Peter Bone
Main Page: Peter Bone (Independent - Wellingborough)Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill
Peter Bone ExcerptsFriday 18th November 2016
(8 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill 2016-17 Read Hansard Text
Pat Glass
Clearly the right hon. Gentleman was not listening very carefully to what I said, because I started by saying that the world is changing and politics is changing. What happened in the previous Parliament is not necessarily right for what is happening now. I also point out that the current Government have created 250 additional peers just down the corridor. Is that what he means by fewer politicians?
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
The hon. Lady is starting a most powerful speech on a very important subject. Does she agree that the answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who was of course at the heart of Government, is that we want more MPs and less government?
Mr Harper
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, let me start to deal with the Bill, as I said I would. I shall deal specifically with the proposals set out by the hon. Member for North West Durham, and I want to make a bit of progress before giving way to my hon. Friend.
The first point raised by the hon. Member for North West Durham was about the number of MPs, and I think she completely failed to answer my question, which was to what question was the answer 50 more Members of Parliament. She did not tackle the cost of her proposals. The current law says that the number of MPs will fall from 650 to 600. Increasing that number by 50 would come at an estimated cost—I think she alluded to this in her remarks—of about £10 million to £12 million a year. That means about £60 million across the Parliament. I heard no proposals from the hon. Lady about how that was to be paid for or any reason why the proposal was a good one at all.
Mr Harper
I do not agree with my hon. Friend. The figure is based on how much MPs claim at the moment and how much we are paid in salary. What my hon. Friend needs to remember is that there is currently a massive disparity between MPs in Welsh constituencies, for example, who have fewer than 50,000 electors, and others. Those Welsh Members are already in a part of the United Kingdom where a huge amount of domestic policy areas are dealt with not by them at all, but by Members of the Welsh Assembly. They get the same level of support as my hon. Friend, yet he has to serve a much larger constituency in terms of electors—and he serves them very diligently indeed. In England, there is not a devolved Administration, so English MPs have to cover the full range of domestic policy areas. I think it would be perfectly possible to deal with the fewer number of MPs without seeing a significant increase in the expenses budget for each of us. Those MPs who currently have very small constituencies will have to deal with no more constituents than many of us already have to deal with.
Mr Harper
Let me first deal with the seemingly reasonable points about the House of Lords made by the hon. Member for North West Durham. She made a couple of points. First—big tick here—I was, of course, the Minister responsible in the last Parliament for securing a much smaller, democratically elected and less costly House of Lords. I received a great deal of support, but not from Labour Members. If Labour Members had given their support to the programme motion that we would have brought forward, we would have been able to reform the House of Lords and have a democratically elected Chamber. That did not take place.
Mr Bone
We cannot allow this myth to carry on. The Second Reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill got the biggest majority of that Parliament. The fact is that the Government did not move the programme motion, so we do not know what would have happened. It should absolutely not have been programmed, as it was a constitutional Bill that should have been gone through line by line. Any parliamentarian such as my great right hon. Friend should have supported that.
Mr Harper
I will answer my hon. Friend’s question, but not at length, as I do not want to try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend is right that Second Reading was well supported, but we had clear indications that the programme motion would not have been supported by Opposition Members, so the Government—quite rightly, in view of all the other challenges we faced—were not prepared to risk other legislation not getting through Parliament as a result. We were not able to make progress.
What the hon. Member for North West Durham needs to recognise, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) said, is that the cost of the House of Lords has reduced since 2010—it has fallen, not increased. Since last year’s general election, there has been a net change in the size of the House of Lords of only 14 peers. What the hon. Lady forgets is that Members of the House of Lords are now able to retire and that a disproportionate number of those retiring are Conservative peers. It is true that there was a significant increase in the 2010 Parliament, but that was, of course, under a coalition Government, and a significant number of the new peers were Liberal Democrats.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
It is a great honour and a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn); I spent 13 years living in his constituency trying to get rid of him with absolutely no success whatsoever. While we hardly agree on anything, he is undoubtedly a leading parliamentarian, and I am pleased, in the best possible sense, that he is now back on the Back Benches and not constrained by being on the Labour Front Bench.
I congratulate the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) on choosing this most important subject to be debated on one of the 13 private Member’s Bill days we have in this House, and congratulate all the Members who have made the effort to attend today. I hope that we will get a Division on this Bill and the House will decide one way or the other.
