Memorandum to the order states baldly that,

“the Assembly constituencies will no longer be the same as the parliamentary constituencies”.

In some respects, it is not an exaggeration to say that in stating that fact in these papers, some history is being made. There is to be a disjoint between the boundaries of the Assembly and of the mother of Parliaments where Wales is concerned. I do not see in the Explanatory Memorandum or in the draft order any explanation as to the intent of the Government with regard to the parliamentary boundaries.

I am not qualified to pronounce upon details concerning Brecon and Radnor, Rhymney, Ogmore, Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil, the vale and Penarth, but I presume that the consultations were scrupulous and that, in terms of these being ward boundaries for the Assembly, things went reasonably well. The order mentions parliamentary boundaries, and although the Minister mentioned them he does not appear to know about the extreme disquiet about the details of the proposed boundaries, which mean that there will be 10 fewer Members of Parliament in Wales. To cut away 10 parliamentary seats from Wales is unjust; Wales’s MPs now are serving their constituents extremely well, and MPs of all parties have never worked so hard, so effectively and so visibly. Their constituents get a fine service, and MPs make their offices and staff readily available throughout Wales to give that excellent service. That service is of more than high quality, and I regret the coalition’s decision to expunge 10 seats. The reasons for this are not given in the draft or the Explanatory Memorandum.

This is a historic blunder, against the grain of public opinion. Are Westminster MPs expected to wither on the vine in the years ahead? Why does the coalition hugely increase, by over 100, the membership of an overcrowded House of Lords when it proposes to cut severely the number of MPs? Ten parliamentary seats are to go in Wales in the coalition’s approach. Even at this late stage, I would hope that Downing Street will decide that it is going too far and will dump such a measure. It seems that we will have more and more Barons and Baronesses and fewer MPs in Wales, but we are not told in the papers before this Committee the reasons why. I do not think that this is the time to denude Wales of its Westminster champions—champions of reform, of the underprivileged and, increasingly, of the unemployed.

There is a birthright here, a parliamentary birthright, and the Government of the day are taking much of it away from the people of Wales. The Government promulgate the merits of what you may call community and yet are hacking away at an established value and historic provision in Wales. So far we have not heard why the Government intend this.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

Quite simply because the Explanatory Memorandum is a statement of the effect of the order as the law currently stands, not a statement of policy. I hope that in presenting the order I made it very clear—I think I have repeated it twice now—that that is subject to the commitment that my right honourable friend has made. Just to be clear, the Explanatory Memorandum is a statement of what the effect of the order would be as a matter of law; it is not intended to be a statement of policy. I hope that clarifies the position. The Secretary of State is doing what she said in that exchange that she would do and considering what the effect is of the fact that there are implications of the disjunction.

My noble friend Lady Randerson asked me to confirm that that was the case in Scotland. It is indeed the position that the UK parliamentary constituencies do not match the Scottish parliamentary constituencies. I would be brave to say that the political parties necessarily find it easy but I rather suspect that individual members of the public, who at the end of the day matter most, have little difficulty in identifying their Member of the Scottish Parliament and their Member of the UK Parliament.

Perhaps for clarity, I should say that there is nothing at the moment in law or in any arrangements that would look at how Welsh Assembly constituencies would change. I say purely as a matter of fact that when the disjunction took place in Scotland, primary legislation was brought in in Scotland to make provision for a separate boundary review of the Scottish parliamentary constituencies. Let us not interpret that as in any way a commitment that we are about to bring forward legislation, but that is factually how that position has been addressed in the longer term in Scotland.

[Lord Wigley]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. The question that arises is how we ensure a mechanism for setting the constituency boundaries for the Assembly within the context of the rules and values on which they are based, which are more community values, in that there are more individual seats and they are geared to the old communities that they used to represent. At the same time, the boundaries for Westminster are based on the totally different principle—what might be called a republican principle—that it is from the people up that the rights and legitimacy of Parliament come. That is an old established principle; whether it works well in other countries is another question. Those two sets of values and analysis are totally different.

What I am really asking is: are we going to have two boundary commissions to do this or different people in the same commission? Are we going to have more resources to enable us to do it?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I cannot answer that question because there is no answer to it at the moment, other than that, having established boundaries, clearly they cannot go on for ever. The very nature of our system is that the boundaries should be regularly updated. We now say that UK boundaries should be done on a regular basis every five years; previously, as I have indicated, it was done every eight to 12 years. It is clear that at some stage some mechanism will need to be put in place to allow an update of the boundaries, but it would be presumptuous and premature of me to speculate now on when that would be, and indeed on whether we will use the same people to do it and what the criteria would be for these boundaries. That is a debate for another day. There are no proposals. However, the noble Lord was right to identify the fact that, as there is a disjunction, there has to be a mechanism at some point for updating the boundaries for the Assembly.