European Parliament (Number of MEPs and Distribution between Electoral Regions) (United Kingdom and Gibraltar) Order 2008

I thank the Minister for introducing the order. I had not come across what he referred to as ““Sainte-Laguë””, if I have my pronunciation right, but I will be coming back to d’Hondt, which he will remember, in due course. I have two questions. First, obviously if the number of our MEPs is reduced from 78 to 72 as a result of the accession of the two countries mentioned by the noble Lord, that is fair enough and we have to make adjustments. Will the Minister give the figures on how many people each of the MEPs will now represent and what equality there is? For example, we now have three representing Northern Ireland, of which the population is X, and 10 representing the south-east, of which the population is Y. Will he tell the Committee what the variation is between the different regions in terms of how many people each of the MEPs will represent and what the level of fairness will be? My second question relates to d’Hondt. I do this in memory of my late friend Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, who taught us all we know about d’Hondt and the bogus, undemocratic, closed-list system that d’Hondt then worked on for electing our MEPs, which none of us were happy with. D’Hondt works in a curious way and, I suspect, works better in larger constituencies. In the old days, the smallest constituency had four MEPs, but now it is down to two; the north-east now has three, as does Northern Ireland. Does d’Hondt still work as effectively—if it ever did work effectively—when you are down to a constituency that has only three MEPs, or would it be better if we thought of some other system? The Minister probably would not like to go back to the debates we had on closed lists, open lists, d’Hondt and so on, but I would welcome his comments on the matter at this stage.