Parliamentary Constituencies bill (First sitting)

Maria Miller Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 18th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Isabel, did you want to add something?

Isabel Drummond-Murray: No, I was just agreeing. That would be the approach we would take, too.

[Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

Q It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Paisley, on what I am sure will be a really interesting Committee. I thank the witnesses for the responses they have already given, and the inevitable hard work they are facing in this area.

Can I follow up on one of the responses to David Linden’s questions, about splitting wards to do what this Bill is trying to do, which is to create equal and updated boundaries across the whole of the United Kingdom? I speak as one who represents a constituency of 83,000 people—well in excess of what I am sure will be the eventual quota. Isabel was talking about the importance in Scotland of using postcodes to try to get some sense of equalisation. Could Mr Bellringer outline for the Committee what the approach is to splitting wards in England, and whether any experts have looked at this to give us advice on what is a good process to follow, particularly when it comes to polling districts?

Tony Bellringer: As I mentioned earlier, we have traditionally had a general policy of using wards as our building blocks. However, as you will know from the previous couple of reviews, there have been instances in which we have been prepared to split a ward to solve a problem in that area.

As Isabel alluded to, the difficulty in England is that we do not have access to a comprehensive dataset below ward level that contains the parliamentary electorates and associates them with the boundaries of whatever that unit is—a dataset that we can then manipulate in the software and quickly move those units around to recalculate the figures, because that is how it works. When we split a ward in England at the moment, we have to go back to the local authority and get the detailed breakdown, usually on a polling district basis, and manually calculate those figures, which really slows the process. If we were to move to a much more open process of using sub-ward-level units as our building blocks, we would have to source that data from somewhere.

[Mrs Miller]

Q If you can do it in Scotland, why can you not do it in England?

Tony Bellringer: At the moment, we do not have the postcode areas in England. We would have to create them; they could be created, but it would take an awfully long time to do.

Between the 2013 and 2018 reviews, one of the things with which we kept ourselves occupied was constructing a polling district-level dataset with the help of Ordnance Survey, in order to map those figures against the actual polling district boundaries. That is almost the most difficult part of the process. We sort of have the figures already because we have access to the actual registers, which are usually subdivided by polling district. However, the polling districts are not mapped in a consistent way and we have to be able to associate the electorate figure with the actual boundary of the unit you are working with, so that when you move the unit, the numbers change accordingly. You need to have mapped those polling district boundaries electronically. We did that process, and it took us and Ordnance Survey about two years to map every polling district in England.

[Mrs Miller]

Q May I probe a little further? We are talking about democracy here, so it is pretty important that we get it right, and a bit of extra hard work and extra IT is what the electorate would expect to get a democratic process. I still do not really understand why you are not doing this, particularly given that I know exactly what the boundaries of my polling districts are, so I do not understand why you do not.

Tony Bellringer: As I say, we went through the process between 2013 and 2018, so at one point in time we had a polling district dataset that we could use. However, as you know, polling district reviews happen all the time across the entirety of England, so that single, comprehensive polling district dataset goes out of date almost instantly. There has to be a way of keeping it up to date. At the moment, that requires us to know who is doing the polling district review and when, so we can go and find out what they have changed it to. Do they have it mapped? No—then we need to get somebody to map it into the system. At the moment, there is no process by which the results of a polling district review are notified either to us or to Ordnance Survey so that it can be incorporated and the dataset can be kept up to date.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Mr Paisley, I do not know if this will help, but it might be useful if the commission provided the Committee with a note on the issue and how it could be overcome. Just because it has not been done before does not mean that it cannot be done in the future, and I think this piece of legislation demands that it be done now. Could I suggest that we ask the commission to provide a more detailed note on how this could be done, with any costings that might be appropriate?

[The Chair]

You are being asked to write a wish list on this issue. Could you do that for us?

Tony Bellringer: Yes. We did actually approach the Government at the time. We have kind of done the work to build that and issue one. There is a requirement for a local authority that does a polling district review to publish the findings, but they just do that by publishing it on a website, and it is also not necessarily in a mapped format. All it actually requires is a bit of something tacked on to that legal requirement to publish, which says, “You also need to send it to Ordnance Survey and the Boundary Commission.”

[The Chair]

Could you give that to us within two weeks?

[Mrs Miller]

Q And any suggestions of changes in the law to do that would be really helpful.

Can I ask one other question—will you indulge me, Mr Paisley? I noticed that the commissions try to minimise the disruption to existing boundaries in its proposals, which is obviously a sensible thing to do. I also noted that it has said in the past that the commissions are not obliged to shut their eyes to likely future growth. That is particularly noted in section 40 of the guidance that was produced at the last review. Will both commissions outline their approach to the next review and whether it will be the same sort of approach? I declare an interest in that I represent a part of the country that is building a lot of houses. To propose boundaries that will inevitably be changed radically in the future would seem to be a waste of the commission’s time.

Tony Bellringer: Immediately before we start a review, the commission meets representatives of political parties to talk about how it plans to operate its internal policies within the framework of the statutory requirements, and that is an example of the kind of thing that we would be talking about with them.

It is unlikely that it would change significantly. The fundamental principle in doing this work is that you have to at some point draw a line and say, “That is the data that we are working with.” You cannot build a house on constantly shifting foundations and so you have to say, “That is the data and we are going to work with that data.”

