Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Bill has a very worthy aim: reducing the number of Members ofthe House of Commons. That would certainlyhave popular appeal, a point which was easily and effectively made by the noble Lord, Lord Baker. I wonder whether it would be as easy to argue in this place for a reduction in the number of Peers of the Realm as it has been to say that there should befewer Members of Parliament. The Bill’s greater significance lies in its proposal to equalise the size of electorates between constituencies. On the face of it, that seems a worthy and proper aim. There is clear unfairness in the present distribution of seats. However, it ignores other unfairness in our electoral system. Other issues and problems must be addressed if we are to change the way in which the Boundary Commission works. It is clearly unfair that there are different numbers of voters in different constituencies. The Isle of Wight has 109,000 electors and one Member of Parliament, while the Western Isles has 22,000 voters and one Member of Parliament. That shows the problem. The Conservative Party has recently been concerned about unequal constituency sizes only because it wins far fewer seats as a result. The smaller seats tend to be Labour and the larger ones Conservative. The Bill fundamentally fails to address a farbigger problem: although we are supposed to have a democratic system for electing the House of Commons, a party with just 35 per cent of the vote wins 55 per cent of the seats. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, referred to the way in which Wales is over-represented in the House of Commons. Surely the democratic point is that a minority of little more than one-third of voters should not have such a majority in that House. That is the real unfairness. On polling day in May 2005, during the last general election, 26,895 votes were required to elect a Labour Member of Parliament; 44,531 votes to elect a Conservative Member of Parliament; and 96,487 votes to elect a Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament. Surely that is the greater unfairness and should be addressed. If one accepts the basic premises that a voting system should deliver the representatives that people vote for and that votes should be of equal value, then the system outlined in the Bill clearly fails the fundamental tests of fairness and democracy. I accept that there is a case for saying that Members of Parliament should represent equal numbers of constituents. However, surely it is much more important for Members of Parliament to be elected in approximate proportion to the votes cast than it is simply to tinker with a fundamentally flawed electoral system. In 1951, and again in February 1974, the governing party won the most votes in the country but won fewer seats than its major rival. It therefore lost an election that it had actually won by achieving more votes, and it therefore went into opposition. That cannot be fair or democratic. It is estimatedthat if an identical number of votes had been castfor the Labour and Conservative Parties in 2005, the outcome, because of our electoral system, wouldhave been 336 seats for Labour and 222 for the Conservatives. The recent Boundary Commission review may very marginally reduce this bias in the system. However, estimates suggest that the new boundaries mayadd about seven Conservative MPs, remove about six Labour MPs and increase the number of Liberal Democrat MPs by three. It is certainly possible mathematically that the Conservative Party could win more votes than Labour at the next general election but win fewer seats. The Bill does not address that democratic deficit. The answer to the problem is not to tinker with an unfair system, but to reform it entirely. There are a number of technical problems in trying to reduce the size of the seats or to make them more equal in size of electorate. The population in some areas can change quite rapidly. The reviews required to equalise the numbers of electors as outlined in the Bill would have to be done more rapidly than those for general elections. Many constituencies would not exist for more than one election and there would be reviews between elections, leading to continuous uncertainty about what boundaries the forthcoming election would be fought on. There would be knock-on consequences of these population shifts; uncertainty over what boundaries existed may affect not just one area, where there may be a rapid increase or decrease of population, but all the neighbouring areas for a considerable distance. While I am not a fan of the existing electoral system, part of the principle is that there is clear linkage with recognisable communities. If the seats are equalised in the way proposed, that linkage would be broken. It helps elected representatives if ward and constituency boundaries are properly aligned. That would cease to be the case if we went in for equalisation in this way as wards and perhaps even polling districts would need to be split between different constituencies to get the same number of electors into each of them. The current process with the Boundary Commission reviews is most unsatisfactory. Many of the claims made at public inquiries on the process are, to say the least, dubious. However, I believe that more frequent reviews of the boundaries will mean that the integrity of the system will degenerate even further. Theytried in the United States to equalise the size ofthe constituencies. That leads to very frequent gerrymandering, as the requirement of making the size of the electorates equal is paramount. It is more fundamental reform of the system that is required, not this Bill.