Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Mark Harper Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 1st December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for providing that clarification.

I am new to Parliament, but I have been in politics for decades, and in that time, I have seen trust in our political system erode. Today, only 20% of the UK trusts politicians at least to some degree. The public already see politicians as remote, self-interested and unaccountable, and the current boundary changes would make that worse. The Bill would preserve the MP-constituency link, the power to scrutinise the Executive and the strength of our communities. It would harness engagement in recent elections to reverse, rather than reinforce, the trend towards disillusionment.

This is a debate about our democracy. I stand to gain no advantage from the change I am proposing because, under the current review, my constituency would stay exactly the same. I am here to speak for the good of Parliament, not my own. I will briefly set out the five key arguments for my Bill, as I am keen to allow time for other contributions.

First, the public see politicians as remote. The boundary changes would take MPs even further away from their constituents. I am fortunate in that I can get from one end of Manchester, Gorton to the other in half an hour, but many colleagues come from rural constituencies that are already a challenge to represent. As we reduce the number of MPs, these constituencies will get bigger. Let us take the example of North Lancashire, which would stretch from the edge of the Lake district to the outskirts of Blackpool and Preston, covering more than half the county.

Practically the only argument that the Government used in favour of reducing the number of MPs was that it would save money—apparently about £13 million. That falls apart when we consider that the previous two Prime Ministers appointed 260 life peers between them, at a cost of £34 million a year. Why increase the size of the unelected House of Lords if we are really trying to cut the cost of politics?

There are other ways to save money. Not embarking on five-yearly boundary reviews, which each cost about £10 million, would be a start. Gradually reducing the number of MPs could be another, but a drastic and sudden reduction in the number of MPs causes much more disruption, and costs more than is necessary. Clearly cost was not the real motivation; the change was an attempt to gain a political advantage.

Secondly, we cannot reduce the number of MPs without reducing the size of the Executive. With the same proportion of MPs as we have now, 48% of Conservative Members would be on the payroll. The job of Back Benchers in all parties is to scrutinise legislation and hold the Government to account. Reducing the number of MPs would tip the balance of power towards the Executive. The charge that politicians are unaccountable would only become stronger and louder. What we would lose in independent-minded dissenters cannot be justified by modest savings.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I was the Minister who tried to bring in a Bill to ensure that the House of Lords was elected, and of course it was because the Labour party would not support the programme motion that we were not able to make any progress. On the hon. Gentleman’s point about cost, it is true that more Members have been appointed to the House of Lords but, since 2010, the cost of running the other place has actually fallen each year—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. The right hon. Gentleman is hoping to catch my eye early in the debate, so I suggest that he saves his speech. As he should know, we need short interventions—we have a long day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

First, I should declare an interest—although it is not strictly an interest—as the Minister who took through the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011. I feel some obligation to defend the very sensible proposals and arrangements that Parliament legislated for in that Act, as they are under attack from what are, I must say, some of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever heard—and I will come on to that last one.

I do, however, thank the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) for the opportunity to debate these issues again. I am afraid that one or two of my hon. Friends in this House are also slightly anorakish on this subject. [Interruption.] One or two of them are waving at me. I, too, always enjoy the opportunity to talk about these important constitutional matters.

First, I will deal head-on with some of the arguments the hon. Gentleman made, and there are a couple of other things I want to say before I turn to the Bill before us. The hon. Gentleman talked about trust in politics. That is indeed very important, but I should share with the House a point that arose when we first discussed and legislated for these proposals. I hope colleagues do not find this too devastating, but when we announced to the public that one of our key proposals was to reduce the number of Members of Parliament from 650 to 600, although I know we would all like to think that the people of the UK were distraught that there were going to be 50 fewer of us, for quite a time it was the single most popular coalition Government policy.

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I hate to rain on my right hon. Friend’s parade, but if we had a proposal to abolish Parliament entirely, that would also be particularly popular, would it not?

[Mr Harper]

I would not go quite as far as that, as there is a serious point about representation, but the public were certainly not devastated by the idea of a modest reduction in the size of the House. The other place is, I think, the second largest legislative Chamber in the world after the Chinese National People’s Congress, and this lower House of Parliament is one of the largest lower Houses, and I thought that our modest proposal to reduce the number of MPs from 650 to 600 was a perfectly sensible step forward.

The explanatory notes to the Bill were prepared by the Public Bill Office on behalf of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, so I do not know whether the following point was put in by that office or by him. We have made the case that reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 600 saves some £13 million per year, which is £66 million over the course of a Parliament. That might be modest in terms of our overall spending, but I think the general public would think that saving £60 million that we could then spend on important public priorities like the national health service was quite important. Interestingly, the explanatory notes talk about the broader context and suggest that there will be a reduction in the cost of politics—the hon. Gentleman alluded to this —associated with the 73 MEPs who will disappear when we leave the European Union. In our debates in this House on Brexit—I promise colleagues I will digress on this only briefly, as we have plenty more days to come over the coming weeks—when we make assertions about what we thought the referendum result meant, colleagues often say, “Well, that wasn’t on the ballot paper.” I am sorry that we did not think about this at the time, but if we had said to voters that when we leave the EU we will not have the 73 MEPs and said at the same time that we were going to use that as a cunning plan to reinstate the 50 MPs going in the law as legislated for, many voters might have thought twice. I am only sorry that I did not think of making that argument in the referendum campaign, given that I was on the remain side of the argument, as we might have had a little more success. I do not think that is a sensible argument, however.

I say to the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton—I may have misheard, but I think the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) agreed with him on this—that just because there are no MEPs in place it does not mean that suddenly a lot of extra work will come to this House. There are quite a lot of things that the EU does, and that MEPs spend all their time addressing, that actually would be better just not done at all. We can make sensible judgments in this House about what we want the Government and Parliament to focus on, and picking up every single thing that MEPs do is not very sensible.

[Mike Amesbury (Weaver Vale) (Lab)]

On the point of reducing the cost of democracy, is it not the case that the Conservatives have stacked the other place with 260 new appointees, increasing the cost of democracy by some £34 million?

[Mr Harper]

I am glad the hon. Gentleman raised that point. It is certainly the case that there are more Members of the House of Lords, because at present, although they can retire, funnily enough when it is suggested to someone who has a life appointment with a considerable income attached to it that they should retire, very few choose to do so—although, to be fair, more of them have been retiring recently than previously. To repeat what I said in my admittedly slightly too long intervention, although there are more Members of the House of Lords, we made an attempt to reform the other place, but Parliament was not completely sold on the idea; and the fact is that the cost of running the House of Lords has fallen since 2010, not increased. It is true that there are more Members of the House of Lords, but the running costs have fallen because of the savings made.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is the right hon. Gentleman therefore saying that the cost of politics and the number of Members are not linked? His argument that the simple way to cut costs in this place is to reduce the number of MPs is undermined by his own evidence.

[Mr Harper]

Not at all. I have made the point that the other place has managed to reduce its costs, but importantly, its Members do not have any constituents to represent. It has made some savings. I have suggested that we could save costs by reducing the size of this House quite modestly. We would still remain a very large lower House of Parliament compared with many others.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

To extend my right hon. Friend’s argument, we could achieve even greater cost-cutting by cutting the number of Lords who do not take their daily allowance of £300.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is right, but I do not want to dilate too much on the other place as I am still pursuing the first argument that the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton made in favour of his Bill.

The second part of the hon. Gentleman’s first argument, which dealt with trust in politics, was about the size of constituencies. He was talking about their geographical size. We obviously represent physical parts of the country, but it is the people in those constituencies that we represent, not the spaces. My hon. Friend the Member for Telford (Lucy Allan) agreed with his proposition that we should have seats of broadly equal numbers of constituents, because it is only then that the weight of those constituents’ views can be broadly the same across the country. That proposition was espoused by the Chartists many years ago.

We obviously do not want exact electoral equality between constituencies, because we have to take into account other important factors, which I will say more about in a moment, but we need to have broad equality. When we brought forward the original legislation, we set a range of +/-5%, which means that the number of constituents could vary by 10%. I want to give the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton some credit here. The former Member Pat Glass brought forward a similar Bill almost a year ago—this is a sort of anniversary of Labour’s attempt to go backwards in terms of sensible boundaries—and she set a range of +/-10%, which would have given a 20% variance. I welcome the fact that the hon. Gentleman thought that that was too big and has reduced the range to +/-7.5%, giving a 15% variance. That is of course welcome; when someone moves in your direction, it would be churlish not to give him credit for doing so.

We need to stick fairly rigidly to broad equality, but boundary commissions can take into account a number of other factors. My constituency neighbour across the water, the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew), seemed to suggest that boundary commissions could not take into account any of those considerations. He talked about those things being swept away completely. It is worth going back to the legislation, which makes it clear that they have to stick to the rule about broad equality but can take into account special geographical considerations, local government boundaries, boundaries of existing constituencies, any local ties and any inconveniences attached to them. They can take all those factors into account.

Obviously, we are not talking today about the specific proposals brought forward by the boundary commissions, but I have taken a cursory look at the changes that they have made. It is clear from the evidence they have taken, and the changes they made between their initial proposals and their subsequent proposals, that many local people made clear representations about the factors I have just set out. The boundary commissioners listened to those concerns and made significant changes as a result.

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

Notwithstanding what the right hon. Gentleman has just said, does he acknowledge that the boundary commission is still proposing a “Devonwall” seat, which ignores the strong identities of Devon and Cornwall and matches them together, and which would be truly unpopular?

[Mr Harper]

I am familiar with that issue. The hon. Gentleman might not be aware that when we were originally taking the legislation through, that issue was raised with me by colleagues from both Devon and Cornwall. Indeed, I think this was the issue that prompted my right hon. Friend the former Member of Parliament for Witney and Prime Minister to make his unfortunate comment about the width of the River Tamar, which got him into a bit of hot water with colleagues from both Devon and Cornwall and which I think he may have come to regret. We had a debate about the issue, and I recognise that my views were not entirely popular, but it was about ensuring that areas were properly represented. One solution put forward by the then Members in Cornwall constituencies was to have less representation in this House. As the Minister responsible, I did not think that that was very sensible. I think that people should be represented properly.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr and others have spoken about local government boundaries. It is worth remembering that we are not proposing to move constituents anywhere. If there are changes to parliamentary boundaries, the constituents do not move. The councils that they get their local services from do not move. The only inconvenience in this process is that, heaven forfend, Members of Parliament might have to talk to an extra local government chief executive. Most of my constituency is coterminous with the Forest of Dean District Council, and I liaise with the officers and elected councillors of that council, but one of my wards is in the borough of Tewkesbury, which I share with my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Mr Robertson). That one ward contains just under 4,000 constituents, who are important to me, as are all my constituents. It means that I have to spend time dealing with another set of councillors and local government officers, but I do not find that to be enormously troublesome, and it causes my constituents no inconvenience at all. I suspect that they spend absolutely no moments in the day thinking about it.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

One of the problems with the boundary review is that in many areas, including mine, local government boundary changes have meant that the proposed areas do not even cover coterminous wards, and some wards would be cut in half. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that allowing some flexibility would solve that problem?

[Mr Harper]

I recognise that there are complexities due to local government boundaries, but I have to say that Members of Parliament are probably the only people who, when driving around the country, see boundaries in front of us as we cross them. I do not know whether other Members have a similar experience, but as I drive past the various signs on the M4, I think of myself passing through the constituencies of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood), my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for South Swindon (Robert Buckland). But let us be frank, that is something that only those of us involved in politics do. Normal people—the constituents we represent—do not see the country as a succession of ward and local government boundaries. Perhaps I am doing them a disservice, but I suspect that if I asked my constituents where the local government boundaries were, most of them would be unable to tell me. And, funnily enough, I do not think that that makes their lives any less exciting and fulfilled.

[Gareth Snell]

I agree that we are the only people who go around the country getting excited about boundaries, but does the right hon. Gentleman agree that people identify with small towns, villages and other communities, and that a 5% threshold would make alignment very difficult in some places? There are examples in constituencies represented by Members on both sides of the House of small towns, villages and clusters of communities, all of which identify as a community, now being split because of that very tight threshold.

[Mr Harper]

I accept that, but we have to balance these things, which is what the boundary commissions do.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Mr Harper]

I am conscious that I have dealt with only the first argument that the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton set out, and I want to make some progress before I take any more interventions.

The hon. Gentleman’s second point, which related to MEPs, was about workload. I have dealt with costs, but I want to take the workload issue head on, because there is a flipside relating to devolution, so he should be careful about going down this road. When we brought forward the initial proposals in the 2011 Act, we had to think through how the country was to be represented. At the moment, certain parts of the United Kingdom are perhaps over-represented in this House relative to their population. Wales, for example, has considerably more Members of Parliament than it would be entitled to on the basis of its population, which is why both sets of proposals would reduce the number of Members of Parliament to which Wales was entitled.

Representations were made to me that the parts of the UK with devolved government—those covered by the Scottish Parliament, and the Assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland—should have less representation in this House because the casework aspect of our job is shared with the representatives in those bodies. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where health is a devolved matter, one could argue that cases about the health service—when I take up such cases as an English Member of Parliament, I raise them with the Secretary of State for Health, who is responsible for the health service in England—would be properly dealt with in the devolved Assemblies. I rejected that argument at the time, because I felt that we needed to ensure that all voters who elect people to this House were treated evenly, but if we follow the hon. Gentleman’s argument that the abolition of MEPs means that more work will fall on us, meaning that there should be more of us, the logic is that those parts of the United Kingdom with devolved government should have less representation in this House, because their MPs’ workload will be shared with Members of the devolved legislatures. The hon. Gentleman should be cautious before pursuing that line of argument, because it might lead him somewhere he would not want to go.

Let me now deal with the frequency of reviews. The hon. Gentleman’s Bill would move from us having a boundary review every Parliament, which was what we suggested, to having one every 10 years. I had to smile to myself when he talked about the tradition of having boundary reviews about every 10 years, because we have not had a full boundary review for almost 20 years. If we do not manage to get a boundary review before the next general election, the registers on which the next election will be fought will be 22 years old, meaning that some people who will be voting at the next general election would not even have been born when the registers were compiled.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend inadvertently says that the registers would be 22 years old, but he meant to say that the boundaries will be based on registers that are 22 years old. The registers will actually be completely up to date.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, as one would expect, given that he is the distinguished Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which covers exactly this area of policy. I am grateful to him. The registers are absolutely up to date. The boundaries, however, are based on registers from 2000, meaning that we have not had a boundary review for some considerable time. That is important, because the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton was talking about the change that comes along with such reviews.

I accept that a boundary review that reduces the number of MPs from 650 to 600 and takes place 20 years after the last one will inevitably involve a lot of change to parliamentary boundaries. The reason we thought it sensible to have a boundary review every Parliament is that there is a choice once we have had that big change: either we have relatively frequent but smaller changes to parliamentary boundaries, or we have less frequent but more significant changes. My view, and the view that the then coalition Government and the House took when the 2011 Act was passed, was that it was better to have more frequent smaller changes. On balance, having reflected on that before today and while listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech, I think that that is right. If we have boundary reviews only once every 10 years, they will just be bigger and more disruptive, so smaller, less disruptive reviews are probably to be welcomed.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

The issue is not having a boundary review, but what has initiated it, which is the reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600. If we compare the average number of constituents in 1955 with the present day, the proposals in the review will increase that number by 40%.

[Mr Harper]

If we look at the existing range of constituency sizes—excluding the small protected island constituencies—we see that some Members represent mainland constituencies with perhaps only 40,000 electors, but others represent constituencies with nearly 100,000 voters. They seem to manage perfectly well, so I do not think that we will find things enormously challenging. I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) is in the Chamber. Her constituency is one of the largest in the country by population, and she does a fantastic job of representing her constituents in this House. Her local authority is seeking significant planning permission for house building to deal with the housing crisis, which means that her constituency numbers will grow considerably.

