Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I think that this clause is deeply suspect. I support the amendment of my noble friend and I should happily vote for other amendments giving slightly more time for a Boundary Commission to undertake its task. It is quite extraordinary that it is now felt responsible to compress the time available for a Boundary Commission to undertake its work into about the half the time that it traditionally takes, while imposing on it quite unprecedented constraints—the need at the same time to achieve the maximum 5 per cent limit and to reduce the total number of MPs by the arbitrary figure of 50. If you have a contractor or several contractors bidding for your business and one says that he can build your house, motorway, piece of machinery, factory or whatever in half the time that it has always taken in the past, and in half the time that the competitors say that they need, you would be sensible to be alert at least to the possibility that serious corners are being cut. It is clear that serious corners, including any sense of public inquiries or appeals, are being cut. Such inquiries are essential in the democratic process. I have given evidence in a public inquiry on a Boundary Commission report. We did not carry the day, but I and those who supported the same point of view all felt at the end of the process that we had had a thorough and fair hearing and that it was an essential part of democracy that such a debate should take place in public about proposed new constituency boundaries. That is the only way in which the public can be reassured that nothing surreptitious is going on and that there is no hanky-panky on the part of the Government covertly trying to influence the result of what should be obviously an entirely objective non-party-political process. Those things are terribly important. All those safeguards are going out of the window. If I was a member of the Boundary Commission, I should like to have the mechanism of the public inquiry and the appeal process preserved. I would feel it much more likely that I did a good and proper job if there was that check and balance in the system. I should welcome the opportunity to listen openly and frankly to the expression of other views on a particular determination that I might make and to think again in the light of that. I should feel that I was doing a much better job having had that opportunity and that there was much less of a possibility that there might be some angle or consideration that had been neglected. I do not think that it is a matter of dispute that a corner is being cut in this case and I do not think that it can really be a matter of dispute that this is a very serious corner that is being cut. It is more than a corner because it is something quite fundamental to the process and to public confidence in it. What is being cut out is, if you like, the dialogue between the bureaucracy, or the agency in the form of the Boundary Commission, on the one side and the general public on the other. It is a serious matter. I have listened to a lot of the debates, although I have not contributed before, but I have yet to hear from the government side a cogent reason as to why this has to take place. The only answer that we get is that it has to happen by the time of the next election. That takes us back to the gerrymandering issue that has been raised on many occasions. Why does it have to happen by the next election? We are trying to get the electoral process right, so if we are going to make substantial changes let us go through the process carefully and thoroughly so as to make sure that we take the public with us. We should make sure that we have something that is valid not just for the next election but for generations to come. We cannot keep coming back to this matter. Frankly, the haste is unworthy of the democratic process and unworthy of the way that constitutional changes should be carefully deliberated in this place. I intend to support amendments along the lines of those put forward by my noble friends that would extend the time available to the Boundary Commissions to complete the deeply delicate task with which they are now going to be confronted if this Bill gets on to the statute book.