Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Michelle Donelan Excerpts

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

[Mr Mahmood]

I have taken the hon. Gentleman’s intervention; he must now sit down.

[Michelle Donelan (Chippenham) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Mahmood]

I am not going to take any more silly interventions from Conservative Members. They must realise what this means to my communities. This is about protecting those communities and building on the unity and bonds that have been formed. Conservative Members do not understand that, and neither does the Boundary Commission. I am passionate about keeping this unity, because of the work we have done over the last 16 and a half years, with the police, the community and many different sorts of organisations, to pull that together. [Interruption.] Conservative Members find this funny, but it is not funny for those people who have had huge numbers of issues to deal with. Thankfully, over the last 16 years, working with these organisations and the police, we have managed to address them. We want to continue to hold the constituency together, and support those people.

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[Mr Mahmood]

The hon. Gentleman cannot have been listening to me: my point is about the connection between the communities that we have, and we want to keep them together. [Interruption.] They will not be together under the boundary changes, because they will be divided between two different local authorities.

[Michelle Donelan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Mahmood]

No, I am sorry, but I must conclude.

What I am asking for is an understanding of what my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton wants to do. It is important to keep such communities together. The Boundary Commission had a duty to do that— to look after communities and people. We are here discussing this matter because the Government have not provided proper registrations for such communities. If they had done so, we would not be looking at boundary changes. I commend my hon. Friend for introducing this Bill.

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[Andrew Gwynne]

I will come on to those points, because the hon. Gentleman will find that the cost of politics is already being cut in a number of ways. The duty of this House is to ensure that the Government are held to account, and my concern is that the proposal to reduce the number lessens scrutiny on the Government of the day. That might not be a Conservative Government, and I would hope that the hon. Gentleman would want to preserve his rights, when he sits on the Opposition Benches, to hold a future Labour Government to account.

The lack of clarity from the Government has concerned many across the Chamber. The Government have stated that the boundary review is proceeding in accordance with legislation, but, according to three senior sources quoted in The Times, the plan is likely to be scrapped due to a lack of support from the Conservative Benches—[Interruption.] I hear “Hear, hears”. Perhaps this will be the latest casualty following the Prime Minister’s failure to win a majority in June.

If the review is going to be ditched, I say to the Government: stop wasting public money. This is a charade. Let’s ditch the review now and start a fresh one based on principles we can all agree on. Suggestions that this is being done to cut the cost of politics are red herrings. The claimed savings of £13 million a year are dwarfed by the £34 million annual cost of the 260 extra peers appointed by the former Prime Minister. Can the Government seriously talk about cutting the cost of politics after offering £1 billion to the Democratic Unionist party? The contradictions in the Government’s arguments are so blatant it is insulting. This Bill proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton would also see potential savings by requiring the boundary commissions to report every 10 years rather than every five.

The Government claim that a reduction will bring the number of MPs in line with that in similar sized legislatures. International comparisons should indeed play an important role in policy making. However, by cutting the number of MPs and making their constituencies bigger and more remote, the Government endanger the MP-constituency link, which is envied by democracies across the world.

[Michelle Donelan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andrew Gwynne]

I will not give way again, because many Members want to speak.

Cutting 50 MPs also presents a crisis of scrutiny, a concern raised by the Electoral Reform Society. Under the current proposals, the reduction would be made entirely from the Back Benches—the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), can shake her head, but there are no proposals to reduce the number of Ministers. That would only increase the Executive dominance of Parliament and undermine the influence of scrutiny from the Back Benches.

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[Dr Drew]

As someone who has stood in seven parliamentary elections and knows his area rather better than the hon. Gentleman, I will take that as a slight rather than a positive intervention.

Location matters. It matters because geography matters, ties to an area matter, local authority representation matters, and the relationship with other constituencies matters. I could not represent any other area. No other area would have me! I am quite simply the MP for Stroud, the area I have always stood for. I would never stand for anywhere else because I believe that that is what I am best at, and I think I have done a reasonable job. I have been elected four times and lost three times, so, hey, I am ahead at the moment. It did not help my predecessor that in preparation for the boundary changes he moved his constituency office. That went down rather badly in the constituency and may not have helped his cause when we stood against each other again, as we have done on a number of occasions, for election earlier this year. Geographical representation has always had a stronger hold on the way in which we decide on the electoral relationships than purely the numbers. If we want to do that, we might as well go to the Soviet system, where the constituencies are not even named—there is just a number and a way in which certain people are put in place. I believe in local representation and I will always argue that case.

