Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My noble friend speaks with feeling about the area that he knows and has served so well. I do not want to detain the House but want to complete my point on local government. That map of local government became so intolerable to tidy-minded bureaucrats in the 1960s that it was judged that it had to be reformed and redesigned. We had the Redcliffe-Maud report and the 1972 legislation that created all kinds of new entities of local government that had never corresponded to people’s sense of reality of where they lived. Many have been abolished and we have never succeeded in designing a new map of local government because you cannot impose it from on high.