Parliamentary Constituencies Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-08
Topic: International Affairs
Dianne Hayter (Labour, Centre-left): I agree completely with the Minister that the union is most successful, and that we want to stay in it and keep it strong. However, I do not agree with the rest of his speech quite so much, particularly because one of the things about keeping the union strong is recognising the differences as well as the similarities. That particularly affects Wales; not just because it is Welsh, but because of its geography My noble friend Lord Hain, because he is working in Grand Committee on the Trade Bill, was not able to participate and therefore could not speak to Amendment 18. On his behalf, I want to say that the reason this has been put is that half the Welsh population live in just 14% of the Welsh land mass. That is different from virtually all of England. Only a small proportion of England is sparse, but 80% of Wales is. The geography is different. For a Parliament to be able to respond to a part of the nation that is so different by allowing greater flexibility about how it is represented in the Parliament of the United Kingdom strengthens rather than weakens the union. I am sorry we could not hear from my noble friend today; he had wonderful maps he could have referred to in order to show this As my noble friend Lord Grocott said, this is about more than just arithmetic. Just as he said, the exempted constituencies show that. Geography is about more than islands; it is about valleys, mountains and other areas. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is wrong to say that this is about bogus arguments—I may not have called them "balderdash", like my noble friend Lord Blunkett, but I do not believe these arguments are bogus. It is about the strength of community representation. It also depends on turnout, which is important, and the greater the feeling of some sense of community. There is no point having absolutely numerically equal constituencies if we then find that some people have to travel so far, for example in Wales, to meet their MP that the turnout ends up being much lower. The number of people voting is very different in each seat. We are trying to give the independent Boundary Commission a little more leeway to use its common sense—I am not saying that this would be for all constituencies—and not to have to split communities unnecessarily The noble Lord said twice, I think, that we were trying to safeguard the current position by keeping the 5%, but in fact it has never been used. It exists only on paper. The 2011 Act brought it in. It is not the "current position" other than on a piece of paper; it has not been used. Trying to pretend that this is retaining something is not true. As I said at the beginning, if 5% was right in 2011 for an average number with 600 seats in the House, almost by definition it cannot be the right number when we move to 650 seats. It may be dancing on the head of a pin, but sometimes allowing that pencil to go a bit more broadly will draw a better boundary I end on what my noble friend Lord Lipsey said. It would have been nice if we could have worked towards compromise in a cross-party way on this rather than by edict. Then we would have reached something that would be good for the whole of Parliament, rather than doing it this way. But this way we must do it. I will seek leave to withdraw Amendment 12 and then move Amendment 13 formally so that we can test the opinion of the House. On that basis, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 12.