Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I always get excited when I see a mathematical formula in a Bill. The formula of U over 598 appears in the Bill. The idea, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, said, is to have an arrangement whereby each vote counts equally towards electing an MP. That is a very worthy aim, with which I have no quarrel. It is like a programming problem, whereby you minimise the distance between the sizes of different constituencies, subject to various considerations. That is a perfectly good aim. Where I fail to understand the Government’s approach is why they are adding another completely artificial constraint by at the same time reducing the total number of seats by 50. You can achieve equalisation of votes and seats and achieve the aim of having each vote count equally with 650 seats. It would be absolutely no problem. It might even make it easier for the Government to achieve their aim if they did that. We already know that they have a problem in having to set aside two seats. There may be many more seats, as noble Lords have said, and other peculiar constituencies that would rather not be broken up or merged. There are lots of constraints that the Government are trying to ignore. If they had 650 seats, they would be able to achieve their aim of reducing the anomaly between the size of the seats and the number of votes required for a candidate to be elected and to solve the problem of all the other constraints, such as the peculiarity of certain constituencies. When most other countries redraw boundaries or do redistricting, as it is called in America, to make adjustments for population changes, as happened recently in India and as happens periodically in the United States, they do not change the total number of seats. They change only the drawing of boundaries between constituencies. With a system whereby you are trying to do several things at the same time, you end up with a very inadequate solution to the problem. The Government may have a perfectly good, non-political reason for reducing the number of seats to 600, but that has not been stated. One problem that we are facing is in knowing whether the Government’s main aim is to reduce the number of MPs, in which case why make the figure 600? Why not 550 or 500—why not half the House of Commons? We do not know. Are the Government trying to increase the load for MPs, which will clearly be a result of this measure? That surely cannot be the aim. Are the Government trying to do their best to achieve justice whereby each vote has the same value? Yes. Since every other country that has tried to solve the problem has solved it without reducing the total number of seats, I fail to understand why the Government have added that additional constraint. We could go back to the Boundary Commission solution and adopt it and not put a constraint of 600 seats but try as best as possible to equalise the size of seats and electorates. Then we could see what the number would be. We could see whether we could reduce it slightly within certain limits. That may be possible. Right now we are trying to do something that is very worthy, but the way in which it is being done—hedged in by other constraints—will prove counterproductive. Here in this Committee stage we are having a discussion of the various conflicting objectives that the Government are trying to achieve in a very narrow and constricted framework. If the framework had not been so narrow and constricted, the solution would have been much easier.