Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I am reluctant to intervene in this debate because I have spent a lot of time over the last few days listening to people talk about this issue. However, I think that the points that have been raised by my noble friends, especially those with experience in another place, should be taken very seriously. I have been moved by the trip down memory lane from my noble friends Lord Snape, Lord Grocott and Lord Rooker to remember many of the times that we had when we first arrived in another place in 1974, when there were 630 Members of Parliament. A few of us were new and we had to learn the ropes. At that time we were perhaps the first of a new generation who actually understood what the role of MPs would be in the future. I remember, when I suggested that I would have an office in the constituency, that many of my more senior colleagues told me I was creating a rod for my own back and that this was not something that was done. I should go to Members’ Lobby and the post office, pick up my post and look through it, discard what I could and do a cursory note to the rest saying that their opinion or their problem had been noted. Things have changed very dramatically, as noble friends have explained. Part of the problem is that we are starting this whole process from the wrong end. It is like looking down a telescope. We are talking about what voting systems should be. We are talking about the number of MPs and nobody is talking about the function of the House of Commons and the role that Members of Parliament have to, and ought to, play. When we come on to later debates, including the relationship between this House and another place, all those fundamental questions will have to be asked again. The Government are introducing a whole series of piecemeal changes which, put together, are totally rewriting the British constitution without anyone stepping back and looking at the overall impact. I think that is probably one of the most serious consequences and to discuss the number of MPs in isolation from all the other issues is just ridiculous. I am sure that the new Members who came into the House of Commons last year—something like 35 per cent of all Members were new at the last election—do not yet realise the full implications that this Bill will have on them, not least, as has been pointed out today, by the completely ridiculous suggestion that you should have boundary changes every five years. My noble friend Lord McAvoy has just outlined the very dramatic consequences that can come from a boundary revision. I, likewise, have gone through boundary changes in both the constituencies I represented. In Bolton West, which was my home town—very much in the same way that the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, was talking about the area he knew—identifying with your constituency was actually the key to providing the kind of service that was needed. Politics comes into this of course and unfortunately in 1983 I lost that seat, partly because there were new boundary changes. Then I represented Dewsbury, which is a former textile town. It is very compact and very close to the next-door town of Batley. There is a great rivalry but they are very close and have exactly the same kind of problems—a declining woollen industry, difficult housing issues and a lot of immigration and consequent issues. When it came to the boundary changes in 1992, the Boundary Commission decided that certain things should happen. In supporting my noble friend Lord Snape in his probing amendment, I am not saying that the boundaries we have at the moment are absolutely perfect. We have all had discussions or disputes or appeared at boundary reviews trying to put our views as to why certain parts of a constituency should be here or there. What happens when you have a boundary review is that those of us who felt strongly about it could make the case. I could make the case as to why certain parts of Kirklees—because under local government reorganisation many years ago Dewsbury, along with Batley, had gone into Kirklees—should be in with Dewsbury or in with Huddersfield next door or even with Batley. Local knowledge, based on where people are working, where children go to school and where the bus routes are, is vital. What you should be creating is not a constituency with an arbitrary number of constituents but a constituency that has an identity—a community that can identify with the Member of Parliament who is going to represent them. I think that is the overriding consideration. My overriding concern is not whether the number is 650, 630 or—with due respect to my noble friend—640; it is whether anyone as an individual Member of Parliament can serve their constituency because of that very significant constituency link. There will still be problems. There will still be issues because boundaries at the moment are not perfect. I have had the difficult experience—as I suggest many others have had—where boundaries sometimes lose a little enclave and people in that area think that you are their Member of Parliament. You have to tell them very carefully and often very cautiously, because they may be very upset, that actually you cannot represent them or take up their issue. However, if overall you can identify with that area then I think that it is likely that you will provide a better service for your constituency and your constituency will know who to go to and what to demand from you. I think that is key in terms of what we should be doing today. I was very interested, however, in what the noble Lord, Lord Winston, said and the question he posed about the statistics and how you work it out. This again is part of the problem. We do not have the essential building blocks and analysis in place to accept what the Government are suggesting or indeed to reject it. We are taking ideas that have come from nowhere, it seems, and we are being told that we should in fact have lines on maps. I agree with my noble friend Lady Smith that the Government should not be setting these arbitrary lines. In a sense it reminds me of days of empire when countries went round the world carving up Africa and saying that a line should be the boundary between two countries. Just think of some of the problems that led to later. I think we are storing up many problems in the future and think it is really very significant that many of the questions that have been asked cannot be answered. As I mentioned earlier, Dewsbury is a small industrial town with its own character and issues. Part of the time I was the MP there—in one incarnation because the boundaries changed very dramatically—Dewsbury had attached to it two rural wards from another part of Kirklees, wards which actually had been in different constituencies over many boundary reviews. This was a very middle-class area, very rural, and when I held surgeries there few people came. Why? They all wrote letters. Basically, they wrote letters about planning issues, very often saying that they did not want things to be built in that area. However, when I had a surgery in Dewsbury it was there for hours and there would be lots of people there. Have a surgery on a similar day out of town in a rural area and somebody might wander in to talk about something and have a chat, but basically when people had a problem there they wrote and later they used the internet, and now it will all be the internet. I think that this is a very ill advised Bill. It is going to store up many problems in the future. It is going to destabilise how Members of Parliament work in the future if they are going to be in a constant state of revolution and I hope that my noble friend gets some answers to his questions.