Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Fifth sitting)

Shaun Bailey Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Shaun Bailey (West Bromwich West) (Con)]

It is great to see you back in the Chair, Mr Paisley. As a relatively new Member of the House, I am quite nervous about following some of the right hon. Members who have spoken. I do not know whether I will quite be able to hit the bar, but I will give it a go.

Given that six months ago I probably did not anticipate being here, potentially putting myself out of a job is an interesting proposition. I wish to touch on some of the points made by my right hon Friends the Members for Elmet and Rothwell and for Basingstoke. I must apologise to the latter—I have been referring to her as my hon. Friend, and have not paid tribute to her membership of the Privy Council. They made some interesting points on self-interest. As my right hon Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell said in the first evidence session, we all have a self-interest because we all want to represent the communities that have put us here.

That notion of community is interesting. My neighbour, the right hon. Member for Warley, made the point in the first evidence session that Government Members might not understand communities quite as much because of our sprawling rural seats. If he can find some sprawling rural parts of Sandwell that he wants to take me to, I would be more than happy to meet him there.

[Christian Matheson]

What about the country park?

[Shaun Bailey]

That is not in my patch.

[John Spellar]

It is in the east.

[Shaun Bailey]

It is in the east. It is an interesting point, because we are put here to represent those communities. In a way, it is a weird dichotomy because those communities are our self-interest, and we want to make sure, ultimately, that they have the best level of representation.

Parliamentary scrutiny is at the core of this, and it is the contentious point. If history has shown us anything, can we really call what we have seen over the past 50 years proper parliamentary scrutiny? Really what we have seen is an attempt by this place to kibosh any sort of review or change to the boundaries. I know we keep harking back to 1969 and to the historical boundary changes, but the pattern that we see speaks for itself. This has been going on for 10 years. In the vein of trying to get things done—as we said in December—now is the time, given that we have talked about the matter for a decade, to finally get some movement on it.

The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood and others asked whether judicial-led boundary commissions would be truly independent. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke asked a representative of the Liberal Democrats in our first evidence session how politicians directly influence judicial-led boundary commissions. Surprise, surprise, no real answer was put forward.

We cannot do down the importance of the judiciary in our democracy. It is one of our three pillars of Government, and of our democracy. I have heard the arguments that we do not want the process to become one led by technocrats. We have had a debate over the past four years, as we have been trying to leave the European Union, about the role of technocrats in our democracy. However, we must look at how communities engage with this matter, particularly the aborted reviews of 2018 and some of the stories that we have heard.

I remember being told an anecdote about the proposal to join Halesowen with Selly Oak. The story was as clear as day: the hearing was going on, and a gentleman walked in off the street and articulately explained, for a good part of 10 minutes, why the Black Country is not Birmingham. In the end, that led to the commission changing its view. We cannot underestimate the role of the public, whom ultimately the Bill exists to serve, and who ultimately are the subjects of the Bill, in forming and shaping it.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Spellar]

I ask the hon. Gentleman to reflect on the proposals of the previous boundary commission, which wanted to take one seat from the middle of Halesowen right the way through past Birmingham, Selly Oak almost to the Birmingham-Solihull border. Another proposal was to run through my constituency right the way through his and then through to Dudley town centre. I am sure he will accept that there is very little commonality between those various constituencies. Indeed, most of our residents have very little dealings with the borough of Dudley and vice versa.

[Shaun Bailey]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I used the example that he raises with respect to the Halesowen and Selly Oak seats because of the interaction of the public, and it was changed. Yes, he is right, and that is why the public came forward during those hearings to put their points across. He knows as well as I do that the Black Country is not Birmingham. That is the point raised particularly in our patch time and again. I absolutely hear his point. We have seen those anomalies; I do not disagree with that. However, we have to trust the process and trust the public to know their communities. I am sure he will agree that our residents in Sandwell absolutely know their community.

[John Spellar]

To reinforce the hon. Gentleman’s point, the Black Country is not Sandwell and not Birmingham, even though people outside think it is, yet that was not recognised by the boundary commission, which stubbornly refused to accept it. That is the difficulty. There is arrogance and ignorance, frankly, in many cases, and there needs to be a corrective mechanism.

[Shaun Bailey]

First, I accept the point that the right hon. Gentleman raises about the boundary commission not understanding communities, but with representations from those communities those points are then corrected. The issue of Halesowen was raised with the boundary commission at the last minute and it was corrected.

