Affordable Homes Bill

Debate between Mark Harper and Andrew George

Friday 5th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George]

Will the hon. Lady allow me to make this point, if she does not mind?

In advancing the Bill in the form in which it now appears on Second Reading, I know that there have been a number of discussions between all parties. I ask the Minister whether he will confirm in responding to the debate that collective responsibility will be suspended on this private Member’s Bill.

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Mr Mark Harper)]

indicated assent.

[Andrew George]

I notice that the Minister nods his assent to that question, so I am given to understand that collective responsibility will be suspended on the Bill. That is important, and I am very encouraged that we have an opportunity for a more open debate.

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[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman said that he wanted the House to make an informed decision, so I thought it would be helpful if I shared with hon. Members in all parts of the House the Government’s estimate of the costings of the Bill, whose drafting goes rather wider than the spare room subsidy. The Government estimate that the Bill would cost about £1 billion of public expenditure, so I would be grateful if he let the House know what spending cuts or tax increases he intends to put before it when it makes its decision.

[Andrew George]

That is most interesting because the Minister was not prepared to share that estimate—that speculative figure—with me before today’s debate. Looking at the consequences of the regulations, we see that if people had no other purpose in their life than simply to be the stimulus for the workings of the housing benefit system, and no say in how or where they lived, there would be no savings for the Government in any case. If the purpose of Government policy is to ensure the proper, efficient and effective use of the social housing resource with no under-occupation, so that every cubic centimetre of every social property is fully occupied, there will be no saving in housing benefit.

My point is that the policy is putting pressure on vulnerable people and they are expected to go into debt, and indeed the evidence shows that they are doing so as a consequence of the policy. That is the reasoning behind these modest and reasonable measures, which are based on the evidence. We can certainly debate the Minister’s speculative estimate of the cost. In any case, when the Government first proposed the measures, they said that they would make savings of £500 million, and they have had to revise that down again and again. We must take into account the number of tenants who have had to move into the private rented sector, where rents are higher, and the number of disabled people who have had to move, requiring adaptations to be made at taxpayers’ expense.

There are elements of the Government’s estimates that we have not seen properly, and I would like to scrutinise the evidence that the Minister believes he has for them. He simply stood up and spouted one figure without any evidence. Perhaps when he winds up the debate, we will hear more about that figure, and I hope that he will come and talk to me before the Bill goes into Committee.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mark Harper and Andrew George

Monday 15th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

6. What plans she has to reduce crime levels in rural areas.

[The Minister for Immigration (Mr Mark Harper)]

Rural areas suffer from certain types of crime, and I am looking forward to the election of police and crime commissioners in a month’s time so that those rural communities have more of a say in policing priorities. I hope that in my own county of Gloucestershire that will include the election of Victoria Atkins, the excellent Conservative candidate.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I am sure that Brian Blake in Devon and Cornwall will have a different view on those matters. I am grateful to the Minister for his reply, but he will be aware that farm watch, neighbourhood watch and special constables provide important community and voluntary support for rural areas. In these straitened times, what reassurance can the Minister give that the beat managers who are essential in co-ordinating the police response in those areas will be available and will continue to exist?

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I know from experience in my county that the difficult financial decisions that police authorities and chief constables have had to take can easily be combined with ensuring that there are more resources on the front line and that some of those excellent neighbourhood policing priorities are maintained. The election of police and crime commissioners will ensure that those neighbourhood-focused activities are not only continued but strengthened.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Mark Harper and Andrew George

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

As the Minister knows, we have debated this issue many times before, but I have not heard him explain precisely what is significantly different about the two constituencies identified in the Bill, or why they are so significantly different that they should be identified. It would be useful to have that on the record.

[Mr Harper]

We have defined the difference. Both constituencies constitute groups of islands which, owing to their challenging geography, are not readily combinable with the mainland. I know that some Members, including the hon. Gentleman, wanted more exceptions to be made, but few if any argued that we should not have made the two exceptions that we did make. Although most of the argument in the House of Commons was in favour of further exceptions, we were reluctant to make many, because we believed that the general principle of equality was important.

There was a clear rationale for the Government’s proposal for 5% either side of the United Kingdom electoral quota. It is the closest to equality that we can achieve while allowing wards, which are themselves drawn with local factors in mind, to remain the building blocks of constituencies in England which account for the majority of seats. We believe that that strikes the right balance between the principle of more equally weighted votes at national level, and flexibility to allow account to be taken of specific circumstances at local level.

The amendment was proposed in a constructive spirit by Cross Benchers in the other place who wanted to ensure that exceptions were strictly limited, and it was debated at length. However, the Government disagree with the Lords, for the following reasons. First, we believe that however emphatic the drafting, attempts to limit the exercise of the discretion in exceptional circumstances are unlikely to be as successful as the proposers of the amendment hoped. Each exception would constitute a further precedent, and as the number of exceptions increases, so does the scope for argument. That is clear from the existing legislation. Boundary commissions are supposed to aim for equality, but because of all the other factors that they must take into account, the size of some constituencies varies by up to 50%.

