My Lords, I will be brief but I want to make one point on admissibility before turning to my main points concerning the substance of this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Hill, who we are delighted to see in his place, made a moving appeal to my noble friend Lord Hart to withdraw his amendment. All of us will have felt the force of that even if we cannot go with him.
However, at the end, he put it as if it was down to my noble friend Lord Hart to decide this and that no one else could have stopped the situation that we are in today. After our last debate, when this Bill was withdrawn by the Government, it would have been perfectly easy for Ministers to put down a Motion in another place or in this House saying that they wanted to proceed with the electoral review and that if it was lost they would agree that they would not introduce the orders in November. It would have been
perfectly easy, perfectly in order and there would have been no difficulty about it. It would have been a clear decision.
They did not do so and we all suspect their motives for not doing so. As we read in the papers, the Prime Minister was determined to see whether he could get the various minority parties in the other place to back the change and carry it through but it was going to take a little while. That is fine, but we should be careful about getting on too many high horses on this matter without checking that our girths are properly tightened.
My second point concerns the substance. I have heard a lot about fair votes this afternoon and the Chartists and all that. When you draw constituency boundaries you have to weigh off various things against each other. Equal weight for every vote is important but so is community integrity and so is the need to disrupt as little as possible the relationship between a Member of Parliament and his constituents: when you take one lot away and put another lot in it takes time for the relationship to form. These are matters of balance: the balance was entirely wrong for 5%. In a sentence: Gloucester Cathedral now sits in the middle of the Forest of Dean.
Intrinsic to the original Bill were the combination of moving from 650 to 600, the decision that the boundaries were going to be changed after every single election and the dreaded 5%. If it had been 10% we would not have had any difficulties in the first place. I am not saying that this is why some Members of this House may have changed their mind, but the argument has moved on and it has got much worse for the proponents of these boundary changes.
In these debates we have often heard from the leading academics in the field—David Rossiter, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie. They wrote on the subject in Parliamentary Affairs in 2012 and I need not add to what they said:
“Those recommendations—
that is to say the recommendations of the Boundary Commission which we are about to put into force if we pass the Government’s Bill unamended—
“were much more disruptive to the pre-existing constituency map than many had anticipated, and the outcome—should the proposed constituencies (or some variant of them) be finally adopted—will see much less continuity and reflection of community identities … As it stands, the outcome suggests that the underpinning theory of British representative democracy—that Members of Parliament represent places with clear identities—is being undermined”.
That is the constitutional case against this Bill and it is a case that has only come to light since we passed the previous Bill in those long winter nights two years ago. They also have something to say on the subject of individual electoral registration—the subject of this Bill—and tie individual registration closely with it. They say:
“If the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration is successful and the electoral rolls are more complete, the allocation of seats could change considerably”.
That is to say that the brand new registers we are getting under this are going to be another wholesale upheaval. As we get to grips with electoral registration and the electoral rolls are changed again and again
and again as a result, there will be more upheavals to come. If we pass the Bill into law we will set a fire to the electoral map of Great Britain, to all the constituency and personal loyalties that have been incorporated within it and to pledge ourselves to do the same thing again at every single election for all eternity. That is why I hope the amendment will be carried.