Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Sheryll Murray Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 18th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Pat Glass]

I do, and that situation is reflected right across the country.

Fewer and fewer people are bothering to vote in general and local elections, because they do not see it as relevant to their lives. We live in a time when many of our people see a divide between themselves and the establishment. That means us, by the way—even people like me, and I was born in a council house in a mining community and went to a comprehensive school. They see huge divides between us, the political elite—or the metropolitan elite, as the red tops like to call us—and anyone who seems to have a vested interest in parliamentary democracy, and the people, as the red tops like to call everyone else.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

Does not the hon. Lady acknowledge that we have periodic boundary reviews to take account of changes in population? Her point about people being missed will be picked up by a future boundary review.

[Pat Glass]

I do acknowledge that point and I will come on to talk about why it is important that we conduct a review every 10 years rather than every five years. One of the communities from which I have heard most is Cornwall. Lots of people have been in touch with me, saying that they are unhappy that their own MPs are not dealing with the issue.

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[Pat Glass]

Absolutely. The Bill will go some way to making that happen.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

The hon. Lady and I share something similar in our constituencies. My constituency stretches from the banks of the Tamar to the banks of the River Fowey. The difference, however, is that because my constituents would not find it possible to travel from one end of the constituency to another by public transport, I go to them, which I consider to be my job as a Member of Parliament.

[Pat Glass]

The hon. Lady misses the point completely.

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[Mr Harper]

There are a couple of things I will say in response to the hon. Gentleman. I agree with his central point. Of course I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) that the last Parliament does not bind this one, but the law as currently enacted would reduce the size of the House of Commons. That is the position unless this Parliament chooses to change it by taking forward the Bill.

As I acknowledged at the Dispatch Box, the one-off reduction from 650 to 600 in this boundary change—which would have happened already if it were not for the stitch-up by the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats in the other place that pushed it out for five years—means that there will be a significant amount of change. I will say a little more about this later, but part of the reason why I support boundary changes every five years is that it is better to have more frequent but smaller changes, to take account of changes in electorate, rather than what has happened over time—namely, very infrequent boundary changes that, because there has been significant movement in the electorate, are very significant. More frequent but smaller boundary changes are preferable. That is what the current position will bring into force.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that over the past 20 to 25 years my own constituency has been a prime illustration of what he is saying? The constituency of South East Cornwall used to be known as Bodmin; it does not even contain the town of Bodmin now. We see a lot of changes. I do not believe that I should have taken ownership of the town of Bodmin when the rest of south-east Cornwall was expanding.

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend illustrates the point that changes in the size of electorates have to be reflected in boundary changes. I was thinking of how to put this into context—

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[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.

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[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone). He made a thoughtful and powerful contribution on the issue. Our politics might not be the same, but he is undoubtedly a champion for parliamentary democracy, and his contribution shone through in that respect.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) for introducing this important Bill. She has done a lot of work on it, and she makes a powerful point that she is not doing so for her own political advantage because, as she told the House, she is not standing at the next election. I place on record that that will be a great loss to the House. She has been a great Member of Parliament for the people of North West Durham in the time that she has been here, particularly with her expertise on education, and she will be missed. If the last act that she performs is to ensure that the House of Commons can hold the Government to account in the future, she will have done a fine job. Opposition Front Benchers fully support her Bill.

The Labour party agrees with the principle of equal-sized seats, which has long been written into law and is the main purpose of the boundary commissions’ work. Before we hear messages to the contrary, we have to remind the House that when Labour was in office, we enacted the fifth boundary review in 2006—it was politically detrimental to the Labour party in terms of seats lost—because we believed then, as we do now, that we have to have boundaries in place that fully reflect the general populace. However, the proposals to redraw our boundaries are unfair. They run the risk of being undemocratic. In many parts of the United Kingdom, they are unacceptable to the local populations.