I also congratulate the hon. Lady on the tone in which she introduced the Bill. I thought it was the right tone. There are party political issues, as the hon. Member for Newport West said, and I will touch on them, but the hon. Lady got to the heart of the matter: this is about Parliament and scrutiny. I did spend a brief moment in her constituency during the EU referendum campaign, and it was a really pleasant constituency. I met people from many different parties, and it is a great shame from her constituency point of view that she has decided not to stand again.
I am also following another parliamentarian of great skill, my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who I thought when he first came to this House was definitely destined to become a great parliamentarian, which he is. He has, unfortunately, been contaminated by becoming a Government Minister, but now he is back, although he has not quite lost that contamination. In a couple of years, he will be back supporting Parliament and not worrying about the Executive.
I thought I would look back to how this all started. This was part of a backroom deal done when the coalition came to power. The Liberal Democrats wanted a vote on changing the parliamentary system, and the Conservative party wanted to equalise the seats, not because it really believed that was fair—although it is fair and the right thing to do—but because it was thought it would give the Conservatives more seats. That is the truth of the matter. To put the other side of the coin, I should say that there are many sitting on the Opposition Benches who are interested in this for reasons of self-interest, too. But I bet most of the Members in the House today are here for the fundamental issue of Parliament versus Government.
Sadly, I cannot see a single Liberal Democrat in the House today, including the former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg), who—I am sorry to have to correct my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean—was the Minister who introduced the Second Reading of the Bill that started all this. I thought it would be interesting to see how the hon. Member for North West Durham voted on Second Reading of that Bill, which took place on 6 September 2010. She voted against the proposals. I then thought I would check who else voted against the proposals. There was the then Member for Northampton South and my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Sir William Cash), for Christchurch (Mr Chope), for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) and for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner). So the Division was not entirely along party lines. There were people who were prepared to vote against, including, to their great credit, many from the Democratic Unionist party.
This issue goes back, therefore, to something the hon. Member for Newport West touched upon: the balance between the Executive and Parliament. Since what we might loosely call the expenses scandal, Parliament has been getting more powers back. We have had a Speaker who has put Parliament first and championed it, we have had Select Committees, and we have had other movements in that direction, including the establishment of the Backbench Business Committee. All the moves have been to take power away from the Executive and give it to Parliament. This move, however, completely reverses that trend.
I am all in favour of broadly equal-sized seats. That is fair, within a threshold, and I would be happy for the Committee scrutinising this Bill to look at that issue. The hon. Member for Newport West made the point that there were exceptions for certain geographical areas. The previous proposals referred to the Isle of Wight and to what I call the Western Isles, which had two constituencies. I think that that makes sense, and we should consider whether that could be expanded for certain constituencies—but I want to get back to the Executive.
The Electoral Reform Society has said that if there were a general election under the proposed new arrangements and the same proportion of MPs were to be elected as there are now, 43% of Conservative MPs would be on the payroll. That cannot possibly be right. We should not all be here to be in government. There are two equal roles for an MP, one of which is to scrutinise Bills that go through this House. Ever since the Blair years, the Bills that have come to this House have been programmed. Sometimes we do not even debate certain clauses of a Bill, and it is actually the other place that does the proper scrutiny. The elected Members here should have the time to carry out that scrutiny.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend has reminded us of that previous debate. Does he agree that one of the reasons that some of us could not support the Government on that occasion was that they would not answer the straight question as to whether there would be a pro rata reduction in the size of the Executive if there were a reduction in the number of MPs. The Government would not answer that, saying that it was premature to ask the question.
Mr Bone
I remember my hon. Friend making that point, with which I entirely agreed.
Things have got worse. We now have more Government Departments, and rightly so, given that we are coming out of the European Union, but I guess that we are also going to have 60% more laws to look at. The argument for reducing the number of MPs seems to be false, especially as we are getting rid of 70-odd MEPs. Also, the Government cannot possibly claim that they are doing this on the basis of cost. We have only to look at how much more money is being spent on Spads. Even during the Blair years it was only a few million, but it is something like £9 million now.
Mrs Sheryll Murray
Does my hon. Friend agree, however, that this is also a matter of fairness and fair representation for all our constituents?
