Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

John Bercow Excerpts

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

[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—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. It is very good of the hon. Gentleman to sit down when I rise to my feet. He is an extremely experienced and dextrous parliamentarian, and I was going to say to him, politely, that he has started his speech “broadly”—let me put it like that—and he cannot be accused of having attended too closely to the specifics of the measure before us. I feel sure that he will now apply his scholarly cranium with laser-like intensity to the matter before us, rather than to the matter that he might wish were before us.

[Paul Flynn]

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I greatly appreciate that advice, and I shall try to focus my laser-like cranium on the effect that these measures will have in Wales. The Welsh Assembly has PR, but it now has the problem that it does not have enough Members for its increasing workload. If the number of Welsh MPs is to be reduced—it is almost certain that that will happen sometime in the future—there must be a compensatory increase in numbers in the Welsh Assembly. That would make the proposals logical and fair, but at the moment they are a piece of special pleading by the Tory party cynically to increase the number of MPs that they have in Westminster. That has nothing to do with reform of our constitution, which is in a very bad state.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Merriman]

I would choose Hook Norton over Finmere as Hook Norton has a fantastic brewery, although Finmere is nearer to my family home.

[Mr Speaker]

I am most interested in the autobiographical details of the hon. Gentleman, with which I was personally familiar, not least on account of the whereabouts of members of his family—my illustrious constituents—but other Members are not so fortunate.

[Victoria Prentis]

I, too, am very aware of the whereabouts of members of my hon. Friend’s family, but I am also aware of the marvellous brewery in Hook Norton, which I am ever proud to represent and from which so many hon. Members are pleased to buy wares from time to time. Christmas is coming and it is doing a very good pack.

Given the pace of change in my own area, I have considerable sympathy for the suggestion made by many hon. Members that we should use more recent data. Unless we have a defined date, which we do not, and a set of electoral registers to assess, there is no right or wrong time to do this. The excellent Library briefing observes:

“Whichever data Parliament directs the Commission to use, there will always be a latency between the data used for a review and the boundaries that come out of a review being implemented.”

If we agree to move the goalposts today, what is there to stop another Member coming along in two years’ time and changing things again? The Boundary Commission is an independent and impartial advisory body that prioritises compliance within legal requirements, not political considerations. In my view, we must let it get on with the job.