Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

The noble Lord will get an opportunity to reply. That does not mean to say that that is not an important issue. We have debated it in the context of Part 1. As the Committee will know, the Government are committed to taking forward the proposals already set in train—by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, himself—on individual registration. My right honourable friend the Deputy Prime Minister has also indicated that there will be a pilot scheme to allow local authorities to data match with other sets of data to try to get a better understanding and a better way to identify those who are not on the electoral roll. To think that to fight an election in 2015 on an electoral roll that has as its basis the electorate in the year 2000 is in some way better defies rational consideration. What the Bill proposes—a rolling review every five years and efforts which we are making which, I think, will be widely supported across the Committee, to encourage individual registration and to identify where there are people who ought to be on the electoral roll but who are not—is far more likely to have an effect for the general election of 2020 than setting up a committee of inquiry that might take ages to report and then to have legislation following on the back of that. We are more likely to achieve what is a perfectly laudable and proper aim of ensuring that as many people who are entitled to vote as can be are on the electoral roll by the way that we are going about it. That is more likely to lead to success. The noble Lord’s amendment also questions whether equally weighted votes should be given priority over other factors. We are aware of and sensitive to other reasons—the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and others mentioned the importance of local ties and communities—for proposing exceptions to the principle. An identity with or affiliation to certain areas of community is something that many people feel to be of considerable importance. Those of us in this House who have been Members of the other place feel that in particular. We acknowledge that there is a strength of feeling, and we would certainly want those with a local interest to make representations to the Boundary Commission in relation to local ties and for the Boundary Commission to be able to take them into consideration. The Bill will allow for constituencies to vary in the number of electors by as much as 10 per cent—that is, 5 per cent either way—of the UK electoral quota. That will allow the commission to take local factors into account. We will no doubt debate possible exceptions: I am sure that amendments have already been tabled to allow us that debate. Another issue raised was workload. It is not the case that workload is a factor taken into account by the Boundary Commission at the moment. One speech suggested that somehow the Government excluding that was another manifestation of evil. It would be a judgment of Solomon for any independent inquiry to work out what is a relevant workload for a particular Member of Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, mentioned the high asylum-seeker numbers in the constituency which he formerly represented with great distinction. I remember as a Scottish Minister once visiting his constituency on an asylum-seeker issue; I know precisely what he means. However, as a representative of a landlocked constituency, he never had to deal with an oil tanker carrying 84,000 tonnes of crude oil crashing and spilling its oil in the middle of his constituency. There are different things which different Members of Parliament have, by the very nature of their constituencies, to deal with. It would be more than a judgment of Solomon to try to weigh up what the different workload was for different Members of Parliament.