Mr Bone
I absolutely agree that as a matter of fairness we should try to equalise the seats, but it is absolutely wrong to reduce the number of MPs and to say that it is being done on the basis of cost. Democracy cannot have a cost put on it. We could of course have a dictator—that would be very cheap! But that is not how it works. In fact, the Government have tended to go a little way towards being a dictatorship. We have had sofa decisions that were not made in Cabinet, and at times it has been really difficult for us in this House to vote on certain issues because of these wretched programme motions. My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering and I spent a lot of our time during the coalition Government voting against programme motions on every occasion, because we had said in our manifesto that that was what we were going to do.
The former Prime Minister made a great speech on Parliamentary sovereignty, and if those proposals had been enforced, MPs would have been encouraged to have a free vote in Committees—although the Government would have been able to change things on Report—and we would have had more open debates without programme motions. That all fell by the wayside, however, because the Government do not really want that to happen; and, to be honest, the shadow Government do not want it either. That is why we have never made progress on that. Hon. Members will remember that the timetable for this House was going to be run by a parliamentary business Committee within two years of us coming into power. I remember talking to the then Chief Whip, who said that that would happen over his dead body, and of course it never did happen. So please do not talk to me about manifesto commitments.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
May I take the hon. Gentleman back to his point about the number of Members of Parliament who are on the payroll? Any Government—those whom I support and those whom I oppose—will have not only Members who are on the payroll but Members who want to be on the payroll. Reducing the number of MPs to 600 will inevitably mean fewer independent-minded MPs. Those on both our Front Benches would probably welcome that, but we should not do so. It will be a retrograde step, to say the least, if that happens, but it seems inevitable that it will.
Mr Bone
The independent Member is entirely right. Of course, I have to be really careful about what I say today because this could ruin my chances of getting on to the Front Bench. This is a serious and important matter, however. I say gently that there has been a tendency for some Members to come to this House not because they want to be Members of Parliament but because they want to be Ministers. They are not interested in the role of scrutiny. We cannot scrutinise the Government properly if nearly half those on our side are on the payroll. Equally, there will be Opposition Members who are on the “payroll”, even though they do not get paid, unless they are Whips. I have never understood why Whips get paid. We should do away with that, but that is another issue.
The role of scrutiny is really important. I have seen in a recent email that about six Select Committees have vacancies for Conservative Members. If we are having problems filling Select Committees now, what will it be like when there are 50 fewer MPs? Those 50 MPs will not, by their nature, have been in the Executive. As my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, there are absolutely no proposals to reduce the size of the Executive in parallel with the reduction in the number of MPs, although there should be.
I want to deal with the question of timing. In my view, it is more than likely that we will have a general election in May, if not before. Such an election would of course be fought on the current boundaries. The argument that we have to get all these boundary changes in place before 2020 is therefore nonsense. Also, it is not good for a Conservative to say that something is out of date just because it is 20 years old. It might be time to start looking at it if it is 120 years out of date, but not after just 20 years.
I want to speak briefly about something that I feel passionately about, which is the other side of our role. We spend a lot of our time here in Parliament from Monday to Thursday—or Monday to Friday if it is one of the 13 weeks in which the House sits on a Friday—doing exactly what we are doing today. The rest of the time, we are looking after our constituents. I have been looking back, and I can tell the House that in the last 100 years, we have never had fewer than 615 Members of Parliament. Way back then, however, they did not have the constituency workload that we have now. I am not complaining about this; constituency work is a very important part of our role. For example, my Listening to Wellingborough and Rushden campaign generates an enormous amount of work. Most Members hold a surgery every week, and my estimate is that I receive at least 1,000 emails, letters and phone calls a week. We have a limited number of staff to help us with that. That workload is going to increase because we are getting rid of MEPs, and it will also increase if we reduce the number of MPs and make the constituencies larger.
I also want to look at how busy Members of Parliament are and what we have to put up with. I am going to touch on an area that does not get a lot of coverage because we do not like to talk about it, for very sensible reasons—namely, the question of security. I doubt that there is a Member in this House who has not been threatened in the last few years. We have seen the terrible death of a colleague. Other colleagues have been attacked. Only recently, I had death threats. My wife has had death threats. The police have intervened. In my first 11 years in this House, I had to dial 999 once from my constituency office because we were worried. Since the referendum, I have had to call 999 three times. I had someone outside chained to the gates of Parliament who had threatened me. I have had two bullet holes—admittedly from air pellets—put in the windows of my office. I have had my house attacked. I have had the office windows smashed. The vile stuff that we get on Twitter is unbelievable. One of the worst things that happened is that some months ago, there was a picture of my youngest son being executed by Isis. They had actually taken another child’s photo and mocked it up, but the police rang me up to say, “Where is your son?” I said, “Well, I think he’s at school”, and they said, “Well, you’d better check.”
