Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I noticed that the Minister did not respond to the question that I asked him and my noble friend Lord Bach about whether the flexibility regarding numbers that has already been determined by your Lordships’ House, with the decision on the Isle of Wight, will be allowed to affect the number referred to by the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, as ““a nice, round figure””. It is important that we should know that when we are debating different views about the terms on which new constituency boundaries will be drawn. I make the passing comment, in light of my experience in local government, that it is not only for MPs to be able to work with the local authorities in their area. My noble friend Lady Henig, who was on Lancashire County Council at the same time as I was, will recollect that there were many occasions when we sought to influence our Members of Parliament serving Lancashire. There could have been difficulties had the boundaries of those constituencies crossed county boundaries. On the whole, we had a good working relationship, to the point where, on one unique occasion, Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman lobbied me to find a way around the ban by her right honourable friend the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, on our giving children free school milk. That remains a unique memory for me. Dame Elaine Kellett-Bowman was very concerned at that time about EU milk subsidies. The sense of locality among political activists is important. There is a mistaken belief out there in the country that the political parties have thousands and thousands of political activists who ought to knock on their door every time there is an election. If we can do anything during the passage of the Bill to explain that it ain’t necessarily so, it would be a good thing. I remember knocking on the door of one Labour supporter in a county council election and being told, ““I have been waiting 10 years for someone from the party to knock on my door””. I said, ““That is because you, as a party supporter, are not out knocking on doors””. He said, ““What do you mean?””. I said, ““Tonight, there are about 18 people out””. This was in what was then the borough of Preston. The public will not understand the debate about the importance of place in terms of political activists, but your Lordships will, from experience. The sense of place and of belonging is critical. In my experience, having lived in London, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and Leicestershire—I was born in Leicestershire—the sense of place in the major conurbations is less, particularly since the abolition of the GLC, although I found, when talking to schoolchildren there, that the sense of place of West Bromwich overrode the new title of Sandwell. The sense of place is critical in building political interest, activism and co-operation around a community, not only within the parties but between the parties. The sense of place matters and in that context, and because of my previous experience—this is a former interest—as leader of the Association of County Councils for England and Wales, I have to say that certain parts of the country, such as Wales and Lancashire, have a very strong sense of place. My noble friend Lord Grocott made the point that this is the only opportunity to debate these issues, because the Bill deprives local communities of the opportunity to put their case. As somebody who has attended most of our proceedings on the Bill, I feel bitterly resentful that I am accused of filibustering for being here and debating this, when I would very much like to go home, because the Government have conceded that local people could do the job that we are attempting to do here. I am surprised, although I intend no discourtesy to the Minister, that the Liberal Democrats are giving up the opportunity that, in our experience, they have taken so often in the past to make a very full presentation at a public inquiry into constituency boundaries at local level. If we want an active democracy, people need to feel that they are part of the system that creates the constituencies and determines boundaries. The Bill is going in absolutely the opposite direction. I shall sit down now, but I shall come back to this subject in other parts of the Bill. The Minister may go away and think that my speeches are not necessary, but he could stop them at any point by accepting that the people in the areas that I have referred to and lived in—Leicestershire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Wales and London—can make their own case, because this is not the place where that ought to be done.