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.