Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Wendy Chamberlain and Gareth Johnson

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Gareth Johnson]

This is perhaps one of the arguments behind keeping to 650 so the actual sizes of constituencies do not change. I have one of the few constituencies in the country that would actually have lost voters, even under the 600 formula, so there are a lot of differences between hon. Members’ constituencies.

I would ask that the Labour party supports this Bill as it goes through Parliament. The only thing in the Labour party’s manifesto about boundary changes was changing from 600 to 650. It has got what it asked for, and therefore should be supportive of the Government on this particular Bill.

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

I shall speak to new clause 3, tabled in my name and those of my other Liberal Democrat colleagues, and the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas).

The Government’s rationale for this Bill is that they want to make every vote count equally, and we have heard that. I pointed out on Second Reading that an electoral system in which a Government can win a majority of seats in this House without a majority of votes is one in which votes can never count equally. What the Government really mean is that they want to ensure that constituencies are more or less equally sized. I think there is broad agreement across the House that, within our current electoral system, there are good reasons to do this, although there is clearly disagreement about just how strict that equality should be.

While we have spent much time discussing how much equality there should be between constituencies, we have not really addressed what I believe is a fundamental question: equality of what? That is why I have tabled my amendment. The legislation, as it currently stands, says that there should be equality between the electorates of different constituencies, and that equality should be determined as a proportion of the electorate of the country.

That is not the only option available. New Zealand, for example, uses the census to determine constituency sizes, and I am sympathetic to this. We provide public services to everyone in our constituency, regardless of whether they are eligible to vote or indeed registered to vote. However, my new clause does something else: it redefines what “electorate” means for the purposes of this Bill. Currently, the electorate within the scope of the Bill means all those people on the electoral roll. I would expand this definition. My amendment would include all those who are eligible to vote, not just those who happen to be on the electoral roll at the time of the review.

According to the Electoral Commission, over 9 million people who are eligible to vote are not currently on the electoral roll. I would suggest to the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Chris Clarkson) that these are not necessarily people who choose not to vote. Our electoral register is incomplete by a large amount. That is a huge problem for our democracy, and it is a problem for this Bill and for what the Government hope to achieve by it, for how can we say that this Bill makes constituencies equal sized when it is based on an incomplete register that misses out nearly 20% of eligible voters? It is easy to think up examples. Two parts of this country may well have an identical number of eligible voters, but one local register may be more complete than the other, and as a result one part of the country counts for more than the other when it comes to the boundary review. That will be the reality when this review takes place.

This also raises questions about the value some Members are placing on this 5%. We must also remember that, by the time of the 2024 election, voters who have lived overseas for more than 15 years will, according to this Government’s manifesto, also be eligible to vote. This is a move that I and my party welcome, but it is another reason why the boundaries that this review will create will never be truly equal. They are out of date before they are even used for the first time.

The most concerning thing, however, is that the 9 million who are eligible to vote but not on the register are not just a random collection of individuals. The groups who are disproportionately likely to be eligible to vote but not on the roll include young people, renters, those for whom English is not their first language, and black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. As far as I am concerned, this is a total failure of public policy. Since the murder of George Floyd back in May, we have collectively reflected across this House on the fact that the structures and institutions that make up our society too frequently produce inferior outcomes for those people who are not white. Every Member of this House should be incredibly concerned about the fact that if someone is black, they are disproportionately unlikely to appear on the electoral roll. We are about to carry out a boundary review that will disproportionately exclude BAME people from being counted. That surely is not right.

That is the problem my new clause seeks to address. It would mean that the fact that our register is incomplete does not make a difference because the Boundary Commission would consider these potential electors too. It is entirely possible to treat 100% enrolment as an achievable goal.

Within this country, in Northern Ireland, there is a far more concerted effort to ensure that those in sixth forms and colleges are put on to the electoral register just as they turn 18. I welcome such assisted registration measures, which should be considered throughout the UK. The Government should accept that the annual canvass fails to register a huge number of people. Automatic voter registration is used in many countries, and it is an issue that the hon. Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) raised in her ten-minute rule Bill recently. Just last week, the Lords Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 found the same thing. It said that completeness of the register had not improved, and it proposed automatic and assisted registration as well as ways to reduce duplicate applications. We have to be doing more on this issue, and I hope that the Minister will offer assurances during her winding-up speech that the Government are willing to engage with this issue.