Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I would like to try to answer the question asked by my noble friend Lord Winston, because it is a legitimate one. Although he did not put it this crudely, he seemed to say that, in theory and on paper, it is a good idea to write down the job description. But that cannot always be done. The one thing about the membership of the other place is that it is unique. Nobody else in the country is doing the things that they do. They are non-executive—they have no authority and cannot issue any orders except to their personal staff to answer questions. They are ombudsmen, champions, ambassadors, marriage counsellors and social workers. After my first 10 years I stopped saying that I had dealt with everything that you could think of, because the next week something completely different, which could never have been contemplated, came into my surgery or across my desk. I went through two boundary changes along with my late friend Denis Howell, who was also a Member of this place. We had discussions about the size of the constituencies and the workload. Since then, I have taken more of an interest in matters outside the narrow urban areas, but Denis explained to me why the workload in the inner-cities was different. My seat was largely outer-city but also had a bit of inner-city. The workload is great in terms of the social side of things, such as the deprivation and the individual casework of people with individual problems, but you then have to balance that against the sparsity of population in other areas as well as what someone called the ““intelligentsia””, although that is not the word that I would use. About once a month somebody would come to see me to talk about policy. It was a shock when someone would do so. I would think, ““What is the problem? This is about policy?””. In other areas of the country, however, Members of Parliament are driven round the bend with questions about policy from their electorate. They have the time, the wherewithal, the knowledge, the expertise and the curiosity to put their Member of Parliament on the rack. It is very difficult to write these things down and say that one is more important than another. I missed part of the debate but made a short intervention before the attempt to close the previous debate at about 7:30 am. However, I mentioned that my constituency numbers increased from 52,000 to 76,000 in the 1983 boundary changes. I had not realised that 76,000 was so important until I heard the noble Lord, Lord McNally, winding up the last debate. That is it: pick 76,000. That is the way to do it. My constituency, at the best measure, was 16 square miles. Radnor was about 1,200 square miles at the time. I visited other constituencies. I was once in Rossendale and Darwin for some reason. I was the opposition spokesman and was with the Member of Parliament. It may have been Janet Anderson, I cannot remember, but we were driving down a road in a valley with fields adjoining. She said, ““We still have another 20 miles to go””. I said, ““I could put my whole constituency in this area that we are looking at now””. The time element of getting around and being available when you have sparsity of population is a factor that we underestimate at our peril. I did not want to intervene earlier on the noble Lord, Lord Liddell, or anybody else, because I had not been in the debate. However, the issue about Cumbria is not an unimportant one. He did not mention it, so I will. The only way you could put five Members in Cumbria is to stick a mountain range in the middle of one of the constituencies. It is the only way you can do it, because on paper it has been looked at and dismissed. When we had the last boundary review in 1992-93, the one that came into force in 1997, at the boundary inquiry in Birmingham we were faced with a situation where Yardley, a Birmingham constituency, if we did it wrong, would be 52,000. We knew that it had been the smallest constituency on mainland England. You could not justify the smallest constituency in the middle of the country because we were comparing it at that time with Copeland, I think it was, on the west coast of Cumbria. That was the next smallest, I think, with something in the range of 49,000 to 51,000 constituents, quite a bit smaller than the average. The reason was the sea and the mountains. If you want to take the view that, ““No, everybody has got to be together””, that means that you put a mountain range in the middle of a constituency. That is the reality. That is not a hypothetical example, but that is what will happen in the county of Cumbria. I do not think that anybody would think that that is a good idea. The only other point I want to make is the one previously made by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, I think, about the unsettling situation for Members of the other place. When boundaries have gone through two changes, in the normal course of events—three elections, a boundary change, three elections, a boundary change—there needs to be a degree of stability. You always knew that at the next election there would be a boundary change. There was an unsettling period, even though you were not fighting colleagues and Birmingham was not losing seats. People retired, and there was not really a massive conflict situation. However, those things occurred in the rest of the country. This is going to be a big conflict in the other place now because they have just had a boundary change. This is not a point about taking the normal flow. It is true that a lot of people have just come in, but the others are there as a result of a boundary change. Now they are going to face another boundary change at the next election. If the Government think they can hold Members’ attention in the Lobby and on all the minutiae and the boring but necessary bits of legislation as we approach the next election, when people are off trying to find a constituency and challenging their colleagues—because that is the inevitable consequence of this—they’ve got another think coming. I think that will cause unsettling. That happens normally, and I have no problem about that. However, to have it happen with two elections running I think is going to cause major difficulties. My final point is one that I would have made earlier, but it does go with the flow of the Bill. We have had constant complaining. When I left here last night, I actually watched the Leader of the House on Sky Television. He gave a very intemperate interview using quite extravagant language about the proceedings in this House, which I think he will come to regret in due course. No journalist ever questions the Government when they start to compare the Bill in the House of Commons with the Bill in this House. When the Commons started on this Bill, it was 153 pages. The Government put into the Bill in the Commons 286 amendments, causing it to leave the Commons at 300 pages. First of all, the Commons were under guillotine—and we know that government amendments take precedence when the knife comes down. It is actually far less time that MPs have had to debate the Bill and their amendments because of the time that the Government took putting their amendments into their Bill to double the size while it was in the Commons. I cannot understand why journalists never raise this issue. The worst thing is that it is not possible to table Questions in this place to find out about amendments in the other place that were tabled but not debated, with no time spent on them, because there is no accountability on the Government to answer such a Question. One cannot table it because the Government cannot answer it. One can only ask about government amendments, which is how we know about the 286. They did not all come at once—there were more than 100 in Committee and more than 100 on Report. They were at it all the while. It is just as well that they cannot amend on Third Reading in the Commons, but they have come into this place to do this. The Government might have lost on one technical issue that I raised on the date, which does not alter or prevent 5 May—I am not seeking to prevent that; they can still do it—but the Government have now taken the level of amendments to well over 300 on their own Bill, and then they complain when we scrutinise what we are presented with. The fortunate thing in this House is that we do not have the guillotine—we do not have the knife—so we will debate our amendments as well as the government amendments. In the Commons, MPs were forced to vote on and debate government amendments and were banned and prohibited from debating many of their own amendments. In many of our debates ex-Members of the other place have shared their lifetime experiences. I fully accept that some of those experiences were from another world—I was one of the last to have a fax machine, let alone e-mail and computers. The fact that we can share those experiences is fine, but we need to make up for the fact that, in the other place, they did not have the opportunity to do so.