Parliamentary Constituencies Bill (Fifth sitting)

Ben Lake Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 25th June 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Ben Lake (Ceredigion) (PC)]

The right hon. Gentleman made a very good point earlier about representation and what it means, and the importance of working the patch. I agree with the point that the right hon. Member for Basingstoke made about the different nature of our constituencies. I would point out, however, that during the summer months the population of my constituency doubles, in part because of the very large proportion of second homers. When they come to me, they have an address in my constituency. I do not ask them whether they are registered to vote in Ceredigion; I serve them, because they have come to me for help. I make that point as a note of caution. We should bear in mind that more factors are at play than purely the electoral register.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. That moves us on to clauses and amendments later in the Bill that we will be able to debate further. My constituency is a county constituency. I am in the city of Leeds, but the other seven seats are borough constituencies, so it is not fair to compare me directly. There is some argument over how big Leeds Central is. It varies from 78,000 voters to 94,000 because it has such a transient population. However, the seat of Leeds East has only 66,000. I know that some Opposition Members might not particularly miss the seat of Leeds East today, but I will not ask them to comment on that. Those are the differences in just one city, among neighbouring seats. Leeds West, on the other side, is a different size to Leeds North East. Seats vary hugely within just one city by tens of thousands of votes, not necessarily just a few. However, I take on board the hon. Gentleman’s point.

I have two final points to make. The right hon. Member for Warley mentioned the OSCE report earlier in his point of order, and I picked up on it as well. The report says that

“making members of parliament (MPs) accountable to their electorate and creating a link between the MP and voters…is undermined when MPs know that they will acquire new voters with new constituencies before each election.”

I do not necessarily agree. I think that we are honourable enough to represent the people we represent right until the end. I am sure that everybody in this room, as soon as they are elected, pays no regard whatever to the voting intentions in areas of their constituency. I have worked every single area of my seat, which had a traditional mining area. The village of Allerton Bywater was a colliery. It was at the frontline of the miners’ strike. I stood in local government for it in 2002 and received 8% of the vote. In the last general election, I received 52% of the vote. It changes. We go in and work an area, and none of us takes any of our constituents for granted.

I therefore think that that is a slightly disingenuous comment, but it points to the fact that at some point things have to happen, and political events may happen towards the end of a Parliament. If we want just to delay the change and kick it forward, we are running into the fact that we could say, “Let’s have it come into effect straight after a general election, so that we all know what we’re doing next time and there’s time to adjust,” which plays into that argument. When is a good time to do it? From our point of view, I do not think that there is one. There is an automaticity point here.

I understand the amendment that Opposition Members have tabled; in fact, I think that the hon. Member for City of Chester made a very reasoned and well placed argument. My view, though, is that we have not removed Parliament’s ability to have its say in the process for two fundamental reasons. First, Parliament is having its say at the very beginning, in the criteria laid out. Secondly, there is still nothing really—we can argue about technicalities, but they have all been overcome in the past two or three years—preventing Parliament from stopping the change, if it wanted to, before it came into effect.