Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I have never before moved an amendment to an amendment in any other democratic body that I have been in. It is quite against Citrine’s rules of procedure, from what I remember from my political education in the Labour Party. None the less, I hope that the House will recognise that this is a natural amendment to an amendment, which the House can agree to. The only reason why Cumbria was not in the original draft of the amendment that my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer submitted is that I failed to get to him in time. I hope that noble Lords opposite will accept this as evidence of the chaos and lack of co-ordination on this side of the House, rather than the planned filibustering that they claim is going on. This is a serious amendment and there are serious local concerns. Why do I think that Cumbria qualifies for special treatment? I give several reasons. First, it is a very remote part of England. I am pretty sure of my facts but I might have got them slightly wrong. In the north-west region, Cumbria accounts for half the geographical area but something like only 6 per cent of the population. It is a geographically large and scattered area. It is also a naturally bounded area in its geography. To the north is the Scottish border. I am glad that at least the Bill allows for Cumbrians not to have to take any Scots into their electoral areas. That is a boundary that, under this Bill, cannot be crossed. It is a natural boundary as well as a national boundary, with the magnificent Solway Firth and the forests of the Borders dividing the two nations. To the east of the county lie the Pennines—again, a natural barrier that divides the communities of the east from those of the west. To the south is Morecambe Bay, which divides the south of Cumbria from Lancashire. There is a natural boundary to this county. There is also a very strong sense of community in Cumbria. I am not saying that it is a community spirit that embraces the whole county in exactly the same way, but there is a community spirit in the many different parts of the county. It is a county that is divided naturally, not just by the geographical features that surround it, but by the Lake District mountains, which lie in the middle of it. Cumbria is also divided by the economics that founded its communities. I was born in Carlisle; there is a very good story about why Carlisle became such an important railway town. One of the reasons was that it was physically impossible for a fireman on a steam train to manage to fire the train over the Beattock summit into Scotland from Carlisle and over the Shap summit south of Carlisle. It was a physically impossible task for a single chap, so all the crews changed at Carlisle. That demonstrates the natural boundaries of the area. Then there is west Cumbria, which is a distinct old industrial community and is now the home of Britain’s nuclear industry. West Cumbria’s prosperity was made on iron and coal, exported through the ports of Whitehaven, Workington and Maryport. That is a distinct community. In the south, there is Barrow-in-Furness, where there was a marsh in the mid-19th century. It became one of the most successful steel-making, iron-making and shipbuilding towns in Britain and has played a key role in the history of the Royal Navy since that time. It is an isolated and distinct community. I have talked about the industrial communities of Cumbria, but the rural communities are also distinct, because the Lake District divides the county into different rural communities—east, north, south and west of the Lake District hills. There are also distinct rural areas, such as the Solway plain and the Eden valley. This is an area that an expert in geography, demography, geology, economic history and all the rest would think was distinct. It is distinct geographically to the extent that it is difficult to see how you could hive off bits into other parts of England without creating the most unnatural parliamentary constituencies. That is a case for adding Cumbria to the list in Amendment 79A and I hope that the House will accept it. It goes along with the argument that I have made at other times. For the sake of completeness, not because I want to bore the Committee unduly, I wish to say that the Boundary Commission has, on successive occasions, recognised the distinctness of the county. The commission decided in its previous two reviews that, despite the fact that the application of the quota did not strictly justify Cumbria’s six parliamentary seats, when community considerations were taken into account—before the issue was put to a local inquiry—the six seats should be retained. This makes a very strong case for adding Cumbria to the list of places where there should be special exemption. Ideally, this is not the way in which I would like this matter to go. I would prefer that we did not have a rigid cap on the number of Members of Parliament and that we had a Boundary Commission that was able to exercise proper discretion, as it saw fit, to deal with these kinds of circumstances. However, the Government have so far refused to show any flexibility on the cap on the number of MPs and on the rigid corset within which the Boundary Commission will have to do its work. As long as the Government are rigid about this issue, those of us who care about community considerations and parliamentary representation have no alternative but to move these amendments. That is what I now do. I beg to move.