Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

A maiden speech, yes. I am taking noble Lords on a tour and I hope that some noble Lords will join me on the tour because, in all these towns, I had to have surgeries. In poor areas, the bus services were not very good. My constituents could not come to me; I had to go to them. I once talked to constituents in Cumnock about Girvan and they had never been to Girvan. They had never in their lives visited another part of my constituency. It was astonishing. They had been to Mallorca, but that is another story. They had not travelled, because the bus services were not particularly good, so I had to go there. Before the reorganisation in my constituency I had 20 surgeries every month. I took them in the morning on each Friday and Saturday and I moved from area to area. After the reorganisation they went up to 24 and going and sitting in a surgery is only part of the work—you then go back and write up all your notes, decide how to follow it through, acknowledge to the constituent that you taken it up. That was the revised constituency before my noble friend Lady Liddell of Coatdyke—it was not all her responsibility, but she was the Minister—brought in the second reorganisation of constituencies that I was involved in. We managed to keep all the boundaries within Ayrshire. We had a big fight, by the way, to keep five constituencies in Ayrshire. My noble friend Lord Reid was very keen to move part of Ayrshire into Lanarkshire for the constituency boundaries.