Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, the amendment of my noble friend Lord Lipsey is self-evidently proper. The legislation provides for seismic constitutional and political change but has been all too little considered hitherto. There was not only the lack of public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny to which my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer has referred but the reality of the way in which the Bill was transacted in the House of Commons is that the Committee stage was entirely perfunctory. At Second Reading in another place some Members of the other place expressed considerable anxiety about the way in which things were being done. For example, Mr Simon Hart, a Conservative Member of Parliament, said: "““I wish to address the issue of honesty. Let us not try to fool people about this Bill. Let us not pretend that it is a response to some kind of great public desire or thirst””." He did not necessarily want the Bill to fail because he accepts the foundations on which it was constructed, but he continued: "““It is the process, not the principle to which I object””." He went on to say that, "““there is a fine line between political reform and political vandalism””.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 120.]" If the House of Commons passed this legislation in the pretty shallow and perfunctory way in which it did—with a very brief Committee stage and very important sections of the Bill, including Clause 11, not being thoroughly examined in Committee—it follows that the other place must have the opportunity in due course to consider again whether it has done the right thing. If the orders made under the Bill were in effect to go through simply on the nod under the negative resolution procedure, that would not be good enough and the House of Commons would not be performing its proper constitutional role. Therefore, the simple affirmative procedure is probably the right procedure to be adopted for decisions on orders made under this legislation. I have some reservations that the super-affirmative procedure would create too much scope for obstruction and too much scope for the intervention of party political interest in the eventual decision-making. However, it is imperative that, when the other place comes to make decisions on orders under the Bill, it should do so consciously and deliberately, which the affirmative resolution procedure would enable it to do. In that way, the other place might slightly make up for the pretty neglectful and haphazard way in which it considered the primary legislation.