I was actually enjoying the speech from the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), and I agreed with some of his points, but it is worth pointing out that the purpose of the original decision by David Cameron and Nick Clegg to reduce the number of constituencies was to reduce the cost of politics at the time. [Interruption.] That was the argument put forward. Then we had Brexit and so on, but I actually agree with the principle of 650 constituencies in the
UK, because if we are not going to reduce the size of the Executive, it would create some disparity, so I welcome the changes.
I congratulate the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), and all the members of the Bill Committee on their work. It can be a complicated matter on occasions. We must not lose sight of the basic principle behind the Bill, which is to ensure that each vote in the UK carries the same weight—that there is an equal suffrage. When someone casts their vote in the polling station at any election, they should be confident that their vote is just as valuable as anybody else’s. We therefore need boundary changes to take place, because there is an unacceptable disparity now.
I agree again with the right hon. Member for Warley that we as parliamentarians and constituency MPs do not like boundary changes, because we put a lot of investment, time and commitment into building up a relationship with our constituents, communities, villages and towns, and at a stroke of a pen the Boundary Commission can remove that connection that we have worked so hard on. In some ways, these changes are welcome, but in some ways they can be very difficult.
The main reason I wanted to speak in this debate is that, as sad as it may sound, I was looking through the Hansard reports of the Public Bill Committee and an awful lot was said about the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and its attitude towards the electoral quota and how much tolerance there should be between the size of different constituencies. I am the UK lead on the OSCE, and I have looked into what it actually said. For Members who are unaware of its work, the organisation sends election monitors to various countries around the world to ensure they are carried out in a fair, impartial and democratic way.
The OSCE does not have a view on whether there should be a 5% or a 7.5% tolerance in the electoral quota, but it is worth noting what it states in its “Guidelines for Reviewing a Legal Framework for Elections”. It states:
“Electoral constituencies should be drawn in a manner that preserves equality among voters. Thus, the law should require that constituencies be drawn in such a way that each constituency has approximately the same population size…The manner in which constituencies are drawn should not circumvent the principle of equal suffrage, which is a cornerstone of democratic elections.”