Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Andrew Love Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Laing]

Not for a very long time, and the hon. Gentleman should not shout.

The matter is being discussed properly now, and there is nothing wrong with the figure of 600. It is a perfectly reasonable, round number.

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady speaks about principles. Should it not be a principle of the measure, since it proposes a change in our constitutional arrangements that is unprecedented in modern times, that at least some public consultation and cross-party discussions take place before anything comes before the House?

[Mrs Laing]

This is a cross-party discussion. We are all here in the Chamber having an open, cross-party discussion. There has not been very much time to consider the Bill, but there have been several months. The Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform has examined it, and we have all received e-mails, letters, papers and so on from people around the country who are concerned one way or the other. There has been consultation—that is why we are here. The debate that we are holding at this very moment is consultation. It is right that we have that discussion, and that the House makes a decision about numbers.

I put it to the Committee simply that 600 is a perfectly reasonable number. It is hard to argue against it unless one is doing special pleading on behalf of one’s constituency or county. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central spoke eloquently about our country’s development, traditions and communities. Communities and traditions develop once boundaries are drawn. My constituency has a part in the north and a part in the south that have little in common with one another, although they are not far apart. However, they join together as a constituency and a district. If another part comes in or goes out, that becomes the community. Communities evolve, and nothing in the Bill will destroy the traditional counties of England.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Heath]

Because this is a Bill about the House of Commons. The House of Lords will be dealt with in different legislation, which the hon. Gentleman will see in due course. His right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) is involved in the discussions. The hon. Gentleman will have to wait. One of the lessons that we should have learned by now is that if we wait for every constitutional change to be made at once, nothing happens. That is what has prevailed for the last 100 years. We are going to change that.

The arguments that I hear about the future of the House of Lords have been strangely echoed in the arguments I heard this evening about this place. An argument that is regularly heard in the House of Lords is that any system that managed to appoint a peer as fine as the person who is speaking must be an exceedingly good system that does not require further change. We heard a bit of that this evening. We heard that any system that elected the current Members of the House must be an exceedingly good system and does not need to be changed. Various hon. Members explained how the numbers that precisely apply to their constituency are evidently the right numbers and should not be changed.

We have had the NIMPO—not in my period of office—argument, with Members saying, “Of course, we all want to see the House brought to a smaller size, but not while I’m still here. Wait until I’ve retired and then you can do it.”

We have also had the impossibility argument, with Members saying, “It is quite impossible to reduce the House from 650 to 600 Members because the electoral quota that would be in place, with 76,000 electors, would make it quite impossible for Members to do their work”, completely ignoring the fact that one third of current Members have constituencies of 76,000, or within a margin of 5% of that. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell) said that it is impossible because there would not be enough time to do all the jobs that a Member of Parliament has to do. I would be more persuaded by that argument if I felt sure that every Member was a full-time Member of Parliament and did not find other employment—some excessively so. Such Members have contributed to the debate. Apparently, the shift from a constituency of 60,000 to 76,000 would make the job impossible.

We heard from the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) that the job is impossible to do if one represents a constituency that crosses a local authority boundary, but how many Members have constituencies that do that? Apparently, it would be impossible under the quota that we are suggesting.

[Mr Love]

The hon. Gentleman is criticising the arguments that have been used by the Opposition, so may I address the arguments that the coalition Government have used? I have read the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee’s report on the Bill. Having considered every argument that had been made, the Committee, which has an in-built coalition majority, concluded:

“There may be a case for reducing the number of Members of the House to 600, but the Government has not made it.”

Can the hon. Gentleman make such a case tonight?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman will have to wait until I get to that point in my remarks, because I have a few other comments to make on what others have said in the debate.

We have heard not only that it would be impossible for Members to accommodate extraordinary constituencies of 76,000, despite the fact that so many of us do it, but that it would be impossible for electors in such constituencies to know who their MP was. We have heard that it would be impossible to have a career structure because anyone who had experience outside the House could not be elected if we had constituencies of 76,000. What an extraordinary proposition that is.

The final proposition was that this is all a partisan move—[Hon. Members: “It is!”] The Opposition say that it is a partisan move to reduce the number of Labour MPs, but we have also heard from the same side in the same argument that it will not reduce the number of Labour MPs. So, we are gerrymanderers, but we are totally incompetent gerrymanderers because we are reducing our own seats and improving the position for the Opposition.

Again, I find it extraordinary that people whom I believed were reasonably intelligent and reasonably numerate can imagine that reducing the size of the House from 650 to 600 means that the 50 smallest seats are the only ones that disappear—they just go puff and disappear into the ether—and that all the rest carry on as they were. The suggestion is that the fact that most of the smaller seats are Labour seats shows that this is a partisan move against the Labour party. I am sorry; I just do not accept that. I do not think that it is a logical argument.