Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Mark Tami Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

That is certainly true. Should the boundary commissions start from the south of England and work their way upwards with their mathematical equations? When the process starts, how often should the boundary commissions allow themselves to use the 95% rule and how often they should force themselves to use the 105% rule? In addition, my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) made the good point that the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has always been constituted on the basis of its four constituent parts. The consideration has always been first that there should be X parliamentary seats for, say, Wales, and then those seats have been distributed within that area. That is a more constitutionally wise way to proceed.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend will be aware that in Wales we are looking at county council boundaries, which is causing all sorts of chaos. Some of my wards have registration levels of 70% to 75%, but in others registration levels are 95%. So the decisions will not be made on the true population levels of the seats.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is right. There are many reasons why electoral registration is so low in certain communities, and in some cases people do not want to register because they do not want to pay council tax—a residue from the original attempt to introduce the poll tax—and others might not want it to be known that they are living in a particular house. In some urban areas, with a highly mobile population, many people are not registered because the process of registering is so difficult. We make it virtually impossible for someone to register at any one time, and that is one of the problems that we need to overcome.

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[Chris Bryant]

In a sense, the hon. Lady makes my point for me. Registration in her constituency may be at 98%, but in many constituencies in the land it is closer to 80%. That is precisely the problem, because—to meet the point that the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing) made—those are the places where there will be an inequity of representation if we proceed solely on the basis of what is proposed in the Bill.

[Mark Tami]

I totally agree with the hon. Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler). However, that is the point: the job can be done, but too many local authorities are interested only in doing a tick-box exercise, as if to say, “We sent the forms, we sent them again, we’ve sent someone round, and no one has replied,” despite the fact that everyone knows that a number of people are living in the property concerned. However, as far as the local authority is concerned, it has done what it wants to do, but it is not prepared to put in the extra work to get those people on to the register.

[Chris Bryant]

That is true. Most local authorities are having to make fairly substantial cuts at the moment, and my anxiety is that they will find their electoral registration budgets all too easy to cut, because people will think, “Well, you know, what’s the real benefit of that?” From my perspective, if we are to achieve equity—which, broadly speaking, means achieving the equalisation of seats, but not absolute equalisation, to allow for where the Boundary Commission has an overriding concern, whether about a geographical community or the splitting of wards, which I hope all hon. Members would think was more complicated—then we need to change what the Bill currently provides for.

The Government propose a timetable of less than three years, which is artificially quick, even under the Bill’s own terms. I do not see why the timetable has to be three years. According to clause 8(3), future reviews will be held on a five-yearly basis, but the initial, dramatic redrawing of boundaries is being tracked even faster than this apparent ideal. Why? Is the reason that the Government are trying to minimise the risks of the results being made out of date by interim changes in the population? There are significant parts of the country where population changes are moving swiftly. Is that why the Government wish to move so fast? I suspect that that cannot be the reason, or else they would be proposing that three years should always be the period for boundary reviews.

I suspect that the truth is far less respectable. As the Deputy Prime Minister himself admitted in the House in July, the real reason for this rushed process is political convenience. He said that

“we need to start with the work of the boundary review as soon as possible in order that it can be concluded in the timetable that we have set out. That is why the boundary review will be based on the electoral register that will be published at the beginning of December this year.”—[Official Report, 5 July 2010; Vol. 513, c. 37.]

That is a circular argument.

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[Andrew George]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I argue further that any Member of Parliament who does their job properly should be seeking out those silent voices rather than waiting for them to come to them. MPs should recognise that people who are not registering are probably not articulating themselves in other ways, so they should be finding ways of ensuring that their needs are properly articulated.

[Mark Tami]

Some local authorities are clearly better than others at raising registration levels. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we should learn from those that are achieving much higher levels of registration? Some have improved from quite low levels, whereas others are more interested in doing the absolute minimum just to say, “Well, we have done what we are required to do.”

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[Paul Blomfield]

I was not aware of that. I am grateful to have been informed and I am not at all surprised. As I said, in Sheffield Hallam, where there is only 4% under-registration, we begin to see the real nature of what lies behind the Bill.

I must disagree with the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing)—this is not just about those who are eligible to vote. Significant numbers of people who are not eligible to vote still need the support of their Member of Parliament. That should be taken account of when determining constituency size because we are there to provide a voice for all those in our constituency.

[Mark Tami]

Does my hon. Friend agree that even when one or two people in a household are on the register, one often finds during elections that there are four, five or six people in the house who are eligible to vote but not on the register?

[Paul Blomfield]

I accept that point entirely. On the calculation of unregistered households in my constituency, I estimate that there are about 25,000 people who are eligible to vote but who would not be counted into the constituency on the basis of a strict redefinition of boundaries by the electoral register. I think that we should—

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[Mr Heath]

There we have the paucity of the argument for the defence. This is not about the historic and cultural value of the principality of Wales. I am a great fan of Wales and I always have been. It has a very important part to play in the United Kingdom, but I return to my point that I see no reason why electors in Wales should have more of a say in this, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, than electors in any other part of the country. That is the principle before us today.

[Mark Tami]

The Parliamentary Secretary was asked a straightforward question earlier. If he believes in equalisation, why will two seats in Scotland be treated differently?

[Chris Ruane]

Answer that.