Committee (11th Day)

Part of Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill – in the House of Lords at 3:49 pm on 19 January 2011.

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Photo of Lord Bach Lord Bach Shadow Spokesperson (Justice) 3:49, 19 January 2011

My Lords, Part 2 of the Bill is aimed, on the one hand, at reducing the size of the House of Commons by 50 and, on the other, at making the 600 remaining seats or, at any rate, the vast majority of them, more equal in size. As noble Lords are aware, we on this side are opposed to the arbitrary and somewhat dubious proposal to cut the other place by 50 seats. What we see as the failure of the Government so far to provide any coherent, considered reason as to why 600 is the better number, let alone the ideal number, for membership of the House of Commons has fuelled concern that the governing parties reached that judgment either on the basis of private, partisan calculation or that, as the some of the rather flip answers that have been given as to why 600 suggest, they did not really care terribly what the figure was. It is for the House and perhaps eventually the country to judge which of those two alternatives is worse.

We on this side of course support the principle of more equal-sized seats. However, we have considerable concern about the practical way in which the Bill sets out to achieve that objective. As we have previously heard, the rigidity of the proposed new rules, with their overriding emphasis on numerical equality to the practical exclusion of all other factors, is likely to unravel long-established patterns of representation in ways that will disrupt political organisation and even break up community identities.

However, even if those flaws were ironed out and a more balanced approach applied to the rules for drawing constituency boundaries, the Bill would still be undermined by a fundamental defect in its design; namely, that you cannot produce equal seats from an unequal register. It is to that effect that I move Amendment 65B, which is grouped with Amendment 67B.

The Deputy Prime Minister told the other place that the December 2010 electoral register will form the basis for the boundary review that this Bill stipulates must be completed by October 2013. But the Government accept the view of the Electoral Commission that in excess of 3.5 million eligible voters, our fellow citizens, are missing from that register. The Government's solution to underregistration is to expedite the rollout of individual voters' registration. That marks a departure from the previously agreed timetable which we feel will harm rather than help voter registration, particularly if the Northern Ireland experience is anything to go by. However, in any event, the Government's own timetable does not begin the move to individual registration until after December 2010. We fear that this amounts to an admission that millions of eligible voters will be ignored when the boundaries are redrawn. That would be bad in any event, but it is made worse when one considers that the missing voters are not randomly spread.

An Electoral Commission study published in March last year found that,

"underregistration is concentrated among specific social groups, with registration rates being especially low among young people, private renters and those who have recently moved home ... The highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation".

The Electoral Commission's study was underpinned by Ipsos MORI research which found-these are pretty shocking figures-that only 69 per cent of black and minority ethnic voters are registered and only 44 per cent of 20 to 24 year-olds, as opposed to 97 per cent of 60 to 64 year-olds.

In light of these facts, what are we to make of the Government's determination to press ahead with a timetable for boundary changes which ignores specific social groups based in particular locations? There are a number of explanations. At one extreme is the possible explanation that the Government want somehow deliberately to exclude these people from the boundary calculations for whatever reason; that is, they actively want to leave certain people and places underrepresented in Parliament. Of course, we do not accuse the Government of that, but it would be serious if there were people outside who thought that it was their motivation. An alternative explanation is that they regard those excluded voters somehow as collateral damage-a regrettable but inevitable by-product of the need to rush to pass the Bill and secure the two political reforms which it contains. It is important to remember in this context that the Bill contains a commencement clause so that the alternative vote, even if it were passed in a referendum, may not be introduced unless and until the boundary reforms are implemented. That is why there is a rush.

Our amendment is an attempt to mitigate the damaging effects of the Government's decision to press ahead on this undemocratic basis by placing an upper limit on the extent of electoral inequality that may result from the Bill. As noble Lords will have gleaned, Amendment 65B is a paving amendment. The substance of the changes that we suggest is contained in Amendment 67B, which states:

"No constituency shall have a total population of those aged 18 and over which is more than 130% of the electoral quota".

I am of course aware that criticisms can be levelled at the amendment, Most obviously, it may be pointed out that not everyone above 18 will be eligible to vote, but the only source that would enable us to work out the eligible electorate is the census. As it happens, the Electoral Commission has said that it is working alongside the Office for National Statistics on a project to use the data from this year's census for that very purpose; but, unfortunately, the Government have already announced that they are unwilling to wait for the fruits of that study because it will not be ready until 2014, which does not suit the political timetable. So we have no alternative but to propose this alternative method. It is intended to provide a backstop on the level of distortion that will be allowed to occur under the new boundary rules.