Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My distress at the lack of interest in the substance of the Bill is a matter of some import. Amendment 58A would replace the current proposal in Clause 11 to fix the House of Commons at 600 seats, with an alternative rule which would anchor the size of the other place at its current membership of 650. As your Lordships’ House’s Constitution Committee made clear in its report on the Bill: "““We conclude that the Government have not calculated the proposed reduction in the size of the House of Commons on the basis of any considered assessment of the role and functions of MPs””." That reality was exposed in the debate last Monday, when the Government again failed to provide any adequate explanation as to why 600 seats is the optimum size for the other place or, in particular, why a 600-seat Commons would serve the public more effectively than the current 650-seat Chamber. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, conceded from the Front Bench that: "““We have never suggested that there was anything magic or ideal about a House of Commons of 600 any more than the current size of 650 is ideal””.—[Official Report, 10/01/11; col. 1222.]" Is that, I ask, rhetorically, the best that the Government can do in a situation where they are using their political majority in the other place in order to push through a reduction in the number of Members of Parliament? It is obviously a dangerous precedent that is being adopted, because it involves using your political power to fix the size of the legislative chamber in circumstances where people will allege, as we do on this side, that it is being done for political advantage. It is worth saying that that approach to the question of the size of the legislative chamber has not been adopted in this country since the Second World War, when a Speaker’s Conference agreed the arrangement that then became law in 1949 and, though there have been changes to the detail, it has never been disputed that the people who should decide the number of constituencies in the country should be the boundary commissions, which are believed—correctly, in my view—to be beyond party politics. We do not want to get into a position where, when you win an election, you then use your majority to fix the size of the House of Commons to suit your political advantage.