Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Mark Field Excerpts

Tuesday 15th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman was asking two questions. On the first, I have not had those discussions with the boundary commissions and I do not think it would be appropriate to do so. On the second, I am not sure that the direction would make the difference that he suggests, but he should put his question to the boundary commissions, rather than the Government.

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Could the Minister clarify the precise situation, because this is slightly confusing? Surely if England is to be divided into regions, each of those regions would have to contain a set number of seats, given that a particular day would be pinpointed. The notion that a particular constituency could cross a regional boundary must be nonsense. We have to work on the basis of a particular region having a certain number of seats, for example, 35 or 45. Any decision taken at the 11th hour for a constituency to cross a regional boundary would have a huge knock-on effect on all the other seats within that region.

[Mr Harper]

No, the process for allocating the fixed number of seats in the Bill is by country. So the 600 seats will be allocated between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by the fair and impartial process set out in the Bill, which is generally accepted to be the best one for doing these types of divisions. The boundary commissions wanted guidance in the Bill about how to divide up England so that they did not have to do it all in one go. So they will use regions as a starting point, but nothing constrains their ability to cross regional boundaries if they think that that makes sense, taking into account the factors that they are able to consider. The regional boundaries and the allocation of seats to regions are not hard and fast things set out in the Bill.

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[Mr Harper]

I can understand why hon. Members are asking me these questions, but these are matters for the boundary commissions. One of the things that we made very clear in the debate when we were being accused of gerrymandering by the Labour party was that in our system the boundary commissions draw the lines, whereas in some other countries those lines are drawn by political parties in legislatures. We have set the guidelines for the boundary commissions and the rules are in the Bill, which we hope will be passed by Parliament and thus enacted. The detail of how the boundary commissions go about that work is a matter for them and they are experienced in doing such work. When they have these public hearings, having published their proposals, they will set out the nature of the scheme under which they are going to listen to people, and they will be very clear about how they have reached their decisions. These are matters for the boundary commissions. I can understand why my hon. Friend is trying to tempt me on this, but it would be wrong for Ministers to try to get involved in directing the boundary commissions on how they carry out their work.

[Mr Mark Field]

Does my hon. Friend not appreciate the concern that when we are discussing whether there should be any variance, be it of 5% or 7.5%, it is important to know how the process operates? If the entire United Kingdom—its 650 seats—were to be considered at once, there would be almost no need for any variance. If things are considered on the basis of smaller clusters, one can see the relevance of having that sort of variance, particularly if there is also a desire to avoid crossing ward boundaries. We do need to have an understanding of the process. If we do not have at least a basic understanding of how it will operate, it will be difficult for us to make any value judgment as to where the variance should lie, which is the subject of amendment 19.

[Mr Harper]

I do not agree with my hon. Friend’s analysis that if we were conducting a single review across the whole United Kingdom, we would not need the plus or minus 5% flexibility at all. We would still need it. At the extreme, we could say that every constituency had to be exactly the same size. We would then end up with a map with lots of straight lines on it, but I do not think anybody would think that that was satisfactory. We therefore set a plus or minus 5% variance, so that the boundary commissions can get seats pretty close to that quota, in order for votes to be of equal weight, but they can also take properly into account the things that hon. Members and those outside this place think they should be able to consider. I do not believe that he was in for the earlier debate, but he will know that the former Member for his constituency had an amendment in the other place proposing that the boundaries of the City of London can be explicitly examined, and I hope that he will welcome that. These are matters for the boundary commissions and we should not be prescriptive about how they carry out their work.

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[Andrew George]

I wish to make a few brief remarks on this most inflexible and rigid part of the Bill. The amendments would move things in the right direction by giving the boundary commissions greater latitude and flexibility than they would have had under the original Bill. In my view, that is a result of the intransigence of the Prime Minister, rather than the Deputy Prime Minister, in insisting that we adopt a situation in which there are just 600 MPs. A more flexible approach would have been to say that there should be no more than 600 and to allow the Boundary Commission the latitude and flexibility to interpret that alongside a clear instruction to work towards more equalised constituencies.

The Government have won that argument, and certainly the current range in electorate sizes across constituencies is intolerable and more effort must be made to achieve greater equality across constituencies. However, to do so in the sanitised, homogenised, rigid, inflexible and intransigent way that the Government propose is not the solution, because that will continue to create a wide range of significant anomalies across the country.

Given some of the interventions that we have heard, particularly from Government Members, it will be interesting to note how the work of the Boundary Commission will dawn on those Members as it does its work. They might believe that the whole town they represent, or the whole part of a shire county, for example, which they feel comfortable with, will not be changed, other than a little nibbling away at the boundaries, which they can tolerate. However, the Government’s approach will mean that we will end up with lines being drawn straight through those constituencies, and the associations that have been established over years between Members of Parliament and their towns will be divided as a result.

I do not know how it will all pan out. As we have heard, although there will be guidance for the Boundary Commission to work within what I call the Government zones, but which others have described as regional boundaries, there is no absolute requirement for it to do so.

[Mr Mark Field]

Surely the hon. Gentleman must realise that every major boundary review, including those that took place before the 1983, 1997 and 2010 elections, resulted in more than half of all constituencies changing, often substantially. That is the nature of any boundary review.

[Andrew George]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, but I think that the inflexibility of the proposals will result in much more significant changes across the country. Having argued that we should have far fewer MPs than even proposed in the Bill, I am not averse to the idea of significant changes being made at one time to the process by which MPs are elected, but I do not think that it should happen every five years, irrespective of what has happened before. That will happen across the country every five years, and as a result of these proposals the changes will be very significant indeed.

All I am asking is that the Government take a less intransigent and more flexible approach—the 7.5% figure is a reasonable extension, frankly. In order to be able to address many of the anomalies, from Argyll and Bute to the Cornish seats and the highlands, the Boundary Commission will need to be given a great deal more latitude than the amendment proposes, as the Minister has rightly said. We had the opportunity to extend the exceptional geographical circumstances of the Western Isles—