Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Lipsey, who is clearly still on very good form and on something of a high from having delivered an Exocet into the Government’s costings for House of Lords reform. His speech reminded me that 10 days ago I saw a great production of that wonderful play, “Close the Coalhouse Door”, in which the socialist alphabet is sung. I think it includes the line, “G is for gerrymandering, which the Tories all think of first”. I wondered whether my noble friend had also been to see it.

I congratulate my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours on initiating this debate. I echo and reinforce what he said about the damage that has been done to our democracy by attacks on the integrity of Members of Parliament when we all know that the vast majority go into politics for the right reasons and stay in often at great sacrifice to themselves. They should not be pilloried as they have been. I am only sorry that party leaderships across the board have not done more to support the good membership that we have in all parties.

This is a very timely and important debate, many aspects of which have already been raised. My main concern is the importance of this issue for the nature of our democracy, especially when there are so many challenges and other unco-ordinated changes that individually—and especially when taken together—could have very significant unintended consequences. As has been mentioned, we see a reduction in the number of MPs, fixed-term Parliaments and individual voter registration. Who knows what will come of the separation referendum in Scotland, or what the outcome of deliberations on the future of this House will be? The combination of all those things, which have not been thought through in any integrated way whatever, could undermine the fundamentals of our democracy in a very serious way.

Turning to the boundaries themselves, I entirely acknowledge that boundary changes are never easy. They will never satisfy everyone and there will always be winners and losers. I speak as someone who has been on both sides of that while a Member of another place. Boundary Commission reviews always raise big issues that are important to everyone and small issues that can be very important to individual constituents who identify with a constituency and its Member. They can raise tempers and concerns very much.

I shall say a little about my experience of Boundary Commissions and my experience in another place. I have given evidence to boundary inquiries on several occasions. My old constituency of Bolton West was subject to significant change in the 1980s and my constituency of Dewsbury, which I represented from 1987, was redrawn in rather an unusual way. I have always given evidence to the effect that I believe that community and identity should be the main consideration and that, although numbers matter, they are secondary to having a community that you can represent and that can identify you as its Member of Parliament. It is important that people can identify in that way and that that relationship can be developed. No one likes losing an election, but it is one thing to lose an election because of the electorate, which is a risk that you take. If you lose an election because your constituency has been carved up by some arbitrary figure, it is far more difficult to take and no one understands it, including the electorate.

In Bolton, I had a straightforward third of the area—an easy, homogeneous group in which everyone could identify who their MP was and the areas that I represented. Later, in my Dewsbury constituency, there was a different situation. The town of Dewsbury was too small to have a Member of Parliament of its own. So was the next-door town of Batley. They had a lot of common interests because they were the heavy woollen industry district. Had they been put together, there would have been one community and one identity, but that never happened. Dewsbury’s three wards were put with Mirfield, which was just down the road on the ribbon development. There was some logic to that because there was some community of interest in work patterns, travel to work, shopping and so on.

However, the Dewsbury constituency also had two wards that are very familiar to my noble friend Lord Clark. He used to represent one of them, Denby Dale. I am sure he would agree that Denby Dale and Dewsbury did not have much in common. There were some rather large hills between them, very few people travelled from one to the other to work, there were no school links, direct bus routes or direct train routes, and people did not go from one to the other for shopping. There was no community of interest whatever. It was like having two parallel constituencies. I enjoyed representing that whole area, but people in Denby Dale and Kirkburton never understood why they were in the Dewsbury constituency when they had no connection to it. As a Member of Parliament, I would rather have had a larger constituency that had an identity than a smaller one that was chopped up and meant representing lots of different areas.

Those are my opinions and my experiences. However, today I want to mention the consequences of the recent proposals and an article in a journal that will be very familiar to the Minister, Parliamentary Affairs. It was published on 3 July and the article is “Representing People and Representing Places: Community, Continuity and the Current Redistribution of Parliamentary Constituencies in the UK” by David Rossiter and Ron Johnston from the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield and Charles Pattie from the School of Geographical Science at the University of Bristol. I am glad to see that the Minister has it and hope he will come to the same conclusions. It has no political axe to grind; the authors are geographers, not politicians. They give a very useful history of the geographical basis of constituencies. Before 1944 there was no set procedure for redrawing boundaries. They show that, from that time until these recent changes, community and identity always took precedence over numbers. Obviously there were guidelines, but community and identity were the most important things.

The Boundary Commission was also given a great deal of discretion and judgment about what was appropriate in different areas. The latest changes are probably the biggest ever. The article shows some of these changes and some of the difficulties. Mention was made of the national quota of plus or minus 5% that has now been established, because other factors can be taken into account only within that size constraint. It is not the same as in previous boundary distributions when people looked at communities and adjusted to try to meet guidelines, so I think that this will prove really difficult in the future. Many existing constituencies fell into that plus or minus 5% range, so many MPs, when this was going through, thought that there would be no change whatever to their individual constituencies. Unfortunately many have had to see very significant changes because of the knock-on effect from neighbouring seats, which my noble friend Lord Lipsey touched on.

In summary, this study says that these boundary changes,

“incorporated much less continuity in the pattern of constituencies”,

and that,

“most existing constituencies were dismembered and many new ones incorporated parts of two, if not three, local authorities”.

Many MPs know that dealing with many local authorities is really very difficult. The report goes on to say that,

“the fracturing of the country’s electoral map was much greater than many … MPs … expected”.

That is clearly true and it is clearly a significant difficulty for many people.

Following on the point that my noble friend made, I point out that this study also shows that,

“The greatest fracturing has been in England’s major urban areas”.

I suggest that those are exactly the areas where we need to engage people more in the political process, and I believe that all that has been said previously about individual voter registration by my noble friends Lord Wills and Lord Lipsey mean that we are going to see a very difficult situation. I fear that it might be appropriate to use the word “toxic”, which my noble friend used.

I will finish by quoting again from this report, which is, as I said, not political. It says:

“If the Commissions’ proposals are implemented—or some variant of them with very similar characteristics ... it will start a process whereby—because a numerical criterion is paramount and geographical criteria secondary—the MPs’ representative role will change. The long tradition that UK MPs represent places and communities will be rapidly eroded; many will just represent numerical aggregates”.

That is dangerous for democracy and why these boundary changes should be opposed.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Is there not a slight contradiction in what he is saying? A minute ago, he was saying that the incumbency factor was very significant. Does that not mean that constituents must recognise their MPs?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Some do, some do not. However, we have a larger problem which we should also address. More and more constituents—including those who used to vote Labour, according to my experience in Bradford—do not identify with the constituency, any political party or politics as such and, indeed, do not wish to register. We will return to that wider issue in 10 days time, when we discuss the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, asked me to guarantee that there would be no further decline in registrations in the move to individual electoral registration, but of course the Government cannot guarantee that. We know that between 2000 and 2010, the number of people not on the register is estimated to have doubled from 3 million to 6 million. I am sure the Labour Government that were in office at that point had no intention of allowing that to happen—it happened, as we know, for a range of reasons to do with political attitudes and social change. We will be doing everything we can to maximise the completeness of the individual register, but the accuracy and completeness of the household registration system has been going down, which is very much part of the reason for the change.