Parliamentary Representation

Mark Harper Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Chris Bryant]

Yes. For some strange reason I seem to have been up in Oldham recently. Oldham East and Saddleworth feels as it if it has been slammed together with no consideration of what constitutes a community.

I do not want to focus too much on that issue; I really want to talk about equalisation of seats. I cannot remember which hon. Member said it, but it is absolutely right that the apparent party political advantage to the Labour party from the fact that it takes more voters to elect a Conservative MP than a Labour one is far more to do with turnout than anything else. The equalisation of seats will make barely any difference, according to calculations done by virtually every academic so far, to the partisan advantage of one political party or another. For that matter, a 5 or 10% leeway would not make a great difference, on a partisan basis, to one or other party. In Labour constituencies there have tended to be smaller majorities, but still safe seats, whereas a Conservative safe seat tends to have a very large majority, because there is a much higher turnout.

I support equalisation to an extent, and certainly as things stand the situation is not right; it is not acceptable and there should be greater equalisation. However, I worry about the Government trying to get 99% of all seats within a very tight band. That is a much tighter band than in any other country, and it is being done on the basis of registered electors, whereas most other countries use population. The hon. Member for St Ives was right when he said it would be a mistake if, because of the Bill, we ended up with—I think these were his words—“antiseptic constituencies” with permanently mobile boundaries. That would not be good for representation of views in Parliament or for ensuring that a full cross-section of British society is here. Nor would it make it easier for people to understand who represents them, and to maintain that continuity.

To give one tiny instance, if a constituent comes to a Member with a case and the Member takes it up, it might take many years, as did many of the miners’ compensation cases that I took up. Someone whose Member stops representing them because of the boundary change must start all over again, from the beginning, because the data protection people have said that MPs cannot hand the file over to another MP. [Interruption.] The Minister is saying something. I do not know whether he wants to intervene; perhaps he will respond later.

On a point of information, international comparisons are often cited regarding the need for greater equalisation. In fact, in the United States of America, if the same equation is made concerning how many voters it takes to get someone elected, Wyoming has nearly 10.5 times the representation, for population, of California. They base their arrangements not on registered or eligible voters, but on population. Sometimes it is good to equalise—but only to an extent.

It is important to recognise the distinctness of various parts of the country when we are drawing up boundaries. Some have already been mentioned. The Isle of Wight was referred to in some of the debates we had in the House of Commons. We believe that the distinctness of the Isle of Wight should be recognised in the statute, and hold a similar belief regarding Cornwall. I note that yesterday was the anniversary of the crossing of the Rubicon. I do not know whether the crossing of the Tamar is still an ambition of the Government. In one sense, Cornwall is only administratively in England. It has a distinctness that should be recognised. If there were a referendum in Cornwall on whether Cornwall should have Cornwall-only seats, there would be an overwhelming majority in favour. I hope the Government will think again on that matter.

Many of the same issues apply to Anglesey, though in that case it goes the other way in being too small, as opposed to the Isle of Wight being too large. The point was made about Argyll and Bute, and, although it did not sound like special pleading, of course it was. However, the point was well made: it is in many ways a sparser constituency than the highland seats. There is a strong argument for the distinctiveness of Argyll and Bute.

Although I understand the issues about Wales—in particular north-west Wales, where there is a high concentration of people with Welsh as their first language—a drive towards equalisation may, and in some academics’ views will, lead to no parliamentary seat having a Welsh-speaking majority. That would be a mistake in terms of how the British Parliament is viewed in Wales, and would incense a greater sense of nationalism. The Government should recognise that.

My final point on specifics that should be recognised concerns estuaries. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid) referred to sea lochs, but it is important that wide estuaries such as those on the Mersey, the Humber, the Clyde, the Forth and the Thames should not be crossed when creating parliamentary constituencies. Some argue that that should apply to Welsh valleys, because of their peculiarities. It would seem odd if a small part of the top of a valley—even if there was no connecting road—was bunged into another constituency. However, I think most issues in the Welsh valleys can be addressed; there is no specific reason why not.

A 10% rather than a 5% leeway would mean there was no need to cross ward boundaries in the creation of seats. In some of the big city conurbations, that is important. There would be no need to cross county boundaries—all geographical and physical necessities that the land, or God or whoever has given us could be met, and there would be no dramatic harm to the representativeness that the Government seek to achieve in aiming for equalisation. I hope that, in striving towards their measures, the Government will look again at whether 10% might not be a better leeway than 5%.