To see evidence of that, one only needs to consider what the Government have done while espousing the need to cut the costs of an elected Chamber. The nub of the Bill, as the hon. Member for Wellingborough said, goes beyond how many MPs there should be or who represents where. It is about how democracy in the United Kingdom functions. I remind the Minister that, in opposition, the Conservatives promised to curb the costs of government and limit the number of special advisers, but the number of those advisers has increased by more than 20%, from 79 before the May 2015 election—the most recent election—to 97 in December 2015. That is the highest recorded number for a majority Government ever. In total, this Administration have spent £45 million on wages and severance pay for special advisers during their time in office. It is curious that Government estimates show a saving of £12 million from the cutting of 50 Members of Parliament. That is roughly the same cost to the public purse as the severance packages that the previous Prime Minister handed out to those who left office at the same time as he did.

When the new occupant of 10 Downing Street came into office in July, space had to be found for those special advisers and close friends who had been so callously thrown on to the scrapheap. They might not be experts, but they surely need a chance, too. In September, the bloated Benches of the other place swelled even further when a raft of them were ennobled by the former Prime Minister, taking its membership to more than 800—far greater than the size of this House. That act debased the other place’s responsibility to check and challenge the Government, turning it into little more than an opportunity to honour former party donors and friends.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Is the hon. Gentleman implying that Baroness Chakrabarti was a Conservative appointment?

[Andrew Gwynne]

The hon. Lady knows that the custom and practice is that when the Government increase the number of lords, other parties also have that opportunity. However—this relates to my next point—the noble Lady that the hon. Lady references is an active Member of the House of Lords and of the Labour Front-Bench team. Many Members of the other place do not make an active contribution to the work of that Chamber and that needs to be looked at.

Only yesterday, the Government announced their intention to drop proposals aimed at changing the powers of the Lords, citing that the world has changed. Well, yes, it has, and if Brexit is the reason for stepping back from curtailing the powers of the other place, it is also a sound and justifiable reason to think again about the changes proposed to this elected Chamber. Although Lords reform is not directly linked to the Bill, it is an important part of how a fully functioning democracy works. It is worth recognising that over two thirds of the public have consistently supported real reform of the other place, yet cynicism and power are all that the Government seem concerned with when overloading the other place with former spin doctors and party workers.

I am heartened, however, by the fact that other people share my concern and that we may actually have support from the most unlikely of sources. When recently asked about his responsibilities in the Lords, Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton responded:

“I was put in as an honour, not as a working peer. Not as lobby fodder. I’m fed up with the fact that I keep being asked now to go in and vote for things about which I don’t have knowledge.”

The other place is so bloated that it is second only to China’s National People’s Congress—the largest legislature in the world—which is odd considering that China has 1.2 billion more citizens than the UK. For a more learned and respected opinion, I ask right hon. and hon. Members to heed the warning of the Chairman of the Procedure Committee, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who rightly stated:

“It seems perverse to reduce the number of elected representatives in this place while the Lords continues to gorge itself on new arrivals.”—[Official Report, 8 September 2016; Vol. 614, c. 502.]

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[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass) on her success in securing this private Member’s Bill. Although I do not agree with all the objectives she has proposed in the Bill, private Members’ Bills are an essential parliamentary device that enable Back Benchers to address issues that concern us and our constituents and, in some cases, to secure good, sustainable changes in public policy and legislation. I have successfully piloted two private Member’s Bills on to the statute book, the Marine Navigation Act 2013 and the Deep Sea Mining Act 2014, and I am very proud to have done so.

I do not agree with the provisions in the Bill that reverse the decision to reduce the number of Members of this House from 650 to 600. I stood on a manifesto in 2015 that said that we would

“reduce the number of MPs to 600 to cut the cost of politics”

and I stand by that pledge.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Is the hon. Lady not an example of that very rare thing, a turkey voting for Christmas? When these changes were first mooted in 2010, the main losers in Cornwall would have been the Liberal Democrats. If the changes go forward, some of her Tory colleagues will surely lose their seats. Why would she want to support that?

[Mrs Murray]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his view, but I happen to disagree. I am hopeful that, at the next election, Cornwall will still be represented by Conservative MPs, and I stand by that election pledge. My constituents voted me to this place to represent them, knowing that that was my pledge.

