Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

My Lords, I readily recognise where the noble Lord, Lord Howarth of Newport, is coming from on this. As the Committee will know, the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 requires boundary review reports to be published on a five-yearly timetable, starting in October 2013. Once this Bill is enacted, general elections will occur at five-year intervals, starting in May 2015. In the absence of any early elections, the effect would be that boundary reviews generally would be published 18 months before each general election. Our debates on the previous Bill were about allowing an opportunity for the political parties and electors to become familiar with new boundaries and, importantly, for the electoral administrators to gear up accordingly. I understand that the intention behind this amendment is to realign the five-year cycle for boundary reviews in the event that an early election causes them to get out of sync. Unfortunately, the amendment does not achieve this. It relates only to when the order is submitted to Parliament; there is no provision made to adjust the cycles that the Boundary Commissions themselves will work to. That is not simply a technical objection but an important and fundamental one. Broadly, I have sympathy with what the amendment is trying to do to ensure that there is one boundary review in each Parliament so that constituencies remain of roughly equal size and votes remain of equal weight. We looked at the interaction between the boundary reviews and the provisions of the Bill. The conclusion that we reached, which may be an echo of what some Members said in earlier debates, was that we simply could not legislate for every scenario under a fixed-term Parliament provision. This is one where it would be far better for judgments to be made by future Parliaments, in possession of knowledge of the circumstances, depending on when the early election—if such there was—took place. I give a brief example. If, for the sake of argument, an early election was to occur before a full boundary review had been completed—say, in early 2018, when the report from the Boundary Commission would not be due before October that year—this amendment says nothing about what should happen to that boundary review, which would be well under way and ready to report in October 2018. It says simply that the next order should not be brought into force until 2022—that is, before the election of 2023. That raises questions about whether the review that was due in 2018 should be implemented in 2022, which would mean that the boundaries could become out of date. Is it the intention that the first review after an early election should have a 2022 deadline, in which case additional provision would be required to define which register that review should use? Without that additional provision, the commissions would have to use the December 2020 register, which would give them a very short time in which to conduct the review. As I indicated, while it would be preferable—and may still be possible for the dates of some early elections—to continue the cycle of reviews that is there, it is far better left to a future Parliament to deal with the specific circumstances if it felt that boundary reviews were not keeping pace with the cycle of elections. In any event, even without doing anything, future elections are likely to be fought with more up-to-date registers than was the case for England in 2010. I welcome what I am sure is the well intended purpose of the noble Lord’s amendment, but I do not believe that it achieves that purpose. I therefore ask him to withdraw it.