Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I strongly support the amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Kennedy proposing that the figure of 600 should be replaced by 650. I only wish that it had been possible for my noble friend, within the realms of order, to have added as a starting point the words, ““for thinking through the changes proposed for the elections of Members of the House of Commons””. That is the force of the argument behind the previous two amendments, and certainly the force of argument behind this one—650, the current number, as a starting point. That is not a defence of the status quo—not a small ““c”” conservative attitude—but a defence that is based on a plea to the Government still to reconsider their proposal in order to give this House, the other House and wider realms of interest a proper opportunity to think how we should determine the number of Members of Parliament, in conjunction with dispassionate independent bodies such as the Boundary Commission, so that we absolutely guarantee the independence of the conclusion and the opportunity for public intercession that has characterised the boundary formation of our parliamentary constituencies since 1949, updated with some sagacious rules that were established in, I think, 1986. The guiding principle that I seek to recommend to the Government, if they were to take advantage of this amendment, would be the fairly fundamental management recommendation that structure should be a function of purpose. That maxim should apply to business and to organisations and administrations of every kind, because if those who are responsible for making decisions—especially about organisation, reorganisation, reform or equipping for the future—have to accept the discipline of making clear from the outset the purpose that they intend for an institution, a stratum of management, a department or a new system of local government or of representation anywhere, they are obliged to say why they are arriving at the recommendation that they put to the corporate, democratic or voluntary organisation, or, dare I say it, to some segment of the big society. If that principle is applied to Parliament, it requires only a very small change from structure being the function of purpose to Members being a function of purpose. There is some difficulty in establishing what purpose is and should be fulfilled by Members of Parliament now and for recognisable years into the future. In this, we have some guidance from within this House. Your Lordships’ own Select Committee on the Constitution, comprising four Conservative, four Labour, two Liberal Democrat and two Cross-Bench Peers, reported towards the back end of last year on their deliberations on the Bill. This has been referred to before in the Committee, but I think it bears repetition for the sake of accuracy: "““The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee heard evidence from bodies such as the Hansard Society, Democratic Audit and Unlock Democracy””—" all organisations of unquestionable repute and detachment— "““who argued that the choice of 600 was arbitrary, lacking a rationale and, in any event, put the cart before the horse. It was argued that a more sensible approach would have been firstly to review the functions of the House of Commons and secondly to form a view as to the appropriate number of MPs required to perform those functions””." The only addition that I would have made, had I enjoyed the honour of sitting on that committee, would have been, ““taking into account the perpetual nature of change affecting the work of Members of Parliament””. That would simply have reflected, although I do not intend to dwell on this, my 25 years of experience as a Member of the other House, representing, at a time of radical and on occasions desperate industrial change, a constituency that had the characteristic of many former coalmining constituencies and far-flung communities inside that constituency—in short, combining the problems of the inner city and separated only by the hills in between. The conclusion that was drawn by the Select Committee on the basis of these representations from the objective interest shown by the Hansard Society, Democratic Audit and Unlock Democracy was: "““We conclude that the Government have not calculated the proposed reduction in the size of the House of Commons on the basis of any considered assessment of the role and functions of MPs””." Could there be a stronger condemnation from an all-party committee, which recently looked in a focused and explicit way at the legislation before the House? It was not a Back-Bench Labour committee or a trade union branch but, I repeat, a committee with a balance of Conservative and Labour Members of this House, two Liberal Democrats and two Cross-Benchers who arrived at that conclusion. Confronted with the arguments, the Minister has given us courteous responses, but the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has been as opaque as he has been courteous. He has told us that the manifestos of the parties that now form the coalition had ““a theme””. It is difficult to accept a community, a commonality or even a similarity of theme when one of the coalition partners wanted a radical volcano of reform in our electoral systems leading to a reduction in the number of Members of the House of Commons, one contingent upon the other, with PR and more devolution, especially in England. With local government reform, the coalition could offer a justification for having just 500 Members of the House of Commons. I would probably have argued with that figure, but at least there was a cogent package of arguments to present in support of the idea of reducing the number of MPs from 650 to 500. In contrast, we had an announcement followed by a manifesto commitment from the then leader of the Conservative Party, now the Prime Minister, in the midst of the scandal and the justifiable outrage about the abuse of public support for MPs, that one way to combat this excess would be to cut the number of Members of the House of Commons by 10 per cent, taking the number down to 585. For the life of me, I can see only the merest scintilla of a theme being pursued, and it is that two parties wanted, to entirely different extents, in entirely different contexts and on entirely different bases of argument—one party wanted profound constitutional change, the other an arbitrary and populist declaration in the middle of outrage about scandal—to reduce the number of Members in the House of Commons. I do not call that a theme; I call it barely a coincidence of convenience. It is a long way from being a theme. In a later contribution, the Minister said that no one has a perfect answer for the size of the Commons. Of course, that is absolutely right—as he said to the committee, there is no ““magic science”” to any of it—but that should be the overture to a whole opera of consideration and consultation: trying to find someone or something that is nearer an objective measurement of what Members of Parliament now do and will do into the electronic future. Instead, we have had the arbitrary conclusion to plump for the figure of 600, despite the absence of any objective rationale, in the words of the Select Committee of this House. We have had a response from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, which was courteously put but again repetitive, that it is a question of judgment. Because there is no perfect answer, it is a question of