[Mrs Miller]

I am listening very carefully. As somebody who was born in the Black Country, I am astonished that anybody would ever think that it was possible to conflate those two communities. I have listened to my hon. Friend’s thoughtful speech. It is important to remember that the legislation gives pre-eminence to equality of constituencies. Everything he talks about is important, but it is really important that equality comes first and foremost, with community ties coming after that. Whatever we might say in this debate today, constituency boundaries are an artificial construct. Their nature is by definition artificial, and we have to make sure that they do not overwhelm the need for more equality as between constituency sizes.

[Shaun Bailey]

My right hon. Friend is, of course, absolutely correct in her analysis. Although equality is obviously the foremost consideration, it does not eliminate those links with communities either. I think she definitely said that in her contribution. She has made the point time and again. I represent a seat with 65,500 constituents and she represents a seat with 83,000. The figures speak for themselves, so I do not think I can add to what my right hon. Friend has said.

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

I want to pick up on the point made about the review allowing local input. The hon. Member for City of Chester described the notorious case of Mersey Banks, which was corrected after a review. Furthermore, to pick up on the point made by the right hon. Member for Warley about the lack of imagination of the boundary commission, does my hon. Friend agree that if the Boundary Commission for England were willing to take the same approach as, for example, the Boundary Commissions for Scotland, for Wales and for Northern Ireland, where wards can be split, that would correct some of the more eccentric seats that have been come up with?

[Shaun Bailey]

My hon. Friend makes a fantastic point on these matters in his usual expert way. We cannot treat this exercise as arbitrary; we have to give the commission some credit. It has intelligent people, who have a degree of imagination about what they can do within the scope of these rules, and they are boundaries or guidelines; they are not so arbitrary that there is no room for manoeuvre, which I appreciate is part of the argument that Opposition Members are making.

I will try to round off my comments as quickly as I can.

[David Linden]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware of amendment 10, which I tabled. He is speaking powerfully about the importance of the boundary commission’s work, in particular its hearings, so will he support amendment 10, which would lift the limit on the number of hearings that could take place?

[Shaun Bailey]

I say to the hon. Gentleman that I am in the process of considering how my support will go; I will not pin my colours to the mast right now.

[Christian Matheson]

Pin them! [Laughter.]

[Shaun Bailey]

First, I will listen to the arguments that the hon. Member for Glasgow East makes, because I do not want to deprive him of the opportunity to articulate his points in the way that only he can. So, we will see what happens when we come to that amendment.

I will simply say that we come to this issue with a degree of self-interest—we all do. Historically, this place has not been the best at balancing the boundaries and making sure that there is equal and fair representation. The parameters that we are setting are flexible enough to ensure that the boundary commission can show some imagination, and we cannot do down the inputs from communities if we are to be sure that these new constituencies are accurately representative of the areas that people live in. Also, we must give credit to the independence of this process. We have yet to hear a really strong argument as to how the independence of these judicially-led bodies can be compromised.

I will round off my comments there.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I apologise, Mr Paisley, for missing part of the debate, but I was in the main Chamber for business questions and came here as soon as I could.

I sympathise with the idea that we should set the parameters for this process, and then remove the politics from it and allow a clean process to come to its conclusion. That is a very attractive proposal and it is easy to see the strength of that argument, on the surface. However, when we listened to the evidence from the experts, one of the things that came across absolutely clearly —I should say that I am speaking in favour of the amendment—was that they do not understand the role of parliamentarians and they do not understand the relationship that parliamentarians have with their constituencies. That came out loud and clear, even from those who were more sympathetic to the argument that place is important in people’s minds in how they vote.

My fear grew as I listened to the evidence that if we hand this process over to bureaucrats or academics, in the absence of understanding of that relationship between MPs and the communities they represent, and of the affinity that MPs develop with those communities, we will end up with a mathematical exercise. We have set the parameters at 5% and basically we just draw rings around the population across the country 650 times, and then we will satisfy the criteria. And by the way, within that, we will do a bit of manipulation to try to meet some community needs.

For me, that hits fundamentally at the heart of what the democratic process is all about. I mean, the origin of politics is the marketplace—the agora—where the popular view would prevail. That is really where the roots of democracy lie. What happens in that marketplace—in that common place within a community—is that people discuss and debate matters, and express views about their common experiences. And eventually, they come to a collective view.

To look at what happened at the last election, in many communities up and down the country, people were sick and tired of being left behind and felt that their communities were forever in decline while others were benefitting from being part of the European Union, the globalisation of the economy or whatever it was. Collectively, they came to the same conclusion and there was a seismic shift within those communities.

That shift moved against the Labour party in what have been called the red wall seats. Some common experience within those communities caused a large body of people to come to a collective view. Place and common experience are important factors in the way people form views about how they want to be represented. To undermine the connection between place and the most common experiences of the community hits at the root of the democratic process.