My Lords, perhaps I should open by congratulating the son of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on his great achievement in the channel. I think many noble Lords know that I am descended from generations of fisherfolk, and genetically the greatest horror I can imagine is finding myself swimming in the open sea, miles from land. I congratulate the team on their extraordinary achievement.
Moving on to the serious business of the amendments, I strongly disagree with the repeated tenor of the remarks made in your Lordships’ Committee that the proposal for a Boundary Commission with permission to have a plus or minus 5%—that is, 10%—tolerance in the size of seats sweeps away, as someone put it, all local ties. I say with respect that that is exaggerated talk. In discussion of the Bill, my noble friend Lord Hayward and I have made no secret of the fact that we believe that having broadly equally sized constituencies is pre-eminent, but there remains an allowance for recognising local ties and geography and so on, and it is to caricature the nature of the Bill or the Government’s objectives to say that it will sweep away local ties.
Without being in any way critical, because I know it is a long-held aspiration of many in your Lordships’ House, I can say only that as we have listened to the debates over the past three days some of these very arguments about local ties have come from people who for many years have argued for massive, multi-member constituencies in the name of proportional representation. There are difficulties in arguing on the one hand that small local ties are important, as I would argue and the Government recognise, while on the other saying that all these constituencies should be swept away and rolled together. I respect everything that everybody says in your Lordships’ Committee, but I note with interest that outside this Committee many of the self-same people have spent many years calling for massive multi-member constituencies.
We have talked on many occasions about tolerance. It is an important issue. There must be some degree of tolerance. There is disagreement in your Lordships’ Committee about what that might be, and that is reflected in the amendments before us. I will come on specifically to the points on Wales, which we have
already discussed in this Committee, but it is an extremely important issue. It is not true to say that this Government do not respect Wales or that they are playing fast and loose with the union. Political comment and knockabout are fair enough, but this Government are passionately attached to the concept of our great union and all of us who speak about it should not feed the impression that we think otherwise. I will come back in detail to those points.
Starting with Amendment 18 and the idea that the Boundary Commission should have the ability to ignore the tolerance range wherever, in its opinion, local ties demand a more flexible approach, here the same arguments that we made during our previous discussion of the benefits of limiting the discretion of the Boundary Commission apply. Like many of us, I sympathise with what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said. He knows very well that if he tugs at the issue of local government, he certainly tugs at my heartstrings, which perhaps shows what a sad individual I am, but he is absolutely right about the importance of local government. Many of us here in your Lordships’ Committee will have had the privilege of serving either a constituency in Parliament or a local authority ward and, whether we have or not, we have all come from a local community. Several of us, including the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and I, have recognised that somewhere that we represented in our titles. Like every citizen, we feel strongly about those places and about what defines them: their geography, community and particular cultures, as my noble friend Lord Hayward said. I am a historian by training and vocation, and I could never be blind to those issues. These are our local ties; they are important and our experience is rich with them.
However, this amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, would place an obligation on the Boundary Commission to judge the respective merits of different local ties and to reward those deemed particularly strong with special treatment by relaxing the rules, but what of the neighbouring constituency where no special treatment applies? Perhaps in the neighbour’s case, the community might fit neatly into the constituency proposed and all within it will be content, but that will not always be the case. It is inevitable that some local communities where ordinary tolerance rules will apply will feel that if only the Boundary Commission understood their character fully, they too could have a different, more appropriate and more generously drawn constituency.
These are the essential ingredients of dispute and challenge, the kind of process that my noble friend Lord Blencathra described for us and that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, drew our attention to in talking of the importance of clarity. They bring a potential to undermine in some ways, and certainly make more difficult, the work of the Boundary Commissions. I repeat that the Bill allows respect for local ties and the Government believe that what is in it is sufficient and the Boundary Commission will respect that.
Amendment 22 seeks to allow the Boundary Commission for Wales to use a tolerance range of 30%—plus or minus 15%. As was powerfully argued by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Wigley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, the
intention is to provide more flexibility to the Boundary Commission for Wales in how it responds to the particular geography of Wales, which in parts is rural and sparsely populated. I do not accept that Wales has been treated, to repeat a phrase that was used, punitively. My noble friend Lord Hayward addressed this point. I and the Government do not believe that equal representation in our Parliament is punitive; it is equal representation, which should apply across England, Wales and Scotland. We all have an equal stake in our union and should be equally represented. Wales, of course, has the great benefit, which England does not, of having its Senedd.
I cannot accept the amendment. As with the other amendments we have discussed, we cannot accept an amendment that will allow a greater degree of variation in the size of considerable numbers of constituencies, in this case only in Wales. We cannot prejudge how the Boundary Commission for Wales might apply this proposed tolerance range, but the result could be that, as was pointed out today, more urban constituencies—for example in Cardiff or Swansea—would have considerably more electors than more rural, less populated constituencies. That variability in electorate size means one thing: voting of differing strengths for the people of different parts of Wales and the people in different parts of the union. Therefore we cannot accept the amendment before the Committee.
I turn to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and supported by my noble friend Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth. “Shall Trelawney die?”—in my day at school we used to sing these good old songs. I am fully aware of the passion—the word has been used by others—that is rightly held for the history and spirit of Cornwall and Devon. The noble Lord’s amendment looking at Devon and Cornwall seeks to erect inviolable borders around each of those two counties. I am sure this will find great favour in parts of the south-west. In effect, the amendment treats Devon and Cornwall separately, with their own allocation of constituencies, just like the nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Once the allocation for Devon and for Cornwall had been set, presumably using the same method as for the four nations—consequential amendments would be needed to establish this, but I will not go into the technicalities of amendments as we are arguing the issue—it would be for the Boundary Commission for England to propose the boundaries of those constituencies within the boundaries of Devon and Cornwall.
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The elevation of two counties could only lead to calls from other counties for similar treatment. What is good for Devon is surely also good for Northumberland or Essex. We might see a queue of applicants forming and a slide towards the fragmentation of our current system. My fisherfolk ancestors lived in Norfolk and Suffolk—the kingdom of Raedwald and the East Angles. Norfolk and Suffolk are pretty jealous about the Waveney. One can imagine those kinds of arguments coming forward if this principle were to be extended.
I will say what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said I would say—I disappointed him on an earlier amendment so I will try to please him on this one by him calling
me right. Without prejudging the work of the independent Boundary Commission, and based on current ONS data and a 650-seat Chamber rather than 600, the changes are likely to be far less dramatic. It appears likely that Cornwall will retain its six seats without needing to cross the Cornwall-Devon boundary. Hence I do not believe that this amendment is needed to keep the two counties separate.
Each time you carve out an area of exemption—the Government have recognised the call for that in the case of Ynys Môn in Wales—the work of the Boundary Commissions becomes more complex and constrained and potentially a greater burden is placed on the remaining areas where no exemptions apply. I shall not go into the maths in detail, but it also becomes necessary to put in place mathematical formulae to address the impacts of rounding effects in the allocation of small groups of constituencies. This is not a path the Government wish to follow.
If we wish to achieve one thing with this Bill, it is 650 equal and updated single-Member constituencies providing the electors of the United Kingdom with the confidence that their votes in those constituencies are of equal strength. The tolerance range of 10% and a logical, fair and cautious approach to exemptions are the tools by which we achieve our goals. I repeat that the current tolerance range has previously been agreed by Parliament and that approval has been recently renewed in the other, elected, House. These tools are sufficient and should stand.