Parliamentary Constituencies (Orders)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 28 October 1970.

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Photo of Mr Peter Shore Mr Peter Shore , Stepney 12:00, 28 October 1970

One point on which general agreement emerges is that hon. Members on both sides think that the Home Secretary has shown very bad judgment in presenting the Orders to us en bloc. His attempt to defend his course of action by citing the procedures proposed, in the very different circumstances, by my right hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan), for not changing the boundaries last year, was very feeble.

The Home Secretary's action is regrettable, because hon. Members have much to say which is of great importance to their own constituencies and areas. They should have been given the proper time to deploy their case and, if need be, to divide the House. As it is, anyone intervening in the debate feels under a certain constraint and restraint. He has his eyes on the clock, because he knows that many other hon. Members wish to speak. Therefore, an hon. Member is almost obliged to make a broad speech rather than a narrower one but one of great importance to his own area.

I shall make a few remarks which cover not only my own constituency, which is affected by these changes, but also a general problem affecting many other constituencies. I am thinking of the heart areas of our big cities. As a result of these boundary changes, the number of constituencies which now exist in the central parts of cities—certainly of London, but also of the great provincial cities—is about to be greatly reduced.

It will be said that the argument for arithmetical equality inevitably dictates that the representation in older inner city areas should decline. Their populations have been declining as people have moved out to other areas—to new towns, to expanding towns, and so on. The argument of arithmetical equality in terms of constituency representation dictates that the growing areas must have an increase and the declining areas a decrease.

I do not propose in general to quarrel with that argument, because it is virtually irrefutable. However, in making its proposals the Commission is allowed a considerable margin. Under the rules which have been adopted, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own electoral quota, which is different from that of England. Most of us would agree that in the past the Commission has given a slight weighting of representation in favour of rural areas or has taken account of other factors, as it is entitled to do; so it is not the slave of arithmetical equality.

Among the factors of which this Commission should have taken account and of which I hope a future Commission will take account is the need to give special weighting to the inner areas of great cities. I argue this on two grounds. First, our social thinking in recent years has come to recognise that the inner areas of big cities have problems which are out of scale with those of other areas. In the last few years we have defined housing priority areas and educational priority areas, areas in which the urban programme would apply. The common core of this priority area approach is the fact that in these areas there are far greater problems than those existing elsewhere. There are problems of poverty—environmental poverty to an extreme degree, real personal poverty which the measures taken yesterday will certainly not alleviate. There is also the problem of immigration. All these problems come together in the priority areas in the inner part of big cities.

It is strange that our redistributive arrangements for cities should seem to be moving in the very opposite direction to our recogniton of priority areas in terms of social policy and allocation of resources. The hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr. John Hall) said that the size of the electorate made no difference. I invite him to come to Tower Hamlets and see the great problems that Members of Parliament have to face there. They are problems of squatters, of homeless people, of a large concentration of families with great problems, and of local authorities whose resources are stretched to the utmost. It is paradoxical that these very areas, which in the past have admittedly been somewhat overrepresented in terms of population, have become under-represented in the new constituencies which have been formed. The quota for England is little more than 58,000, but wherever we look in the new areas of our cities there is tendency to find new constituencies being recommended whose size is above the English constituency quota, whereas throughout the rest of the country there are constituencies which are far smaller and whose problems do not even begin to match the scale of those that the inner areas have to face.

I certainly do not argue that there should be any sharp departure from the arithmetical rule. I am not saying that even areas under great stress should be so favoured that they have an extra Member of Parliament where this would not be justified in terms of the electoral quota. I am saying that if the Boundary Commission had had its attention drawn to the need to make sure that these areas of great stress were not under-represented, then it is almost certain that the Commission could not have recommended that there should be two or three Members of Parliament in those areas where at present there are three or four.

I conclude by urging on the Minister who is to wind up the debate, ideally to withdraw these Orders, to think again and to present some new ones. However, if the Government cannot do that, let them for heaven's sake think about these areas with great problems since they could become major problem areas in our social life in the years ahead. Let them see whether they can build some reasonable principle of weighting into whatever rules the Boundary Commission has to operate in future.