Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill [HL]

It is, my Lords. There are 14,300 more electors in an English seat than in a Welsh seat. That is over-representation by any definition of the word. I am sorry—I was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, but I have to recognise that Wales is over-represented. An average size of constituent electorate for all the United Kingdom would be 76,000 per constituency, which would have the following effect: under a general reduction to 581 MPs, England would have 486, 43 fewer than now; Wales would have 29, 11 fewer; Scotland would have 51, 8 fewer; and Northern Ireland would have 15, three fewer. All countries would lose some seats, but they would be a standard electorate size, which is only just and fair. Votes are worth the same wherever they are throughout the United Kingdom. It has always been said that we should overcompensate for Wales and Scotland. I do not think that that is fair, and there is always the issue of very large constituencies. One MP in Western Australia represents a constituency which is the size of the whole of western Europe, although I am not suggesting anything quite so radical for Scotland. I believe that this is a sensible suggestion. It was put forward in 1988 by Roy Jenkins in his report, which is still revered somewhere in the Liberal party, on electoral reform; namely, that there should be a single electoral quota, 76,000. The comparison with the size of other constituencies around the world is interesting. The United Kingdom, with a population of 60 million people, has 646 MPs; Germany, with a population of 82 million, has 600; Japan, with a population of 127 million—twice the size of ours—has only 470; Russia, with a population of 144 million, has 450; and America, with a population of 293 million, has 430 Congressmen. By any standard internationally we are massively over-represented. I hope that this Bill will be a constructive contribution to the debate and the major national review that the Boundary Commission has askedfor. A review is well overdue because the last onewas in 1944 and it was based very much on the 1917 arrangements. The average cost of a Member of Parliament is £489,000, which covers virtually everything. Multiplying the cost of 65 MPs would give £32 million in savings, but that is not a fair figure because, although some of the fixed overheads could be reduced, some couldnot. The savings would probably be about £20 million, which happens to match the state funding that the parties are talking about. The cost of our democratic process is interesting. The whole cost of our democratic process—everything—including the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, the Northern Ireland Assembly, us and others, and all the business of elections, has doubled in the lifetime of this Government. I do not think that this figure will feature very highly in the legacy, but it is £1.3 billion, a huge sum of money. I was very interested to see that the basic salary of an MP is now £60,675. In a recent survey in the House Magazine, 61 per cent indicated that they want more. MPs’ claims for expenses average at £134,000 a year. When I first joined the House of Commons in 1968, we were given 1,000 free sheets of paper a year. I see the noble Lord, Lord Richard, nodding—he might have joined when we were given only 500 sheets. One had to buy any sheets more than the 1,000. There was no free postage. Yet one MP last year spent £25,146 on postage: his constituents are very fed up getting letters from him. There was only one free telephone call, which was to your town clerk. You went to a little office with telephones where two old, retired soldiers in brown coats collected money from you for your telephone calls. Of course, we had no offices; we sat on benches. There is a huge difference. On top of that, the House of Commons this year has voted each Member of Parliament £10,000 extra in order to communicate with constituents. That is a payment to incumbents to protect their incumbency. While the reform of the House of Lords is, as it were, at the top of the agenda and everyone has views of one sort or another on that, although we are expecting the Government’s proposals, it is quite appropriate for us to say that it is time that one should think of reforming the House of Commons as well. Its procedures should be reformed. The former Speaker, the noble Baroness, Lady Boothroyd, made a speech on that only the other day. She said that the House of Commons we knew is about to disappear. We are getting Bills up here with 40 pages undebated; the guillotine has become routine. But that is the procedure of the House of Commons and it must sort it out. However, the size of the House of Commons is a matter on which we can legitimately have a view and I hope that this will be a helpful and constructive contribution to the debate.