Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I do not in any way wish to be political and I certainly do not want to be accused of filibuster, which is not my intention at all. I tried to raise this point earlier, but it has not been answered by anybody on either side of the House. When we employ people in most parts of the public sector, we make certain that that employment is tailored to the job that is required, taking account of the number of people who will be required to fill posts to do the work. It seems to me that we have not yet in this debate fully explained exactly what we are requiring of our Members of the House of Commons. When I, for example, do an experiment in my laboratory, I make very serious mathematical calculations to try to predict what I will need mathematically in order to get a satisfactory experiment or a satisfactory result or to get something that is valuable. I use complex statistics. It seems to me—perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, might be able to answer this, and I hope the noble Lord, Lord Snape, might come back to it when he returns to his amendment in due course—that we are not doing anything other than pulling out of the air numbers which do not have any rationality. This is a really important issue for the House. For example—maybe this has come up before, but I have not heard it—it seems to me pretty obvious that, given the nature of an inner-city constituency with the deprivation that is likely to be present, a sitting Member is going to have a much harder task in servicing those constituents than someone in a rural area with perhaps the same number of constituents. It happens, of course, that most inner-city areas would be more likely to be represented by a Labour MP, but that is not my point at all. My point is that it does not make sense to have a blanket rule across constituencies; the amount of work in constituencies will naturally vary considerably. I hope that while we are teasing out this issue of whether it is 650 or 640, we might actually address this, and that future speakers in this debate will do just that.