Parliamentary Constituencies (Amendment) Bill

Debate between Peter Bone and Mark Harper

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 18th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, let me start to deal with the Bill, as I said I would. I shall deal specifically with the proposals set out by the hon. Member for North West Durham, and I want to make a bit of progress before giving way to my hon. Friend.

The first point raised by the hon. Member for North West Durham was about the number of MPs, and I think she completely failed to answer my question, which was to what question was the answer 50 more Members of Parliament. She did not tackle the cost of her proposals. The current law says that the number of MPs will fall from 650 to 600. Increasing that number by 50 would come at an estimated cost—I think she alluded to this in her remarks—of about £10 million to £12 million a year. That means about £60 million across the Parliament. I heard no proposals from the hon. Lady about how that was to be paid for or any reason why the proposal was a good one at all.

[Mr Bone]

I wonder how my right hon. Friend came up with that figure. If we as Members of Parliament will have more work to do and more areas to cover, we will presumably have more expenses. Could it be that the figure produced by my right hon. Friend is fictitious?

[Mr Harper]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend. The figure is based on how much MPs claim at the moment and how much we are paid in salary. What my hon. Friend needs to remember is that there is currently a massive disparity between MPs in Welsh constituencies, for example, who have fewer than 50,000 electors, and others. Those Welsh Members are already in a part of the United Kingdom where a huge amount of domestic policy areas are dealt with not by them at all, but by Members of the Welsh Assembly. They get the same level of support as my hon. Friend, yet he has to serve a much larger constituency in terms of electors—and he serves them very diligently indeed. In England, there is not a devolved Administration, so English MPs have to cover the full range of domestic policy areas. I think it would be perfectly possible to deal with the fewer number of MPs without seeing a significant increase in the expenses budget for each of us. Those MPs who currently have very small constituencies will have to deal with no more constituents than many of us already have to deal with.

[Mr Harper]

Let me first deal with the seemingly reasonable points about the House of Lords made by the hon. Member for North West Durham. She made a couple of points. First—big tick here—I was, of course, the Minister responsible in the last Parliament for securing a much smaller, democratically elected and less costly House of Lords. I received a great deal of support, but not from Labour Members. If Labour Members had given their support to the programme motion that we would have brought forward, we would have been able to reform the House of Lords and have a democratically elected Chamber. That did not take place.

[Mr Bone]

No.

[Mr Harper]

I know that not all Conservative Members were enormously enthusiastic about it, but the fact is that we were not able to make that proposal.

[Mr Bone]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Harper]

Go on.

[Mr Bone]

We cannot allow this myth to carry on. The Second Reading of the House of Lords Reform Bill got the biggest majority of that Parliament. The fact is that the Government did not move the programme motion, so we do not know what would have happened. It should absolutely not have been programmed, as it was a constitutional Bill that should have been gone through line by line. Any parliamentarian such as my great right hon. Friend should have supported that.

[Mr Harper]

I will answer my hon. Friend’s question, but not at length, as I do not want to try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend is right that Second Reading was well supported, but we had clear indications that the programme motion would not have been supported by Opposition Members, so the Government—quite rightly, in view of all the other challenges we faced—were not prepared to risk other legislation not getting through Parliament as a result. We were not able to make progress.

What the hon. Member for North West Durham needs to recognise, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson) said, is that the cost of the House of Lords has reduced since 2010—it has fallen, not increased. Since last year’s general election, there has been a net change in the size of the House of Lords of only 14 peers. What the hon. Lady forgets is that Members of the House of Lords are now able to retire and that a disproportionate number of those retiring are Conservative peers. It is true that there was a significant increase in the 2010 Parliament, but that was, of course, under a coalition Government, and a significant number of the new peers were Liberal Democrats.