I have talked about the size of this lower House, and we represent relatively few people compared with legislators in comparable lower Houses. It would therefore not be impossible for us to have slightly more constituents each, on average, than at present.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The right hon. Gentleman says that we represent fewer constituents than Members of similar legislatures, but that does not seem to be the case. If we look at the figures for Commonwealth legislatures, Cyprus has 14,000 people per representative and Jamaica has 34,000. If we look at the Nordic countries, we see that Norway has 30,000 people per MP. On what evidence is he basing his assertion? I am rather confused.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman obviously has a very narrow view of the Commonwealth.

[Oliver Dowden (Hertsmere) (Con)]

The obvious example to cite is India. According to a House of Commons briefing, it has on average 2,192,379 electors per representative.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am not proposing that we reduce the size of this Parliament to that extent, but if a legislator in a similar type of system is capable of representing more than 2 million people, I do not that our rather modest changes should be completely beyond our wit.

I turn now to what the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton and other Opposition Members called the 2 million missing voters. That refers to the fact that electoral registration increased after the compilation of the 2015 registers, which are being used for the current review, and after the referendum, which was a big electoral event. The hon. Gentleman referred to the missing voters as if they were somehow not being taken into account, and Pat Glass said the same when she introduced her Bill last year. The important thing for a boundary review—my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) alluded to this in his point about the registers being up to date—is not the absolute number of electors, but how those electors are distributed across the country. The only thing that will make a difference to the number of seats is if the distribution of the electors changes substantially.

I must confess that I have not seen an up-to-date piece of work, but the excellent Matt Singh of Number Cruncher Politics published an interesting paper on 16 September 2016 in which he looked at that particular objection to our boundary review to see whether it made sense. He looked in a detailed, analytical way at the extra voters who came on to the electoral register ahead of the referendum to see whether they were distributed in a way that would cause a significant change if the boundary review were restarted with those registers. His short conclusion bears repeating:

“So to sum up, amid lots of misleading claims and counterclaims, there is a legitimate question about the effect of the date at which registration figures were taken.”

That was the point raised by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. The paper continued:

“But a detailed analysis of these figures and the subsequent 2 million increase in registration in the run up to the EU referendum provides the answer. The data does not support the suggestion that using the later version of the register would materially alter the distribution of seats. Instead it points to a very even distribution of the 2 million newly-registered voters between Conservative and Labour areas.”

That reflects well on Members on both sides of the House from across the country, because it shows that, in the run-up to that significant voting event, which we now know will change the direction and route this country takes, they did a fantastic job either of doing registration drives or of inspiring voters to register in a consistent way across the United Kingdom, rather than in a partial way that might have changed the distribution. The fact that some of those voters are not on the register that is being used for the current boundary review does not materially affect the distribution of seats across the country.

[Jim McMahon (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Gentleman has covered a great deal of ground, but will he cover the obvious ground? After spending £3 million, the Government know that the boundary review cannot get a parliamentary majority.

[Mr Harper]

I would prefer to test the opinion of Parliament, and we may or may not test Parliament’s opinion today. The right process is to do what is set out in legislation. The boundary commissions in the four parts of the United Kingdom will report by October 2018. Orders will then be brought before this House and the other place, and we will vote on them. They might get through; they might not—I do not know the answer to that question. We have not seen the final proposals from the boundary commissions. In fact, we have not even seen the final draft proposals for some parts of the UK. The opinion of the House will be tested in due course. If we were to take a view before a boundary review even started on whether we thought it would be approved by Parliament, I suspect we would never have a boundary review.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr has now disappeared from the Chamber, but he spoke about large wards. He is perfectly right that, in urban areas, the building blocks of parliamentary constituencies—local government wards—tend to be larger. I accept that was a problem in the abortive review that was not brought to fruition. The computer kit that the Boundary Commission for England used to do all the mapping could not split local government wards very well, but my understanding is that the commission has fixed the problem with support from the Cabinet Office and that it is now perfectly possible to split local government wards in urban areas. Trying to keep such wards together makes a boundary review difficult.

I am sorry that the hon. Gentleman is not here, because I want to deal with his point about crime. It was effectively about working together, but I did not understand his argument—Conservative Members were looking slightly amazed as he made it. Let us take his example of Birmingham. He has a police force that covers the whole west midlands, and Birmingham has a city council and a number of parliamentary constituencies. My hunch is that Birmingham Members of Parliament do what Members of Parliament do in my county of Gloucestershire: when there are common issues that concern us all and that cross boundaries, we work together. The election of the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Drew), unfortunately for my party, meant that Gloucestershire was no longer completely represented by Conservatives.

[Dr Drew]

That’s democracy.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but I am perfectly happy to work with him on common areas of concern, even though he represents a different political party. If we change parliamentary boundaries so that a particular part of a city or area is to be represented by two different Members of Parliament, the idea that somehow they will be incapable of working together, and with their police force and local authority, to deal with an important matter such as crime and the safety of their constituents is, frankly, nonsense. That was why Members were laughing at what the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr said. They were not laughing at a serious issue; they were laughing at the idea that people cannot work together to solve such important problems.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I am another west midlands MP with a very small constituency, and it might be worth the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) recognising that we also have the west midlands Mayor, Andy Street. We are very used to working together across boundaries.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Devolution of local government also goes back to the point about workloads. Again, it demonstrates that different areas of the country are grouped together for certain purposes, and we have seen that level of devolution in the west midlands and we are seeing considerable levels of devolution in Greater Manchester under the Mayor, Andy Burnham.

[Afzal Khan]

Hear, hear!

[Mr Harper]

I am a great believer in that level of devolution. The hon. Gentleman is a distinguished former local government leader, and I do think that decisions in this country are too centralised. Giving important areas of the country with political leadership the ability to make more decisions for themselves is welcome.

Of course, there is nothing to prevent people from working together. I was impressed when I visited Manchester as a Minister in the Department for Work and Pensions. I met the leader of Trafford Council, Councillor Sean Anstee, who is one of the local government leaders in Greater Manchester. He told me that local government leaders, even though they are of different political persuasions, have a shared vision on some of the big challenges for that area of the country. They are able to work together, notwithstanding their political differences. That blows out of the water the argument of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr about boundaries. It is perfectly possible for us all to work together.

I had planned to make a couple more relevant points before saying a word or two about the Bill. Obviously, I have just been addressing the five arguments of the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton in favour of the Bill—I hope hon. Members feel I have adequately dealt with those arguments and have been persuaded.

There has been quite a bit of discussion about voter registration. Again, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr made some allegations about that, and I am disappointed he has not stayed around to listen to a response. He said that we have made it difficult to register to vote and that we have tried to drive people off the register, which simply is not true and is not borne out by the facts.

The Electoral Commission published a report in July on electoral registration at the June 2017 general election, and the report makes it clear that “more than 2.9 million” applications to register to vote were made in Great Britain between the Prime Minister’s announcement on 18 April and the deadline for applications. Ninety-six per cent. of those applications were made through the online service—I had the privilege of kicking off that service when I was Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform—which has made it much easier for people to register to vote. More than two thirds of those online applications were made by people aged under 34. I do not use 34 as a proxy for young; it is simply a fact that the Electoral Commission put in its report. The idea that, somehow, we have made it difficult for people to vote when all they have to do is use an electronic device to register online is simply not borne out by the truth.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

That is not the case for those who are homeless or for a number of other people who do not have a fixed abode. Does the right hon. Gentleman recognise that those people are disadvantaged by the new system?

[Mr Harper]

No. I accept that some people may not be able to use the electronic method, but they are of course able to register in the traditional way. I think I am right in saying, although the Minister will be able to confirm this, that many local authorities go to considerable lengths to make sure people who might be disadvantaged are registered to vote. I know many local authorities make great efforts to make sure homeless people are registered. Under the law those local authorities have a duty to get as many people legitimately registered as possible.

That bring us to the other part of the argument, because the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr said that people disappeared from the register. Yes, they did, because the registration process does two things. It deals not only with making sure the register is as complete as possible, so that everyone who is entitled to vote is on it, but with making sure that it is accurate and that only those people who are eligible to vote are on it. Many of the people who left the register when we introduced the new voter registration system were, in a sense, not really people at all. Many of them were people who were no longer in those constituencies and should no longer have been registered to vote but had not been removed from the register, and some of them were no longer alive and that had not been taken into account.

On accuracy, I also come back to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex about how up to date the register is, as the other thing to remember is that the current boundaries are based on electoral registers from 2000. So however imperfect the current process may be, if we do not get this review done and have the boundaries implemented, Members are saying that they are comfortable for seats to be drawn on the basis of registers from 2000. That means that at the next election we would have the absurdity of people voting who were not alive when the registers on which the seats were founded were put together. That is absurd and it needs to be changed.

[Kevin Foster]

My right hon. Friend made some interesting points about the registration process. Does he agree that it is bizarre to be hearing in the 21st century arguments that electoral registrations should still be based on a concept of male heads of households formed in the 19th century, as the old system was?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. We had an argument about this at the time, and the concept that the head of household, who was invariably the man, should be responsible for registering people was rather out of date. Putting that responsibility on individuals is an improvement. As I said, all the evidence suggests, and the fact that a lot of people registered to vote in the referendum demonstrates, that this is not a difficult process. It is straightforward. The online registration system is much easier.

The only significant Electoral Commission recommendation—the Minister ought to reflect on this point—related to the problem that in the current system it is not easy for people to check electronically that they are already registered. A significant proportion of the people who tried to get registered for the general election were already registered and these were duplicate registrations. That puts a burden on electoral registration officers at a very busy time, and there would be some sense in our reflecting on whether we can improve the online system to deal with that.

[Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the longer this boundary review is delayed without being implemented, the greater the unfairness becomes, particularly with regard to rural seats, which, in the main, have seen a large increase in population?

[Mr Harper]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. We are not carrying out this process at a massively fast pace, and the boundary changes should have come into force some time ago, but there was an unholy alliance between the official Opposition and the Liberal Democrats. I do not see any Liberal Democrats here today, which is surprising, because they are normally fascinated beyond all bounds of reasonableness with constitutional matters. As this Bill is of a constitutional nature, I am amazed that there is not a single Liberal Democrat here to debate it. I worked closely with them in the coalition Government—

[Dr Drew]

You finished them off.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman says we finished them off, but I do not think we quite did that, as there are still some of them left. I am amazed that none of them have troubled themselves to come to Parliament to debate this constitutional matter.

I come to the last couple of things I wanted to say about this Bill. [Interruption.] My hon. Friends must not tempt me. You were not in the Chair at the beginning of this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, when Mr Deputy Speaker did us all a service by stopping us worrying that a dreadful mistake had taken place. When I looked at the Bill yesterday, I was astounded that on St Andrew’s day a Bill had been produced that seemingly had omitted the entire part of the United Kingdom known as Scotland and had also inadvertently put Northern Ireland in Great Britain. Those of us who follow the constitution carefully will know that that is something we should not do. Fortunately, I was able to hear the excellent point of order from my hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson), who pointed that out yesterday—[Interruption.] He does not need to be here, because he is in his constituency, having made the point of order yesterday. Mr Deputy Speaker was able to answer it yesterday and made a statement, putting us all at our ease; there had been a simple, inadvertent printing error, and the official Opposition and one of its spokesmen had not inadvertently wiped out Scotland and confused where Northern Ireland went. I am pleased Mr Deputy Speaker was able to put us straight.

The only point I wanted to make about the Bill is that in clause 2(2) the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton has widened the variance from +/- 5% to +/- 7.5%. I touched on this in my opening remarks. It is welcome that he has accepted that the range of +/- 10% that his colleague suggested last year is too wide; that was the position the Labour party took when we were doing the legislation. Given that he is a Front-Bench spokesman, albeit not on this subject, I hope that at least the Labour party has accepted that a 20% span is too wide and that narrowing it is better. I welcome that change in his Bill.

I also note that the hon. Gentleman is suggesting, having said we ought to get on and do this, that instead of the boundary commissioners reporting by October next year, when we could get the boundary reports in front of this House, we should delay a boundary review until October 2020. In one sense, I do not have a problem with that, because under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 we are not due a general election until 2022. However, I thought the Labour party’s position was that it wanted a general election as quickly as possible, and therefore delaying the boundary review by a further two years would seem to be a problem.

I wish to put one final point on the record, although it is in the Bill. It is worth making the point that significant financial provisions are contained in the Bill, because money is spent in two ways. The number of Members of Parliament is increased from that set out in the current law, which would reduce the number of Members of Parliament, so a significant cost is involved there. Another boundary review would be necessitated, in addition to the one that is almost complete, so a significant cost is involved there, too. The explanatory notes show that if this Bill is to make further progress a money resolution would be required.

I think I have dealt comprehensively with all the arguments that the hon. Gentleman put forward in favour of his Bill. If the opinion of the House is tested, I hope colleagues will be persuaded not to give it a Second Reading, and I thank the House for its indulgence.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 23rd May 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chloe Smith)]

I shall keep my remarks extremely brief. With regard to the substance of the Committee proceedings, I have nothing to add to what I said at the two previous Committee sittings, or to what was said in response to an urgent question and in the emergency debate. However, I will take this opportunity to wish well the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, who will not be joining us at future sittings. We wish her much happiness in future.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I had not planned to speak in this Committee, having taken part in the Standing Order No. 24 debate on Monday, but the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton has provoked me slightly. One or two of the points he made require a response.

I do not think that the Government have been disingenuous. That accusation is unfair. We gambolled around this territory in the House on Monday, but the Government have set out a principled reason. As I said on Monday, in 2011 Parliament took a decision, when it passed the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, to set up a boundary review process. That was disrupted at the other end of this building by some shenanigans by the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats, who inserted an amendment out of the scope of the Bill to divert the boundary changes.

We are now on the second go, and I think it is reasonable to allow the boundary commissions to report—as they have to do by law between September and October of this year—and to allow the House to reflect on their report before we make further progress. I listened carefully to what the Leader of the House said, and she repeated what the Minister said, which was that the Government are not refusing to provide a money resolution forever; they simply do not think that one is appropriate at this time, until the House has had time to reflect on the report.

[Afzal Khan]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his conclusion, but the point is that Members of this House know what has happened before and the review that is taking place. Despite that, the House voted unanimously. I am sure that he is aware that Parliament is sovereign and that it can change its mind as well, if it wants to.

[Mr Harper]

It is indeed, but it is also the case that the spending of money is a financial prerogative of the Crown. It is for the Crown to propose spending money and for Parliament to assent to it, as was made very clear by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) in his excellent speech on Monday, with which I concur.

The hon. Gentleman’s Bill involves significant expenditure. It is not just about having another boundary review process; it is also about increasing the number of Members of Parliament by 50, which means quite considerable expenditure. It is for the Government to make decisions about expenditure. His argument would have more force if the Minister had said that the Government were not going to bring forward a money resolution at any point during this Session. That is not what the Government have said; they have said that the boundary commissions should be allowed to report and that the Government will then reflect on the House’s decision making on the boundary commissions’ reports. It is entirely possible that decisions may be taken at a later stage that will enable us to make progress in Committee. The Government are not being disingenuous.

It is also not the case that the Government invariably bring forward money resolutions. I remember an interesting case in the 2010-2015 Parliament, when I think my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) had a private Member’s Bill on a European Union referendum, which, as we know, commanded majority support in the country, albeit a small majority. The then Prime Minister wanted to bring forward a money resolution, but the Government were unable to do so, for all sorts of complicated, coalition-related reasons that I will not trouble the Committee with. There have been other examples that the Leader of the House set out. It is not an invariable rule; it is a convention.

The Minister has made it very clear that this matter remains under review and that the Government have not ruled out bringing forward a money resolution at some point in future. I do not think that the motives that the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton has ascribed to the Government are reasonable. That is all I wanted to say in response, recognising that the motion under consideration this morning is a fairly narrow one, as I thought his points needed to be dealt with.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her kind words and for wishing me well, as I am expecting my first child increasingly soon. It has been a pleasure to shadow her over the past couple of months—there have certainly been some mix-ups with our names. It is certainly one of the more interesting shadow relationships, as our names are so similar.