I want briefly to say a couple of words about the number of seats in Parliament. The hon. Member for Argyll and Bute said that the number has always crept up, except when the Irish Free State was created and we cut the numbers. However, the measure we should think about first is the nature of the job of a Member of Parliament. International comparisons were made by the hon. Member for St Ives. However, to compare the UK with Spain, France or Germany—where Governments are not constituted in the same way—is to compare apples with pears and is therefore mistaken. Similarly, the powers held by parliamentarians in those countries are very different. In France, much more is devolved and done by councillors. We have far fewer councillors—one for every 3,000 voters, whereas in France it is one for every 110. Those comparisons do not bear examination.

As MPs, we create the Government; we are the electoral college, as it were, for the Prime Minister and the whole of the Government. All Ministers have to come out of Parliament, because the amendment in the 1689 Bill of Rights was lost. Dramatic cuts in the number of MPs would be a mistake. The number of constituents has grown and grown over the years, as has the amount of casework we are expected to do.

I have two final points. I wonder how the AV Bill—I cannot remember what it is called—

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)]

The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill.

[Chris Bryant]

From a sedentary position, the Minister has helped me out. I wonder how the Bill is doing in the House of Lords. As I understand it, the Bill has to be out of the House of Lords in February in order to have the referendum in May. With another 70, 80, 90 sets of amendments, I wonder whether it is now possible for the Bill to have the two weeks between Committee and Report stages in the House of Lords, and come back to the House of Commons. I urge the Minister—indeed, I make him an offer: if he splits the two elements of the Bill, as we urged in the beginning, we could help him get his AV referendum in time for May.

House of Lords reform has been briefly mentioned by several Members. When are we going to have that Bill? It was originally going to be before Christmas, then at the beginning of the year, then in January. We hear rumours of March, April and May. When will we get the Bill?

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)]

It is good to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Riordan. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), it is the first time I have done so.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for securing the debate, and giving me and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) the chance to spend the entire morning in Westminster Hall, debating a fascinating range of topics.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives ranged widely across a number of constitutional issues. I hope I will deal with all the points he raised, but I might be a little pressed. I will deal first with the issues he raised, as it is his debate, and then touch on some raised by other Members. He started with the question of why the Government settled on 600 as the right number for the House of Commons. We were frank during the debate on the Bill. There is no magic about it; it is a judgment. The two coalition parties had different views before the election. They both wanted to shrink the size of the House of Commons: the Conservatives to 585, and the Liberal Democrats to 500, albeit with a change to the voting system. We settled on 600, which we thought was the right balance; as several Members have pointed out, constituencies should not be so large in population that Members could not do the job. With 600, most constituencies would be within a range that Members today would recognise, and we do not think it is an enormous leap.

The hon. Member for Rhondda said he would be against a dramatic cut in the number of MPs. The Government would be as well; we are not making a dramatic cut. We are making a modest reduction of about 7%. One can argue about it, but I do not think anyone can say that a reduction of 7% is dramatic.

I was aware of the Bill brought forward by the hon. Member for St Ives. He said that his Bill proposed a reduction to 500, primarily as a result of devolution. Prior to the formation of this Government, people argued that we should treat the parts of the United Kingdom that have a devolved Parliament or Assembly differently from those parts that do not, in terms of entitlement to seats at Westminster. That idea was put forward but the Government decided not to do that. We were keen to treat all parts of the United Kingdom in the same way, so the quota is a United Kingdom quota. Because of where we start from, the impact of the change in the number of seats will differ in different parts of the UK. That is because we want the weight of a constituent’s vote to be equal across the United Kingdom, and that is an important principle.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives, supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute (Mr Reid), wanted to know what principles guided us on the two exceptions. First, we wanted a set of principles that were widely applicable and that gave the boundary commissions the chance to allow it. We made only two exceptions out of the 600 seats for exceptional geographical reasons; the constituencies both have small populations but are large enough to sustain a Member of Parliament, as they do now, because of their dispersed geography.

I know that the matter is debatable. My hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute demonstrated an encyclopaedic knowledge of his constituency, as one would expect from an assiduous Member of Parliament; he certainly taught me something. None the less, I still believe that the Government have made the right judgment about the two exceptional constituencies that he selected. I would not be so churlish as to suggest that he was pleading for anything special. However, the hon. Member for Rhondda did so; he engaged in special pleading for Wales, something about which those who participated in the debate on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill heard an awful lot. We heard much about the Welsh valleys and Welsh constituencies, as the record will show.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives and my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton), who is not in her seat, made some specific points about Cornwall. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives spoke about what he called—I have to be careful here—the border between Cornwall and England. I think that he raised exactly the same point when we were debating the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. He referred today to the length of that debate; we had eight days of debate in the House, and he has obviously had the opportunity today to expand on the points that he made then.

