HL Deb 21 January 1947 vol 145 cc30-7

4.15 p.m.

Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. I think everybody will agree that it is necessary to bring about as early as possible a redistribution of seats in the House of Commons. For that purpose an Act was passed in the days of the Coalition Government providing that Commissioners should be set up—this, of course, followed upon a Speaker's Conference, as is the usual practice—to devise new boundaries, and that Act set out certain definite rules. Those rules concerned themselves in particular with two matters. One was with regard to the mere question of numbers. Obviously it is very undesirable that one constituency should have an electorate very much larger than another constituency. Fifty thousand is the normal number, and it is very undesirable to have some constituencies with 25,000 and other constituencies with 100,000, each returning one Member and having one vote.

There is also another aspect of the matter: you should not have regard too much to mere numbers, you should also have regard to not splitting up a group of people such as a city or a borough who have been associated together in history and ideas and all that sort of thing. The rules as they were originally propounded made that latter consideration subservient to the former. In short, they stressed too much the question of numbers and not sufficiently the question of local association. I think we would all agree that both factors ought to be considered, and neither the one nor the other should be subservient. Of course, you should aim at getting, as nearly as you can, constituencies of equal size numerically, but you should also avoid, so far as you can, splitting up old historic associations and groups. The effect of the Schedule under the Act—I think it was passed in 1944—has now become apparent. The Commissioners have not to present a report to Parliament through the Home Secretary until they have finished their labours, but as they went about the country making more or less provisional conclusions and discussing these matters with people on the spot it became obvious that there were very considerable heart burnings. The heart burnings were felt just as much on the Opposition side as on the Government side—in fact, rather more on the Opposition side. There were complaints which began in an informal way to find their way to the Home Secretary.

The Home Secretary took what I think was the right course. He went to the Speaker, who was the Chairman of the Conference, and, with the Speaker's approval, and with the very strong approval of the Chairman and the Deputy Chairman of the Commissioners—who stated, by the way, that they had not been subject to the least political pressure—the Home Secretary told the House that he proposed to amend these existing rules by doing away with the principle under which the one rule was subservient to the other, and have two rules of equal strength and validity. He made this announcement, and for a time it looked as though it were going to be a highly controversial matter because on the announcement being made it was immediately asserted by the Leader of the Opposition that this was a most flagrant and shameful gerrymandering, apparently to avoid the Prime Minister's seat being mixed up with some other. If it really had been flagrant and shameful gerrymandering, it would be a most grievous blow to our democratic system. I will content myself by merely saying that I do not know whether to be more surprised that the suggestion was made or that the suggestion, when the facts were revealed, was never withdrawn. The facts were as I have stated them. When they were revealed, this alteration was approved by every Party in the House.

The Committee and Third Reading stages occupied about half a column of Hansard, there having been no opposition at all. So short were they, in fact, as I shall point out on the Committee stage, that there is a clerical error in this Bill, which your Lordships will have to amend and which shows, if any one of us were inclined to deny it, what great value and merit there is in having a revising Chamber, and that, even on a matter dealing with the constitution of the House of Commons, the Members there failed to observe something which I shall point out to your Lordships and which we shall have to put right for them. Subject to that, I commend this Bill to your Lordships. It is, of course, a matter which deals very directly with the constitution of the House of Commons. It is, therefore, a matter primarily for Members of another place, and although we have full rights in the matter we should always be very slow to interfere in any Bill concerning the constitution of the House of Commons which commends itself to all Parties. I am perfectly certain that those of your Lordships who have read the Bill will say that it commends itself to you. Accordingly, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)

4.25 p.m.

VISCOUNT SIMON

My Lords, I would ask leave to say a few words in support of the Bill, first of all because it gives me an opportunity of saying that, as usual, it has been explained to the House very clearly by the noble and learned Viscount on the Woolsack. I have a further excuse in that I introduced and endeavoured to explain the Bill of 1944. I do not feel sure that the Lord Chancellor has emphasized what I should have thought was the most important and interesting fact about this legislation. Hitherto, the redistribution of seats has been done spasmodically. You have had a Redistribution Bill perhaps once in a generation, but in the meantime the population shifted, and before you had another Redistribution Bill things became very lopsided indeed. They are much more lopsided than the Lord Chancellor suggested just now. At the present moment there are two constituencies in the House of Commons which contain more than 200,000 electors, whereas—to go to the other extreme—I think there is another constituency which contains only 29,000.

But the big thing which has been achieved, and achieved by all Parties together, in the main Bill—and preserved in this Amendment—is that we now have a Boundary Commission which is more or less continuous. Thus, that Commission, after its original arrangements have been considered and, if Parliament thinks fit, approved, will not cease to exist, but. Will at suitable intervals make a fresh survey and present new proposals which, in turn, Parliament may adopt by agreeing to the draft Order in Council. You will thus have a more or less continuous re-arrangement of constituencies and will avoid these quite abnormal differences which have hitherto existed. I entirely agree with the Lord Chancellor that mere arithmetical calculation is not the most important matter. The most important matter, so long as you get constituencies that are reasonably like one another in size, is that you should respect and preserve the natural unity of a city, town or other area which is accustomed to be represented by its own member, whoever that member may be.