As this is the last Committee sitting I shall be attending, I want to put on the record some of my thoughts about the Bill. Given that my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton intends to keep coming back to the Committee to pursue the Bill, I expect to be substituted in future sittings. The Government’s efforts to sabotage the Bill by refusing to grant a money resolution defy the will of the House. That sends a clear message to Members of the House and to our constituents that the Tories care more about their own political advantage than about doing what is in the best interests of the country.

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the Standing Order No. 24 debate on Monday, and on persevering in holding the Government to account. I share his concerns that the Government are trampling over parliamentary procedure and making a mockery of the private Member’s Bill process. During that debate we witnessed a Government who were unable to put forward a single convincing argument to justify their undemocratic actions. The Leader of the House claimed time and again that

“it is for the Government of the day to initiate financial resolutions.”—[Official Report, 21 May 2018; Vol. 641, c. 595.]

That simply is not true. It is an established parliamentary convention that the Government bring forward money resolutions for private Members’ Bills that have received a Second Reading, as this Bill has.

Until recently, the Government largely followed that convention. In 2013 the former Leader of the House, Andrew Lansley, told the Procedure Committee in evidence:

“To my knowledge, Government has provided the money resolutions...whenever we have been asked to do so.”

The Procedure Committee’s 2013 report therefore concluded:

“Government policy is not to refuse a money or ways and means resolution to a bill which has passed second reading.”

The Speaker also made his position extremely clear by saying that the Government should bring forward a money resolution and impose some “logic and reasonableness” on the process.

[Mr Harper]

Mr Speaker can obviously speak for himself, but I listened carefully to his response to that point of order. He was clear that he was not expressing the view that the Government should bring forward a money resolution—indeed, he made it clear that that was entirely a matter for the Government. He said that he felt it would be helpful if the decision-making processes about whether they brought forward money resolutions had an element of “logic and reasonableness” to them, but he did not express an opinion himself.

[Cat Smith]

I will leave it to hon. Members to listen to what Mr Speaker said and make their own interpretation, as there are clearly multiple interpretations in the Committee. What is clear is that money resolutions have been brought forward for Bills that received their Second Reading later than this one, which strikes me as entirely unfair.

The Government have argued that their response to the Bill is about timing and that they intend to wait until the Boundary Commission produces its report for Parliament before progressing. They have taken a leisurely approach to considering the Bill, as it has already been five months since it received its Second Reading. I did not expect to have to leave the Committee to have a baby in the time that is has taken the Bill to progress through Parliament—in December I reasonably expected it to have passed by the time I needed to take some time away from the House.

My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton raised the issue of granting a money resolution with the Leader of the House in three consecutive business questions, on 3, 10 and 17 May. Numerous points of order have been raised too. In February, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee concluded that the House,

“should be given an early opportunity to debate the options for reform and to decide whether or not to continue the current boundary review”,

and that the Bill provided the opportunity to do so. However, the Government chose to ignore the views and expertise of Back Benchers.

It is also completely disingenuous of the Government to claim that they are blocking the Bill for financial reasons. On Monday the Leader of the House told us that the Bill would,

“place a potential financial burden of £8 million on taxpayers.”—[Official Report, 21 May 2018; Vol. 641, c. 600.]

However, waiting for the Boundary Commission to publish its report in the autumn will waste even more money. I am more than confident that the Prime Minister did not consider the “potential financial burden” when she appointed a series of new peers last weekend, which will cost taxpayers more than £1 million a year. Ministers have referred on numerous occasions to the fact that continuing with the boundary review is a Conservative manifesto pledge. The manifesto also included commitments to repeal the fox hunting ban and to address the size of the House of Lords. Where did those commitments go?

The Conservative party seems to have completely forgotten that it is in a minority Government. A lot has changed since 2011, when the original Boundary Commission process started. We have had two general elections and the Brexit referendum and its consequences. This is a hung Parliament and the Government’s mandate is completely different. For a minority Government to defy the will of the House in this way is deeply undemocratic.

The Government’s motives are clear: this is not about principles, but electoral maths. This is not the first time the Conservative party has tried to rig our democratic process in its favour. There is the ongoing scandal of the Government refusing to vote and then refusing to act on Opposition day motions. They have stuffed the Standing Committees of this House with a majority of their Members, even though they are a minority Government. There is also the £1 billion that they gave to the Democratic Unionist party in order to get their legislation through. At the local government elections on 3 May, the Government piloted discriminatory ID requirements that denied hundreds of legitimate voters their democratic right to vote.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

I suggest that the hon. Gentleman takes a look at the impact the Bill would have on the way our Parliament is made up. It strikes me that what the Government are doing is unquestionably about rigging the electoral system in favour of one party, instead of something that is balanced and reflects the view of the majority of the parties in this country.

[Mr Harper]

I did not try to intervene the first time the hon. Lady said it, but I do not think that having equal-sized constituencies can be described as rigging the system. It is a reasonable argument, and something that the Labour party is in favour of in principle—just not in practice.

[Cat Smith]

The right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to hear that I will come on to talk about the equalisation of constituencies. I think we will find that there is quite a lot of common agreement that there needs to be a Boundary Commission. The current state of constituencies in this country is not one I am defending. I am arguing for a Boundary Commission in order to have new boundaries, so that our constituencies can be more equally sized—something we would all like to see—but in a way that is fair and represents community ties.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Fifth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 6th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

I thank hon. Members for coming here on this lovely Wednesday morning. I welcome my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester, who is now Labour’s Front-Bench lead on the Bill. I can only offer my apologies that our time will not be well spent as we are meeting just to adjourn: without a money resolution, we cannot discuss any part of the Bill.

I am determined not to let this rest, as MPs from all parties have made it clear that it is unacceptable that we have not yet had a money resolution. Parliamentary precedent and the will of the House dictate that we should be able to debate the Bill in Committee, and we have only a few weeks before the summer recess.

As the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee said in its report, the Government “cannot be confident” that the House of Commons will support the implementation of the boundary commissions’ proposals when they come before us in the autumn. We all agree that we need new boundaries, and the Bill could be a real alternative to the boundary commissions’ proposals—it would not mean resorting to current boundaries for a 2022 general election. However, if we are to have that, we need to get a move on.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. As you were not in the Chair for our previous sitting, you have the blessing of not having already heard what I am about to say. I want to respond to a couple of points made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. First, I cannot think of a better way to spend some time on a Wednesday morning than sitting in a Committee Room with such esteemed colleagues from both sides of the House. It is a great pleasure, and I look forward to doing so for many Wednesdays to come, even if it is only for a short time and not for as long as we would hope.

The Government have made their position clear, and it should not come as a surprise to the hon. Gentleman: they have not ruled out bringing forward a money resolution, but they feel that the House should have the opportunity to consider the boundary commissions’ reports, which are under way. I note what he said about the report from the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), but we should not prejudge the House’s decision on the boundary commissions’ reports. It is reasonable to wait for the House to see those reports—we have not seen them yet—and for it then to make a decision. We can then come back to this issue. That is a reasonable position, and the Committee may then be in a position to consider the significant detail of the Bill.

If the Labour party is really signed up to having more equal-sized constituencies, and boundaries drawn using electorates more recent than 18 years ago, on which current boundaries are based, it should not keep trying to put blockages in the way. The last time there was a boundary review, Labour worked with the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords to disrupt it and put it off for five years. I am afraid that it is difficult to see this as anything other than an attempt to do the same all over again. None the less, I look forward to seeing the boundary commissions’ reports and the debate we will then have in the House. We can then come back to this issue.

As the Minister has said on numerous occasions, the Government will then be able to reflect on whether to bring forward a money resolution, and then we may be in a position to debate the Bill. I for one love talking about this subject, as the hon. Gentleman will know from studying Hansard when we took the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 through the House. We spent many happy hours on that on the Floor of the House and I look forward to the opportunity to do so again.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton for welcoming me to the Committee. I can inform the Committee that my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) has commenced maternity leave. I have no further news than that but it is my great pleasure to substitute for her.

It is also a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen, though it is also bitter sweet and rueful, because it seems to me that the pleasure will be denied. Proceedings here will be over all too soon, for no other reason than political manoeuvrings, because the Government have failed to recognise a democratic vote on Second Reading to allow the Bill to proceed to Committee stage. The House made a decision and we should respect that.

The Government have form in talking out private Members’ Bills but I venture the possibility that this is the first time a private Member’s Bill has been blocked by not being talked about. This is the first time for such a Bill not to be talked out but to be simply knocked into the long grass.

[Mr Harper]

rose—

[Christian Matheson]

The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean is more experienced in the matter and I always love to hear his view.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

I draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to an example I gave at the previous sitting of the Committee when the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood was serving on the Front Bench. That was the private Member’s Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on the European Union referendum, a measure that we now know commanded majority, albeit only a small majority, support in the country.

That Bill did not receive a money resolution, despite the fact that the Prime Minister of the day was in favour of one. There were all sorts of complicated coalition-related reasons for that. This is not the first time that a Bill has not made progress. The Leader of the House, gave several examples in the debate in the House. This is certainly not the first time and probably will not be the last.

[Christian Matheson]

I am most grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for pointing me in the right direction on that. He talked about reasons within the coalition for not bringing forward a money resolution. I cannot see any reasons why a money resolution should not be brought forward now. At least we could make progress in Committee and then take the Bill back to the House for Report and Third Reading to see whether it still commands support.

I respectfully suggest to the Minister that this really is not a good look. It does not look as though the Government are engaging well in the democratic process. There may be reasons not to introduce a money resolution but the impression it gives is of stifling democracy and ignoring a decision made on the Floor of the House on Second Reading. I am reminded of Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism:

“There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

That applies very much in the case of this Bill. It might be problematic for the Government to talk about the Bill but it will be even more problematic if they do not, because they will give the impression of running scared of a democratic decision that might not suit their political position.

The Minister’s position seems to be to knock this into the long grass, to see if we can get to recess without a money resolution, and once the House returns after the summer recess, to see if we can get the debate that the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean might have been referring to. That is the debate on the current boundary provisions, which we know are based on an out-of- date register lacking 2 million voters, thus distorting representation.

[Mr Harper]

It is the case that whenever a boundary review is set in train a line has to be drawn somewhere. I would make two points. First, the current boundary review uses electoral registers that are more up to date than existing constituencies, which are 18 years out of date. Secondly, analysis by Matt Singh of the Number Cruncher Politics website, which I have referred to in the House before, shows that the distribution of those 2 million voters across the country was broadly proportionate to the existing electorate. In other words, contrary to the impression the hon. Gentleman was trying to give, that would not have made a significant difference to the distribution of parliamentary constituencies.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Sixth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 13th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Christian Matheson]

What a great pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries. I will again make the announcement that I made to the Committee last week, which is that I have taken the place of my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), who I am very pleased to say is on maternity leave. I am sure that Committee members continue to send her and her husband all the best.

I will not make such a long speech as my good friend the hon. Member for Glasgow East, but I express my regret that we are in the same position as we have been in for the last five weeks. I have not, of course; I am only a fairly new addition to the Committee so I have not had to go through the proceedings and processes quite as tortuously, but it is a matter of regret that we are not able to debate the Bill in detail, because the Government still refuse to bring forward a money resolution. Indeed, there seems to be a distinct lack of interest on the Government Benches in the Committee. However, it is good to see the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean in his place. I understand he has been an assiduous attender, and I respect that. It is good to see him here taking the Bill seriously.

I do not want to detain the Committee too long on a fruitless exercise. I simply want to ask the Minister whether she will take back—or has already taken back—to ministerial colleagues a sense of Members’ frustration at the lack of progress. Will she explain that after a clear decision on Second Reading there is, certainly among the Opposition, anxiety, disappointment and—dare I say it—something approaching anger? There is a sense of a certain contempt in the way the Bill is not being dealt with.

I respect the Minister for taking one for the team in this respect: she has to go through the process, and this is not about the hon. Lady herself. She is very well thought of. It is about the Government as a whole not taking their responsibility to the House seriously. I ask the Minister to take back to her colleagues the idea that they cannot keep kicking the matter into the long grass forever, and that at some point the Bill will have to be debated.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

It is good to see you in the Chair this week, Ms Dorries. I shall keep my remarks brief and, I hope, orderly.

I want to correct a factual point made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. He said that the House of Commons did not support the instructions given to the boundary commissions for the current review. He is shaking his head, but I think that that is what he said. The House of Commons of course agreed the detailed rules setting out the current boundary review. I think it is important to acknowledge that.

[Afzal Khan]

What I was trying to say was that the current situation is that there is not support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

The point is it should not be a surprise to the hon. Gentleman that the Committee cannot make progress on the Bill and that there is a motion to adjourn, because as the Minister explained in an earlier sitting—and I have said on a number of occasions—the Government position is clear. There is a boundary review under way. Under the relevant legislation the boundary commissions must produce reports for this Parliament between September and October. The Government have said that they want the Boundary Commission to be able to complete its work, which it has undertaken at considerable public expense.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have heard that point made a number of times by the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members. Does he accept that it is a good argument for not supporting a money resolution, but not for not tabling one?

[Mr Harper]

I think it is a good argument for not proceeding with the Bill at this point. The Government have made it clear that they do not want to proceed with it at this point. They will keep the matter open and both the Minister in Committee and the Leader of the House in the Chamber have made it clear that when the boundary commissions have brought forward their reports and Parliament has had a chance to consider them the Government will reflect on the position and make a decision on whether to bring forward a money resolution.

I think that that is a sensible position. Having listened carefully to what the Minister and the Leader of the House have said previously, I think that it will not change. I will continue to attend the Committee—and I acknowledge what the hon. Member for City of Chester said about that—so that we can debate the motion to adjourn. If at some point we debate the Bill in detail, I look forward to doing that, since it will amend the legislation that I had the pleasure of taking through the House when I was a Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

It is about making a decision. The Government have made a decision that it is sensible to allow the boundary commissions to complete a review, which they have almost done, at considerable public expense. They have consulted not just Members of Parliament and political parties but thousands of members of the public, who have looked at the initial drafts. They listened, responded to that and have made amendments. The Government wish that process, which has taken place at considerable public expense, to conclude before they reflect on whether it is sensible to proceed with the hon. Gentleman’s Bill.

That is a perfectly sensible decision. I accept that he and his hon. Friends do not agree with that, but it is perfectly rational and defensible. That is why we have the motion to adjourn before us, and I think we will have such motions for considerable weeks until the boundary commissions have had a chance to report. It is a perfectly sensible decision, set out clearly by the Minister at earlier stages of the Committee.

[David Linden]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Harper]

No, I will conclude my remarks. Thank you for your indulgence, Ms Dorries.

Question put and agreed to.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Seventh sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 20th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I want to put a few remarks on the record on the motion to adjourn because things have changed a little bit from the last time the Committee met. On previous occasions, the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton has referred to the decision the House took to pass his Bill on Second Reading. This is and remains entirely true.

The difference today is that the House was explicitly asked a question yesterday about the proceedings in this Committee. The House was asked whether this Committee should have leave to consider the Bill, notwithstanding Standing Orders about money resolutions. Parliament, or rather the House of Commons, explicitly decided that we should not make any progress until there is a money resolution. Following the hon. Gentleman’s logic about obeying the wishes of the House of Commons on making progress, as his Bill was passed on Second Reading, I would say that the House has been explicitly asked whether we should make progress, ahead of a money resolution being granted, and the House has said, no, we should not. We had a very wide-ranging debate yesterday and a clear decision was taken.

The hon. Gentleman also alluded to what I said yesterday about the timing of the Boundary Commission report. I presume the other commissions have written to Members in other parts of the country; the Boundary Commission for England has certainly written to hon. Members representing English seats and has pointed out that it will report just before we come back in September. Of course, to anyone outside who is listening to or reading our proceedings, that might seem like a long way in the future, but it is only four full sitting weeks until we are able to consider those reports.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I have experience of the Boundary Commission for Scotland; there is a particular estate in my constituency and the commission was considering changing the boundaries. The problem that I found in that case was that the Boundary Commission for Scotland reported and the Government took a certain amount of time to consider that report.

