I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and to commend my noble friend Lord Foulkes on his two entertaining speeches this afternoon. They were both extensive and informative: I know more about the change of name in south Ayrshire than is good for me, but he made some extremely useful points. I did not know that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, had relatives who invaded Britain in 1066, which is another revelation.
I am joining in because this emphasis on numeric equality is dangerous. Just like the algorithm which was applied to examinations this year, it places a particular imperative at the centre when it should
often be ancillary. It is clear that on boundaries, with the exceptions already enunciated about islands on the edges of the UK, you cannot have constituencies with vast disparities of numbers. Equally, to have in place a tight numeric value and therefore a restriction on the commission being able to take into account sensible, logical community-related issues is a nonsense.
By the way, we ought to note—I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, will correct me if I am wrong—that quite a lot of boundary changes have taken place over the last 20 years. My own former constituency was substantially expanded in 2010 on the back of local authority re-warding boundary changes, which often take place in this country. The devolved Parliaments have also seen such changes.
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I want to make just a couple of points. The first has already been made but needs re-emphasising. Large rural areas are a major challenge and the numerics are less important than the ability of the Member of Parliament truly to represent those areas.
Secondly, at the opposite end, inner-city constituencies are incredibly difficult to represent. I remember having a conversation with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, whose friendship over the years I have really valued, about his riding around to different villages on a bicycle trying to persuade people to come to his advice surgery. In my case, it was an effort to persuade them not to come as often as they did, because they were repeat offenders. One reason I stood down in 2015 was not that I did not think that I could do the job any more but that I could not do it as well as I had done; frankly, I got sick of advice surgeries after all the years I had held them.
I mention that because the missing 9 million relates to this. You have a very large number of people in inner-city constituencies who are not on the register, but you still represent them and hear their complaints and problems. You could not possibly—although I had a colleague on the Labour Benches who did this—ask people who came in whether they were on the register and, if they were not, say, “Well, go get registered and then I’ll deal with you”. Nobody really wants to do that, so we need to be sensible about the balance.
The difference between eight or 10 years in re-boundarying is really important. As has already been said, people just about get used to knowing the name of and being able to relate to their Member of Parliament in a single-Member constituency. I favour it for that reason: people know who they should hold to account. They just get to know whether they will say to them, “I’m voting for you at the next election because you’ve done a really good job for me and my community”, or “You’ve been an absolutely lousy MP and I hope you’re not expecting me to vote for you”—and then somebody changes the boundary and they do not have the choice. This can seriously affect the way in which people respect their local Member of Parliament and the way in which MPs see their constituency. Although through the single-Member constituency system we elect a Government—that is its primary purpose—we hold dear the accountability at local level and people taking the community seriously.
Some of the proposals in the last effort at boundary changes—such as in the right honourable Iain Duncan Smith’s constituency, where you have to traverse a reservoir, or on Merseyside and the Wirral, where people would either travel two miles to find a bridge or the constituency MP would have to have his or her own motor launch to get to the other side of the Mersey to represent the people there—were just a nonsense. It is made worse the more often you change those boundaries to fit in with a 5% variant, because by hook or by crook, no matter how bright the commissioners and the people working for them are, they are drawing lines on a map to fit in with those numerics.
We know that they are doing that because, had the previous boundary changes gone through on top of the boundary changes already made in Sheffield, you would have seen that people had drawn lines. I do not blame them; they sit in an office in London. I do not expect anybody to research this, but I would be surprised if anybody on or working for the Boundary Commission has ever lived in the north of Sheffield. If you do not know an area and you do not have a clue about its nuances, you are bound to get it wrong. The tighter the task you have been given, the more likely you are to mess it up. So having longer periods of stability, with people genuinely representing their areas and having the ability to adjust to changes and turnover as time goes on, makes sense, but being rigid about 5% and an eight-year timetable does not.