As we have heard, in 2015 the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee savaged the Government’s approach to reducing the number of MPs. It argued very strongly that we should not just look at the numbers and proposed a 10% variance. I would still adhere to that, because I do not mind representing more people. I would rather that the people I represent—

[Michelle Donelan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Drew]

I will not give way now, because other people want to speak.

I would rather that the people in the district also have a relationship to the constituency. If that means that I have more electors, so be it. That can be reflected in some additional help with case work and so on. It is important that we tie these relationships together, and anything that undermines them is a bad thing.

[Michelle Donelan]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Dr Drew]

Very briefly.

[Michelle Donelan]

Does the hon. Gentleman concede, though, that it is impossible for an MP to give the same service as another MP who has half the number of constituents, and that he is actually doing down our democracy by suggesting that we continue to increase the variation between constituencies?

[Dr Drew]

The honest answer is no. When I talk to colleagues who represent urban constituencies, it is clear that their casework, which consists of much more on the immigration front than mine would, will take them an awful lot longer than I would spend on many of the cases that I have to deal with. That does not mean that I end up with an easier road; I just think it is very important that we understand that constituencies have different profiles and we should reflect that.

I want to bring my remarks to a speedy conclusion, because I—

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[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I will try to ask the right question: why is the only measure that the Government are pushing to reform our disfigured electoral system one that will give them a numerical advantage? I should declare a vested interest, in that my constituency will disappear if the changes go through, and I do have a little regret at the fact that that will interrupt my promising parliamentary career just as I am beginning to get the hang of how this place works. However, that is not why I am making a speech.

It is revealing that the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin), had to harp back to before 2010, when he became its Chair, to be able to cite an example of a useful reform. I have been on the Committee for three Parliaments, and I know that the reputation of Parliament is as it was described by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan). That is the crucial point—it is what this debate is about. The few people who are not looking at the coverage of the royal couple in Nottingham this morning but are watching our soporific exchanges here might be surprised at our self-indulgence, but our reputation fell to rock bottom during the expenses scandal and it is now worse—it is subterranean—and that is what we should address.

We must address the weaknesses in our system. If we want every vote to count, we can do that through a system of proportional representation. We need a system that is fair and through which the views of the people are represented. In two Parliaments during my time in the House, the Conservative party won 20% of the vote in Wales but did not get a single one of the 40 seats for Wales, which is outrageous. If there was a PR system in the United States, we would have been spared a President who behaves like a petulant child, and we would not have had to express our anger in the way we did yesterday. That shows the major weakness in the system.

Other scandals are certain to take place. What happened to the system for disciplining Ministers? Under the system set up by Gordon Brown, two Ministers were called in by the adviser on Ministers’ interests. There was someone in place to do such a job, in accordance with the ministerial code, but since the Conservative Government have taken over, that post has been subsumed into other roles, and people are judged not by the adviser whose job it is, but by civil servants and others.

As has happened in some cases, there is now a process of absolution by resignation. Two Ministers have resigned to conceal what they were accused of doing. One was accused of having meetings with Mossad outside his ministerial role, and another was accused of considering giving international aid money to the Israeli army. Those two people lost their jobs, but they were not disgraced in the way that they should have been if the public had been informed. We had the case of two Ministers giving £3 million to a charity that was favoured by the previous Prime Minister.

[Michelle Donelan]

I am a little concerned that we are getting off the important topic under discussion—I would like to get back to it. The hon. Gentleman said that he wants to make votes count much more. Does he concede that the equalisation of constituencies would do that?

[Paul Flynn]

I accept entirely the logic behind the Bill and its arithmetic—I am not arguing about that. I am saying only that a massive programme of reform is urgent and essential. I was making a point about the two Ministers who threw away £3 million by giving it to a dodgy charity that went broke three days later. They were never called to account by the Prime Minister, but that should have happened. We must reform that system. We must get reform in the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments as well. We have a system whereby Ministers, former generals and others can—