We have to put up with all that. We have to have contact with our constituents, and I would not change any of that. Some of us will be getting enhanced security, and the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority is doing its best to help with that. We have to deal with that sort of stuff. We have to deal with constituents’ problems. Some of them are just run of the mill things where we can help out. A lot of the stuff we deal with relates to local government. A lot of it is social care issues, which this House really needs to look at from a bipartisan point of view.
Some of the stuff we deal with, however, is exceptionally serious. I can remember at least two occasions where we campaigned on such matters in this House. As a result of one of those, thanks to Gordon Brown, the NHS position on some treatment changed, and a little boy who would have died got a few years extra life out of it. That sort of thing is worth while, but it is time-consuming. The fact is that if we are going to put more work on ourselves because of leaving the EU while at the same time reducing the number of MPs, we will not do the scrutiny properly, and I am afraid that our service to our constituents will go down. I feel passionately about that, and that is why we should not reduce the number of MPs.
I will tell the House about the effect that the current reforms will have in Northamptonshire. Under the scheme, we are entitled to 6.5 MPs. It is proposed that the seat of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) goes all the way up to the borders of Leicester. There is no logic in that and no consistency. My seat will be divided between the constituencies of four different MPs, who will all be representing one council. It does not make any sense. The Boundary Commission proposals move people around willy-nilly. I would have 6,000 coming in from the Corby constituency, 3,000 going into Kettering, another 3,000 going into Northampton South and the northern villages going into the new Daventry seat, which will go up into Leicestershire. If we had the same number of MPs, Northamptonshire would be entitled to seven MPs and we would not have those problems.
I know that there are party political issues about numbers. I urge all Members to put that to one side and to think about Parliament, the Executive and why we are here. I urge everyone to support the Bill. There obviously will be issues that will need to be looked at in Committee. If the hon. Member for North West Durham would like me to, I volunteer to serve on the Committee.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
I should begin by saying that, like the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who introduced the Bill, I have no personal interest in this, because I, too, will be standing down at the next election.
I should say to my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) that doubtless I am much contaminated by six years in government and 18 years on the Front Bench, but I nevertheless believe it makes sense for us to consider these issues as though we had a population that needs to be served by a system of government that works in the interests of that population. We should not be thinking about this simply in terms of the House of Commons, which is a matter of more concern to many people in this place than it is to many of our citizens, who want to be well governed but who do not know much about and do not much like the workings of the House of Commons. The House of Commons certainly should not think of itself as a model to the world, because, as the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) rightly said, there is currently much scepticism about the organs of our democracy.
Sir Oliver Letwin
As my hon. Friend knows from previous conversations, I do take that view and have done so, uniquely in the Conservative party, I believe, for about the past 40 years. I shall briefly touch on that at a much later stage in my remarks, but for now I simply wish to observe that it is important that we think about this issue as grown-ups who are trying to look after the interests of our fellow citizens, not as people who happen to be sitting on these green Benches trying to look after the interests of the House of Commons, which is an artefact of no value whatsoever unless it is part of the good governance of our country in the interests of its citizens.
This is the first time I have attended a debate on a Friday for very many years, and I was surprised to discover that I was quite interested in the nature of the debate. It seems that, from time to time, there have actually been some arguments made—that is a rare thing to hear in the House of Commons. In principle, three kinds of arguments have been going on. The first is whether equalisation is the aim of the current Act governing the Boundary Commission activity or whether it is about gerrymandering. The second is about whether 600 is a better number of MPs than 650. The third is the question raised by the hon. Member for Newport West: is it right to make incremental change in pursuit of incremental improvements when large questions about the constitution as a whole also need to be addressed? I want to discuss each of those points in turn.
First, I turn to the question of whether the motive for and effect of the current Act of Parliament governing the Boundary Commission’s activities is equalisation or gerrymandering. As I would have expected, my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) dealt very effectively with the fact that the current Boundary Commission review does not include reference to the people who registered at the last moment. I was the Minister who brought to the House arrangements to ensure that people who registered at the very last moment were able to vote in the referendum, and it is certainly right that they should have been registered. My right hon. Friend dealt very well with whether the fact that they registered after the Boundary Commission figures were produced affects the outcome of the review to any significant extent.
