Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I very much agree with my noble friend’s comments, although I would not be happy even with a reduction to 640, as the amendment proposes. I shall speak briefly from personal experience. The only justification that I can think of—I really have been wrestling with this—for the Government deciding to reduce the number of MPs is that they must somehow or other think that it does not make any difference to the way in which MPs can serve their constituents. It was my experience as the MP for The Wrekin that when the electorate went up to 90,892 at the 1992 election, it was like the cavalry coming over the hill when the Boundary Commission said that the constituency had to be reduced in size. It went down quite dramatically. I acknowledge that it ended up smaller than you would expect a constituency to be, but it includes a very rapidly expanding town. The electorate went down from 90,892 to 56,558. I have to say to the House that although, like the vast majority of MPs, I was very hard working and did my very best to represent the people who had sent me to Westminster, the level of service and the quality of job that you can do when you have 56,000 or 60,000 people to represent is dramatically better than the service that you can deliver when you represent 90,000 people. At the simplest level, as far as I was concerned, it meant that instead of largely reacting to constituency problems, complaints and grievances—because that filled your time—and going to factories and schools, for example, when they invited you along, I was able in a reasonably coherent way to set out a programme of action within the much smaller electorate and geographical size of the constituency to do these things on a much more systematic basis. I find it impossible to accept the argument that you should increase the size of constituencies. I would describe this section of the Bill not as the reduction in the number of MPs, but as the increase in the size of constituencies. Doing that weakens the link between the MP and his or her constituents. I find that pretty astonishing, particularly when it comes from members of parties that were very concerned about the breakdown of trust in Parliament—we were all concerned about that—up until the last general election, when it was said that MPs and Parliament generally must reconnect with the people. Now they are bringing forward a Bill that makes that unarguably more difficult. I suggest to the Government that they would save themselves an awful lot of difficulty—I know they are not looking for suggestions—if they looked again at the proposal to reduce the number of MPs and concentrated instead on the mantra, which we have heard so frequently, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord McNally, about fair votes in fair constituencies. I cannot remember it, but it is some mantra of that sort. They should concentrate rather more on equalising the size of constituencies, if that is their objective, and rather less on simultaneously trying to reduce the number of MPs and increasing the size of constituencies. I was going to say, ““If I was a betting man””, but I am a betting man. I would bet that if, in the privacy of their own party relationships, the Conservative leadership and the Liberal Democrat leadership went to their own Members of Parliament—who now know that they will be in conflict with neighbours as the constituencies are redrawn, will for the most part have bigger constituencies to represent and will have to face this upheaval every five years—they would not still be very keen to go ahead with the Bill in its present form. I would imagine that if the Whips do what Whips have traditionally done, at their best, which is consult their Members, they would find widespread misgivings about what is being done. When you get over the flush of success when you are first returned and at subsequent returns—we know there has been a terrific turnover in membership of the other House—they will begin to realise that very substantial changes are coming their way, probably to their disadvantage, which their own Government are whipping through. I have no problem whatever with this House spending time on a Bill that primarily concerns the House of Commons, because very quickly, large numbers of their Members will object not only to the constituency part of the Bill, but to the change in the electoral system. So we have the astonishing situation that on most bits of the Bill, I have no doubt that there is a majority in the House of Commons against. I am certain that that is the case with respect to changes in the electoral system and I suspect that by now, in private, it would also be the view of many Members of the House of Commons in respect of the constituency boundaries part of the Bill. That is why the function of this House is so important. It is to do the job that the Commons could not do because of the guillotine, but I also believe it to be true, paradoxically, that those of us who are concerned about this Bill are more representative of opinion across the House of Commons than can in any way be described by the votes that took place. Finally, I have seen Minister after Minister defending the Bill and finding it impossible to explain why they have picked 600 and why they have that size of electorate for the constituencies. They would not be in this difficulty if they had thought again about the wisdom or otherwise of simultaneously changing the basis on which constituency boundaries are drawn—we could have a serious argument about making them more equal—and taking a decision on reducing the size of the House of Commons. They would not be in the business of having to explain the optimum size of a constituency; they would simply be able to say that this was what the independent Boundary Commission had decided in the past. It may not sound like it, but if they could bring themselves to look again at the position they have adopted on some of these things, they would make life a great deal easier for themselves. I have to say that I would certainly oppose any reduction in the number of Members of Parliament.