§ Mr. GreenwayI beg to move amendment No. 8, in page 5, line 24, at end insert
', but no such order shall be made until the Secretary of State has submitted a report to both Houses of Parliament giving details of the calculations carried out in the course of the procedure mentioned in sub-paragraph (1)(a) above.'.The amendment has two clear and vital objectives. One is to achieve greater openness in future decisions about arrangements for European elections, and the second is to ensure greater accuracy in the apportionment of Members of the European Parliament between electoral regions. I am sure that the House will agree that both those aims are essential to our fundamental democratic process.
Throughout the Committee stage, Conservative Members sought to draw attention to the serious deficiencies in the procedures leading to the Bill's publication. The Bill is being imposed on the country without any prior discussion, either within Parliament or outside. The Government failed to publish a White Paper outlining their plans. As a consequence, there was no public consultation. As we have heard, there was a focus group involving a maximum of 48 people, but that hardly rates as a public consultation.
Despite the Prime Minister's professed faith in the parliamentary boundary commission, it was not consulted, thus denying the public any opportunity to express a view on the arrangements by which their MEPs will be elected. Therefore, the Government have no way of knowing whether voters are satisfied that the allocation of MEPs to electoral regions is fair, and whether the process has been both open and accountable. Clearly, it has not been open and accountable, because the Government have simply imposed their preferred solution and, in so doing, have shown contempt for both the House and the public at large.
What of the future? The schedule provides the only mechanism in the Bill for any review of the arrangements. Notwithstanding the Home Secretary's commitment to review the experience of the election next year under this Bill, the fact remains that this is the only provision in the Bill that we can be certain provides an arrangement for such a review. However, that arrangement lies entirely within the gift of the Home Secretary. He will consider whether the ratio of electors to MEPs requires adjustment, and he will make, by order, such amendments to the distribution of seats as he considers necessary.
We say that, before the Home Secretary does any such thing, he should at least submit a report to both Houses of Parliament giving details of his calculations. Such a report would not only ensure greater openness, which we think is essential, but allow the House the opportunity to seek a proper explanation of his calculations because we need to test their accuracy.
Why should that be necessary? As we have seen, in introducing the Bill to the House, the Home Secretary has already shown that maths is not his best subject. As he admitted in Committee, he made an error in his explanation of the divisors used in the seat allocation and, by consequence, misled the House. Let me say straight 813 away that we fully accept that it was unintentional, but that rather makes our point. It is not that the Home Secretary knew that he got it wrong, but the fact that he did not know that he had got it wrong. How can anyone have any confidence that he or a future Home Secretary, doubtless with access to the same advice, can be relied upon to reach the right decision?
There is rather more to it than meets the eye. During the debate in Committee on 26 February, the Home Secretary argued that the eminent Professor Ian Maclean, head of politics at Nuffield college, Oxford, to whom my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) referred earlier, had got it wrong in suggesting that the Government had used a divisor in the process of seat allocation. He insisted:
It is a very simple system that does not need divisors."—[Official Report, 26 February 1998; Vol. 306, c. 549.]That is not what the eminent Professor believes. Indeed, since that debate, Professor Maclean has written to my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere. The House would do well to take note of what he says.
§ Mr. George HowarthThe hon. Gentleman referred to it earlier.
§ Mr. GreenwayNo. It is an entirely different matter and I suspect that it is even more important.
After challenging what the Home Secretary said at column 549, Professor Maclean writes:
The procedure he then outlines in his next paragraph, as he did in a letter to me, is that he takes a dividend, (the electorate of England), divides it by a divisor (71) and gets a quotient (just over 521,000 electors per MEP). He then assigns these quotients to the regions. Each region, of course, is exactly entitled to a whole number plus a fraction of MEPs. So how does the Secretary of State proceed 'in such a way as to ensure that the sum of divergencies in each of the nine regions—ignoring plus or minus signs—was as low as possible'?The professor continues:I think he thinks that, as he and his officials presumably did this by hand, they were not using a divisor. But they were really speaking prose. To guarantee that you get the result of this calculation right, you must use one of three divisors. In the American literature they are the Dean, Huntington and Webster divisors.We have had d'Hondt and Sainte-Lague; now we have the Dean, Huntington and Webster divisors.The professor continues:
On different interpretations of making 'the ratio of registered electors to MEPs the same', each one of these is the only correct divisor to use.This is the crunch:Webster is another name for Sainte-Lague. So Sainte-Lague is one of the three divisors that the language of the Schedule mandates him to use.So there we have it. There is a divisor, and it is clearly a political decision which divisor is used.For now, the public appear disinterested in the Government's meddling with our democratic process—as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) said in an earlier debate, they were unaware of what was happening. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Bedfordshire (Mr. Sayeed) referred to the disinterest of 814 the fourth estate, and I agree with him too, but, in spite of the sea of disinterest, the position may change come the election next year. However, that does not mean that the issues are unimportant and do not matter—far from it. The House should require the Government to agree on a procedure that will help the Home Secretary to make a better fist of it next time. I am not seeking to personalise the debate, but in embarking on a system of proportional representation, we have ventured into uncharted waters.
