Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I note the observation and the support that my noble friend Lord Winston offers in that respect, but I am also sufficiently new here still to be content to be guided by all Members of the House in the appropriate courtesies of the House. I was speaking to the variable performance of Members of the other place as I saw it from a ministerial position, which led me to ask what the appropriate size of a constituency was. Earlier in our debate this evening, we had an extremely interesting contribution from my noble friend Lord Davies of Stamford, who talked about the principles that might determine the size of a constituency. I mostly come from Cornwall, as does the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I had always understood that one reason why constituencies in Cornwall were smaller than elsewhere was the geographical distance within the constituency and the time taken to travel to and from the constituency. Of course, my political views were formed in my teens when I was at school in Truro, when a journey from London to Truro would have taken 10 or 12 hours on the A30, and it seemed to make good sense to have smaller constituencies. I find it very difficult to know where my decision will finally lie. I listened to the debate in the House on the size of the other place, but it seems to me that this decision requires care and attention to the colour, texture, features and particular needs of different constituencies. I make one final observation from my experience as a junior Minister in the previous Government about the other place’s difficulty dealing with the detail of legislation. This is partially a reflection—I do not for one minute suggest that people in the other place are not diligent—of the additional burdens that are now placed on Members’ time in the other place. Members of Parliament are now increasingly looked to by their constituents to solve every issue relating to local communities and families, and will probably be even more so now that this Government are stripping resources out of local government. Is it not interesting that when government has abundant resources, it centralises, but when government cuts costs, it decentralises in order to push the burden of that cost cutting on to local authorities? The pressures on Members of Parliament in the other place will become even greater as a consequence of the changes in economic management. When it came to legislation with which I was involved on the Front Bench, I thought at first that it would be helpful to read Hansard from the other place to guide me on what the issues were likely to be. I found that the only person who really challenged the detail of legislation on finance was the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, who struck me in some cases as the only informed opponent of legislation in detail for which I was responsible. It certainly did not receive sufficient attention in the House of Commons. I recognise that I bring a very limited perspective here, and there is much more that I will wish to say later in the debate about issues relating to Cornwall, where the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, was a representative for many years in the other place, but from my perspective as a Minister and as a person who is proud to be a Member of this new House, I am deeply concerned that an arbitrary figure has been picked out of the air. I remember the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, putting his hand up and pulling that figure down on Second Reading. I thought that that summed up the amount of thought the Government had put into this matter. The people of this country should reasonably expect the number of constituencies to be determined carefully by an independent body, as in the past—a body whose decisions we can all support.