At the same time, where we are looking at competing options in an area, if one is obviously more suited to an area that is clearly growing in population—maybe we know that from strategic planning approvals that have gone through in the area—that will veer us towards that option as the preferred option. That is really what it means.

What we cannot do is say, “Well, okay, the electorate that we are supposed to be working with is this and the electorate is now this, so let’s use that instead.” We still have to stick to the original electorate figure, but be alive to the fact that it is clearly growing and can be demonstrated to be growing. That is quite key as well—we draw a distinction between proven growth in an area and projected or speculative growth in an area.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Presumably, it would affect your geographical boundaries, which may not have live bodies in yet, but will in the future.

Tony Bellringer: Yes and no. The distinction I am trying to draw here is that if you have had a strategic planning development approved and it has been built and people have started to move in, you can say that those figures have changed—it is clearly growing. Even though those figures have derived from a point in time after the electorate data that we are supposed to be using, there is a clear indication that the area is growing. If you have had a strategic planning development approved, but it has not been built yet at the time we are doing our review, we might go, “Well, it is not as convincing.”

[Mrs Miller]

Q And in Scotland?

Isabel Drummond-Murray: I do not think there is much to add to that. We have to work with the electorate as set out in the legislation. On the local government side—I am also secretary to the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland—the legislation sets out that we take account of the forecast for five years.

That all points to the need for regular review. We draw a line when we know there is going to be growth and there is capacity to absorb it through the existing 5% tolerance. I guess we could take account of it, but it is not something that has featured particularly on the parliamentary side, simply because of the way in which the legislation is drafted. We use the electorate at the start of the review; we do not guess what the electorate will be at a point in the future.

[The Chair]

We have four more questions and about 11 minutes on the clock, though I will push it on to get all the questions asked, because the evidence we are getting is very good for the inquiry.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jane Hunt]

Q Ward splitting was referred to previously. How would that work in Wales? There was some reference to some wards being too large, which gives me the idea that single-seat wards would be a good idea for the future. How would that work in Wales? Are there areas where local government wards are too large?

Shereen Williams: Like our colleagues in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, we use electoral wards as our building blocks. However, if there was great difficulty, we would use community wards within the electoral ward. In the past, we have put forward proposals where one or two parliamentary constituencies had a split ward in them. It is a route that we would rather not take because it creates confusion for voters when you have a different local authority and a different parliamentary constituency compared with somebody who is in the same electoral ward as you.

[Mrs Miller]

Q I start by thanking Shereen for her evidence today. In your evidence, you have highlighted the specific challenges in Wales because of the beautiful geography you have. Can you and the Welsh commission learn from the experience in Scotland, when they undertook a very significant review of boundaries in the ’80s—I am sure Scottish members of the Committee can remind me exactly when that was—when there was major reorganisation? It is a challenge, but it is one that has been successfully undertaken in Scotland and perhaps now the challenge falls to Wales. Is there any learning you can get from that?

Shereen Williams: The four Boundary Commissions are in regular contact. We rely on each other and we share good practice on a regular basis. In terms of those changes that have taken place in Scotland, I cannot imagine why we would not be able to invite Scottish colleagues to present to commissioners and to inform our thinking on how we deliver this report for Wales.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Sorry—that major change happened prior to 2005, actually. It is really reassuring to hear your comments.

Going back to the question that my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough raised about splitting wards, it is interesting that that seems to be something that can happen in Wales and Scotland, although the procedures are not as easy as they might be. We heard that from the commission in England. Would you be able to advise the Committee about working with Mr Bellringer on what would need to be put in place to ensure that, if it was helpful, sub-ward-level splits could take place? Would you be able to provide some more information for the Committee on that?

Shereen Williams: Scotland and Wales’s challenge is significantly different from England’s because of the number of electorates. Tony has to co-ordinate in terms of trying to get all the parliamentary constituencies set up for England. In Wales, we are used to splitting wards because we tend to do that for our local government boundary reviews, so we are quite comfortable with the practice of breaking up electoral wards and splitting up communities into sub-wards in order to create electoral wards—this is going back to community wards. In terms of sharing that practice with Mr Bellringer, that would not be an issue, but I have to acknowledge that he has a far more difficult job in hand compared with us in Wales and Scotland.

[Mrs Miller]

Q Very finally, in Wales you have the wonderful Ynys Môn constituency, which is the second-largest island in the United Kingdom—I am nervously looking at the Chair here—or maybe the third, depending on how you view Northern Ireland.

[The Chair]

Rathlin Island. I think you are right.

[Mrs Miller]

I wondered whether, as somebody who was brought up in Wales and understands the importance of cultural identity within the Welsh nation and the psyche, you have thought further about how that constituency should be treated. I am a Hampshire MP, and the Isle of Wight gets particular protection because of that.

Shereen Williams: That would be something for Parliament to decide as to whether Ynys Môn becomes a protected constituency, as they have in Scotland and the Isle of Wight. It would not be for the commission to comment on that.

[Mrs Miller]

Understood. Sorry, I have probably pressed you too far on that.

[The Chair]

Shereen, thank you very much for your wonderful evidence and, more importantly, for getting us back on time. You have made my chairmanship so much easier. Thank you for giving us your time this morning.

Shereen Williams: Thank you for having me.

Examination of Witness

Eamonn McConville gave evidence.