However, we do not need to rely on my right hon. Friend’s view on that because the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David), who interjected from the Labour Benches, blew the whole argument out of the water when he quoted, quite sensibly, the Library figures. They showed that the total effect, even on an analysis less favourable to the argument I am making than that which was provided by the independent source for my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean—the House of Commons Library analysis—the total net difference is two extra in London and one fewer in the south-west and in Northern Ireland. There is no significant distributional impact.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Actually, no. With his typical brilliance, the right hon. Gentleman is alluringly enticing us to avoid noticing that there would be a reduced number of Scottish Members altogether in this House. As his party currently controls almost all the Scottish seats, it is to his advantage to maintain the number of Scottish Members and, indeed, a system in which Scottish electors are typically over-represented by the number of their Members of Parliament, almost all of whom are from the SNP.
As I say, I do not actually believe that that is the material question. The material question is whether having the current set of proposals being operated by the Boundary Commission would equalise better than not having them, the answer to which is clearly yes. Is it right to equalise more rather than less? The Opposition and the Government appear to agree that that is right, and even my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough agrees that it is right. Are we going to equalise more or less if we proceed with this Bill rather than the current arrangements? The answer is clearly that we are more likely to equalise better if we proceed with the current arrangements rather than the Bill.
I want to turn now to the second question, about the number of Members of Parliament. There was a very interesting contribution from my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough, and the Opposition spokesman made some echoing remarks about it. Both of them were really trying to argue that 650 is a better number—incidentally, I do not suggest that either of them suggested that there was a perfection about 650—than 600 for the purposes of doing what they each described as holding the Government to account. That is obviously a serious argument, in the sense that in a House of Commons in which 99.9% of its Members were on the payroll, the 0.1% of its Members who were not on the payroll would have some difficulty holding the 99.9% to account.
I do not personally believe that the difference between 650 and 600—or, while we are at it, 600 and 550, or 600 and 500—makes terribly much difference to the effectiveness with which this House is able to hold the Government to account. My experience is that one good MP, one effective Select Committee or one Opposition spokesman who knows what they are doing can hold a Government to account very powerfully, and a very large number of incompetent and inadequate people sitting on these Benches can wholly fail to hold Governments to account. I do not believe there is any clear relationship, still less any systemic relationship, between the number of people entitled to sit on these green Benches—most of whom, mostly, are not here—and the amount of actual, effective scrutiny of Government. It is quality, not quantity, that affects the scrutiny of Government.
It seems to me that we should address a different question in looking at whether 650 is a better number than 600 or vice versa—of course I accept that neither is a perfect number, and there is no absolute standard in terms of the right numbers. I think there is a certain myopia on this. We have to open our eyes and ask ourselves just how we look to the world. People have mentioned the other place, which, incidentally, I think is ludicrously structured altogether and is definitely in need of reform. Indeed, I tried very hard to get it reformed into a proper elected Chamber, and I shall go on arguing that case, because it is the only thing that will save that part of our democracy and actually create some checks and balances in our system. People have observed that the other place is now the largest legislature other than that in China, which obviously has more than 1 billion people in it. That may be true, but there is another legislature in this country that is almost as large—it is here. We have 650 Members of Parliament seeking to be the primary source of legislation, if I can put it that way, for 60 million people. In the United States, there are 100 Senators, who are counterpoised against, roughly speaking, the same number of representatives as we have in this House. If we add the two numbers in the United States together, the total is not that much greater than our 650, but those people are looking after the interests of 300 million people, instead of 60 million people.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I will, but let me just anticipate what I think my hon. Friend might be about to say. It used to be said that the reason that is appropriate is that the states in the United States have so much power. It is no longer the case—this is very much the point raised by various of my hon. Friends—that we live in a wholly centralised system; we live in something that is getting very much closer to being a federal system, in which vast amounts of the power that used to reside in this place have been devolved in one way or another to Administrations elsewhere, and more of that is going on all the time.
We are vastly overweight; there are many more of us MPs per head of population than in most other serious democracies. I am not aware of any Member of Parliament who could not handle some more constituents. Now, I accept that it is more difficult for those who live in and represent seats that are much larger. My own seat is middling, in the sense that it is 400 square miles. I do not have the advantage that urban MPs have of representing a very small patch, but I am not, of course, challenged in the way that some of our Scottish colleagues, for example, are with their vast seats, and I do accept, therefore, the reason for some exceptions. However, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, that issue was debated when we moved from 650 to 600, and a balanced judgment was struck about creating enough exceptions to try to deal with those who face particular geographical problems.
