My Lords, I am entering the debate on this group of amendments and speaking to them because I am afraid I disagree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I find his emphasis on community and the sense in which that plays a critical part in the function of a Member of Parliament a somewhat flawed idea.
The truth is that I live in the house I was brought up in; I have had three Members of Parliament and lived in three different constituencies. My constituency has not changed, but other bits have been added on or taken away during my lifetime. They were never part of the community, which is, after all, in the fens and surrounded not by mountains but great unpopulated areas; they are no more part of a community than Welsh valley communities that may, perhaps, have been connected to communities over the mountains. However, it was fair, and it is fairness that my noble friend Lord Blencathra managed to convey in his excellent speech. There is a huge difference in the way constituencies are distributed in this country, and this is unfair to the voter. It means that, if you start off with a variation with a wide spread, you end up with an enormous variation. I believe that the top 20% of constituencies total the same as, or more than, the constituencies that make up the city of Sheffield. That cannot be right.
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I think that noble Lords might well consider that these amendments are the elastic amendments; they appear to be designed to stretch the starting point, which we should emphasise, of an electoral quota being considered by the Boundary Commission from a variance between constituencies, under the current
rules, of 5% either way or 10% overall. These amendments propose 7.5% or 15% overall variance and, as my noble friend Lord Blencathra explained, those figures are sizeable when it gets down to actual voters. In its second part, the Lib Dem Amendment 14 talks of a 10% start-off and a 20% overall variance. This cannot be justified. However, it is as nothing to Amendment 18, which has a special case for Wales, proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Hain and Lord Wigley, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Aberavon, who I believe is the only one who will be speaking to us.
I should, perhaps, tell noble Lords that I have a fondness for Welsh politics since I acted as the agent for Plaid Cymru in my school’s mock election in 1959. We did not win, but we came a respectable second to the Conservatives, leaving the other parties far behind. I had not been to Wales at the time, and that may have stretched the political norms but no less than the girth that the noble Lords seek to encircle by their amendment. I suggest to them that we have an opportunity to discuss exceptionality in a number of subsequent amendments.
Meanwhile, I will go back to where I started and remind noble Lords that the electoral quota is a starting point. The differential from that quota at the beginning of a review means that any variation from the quota at the beginning can lead to very wide variations towards the end of the review period. The current rules are a sensible compromise for a practical fit between geography, community and constituency representation in Parliament. We should be very careful about departing from that principle.