Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

For the sake of the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, I say that I shall speak to Amendments 73, 74A, 74B, and that my remarks will be about rule 5(1)(c). The noble Lord, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, claim that this is a filibuster. He needs to get out more. I remember the Scotland and Wales Bill of 1978. As a young reporter, I remember covering Mr Tam Dalyell during that debate. I want to say that he spoke for days, but that may be exaggerating. On one occasion, he spoke for about six hours. To me, that is a filibuster. In all my interventions, I have kept my remarks very brief—to some extent because the air conditioning is going to my throat; perhaps I will get a cough sweet whenever I get an opportunity to go out of the Chamber. I compliment my noble friend Lord Kennedy on introducing Amendment 73, because it gets to the heart of where the Bill has gone wrong and reintroduces some common sense. The Bill has been cobbled together from two different directions and been rapidly put through the Clerks with, I repeat, no consultation, no pre-legislative scrutiny, and no discussion through the usual channels. As a consequence, we have a Bill which is a dog's breakfast. One area that most concerns me is the framework within which the Boundary Commission will operate. All of us who have attended Boundary Commission hearings know that sometimes, when the first stab is made at the shape of the boundary, extremely bizarre results come out. The late John Smith, on 10 May 1994, two days before he died, addressed the Boundary Commission about the new constituency of Airdrie and Shotts, which would have resulted in the town of Airdrie being cut right down the main street because a bureaucrat somewhere had thought, ““We need to get some numbers right here””, and took no account whatever of the cohesion of the town, the history and the nature of the communities built up within that area. If the Government accepted Amendment 73 on rule 5(1)(c), we could ensure that any local ties broken up by changes in constituencies should be taken into account by the Boundary Commission. That is a lot more sensible than the rather vague construction contained in the Bill. My noble friend Lord Foulkes introduced two very interesting amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, made a powerful case for his amendment on wards; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, in an earlier debate, pointed out the importance of wards and I intervened in that debate too. The other amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Foulkes relates to what he calls the ““wealth”” of the constituency, but I am not 100 per cent certain that that is the right expression. It should really be the ““socioeconomic make-up”” of a constituency, because there is a difference in dealing with areas of social deprivation compared with dealing with areas where there is wealth, education and people with the self-confidence to take on issues. One of the big problems that people encounter at any level of election when they are dealing with areas of social deprivation—particularly where a number of us come from, in the west of Scotland—is high levels of mortality. In some areas—like the area that was previously represented by the noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn—life expectancy of the average male is 44. That is quite a shocking statistic and it has an impact on the kind of work that has to be done by councillors, Members of the Scottish Parliament and by Members of the other place in this Parliament. It does make sense to take factors like that into account. What we really need to look at—and I believe the amendment of my noble friend Lord Foulkes is really a probing amendment—is whether there is a better way of encapsulating that into this piece of legislation I notice that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has left his place, so I assume that it will be the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, who will be answering this part of the debate. Could I make an appeal to him? At the end of the previous debate, the response we got from the noble Lord, Lord McNally, was not acceptable. I accept that he is tired: he seems to have been a one-man Government today. He answered three Questions at Question Time, and he has been going for some hours, so I have a great deal of sympathy for him. But because this Bill is so badly drafted, what the Minister says at the Dispatch Box is of vital importance. It allows the interpretation of the Bill to be taken to another level. I am sorry the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is not here, because there are many Scots in this House, and I see the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad, on the other side. Although for this House it is still Monday, for the rest of the world it has now slipped into Tuesday and, of course, today is Burns Day. With noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in their places, perhaps they could say to the noble Lord, Lord McNally: "““Tam, Tam, ye’ll get yer fairin,""In hell they’ll roast ye like a herrin””." If he would please give us the kind of response to this Bill that I think we are entitled to, we will intercede to make sure he is not roasted like a herrin.