Mr Bone
My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech, which appears to be plausible, until we listen to the substance. He is talking about the United States of America, where there is a wholly different system. There is the split of powers, and, of course, the states have their rights. The comparison is completely unfair, and my right hon. Friend might want to look at look at the point again.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I think that is the nearest thing to a compliment I have ever received from my hon. Friend, and it is probably the nearest I am ever going to get, so I shall celebrate it quietly. I do not accept the second part of his argument—the first part I have already dealt with. He asserts that, in the absence of a separation of powers, which, as I have said, I would actually prefer to see, the danger from the numbers of MPs on the payroll, or the crypto-payroll of the Opposition, is that nobody is really holding anybody to account. Actually, the dynamic of this House of Commons—one can see it sitting here or standing here right now—is a dynamic of dialectic. The principal form of the holding to account of the Government of the day resides on the Opposition Front Bench, not, I regret to say this, with my Back-Bench colleagues, among whom I now number myself. It is the quality of the Front-Bench arguments from the Opposition that principally challenges the Government of the day. This House is designed to reflect that, and that is the reason we do not sit in a circle, but opposite one another. That is behind the whole structure of debate in this House. Indeed, the timetable of this House is organised on that principle. If my hon. Friend’s charmingly nostalgic, although never-existing picture of a House of Commons that was holding Governments to account from the Back Benches were accurate, we would not recently have introduced a bit of Backbench Business; we would have substituted Opposition days, of which there are many, with Back-Bench days.
Sir Oliver Letwin
My hon. Friend would be very much in favour of that, but that is not how this place works or has ever worked. This place works in terms of the dialectic between Opposition and Government. It is a very powerful dialectic. It reaches certain crucial moments each week at question times. It reaches its most crucial moment at Prime Minister’s questions, and that is the jousting match—often, alas, not terribly illuminating, but nevertheless—that causes the Government to be on their toes most, and that forces Prime Ministers to find out what is going on in their own Governments and to defend them across the Dispatch Box. That is much more powerful as a form of holding people to account than anything that can be done from the Back Benches, and it is nothing to do with the numbers. So I reject the argument that the numbers have any significant impact on the ability of this House to hold the Government to account.
Sir Oliver Letwin
I agree that at a time when, regrettably, there is a rather weak Opposition, and when there are, as it happens, many very enterprising Government Back Benchers, not all of whom are willing to go along with everything, we will get cases in which the Government Back Benchers do perform a very important role in holding the Government to account. However, that is due to the quality and not the quantity of the contributions that are made by my hon. Friends on the Back Benches. We could have hundreds of lemons sitting here and not having the slightest effect on the Government of the day, or we could have five, or three, very effective Back Benchers who could cause very considerable trouble for the Government of the day. It is about quality, not quantity.
I want finally to address the interesting point made by the hon. Member for Newport West, whose argument was different in kind from that of the hon. Member for North West Durham and the other speakers. I hope he would agree that I am not doing his argument any injustice if I say that he was arguing, first, that there are many large constitutional deficiencies in Britain today—a proposition with which I abundantly agree—and secondly, that it makes no sense to try to change one particular element of the whole picture, though he admitted that it was an element that probably did require change, in the absence of an overall and thoroughgoing change of the whole system.
That is a very serious argument, but it is also very seriously wrong. I think it is wrong for two reasons: first, practically, and secondly, theoretically. Of course, in the end, the practical argument matters more than the theoretical one. The practical truth is that we are not going to get the kind of constitutional change that I think he, and certainly I, want any time in the near future. I personally was partly responsible for the total failure to secure the reform of the House of Lords. The House of Lords, in its current structure, is a wholly indefensible object. No rational human being could possibly argue that it is a good idea to have a legislature constituted in the way that the House of Lords is constituted. Indeed, I never heard anybody, in the whole of that debate, make an argument in favour of the House of Lords as currently constituted, except that they thought it was the lesser evil. What they meant by that varied. Some of the people I failed to convince said that what is better about the House of Lords is that it is totally useless, so it cannot do anything, and so the House of Commons reigns supreme. Some said that what is better about it is that it is not another House of Commons. Some said that what is better about it is that it cannot intervene in such a way as to prevent the Government of the day having their will, or create the kinds of checks and balances that I suspect that the hon. Gentleman wants, and certainly I want, to see in our constitution.
