Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Glentoran and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I rather differ from my noble friends on the Front Bench. I could not support this amendment were they to test the opinion of the House because I do not think that it is right for government to fix the size of the House of Commons, which would be the consequence of this amendment. However, I think that it is a valuable amendment if it has been tabled as a probing one, as we need to get at some principles on how the size of the House of Commons should be determined. Like my noble friends, I have sought in vain so far to understand the principle that is animating the Government’s policy in this Bill.

The Liberal Democrats, in opposition, took a principled position. They proposed that the size of the House of Commons should be reduced to 500 Members but that would be on the basis of their being elected on the single transferable vote system and of more extensive devolution and the creation of regional assemblies. On that basis it was entirely reasonable that they should argue for a reduction in the number of Members of the House of Commons. Before the election, the Conservative Party proposed that there should be 585 Members of the House of Commons, and it was more difficult to ascertain the principle underpinning that proposition. My noble friend Lady Liddell has already referred to the observation of the noble Lord the Leader of the House that a 10 per cent reduction was a nice round figure, just as he said that 600 in the House of Commons was a nice round figure. Both 585 and 600 are nice round figures, but we would all agree that that is an insufficiently convincing basis for introducing a very major constitutional change that would weaken the capacity of the House of Commons and would tilt the system of parliamentary representation by favouring the Conservative Party and disfavouring the Labour Party. We therefore need to find better reasons.

We have not yet heard any good reasons for reducing the size of the House of Commons. At least the noble Lord, Lord Maples, had a go at trying to persuade us that it would be a good idea. Conservative arguments, such as they are, have been that the House of Commons is expensive and that the British people are overrepresented in the House of Commons compared with representation in other legislatures. Those reasons simply do not stand up to scrutiny. The argument that you should take 50 Members out of the House of Commons to save £12 million is risible. It would be risible even if you would save £12 million, but as a number of my noble friends have already explained, we will not save £12 million because the costs for a reduced number of Members of Parliament serving larger numbers of constituents would be no less. Possibly, when the Minister winds up this debate a little later, he would be kind enough to remind us what proportion of the fiscal deficit is £12 million.

[Lord Glentoran]

My Lords—

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[Lord Howarth of Newport]

Let me finish my sentence and I will give way. When the Bill was introduced, if I remember rightly, the deficit was running at about £180 billion, so how significant is the saving of £12 million?

[Lord Glentoran]

I am wondering what the constituents of the House of Commons have to do with this House. Why are we debating the numbers, finance and funding of the other end in this Chamber?

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Glentoran and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glentoran]

I thank the noble Baroness. I have two or three points to make. I did not talk to anybody to get my peerage—I happen to be a hereditary Peer. That is why I am here and why I have been here as long as I have. I am a Conservative through and through, although I of course support the coalition. I live in a country where we have single transferrable voting and a total nonsense at the moment of some form of Executive which seems unable to make decisions. I for one—I think there are many people in my party like me—am not looking to pave the way for a different form of voting, as the noble Baroness said.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I very much welcome the contribution by the noble Lord, Lord Glentoran. We have been looking forward to it for some hours since he trailed it a little earlier in the evening and it has been a sweet moment. It has also been a sweet moment listening to my noble friend Lady McDonagh as she moved her amendment. She spoke with a profound knowledge of elections and how they work, and, more importantly, of politics in this country much more broadly and of what makes people respond and behave as they do in politics. I have enormous respect for her judgment. I therefore have a natural disposition to be drawn to her proposal that the House of Commons instead of being reduced from 650 to 600 should be reduced only to 630. However, I have some difficulties with her amendment. One of the difficulties that I find in it I expressed in discussion of the amendments tabled by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer. I do not think that it is appropriate for the Government to determine the size of the House of Commons. My noble friend and I both agree that, for all sorts of reasons that we touched on in earlier parts of the debate, it should not be for politicians to fix the size of the elected House of Commons.

However, I do think the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady McDonagh is moving in the right direction. I shall probably be more inclined, when we come to them, to favour the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lord Snape and Lord Kennedy of Southwark. I am very much looking forward to those debates in due course. As I have already said to the House, I think there is a very strong case for a larger rather than a smaller House of Commons. I put some thoughts to the House earlier on why I think the pressures of business and demands on Members of Parliament within the House of Commons are very great and are difficult to be accommodated with the existing size of the House of 650. Equally, I think that when whichever body it is comes to consider the appropriate number of constituencies, it will also want to look very carefully at the volume of work that is expected of Members of Parliament in their constituencies—the expectations, indeed the requirements, of electors.

As a result of the defeat of the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Soley, we know that a generically independent commission will not determine this, but I live in hope that the solution put forward by my noble friend Lord Lipsey will in the end recommend itself to the House and that we can come back to that at Report. I mean his proposal that the Speaker’s Conference should determine the matter. As the Speaker’s Conference considers what the appropriate size of the House of Commons should be in future, I hope that it will take account of a number of factors that seem relevant. We all know that the age of deference is long gone, but the demands of constituents upon Members of Parliament will grow and grow—and will grow further should we see the introduction of a new constitutional arrangement proposed by the coalition, at the instance of the Liberal Democrats who have been keen, at least up until recently, to introduce a right of recall. I have been interested by the fact that, whereas all the rest of the agenda for constitutional reform, about which the Liberal Democrats have hitherto been so enthusiastic, has been pressed forward energetically and urgently, for some strange set of reasons we are not seeing them put the case with any comparable urgency for the introduction of a right of recall. I do not know whether my noble friends have any idea of why that might be, or whether it is anything that transpired in the politics of our country in recent weeks and months that could have caused them to have second thoughts and even, possibly, to lose their nerve over this.

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[Lord Glentoran]

My Lords, I am so sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, once again, but he is giving us a lecture about all the possibilities of the future and about all the things that MPs at the other end do. What I, and I am sure people on this side of the House, would like to hear from him is what the party opposite thinks and considers is a sensible number of MPs to be elected to the other House.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I cannot, of course, speak for the Front Bench of the Labour Party, but in my own view it should be not less than 650. I therefore disagree with the proposition from my noble friend Lady McDonagh, although she is shifting the debate in a direction I want to see it move in. I am making a case not only that she is proposing too few Members of Parliament—630—but that we ought to have an amendment down on the Order Paper, and probably will on Report, that will provide for an increase above 650. I do not want to detain the House unduly, but I think that some of these issues—

Let us consider the question of immigration, which is such a staple of Members of Parliament’s surgeries. Indeed, Mr Greg Hands, the Member of Parliament for Hammersmith and Fulham—

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Glentoran and Lord Howarth of Newport

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

We are not talking about an extreme and highly unlikely possibility; we are talking about the possibility that someone with perhaps £2 million to spend could parcel it out between different beneficiaries who would all then campaign on one side of the referendum argument.

The Minister just said two things that are in conflict. He said that he had confidence in the rules and regulations as they are now but, when he was asked by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours what there was to stop this kind of abuse, he said that he frankly suspected that there was nothing. Those two remarks are in conflict with each other. This is a very important issue. We need to know the answer to the question, and if that answer is not satisfactory then the legislation needs to be amended to ensure that such abuse cannot take place.

[Lord Glentoran]

I just wonder if the biggest lump of money that has interfered with elections over many years has been that of the large trade unions. They come together as a bulk with a huge amount of money, bigger than that of any individual.