Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Susan Elan Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

Members on both sides are laughing because my hon. Friend has of course moved around the country himself, so I will assist by saying that I know that the people of Wales welcome him back to his home town.

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that where there are significant changes in the population there will not only be effects for one constituency but potentially nudge-on effects for many others, which may move from one county council or one borough to another. In part, we have to accept this. Rhondda used to have two parliamentary seats, Rhondda East and Rhondda West, and then we moved down to one parliamentary seat because the population fell dramatically. I do not believe that the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies in Wales or anywhere else should be written in stone—of course we have to move with the population flows. However, if we move forward precisely like this, without any kind of exemption, one constituency in Wales will represent at least a third of the geographical area of Wales. That would be unacceptable. It would cover several counties, which are unitary authorities in Wales, and would include areas that are, and feel themselves to be, virtually in England, and a large part of Wales that is fiercely proud of its Welsh language heritage. That would be an inappropriate direction in which to move.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with what the women’s institute has written? As I am sure all hon. Members know, anyone who dares to suggest that the women’s institute is party political will have their come-uppance, but it has expressed great concern about the effect that the changes will have on rural communities, because natural geographical boundaries will be cut up.

[Chris Bryant]

Tony Blair learned that one should not really mess with the women’s institute, and I have no intention of doing so, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right. Large parts of her constituency are very rural, and chunks of mine are semi-rural—everybody in the Rhondda lives within about 200 metres of a farm. Surely the point is that overriding concerns must be able to trump mathematical perfection, not entirely but to a degree. The Government have already accepted that in relation to three constituencies, but it should apply more widely.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) has tabled amendment 38, which refers to registration. A lot of Members talked about under-registration yesterday afternoon, and the Deputy Leader of the House has just mentioned it. I am glad he accepts that some 3.5 million people are not on the register and should be. I make no pretence that we got it right when we were in government. Indeed, some of us—particularly one of my hon. Friends, who is probably about to intervene on me—quite rightly argued aggressively in the last Parliament that many people are under-represented on the register. The danger is that they will therefore be under-represented in Parliament and their concerns will not be taken on board.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I very much agree. One subject that I want to mention is precisely what the job of a Member of Parliament is in the modern era. That has obviously changed in the past 50 years and I pay tribute to the Liberal Democrats, because the kind of pavement politics that they advocated strongly—through which they won a number of seats in the ’80s and ’90s—is one thing that has changed the nature of an MP’s job today. My hon. Friend is right, and I do not think that there has been any consideration of that matter at all.

[Susan Elan Jones]

I welcome what my hon. Friend said about the balance between the Executive and the legislature. Judging from some of the nodding of heads, other Members did too. However, does he agree with the Deputy Prime Minister, who said to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in July:

“I think we have executive dominance; we have one of the most executive-led forms of government anywhere in the western world”?

I am not sure whether Nick agrees with Nick now, but does my hon. Friend?

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, that is true because of the structure we have in this country. Sometimes Members talk of checks and balances, which is really an import from the American system where the constitution was expressly written so as to have checks and balances. Incidentally, one of those checks and balances in the American system was that each state should have two Senators regardless of the number of people living in it. For instance, Rhode Island is tiny compared with California, which is larger economically, politically and in every other sense than a large number of countries in the world, but the two states only get two Senators in the Senate. In the British system, we do not have quite the same checks and balances—particularly if the House of Lords is dominated by a coalition in which two parties manage effectively to have control of both Houses, of the Executive and of the legislature.

I do praise some of the things that the Government have done since they took office, such as setting up the Backbench Business Committee. I hope that the whole of business could be handed over to a business committee, because I think that the role of the legislature needs to be reinforced so that the Executive is held better to account.

Various arguments have been advanced for cutting the number of MPs from 650 to 600, one of which makes international comparisons. I have heard the Deputy Prime Minister use that argument several times but it is completely fallacious. It is wrong to compare the British Parliament with the Spanish Parliament, for example, because the vast majority of Spain’s Ministers do not sit in the Spanish Parliament. The Executive are not created out of the Parliament. Similarly, in other countries—the United States being the most obvious example—the Executive do not spring from the legislature, so there are not 95 people who automatically have a second job as a Minister or a Parliamentary Private Secretary. That comparison is therefore inappropriate.

