My Lords, I am very pleased to speak to my Amendments 2 and 3 to Clause 1 regarding expanding the Boundary Commission review period from eight to 10 years. I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has already indicated his agreement with this. It would mean that after the 2023 report, the commission would no longer need to conduct another review until 2033. I have a number of reasons for this, and I will go through them all.
The first is that it will actually chime more coherently with electoral cycles across the United Kingdom, both for the devolved nations and for local and regional elections. Scottish Parliament elections are now every five years. Although I understand that we might be moving away from a fixed-term Parliament here, it is normally the case that Parliaments last between four and five years. To have such frequent Boundary Commission reviews causes great disruption, as I hope I am about to explain.
I thought that I had asked to speak after the Minister on the previous group, but perhaps I did not email the right address. The Minister argued very strongly —I think this was his main argument—that everyone’s vote should have equal weight. That is what I call the arithmetists’ argument when we come to boundary reviews. Is not the logical conclusion of that to move towards some form of proportional representation? That would seem the basis of his argument. I am not in favour of proportional representation because I am very strongly in favour of individual Members representing constituencies. That is the argument for these amendments and for further ones that I have later on.
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The Tories—sorry, the Conservative Government—now seem to see the Commons’ main, if not sole, function as being an electoral college to elect the Prime Minister. After that MPs can sit back, pick up a directorship or consultancy here or there and go about other business, and Mr Cummings, with the help of Mr Johnson—let us get it the right way round—will continue to run the country. Well, that is not my understanding of what Members of Parliament should be. When my noble friend Lord Cormack—I call him my noble friend—was a Member of Parliament, I remember that he was a very active constituency Member. The number of times I heard about Lincoln—was it Lincoln?