Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am toldthat we have a few. He produced a documententitled Pruning the Politicians, in which he advocated a 20 per cent reduction in the size of the House of Commons. In essence, that means that its size would fall from 646 to 581. I will deal with the detail of that in a moment, but perhaps I may say first that I have had help in drafting the Bill from the Public Bill Office. Electoral legislation is a rather arcane matter and my Bill is based on existing legislation. I have had help from Thomas Elias and Nick Besly. I thank them very much for that. We are very lucky in this House to have such a good Public Bill Office. In my experience, it is as good as, or indeed better than, that in the House of Commons. The history of membership of the House of Commons is that before the Act of Union of 1707, there were 513 Members of Parliament for England and Wales. Forty-five were added at the Act of Union. It was recognised at that stage that, in relation to the population of Scotland, that was an over-representation. That increased the number to 558. It remained at that until Pitt’s disastrous Act of Union, which abolished Grattan’s Parliament in 1800, when 100 Members were added for Ireland, a significant over-representation for Ireland. That increased the number to 658. It remained at about that level for quite some time. In 1885, 12 more were added. When southern Ireland became independent, Northern Ireland received 12 Members, but they did not take away 88; they took away only 55. One reason why it was still a largely over-represented House was that, in 1917, there was a Speaker's Conference. There were no minutes, so no one actually knew what had happened until the final outcome, but it discussed the question of limiting the membership to 500 and created the situation we are now experiencing, because it said that there should be an average electorate of 70,000. That meant that as the population rose in each of the countries there would be an automatic ratch-up of the number. In 1968, when I first entered the House of Commons, it was smaller than it is now. My proposal would also equalise the size of electorate constituencies throughout the United Kingdom, which is only fair, but very radical. The average electorate size of a constituency is 68,736, but there is a great variation between the constituent parts of the UK. The English average is 70,231; Scotland is next, largely as a result of the reduction of seats in the previous Parliament, at 65,444; the Northern Ireland average is 64,078; and the figure for Wales is 55,920, so Wales is significantly over-represented in the House of Commons.