Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

With great respect, I ask the noble and learned Lord to address the figures. That is a total exaggeration, which is not unknown from the former Lord Chancellor. In fact, very little was done, and I have read apologies from those on the former government Front Bench in the other House saying that they did not do enough. I ask the noble and learned Lord to read Hansard occasionally. Among the other things I favour in this Bill is the proposal that the Boundary Commission should do five-yearly reviews. We have been accused of just looking after the Conservative interests in this Bill, but I have seen situations when Labour in office has deliberately delayed boundary reviews. Let me give an example. Before the 1970 election I had won a by-election in Acton, which was a Labour seat. We were coming up to the 1970 election and a boundary review was published, which was going to make my seat a safe seat, so I had a vested interest in it. Alas, the Home Secretary of the day, Jim Callaghan, did not share that interest and did everything that he possibly could to manoeuvre to prevent the Boundary Commission proposals coming before Parliament. It was a shameful process; he tried to jiggle a few seats here and a few seats there, and it had to be withdrawn. So for electoral advantage the Labour Party rigged the system in the 1970 election, and it has done it before. Successive Governments have always been rather slow to introduce Boundary Commission reports. As a result, you had the electorate of 2000 for the 2010 election, while the 2005 election was on the electorate of 1991. Successive Governments have delayed. So I welcome the fact that this will be done on a five-yearly basis. I am also glad that public inquiries are going to be scrapped. I do not know how many Members of this House have attended a public inquiry of the commission, but they will all agree that it is a misnomer to call it a public inquiry. At the ones I attended, no ordinary citizens turned up at all. The only people who turned up were the ward councillors and their wives—I suppose they are ordinary citizens—the sitting Member of Parliament, the various candidates and their election agents. It was really a rehearsal of all the submissions they had made to the Boundary Commission. Those with the small interests of the locality were not there at all. Moreover, with regard to the findings of those inquiries, the greatest changes that they have ever instituted were to change the name of the new constituency. In the whole history of the Boundary Commission there have been three inquiries leading to significant changes in the boundaries.