Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Toby Perkins Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 2nd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I enjoyed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). If he had been here in the 2010 to 2015 Parliament, he would have heard many of the arguments that he has made today in the debate then.

We heard from the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett). I presume that back in 2010, in spite of what Labour was telling him, he voted for the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, which proposed reducing the number of seats down to 600, and he now says that it was actually that reduction which meant that communities got split up. But actually, from looking at each individual region in the Boundary Commission’s proposals, it was very clear where it had started its work and where it had finished. The work at one end of the region was quite neat, but by the time the commission had got to the last few seats there were really odd constituency boundaries, because of the narrowness of that plus and minus 5%.

The hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) spoke about the importance of every vote being equal. He ought to be careful; the way he was talking, he sounded like a bit of a proponent of proportional representation, and I am sure that that was not quite what he meant. There is a reason why some of us are against that, and it is that precious constituency link. All of us who have been Members of Parliament and have gone back to ask for votes on second and subsequent occasions—and know how important the work that we have done for our constituents has been in that regard—will recognise the importance of the link between a voter and the place that the Member seeks to represent.

I am very lucky. I am the Member of Parliament for Chesterfield, and what Chesterfield is very clear. The vast majority of people in my constituency are in the Chesterfield borough. Two wards of the Chesterfield borough are in the North East Derbyshire constituency, but most people in my constituency are very clear about where they are from. There are many other constituencies where it is much more opaque, and the more narrowly we draw the plus and minus tolerance level, the more difficult it is for the Boundary Commission to put together proposals that take those things into account.

When we remove the parliamentary scrutiny, many of the people who are speaking up for absolutely the right reasons now may come back and say, “I still think I was right to vote for that Bill, but it is the Boundary Commission that has come up with these proposals. If only they had done it different in my constituency and given me this ward, it would all have been okay.” But it is the domino effect of all the other different constituencies that makes this very difficult to achieve. Members of Parliament are taking their constituencies and communities in their hands when they propose and vote for this narrow tolerance level, alongside the removal of any element of parliamentary scrutiny.

The hon. Member for Dartford said a few moments ago that there should not be any disagreement about the overall principle that we need boundary changes, and of course there absolutely is not. I recognise that boundary changes are an integral part of reflecting the fact that our communities change in size and that there is population shift over any period of time, so I absolutely recognise that the process needs to happen. It is all about how narrow the constituencies are, so that we retain the importance of that constituency link, and how regular the boundary changes are, because if voters move into different constituencies from one election to the next, it takes quite a long time to educate people about who their new Member of Parliament is and for Members to build up a relationship with new communities and to understand the issues in those communities. The principle of whether we have boundary changes is not at stake; what is at stake is how we operate. If many of the things that the Labour party argued for when we discussed parliamentary constituencies in the 2010 Parliament had been supported, the Government would have got the boundary changes they wanted, rather than finding 10 years on that they were never actually introduced. That should disappoint all of us who believe in democracy.

I shall make one final point. The likely outcome of the Bill will be that a city like London, where we have seen huge growth in population size but which has a transient population that is less likely to register than the population in some other areas, is likely to see a reduction in its number of seats. That cannot be right in a democracy if we actually want constituencies to reflect the number of voters. I would really like the Government to consider that issue in Committee.