Is there not a danger here that, although the right hon. Gentleman is technically right that in four sitting weeks the Boundary Commission could publish its findings, we are probably at the mercy of the Government’s introducing some sort of resolution to the House that Members can vote down? Forgive me, but I am not necessarily sure that I would trust the Government to bring forward such a resolution timeously.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman makes the perfectly fair point that bringing forward the Orders in Council, and scheduling the debate and the vote on those, are obviously matters for business managers—both Government and Opposition business managers, working in conjunction and having conversations with each other. That is entirely true.

However, I think I am right—I may be wrong, but I think I am right—in saying that there is a legislative weight on Ministers, in the sense that the boundary commissions have to report between the beginning of September and the beginning of October. I think I am also right in saying that the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 puts a weight on Ministers to bring forward the Orders in Council as soon as is practically possible. Ministers cannot just delay matters forever; there is actually an injunction to move with reasonable pace, allowing for some level of consideration.

Obviously I do not speak for the Government but my sense is that the Government would want to move reasonably quickly, so that we knew what sort of position we will be in. Also, it follows from what Ministers have said already, and the Leader of the House explicitly confirmed yesterday, that the Government are not trying to kill the Bill, but they want the House to have the opportunity to reflect on the boundary commissioners’ reports and, as I have said, to debate the Orders in Council. Then we can reflect and take further steps.

It is implicit in that process that the Orders in Council need to be introduced to give the House a chance to consider and debate them while there is still enough of the Session left so that if it was considered appropriate to grant the money resolution and proceed with consideration of the Bill, there would be enough time to see that process through. Effectively, that gives a window of opportunity, which Ministers will obviously reflect on when they make their decisions.

[Afzal Khan]

This private Member’s Bill does not try in any way to stop the review. All it is trying to do is allow a parallel—an alternative—because many of us in the House feel that the review is dead in the water and will not get anywhere. It is also important that we have an alternative because we cannot carry on having elections for another 18 or 20 years based on the figures that we had before. It would help the House overall and help democracy to move forward in this way.

[Mr Harper]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point, which is perfectly sensible. I just do not agree with matters being conducted “in parallel”, for two reasons. First, if we are going to debate the Bill, we should find out the House’s view of the boundary proposals. Although he asserts, as he did yesterday, that he knows what the answer is, in my experience—as a Back Bencher, a Minister and Government Chief Whip—it is always quite useful to test the opinion of the House through a Division rather than just assuming what the answer will be, because sometimes the answer will be a pleasant surprise and sometimes it will not be such a pleasant surprise. We should not assume that we know what the answer will be.

Secondly, if the Government are not successful in getting those Orders in Council through, the debate on the Bill would be better informed by the Government’s having listened to the concerns that Members express in the debate on the Orders in Council.

I know that it would be a slight tragedy, because I would effectively be arguing for not continuing to debate things in this Committee, but given that the boundary legislation is constitutional in nature and by definition affects every single Member of Parliament, there would be a case, were we to make progress with the Bill at some point, for the debate on it not to take place in Committee. Committee stage should take place on the Floor of the House, as it did for the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. That is generally what happens to constitutional legislation: all stages are taken on the Floor of the House.

That is another reason why it is better to wait for the House to have the opportunity to consider the boundary proposals. If the Government do not get those proposals through and want to make progress on the Bill, using it as a vehicle, it would be better if time were found for all its stages to be debated on the Floor of the House because of the nature of the subject matter. Realistically, we cannot do that when we do not know the outcome of the boundary commissions’ proposals.

For all those reasons, it is right for the Committee to adjourn. We shall know what the boundary commission reports are in four sitting weeks, and the Government will then reflect on them—I hope, reasonably quickly—before they come up with the Orders in Council. That is why it is right for the Committee to adjourn, so I hope that we agree that motion.

[David Linden]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen, and to see you back in the Chair.

I shall be brief, because we have had quite a lot of debate this week. It has been a pleasure to spend Monday, Tuesday and today with the Minister and the shadow Minister. It is apparent to me that one of the most pressing and gripping issues is parliamentary and constitutional reform, but perhaps that view is not shared by the wider public.

It is also a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean. I was intrigued by what he said about how yesterday the House of Commons made clear its view. If that is indeed the case, perhaps something new is happening: the right hon. Gentleman and the Government are now taking part in Opposition day votes. If they are saying that when the House of Commons votes on an Opposition day, the result should be taken note of, I look forward to future votes on the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign and many other issues. So when the House sends a very clear signal, the Government will listen to that.

[Mr Harper]

It is very clear. Certain motions passed by the House are binding, and motions such as yesterday’s, which was to direct the business of the House, are binding, so the vote yesterday was binding. However, some of the other motions that the hon. Gentleman is talking about are not binding, so to do what he suggests would require primary legislation.

[David Linden]

I have a lot of respect for the right hon. Gentleman, but that is probably just parliamentary gymnastics in action. When the House of Commons divides and the opinion of the 650 or so Members, who are sent here to represent their constituents, is tested, the Government cannot say, “On these particular votes the House of Commons’ voice can be heard and somehow respected, but those other votes are a bit inconvenient for us, because we don’t have the numbers, so we’ll just ignore them.” The Government were getting into a difficult position on Opposition day votes and when Government Members take part.

Yesterday, there was some debate about whether the Bill was being killed. I would probably have taken that view, but the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean and indeed the Minister have said no, the Government are not killing the Bill in Committee. They might not be killing the Bill, but it does feel as if it is in Guantanamo Bay at the moment—being held for numerous days without trial. We have not had the opportunity to put the Bill on trial, to scrutinise it line by line.

My final observation this morning is about something I found very telling last night. When the House divides, it is very unusual for Democratic Unionist party Members not to take part in a vote, and it is curious that, in the five, six or seven sittings of the Committee, the hon. Member for North Antrim has not always been present—he is a larger than life character, so if he is in the room, we tend to notice him. Yesterday I found the comments of the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Nigel Dodds) and the fact that Democratic Unionist party Members chose to abstain very interesting. It is fairly well known that the DUP is not united at the moment on the whole issue of reform of parliamentary constituencies.

I am happy to sit in Committee every Wednesday morning, but yesterday’s debate in the House was interesting. Comments such as those of the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) show the direction of travel in the House. He did a very good job of being both a Government loyalist and a rebel—the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean, as a former Chief Whip, is aware of how such speeches are made. He said that he was not happy about how the terms of yesterday’s motion were framed, and he would therefore go into the Lobby to support the Government. However, he made it absolutely clear that he does not support the reduction of 650 seats to 600.

We can come here and continue to have these debates, but it was clear yesterday that the direction of travel is that the democratically elected House of Commons does not support the number of seats being reduced from 650 to 600. I think we will find that out very clearly when the will of the House is tested on it.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Eighth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 8th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 27th June 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

I thank Members and the Clerk for attending this sitting of the Committee on the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill. Regrettably there is nothing new to report on its progress. I continue to be inspired by my colleagues’ devotion to it and to the larger parliamentary process. In a representative democracy there is nothing more important than to ensure that electoral processes are free and fair.

It is acknowledged on all sides that electoral boundary reform is long overdue, although we disagree about how that must be addressed. I acknowledge the arguments that have been put forward by those who are stalling on a money resolution. First, they argue that a boundary review is going on, and we should allow the process to finish uninterrupted. The argument, in that line of thinking, is that we would endlessly spend money on another boundary review. Secondly, it is argued that according to the separation of powers, tabling a money resolution is the prerogative of the Crown. I do not want to add much on that point. Many of my colleagues have provided sound arguments against it, supported by historical evidence.

It is clear that the Government’s refusal to table a money resolution is at best misguided and at worst a disturbing trend towards the obstruction of the parliamentary conventions on which our democracy depends. Will the Minister confirm that the lack of a money resolution is a response to financial concerns? Does she agree that the convention holds that soon after a Bill passes Second Reading the Government table a money resolution?

In relation to the first point that is argued, we all know that there is a boundary review going on, but it is also true that instructions were given to reduce the size of the House of Commons from 650 to 600 Members. That measure has far from unanimous support. The final boundary proposals have not been released, but they are in serious danger of being rejected on those grounds alone. No one can predict the future, but there is a consensus that the boundary review is unlikely to pass. As the Select Committee on Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs said in its report, the Government “cannot be confident” that the House of Commons will approve the suggested changes. Will the Minister clarify whether she agrees about that?

Last week the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean made the point that the Boundary Commission report is only a few weeks away. I welcome that, because it means that now is possibly the best time to go forward with the Bill. The final boundary proposals are due soon. If the House votes for them, the money that the Government are reluctant to commit will not be spent. If it rejects them we have contingency plans to put in motion, but if the money resolution delay continues we shall be unprepared for a rejection of the final boundary proposals, and new boundaries will unnecessarily be delayed further.

That data that our current boundaries are built on is 18 years old—old enough to vote, if it could. We need to prepare responsibly for the vote on the Boundary Commission recommendations and begin line-by-line analysis of the Bill. The facts are clear: the electoral boundaries need to be updated. There is a serious danger that the current boundary review recommendations will be voted down. The Bill is a serious attempt at cross-party compromise and it has received a unanimous Second Reading. If we act responsibly we will move forward with the Bill, to ensure that the people of the UK are represented fairly.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Dorries. I have a few remarks on the motion to adjourn, picking up on the comments made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, whose Bill it is.

First, we have an update on where we were last week, because there are now only three full sitting weeks until the Boundary Commission’s report. I agree that there is not consensus or 100% unanimity about Parliament’s decision a number of years ago to reduce the size of the House—of course not. It was a hard-fought battle to get it through, but the House agreed to it, as did the House of Lords. It is an Act of Parliament; it is the law. Rather than anticipating what decision the House might make when faced with the Orders in Council suggesting that we implement the reports of the boundary commissions—whose final versions we have not yet seen—we should wait for that decision.

As I said last week, in answer to a point from the hon. Member for Glasgow East, who unusually is not in his place today, there is an injunction on Ministers in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, and in the amended legislation on parliamentary boundaries, to bring forward the proposals as soon as is reasonably practicable after the boundary commissions have reported. I do not think that Ministers can just not do anything for ages. We will get a reasonably early chance to make a decision.

The reason that I do not think we should act in parallel—as I also said last week—is that the Bill makes some significant proposals about changing the size of the House, the frequency of boundary reviews going from five to 10 years and the amount of flex in the size of the seat. We will want to debate those issues having listened to the debate on the Boundary Commission’s proposals. They will be debated on the Floor of the House, so all Members will get the opportunity to discuss them, and I think that that is what we want.

My final point was also made last week—forgive me for repeating it, Ms Dorries. There is a strong case for saying that if the House were to reject the Boundary Commission’s proposals, and therefore the Government wanted to give Parliament an opportunity to look at an alternative strategy, the Government should find time to consider the Bill in all its stages, including Committee, on the Floor of the House. It is a constitutional Bill. All stages of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 were debated on the Floor of the House. I would argue that it is not right to debate changes that significantly affect Parliament in Committee, with relatively few Members present, so that all Members could debate them only on Report. The Government cannot make the decision about finding time on the Floor of the House until we know the position with the boundaries.

For all those reasons, I think the Government’s position is sensible. They have made it clear that they are not trying to kill the Bill: they want to hold it in suspended animation—or whatever other phrase we might choose—until the House has had a chance to consider the Boundary Commission’s report. I think that is a sensible way forward. I recognise why the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton is frustrated by it, but the period of his frustration is shrinking as time passes; we do not have many sitting weeks until the Boundary Commission’s report. I hope that the current approach will eventually meet with his approval.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

What a pleasure it is to see you in the Chair, Ms Dorries. It is always worth restating what a great pleasure it is to follow the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean, who, week after week, makes considered and relevant comments about the nature of the Bill. We appreciate that he is taking the issue seriously even if we do not necessarily agree with the comments that he is making.

The right hon. Gentleman points out that we have only three sitting weeks left before the recess, and that after the recess the Order in Council is likely to be laid. That is a good reason to crack on with the Bill now and give it detailed consideration in Committee, as it cannot possibly complete its parliamentary passage through both Houses within those three weeks. We could, however, carry on with the detailed consideration of the Bill and get on with the stages that we are able to, before the Order in Council is laid. If the decision is taken not to accept the Boundary Commission’s proposals, we would have something waiting in the wings and we could crack on quickly. I remind the Committee that no one—certainly no one in the Opposition and, if I may be so bold as to speak for them, no one on the Conservative Benches either—denies that we need a review of boundaries.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for what he said in his opening remarks.

I would just add, and I say this gently because I accept that he was not responsible, that the Labour party—including the hon. Gentleman and the Bill’s promoter—has now accepted that we need to update the boundaries. That would be a bit more credible if it had not kiboshed the last boundary review that was supposed to have been completed in 2013. We should have done it by now and had it in place for the 2015 election. It was, of course, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats who kind of did a slightly dirty deal in the House of Lords, and then in the House of Commons, to kibosh the last review. So his protestations about wanting a rapid conclusion would be a bit more credible if his party had not done that in the past.

[Christian Matheson]

I cannot perceive that any deal with the Liberal Democrats is ever dirty, but I would take advice from the Conservative party on that matter.

That review was kiboshed—I was not in the House at the time—because it continued with the notion of reducing the number of constituencies from 650 to 600, which does not enjoy Opposition support, particularly at a time when other constitutional changes mean that we need to maintain the strength of the House. We are where we are.

In his speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton, talked about a “disturbing trend towards the obstruction of the parliamentary conventions on which our democracy depends.” I know the Minister personally and I do not believe that is her intention. It may be the intention of Ministers elsewhere in Government, but I do not believe it to be hers, although she represents the whole of Government in this Committee. I hope she will respond to some of the questions that have been raised.

I would like to consider the position of the Minister at the moment. It is a rather tricky role that she has been asked to play. I could not help but notice that another member of the Committee is not in his place today—the hon. and gallant Member for Beckenham. He is very well thought of in my constituency because of his service in and leadership of the Cheshire Regiment. I do not know if hon. Members have ever been on battlefield tours with him, but they are well known and one of his battlefield tours is of the D-day landings. I recall the D-day landings on the night of 5-6 June 1944. The Orne river bridge and the canal on the eastern flank—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

I am extremely grateful, Ms Dorries, that you bore with the hon. Member for City of Chester, because that was a quite entertaining story. We would have been very disappointed if you had cut him off before we saw where it was going. Although I have never served in uniform, the comparison the hon. Gentleman just made is one of the most complimentary that anyone has ever made about me in the House, for which I am grateful.

[Christian Matheson]

The right hon. Gentleman deserves it. I go back to my previous point—he has enhanced his personal reputation in this matter. Thank you for bearing with me, Ms Dorries. Open-ended commissions and instructions are not always helpful. At some point, we need to get to a conclusion in this matter. Simply knocking it into the long grass is not the way forward for parliamentary democracy. Debate is always better than closing down debate. With that, for one more week, I resume my seat.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Without a money resolution, I cannot accept a motion to consider clauses of the Bill or amendments; I am afraid we are just not charged in this Committee with doing that.

[Mr Harper]

I will move a motion to adjourn again, to give the Committee a second opportunity.

[The Chair]

I can accept the motion to adjourn only from Mr Khan. I will suspend the Committee so that we can have an informal discussion.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Tenth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 10th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 11th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

In a week in which there has been nothing normal in Parliament, it is good to meet here on Wednesday morning. It seems that this place is erupting, and that there are only two things we can count on in life: this Committee will meet, and the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) will probably intervene in the Adjournment debate in the House tonight. It is great to be here, and I look forward to next week’s sitting.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will not delay the Committee for long. I wish to put on the record the fact that I am sorry that I could not attend last week. I was heartened to note, however, that the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton made the point that I would have made if I had been here. I am grateful to him and thank him for enabling me to be present in spirit, if not in the flesh.

