Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

No, my Lords, I want to make progress on my argument and allow us to proceed with a couple of issues of serious scrutiny that I still want to raise in this group of amendments. The first concerns the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, making the boundary commissioners take into account their perceptions of the socioeconomic base or relative wealth of each constituency. Over the decades in which many of us have been involved in Boundary Commission processes, I have not heard it seriously argued by anybody that the boundary commissioners are anything other than impartial and independent. However, my view is that we should not start asking them to exercise their judgment about the relative wealth of different constituencies, using different, competing socioeconomic factors, or to try to use their judgment to suggest that, because certain MPs have a lot of problems of this nature or fewer problems of that nature, these seats should be varied in some way. How could the boundary commissioners possibly be expected to be seen to be impartial and independent in their judgment? I suggest that that is not a serious factor that the boundary commissioners should have to take into account. Having seen many submissions to public inquiries on Boundary Commission processes and read many of them in the past, I have thought that the criteria which people sometimes think could be applied are not serious ones on which you would expect the commission to impartially draw the constituencies in the way that it has. Finally within this group, I want to comment on Amendment 76, which concerns eliminating references to the euro regions with particular regard to the way in which the Boundary Commission for England works. That does not seem a sensible way in which to suggest that the Boundary Commission for England should go about its business. The Bill is not prescriptive in saying that it must follow the boundaries of the euro regions but, if it is to work in a sensible way across the whole of England, it could not possibly start in, say, Northumberland, go down to the Isles of Scilly and then go across to Kent. In order to make this effective, we need to retain the language in the Bill suggesting that the euro regions may be building blocks that the commissioners use, saying that they will want to work simultaneously on the south-east, the south-west and the north-east, and have a proper process of scrutiny that could be effective with online representations. They will need to work simultaneously on the different regions rather than across England as a whole.