We have been asked to accept that the allocation of MEPs is fair, yet few people have the knowledge or experience to know whether it is the best that it could be and entirely accurate. The fact that we appear to have little choice but to accept it for now is no excuse for failing to put on the face of the Bill a mechanism to give everyone the chance of doing a better job next time.
Parliament has a right to be taken seriously, and its views and opinions cannot simply be brushed aside out of political expediency. I am glad that the Home Secretary is to reply to the debate. The fact that he did not fully grasp what he was doing should be a warning to the House of the perils of accepting anything at face value.
I look forward to hearing the Secretary of State's explanation of why he might think it wrong to require a future Home Secretary to publish a report on the calculations on which he has based any future changes on the allocation of MEPs between the regions, as that is our simple proposition. It would not delay matters unnecessarily, but it would ensure greater openness and allow the House the opportunity to test for itself the accuracy on which any future changes are based. That is our fundamental democratic right: therefore, I commend the amendment to the House.
§ Mr. StrawAs I hope the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway) will accept, I do indeed take Parliament seriously, and believe that Ministers should be held properly to account, particularly for such decisions. Although I am happy to write to the hon. Gentleman, I shall not pick him up too much on whether or not a system of calculating the allocation of MEPs to each of the regions follows the Sainte-Lague or Webster divisors, or a different system.
I did not say that we did not use divisors to achieve the result—of course we had to do so, as I explained at column 549 on 26 February. However, the Sainte-Lague and d'Hondt divisors use an advancing series of numbers by which various other numbers are then subject to division. D'Hondt uses the series one, two, three, four, five and Sainte-Lague uses one, three, five, seven, nine. As the House now famously knows, Sainte-Lague modified begins with 1.4, which is the square root of two, and then follows the sequence three, five, seven, nine.
I am happy for the ombudsman to examine all the files in the Home Office. It may be, as Professor Maclean is claiming, that we reached a similar result to Sainte-Lague, but we did not use that system. We used a system of ascertaining the lowest sum of the divergencies, as I have explained.
What is important, and goes to the heart of the hon. Gentleman's argument, is that the public and Parliament should be satisfied that the system being used to allocate the number of MEPs to each region is entirely fair and transparent, and that people can see how it operates so that any error or worse can be exposed. 815 It is not true that the arrangement for settling the allocation of MEPs between each region is, to use the hon. Gentleman's words, in the gift of the Secretary of State. Any Secretary of State, whether myself or a successor, will be bound by the provisions of schedule 1(4), which requires the Secretary of State in the year preceding any election to
consider whether the ratio of registered electors to MEPs is as nearly as possible the same for every electoral region in England and…make by order such amendments of (3) of the Table as he considers necessary"—not desirable, but necessary—to ensure that resultThat gives the Secretary of State virtually no discretion whatsoever, except to apply the rules of arithmetic accurately. If he fails to do that, he may be subject to account in Parliament and, as this is subordinate legislation, to judicial review in the courts.8 pm
I hope to reassure the hon. Member for Ryedale (Mr. Greenway). In the amendment, he calls for an order-making power by which a report is made to Parliament before the Secretary of State makes a decision. The Secretary of State can have a decision brought into effect only by order made to the House under the negative resolution procedure, as set out in paragraph (7). No changes come into force unless they have received the approval of Parliament. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will accept that.
Then there is the question whether Parliament should be informed of the changes that the Secretary of State has in mind and whether the arithmetic should be laid on the Table of the House in advance of any order being made. That is the point of the hon. Gentleman's amendment. I agree with him, and I give an undertaking to the House that the detail of the arithmetic and all the calculations made under that paragraph will be put before the House by way of a written answer as soon as they are made, and well in advance of any order being made. In the light of that, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will not feel it necessary to press his amendment to a vote.
§ Mr. GreenwayI am most grateful to the Home Secretary for his response and for the reassurance he has given to the House. Clearly what we wanted—a report to the House before any order is laid—is precisely what he has in mind, and we are grateful to him for that. As a consequence, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
§ Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.