Question put and agreed to.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Eleventh sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 11th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 18th July 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I congratulate him on completing his first year as a Member, but we are not really interested in hearing what Members who have served for more than a year have done in Parliament up until today, so I ask them to refrain from telling us about that and concentrate on the motion to adjourn the Committee till 5 September.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I am grateful for your guidance, Mr Owen, but Members will be pleased to hear that I did not intend to take them through a 13-year whistle-stop tour of my parliamentary career, tempting though that is.

Let me make a few remarks very much connected to the motion to adjourn. I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton on securing a private Member’s Bill slot in his first year in Parliament. Some of us have been here quite a long time and have never managed to get one, although, when I was a Minister, I spent a lot of Fridays here, generally explaining why people’s private Members’ Bills were not very well drafted or not a very good idea. However, the process is important, and he has carried the Bill to this point with great skill, so he should be pleased with that.

On the rather unfair contribution of the hon. Member for City of Chester about trains, I think I am right in saying that my hon. Friend the Minister was actually stuck on a tube train, which are of course run by Transport for London—a state-owned transport authority run by the Mayor of London. Therefore, any criticism—of course, Government Members did not criticise—should sit squarely with the Labour Mayor of London for running a malfunctioning tube system. I would not make that point, but the hon. Gentleman was slightly unfair to the rail system. I say that only because I was provoked.

The more serious and substantive point, which is relevant to timing and therefore to the motion to adjourn, is about what happens next. I think I am right in saying—I have put this on the record previously—that the Boundary Commission for England has made it clear that it intends to send its report to the Leader of the House before we return in September so that she can lay it before Parliament during the September sitting. I confess that I do not know what the other three boundary commissions intend. Perhaps the hon. Member for Glasgow East can inform us.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I am concerned about waiting on the Leader of the House to schedule this process. I declare an interest: I am expecting a daughter in the autumn. The Leader of the House promised that arrangements for proxy voting would be brought before Parliament, but she failed to do that. Last night, a major furore broke out because a pairing arrangement was broken. I therefore caution the right hon. Gentleman not to take too seriously the promises of the Leader of the House, who has not been great at bringing plans before the House.

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman has made that point before. I think I am right in saying that the legislation that sets out how the Boundary Commission process works puts some pressure on the Government to bring forward proposals as soon as is practicable, so there is some legal force for doing that. I confess that I do not know what the other three boundary commissions will do, but certainly the Boundary Commission for England will produce its report in September, when we get back.

We will then know what the boundary commissions all recommend and, as I have said before, the Government have made it clear that they will look at those reports. They can then test the will of the House, and they have said that if Parliament takes the view—I hope it does not—that it does not want to proceed with what is set out in the boundary commissions’ reports, they will reflect on whether to bring forward a money resolution for the Bill and on whether the Bill is the right vehicle to deal with that set of circumstances.

I recognise that this process has been frustrating for the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, but in terms of parliamentary weeks we actually do not have much longer to wait until we have the boundary commissions’ substantive reports in front of us. Members of the public will think that is a long way off, because they will take into account the summer, but it is actually not many sitting days away, so I counsel him to be a little more patient. I look forward to seeing him when the Committee reconvenes on Wednesday 5 September, and I join him in wishing all Committee members and those here serving Her Majesty’s Government a pleasant summer recess. I look forward to seeing everyone in September.

[David Linden]

It is, as ever, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I congratulate the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood on the birth of her son, Elijah. I commend the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, who has become a genuine friend since we were elected in June last year. The fact that he has had the patience to sit through this process is testament to his character. I very much hope we do not have to wait much longer.

We all saw the shenanigans play out last night, and we have all read in the press today that Government Whips threatened Conservative remainers—the rebels—with an early election, so we know that the Government possibly have an appetite to contest elections with the current boundaries and 650 seats. I therefore suggest that their current position is somewhat weak.

I come back to the idea of the private Member’s Bill system being an absolute sham. I have an interest in this Bill because, I must confess, I am interested in parliamentary and constitutional reform. With the greatest respect to the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, one of the greatest difficulties I find about this place is that too often we indulge in navel gazing about it. It is sad that, although this Bill is very important in terms of the number of seats in this House and the wider issue of how we scrutinise legislation, it is not the only Bill for which a money resolution is being withheld. My hon. Friend the Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Angus Brendan MacNeil) has a very good Bill—the Refugees (Family Reunion) (No. 2) Bill—which is about how this country treats people who come from some of the most vulnerable parts of the world.

[David Linden]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman. I should clarify that that was definitely not a dig at the Labour party.

We come back to the central issue that we hear regularly, particularly from the Leader of the House, whose job is actually to stand up for the House in the Cabinet—I am not sure she always does that very well—about Parliament taking back control. The fundamental point is that last December, the House voted by a majority for this Bill on Second Reading. It authorised it to go into Committee, and the Committee of Selection set up this Public Bill Committee and commanded us, as Members of the House, to scrutinise the legislation line by line and clause by clause. It is not a very lengthy Bill. I daresay that if we had the money resolution, although some of us in this Room like to talk at length, we could probably consider this Bill clause by clause and line by line in one or two sittings at the most. It seems a waste of time. There are civil servants here, and it strikes me that it is a huge waste of their time, too, for us to go through this charade every single Wednesday morning. We turn up here and know that we are not going to make progress. It is disrespectful to the civil servants.

[Mr Harper]

I just want to pick up the point about Parliament taking back control and the democratic point. The hon. Gentleman will be aware that, on 19 June, the Labour party tabled a motion asking the House whether we should debate the content of the Bill, notwithstanding the fact that there is not a money resolution. The House gave its clear view that we should not do that until there is a money resolution. The House was asked that question and it gave a very clear answer, by a majority of 15, that we should not proceed until there is a money resolution. That is indeed Parliament taking back control.

[David Linden]

Well, I recall that, on that day, the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) said that he favoured the Bill in principle, but he voted with the Government because of a technicality relating to how the motion was drafted. Although the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean is absolutely correct that the motion was defeated during Labour’s Opposition day debate, the main issue is that there is a clear majority in the House to retain 650 seats. I reckon that, if the question was put to hon. Members in a simple motion that says, “This House believes that there should be 650 seats in the House”, the right hon. Gentleman would find that there is a majority in the House for that. I would be very happy if that motion was brought forward. I would certainly be able to vote for it myself.

Tempted though I am to talk about my first year in Parliament—I was having a quick look in my diary, and it has been a very busy year indeed—I will spare the Committee this morning. I hope that, by the time we come back in September, the warm Prosecco and all the shenanigans of the Conservative party might have died down, although I do not hold my breath. Perhaps when we come back in September, Her Majesty’s Government will treat this Committee and the House with respect.

--- Later in debate ---

[David Linden]

The hon. Lady makes a very valid point. We have had 11 or 12 sittings of the Committee and, although it has been enjoyable, it is sad. When all the Parliamentary Private Secretaries were resigning, I thought my friend the hon. Member for Torbay would have the courage to do that, but he is hanging on. At this rate, he might end up as Prime Minister, being the only one left in the Government. We will hold out in that hope.

In all seriousness, we have reached a point in this Parliament where things are clearly fractured and the Government are very fragile. We will see what state they come back in after the summer. I would not rule out that we might be going back to the country.

[Mr Harper]

Without wishing to embarrass my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay, people need to understand that the only thing that keeps him as a Parliamentary Private Secretary is the thought of being able to come to this Committee every Wednesday. This Committee and the colleagues in Committee keep him serving in Her Majesty’s Government. We are all doing our bit to keep him here.

[David Linden]

The right hon. Gentleman has got that spot on. I made this point last week, but I have to repeat it. Although people generally say only two things in life are certain, death and taxes, in a Parliament where everything is falling about us, in my view the only two things in life that are certain are that the Committee will meet on a Wednesday and that the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) will take part in Adjournment debates.

It has been very nice spending this time on a Wednesday morning in Committee, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it, but we are all paid close to £80,000 a year to be legislators and to scrutinise legislation. We can come here to spend three, four, five or six minutes making funny speeches and having a bit of a laugh with each other but, fundamentally, we are all legislators—let us start behaving like them.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Twelfth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 12th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 5th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

I welcome everyone back to the Committee. I hope that we have all had a good recess. We are back to Parliament and back to our regular sitting every Wednesday. Over the summer and in a number of hearings before then, we talked about how we can make things move forward. Ultimately, the key issue coming from the Government side was that they were keen to get the boundary review in, and I believe that that has happened, so perhaps the Minister can tell us now what the Government’s plan is. In what way do they want to move forward? Do they wish to have an immediate vote on the Boundary Commission’s report or not, and if, as we expect, the Government lose, what is the way forward? Perhaps there can be more clarity.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

It is very good to see you in the Chair after the summer recess, Ms Dorries, and to see colleagues back to discuss the Bill. I have just been reflecting—just looking at the motion to adjourn—on what we were talking about when we broke up for the summer, and it might be helpful if I update the Committee, having had a look at the information from the Boundary Commission for England. The commission set out—I think I referred to this before Parliament rose for the summer—that it planned to present its report to the Government on or around 5 September, and it confirmed that that would indeed be done today. It has made it clear that, because of what the law says, it is the Government who must lay that report before Parliament, so assuming that it delivers its report today, which it has confirmed it will, and the other boundary commissions do so, the Government will then at least be in a position to lay those reports before Parliament and to lay out an indication of the timetable.

For today’s purposes, I think it is a bit unrealistic and a bit unreasonable, given that the reports will have been received only today—they may not yet have actually been received—to expect the Minister to say anything at all today about timing; I therefore have no criticism at all of the Minister. But, clearly, after today the Government will at least be in a position to reflect on the reports and consider when to bring them forward. Whether or not the Minister sets that out in a future sitting of the Committee, I am sure that colleagues will ask the Leader of the House—I understand that the reports will be sent to her—about the timetable. That will then give us the opportunity to reflect on whether this Committee can make any further progress other than just discussing a motion to adjourn. I hope that that is helpful to the Committee.

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

The right hon. Gentleman said that the report would go to the Leader of the House. My understanding is that it now goes to the Cabinet Office—that was changed last week—so it might be helpful if the Minister, in her reply, says how quickly the Cabinet Office intends to publish it or whether it intends to sit on it.

[Mr Harper]

Of course, as the hon. Gentleman knows, the Government are indivisible and all Ministers speak for the Government, so wherever the report ends up in Government, the Government collectively will be in a position to reflect on the contents and then set out the next steps. As I said, it would be unreasonable to expect the Minister to be able to do that today, not having had the chance to reflect on the report. She may be in a position to do so next week; I do not know. But even if she does not, the Leader of the House will no doubt be asked about the report, even if it is not specifically the Leader of the House who reflects on it. I think that I am right in saying, if it is indeed going to the Cabinet Office, that the senior Cabinet Office Minister, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, has questions in the House next week, so it will be open to him or one of his team, in which my hon. Friend is a Minister, to answer those questions if they are put before them in the House. Therefore, in the not too distant future, we may have at least a little clarity about timing, which will then enable us to not have to keep coming here every week just to talk about the reports having been laid. We will be in more of a substantive position to go forward. I hope that is helpful to the Committee.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to see you in the chair once again, Ms Dorries. I was going to make some comments about it being a great pleasure to see members of the Committee back here, but in the light of your comments about my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East I will keep my comments more sombre. I was not aware that she had suffered a bereavement; I am very sorry to hear that, and I am grateful for your opening comments.

The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean was reflecting on the handing over today, and the imminent publication, of the current set of boundary proposals, based on the guidance that was given by the House and by this Government in previous years. My response—I wonder whether the Minister might consider this—is that, irrespective of what happens to that set of proposals, this Bill remains on the Order Paper. Irrespective of the fact that the House will either accept or reject the proposals that are to be handed over to the Cabinet Office today and then presented to the House at some point in the imminent future, this Bill still needs to be dealt with; it cannot simply continue to be stonewalled through the Government’s failure to introduce the appropriate money resolutions.

Can the Minister indicate in her response, if she chooses to respond to the Committee this morning, what plans the Government have to deal with this Bill? If this Parliament goes the full term, will we still be meeting here on a Wednesday morning three years hence to consider the possibility of this Bill?

[Mr Harper]

Of course, I also associate myself with the remarks that you made about the hon. Member for Coventry North East and her recent bereavement, Ms Dorries. When the hon. Gentleman says that things will happen “irrespective” of what the House decides about the boundaries, of course it is not irrespective. If the House decided to go with the proposals the boundary commissions are going to bring forward, the House would effectively have made a decision to proceed on that basis. No doubt, therefore, the House would be asked not to proceed with this Bill. If, of course, the House chooses not to proceed with the boundary commission proposals, we are in a different space.

On a point of fact, we would not meet for the rest of this Parliament, because, of course, private Members’ Bills lapse at the end of the Session so, thankfully, we would meet and have the pleasure of each other’s company only until the end of this Session, not for the rest of the Parliament.

[Christian Matheson]

The right hon. Gentleman is right on the second point; the Bill would lapse at the end of this Session, so we would have to go for only another nine months. He answered his own question in the first part of his intervention, because he talked about the fact that if the imminent set of boundary proposals go through, the House would then be asked to withdraw this Bill. That is entirely my point: the Bill would continue to stand on the Order Paper and would still need some kind of cancellation.

That is where we should be heading with these proposals. The Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton has been read a Second time, and my advice to the Government would be simply this: move the money resolution, continue consideration in this Committee, and then kill the Bill off with a majority on Third Reading.

That would seem to be the obvious solution. If Conservative Members are confident that they have the majority—they may well have the majority to take the imminent proposals forward—they should follow the correct and democratic procedure, undertake the Committee stage and then cancel the Bill by voting against it on Third Reading. That is surely the way forward, because it would stop us having to meet every Wednesday at 10 o’clock—much as that is a great pleasure, Ms Dorries—albeit that that would only be to the end of this Session, and I am grateful to the more experienced right hon. Member for Forest of Dean, who is a former Chief Whip and obviously knows about procedure, for reminding me of that.

I am an avid reader of the Daily Mail, and there is an article in it today about this very issue. The article, which I am sure we can trust, alleges that members of the Government have written to Conservative MPs urging them to back the imminent set of proposals. Since this is absolutely germane to the procedures under consideration by the Committee, may I ask the Minister whether such a letter has indeed gone out to Conservative Members, and whether she will place a copy of that letter in the Library for us all to see?

Another allegation in the Daily Mail, and I see no reason not to trust it, is that an undertaking has been given to Conservative Members that no man will be left behind. This being the 21st century, we might also say “no woman”, or “no hon. Member” shall be left behind. In other words, some kind of grubby deal has been done to persuade Conservative Members to vote in favour of the imminent boundaries, irrespective of whether they consider it right or wrong, on the basis of how it would affect them personally. That is why I use the phrase “grubby deal”.

We cannot allow introspection and self-interest when we are considering parliamentary boundaries that are the basis of the way in which the House is elected and, therefore, the basis of our democracy and democratic procedures for the next 10 or 15 years. If the boundary procedures take as long next time as they did this time, it might even be more than 15 years. Let us hope not, because there is a consensus that parliamentary boundaries need to be reviewed. Will the Minister confirm whether a deal has been done with Conservative Members that no man will be left behind, and that self-interest should be a consideration when they are considering the imminent set of boundaries?

If that is the case, that is yet more reason why my hon. Friend’s Bill, which takes into account not self-interest but the broader interests of the United Kingdom and the basis of our democratic representation, should proceed, as opposed to grubby deals and cajoling based on self-interest, which is the allegation in the newspaper article. If the Minister confirmed or denied whether such a deal has taken place, I would be most grateful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chloe Smith]

I confirm that I used the word “months” and I deliberately did so. I intend to be realistic with the Committee that those instruments are complex and need to be prepared fully and correctly. I wish to be quite straight about that with the Committee.

The more specific scheduling of a vote after that point is, of course, a matter for the Whips, which I am not in a position to confirm any more specifically today. I add something I think the hon. Member for City of Chester and other Committee members might already be aware of: the governing legislation says that the orders shall be laid “as soon as may be”. That is the technical guidance the hon. Gentleman is looking for in his question.

