Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I am tempted to be encouraged by the tone of the response from the noble and learned Lord, but I fear that I cannot derive the comfort that I hoped to obtain from the paraphrasical content of what he said. I press him a little more, because I think that there is quite a wide consensus on this around the House—I may overstate the case where Conservative Peers are concerned. We are not alone on these Benches in asking the Minister to consider that an excessively rigid insistence on electoral parity on a fixed arithmetical quota with the minimal latitude of only 5 per cent either side of the norm of 75,800 electors to a constituency will preclude appropriate weight being given to factors that everyone recognises as significant: local ties, geography, community, history and, very importantly, the relationship between parliamentary constituency structures and the structures of local government. The noble and learned Lord said, when we debated the question of how large the House of Commons should be and how many Members of Parliament should be there, that it was a matter of judgment. It is also a matter of judgment how you weigh all the valid factors. None of us is saying that it is not highly desirable to achieve the closest approximation to numerical equality between constituencies that one can, consistent with a sensible and satisfactory recognition of other factors. It cannot be a wise judgment to discount the significance of geography and natural boundaries. We are told by the people of Cornwall that the River Tamar, a natural boundary between Cornwall and Devon, matters very much to their communities. However, the combination of the reduction in the number of constituencies that the Government intend, together with the increased requirement for numerical near-equality, produces absurd anomalies that a wise Government would not tolerate. The situation is comparable in Wales. My noble friend Lord Morgan told us in a recent debate that his parents grew up in communities only two miles apart, yet spoke a different Welsh. The cultural, linguistic, historical and community distinctions between the different valleys and communities of Wales are even more significant. As far as concerns islands, the Government have sensibly recognised that the Western Isles must be treated anomalously and made exceptions to the rule, as must Orkney and Shetland. Equally, the Isle of Wight and Ynys Mon make claims that sensible, pragmatic Ministers would not only acknowledge but concede. Not to do so would be unwise. I remind the House of the moving and important speech about Jarrow made by my noble friend Lord Dixon. A wise politician gives due recognition to the bonds of community, to people’s sense of history and identity and to what it is about the places in which they live that makes them feel that it is their place, and that they want it expressed and represented in the system of parliamentary representation. I will say a word or two about local government—I am conscious of being in the presence of noble Lords who know far more about this than I—and about the development of patterns of local government in our history from the Municipal Corporations Act 1835. The Act entitled communities to petition for incorporation and led to the evolution in this country of the structures of local government that have persisted and developed for something like 130 years. The structures are full of anomalies, but the consistency in the anomalies is that they recognise people’s sense of local identity, and of the place where they live that they wish to have expressed in how they are governed municipally.