Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I think that my noble friend is anticipating the debate on the next amendment, which stands in my name. A lot of the debate within the Conservative Party arises from the document written by Andrew Tyrie. It is a good document and worth reading, but the interesting point for me is that he argued that the number of MPs should be reduced by 120—that is, by 20 per cent—and that that reduction should be carried out over 10 years in two five-year periods. That is where the figure of 60 comes from—it was going to be the amount of the reduction in the first five years. I forget which noble Lord intervened to question whether this was a matter for the House of Lords, but one reason why it is a matter for the Lords is that there is a clear statement in Mr Tyrie’s document that the redundant MPs, as I think they were described, could be sent to the House of Lords. Of course, when you reduce the number of MPs, you have a big fight over who inherits the constituency and what the constituency boundaries are. The suggestion was that those who did not succeed in retaining a seat should be considered for a peerage. Therefore, there is some background to this matter. The interesting point is that that figure of 120 was quoted quite frequently. I do not know where Nick Clegg got 150 from—he seems to have plucked it out of the air. However, the thing that troubles me most, and the reason why the number is important, as well as the way in which we decide these things—a matter that we shall come to when we deal with the next amendment—is that the figure of 60, mentioned in this document and in subsequent speeches by David Cameron when he was the leader of the Opposition, relates to the advantage to the Conservative Party in terms of winning more seats. It was not put like that directly. It was said that there was unfair representation and that the Labour Party had too many seats. The other reason given was finance. However, for the moment let us focus on the fact that Andrew Tyrie based his conclusion on the number of electors in an area. He argued that a vote in one area was not worth as much as a vote in, say, a Labour constituency because of the number of electors in the constituency. However, as has been pointed out in many previous debates on this matter, everything hinges on voter registration and the socioeconomic factor of turnout. Those things matter, but the problem is that Andrew Tyrie does not take them into account. The Committee may be pleased to know that I am not going to go into great detail about MPs’ constituency work but, as we know, there is a difference in a constituency where, regardless of who represents it, registration is much lower. In many cases, the MP will be representing people who are not on the register. Perhaps I may refer briefly to my own experience of this matter. Very few research projects have been carried out on MPs’ constituencies. One such project was carried out on my constituency over a period of a year and it threw up two things that are relevant to this debate. One was that an awful lot of people would say, ““I supported you””, but, when you looked at the electoral register, they were not on it. In other words, what they really meant was, ““I supported Labour””, or, if it was a Conservative MP, they would have said that they supported the Conservatives. However, that did not necessarily mean that they voted, because often they were not on the register. At times, that situation applied to 50 per cent of the people who turned up at my advice surgeries. Another thing troubled me, and this is why I think that there is a case for looking at how MPs do their job and the numbers involved. Whenever anyone came with a council problem—my noble friend Lord Martin referred to this—we asked why they had not gone to see to their elected councillor first. Almost invariably, the answer was, ““I thought I’d go to the top””. In other words, people view political power as a sort of pyramid. They think, ““The MP’s at the top, so I’ll go and see him””. I have always been troubled by this problem of undermining local authorities. It is one reason why I began to question whether there are too many MPs. If you take cases away from elected councillors, you are in effect saying to them, ““You don’t have to do your job. I’ll do it for you””. That is undesirable. However, if you go down the road of saying that MPs should not take council cases or Scottish Assembly cases or whatever and you enhance devolved power—something that I greatly support—you then have to ask: who does the MP represent? One reason why I have been tempted to go for a smaller number of MPs is that, particularly over the past 40-odd years, MPs have largely become councillors and social workers, and that is not desirable. At the same time, MPs have paid less attention than they might have done had they had more time to the national and international issues with which our Parliament is rightly concerned. Therefore, there is an imbalance. That takes me back to the central issue, which is that I am passionately against the Bill as a constitutional Bill. If you are going to change the number of Members of Parliament, first you have to take account of certain important key factors and the process by which you make that change. As I said, I shall come to that when we debate the next amendment. Secondly, the number has to be decided on a rather better basis than that the Conservative Party will do rather well if 60 seats are knocked out. Much earlier today, someone said to me, ““Well, we changed the number of people in the Scottish Assembly””, or the other Assembly, ““and we didn’t make such a song and dance about it””. To that I say that, if you change the size of a House of Parliament without the consent of all the parties, and some parties, rightly or wrongly, believe that that enhances the position of one party, then, if they are right, the chances of those other parties forming a Government are reduced. The crucial difference between Parliament and the Assemblies around the United Kingdom is that, if you win a parliamentary election in Britain, you can change all those other things. You can change an Assembly or even get rid of the Assembly in Scotland if you like. There would probably be a riot by my noble friends here if you did that, but you would have the power to do it. However, if a political party’s chances of winning as well as it would have done are taken away from it, something much more fundamental is being changed. It is on this sort of point that this Bill is different from a normal constitutional Bill. A constitutional Bill that, for example, removes the judges from Parliament and puts them in a Supreme Court can be reversed by a future Government, but future Governments have to be elected via a system in which people have confidence. This is a matter for the next debate but I hope that I have gone some way towards explaining where this figure of 60 MPs has come from. It originated very much in Andrew Tyrie’s document. It is argued as being a first step, but I should like to know from the Government whether the second step is still under consideration. If the first step was to bring about a 10 per cent reduction in the first five years, instead of, as was originally suggested, 20 per cent in 10 years, will we have in the next Parliament, if the present Administration continue, another Bill like this one reducing the number by another 10 per cent? That is what is so dangerous about the Bill—we do not really know what the agenda is. We know that the figure of 60 has been discussed within the Conservative Party over the past eight or nine years, or probably longer. We also know that 20 per cent was the initial figure and that it was then reduced to 10 per cent—that is, 60, give or take a few—over a five-year period, and the document talks about how the political parties should adjust their reselection processes to allow that to happen. As I indicated, MPs who lost their seats would then be considered for a peerage. However, this is a wholly different agenda and one that I find rather uncomfortable. I am willing to support this amendment because of the next amendment, which stands in my name. As I said, I think that the way in which we do these things is more important than the number, but if we are to have a number, this one would do very well.