If we are to make any kind of comparison, we must bear in mind differences in the level of devolution or federalisation from one country to another. Comparing the United Kingdom with Germany, for example, is inappropriate because the Länder has far more significant powers than any local authority in England and more powers than the Welsh Assembly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Gavin Barwell]

I want to start by agreeing with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) who, unfortunately, has left the Chamber. He made the point that there is an irony in the positions that the different parties are taking. The Conservative party is making the progressive argument for greater electoral equality, while Labour is arguing the case for greater adherence to traditional community boundaries. One thinks back to 1982 when Michael Foot, then leader of the Labour party, and the Labour Chief Whip took the Boundary Commission to the courts because it had not crossed community boundaries and had not, in Labour’s view at that time, achieved sufficient electoral equality. For the benefit of my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert), I shall make four short points about the arguments advanced in favour of these amendments.

We have been asked, first, why we should reduce the number of seats. I can speak only for myself and describe why I shall be voting for such a reduction. I was a candidate during the MPs’ expenses scandal and I carried out a survey of every elector in my constituency. I put to them proposals from all three political parties about things that could be done to improve our political system and found that the second most popular was that the number of MPs should be reduced. [Hon. Members: “To what?”] At the time, I proposed a 10% reduction; that was the figure in our manifesto and I would happily have supported it.

[Susan Elan Jones]

rose—

[Gavin Barwell]

I shall make some progress. I recognise that the coalition has proposed a slightly different figure, but it still represents a reduction and I am happy to support it.

The second argument that has been advanced relates to whether we should have a fixed number of seats. We have heard a great deal of enthusiasm for the current rules, although I am not sure how many Members have read them. As I was saying to my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr Syms), they allow the crossing of county boundaries. However, Members may not be aware that the Boundary Commission and the Committee on Standards in Public Life implored the previous Government to change those rules because they are contradictory, confused and muddled. Therefore, some of the enthusiasm that we have heard for the current rules is misplaced, and it is not unreasonable for Parliament to take a view on what the size of this House should be.

I am not a lawyer, but I can say that the amendment standing in the names of the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), among others, is defective. It seeks to amend the first paragraph of proposed new schedule 2 to the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986 in a way that would wholly contradict proposed new paragraph 2(3) of that schedule, which would define the United Kingdom electoral quota in a completely different way.

The third point to deal with is the assumption expressed by Labour Members that a reduction in the number of constituencies and, thus, larger constituency sizes will lead to seats that less reflect community identity. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how this measure will work, because although that assumption will be true in some cases, in others the measure will lead to constituencies that better reflect community boundaries. Under these proposals, instead of having three MPs covering my London borough of Croydon, we would have three and a half, so the new seats would be likely less to reflect community identity in Croydon. However, the next-door London borough of Bromley covers three and half constituencies and that would reduce to three, which would doubtless better reflect community identity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Heath]

I am addressing the arguments made in the Chamber tonight that suggested that the reduction from 650 to 600 was an unimaginably ambitious target for the House and would result in the loss of Labour seats and was therefore a partisan move, rather than being what it is: a modest reduction in the size of the House. We have discussed other sizes of the House. The Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos proposed a reduction in the size of the House of Commons. The Conservative manifesto suggested the figure of 585, and the Liberal Democrats suggested 500, but on the basis of the single transferable vote.

I have made it absolutely plain that this is a matter of judgment. Six hundred is not a magical figure. I have never pretended that it is. It is an arbitrary figure, but it is one that results in an electoral quota of about 76,000, which is an entirely possible figure, as we have demonstrated, on the basis of the 2009 electoral register.

[Susan Elan Jones]

rose—

[Hon. Members]

Give way.

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Lady will have to be a little bit patient and not just stand there, but ask and then wait until I give way.

The country would like to see a reduction in the number of Members of Parliament in this House. We have tried to strike a balance between what is achievable and sensible in terms of the operation of Members of Parliament and what is desirable in finally turning the corner in terms of the ever-increasing size of the membership of the Chamber.

[Susan Elan Jones]

I am grateful to the Minister for finally giving way. He mentioned that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservative party proposed in their manifestos at the last election reductions in the number of seats. Various Conservative candidates in north Wales said, having cited Guy Fawkes among others, that people would probably think that the Guy Fawkes option was a good one, but we were then talking about a reduction of 10% of seats in Wales. When they were questioned, they said, “Yes, of course, it will be 10% of Welsh seats, because the new Conservative Government will be very rational in doing this.” How does the Minister justify talking about a reduction of, I think, 7.7% across the whole United Kingdom but a reduction of 25% in one of the component nations?