Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I speak for a second time on the question of opposing an arbitrary reduction in the size of the House of Commons, this time in support of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Kennedy. When I spoke previously on the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady McDonagh, I strongly made the case that an arbitrary reduction would work against the better representation of remote and isolated communities and against respect for historic traditions in the way that constituency boundaries are drawn up. In his response, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said, essentially, ““Too bad. This is all about making sure that we have equal electoral districts””. The problem with the position of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is that the Government have in the Bill recognised the need to take account of remote and isolated communities, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, well knows from his former constituency in Orkney and from the Shetland and Western Isles. In seeking to find the logic of this arbitrary reduction, why is it okay to recognise the very special position of the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland but to eliminate the possibility of the Boundary Commission taking local community factors into account by imposing this arbitrary reduction and then saying that it will have very little flexibility to deal with community considerations? I raise that again because the noble Lord, Lord McNally, gave me no satisfactory reply on the point. We need a House of Commons of sufficient size for the Boundary Commission to accommodate areas like Cumbria that have special problems of representation because of their geography and remoteness. The only rationale that the Government have given for their arbitrary cut is the claim that it is a good idea that cuts the cost of politics. We are told that the cost that will be cut is £12.2 million. I thought about what this represents as a way of trying to keep awake in the hours of the night. One way of expressing £12.2 million is that it is the cost of one hour of every day of the National Health Service. It is a trivial amount of money and a trivial basis on which to muck about with our democracy. The Government must come up with a better argument to justify the reduction than that it saves £12.2 million. The noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, put it well. We all know why this reduction was put in place. It was a populist response to the anger about MPs’ expenses, but it reduces the standing of Members of Parliament in the country because it gives the impression that we can go around saying that we need fewer of these wastrels whom we have to subsidise. It is quite disgraceful that the Liberal Democrats should endorse the populist nonsense that the Conservative Party promotes and propagates. If we had a serious debate about the size of the House of Commons, one would want to take into account all kinds of other factors, such as the international evidence. I am not an expert on the world, but I know a bit about Europe. When I look at the situation in the European Union, I do not see that we have too many politicians by comparison with our European partners. Germany has a very large Bundestag; it is a bigger country. It also has parliaments, governments and Ministers in each of the länder. In Italy, the Senate is a large chamber and there is also a Chamber of Deputies. We all crack jokes about Belgium, where there is a federal Parliament, three geographic parliaments and three language parliaments. The crack about Belgium is that there are more ministerial cars per head of population than in any other country in the European Union. I would like to see a proper paper on this. In a proper process, there would have been an opportunity for experts to conduct a proper international comparison of whether we in Britain have too many elected politicians. If that had been done, it would not have made the case for what the Government arbitrarily have decided to do. There are other arguments for reducing the size of the House of Commons. One is that you were going to go in for genuine regionalism and localism. However, is that what this Government are doing? The only bits of regional government that we have—the regional development agencies, which were originally envisaged as coming under regional government—are being abolished. As for extending the powers of local authorities, we do have the Localism Bill—but are the Government really proposing a major review of local authority finance in order to make sure that local authorities have much more independence of action than they have had? No, of course not. And are the Government actually releasing local authorities from central controls? No, of course not. Eric Pickles goes round saying, ““You have got to collect your bins every week””, and ““You cannot pay your chief executive more than this””. What kind of local freedom does Mr Pickles believe in? There is no argument for reducing the size of the Commons on the basis that we are going in for regional devolution and much more independent local government with greater freedom of action.