Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

No. If I may, I shall make some progress. We left the Conservative laws in place. To deal with the point raised by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster, we never sought, and would never have sought, to change the laws relating to boundaries without broad cross-party agreement. The insinuation that we somehow contrived to secure a large gap between the average size of Labour seats and Conservative seats is wholly ill-founded. Six of 10 of the largest constituencies are now Labour, and only three of the 10 smallest are. As I say, we would have been happy to discuss with the Deputy Prime Minister sensible and fair ways of speeding up the timetable for drawing boundaries, just as we did in 1992. Unfortunately, he has put political self-interest way ahead of democratic principles. That is especially evident in his proposals to reduce the size of this House to 600 Members. The justification for that proposal, which we heard yet again today, is that the House is allegedly too large. That claim does not withstand examination. Our ratio of elected parliamentary representatives per head of population is roughly the same as that in France and Italy; the ratio is much smaller for other EU partners such as Ireland, Sweden, Greece and Poland. Of course, our House is larger than theirs because the population is greater here, and we are not a federal state. That said, we have only 20 more Members than the Bundestag in Germany. In any event, a more sensible basis on which to decide is to ask what level of representation is right for the United Kingdom, and to examine how the electorate and the House of Commons have changed over time. If the number of Members of Parliament had grown out of all proportion to the size of the electorate, there would clearly be a problem, but that is not the case. Today, there are 650 Members, an increase of less than 4% in 60 years. Over the same period, the electorate have grown by 25%, and the work load of Members on both sides of the House has increased exponentially; that is both the work that arises from constituents, and the work that arises from responsibilities in the House. Perhaps that is why, in 2003, the man who today is Prime Minister argued to preserve the boundaries of his west Oxfordshire seat and made a strong plea for the size of the House of Commons to stay as it was. The right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron), now the Prime Minister, said in his oral evidence to an independent local public inquiry, which existed then and existed under us, but which will no longer exist:"““Somebody might take the view that at 659 there are already too many Members of Parliament at Westminster. They may take the view . . . that Westminster has less to do, with less MPs—I certainly hope that is not the case.””" I quote from the Boundary Commission for England: Transcript of Oxfordshire Boundary Inquiry, 2003. The Deputy Prime Minister—this was another error by him—said that the number of Members in the House had crept inexorably up. That is not the case. If he had bothered to examine the House of Commons Library research note on the Bill, he would have seen that on the back. The numbers went up to 659 under the Conservatives. They were put at 659 in 1992. They were at 659 in the 1997 election. They are now down to 650. Of course we would have been happy to discuss sensible and agreed reductions in the total size, as indeed we did when we were in office.