I have a lot of respect for the hon. Member for North West Durham, but I have to tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I was going to raise a point of order during her speech this morning. In the interest of the smooth transition of the debate, however, and having asked to make a speech, I have chosen instead to raise the matter now. The hon. Lady said that she had received more representations on her Bill from Cornish people than from anyone else. I am sure she respects the unwritten protocol in this House that if representations are made to us from another MP’s constituents, we inform the MP and usually pass on the representations. I am quite happy to take an intervention, so that she can confirm that none of those representations came from South East Cornwall because nothing has been passed on to me.

[Pat Glass]

I do not know where they came from. They said they were from Cornwall. They contacted me by email and on Twitter. The hon. Lady can look on Twitter and see.

[Mrs Murray]

I just felt that I ought to put it on the record that I, a Member for a Cornish constituency, have not been informed of any emails sent to another MP. I am quite disappointed about that.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I am not quite sure what the hon. Lady’s point is. From what she is saying, she would not change her mind anyway, so it would be a complete waste of time her constituents lobbying her on the Bill.

[Mrs Murray]

It is a case of treating other Members, no matter what their political affiliation, with some respect.

[Andrew Stephenson]

My hon. Friend is making an eloquent point. The Guardian today cites people saying they are against Cornwall being split in half. Any Member they contact should be telling them that there is a 12-week consultation. We are well into it now, but people can still submit representations through the Boundary Commission website. They can still lobby and they can still change things. More than 40,000 representations were made by members of the public during the 2013 abandoned review. Surely, as Members of Parliament, we should be encouraging people to engage with the process, not trying to scrap or abort it, so that we have a general election based on electoral figures that are 20 years out of date.

[Mrs Murray]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend.

I would like to quote the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg). I know that he has already been quoted today and it is not something that I do often in this place, but he outlined well how we compare around the world. He said:

“Reducing the number of MPs allows us to bring our oversized House of Commons into line with legislatures across the world. The House of Commons is the largest directly elected chamber in the European Union, and it’s half as big again as the US House of Representatives.”

My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) mentioned that last point earlier. The Government have estimated that the reduction in the number of MPs will save £66 million over the course of the Parliament. I am quite disappointed with Opposition Members who seem to have made light of that figure. That money could be focused on looking after and benefiting our constituents.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The hon. Lady, using the larger figure spun by Cameron, talks about £66 million, but the figure is £12 million a year. She was part of a Government who spent £9 million on a leaflet arguing their case for the EU. Where is her perspective?

[Mrs Murray]

If the hon. Gentleman refers back, he will see that I did not agree with that.

I am sure that these savings would be welcomed by taxpayers across the country. We often have to take difficult decisions to try and balance the country’s books, so should this place not do what it can to contribute? Should we not have to face a fair share of any cuts? We are always being criticised for cutting expenditure on education, putting pressure on teachers, putting pressure on NHS workers and putting pressure on our armed forces. Should we not share some of that burden and try to make some savings ourselves?

[Mr Jones]

If the proposals go through, the hon. Lady’s seat disappears and she is not one of the successful Tory candidates, would she then refuse a peerage?

[Mrs Murray]

To refuse something, one has to be offered it. I think that the hon. Gentleman should pay attention to the Prime Minister’s response to a question from an Scottish National party Member on Wednesday: things like that are not normally discussed in this place.

Why are Opposition Members supporting the Bill? Is it to change the number of seats? That will lead to the redrawing of a map and the need for sitting Labour Members to be selected for new areas. Are those who did not champion the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as Leader of the Opposition now nervous of the membership that gave him its support? Some 80% of Labour Members gave a vote of no confidence in their leader less than six months ago. Are they now nervous?

I cannot say that the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 is perfect. In 2010, I put forward my own amendment to the Bill as it passed through this place to recognise Cornwall as a distinct area, and it stipulated that no constituency should cross over to Devon. As far as I remember, that was supported by my Cornwall colleagues at the time. Unfortunately, we lost that argument, and the legislation was enacted, with priority given to providing each elector with an equal say in who runs the country. Our Cornwall population is not currently such that a cross-over seat with Devon was avoidable—no matter how undesirable it was.