[Andrew George]

I would be interested to know why the Government believe that they know best how to divide the country into constituencies. If the primary purpose is to reduce the number of Members of Parliament to no more than 600—a laudable aim, which I strongly support—would it not be sufficient for the Government to stick to that, and allow the Boundary Commission to do its work?

[Mr Harper]

No, I do not think that it would. The existing process causes a significant variation in the size of constituencies. Even if we set aside differences between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom, where there are different electoral quotas, we see within England significant differences between parliamentary constituencies that effectively mean that the weight of someone’s vote, in terms of the say that they have in the House, is significantly different from the weight of someone else’s vote. The Government do not think that that is right: we believe that constituencies should be of more equal size, so that votes are of more equal weight across the whole United Kingdom.

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[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend mentioned the number of votes. It is true that if someone genuinely resides in more than one location, rather than merely owning property in those locations—I know that this has been an issue in some parts of the country including Cornwall, and I urge returning officers who do not believe that someone genuinely resides somewhere to be firm about challenging that claim—even if they receive two ballot papers, they are entitled to vote only once. That is the point that I was trying to make to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). Currently it is possible to obtain more than one ballot paper, but it is a criminal offence to use more than one in the same election.

[Andrew George]

May I clarify a point? As the Minister said, we have debated the issue before. Does he mean “reside”—in which case people with three or four homes could presumably register in each of the places where they occasionally reside—or does he mean “primarily reside”? Surely it must be decided where people’s primary residence is, rather than where they occasionally reside. People with second homes—and third homes, and fourth homes—have a significant advantage over all other voters, in that they can choose where to deploy their vote most effectively.

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[Andrew George]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

I have a dazzling range of talent to choose from, but I have not heard yet from the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil).

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[Andrew George]

Given the nature of some of the questions that the Minister has been asked in the past few minutes, does he agree that perhaps there should be an opportunity to review the wisdom of going ahead on the basis that he is describing? Clearly many hon. Members are not fully aware that this inflexible, sanitised and homogenised approach will result in lines being drawn through constituencies where sitting Members believed that there would be no significant change to the boundaries. That will be happening across the board as a result of the very changes that he proposes.

[Mr Harper]

I recall distinctly that we had this debate in the House in the first place. The boundary commissions set out clearly in evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee that the reduction to 600 Members and the clearer hierarchy of rules would mean that there would be significant change across the country, except of course for the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar and one other Member, whose constituency boundaries will remain the same. Members were very clear about that at the beginning, so I do not think that that is a new piece of information.

Arguments have also been advanced that this extra bit of discretion would mean that parliamentary constituency boundaries would not need to cross county boundaries where the area is a little bit over or under the 10% band of tolerance, but the Government do not consider constituencies that cross local authority boundaries to be a problem in principle—certainly not for electors, who should be the focus of our concern. The 7.5% discretion rule would not solve the problem: it would just move the line somewhere else.

The Government’s proposal of allowing 5% on either side of the UK electoral quota has a clear rationale: it is the closest we can get to having fair and equally weighted votes for electors while still allowing local factors to be taken into account, using wards as the building blocks in most cases. We think that is the right judgment in principle and in practice. Our reasons for disagreeing with the amendments do not detract from the usefulness of this debate, which has been valuable, but we think that the principle of one vote, one value and having more equal-sized constituencies is right. The amendments compromise that principle and would cause practical problems for the review. That is why we oppose them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

On the hon. Gentleman’s point about the views of local people, when I visited the island myself and spoke to people there, they were very clear that they were not being prescriptive about whether they wanted one seat or two. The clear message that I got was that they did not want one that crossed the Solent. They did not say that they wanted only one seat—they were relaxed about whether they should have one or two. I believe that the nub of Lord Fowler’s point was about the nature of a cross-Solent seat, and our amendments in lieu reflect that.

[Andrew George]

There are, of course, other parts of the country, including Cornwall, where people recognise boundaries in precisely the same way as people on the Isle of Wight recognise their boundary on the Solent. Is the irony not lost on the Minister that when we have 650 seats in the House of Commons the Isle of Wight has one, but when the Government are seeking to reduce the number of seats in this House significantly, they double that representation?

[Mr Harper]

If the hon. Gentleman will let me finish my argument, which does not have very much—[Interruption.] No, I am just saying that I have not got to that bit yet. If he will let me, I will get to it.

The amendments that we have proposed in lieu of Lord Fowler’s amendments would resolve the problems that I have mentioned. The Boundary Commission would be required to create two constituencies wholly on the island. They would obviously be outside the range of 5% either side of the quota—otherwise we would not be having this debate in the first place—but each would be closer to the quota than a single island constituency would be. That would ensure that electors’ votes were closer in weight to those cast elsewhere in the UK, which we believe is important.

Our amendments also make consequential adjustments to the formula used to apportion seats to the constituent parts of the UK and to calculate the UK electoral quota, so as to be consistent with the approach taken to the other exceptions in the Bill. To pick up on a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing), who is not in her place, they will therefore provide the Boundary Commission for England with a clearer task than under the amendment made in the other place.

Parliamentary Representation

Debate between Mark Harper and Andrew George

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[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.