My Lords, the amendments in this group are mainly to do with promoting constituencies that are genuine, from a community standpoint, rather than percentage purity. Percentages are useful, but they are a tool; community and geography should trump them. The Committee just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, on his amendment, which would make the job of the Boundary Commissions even more difficult than the Government have. The House of Commons Library tells us that the quota is likely to be in the area of 72,600, so 2.5% either side of that would mean a flexibility of no more than 1,800 either way—that is people, not percentages. This would be far less than most local government wards and would lead to the splitting of both wards and polling districts in all but the smallest of rural wards. That amendment would make a poor Bill worse.
The other three amendments all attempt to improve the lot of the Boundary Commission in, hopefully, getting cohesive constituencies based on genuine communities. The flexibility offered by the 5% tolerance from the quota gives 3,600 people—not percentages—either side of it. Amendment 15 would move that up to 5,400. Amendment 16 would move it up to 5,800, or
7,260 in certain cases. Amendment 17 would shift the figure to exactly 7,200. An amendment being tabled next week would move it up to 10,900 in Wales. I trust that we can manage to consolidate these amendments at a later stage.
One of the fallacies of being in the grip of percentages is that the 5% used in the 2018 proposals for the 600-seat House of Commons—which are now well behind us—gave a tolerance of 3,900. These present proposals would reduce that further, as the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, alluded to earlier.
I often try and look at the other fellow’s viewpoint. We can learn a little of Her Majesty’s Government’s thinking by going back in history. Over the years, the inner-city constituencies lost population and the suburbs increased. Conservative politicians thought that meant that their constituencies were disadvantaged. Perhaps the breaking down of the “red wall” might change that a bit.
I am pretty certain that greater flexibility will assist principally in giving, let us say, a modest-sized town its own seat, rather than having to lose a bit of it to another seat or having to take in a small part of a rural area just to make up the numbers. It is of course far easier to use the building blocks of wards and polling districts to build constituencies in large cities. Small towns and large seats in rural areas are the ones that will really benefit if we can change this business of percentage purity. I hope that we can do something to make the geography and community sense of our constituencies real for people to absolutely understand.