Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

It may well be achievable but on the basis of a deficient register. That is at the core of our complaint. We do not accept that the review should take place on the back of a deficient register. I do not challenge my noble friend Lord Soley, but I do put it to him that when the Electoral Commission tells him that registration rates in London have gone up, that is at variance with the statistics that have been published by the Office for National Statistics in Wales. The director-general wrote to Chris Ruane, a Member in the other House who has led the charge on this issue over recent years. He has tabled hundreds if not thousands of Questions, and has a library of statistics that is of great interest to those of us who take an interest in these matters. In June of last year, the director-general of the Office for National Statistics in Wales wrote to him: "““I have been asked to reply to your question asking what the electorate was in each year since 1997 in the 100 parliamentary seats which have had the largest decrease in the number of electors on the register since that date … This is the latest year for which comparable data are available””." One can look at where the London boroughs stand in this table of the bottom 100. I will start from the bottom of the table. Kensington and Chelsea, the Cities of London and Westminster, Regent’s Park and North Kensington, Holborn and St Pancras, Hampstead and Highgate, Hammersmith and Fulham, North Southwark and Bermondsey, Islington South and Finsbury, Brent East—I intervene at this stage to suggest that they are not doing well in London, despite what the Electoral Commission might say—Wimbledon, Vauxhall, Tottenham, Lewisham, Deptford, Islington, Hackney. There are more that I could reel off. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, tells us that the problem does not necessarily arise in the way that we suggest because many of these are safe seats where people do not think that it is worth voting. I argue that most of the seats in London that I referred to are highly marginal.