Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Outrageous, as my noble friend rightly says. We managed to keep four constituencies in Ayrshire out of the original five, but that meant that of five Labour MPs, one had to go, because we were only going to fight four constituencies, and that is why I ended up here. I was the longest serving, the oldest and I thought, the time is now right for me to give up, after 26 years representing that area. I gave up and, thankfully from my point of view, if not from anyone else’s, I was asked to come here. That, I hope, illustrates some of the workload of Member of Parliament. When I got down to Westminster as an MP, as I said earlier, we had no mobile phones, no e-mail and the burden grew over the years. I remember talking to Tom Oswald, MP for Central Edinburgh—he used to keep a book with all his letters. He wrote down who he got the letter from, when he received it, who he wrote back to and he wrote all his letters in longhand, put them in an envelope, put on a stamp that he paid for himself and sent off the letter. That was what a Member of Parliament did at the time. Things have changed dramatically since then, but someone told me recently that one of the things we should take account of in the workload of a Member of Parliament is the increase in work due to government initiatives. It is certainly the case that Governments keep thinking of things which involve Members of Parliament in more work. They keep changing things. At the moment the NHS in England is being changed dramatically. I am sure that that will create huge additional burdens for English Members of Parliament. Governments, when they change constituencies, especially when they reduce the number and increase the size, ought to think of the workload that they are putting on to these Members of Parliament. My noble friend Lord Kinnock, former leader of our party, is still with us. It is amazing that he is keeping awake and making such useful interventions all through the night. With his sagacity he put my noble friend Lord Anderson and me on the Front Bench. I mentioned earlier the importance of the work of Opposition Front-Benchers, doing this with very little support at the same time as being a constituency Member of Parliament and everything that that involves. A number of noble Lords have argued that the number of Ministers needs to be reduced if the size of Parliament is to be reduced, otherwise the power of the Executive becomes ever greater—and it has increased. We heard earlier not just about the number on the payroll but the number of Ministers who are not paid. Everyone seems to have a PPS. When we started, as my noble friend will remember, only Secretaries of State had PPSs; then Ministers of State got PPSs; now I understand that Under-Secretaries of State have PPSs.