Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill - Clause 19 - Advice of the Electoral Commission
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
Thank you, Mr. Benton. It is a pleasure to welcome you back to the Chair.
I was suggesting that the Committee was eagerly awaiting amendment No. 73 and I suspect that the Minister may also have been eagerly awaiting it so that he can tell me that it is redundant. Although it deals with an important point, I am prepared to concede that clause 21(b) has, perceptively, picked up the same point. I apologise to the Committee for tabling an unnecessary amendment, but it gives me the opportunity of asking the Minister a question about it and, by implication, the wording of clause 21(b), and the interpretation that is to be placed on the words ''reasonably practicable.'' The Minister might fairly ask me what interpretation I place on those words as I included them in the amendment. It was always my intention to try to have this debate because the problem is that potentially conflicting objectives may be set for the Electoral Commission when reflecting the identities and interests of local communities to ensure that the number of electors in each area is as near as reasonably practicable to being the same in each area. Those may be conflicting objectives and the weight that should be placed on each one is probably the correct approach in trying to work out what ''reasonably practicable'' means. Clearly, we do not want to abandon the principle of natural communities to avoid one electoral district having 159,999 and another having 160,000 electors. I plucked those figures randomly, but I suspect that the Minister will find that, in a maximum-sized elected regional assembly, that is approximately the number of electors per assembly person that the east of England region would find itself saddled with. Perhaps the Minister will tell the Committee how he intends to approach that. I am giving advance notice that I recognise that amendment No. 73, although perfectly
formed, is unnecessary because it duplicates something that appears elsewhere in the Bill.
Amendment No. 71 raises a separate issue. It would require the Secretary of State to specify how many members of the assembly are to be directly elected for an individual electoral area and, by implication, how many are to be elected by a top-up system or another method. That is important information for the Electoral Commission and I cannot see how it can do its job properly unless it has that information. It would be very informative for the Committee if the Minister would put on the record what he expects the balance to be between directly elected members and top-up members, and whether he sees any drawbacks in that system.
I remember having an illuminating conversation with a member of the Bundestag in Germany, who told me that the Bundestag has two classes of member. Some are directly-elected members who have to deal with the type of burdens—not burdens, but joys—with which Members of Parliament are familiar, such as constituency correspondence, constituency surgeries and all those tasks that we take for granted, but that limit the amount of time that we have available for getting involved in the broader debate and the broader political issues because we always regard pursuing constituents' problems as our first priority. The other class of member has no direct constituency responsibilities. The member I spoke to complained that the latter are invariably able to participate to a greater extent in the broader debate, spending more time in the Chamber and playing more of a role in committees, because they have less of a burden of constituency-related responsibilities. It is often those members who spring to national prominence in the public eye, because they are on television making headway and making waves. Has the Minister thought about the problem that will arise in regional assemblies as a result of having two classes of member—one with direct constituency responsibilities and one with without—and the nature of the balance between the two?