Last month, I upset councillors when I made a comment about Cornwall Council. Since then, rather than focus on local government matters, the council has been spending money on a Queen’s counsel and has convened a full council meeting to discuss the very subject that we are debating today—parliamentary boundaries. I will not call the council what I called it in this place last month but leave my constituents to make up their own minds on whether that is good use of resources.

I am similarly concerned about the cost of the Bill. This provision would be an unnecessary disruption to the boundary commissions’ well advanced reviews and undoubtedly mean more unnecessary costs, but the Government want to make an estimated £66 million saving. Although the hon. Member for North West Durham is no longer in her place, I ask her where she would find this money if not from legislation—would it come from further cuts to our NHS, our schools or our armed forces? I say no.

[Mr Jones]

rose—

[Mrs Murray]

I am just coming to my conclusion.

Let us kick this expensive piece of legislation into the long grass where it belongs. Let us save some money, so that we can invest in our NHS, our schools and our armed forces, as a Conservative Government would, instead of spending money on politicians, which Labour seems to want to do.

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[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

I want to start by saying that I will be supporting the Bill and concur with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) about why he supports it. However, I will mainly talk about the impact that the proposed boundary changes will have on Cornwall. I want to explain why people in Cornwall, my constituents in particular, feel so strongly about this issue and have urged me to speak up today.

Many hon. Members will be aware that the restrictions in the current legislation mean that Cornwall will have to share an MP with Devon. There will have to be a seat that crosses the border between north-east Cornwall and north-west Devon.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

Will my hon. Friend explain to me what part of his constituency may cross the border with Devon?

[Steve Double]

My constituency is clearly in central mid-Cornwall and no part of it will cross the border, but the people of Cornwall feel strongly about this whether they are directly impacted by the cross-border seat or not. The Minister will know that the matter has provoked strong feelings for many in Cornwall. I acknowledge that that reaction may seem strange and make little sense for people outside Cornwall—many simply view Cornwall as another English county—but the Cornish pride themselves on being different, un-English, and unique in many ways. It is therefore unsurprising that people who do not share that sense of pride and passion in being Cornish do not appreciate how the Cornish people feel. The truth is that this is an emotional reaction to the proposals.

I will admit that I have looked at many of the reasons for objecting to the cross-border seat in the current legislation, and there are no reasonable legal arguments to stop it going forward.

[Mrs Murray]

rose—

[Steve Double]

I will make a little progress before I take another intervention.

Cornwall’s democratic representation will not be somehow diluted by sharing an MP with part of Devon. I do not believe that an MP will be unable to represent two different counties in one constituency. Many hon. Members represent diverse constituencies with people from all sorts of ethnic and cultural backgrounds very effectively. This is about a purely emotional response from the Cornish. We have seen over the past six months that voters have become much more emotional in how they react to Government and our democracy—politics is now much more emotional.

Like many, I had hoped that the granting of minority status to the Cornish people would provide a basis for a legal challenge. There was great joy in Cornwall in 2014 when the Cornish were recognised under the Council of Europe’s framework convention for the protection of national minorities. We were told that it would give us the same recognition as other Celtic people in the UK, but it appears that this does not apply when it comes to parliamentary boundaries. Although the Boundary Commission has recognised and maintained the borders of Scotland and Wales when drawing up the constituencies, the same respect has not been shown to the Cornish border. Sadly, legal advice obtained by Cornwall Council has stated that our Cornish minority status is not something that can be used to argue against a cross-border seat, so despite all the rhetoric, it seems that the legal arguments against this boundary are very weak.

[Mrs Murray]

There has been a petition on this and some of my constituents wrote to me about it. I looked at the petition website and saw that 400 of my constituents—out of 72,000—had signed it. Does my hon. Friend know how many of his constituents signed it? He said he was speaking on behalf of the Cornish, but let me put on the record the fact that I am a Cornish girl and he was not speaking for me.

[Steve Double]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I do not know how many people from my constituency signed the petition, but I have been out in my constituency, on the doorsteps, in the pub and at my surgeries, and what I do know is how many people have come directly to me to raise their strong feelings about this issue. That is what I have taken notice of. Leaving aside how many constituents have raised this issue with me, it is one that I, as a Cornishman, feel strongly about.