Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, disappointingly for Members of the House, this is not part of our tour of Great Britain. This is about the maths of the proposals made in the Bill. The practical purpose of this particular amendment is to create an adjusted electoral quota for each of the four parts of the United Kingdom, having first discounted the whole constituencies that we suggest should be allocated to certain parts of the country including Cornwall and the Isle of Wight. It also prevents any part of the UK having an increase or decrease in representation of more than 10 per cent of its seats at any one boundary review. As noble Lords who have studied this amendment will appreciate, and I imagine that there are many of you who have, it is a rather technical revision which is easier to understand and easier to explain, in the context of the other amendments we have tabled to Clause 11 of the Bill. This is because these amendments, when added together, would comprise an alternative set of rules for drawing parliamentary constituency boundaries. However, because we have tried to follow the chronology of the Bill when tabling our amendments, we have been forced to split our alternative scheme into individual elements. To use a motoring analogy: if our full set of amendments adds up to a car, Amendment 89A on its own only represents the spark plugs. However, because it would be difficult to describe a car if one was only allowed to refer to the spark plugs, I hope the House will allow me to explain the reasoning behind this specific amendment with reference to the others that we have tabled to the same clause. Our amendments to Clause 11 would, if taken together, establish a new basis for drawing boundaries that would anchor the House of Commons at around 650 seats. They would create more equal-sized seats—reducing the disparities between electorates that the Government are anxious to tackle—while providing the Boundary Commissions with adequate room for manoeuvre to take account of wider factors including geography, community and history. Our rules would also ensure that in a limited number of cases, certain parts of the UK would be guaranteed an allocation of whole constituencies, to preserve the particular geographic or historic integrity that marks them out. As your Lordships are no doubt tired of hearing, the proposed new rules for drawing constituencies put forward in the Bill are, we say, overly rigid and inflexible. They start from the premise that the Commons should be fixed forever at 600 seats. Two Scottish island constituencies are then discounted and a United Kingdom-wide electoral quota is calculated by dividing the rest of the UK electorate by 598. The Bill then employs the Sainte-Lague method for allocating seats to the four parts of the UK. Once those calculations are made, the Boundary Commissions are tasked with constructing the electoral map according to a strict electoral parity rule. Every seat must fit within 5 per cent either side of an estimated electoral quota of approximately 75,800. In separate amendments, we have sought to inject greater flexibility into that parity rule, so that proper consideration can be given to concerns about geography, community ties and so forth. We have also tabled amendments to replace the Government’s rule for a 600-seat House of Commons with a ““fixed divisor”” that would anchor the House at around 650 seats but allow a small margin of leeway which would be of practical use to Boundary Commissions. Amendment 89A, the central focus of this debate, follows on from those amendments. Under our scheme, an initial UK electoral quota would be calculated by dividing the total electorate of the UK by 650. That quota would then be used to calculate the number of whole constituencies that would be allocated to the areas listed in our Amendment 79A —which in our scheme would be the rule 4(1) referenced in Amendment 89A. Once that had been done, an adjusted UK electoral quota would be produced by the method outlined in Amendment 89A, which would become rule 5 in our scheme, reading: "““The total electorate of the United Kingdom less the areas listed in rule 4(1)””—" that is our Amendment 79A— "““divided by 650 minus the total number of seats allocated to the areas listed in rule 4(1)””." So I imagine that that is very clear. Once that calculation had been made, we would employ the Sainte-Lague method to work out the allocation of seats for the four parts of the United Kingdom. It would then be down to the Boundary Commissions to draw the constituency maps within those areas, guided by an electoral parity rule which states that constituencies would contain broadly the same number of electors. In our scheme, the level of tolerance in respect of the electoral quota would be 5 per cent in most cases but with a maximum level of disparity of 10 per cent where Boundary Commissions deemed it necessary to take account of significant other factors. The Bill states that the electoral quota, which forms the basis of the parity law, should be universal across the UK. In other words, there should be a single UK electoral quota. However, our scheme would allow—once the initial calculations about whole constituencies had been made and discounted, and the Sainte-Lague formula used to allocate numbers of seats to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—for a slight variation in the electoral quota between the four parts of the UK. That would be done by dividing the electorate of each part of the United Kingdom by the number of seats allocated to each part through the Sainte-Lague method. This would be only a very slight variation and would not cause any significant distortion. It would simply be a practical measure to give boundary commissions a little flexibility to cope with any awkward roundings up or down they might otherwise encounter when trying to impose a uniform UK electoral quota everywhere. That could be a genuine problem in Northern Ireland and Wales which, given their smaller size, may struggle to construct an electoral map on which every seat is able to meet the narrow tolerances that the Bill sets around the proposed uniform electoral quota. Indeed the Bill already recognises this potential problem in the case of Northern Ireland, which is why rule 7 enables the Boundary Commission in that part of the UK to disapply the electoral parity rule when it feels that is necessary. We believe that our overall scheme provides a more sensible way of tackling these problems. As I made clear at the beginning, it would deliver more equal-sized seats but would inject more common sense and practicality into the process. Finally, Amendment 89A would ensure that the total number of seats to be allocated to any country shall not be more than 10 per cent above or below the current number of constituencies, and if the number of seats allocated by the process I have outlined exceeds that limit, additional or fewer seats would need to be allocated as appropriate to bring the allocation into line with this rule. That is particularly pertinent in the case of Wales, which under the Bill would see a reduction of 25 per cent in its parliamentary representation, from 40 to 30 seats. That is too great a reduction in one review. I remind noble Lords of the speech of my noble friend Lord Touhig about what the effect of such a sharp reduction might be on the union. It would cause massive disruption to long-established patterns of representation, producing one seat that would be almost half the landmass of Wales, and others that would divide valleys irrespective of community ties and problems of accessibility. Perhaps even more significantly, that sudden reduction, which would cut the number of Welsh parliamentary seats below the current legal minimum of 35, could alter the way in which the UK Parliament is viewed in Wales. I think the Government need to think quite carefully about introducing major political and administrative changes that could undermine the union. The Conservative Party historically adopted a sensitive approach to issues concerning the union, but in this Bill that is less evident than previously. That is an important point. Overall, this is a quite technical amendment which, as I explained at the beginning, cannot be viewed in isolation. However, when seen in the round I hope that it illustrates that there is an alternative to the scheme set out in the Bill which would nonetheless deliver more equal seats, which is the Government's central objective. I hope that it is symbolic of the fact that we have thought very carefully and deeply about this matter and have endeavoured to propose a scheme that would improve the Bill. Our alternative goes with the grain of the Bill’s main aim, which is to create more equal seats, but it does so more practically and sensitively than the plan which the Government have put forward. I ask the noble and learned Lord, a man of great practicality and sensitivity, to explain why his scheme is better than ours. I beg to move.