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying that last point. I referred to that in a previous sitting. Ministers cannot unduly delay matters but they clearly have to go through the proper process and ensure that the orders are correct.

I want to ask the Minister a question about what she said on process. In a previous sitting, I brought up the subject of where these issues are debated. There are two points I want her to reflect on: one is what the hon. Member for City of Chester said about whether the House should give us permission to debate the Bill before the House has taken a decision on the boundary reports. I do not think that is sensible because the debate on the order would need to be taken into account if there was a wish to change legislation.

The second point, to which I think the Minister referred, is that these matters affect all Members of Parliament. If we were to debate the substance of the Bill, it should not be done here in Committee. As with the original legislation, it should be debated on the Floor of House in a Committee of the whole House, so that every Member of Parliament had the opportunity to consider it. The Minister has set out a sensible way to proceed.

[Chloe Smith]

I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s compelling points. The first, on time, is absolutely correct. I agree that there is little point in this Committee discussing matters that are also before the main Chamber before the main Chamber does so. Secondly, on scope, I also agree, as I said earlier, that it is correct for the main Chamber to look at these matters, first, because they affect all Members and, secondly, because they are constitutionally important. It is the convention of this House that such matters are dealt with in the main Chamber.

[Chloe Smith]

No doubt, Ms Dorries, if I did not say it, you would say that it is not for me to do that. It would be for the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton to have such a conversation.

Following your guidance, Ms Dorries, I shall refrain from commenting on the internal machinations of parties, though, if I did, no doubt questions about the unity of both the Labour party and the Scottish National party would become very clear, given what we have seen in the press over the summer—in the Daily Mail or elsewhere.

Notwithstanding that, I can confirm that the party chairman of the Conservative party has written to Conservative colleagues, as is entirely reasonable and expected, but I do not think it is appropriate to lay that correspondence in the Library, as requested by the hon. Member for City of Chester, because those are party documents. The very important documents that we are discussing are of course the boundary commission reports. I hope I have used my comments to lay out the process that the Government intend to use for those documents, which will be before us very shortly.

[Mr Harper]

Before the Minister sits down, may I press her on one matter that I hope will be helpful to the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton? Picking up the point that the hon. Member for City of Chester made, it would be sensible for the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton to consider talking to the Government about a motion to discuss the substance of the Bill on the Floor of the House. That could save us coming here every week to talk about a motion to adjourn.

However, having listened to my hon. Friend the Minister, I anticipate the Government’s response to be—I am only a Back Bencher, so I do not know—that that makes sense, but that it does not make sense for that process to start before the House has had the opportunity to consider the Order in Council. As I have said before, if we are to debate the substance of the Bill, and therefore amend the current process laid down in law, we should want to do so after listening to Members’ concerns about the existing process. To start changing the law about the process before even allowing one process to conclude under the existing legislation is to put the cart before the horse.

To avoid our having an interesting but slightly null debate every week on whether to adjourn, it may be sensible for the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton to have that conversation. I anticipate that the Government would perhaps agree to that, but to have the process start once the House has had the opportunity to consider the boundary commissions’ proposals. That might be a constructive and sensible way forward. The Minister will no doubt reflect on my contributions and those of the hon. Gentleman, and the hon. Gentleman may well also reflect on them with purpose.

[Chloe Smith]

My right hon. Friend is as forensic, logical and authoritative as ever, and I have nothing further to add.

Question put and agreed to.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Thirteenth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 13th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 12th September 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

It is a privilege and an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. We will all now have seen the boundary commissions’ reports that the Minister had sight of last week. As she admitted in our last meeting, the Government’s strategy is to kick the boundary issue into the long grass. What has changed?

We are in a mess because the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, tried his luck at rigging the electoral system in his party’s favour. The Conservative party since lost its majority in Parliament and now does not have support for the plans, even among its own Members. Many Conservative MPs refuse to support the proposals—for both self-interested and principled reasons—and the Government are running scared of holding a vote that would make those divisions public.

We all agree that we desperately need new boundaries. I worry that, if we are not careful, we will walk into another election with constituencies based on data that is more than 20 years old. We cannot afford to wait months for the Government to get their house in order. My Bill needs a money resolution so that we can work together on a realistic, practical and cross-party path forward. I hope that the Minister will consider that and see to it that we receive a money resolution, so that, whatever happens with the boundary review, we will at least have a parallel system that could deal with this issue.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will keep my remarks focused, given that we are considering only the motion to adjourn, and respond specifically to a couple of remarks from the Bill’s promoter, the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. He said that the purpose of the original boundary proposals brought forward when my former right hon. Friend David Cameron was Prime Minister was to rig the system in favour of the Conservative party. That needs to be put straight. It is simply not true, as he would know if he read the long debate that we had on the Floor of the House.

The proposals were about levelling the playing field so that seats were more equal in size, so that we did not have the ridiculous situation of having seats with very small electorates—there are many in Wales with electorates of around 40,000, for example—and also seats with close to 100,000 electors, meaning that a voter’s vote in those constituencies can be worth half as much as in another seat. That is simply not right. It is about having relatively tight spans so that every voter’s vote is of broadly equal value across the country. That is the principle, and I think I am right in saying that it had Labour party support both when the legislation was going through and now, so we can put that party-political accusation aside.

The hon. Gentleman’s second point, about timing, is relevant to the motion to adjourn. The Minister’s remarks last week—I do not know whether she will add anything today; I do not think there is anything to add—made it clear that the Government and officials are getting on with drafting the Orders in Council, and she made the point that it is a lengthy process. Ministers cannot be dilatory about it, because in the legislation there is a legal injunction on Ministers to bring forward proposals “as soon as practicable”, so they have to get this work done.

We are talking about detailed specifications for 600 parliamentary constituencies. There are only so many skilled draftsmen in Parliament, and they have other important legislation to draft—such as Brexit legislation and the thousands of statutory instruments that will have to go through the European sifting committee—so there are capacity constraints.

However, the Minister made it clear that that work is already under way, and said that it would take months. Opposition Members pressed her on that last week, and she said that she had chosen her words with great care and it would take that length of time, so she has set out the process. She made it clear which Ministers were responsible, and our right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office has ultimate ministerial responsibility. I just remind colleagues of what I said yesterday: he is answering questions in the House today at 11.30 am, so those who wish to press him on that will have the opportunity to do so, if there are appropriate questions on the Order Paper. This Minister has therefore set out a sensible process.

My final point on proceeding with debating the Bill is that I still hold to what I said last time. If the House decides not to proceed with the boundary proposals as delivered by the four commissions, and if we are going to debate the Bill and the Government decide that they will bring forward a money resolution and proceed, two things are true. First, the Bill would need to be debated; the Government would clearly have to find time for that on the Floor of the House—as was the case with the original boundary proposals and legislation—so that all hon. Members, not just the select few in this Committee, could participate in the debate. Secondly, one would not want to have that debate without its being informed by the debate and the responses from individual Members on the commission proposals, which would by that point have been rejected, because one would want to take into account the reasons why Parliament had not supported the boundary proposals if one were then going to alter the rules. Unless we were going to alter the rules, while listening to that feedback, in a way that we thought would lead to more acceptable proposals, it would be a rather pointless and otiose exercise.

[Afzal Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman’s contributions have always been very reasoned, throughout the process in which we have been engaged. The one thing that I am struggling with is this: we have been meeting here every week since May and this time is being wasted. If there were a money resolution, we could discuss the Bill line by line, and then, when the matter got to the House, we could discuss it both ways. What is the loss for us, not having a money resolution? By having a money resolution, we could iron out all the detail that needs to be dealt with. We meet every week in any case.

[Mr Harper]

If I follow the hon. Gentleman’s logic through, that does not really work, because of course if we had a money resolution—I know we do not—we would be debating the Committee stage of the Bill here, but that would just then be repeated all over again, because the Committee stage would be done on the Floor of the House too, so the time would be wasted.

I suggested to the hon. Gentleman last week that, if he is concerned about the 30 minutes or so that we spend together on a Wednesday and the time it takes for the House, a potential way forward might be for him to engage with the usual channels and have a discussion about whether some arrangement can be reached whereby the Government might agree—I do not know, because I do not speak for the Government; I am a Back Bencher—to bring forward the boundary proposals as soon as is practicable, as the Minister set out, and if the House chose not to proceed with those, they might be prepared to make some of the commitments that I have suggested, about this being debated on the Floor of the House. In those circumstances, it may be that it is agreed that we then do not meet every Wednesday for a debate on the motion to adjourn, but with a commitment about what might happen if the House chooses not to proceed with the existing proposals.

I am sure that the Government would entertain having the conversation. I do not know what they would want to agree. They might not be prepared to agree to that—I do not speak for them. However, it seems to me that that might be a productive set of conversations to have, and then we would not spend the House’s time in this Committee, pleasant though it is, and we would know where we were. There would be a two-stage process. The House would have the opportunity to take a view on the existing proposals, which have been introduced and are now being turned into legislation. If that were not to go through, there would be a fall-back, a plan B—that seems to be the terminology that people like today. That might be a sensible way forward.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

The right hon. Gentleman has made an intriguing proposal about taking the Bill back on to the Floor of the House, but could he clarify something? Why would the Government’s attitude on the Floor of the House be any different from the stonewalling we see in this Committee?

[Mr Harper]

Again, I speak just for myself. My point is that the Government would not agree to take the Bill back on to the Floor of the House now. It would be a two-stage process. The Government have made the commitment already; the Minister made that last week. I do not know whether she will speak today—I am not sure she would have much to add, so I, for one, would not be disappointed if she did not, apart from being generally disappointed when we do not hear from the Minister. I do not think she has a lot to add, so I do not think there is any requirement for her to speak today if she does not wish to.

As I said, there would be a two-stage process because I do not think it would be appropriate to debate new rules and new ways of achieving boundaries without being informed by the feedback on the existing ones. When the boundary commissions’ proposals are brought forward as Orders in Council, there will be a debate in Parliament and Members of Parliament who do not support the proposals—and there will be some, on the Opposition Benches at least—will be able to put on the record the reasons why they do not support them and the rules that led to their drawing up.

Not having that information to hand and debating in detail would not work. For all we know, the House might agree to the proposals, in which case there will be no point in changing the law in the first place. We would simply waste a huge amount of time on the Floor of the House of Commons. It seems to me that the most sensible approach is to park the Bill formally. It is parked in an informal way at the moment. There may be some benefit in having that conversation with the Government and getting an agreement.

As I said, I do not know if that agreement could be reached, but it seems not unreasonable to try. That would avoid the minor inconvenience—it is only a minor inconvenience—of our meeting every week but not being able to make substantial progress.

[Afzal Khan]

The right hon. Gentleman’s proposal is sensible. Last week, we had an informal discussion and I offered to meet the Minister to see if some sort of resolution could be found as a way forward that was acceptable for both things that are trying to run in parallel here.

[Mr Harper]

As I said, I do not speak for the Government but it seems to me that that might be a sensible way forward. We are now in the short return in September and have almost run into the conference recess. There is obviously a period before we return on 9 October—we would reconvene on 10 October—to talk again. There is a little bit of time before we rise.

It is sometimes difficult to have usual channels conversations outside sitting times but I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that he kicks those off. It is his Bill so he needs to initiate those conversations. We will see where we get to. We might be able to make considerable progress. That is just an idea; I do not speak for the Government, but it seems a perfectly constructive way forward and I commend it to the hon. Gentleman.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to see you back in the Chair, Mr Owen, for our proceedings. What a pleasure it is, as always, to follow the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean. I come to the Committee this morning to offer a couple of observations on what happened on Monday. I was at an event in Scotland with a number of my hon. Friends from the Scottish National party. We were all at a table and all of a sudden around 10 o’clock they all went on to their phones. It was like watching pupils get their report card from school. Everybody was frantically looking through what was happening to their seats, whether their seat would be abolished and what the proposals looked like.

I tend to take the view, as a Scottish nationalist, that at the next general election, I hope that we can have 59 fewer seats, by way of Scotland becoming independent. I accept that is perhaps not an immediate prospect. My view is that it is absolutely unacceptable for Scotland to lose the six or seven seats under the current proposals.

Last week, the hon. Member for City of Chester and I talked about our not-so-favourite newspaper, the Daily Mail. I confess I am not avid reader of the Financial Times but it was sitting in the Members’ Tea Room yesterday. I noticed a small article in it that suggested that the Government are now considering the possibility of delaying the votes on the boundary changes until after Brexit.

That presents several difficulties for the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton because we are in a two-year Session. The problem is, if we wait until Brexit at the end of March, we will probably be heading for prorogation before a new Queen’s Speech within a month of that.

--- Later in debate ---

We will still be meeting here in March. I predict that the Government will eventually put the proposals to a vote in the House, because they have to, as the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean said. They will be defeated. The hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton will probably run out of time and the Bill will die. The right hon. Member for Forest of Dean talked about not wasting time, but in reality, some innocent young Conservative MP from the Back Benches—perhaps even the hon. Member for Torbay—will have to bring this very measure back as a private Member’s Bill. It will leave some poor Conservative with egg all over their face. Let us give up the charade.

[Mr Harper]

I want to pick up on the hon. Gentleman’s point about democracy, because more recently than Second Reading, a motion was put to the House on 19 June. The House was given a clear choice about whether to allow this Committee to make progress on the Bill without a money resolution. Notwithstanding predictions about what the House might do in future when it is given the Orders in Council, it made a clear majority decision for us not to proceed, so the Government are actually following the will of the House.

[David Linden]

I am very grateful as always to the right hon. Gentleman, who participated in that debate, as I did. Several hon. Members were very clear when they stood up on the Back Benches. As a Government Back Bencher, the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay did very well when he suggested that, although he did not support the reduction to 600 seats, he would not vote on the motion based on a technicality, because he did not think that it was appropriate for the House to take that route.

We are all big enough and ugly enough to have conversations with hon. Members across the aisle, and it is clear that there is not a majority in the House. That is precisely why the Government will not have that vote on the Floor of the House, because frankly, they have enough ongoing division within themselves, let alone with the other side of the House. If the Government are serious about respecting the will of the House—if the Leader of the House in particular, who is one of those great people who believe in parliamentary sovereignty—and genuinely want to take back control, they should schedule the vote. We will have the vote.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you, Mr Owen. Over the weekend and on Monday, I read coverage relating to this vote. One national newspaper quoted the Minister from our meeting last week, and the Committee was characterised as obscure. I am not sure whether it is a promotion or a demotion, after 13 or so weeks, to have reached the ranks of obscure. When we are still here in March, as the hon. Member for Glasgow East said, I wonder whether we will become veterans. I have not been here very long, but I wanted to become a veteran, so that will be very exciting.

What is at the nub of this and what saddens me about it is that our politics should never seek to emulate American politics. I do not think that the Americanisation of British culture in general is a great thing. However, if anyone watches American politics now, as I know lots of people in this building do with great interest and sometimes horror, they see is that everything—whether it is the colour of the napkins or the electoral system— becomes a partisan arm wrestle. Everything, whether it is appointing judges or whatever it is, becomes an exercise in narrow advantage.

I am willing to take much of what the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean says at face value. The intentions at the outset, many years ago now, were very honourable. However, this has now become—without doubt—an exercise in political advantage: “the Government want this process to happen; it would help them. We do not want it to happen; it would not help us.”

If someone is a student of British politics, as I know lots of people in this room are, they will know that that has never been the way in which we have done our boundaries. Our boundaries and the way in which we have dealt with this system has been characterised by fair play and equity. Of course, I understand that we do not want to have ballooned constituencies in some parts of the country and tiny ones in others, but at the same time we want conversations about how to set a fair system—one that gives people as equal a voice as is physically possible—without tilting the scales one way or the other, because that goes against British values and our democracy. And whether we like it or not, we are in that territory now. Nothing could make that clearer than the fact that the vote on this issue is now being kicked further down the road, because the Government are not sure that they will win it.