There were many reasons why people defended the House of Lords, all of which were of the character that things as they are indefensible, but less bad than they would be if we had a properly elected Chamber at the other end of the building. They were a rainbow coalition of people with different points of view on just that one point about the reform of the House of Lords, which made it quite impossible. There was a fascinating interchange between my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean and Opposition Members, and indeed my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough, about whether we had to withdraw the proposal. By golly, we had to withdraw it, because we had done the sums and we knew perfectly well that we were going to get nowhere near being able to carry it through. This was something that had been in the manifestos of both the two largest parties, and was the primary goal, once AV—the alternative vote—had bitten the dust, of the minor party in the coalition. All three parties had it in their manifestos, and one of them really cared about it, yet we could not even get that through.
Therefore, the chances of getting through major constitutional reform to create a system of checks and balances based on the separation of powers in a written constitution, which are things this country certainly needs, are very dim indeed. In fact, my guess is that some decades—possibly some centuries—from now, people will still be standing in this place talking about those issues. If we were to wait for that before making incremental change, we would have registers that are 50, 100 or 200 years out of date. That would not, practically speaking, be a sensible way to proceed.
Mr Bone
The point that I hope my right hon. Friend and I can agree on is that the Government decided not to proceed with the Bill on the Floor of the House without a programme motion. It is not that they would not have got it through, but that they refused to give up the time to allow it to be debated without a programme motion.
Sir Oliver Letwin
We ought to have a historical seminar about this. My hon. Friend is only partly right. It is perfectly true, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, that if we had tried to proceed without a programme motion, the main sacrifice is that we would have been unable to do almost anything else that was in our programme for government and that the Government needed to do.
Sir Oliver Letwin
It was indeed a choice. What my hon. Friend does not recognise, though, is that it was perfectly clear, having done the sums, that we were not, at the end of it all, going to get anything through, so we would have achieved the miracle of sacrificing almost the entire rest of our programme for the sake of achieving nothing whatsoever. That was not an attractive prospect, and that is why we withdrew the proposal, even though the corollary of doing so—this is the supreme irony of discussing the matter today—was that the Liberal Democrats in the coalition refused to support the implementation of the very changes that we are now discussing.
Mr Chope
I am trying to address that point. If we are to have proper democracy rather than mathematics, we need a reasonable period within which the boundary commissions in Wales and England can look at the evidence and work out where it will be best for the boundaries to be situated. They could then consult and hold public inquiries on that basis. We have already heard, however, that if the Bill were to be put on to the statute book with a requirement for the new arrangements to be implemented no later than October 2018, it would not be possible for the boundary commissions—certainly those in England—to do the necessary spadework to ensure an equitable outcome, rather than one that would be subject to judicial review as a result of having been rushed and not taking into account the representations that had been made.
Mr Bone
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. I want to get it clear in my mind what he is saying. Is he suggesting that we should equalise the seats and keep the same number of Members of Parliament, for reasons of democracy and scrutinising the Government, but that this cannot be achieved in the proposed timescale? Should we not simply allow the Bill to have its Second Reading and then amend it in Committee?
Mr Chope
I take my hon. Friend’s point. I am trying to plead with the hon. Member for North West Durham to come up with a proposal that would enable the boundary commissioners to come forward with their proposals before October 2018 and therefore enable her Bill to be implemented in time for the next general election. I am willing her to try to find a way of achieving that. From what we have heard from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset, however, that could be very difficult. Some rough and ready exercises might have to be carried out, possibly involving a reduction in the time for consultations. I challenge the hon. Lady to come forward with proposals that would enable someone looking at this Bill to decide that it was practical to require the boundary commissions to have their proposals in place by October 2018. I hope that she will be able to address that point when she responds to the debate. If she cannot do so today, and if the Bill gets its Second Reading, we will obviously be able to deal with this in Committee.
In its evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in September 2014, the Boundary Commission for England said that the approach that it had taken to the previous review had been well received, but that
“if the Commission is to continue that policy for the next Review, it does mean there is very little flexibility within the timetable outlined above.”
That timetable suggested that the commission was
“working towards a formal launch for that Review around the end of February 2016”,
and that it
“anticipates submitting its final report of the next Review in September 2018.”
The commission stated clearly that
“if changes are made to the governing legislation in the interim, that may have a consequential impact on the timetable for the next Review.”
