By Sadiq Khan - 17th January 2011
The bill is partisan. It ignores history. And it will harm Parliament, not enhance it
Sadiq Khan MP
The government’s rush to reduce the number of constituencies is ill-thought out and would damage Parliament, says Sadiq Khan.
The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill is arguably one of the most fiercely contentious current pieces of legislation. Split into two parts, the first section addresses a referendum on the Alternative Vote system (set to take place on May 5 – the same day as council elections in England and national elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), with the second part focusing on fundamental changes to parliamentary constituencies.
Given its rather odd construct – a clumsy concoction of two loosely related topics – it has been accurately described by my colleague Baroness McDonagh as a “cut-and-shut” bill. While the first part of the bill might grab the headlines and spark vigorous campaigns, part two of the bill will have an equally profound impact on the electoral map of Britain.
It aims to redraw parliamentary constituency boundaries so that they all have the same number of registered electors, and to cut the number of MPs from 650 to 600. The bill is partisan. It ignores history. And it will harm Parliament, not enhance it.
The combination of these two aims is a potent cocktail. The government has failed to produce any evidence to support the chosen figure of 600 MPs, completely ignoring the fact that at the last general election, the Lib Dems and Tories campaigned for a House of Commons with 500 and 585 members respectively. Therefore, a choice of 600 has a rather suspicious whiff to it.
The government says that we need to stem the inflation in the number of MPs and rectify the over-representation in our parliamentary system. But the facts simply don’t support this. In 1922, we had 615 MPs for an electorate of 21,000,000. By 2005, there were 646 MPs for 44,245,000 voters. Compared to many other countries, the argument that UK voters are overrepresented is simply exaggerated.
Whilst the UK has more MPs per 1,000 voters, it has far fewer other elected officials. In order to achieve equal-sized constituencies, there has to be a robust and reliable measurement mechanism in place. And this is where the coalition government’s plans go seriously awry. I recognise it is not a simple task, but the option chosen by the government on which new constituency boundaries will be calculated will be based on incomplete data.
Their choice is to use the figures of those registered to vote as of December 2010, as opposed to alternative measures such as figures for those eligible to vote (i.e. population aged 18 and over). It is an established fact that there is a gap between these two figures, and as recent data from the House of Commons Library illustrates, this is not small numbers of people but a significant proportion of the adult population (see table). Estimates by the Electoral Commission put this figure at upwards of 3.5 million.
There are 19 constituencies where over 20 per cent of the eligible voting population are not currently registered to do so, and over 200 constituencies where the variation is five per cent or more. In two seats – Kensington & Chelsea and Cities of London & Westminster – over two-fifths of the eligible population are not registered to vote. This is a startling finding, and one which ought to be a concern to all who seek a healthy representative democracy.
And this is not a party political issue – the top two worst-affected seats are Conservative, with Liberal Democrat seats also affected. But it does appear to be predominantly an urban phenomenon, although not exclusively (for instance, West Suffolk is missing almost 16,000 elected voters).
This is further compounded by the bill’s proposals to downgrade the importance of local history, ties and geography, as the Boundary Commission will only be required to consider these once they have met strict mathematical considerations.
=If you thought that the Commission’s decisions will continue to be tempered and shaped through public inquiries, think again. Public inquiries will also be abolished as part of this legislation, despite the fact that in the vast majority of cases, public inquiries have persuaded the Boundary Commission to think again.
Basing boundary decisions purely on electoral registration data runs the risk of re-drawing constituencies that underrepresent 17-24 year-olds, private tenants and the black and minority ethnic community. According to the Electoral Commission, 56 per cent, 49 per cent and 31 per cent respectively of these groups are not registered to vote. In addition, many of those vulnerable by means of language or learning are also missing from the register.
While raising the rates of electoral registration is a democratic challenge in itself, and one which the previous government had begun to tackle, relying exclusively on this data will result in a distorted map of constituencies that utterly fails to represent the true scale of the population and its wider socio-economic needs. And the resultant upheaval caused by a total redrawing of constituencies will lead to a stampede amongst sitting MPs and prospective candidates to find new seats.
This is why this legislation is wrong in its headlong pursuit of constituency changes. In 2011, there will be a census which offers the opportunity of a much more accurate picture of the UK’s population distribution. The coalitionmust take heed, and delay these rash proposals until we have much more appropriate data at our fingertips.
Sadiq Khan is shadow justice secretary.
Have your say...
Please enter your comments below.