Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Corston]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to take part in this important debate. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, who has done us a great service in allowing us to do so. What we are discussing—the proposals of the parliamentary Boundary Commission—is based on what I can only describe as a Faustian pact entered into May 2010, in which in return for an alternative vote referendum the Liberal Democrats agreed that they would support proposals to reduce the number of parliamentary constituencies in this country from 650 to 600. I have read in more than one place that that was based on naked party-political interest, in that there would be a guarantee of an extra 20 Conservative seats should those proposals be implemented.

The tragedy for the Liberal Democrats is that they will be the greatest casualty from all of this, because my experience after a lifetime of politics is that what has guaranteed many Liberal Democrats a seat in the House of Commons is what has been described as incumbency. They have indulged in what has been called “pavement politics”, whereby you are more concerned with dog mess than with China’s position in the United Nations. Actually, there is a lot to be said for that—but that is how they established themselves.

I worked 30 years ago as the regional organiser for the Labour Party in the south-west of England. I remember going to the Yeovil constituency Labour Party in 1981 when everyone was talking about the forthcoming election as if it was a dispute between it and the Conservative Party. I pointed out how misplaced that attitude was. I said, “Do you know there’s a chap called Paddy Ashdown who lives in Norton-sub-Hamdon, who has bought himself an offset litho duplicator, and he is going to snatch this constituency from under the noses of the Tories in doing so?”. And of course he did—I congratulate him. A few years ago I found some of the then Paddy Ashdown’s leaflets, which he distributed to the good people of the Yeovil constituency, which helped him to win the seat. I sent them to him and he was very grateful, because he did not have copies himself.

The success of Liberal Democrat MPs has been about what my noble friends have called a sense of place rather than electoral mathematics. However, I have been told on what I think is reasonable authority that, at an angry meeting of Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament after the proposals of the Boundary Commission were published, Mr Clegg promised those Liberal Democrats currently sitting in the House of Commons that should they not be successful in being elected, they would be at the top of the party list for the new senate. We can probably work out what that is about.

I want to talk here about the implications in the proposals for democratic representation. In doing so, I want to focus on two proposed seats from the Commission. The first is the Forest of Dean, which is probably one of the most enclosed and identifiable communities in this country. It covers what Dennis Potter used to call the “blue remembered hills”. If noble Lords want to know whether the Forest of Dean is special, they should just speak to my noble friend Lady Royall of Blaisdon, a proud Forester herself. I have a long association with that part of the world going back 30 years. The new seat is going to include the centre of the city of Gloucester. One of my noble friends recently referred to what would happen to Gloucester Cathedral, but I point out that the new seat will contain not just the cathedral but the Gloucester docks, the county cricket ground, the city’s ancient gate streets, the council headquarters, the police buildings and the law courts. Everything which is identifiable as what has been described locally as the “historical centre of their city” will not be represented by anybody who is sitting for Gloucester. It will tacked on to the Forest of Dean, and anybody representing the Forest of Dean who has any sense is not going to spend as much time in Gloucester as they do in the Forest of Dean, a seat currently held by Mr Mark Harper, the Minister taking some of this legislation through the House of Commons. Such is the anger in Gloucester about these proposals that not only were 400 of the 503 submissions to the commission implacably opposed, but there was a protest march through the city of Gloucester with banners saying, “Save our city centre”. Anybody who tells me people do not care about this is profoundly misguided.

I now want to talk about the new seat of Mersey Banks. Mersey Banks is, as the name suggests, two areas on opposite sides of the River Mersey. They do not cover the mouth of the estuary; you have to drive right round the estuary to get to the other bit of the seat. It includes three local authorities—two have comprehensive school systems and one has a selective system—two police authorities and two fire authorities. There are absolutely no historical links at all. Nor are there any road links, because you cannot get from one bit of the constituency to the other without leaving the constituency in three places.

I do not blame the commission for what it has come up with because it was given a poisoned chalice. If all you care about is numbers, you are going to have constituencies that make absolutely no sense. It is a bit rich to have Conservative MPs repeatedly criticise the Boundary Commission—as they have done—because it was given an impossible job to do. As many noble Lords have said, electoral representation is not about numbers: it is about a sense of place. I was proud to represent part of the city of Bristol. When the local government financial settlement was announced each year, I looked to see what happened to Bristol. I could get up in the Chamber and fight Bristol’s corner; I could write to Ministers on behalf of Bristol; I could speak in the Bristol media and in meetings in Bristol about the treatment of the city. Just suppose my constituency had covered areas of Bristol, Bath and North East Somerset and Kingswood. What would I have done when the local government financial settlement was published? I would have been a disinterested observer and I would have tried to hold the ring. If anybody from Bristol had complained, I would have said, “Oh well, Kingswood’s not doing very well either” and vice versa. The great thing about being a Member of Parliament is the way in which you identify with the people in that sense of place.

It might sound a bit fanciful, but when I left the other place for health reasons not of my choosing, giving up a constituency—and I am sure it is the same if you are defeated—was like giving up a child for adoption. Even now when I drive down the M32 I look left and remember that that was the place I used to represent. That is an aspect of being a Member of Parliament which is probably ridiculed in the media and not understood, but it enables you to be an effective member because of the possibility of that personal engagement.

Finally, I want to remind colleagues that electoral legislation is based on the Representation of the People Acts from 1949. That is what this is about. It is not about some notion of geographical parity, it is about the sense of representation. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, people do identify with their Member of Parliament. There is a great analogy with the NHS. If you ask people what they think of the NHS, they think it is not very good: if you ask them what they thought of the treatment they had a few weeks ago when they had a hernia operation, they say it was fabulous. Many times, people would say to me, “I don’t think much of MPs, Jean, but you’re okay”. There is a huge opportunity being missed here and huge damage being done to the fabric of our political life. All I fear is that there will be even more disengagement and even more trauma down at the other end of this place for people who do not deserve it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Corston]

Would the Minister acknowledge that we have also had a vastly growing population?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Certainly, and I also acknowledge—this is very important—that there has been an enormous degree of centralisation in the way that British politics, and particularly English politics, has operated. Fifty or 100 years ago, certain casework was conducted by local councillors. However, as the central state has taken on what the local authority used to do, so people have come to their MPs more and more, and that has led to a tremendous growth in the amount of MPs’ casework.

I do not entirely recognise a golden age of constituencies in which every constituency represented a long-term and clear place. The noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, will know that the Colne Valley as a constituency has changed very radically over the years. The first constituency that I fought—Huddersfield West—disappeared very rapidly and is now part of Colne Valley, whereas Saddleworth has long since gone somewhere else. The constituency in which I live, Shipley, has a moor down the middle of it and part of Wharfedale, which is occasionally cut off by snow in winter, is part of the constituency. I found myself at my first election as a candidate there having to explain to people in Wharfedale that they were part of the Shipley constituency and not connected with Ilkley or Pudsey.

One could take many examples of this. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, talked about some of the Kirklees constituencies. When I first started thinking about politics in that region, the Spen Valley was a constituency. We then had Batley, Brighouse and Spenborough, and Batley and Spen. In the 2005 general election I spent an afternoon standing in Huddersfield marketplace meeting people coming in from Heckmondwike, Gomersal, Cleckheaton and elsewhere who said, one after the other, “Can you help me? I’m not sure what constituency I’m in”. I realised how little I knew about the changing boundaries of those West Yorkshire constituencies. As we all know, MPs identify very strongly over time with their constituencies, but their constituents very often do not identify so closely with them in return.