Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I am absolutely sticking to the rules of the House because what both of these amendments propose is an assessment rationally based on evidence as to what the numbers should be. It is impossible, in my view, to answer that question without knowing what the relationship between the Executive and the legislature is going to be. Let me remind the noble Lord and members of the party opposite of what was said by the Deputy Prime Minister in explaining the rationale of the constitutional reform being put forward. One of the things he said was this: "““It is an unambiguous judgment on our part that reducing the power of the executive, seeking to boost the power of the legislature, making the legislature more accountable to the people … collectively introduces the mechanisms by which people can exercise greater control over politicians””." These are good and fine thoughts, but how do you unambiguously reduce the power of the Executive or seek to boost the power of the legislature if you reduce the number of Back-Bench MPs and do not proportionately or in some other way reduce the membership of the Executive? It may be that it is not right, as the later amendment proposes, to do that simply on a proportionate basis, but in the Constitution Committee we asked both the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister, Mr Mark Harper, about the relationship between the Executive and Back Benchers after these reforms. I remind noble Lords what they both said—it is in paragraph 32 of the seventh report of the Select Committee on the Constitution: "““The Deputy Prime Minister recognised that ‘There is a strong argument that says that you must look at this and adapt the number of people who are on the government payroll so that you do not get a lopsided imbalance between those on the payroll and those holding them to account’””." He is quite right. When is that going to happen? He said: ““I totally accept that””, but it is not happening in the Bill. Unless the Leader of the House is going to surprise us by accepting the amendment later—I strongly suspect that he is not going to do anything of the sort—it is not going to happen in the Bill. The Minister was asked the same question. He also accepted that, "““there is a problem that needs to be dealt with””," but argued that the Bill is not the right vehicle to do it. What I say, and I care about constitutional reform—sadly, lawyers do—is that this House is being asked to accept, and indeed the country is being asked to accept, a change in the balance between the Executive and Back-Benchers, purportedly in the context of a programme which argues for a reduction in the power of the Executive in circumstances where we do not know what the end result will be.