I have not heard anything from the hon. Member for North West Durham about her conversations with the Boundary Commission on its evidence to the Committee, or about whether she thinks that that evidence could be modified in the light of the needs that she has expressed on behalf not only of Opposition Members but of many Conservative Members who have concerns about this.
It is of paramount importance that, by 2020, we have new boundaries that reflect more accurately the need for equality of electorates in each constituency. At the moment, the disparities are so great and are getting greater, so we cannot wait beyond 2020. If the hon. Lady is saying with the Bill, “I agree with that point, we must do something before 2020”, it is incumbent on her to explain—if not today, in Committee—how it can be achieved and how she has been able to work with the relevant boundary commissions to bring that about. It is only if she can demonstrate the practicality of the Bill that she will ultimately be able to get the House’s support. It is a paramount requirement that we equalise the constituencies before 2020.
I gave evidence earlier this week to the Boundary Commission inquiry into constituency changes in the south-west. I was surprised by how few people came along to give evidence. There were probably half a dozen people. It was a two-day hearing. I finished giving my evidence before lunch—my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms) gave evidence, too—and only one other person was due to give evidence between then and 8 o’clock in the evening. That was the first day of the inquiry; I do not know what happened on the second day.
There may well be means by which the prolonged procedure for examining these proposals can be foreshortened, but that is the kernel of the matter that the hon. Lady, in bringing forward this Bill, has to address if it is to progress and get on to the statute book.
This issue is very important. I am disappointed that the Government have not been prepared to say, “If we reduce the number of MPs to 600, we will have a pro rata reduction in the size of the Executive.” They could have done that. It would have been the right approach, but they have ducked it up to now. Perhaps the Minister will be able to assure us that there will indeed be that pro rata reduction. In a sense, that would mitigate some of the problems we have been discussing today.
I expect that the Bill will receive a Second Reading, because, unlike a lot of private Members’ legislation, it seems to have generated a lot of interest. It is great to see so many Members in the Chamber on a Friday. If the Bill does get a Second Reading, we need to look at its practicalities in Committee.
Wendy Morton
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that, because I was about to talk about my constituency and pick up on some of those points.
Aldridge-Brownhills forms part of the borough of Walsall, along with Walsall North and Walsall South. As I said, its electorate currently stands at about 60,000, which is 7,000 fewer than that of either of my Walsall neighbours. I do not feel this is right, and I accept that changes need to be made to bring my constituency more in line with others across the country. The position is similar in constituencies in Birmingham. Edgbaston, with just under 63,000 electors, borders Hall Green, which has 74,000 electors—a disparity of about 11,000. The situation is repeated in relation to Hall Green and Hodge Hill, and there are other examples across the country. I therefore question what valid democratic reason there is for this Bill to perpetuate these disparities.
Wendy Morton
I am going to make some progress because there are still Members who want to speak.
Along with colleagues on the Conservative Benches, I was elected on a manifesto pledge to reduce the number of Members of Parliament, and the Government have a clear mandate from the people to do this.
Wendy Morton
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point, but I still maintain that I was elected on a manifesto pledge to reduce the number of MPs. I recall the same point being made when I was knocking on doors in the 2010 election.
The hon. Member for North West Durham spoke of emails of support from members of the public, but I would question what consultation has been done in preparing to bring the Bill before the House. Perhaps that will be clarified at a later stage.
The House of Commons is the largest lower Chamber of any western democracy. The American House of Representatives, with 435 members, serves a population of 318 million. In Japan, the House of Representatives has 475 members representing 127 million people. It has long been argued that a small legislature is better at holding the Executive to account and at scrutinising legislation. That is why I am happy to support the Conservative manifesto pledge to reduce the number of elected Members. Much has been said this morning about the other place, but I think that we need to take the lead and put our own House in order before we seek to reform elsewhere.
As I have said, I accept that my own constituency of Aldridge-Brownhills must change. I and others in the constituency welcome the boundary commissioners’ decision to keep it intact and to expand it so that Bloxwich East and West are encompassed by the Walsall borough. Streetly is integral to that, and the boundary proposals will bring together the communities of Pelsall and Brownhills, which were previously separated by local government reorganisations.
This House should accept that a boundary review is under way and that the public are being consulted for the second time in five years. It would be wrong to ignore their views. To halt the process again would be unforgiveable. If the Bill is passed, the public could be forgiven for thinking that Members of Parliament were putting their own self-interest before democratic equality and democratic accountability.