And at length, it has to be said.
I want to tell the House about something that happened in the East Riding of Yorkshire. For many years, people who think about these things have looked at the boundary of the city of Hull and thought it is too constrained and has too little of the hinterland within it. A lot of people thought that it would make sense for it to be expanded outside, but East Riding of Yorkshire Council is a very successful council and the residents are relatively happy with it. The city of Hull announced that it would set up a commission to look at the boundaries—in effect, at the possibility of Hull expanding outwards. It did so with little or no involvement from East Riding of Yorkshire Council. The response of the council was to call a referendum for the surrounding communities of Hull to see what they thought. This was a one-off referendum: nothing else was going on at the same time. One might think that the arcane issue of boundaries could occasionally capture the public imagination, but generally people would just accept a sensible top-down solution given to them by leaders and Governments and so on.
We need to be careful. I do not have the figures to hand, but, off the top of my head, there was a 75% turnout and a Ceau?escu-esque election result—96% said that they did not want the expansion to go ahead. I mention that in the context of amendment 56 and the argument
that, because not all councils are quite in line, perhaps all they need is a little push to get a sensible result. We should be remarkably sensitive to how strongly the population can feel about such things.
7.30 pm
Expanding Hull is not an utterly absurd idea—it is not necessarily evil. People sat quietly, the letters of the local papers were not full of it and nobody talked about it in my street surgeries, yet when they were asked 96% of three quarters of the population said, “No, no, no”, to the three questions. I add that to the debate to illustrate just how sensitive we ought to be and how easily this could spiral out of control and cause political difficulty and real dissatisfaction.