Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, in speaking to Amendment 55, moved by my noble friend Lord Lipsey, I am obviously happy that I will not speak to or move Amendment 56, which stands in my name. We are already in 2011 and the proposal in the Bill is that we are to have a report from the Boundary Commission in a little over two and a half years. That is just impractical. If we do not see some movement on this, we are creating the conditions whereby the Boundary Commission will find it almost impossible to have any sort of meaningful process with local residents, even under the limited proposals in the Bill. Many years ago, I lived in Coventry—a great Midlands city—and I was involved in presenting evidence to the boundary inquiry in the early 1990s; I think it was in approximately 1993. That inquiry was triggered by proposals to reduce the number of parliamentary seats from four to three. At that time there were three Labour and one Conservative Members of Parliament. Going down from four seats to three meant that it was very unlikely, however you drew the boundaries, that the Conservatives would retain a seat in the city. In producing its recommendations, the Boundary Commission produced two seats in the north of the city. It had a Coventry North West seat and a Coventry North East seat. It put the Holbrooks ward from the north-west and the Longford ward, where I lived in the north-east, into the same constituency. It made no difference to the outcome of a future election but the Boundary Commission, by drawing up its proposals back in its London office, had missed the Coventry-Nuneaton railway line and the A444 from junction 3 of the M6 into the city. I stress again to your Lordships that where those wards ended up made no difference to the actual outcome of the election, but it had completely missed that. We had a local inquiry; local residents, community groups, Members of Parliament, the parties and the local authorities all attended. The next day, the commissioner himself drove around the city, visiting the various points that had been mentioned by residents there. He saw the merits of the case argued by people and changed the proposals accordingly so that, even today, the Holbrooks ward remains in Coventry North West and the Longford ward remains in Coventry North East. My point is that if the Government get rid of local inquiries and only allow less than two and a half years, as proposed in the Bill, for written submissions then such things will never be picked up. We will have constituencies created that have no basis in any sort of community ties and no relationship to local residents. I want to hear from the Minister whether the Government are prepared to risk that or are they prepared, as the amendment suggests, to give a longer time than they are proposing for the Boundary Commission to consider written proposals?