[Mr Harper]

I am reflecting on this from memory, so I hope the Committee will forgive me if I have not got it quite right, but I think the hon. Gentleman is putting a gloss on the way that this process perhaps worked in the past. I seem to remember that in 1968 the then Prime Minister, Lord Wilson, brought forward to the House a set of boundary proposals that were not advantageous to the Labour party and he asked the House to vote them down. As it happened, it did not work because he lost the 1970 general election. Nevertheless, the idea that this process has somehow always been conducted in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests is perhaps not an accurate reading of the historical record.

[Alex Norris]

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention; his recollection of 1968 may well be stronger than mine, for obvious reasons. Perhaps I am putting a gloss on things and maybe we are looking back, as we tend to do, through sepia or whatever, but the point is that we have never been more partisan and red state/blue state than we are today, and this process is the perfect example of that.

So for goodness’ sake, let us kill this process off. We have got complete recognition that something needs to change—the boundaries need to change—but we have got this zombie hangover from the last Parliament in front of us; well, it is not in front of us today, but it will be in many months’ time. Of course I do not mean my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton, but the boundary review.

Let us put this boundary review to bed. Let us get down to discussing what I think are pretty good first principles in this Bill and let us get to where we all want to be. It will reflect on all of us better; it will also be better for our mental wellbeing, I suspect. Ideally—this is my major goal—we might have an outcome before the baby of my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith), who has been born during these proceedings, goes to university.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bambos Charalambous (Enfield, Southgate) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Owen.

What we see here is an anti-democratic process. It was 1 December 2017 when this Bill passed its Second Reading, so we are now more than nine months down the line and we have been meeting ever since, because the Government will not grant us a money resolution.

We have been given various reasons why we have not been given a money resolution. We were told that the boundary commissions’ proposals were coming and that it was best to wait for them to arrive, so that both matters could be considered together. Now we are being told that there are some complex resolutions and instruments that need to be prepared for that to happen. Surely the Government should have been ready for that. They knew when the boundary commissions would report. The proposals are the same as they were a year ago. The Government must have known what was coming—what landed on their desk cannot have been a big surprise—so it is no excuse for them to say they need more time to prepare and introduce those instruments.

[Mr Harper]

With the greatest respect, the boundary commissions gave their final proposals to the Government only on Monday. The Government could not have drafted the Orders in Council until they received those proposals. They could not have anticipated that the draft proposals would remain unchanged, and I do not think they remain completely unchanged. Drafting legislation is a complex process. Only certain people in Parliament can do it, and it is detailed, technical work, so it takes time. To be fair, I do not think the Minister is making that up.

[Bambos Charalambous]

If nothing has changed since the previous proposals were presented about a year ago, draft instruments should be ready to go now. Certainly, nothing whatsoever has changed in my constituency, and I am not sure what has changed in other areas. The majority of things have remained the same since last year.

This is an attempt to run down the clock on the Bill. There are only two more sitting Fridays this year. We are told there may be more coming next year, but we do not know when they will be announced or on what dates they will be. Even if the Bill got out of Committee, we would need another sitting Friday for it to get its Third Reading, and a number of other Bills would be ahead of it in any event. This is purely an attempt by the Government to run down the clock on the Bill.

If the Government are so confident about the proposals, why will they not put them to a vote? I know why— because they would lose. I heard the hon. Member for Wellingborough say openly in business questions last Thursday that he would vote against the proposals if they were brought to the Floor of the House. I understand that a number of his colleagues share that view. Certainly, Labour would oppose the proposals were they put to the House—that is my opinion—so the Government would lose.

We need clarity. People say a boundary review has not taken place for a substantial period, so we all agree what the issue is and that it needs to be resolved, but we have a log jam with respect to how that should be done. The way to get out of it is to ensure that the Bill gets a money resolution, progresses out of Committee and has its Report stage soon.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Fifteenth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 15th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 17th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

Last week, my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester presented the Committee with a draft order that the Government could easily use to lay the boundary reports before the House. I do not believe it is necessary to copy the offer. The Minister had claimed that preparing the order would take many months, but it is quite clear that it could be done much quicker than that. I would like to ask the Minister how many civil servants are currently working on drafting the order. Is anybody actually doing that?

Whitehall might sometimes seem an obscure place but it is accountable to Parliament and, ultimately, to the public. Has the Minister instructed any parliamentary draftsmen to draw up the order? If so, how far have they got? I would be grateful if we could get an update, seeing as the boundary review was released a month ago.

Even quicker than an order for the boundary review would be a money resolution for my Bill. The Government had no trouble tabling multiple money resolutions for Bills behind mine in the private Member’s Bill ballot. In fact, just yesterday the Minister tabled and spoke to the money resolution for the Overseas Electors Bill, making it crystal clear that money resolutions are being used for party political reasons, to further private Members’ Bills that the Government support and block those they oppose. We can continue to meet every Wednesday morning and I am glad that colleagues continue to attend, but it would be better if we could actually discuss something.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I am grateful that you have called me, Mr Owen. I want to put a few remarks on the record that are pertinent to those raised by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. First, I should apologise that I was not here last week; I was unavoidably elsewhere. I notice, having assiduously read the fantastic Hansard report, which we are so blessed with in these Committees, that I was mentioned in dispatches, as it were, so I thank the hon. Member for City of Chester who speaks for the Opposition for noticing that I was not here. It is always good when people actually notice that one is not at Committee and that it does not just pass people by.

I want to say a couple of things about the drafting points. First, I am slightly disappointed that the hon. Member for City of Chester appears to be so despondent in his role as a Member of Parliament that he has decided to audition for the job of parliamentary counsel. Having acquainted myself with that, I can tell him that being a parliamentary draftsman is rather better paid than being a Member of Parliament. They are very senior lawyers and it is a very specialist job. If the hon. Gentleman looks at the pay scales, he will see they are rather better remunerated than even Cabinet Ministers. I should say that he would be very sadly missed, so I hope his application to be a parliamentary draftsman is declined.

I notice he offered his services to the Minister, but I think she probably has the services of parliamentary counsel to hand. As she said, it is a complicated process. I know the hon. Gentleman has not had the chance, but I have been able, in a number of roles, to ask civil servants to instruct parliamentary draftsmen. It is actually more complicated than the hon. Gentleman thinks and it needs to be right. What the Minister said last time about the complexity of the task is very necessary.

Given that we can discuss only the adjournment, I will repeat what I said on the final point made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton about a money resolution. As I have said, the House now has the chance to take a decision on the boundary commission reports that have been laid before it. If we were to actually consider this Bill, it should not be considered in Committee. All the previous legislation on boundaries, because they are constitutional in nature, were considered in a Committee of the whole House. If the Bill were to make progress, the Government ought to find time for it so that all Members—because this issue affects all Members—could discuss it on the Floor of the House.

I think that the right approach is to allow the House to take a decision on the boundary commission orders. Obviously, in my current life as a Back-Bench Member of Parliament, I have no influence over that; it is a matter for the usual channels to discuss. However, if we were to discuss it in detail, it should be done in the House.

[Afzal Khan]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his conclusion and for his efforts in the Committee. The question is ultimately whether he believes that we should resolve this issue. After all, we have used the current figures for 20 years. Do we want to end up using them for 25 years? If we do not get on with this, there is a real risk that that will happen.

[Mr Harper]

One generally welcomes sinners who repent, and I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman is seized of the urgency of dealing with the boundaries. I reflect on how disappointing it is that his party and the Liberal Democrats did not think so when they combined to block the boundary review that was supposed to take place off the back of the legislation passed in the House in 2011. Had they not conspired to block that review, new boundaries would already have been put before the House and we would already have fought a general election on them. I am pleased—I will be grateful if the hon. Member for City of Chester will confirm this—that the Labour party’s position is that we need new boundaries, because that was not its position when they were blocked last time. That is welcome. We obviously want this process to continue.

I have one final point. As I have said previously, consideration of the Bill is slightly putting the cart before the horse because, first, we would be considering it without knowing the House’s decision on the new boundaries laid before it. If the House accepts those, the decision has been taken. Secondly, even if the House were to reject the boundary commission proposals, as in the scenario set out by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, we should want to understand why the proposals brought forward under the existing legislation were rejected before we were to amend the Bill. Those reasons would obviously come up in the full debate that would take place in the House, and we should want that knowledge to inform the debate on the Bill.

That is why the sequence of this process that the Minister has set out in previous sittings is right, and I recommend that the Committee accepts it when it considers the motion to adjourn shortly.

[The Chair]

I am keen to hear from Back-Bench Members, so I call Karen Lee.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is, as ever, a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Owen. I also apologise for not being here last Wednesday; I think Members will know my situation at home. I take this opportunity to place on the record my thanks and gratitude to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and particularly to the neonatal intensive care unit at the south Glasgow university hospital.

I do not intend to speak at any length today. I will make only one observation, to follow on from the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton. Yesterday I sat through the debate in the main Chamber on the Overseas Electors Bill, which was introduced by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire (Glyn Davies). I now find myself taking a rather unusual interest in money resolutions for private Members’ Bills. I was rather surprised to hear the Minister say yesterday that the proposals would cost £1 million a year for 10 years. One of the arguments that we hear at this Committee is that we have to be careful how we use public money, so I am not sure how those two arguments match up.

I heard numerous Members, particularly Conservative Members, talking about “votes for life.” I happen to disagree with the Bill that was before the House yesterday, none the less, I respect the fact that the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire managed to get a Second Reading for it. I respected the democratic vote of the House yesterday when it gave that Bill a money resolution. I respect the fact that next door, at 2 o’clock this afternoon, a Committee will meet to consider it clause by clause and line by line. The fundamental issue is that the House of Commons has commanded that that Bill be able to progress, but the Government are using delaying tactics by not granting a money resolution to the Bill promoted by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton, which is an abuse of Executive power. The Overseas Electors Bill will come back to the House at some point for its remaining stages, and I will vote against it on Third Reading, but I respect the fact that it will go to Committee this afternoon and that members of that Public Bill Committee will be able to scrutinise it line by line. That is exactly what we should be able to do here.

[Mr Harper]

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the wishes of the House of Commons, it is worth putting on record that on 19 June, Opposition Front Benchers moved a motion to ask the House whether this Committee could consider the clauses of the Bill, notwithstanding the fact that no money resolution had been tabled. The House was asked for its opinion about whether we should proceed. It divided, and made a clear decision with a majority of 15 that we should not make any progress on the Bill. We can debate whether that was the right or wrong decision—obviously, the hon. Member for Lincoln believes that it was the wrong decision—but the point is that the House made that decision, not the Government, and that is why we are not making further progress.

[David Linden]

We have had that debate before, and we know that on the day, several Conservative Members said that they supported the principle of the Bill, but were voting against the motion on the basis of a technicality. As the parliamentary term continues, I think that more and more Conservatives will come out and say that they do not support the reduction of seats from 650 to 600. We will see what happens when that comes before the House.

I want to pick up on a point that the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean made about how long it takes to draft legislation. I am sorry, but I cannot buy that. Numerous times in this House, I have seen emergency legislation brought forward in respect of Northern Ireland, which is fast-tracked at all stages—done in one day—and drafted in a matter of days. If the Government can draft legislation for Northern Ireland very quickly and get it through all its stages in the House of Commons, they can do it with this Bill.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Sixteenth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 16th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

The way that we draw our boundaries in this country has until recently inhabited a sacred space in our politics. We have four independent boundary commissions that independently consider the population and community ties across the UK and produce proposals for how many MPs there should be and where the boundaries of those constituencies should lie.

It is essential that that process remains independent. We need only look to the United States to see the danger of their approach. Extreme gerrymandering has eroded public faith in the political system. Debate around boundaries has been poisoned by party-political fighting, and lengthy lawsuits have recently reached the Supreme Court.

I believe strongly that we must keep our process independent. The current proposed boundaries have been expressly designed to benefit the Conservative party, and 2 million people have been disfranchised from the process. The Government have cut the number of MPs to an arbitrary 600 and equalising electorate size has been given priority over community ties.

My Bill has cross-party support. It is nonsense that we are in these endless Committee sittings, wasting time instead of pressing ahead with my Bill to produce the new boundaries our democracy needs.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will speak briefly. I did not intend to speak—I know everyone says that—but the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton said a number of things that cannot land on the record without correction.

First, I agree with him completely that the process covered in his Bill and the process under way absolutely have to be independent. I agree that the way other countries draw their boundaries, for example, the United States, is not one that I wish to follow. There, elected politicians sit with a map drawing boundaries.

My challenge to the hon. Gentleman is that that is exactly not what happens in this country. The boundaries that are now with Parliament, and with the Government for converting into orders, have not been drawn by party politicians. They have been carefully drawn by independent judicial office holders. They have obviously listened to evidence from the political parties, as one would expect, but all political parties have been able to give evidence. They have heard evidence from other people and produced independent proposals.

Of course, those proposals are shaped by the rules set by Parliament. Those rules are about equalising the size of constituencies, and I think there is general agreement that constituencies should be of equal size, not for our interest, but so that votes across the country are of equal weight wherever voters live.

I do not know whether it is still true, or whether someone has polled it, but I think it would be the case that reducing the number of Members of Parliament remains the most popular policy of the coalition Government. With 600, we would still have more politicians in the country at that level than many other comparable democracies.

[Afzal Khan]

Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman could enlighten us as to where the number of 600 comes from.

[Mr Harper]

It is not scientific. I think I set it out when I took through the original legislation. We made a decision to reduce the size of the House. There is nothing magic about 600. The current number is 650 and we decided to reduce that by about 10%, because that was about the amount we were shrinking of the rest of the public sector, and 600 is a round number. Rather than saying it was 587.5 or 592, it is 600. There was a conspiracy theory at the time about this special number that was specially designed to have some specific effect, but it is just a round number—600 seems a more sensible number than 604. There is nothing magic about it, but there was a general sense that it would be better to have slightly fewer Members. By comparison with similar western democracies, we actually have quite a lot of Members of Parliament at our level of government, and it seems sensible to make a modest reduction.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

The right hon. Gentleman is quite right to say that we have a lot of Members of Parliament, but there are even more Members of the House of Lords. What will the Government do to reduce that number?

[Mr Harper]

I do not want to go too far into that or you will pull me up, Mr Owen, but I brought forward an ill-fated attempt both to radically reduce the size of the House of Lords and to make it more democratic. If we had received support from the Labour party for the programme motion so that we did not spend the whole of the 2010-15 Parliament talking about it, we might have made some progress. Sadly, that was not to be, and now it is not at the top of this Government’s priorities because we have other important matters to deal with.

I just want to put on record that I think it is incredibly important that we have an independent process for drawing boundaries, but that is indeed what we have in this country. I would like the Government and Parliament to be able to consider the boundaries that are drawn up by that independent process before we make progress with the Bill.

[David Linden]

It is, as ever, a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Owen. I looked at the Order Paper and saw that this is the sixteenth meeting of the Committee—my goodness, I am sure there will be a Netflix documentary about us soon.

I want to pick up on one or two points made by the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean. As I was not a Member of this place during his time as Chief Whip and when he was a member of the Government, I was not aware that he was a great reformer who sought to abolish our cronies in ermine. I am none the less disappointed that he was not successful at that—I am sure he would have had the support of the Scottish National party, and he certainly would have had my personal support. He is absolutely right to make it clear that the boundary commissions are entirely independent; none of the members of this esteemed Committee is questioning the impartiality of the fine civil servants who serve on the boundary commissions.

It comes back to the principle that has been directed to civil servants by Government, which is to reduce the number of seats from 650 to 600. The noise of a reversing JCB digger could almost be heard as the right hon. Gentleman talked about how they arrived at this magical number of 600. The technical way of saying how they found it is that they put a wet finger up in the air, and that is how they came up with the figure of 600 —I have other feelings about that.