judgment. That, too, is absolutely right. So let us enter an objective consideration that has been put several times in this Committee but has still not received a cogent response. The consideration that I would put, among many others that we could cite, is that the number of Members of Parliament since 1950 has risen by 4 per cent, and the number of electors by 25 per cent. In any other sphere, if you were to get an increase in what I shall call, in neglect of my sisters, manpower of 4 per cent—and those people had to deal with 25 per cent potential greater demand—you might commend them on their extra productivity and on the reduction in marginal unit costs. That might be acceptable, except that the marginal unit costs of having Members of Parliament have gone up and up. One reason is because there is this disparity between the rise in the number of Members of Parliament and the much greater rise not only in the numbers to which they must be accountable and for which they must be responsible, but, as others have relayed at length, in the huge increase in workload. I am tempted to replicate some of my noble friends’ reports, but I shall not except to refer to one point made by my noble friend Lady Mallalieu. I knew her father, Curly Mallalieu—he was a dear comrade and friend of mine. He was a war hero and a man of great distinction, a brilliant sportsman and marvellous journalist and great company. He was also a very good Minister. I came into the House of Commons in 1970, together with my noble friend Lord Prescott, on the same day, and we served with Curly for four years. He was a fastidious constituency Member of Parliament who did surgeries once a month and answered all letters. He had a very high reputation. However, that was at a time, as my noble friend Lord Prescott and others of our generation will testify, when total constituency engagement in the so-called welfare officer role was not only hardly undertaken by the generation before us but was regarded with contempt by the generation before us. I was upbraided by a dear friend for doing constituency work in the Library in a House of Commons in which having a desk was a rarity—a real mark of the Whip’s privilege. It was a long time before I got a desk, and when I did so it was in a room that I shared, to my experience’s huge advantage, with the now noble Lord, Lord Bannside, who now sits on these Benches. That was the state of affairs then. What we encountered was unacceptable to our generation’s commitment to the service of the community. We were told that we were there to represent the constituency in Parliament, not Parliament in the constituency. Could there be any more categorical difference after the passage of 41 years? Of course not, which is why I reinforce the point about the increase in numbers in the electorate with a massive alteration in expectations of Members of Parliament of servants of constituents—I believe rightly. That is quite apart from the wider dimensions of the contact with Members of Parliament that is now facilitated by electronic communication as well as by the fluency of the electorate, the higher levels of education and the greater willingness to engage in the increased demands put on Members of Parliament. That is without looking at any external dimension or the increased workload on Parliament, about which everyone in my view rightly complains, which arises from massive programmes of legislation that have emanated from Governments successively over the last quarter of a century and which show no sign of pausing, slowing or being diluted under the present Government. The workload has gone up, in quantity and probably in expectation if not in quality, and the place has changed. However, without taking account of those realities, which are not mathematical exactitudes but nevertheless tangible changes of huge dimension, how can a Government arrive at the conclusion that the number of Members of Parliament should be cut from 650 to 600? There is no objective basis and no rationale other than perhaps the very feckless rationale that I suggested earlier: that 600 has the advantage of not being 585, which was the number that the Conservative Party first thought of and which would have been unacceptable in the course of coalition deliberations and negotiation of agreement. It appears that that is the last negotiation that anyone in this Government will enter into. I make this final point in recommending that we stay with 650. We should start from where we are and have a process of consultation and deliberation so that it is possible for the Government and this Parliament to arrive at a figure that reflects the nature of the work of a dutiful Member of Parliament in 2011, 2015 and beyond. What will happen if a change is introduced that does not secure consent by negotiation in this House of negotiation, which is capable of operation only through usual channels and where the absence of a guillotine is a product of the absence of a guaranteed majority? That is the arrangement that has been sustained and is sustainable because of the nature of this House. The Government are contriving an unseen and unannounced but massive reform of the House of Lords in the most retrograde way possible. This has been a House of negotiation and arduously won agreement—a House in which Governments have not used and not been able to use the final, conclusive, clumsy and heavy result of overwhelming majority to get their way. If on this very significant constitutional Bill, which determines how the citizens of this country are represented and governed, this Government are not willing to take account of objective realities and requests for rationales that have been submitted by detached, independent and respected bodies, let alone by Members from this side of the House, they really are a Government who have become tunnel visioned and who will pay the price, although perhaps not in this Bill. During the passage of this Bill, loyalties have been relied on and understandings taken for granted, not on these but on the Government’s Benches. Tangible and in many cases terrible changes have been proposed on benefits, on the volcano in the English National Health Service and on the termination of the education maintenance allowance. On those and a legion of other changes, such as in housing benefit and council housing tenure, Members of this House on the Cross Benches and on the Government’s Back Benches who are exercised about the difficulties that will be inflicted on people who are virtually powerless to resist these changes will want some recompense for suspending their judgment and going through the Lobby with the Government on this Bill. As this Parliament moves into the next 12 and 24 months, the Government will really earn the penalty that they deserve for breaking the valued and sustainable conventions of this House and not listening to arguments but for sticking to an arbitrary figure that is unsupported by cogent argument and for reducing the size of the House of Commons because of their dependence on welding two disparate parts of constitutional change together in a way that has been entirely unnecessary. They can have their referendum, as my noble friends on the Front Bench have made abundantly clear, and on the date on which they want to hold it, but they cannot justify ramming through this House that undertaking in the coalition agreement at the same time as undertaking a course of action that will earn them for ever the reputation of a gerrymandering Government.