Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

It is; it happened because of the Scottish reduction. The reality is that we need to build a slight reduction into the system, otherwise we will have a constant creep-up of the numbers. Is it very much more difficult to represent 76,000 electors than it is to represent 69,000? I do not think that it is terribly difficult—we have the staff and the commitment to do it. All that we are talking about is drawing up fair boundaries, with a modest reduction in the House, which is not going to make a major difference to most people in this House, except in Wales. The problem with Wales is over-representation. There have been changes in Northern Ireland, where the number of seats was increased because the constituencies were very large, as well as in Scotland and England; Wales is the one part of the Union that is out of line. I understand the pain and difficulty that the proposals will cause in Wales, because there will be quite a radical change there, but throughout most of the UK, it will be a very modest change indeed.