I wanted to make a brief contribution today because, having looked at the Order Paper for the main Chamber, we are of course considering some very important legislation for Northern Ireland. One point that I made in Committee last week was that before my time as a Member in this House, when I was a researcher, and now as an MP, I have seen the Government countless times bring forward legislation for Northern Ireland very quickly. The Minister is a former Northern Ireland Minister herself, so she will know how quickly legislation for across the water can be drafted. I find it a little bit bizarre that legislation for Northern Ireland can be drafted so quickly and, indeed, passed so quickly— in one day—yet Orders in Council take months to be brought to the House.

[Mr Harper]

I may be wrong, but I think the reason why Northern Ireland legislation tends to be dealt with differently is because there is generally a consensus between Front Benchers on the proposals that are brought forward. It is only because there is agreement on the process that it can be done like that. If what is being proposed for Northern Ireland is politically contentious between the parties, it simply would not be possible to bring it forward on an emergency basis. We have established in our relatively limited debates in Committee on Adjournment motions that there is no consensus across the parties on the subject of parliamentary constituencies. I do not think that the process would work in the way that the hon. Gentleman suggests.

[David Linden]

I caution the right hon. Gentleman—if he wants to talk about contentious issues in Northern Ireland, I do not think that the Government are on their finest form with some of their proposals for how they will treat Northern Ireland over the backstop. It is fine if he wants to lecture me on that—I dare him to do so.

I ask the Minister: how many civil servants in the Cabinet Office are working on the preparation for this? The final number I would like to find out from the Minister—I would be grateful if she gave it to me sooner rather than later—is this. We are talking about cutting the cost of politics, but we are approaching that wonderful time of year again when the turkeys are stuffed—when people put on ermine robes and become new Members of the House of Lords. It is around this time of year when we find out the long list of new Members of the House of Lords. How many new lords can we expect next year?

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

And of course, Mr Owen, we understand and follow every word you say as you direct us. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, but that pleasure is tempered by the disappointment that, once again, we have failed to receive the money resolution that would have allowed us to proceed.

It is genuinely always a pleasure to listen to the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean. I have said previously that his experience is invaluable in this Committee. Let me put on record the Opposition’s view that there is absolutely no question about the Boundary Commission’s integrity—none whatever. There is an issue, of course, about the guidance, which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned, that the House gives to the Boundary Commission when it makes its decisions and proposals.

The Bill would not reduce the number of constituencies, but it would allow an ever-so-slightly greater tolerance about the national average than the boundaries currently awaiting the House’s decision. It would allow for an equalisation of the size of constituencies, and a greater recognition of communities of interest around them, which make up an important part of the identity that electors feel with their parliamentary constituency. We absolutely want to progress to greater consistency across the numbers in parliamentary constituencies, because it is not helpful to have too great a divergence from the national average and constituencies of too great a size.

Hundreds of thousands of voters were not on the register on which the existent boundary proposals were based, so there will inevitably be a great variation in the number of voters. It has been suggested to me that some of the inner-city seats in London might have well in excess of 100,000 residents—150,000 in two cases—but not voters, because people have fallen off the register.

[Mr Harper]

On that point, of course whenever we draw a cut-off line and start a process, we cannot possibly be completely up to date. A big change happened with the general election and the referendum, and the analysis that was carried out by Number Cruncher Politics and the Library shows that the distribution of those voters is broadly equal across the country. If they were all on the register, it would not make a material difference to the distribution of seats across the country, so the hon. Gentleman’s fear is unwarranted.

[Christian Matheson]

I am grateful for that intervention, and I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point. I shall look up that report, but that still does not negate the problem that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are not actually on the register.

I do not intend to detain the Committee for much longer, save to say that we need progress, and we are being prevented from making progress by the Government’s failure to bring forward the money resolution or the alternative to it, which is the orders for decision by this House. I believe they are doing that because it suits the internal dynamics and politics of the Conservative party. Those considerations are overriding the national need for a decision on this matter. The longer this goes on, the more unhelpful the Government’s position is.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Twenty Fourth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 24th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th January 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship in this new year, Mr Owen. I welcome back all Members; I hope they had a good Christmas, and I wish them all also a happy new year. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] I hope that with the new year, the Minister has had an opportunity to reflect, and perhaps has a new attitude towards this Committee. In 2018, we had a full year in which no progress was made on this Bill—what a disappointment that is. We are fast running out of time for these changes to come in before the end of this Parliament, and I hope the Minister will feel that we should get on with it.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will speak briefly this morning, to say to Members that as I have not been to the Committee for a while, I thought that as the new year approached it would be good to re-acquaint myself with old friends. I also wanted to say, having read the Hansard report of the last Committee meeting, that I am grateful that our good friend the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton got his Christmas present just before Christmas, as the Government did publish the immigration White Paper. I know that he was hoping for that at the last Committee meeting, so I am pleased that that Christmas present was delivered. I do not know whether the hon. Member for Glasgow East got the little note in his stocking from the Minister that he was hoping for; I suspect not.

I am looking forward to hearing what the Minister has to say about whether any progress has been made on drafting the statutory instrument. Obviously, the House’s agenda is very full at the moment with debates on European Union matters, and I know that lots of pieces of legislation that are critical to our exit from the European Union need to be dealt with, so I am not hopeful that the House will find the opportunity to consider this matter at an early stage. However, I look forward to hearing whether progress will be made at the earliest opportunity, and I join you, Mr Owen, in wishing everyone a happy new year.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

As ever, it is an immense pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen, and I extend my best wishes to all members of the Committee for a happy, peaceful and prosperous new year. I spent yesterday afternoon taking part in a debate on democracy in Uganda—an excellent debate, led by the hon. Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams). In that long debate, it struck me a little that we as Members of the British Parliament are busy quite rightly holding Uganda to account for its lack of democracy, but for almost a year, I have been taking part in a Bill Committee that is considering reducing the number of legislators who can scrutinise the Government just as more powers are coming back from the European Union, and, last year, more than 20 new Members of the House of Lords were appointed. We as Members of the British Parliament have the audacity to lecture other countries about how democracy should work when we are trying to shrink the number of people who can scrutinise the Government in this country. I will leave that thought with Members. I look forward to participating in the Committee from now until we prorogue around March, if we get that far, but it has been an absolute pleasure to be part of the Committee in 2018, and I look forward to many more meetings in 2019.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Thirtieth sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 30th sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 24th April 2019 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

I welcome Members to the 30th sitting of the Bill Committee. I hope you all had a good Easter break.

Motion made, and Question proposed,

That, notwithstanding the Order of the Committee of Wednesday 4 July 2018, during further proceedings on the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill the Committee do next meet at 10.00 am on Wednesday 5 June.—(Afzal Khan.)

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I will endeavour to speak briefly. It is a great pleasure to be here at our 30th meeting. I have been to many of them—not all of them. I will happily support the motion moved by the hon. Gentleman when the Committee comes to decide on it.

The only other two things I have to say, if you will indulge me, Mr Owen, are that I wish the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North, all good luck on her maternity leave. The Committee has had a number of maternity and paternity considerations, which perhaps indicates how long it has been going for. Finally, I welcome the Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Torbay. He has served a long apprenticeship—perhaps too long—as a Parliamentary Private Secretary, which he has conducted with some considerable skill, and I was incredibly pleased to see the Prime Minister recognise his talents. He has been rewarded—if indeed reward is the word—by taking over from my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North in sitting in the ministerial chair. On that note, having wished him well, I am happy to support the motion.

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

It is, as always, a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. You reminded us that this is the 30th sitting of the Committee. It is a sad indictment that there have been more Committee sittings than I have had birthdays on this Earth, but that is another story.

I also welcome the Minister to his position and once again wish the hon. Member for Norwich North all the best as she goes through the last part of her pregnancy. As the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean said, the Minister had been a PPS on the Bill Committee for some time. In that role, he was often restricted from speaking, so I am sure we are all excited to hear what he has to say, not just about the Bill but about any potential money resolution to it. We will reserve judgment on whether a new Minister means a new approach. I know it is not a fashionable thing to do, but I remind the Committee that the House voted for the Bill at Second Reading and wanted to see it proceed. I hope he will bear that in mind.

If we are to take the Committee seriously—whether we will be here in June is a different story—it is still not too late to bring forward a money resolution. The Government can magic up Fridays, as we have seen in recent months, and if they could do that for a couple of extra Fridays and there is the will in the House to bring forward the money resolution, we could get the Bill expedited. I am sure that the Minister, a reforming Member of this House who will want to honour the House’s will, will stand up in a few minutes to say exactly that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Afzal Khan]

I beg to move,

That the Committee do now adjourn.

Thank you, Mr Owen. Happy 30th sitting of the Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill Committee. Traditionally the 30th is the pearl anniversary, but unfortunately MPs’ expenses would not allow me to buy each member of the Committee a pearl. Perhaps I might offer some pearls of wisdom instead.

Hon. Members might notice that the next proposed meeting is not in a month’s time, as has become our tradition, but in five weeks. That is to take account of the possibility of a recess at the end of May. After the chaos of the Easter recess, we will see whether MPs ever get a break again. I hope that after our week off last week, the new Minister has come back rested, refreshed and ready to take on the issue of parliamentary boundaries.

The Tories’ mishandling of Brexit means that we will have to fight the European elections, the local elections next month and a possible general election. There is reason enough there to look at the building blocks of our democracy—constituency boundaries. These elections will no doubt mean more electors, as people register to vote this year, making the proposed 2015 cut-off date for the boundary review even more ridiculous.

Last month, in my role as the shadow Immigration Minister, I took the Immigration Bill through Committee stage. Though it was not a massive Bill, it was longer than this one, and we got through it in two weeks. We should have been done with this Bill a year ago, but we will keep on meeting until we can make some progress. I hope the Minister can assist us further in this progress.

[Mr Harper]

I had not intended to speak, but, as ever, the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton has provoked me.

On the point that the hon. Member for Glasgow East mentioned about how long it will take to do the statutory instruments, looking at historical precedent, I think I am right in saying—I am sure the Minister will correct me if I am not—that the last Labour Government took around 10 months to get orders drafted on the boundaries issue. It can take a considerable period of time to get these things done. That would take us right through to the autumn of this year. It would be difficult for anybody from the Labour party—or the hon. Member for Glasgow East—to say that anything less than 10 months was unreasonable, since that was the length of time that their own party took when they were in government.

Finally, I want to address the point made by the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton about the distribution of electors. It is not the number of electors who are on the register at any particular time that is relevant here, but their distribution across the country. The argument about cut-off points, which we have had before, is that even if more electors are registered, if those electors are broadly similarly distributed as at a previous cut-off point, they do not make a material difference in the distribution of constituencies.

As the House of Commons Library analysis showed when we looked at this before, there was no significant material difference in the electors who were added post 2015 for the European referendum or for the 2017 general election. They did not make a material difference in the distribution of seats, so I do not think that the passage of time makes the original cut-off period null and void.

I still think that the Government’s process is the right one—to finalise the Orders in Council, bring them before the House and allow the House to debate and vote on them. If the House passes them, we have our new boundaries. If the House fails to support those Orders in Council, at that point the House and the Government can reflect on the appropriate way forward, the House having taken a decision on the process that has already been under way and is nearing its completion. That is the sensible way for this Committee to consider the matter as it decides whether it wishes to adjourn.

Question put and agreed to.

Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill (Thirty Second sitting)

Mark Harper Excerpts

Committee Debate: 32nd sitting: House of Commons
Wednesday 10th July 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I beg to move, That the Committee do now adjourn.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. I thank Committee members for being here once again. They may be interested to know that this is the 32nd sitting of our Committee; it is also our last meeting before the summer recess.

I will not go into detail about the sheer disappointment that I have felt at the lack of progress over the past two years. However, I think it is important at this stage to reflect and review. It has been my aim from the outset to enhance our democratic process. By maintaining the number of MPs at 650 and ensuring that boundaries have a more equal number of voters in each seat, we will guarantee free and fair elections—and given the current political climate, an election could be imminent.

As it stands, the boundary review is completely undemocratic and seeks to reinforce the power of the Executive at the expense of Back Benchers. With a new Prime Minister on the horizon, I urge the Government to bring these proposals forward, so that the House can make a decision and we can finally make much-needed progress.

After 32 sittings, it is evident that the Government have run out of excuses. There is simply no reason why the necessary orders should not have been drafted. I am fully aware that my Bill has cross-party support, and I hope that the summer recess will provide an opportunity for the Minister and the Government to seriously consider the Bill’s proposals. On that note, does the Minister care to provide any updates?

I wish hon. Members a great recess and look forward to seeing them all in October.

[Mr Mark Harper (Forest of Dean) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton on persevering with his Bill through our Committee sittings. I reinforce what I have said previously, which is that I think that there will be a time to consider his Bill, but it is not now; it will be when the House has had a chance to consider the orders.

I join the hon. Gentleman in asking the Minister for an update, although I am a little more cautious about the timetable. I remember that in an earlier sitting the Minister—I cannot remember whether it was the present Minister or his predecessor, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North—set out some historical precedents for how long previous Governments, of other parties, had taken to get some orders drafted. I seem to remember that when Labour was in power, a set of orders took up to 10 months to be drafted. It would be interesting to know what progress we have made, but even if we were proceeding apace, it would not be unreasonable not to have concluded the process. When the orders are drafted and put before the House, that will be the time for the Government to consider whether they wish to bring forward a money resolution, so that we will have a chance to consider the Bill.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton on his perseverance, and look forward to hearing from the hon. Member for City of Chester as Opposition spokesman, and from the Minister.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton, whose resilience and persistence in this matter is an object lesson to us all.

This could well be the Committee’s final sitting. My hon. Friend reminded us that this is our last meeting before the summer recess; the memory of the last meeting before last year’s summer recess only enhances our frustration on the Opposition Benches. If certain hon. Members—not on the Committee, I hasten to add, but in the Government party—get their way and Parliament is prorogued, this will indeed be our last sitting, and my hon. Friend’s Bill will fall. However, that will not take away the need to bring the proposals before the House, as the right hon. Member for Forest of Dean notes. The sooner we get those, so that the House can make a decision, the better. It is not acceptable that the Committee has taken this long to achieve absolutely nothing; the sooner we get this matter dealt with, the better.

I will leave it at that. I wish all Committee members a pleasant recess. As always, I shall be working in my constituency, and I am sure that they will be doing the same.

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Kevin Foster)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Owen. The Committee may find it helpful, in deciding whether to adjourn, if I update it on the judicial review against the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland. I am sure that Committee members are aware of those proceedings, but I stress that the BCNI is independent of the Government, and that the Cabinet Office was not party to the original proceedings.

The High Court of Northern Ireland has now issued its judgment in relation to the judicial review. It has concluded that the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland erred in law procedurally, and fettered its discretion by setting a high threshold for making changes at the last of the three statutory stages of consultation that it had followed. The Court had indicated that it was considering ordering the Minister for the Cabinet Office to attach a declaration to the boundary order, when it is brought forward, stating that the Boundary Commission’s consultation contained an error of law. To be clear, the Court has not struck down the order; it has merely made that statement.

We made submissions to the Court to argue that that was not an appropriate remedy, given the separation of powers between the Court and Parliament. The Court listened to our concerns, and its final order states that it has accepted our position, and has agreed not to order the declaration to be attached to the boundary order. The Court has made it absolutely clear that the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland took all the steps that it was required to take by statute; it has not quashed the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland’s report.

As Committee members would expect, the Government have closely followed the judicial review. We are also conscious that both the applicant and the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland have six weeks to decide whether to appeal the Court’s judgment, which will obviously have implications for the timetable of the boundary order.

I wished to update the Committee on the matter. I hope that hon. Members will be content with that explanation.

[Mr Harper]

Before the Minister sits down, I have two questions. First, am I right in thinking that until the appeal period is concluded, the Government cannot continue drafting the orders, or bring them before the House? Secondly, once the appeal period has concluded, or an appeal is heard and decided on, assuming that the Court does not quash and overturn the work of the Boundary Commission for Northern Ireland, will the Government be in a position to make further progress, albeit with the constraints set out by the hon. Member for City of Chester about the potential end of the parliamentary Session?

[Kevin Foster]

rose—