Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I indicated that an important factor would be the size of the reformed House, because if the overall number of Ministers is to be retained, it may be considered preferable to draw them from the elected House, with tested accountability mechanisms, rather than increasing the ministerial numbers elsewhere, including in this House. The noble and learned Lord raised that issue, although the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, raised it first. It is an important issue. It is an issue which the Government have indicated needs to be addressed, but not in the Bill. There are other implications. For example, if Ministers were not to be in the other place, would they automatically be in this place? Would they have voting rights in this place? There are a whole host of issues which are perhaps more relevant to the debate about the constitution of the second Chamber in the context of a reduced House of Commons than to be dealt with in this debate. Another consideration which the amendment addresses is the time taken to complete the boundary reviews. As I said, the issue at hand here is simple. Reviews take too long, meaning that boundaries become out of date. The Government propose five-yearly reviews, with the first review to report in 2013. That leads on to another issue raised by noble Lords, such as the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours, Lord Harris of Haringey, and Lord Wills, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. That is whether we might use a population base rather than an electorate base to draw up constituencies. The electoral register has always been used for that task. I took the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, to indicate that that is still his basic position. The 1986 Act, which contains the current rules, passed through Parliament without the intervention of a committee of inquiry. The secretary of the Boundary Commission for Scotland gave evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee where he discussed the practical problems with using population. I cannot see what an inquiry of potentially three years could resolve here that previous Acts of Parliament and the opinion of an independent Boundary Commission cannot.