In response to that debate, I said that although that view is shared by some in Cornwall, the Government’s position is that Cornwall is part of England and the United Kingdom; we do not recognise that boundary in quite the same constitutional way as does my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives. I understand why my hon. Friend takes that view, but I was surprised that the hon. Member for Rhondda appeared to suggest that the boundary had constitutional significance. I do not know whether the Opposition have changed policy and are trying to separate Cornwall from England, but I do not suggest that my hon. Friend takes that view.

My hon. Friend made some good points, including about the difficulty of getting to London from his constituency. That is something that he and I can both take up with First Great Western. I see that my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) has arrived for the next debate; he, too uses that train service and will concur. That will be the best way to deal with that problem.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives accepted in general the strong case for moving towards equal seats. I was most impressed by his novel arguments, which I have not heard before, for claiming significant parts of the Atlantic ocean as part of his constituency. We might get into all sorts of territorial difficulties if we did so, but it was a novel idea.

My hon. Friend and his fellow Members of Parliament for Cornish seats met the Prime Minister and me to make a pitch and to explain why they believe that the nature of Cornwall is unique. I would leave him with this notion. The Government do not subscribe to the view that one cannot represent constituents in Cornwall and other parts of the country, Devon being the most obvious. “We already have Members of the European Parliament who represent the whole of the south-west of England, and so represent constituents in Cornwall, in Devon and, indeed in Gibraltar perfectly ably.” Cornwall and Devon also share a police force. The border is not inviolate.

I do not accept the argument put by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives, although I know that my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) shares his view, about a Member of Parliament representing, say, part of Plymouth and part of Cornwall. Of course, some things are more important to one group of constituents than to others, but that is true of many constituencies. I have a fairly large rural constituency, and at one end of it a particular range of matters will be important that have no connection with those at the other end because of the distance. Nevertheless, I have to represent them all and understand all those issues. That is part of the job of being a Member of Parliament. The Government do not share the view that it is impossible to deal with that.

[Andrew George]

Of course it is not impossible to represent Gibraltar and Cornwall; nor is it impossible to represent places on either side of the Scottish border. However, the Minister has rather inventively twisted some of my evidence on what was so exceptional about the two constituencies that have been preserved. The question that he must address is what is the problem in allowing the Boundary Commission reasonable flexibility to allow constituencies that have a clearly shared view about where their boundaries should lie? That is particularly so as those areas outside them would not be affected and certainly would not be protesting against such a settlement.

[Mr Harper]

The principle that votes should be of more equal weight across the country is important. Several Members have used words and phrases such as straitjacket and the rules being too tight. If we were to say that all constituencies had to be exactly the same size, my hon. Friend’s argument would have some force. However, although we are reducing flexibility there is still a 10% range in the size of constituencies. Based on the 2009 data, constituencies will broadly range from about 73,000 to almost 80,000. There is still a fair bit of flexibility, which allows the independent boundary commissions to take account of issues such as local authority boundaries, community boundaries and the geographic features that we have to contend with.

In evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, the boundary commissions said that they would be perfectly able to deal with the rules proposed in the Bill, and that it would not present them with insuperable problems. We are fortunate that the four boundary commissions are politically independent. Those who pretend that some sort of gerrymandering exercise is going on are simply wrong. That phrase emanates from the USA. As one of my hon. Friends said, it is not that there is just some political interference there; in some parts of the United States, the boundaries are drawn up by the legislatures. It is not that there is interference, but it is a political decision on where the boundaries should be. We do not do that here. Parliament sets the framework, but decisions about where the boundaries should go are taken by boundary commissions.

[Andrew George]

That is the nub of the debate. The exception argument for the two preserved constituencies that the Minister has advanced this morning does not deal with the question of why that principle was decided upon, and why that reasonable flexibility should not also be applied for other constituencies.

[Mr Harper]

I shall deal briefly with the other two points raised by my hon. Friend, as they were important, particularly so in his part of the country. He was right to draw attention to the need for an accurate and complete electoral register. Our electoral registration system means that 91% or 92% of eligible voters are registered. Internationally, that is pretty good. However, the Government are not complacent and want to do better. That is why I wrote to every local authority in the autumn, inviting them to take part in pilots to consider using public sector databases to improve the accuracy and completeness of the register. We had a good response, and I shall announce which local authorities are to participate in those pilots in due course.

I wrote to my hon. Friend about dual registration, which I know is important in Cornwall. He referred to people who own second homes and who choose to pay business rates because they let those properties. The rules are fairly clear. People who let their property are not entitled to register to vote. There must be a residence qualification, and there is case law on the matter. Electoral registration officers have to make such decisions on individual cases, and they should do so. I have received letters from people who object to not being allowed to register to vote, but one test is for the electoral registration system to be robust with them. Those who own a second home who pop there for only a week every year for a holiday will almost certainly not fulfil the criteria for being resident and entitled to vote. Local authorities could do a lot to help with that.