Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Owen Smith Excerpts

Monday 25th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

This is entirely speculative, but it might be something to do with the Bill acting as the Araldite that holds the coalition together. The fact is, however, that the Deputy Prime Minister—or Sandie Shaw, as we normally know her, or him, now—is so Araldited to the Prime Minister that there is probably no need for the Bill to be introduced in precisely this way.

There should have been pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. I am sure that a Joint Committee would have said that it should not have been constituted in this way, and that it was inappropriate to try to foist combined polls on Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland when they had expressly said that they did not want a combination of a referendum and their own elections, especially in Northern Ireland, where on the same day there will be local elections as well as Assembly elections. I am pretty certain that such a Committee would have found that inappropriate.

Indeed, we can be pretty confident of that because the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which is chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), made it absolutely clear that it believed that it had not had enough time to consider the Bill before it suddenly had its Second Reading. The Select Committee had only five days in which to read the Bill and to get constitutional experts to talk to its members and provide evidence. Those witnesses themselves thought that it was inappropriate that such haste was being adopted.

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

May I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the report from the Welsh Affairs Committee that came out today? No doubt he will already have read it in detail. It reaches precisely the same conclusion as he has drawn. The Committee has a Government majority, but it nevertheless concluded that the Bill was being railroaded through with undue haste, and with completely insufficient scrutiny by this House. It also believed that it would have a significant constitutional impact on Wales. Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a disgrace?

[Chris Bryant]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend if he is suggesting that the Committee’s report is a disgrace, because it is excellent in highlighting the implications for Wales of the Government’s proposals on constitutional reform. But my neighbourly Friend makes a good point: the Committee is not comprised of rabid left-wingers—or, for that matter, entirely of members of the Labour party—and those who voted on this matter, those who turned up, were predominantly Conservatives. In fact, one of them is now a Parliamentary Private Secretary. Many of us deprecate the fact that there are PPSs sitting on Select Committees, but I note that the PPS who sits on this one chose to absent himself from the vote. I can presume only that that was because he agreed with the findings of the Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith) is absolutely right to say that the Committee makes it clear that there has not been adequate scrutiny of the Bill, particularly in regard to Wales. It also makes the wider point about the amount of time that has been allowed in general.