The Act of 1944, for which I had some responsibility, indeed allowed for that, because the Boundary Commission was directed not to stick to strict arithmetic. It was left at liberty to carve out constituencies which differed by as much as 25 per cent from the normal, either up or down. But that has been found to be not quite enough, and more latitude is provided in this Bill. There was, or there is said to have been, in ancient Greece a gangster—I suppose one of the first of the gangsters—named Procrustes. He had the unpleasant habit, when people passed his way, of adjusting their size to the length of his own bed. If you were an abnormally small roan he stretched you sufficiently to fit exactly into his bed; if, as sometimes happened, you were unusually tall, he chopped off as much of your legs as was necessary to secure that he achieved complete mathematical uniformity. That is not the way in which you can wisely redistribute the electorate.

I also agree with the noble and learned Viscount, the Lord Chancellor, that it is not primarily for this House to go into these details. There was, of course, a famous occasion in 1884, when Mr. Glad-stone's Government introduced a very valuable Reform Bill which gave the vote to the agricultural labourer, when the Leader of the Conservative Party in this House announced that the House would not allow the Bill to proceed until they had also viewed and approved the scheme for redistribution. That was more than sixty years ago, and I think the extent to which this House claims to revise arrangements agreed to in another place in these matters has been very considerably curtailed. Still, the Bill is a Bill that is enacted by the King's Lords and Commons, and it is right that we should take an interest in it.

There are two facts about this new Bill which have interested me. In the first place, and not for the first time, Scotland and Wales get proportionately more members than they are entitled to, from the point of view of population and electorate. Whether that is because they are farther off, and therefore perhaps are thought to be more difficult to exert influence in Westminster, or whether ii is that Scotland and Wales before now have obtained rather more than Englishmen, I do not propose to inquire into. The other thing which is of very great interest to those of us who are concerned with the form of Acts of Parliament is that the Schedule to the Bill is in a form which is almost novel. It has to some extent been adopted from time to time before, but it is quite a new idea and I think it is well worth observing.

The Schedule to the Bill contains amendments which it is found necessary to make in the rules of the earlier Act, amendments-by way of addition and also amendments by way of omission. In order to make it intelligible to the Legislature the additions are printed in thick black type, and I think that is the most sensible way of making the thing plain. As far as the omissions are concerned, for instance, what used to be Rule 3 (1)—which is going to be omitted—is represented by a 3 followed by five dots. That happens again, I think, at the top of page 4. Possibly the noble and learned Viscount, the Lord Chancellor, can tell us how this will work out when we look at it on the Statute Book. I do not think that the Statute Book has ever gone in for emphasizing passages by thicker type, and I have no doubt that when it is put in the Statute Book it will all be in the same type. I am rather more puzzled to know how the Schedule will read when one sees on page 3, line 20: "3.—(1) ….." I wonder how much of that will appear in the Statute Book when it is finally printed.

I warmly approve of this novel practice. It seems to me to be so helpful to the Legislature when we are trying to understand what are the changes and what is old matter. I am not asking this question with any idea of prejudice, but it seems to me that it would be rather convenient if at some stage we might be told how far this is simply to assist us when we are considering the Bill, and whether when it enters upon the Statute Book these dots—I will not qualify them by any preliminary epithet—will appear.

4.32 p.m.

LORD REA

My Lords, after the exhaustive description of this Bill which has been given by the two noble Viscounts who have preceded me, there is little that remains for me to say. On behalf of my noble friends on these Benches I would say that we welcome this Bill as an obvious necessity to remedy something which I think it is agreed was a blunder in the Act of 1944. We welcomed that Act of 1944 as, at any rate, an instalment to the reforms that we think necessary in order to constitute a really democratic Parliament, but we only accept this as something on account. I am aware as the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, has said, that we must tread delicately in dealing with the affairs of the other place; hut, after all, a good many of us have spent a large part of our Parliamentary lives in that other place, and we may perhaps be allowed to have a sufficiently paternal interest to offer a few remarks which it is hoped will be helpful.

I do want to make it clear, as one who had the honour of sitting on the Speaker's Conference, that that Conference never had in mind to tie the Commissioners down as closely as the Act has done. I hope that the Commissioners will take advantage of this amending Act to take a wider view. I also want to impress upon the Commissioners, if I may, the importance of having regard to local sentiment. Perhaps in the absence of my noble friend Lord Jessel I may be allowed to refer once more to what he called my King Charles' head, and to say that if only we were allowed to introduce a system of proportional representation in the Constitution these difficulties would not arise. But, taking things as they are, I think we are all agreed that something has to be done and that the late plan has got to be scratched, because it exasperated not only all Parties but very nearly all areas in the country. Therefore I want to suggest that the Commissioners should take a broader view on that ground of population, and I want particularly to suggest also that they might be a little more elastic in considering the number of constituencies. There is nothing sacred in the number of 615 seats in the other place.

VISCOUNT SIMON

It is more than that now.

LORD REA

It is more, but only slightly more.

VISCOUNT SIMON

It is 640 now.

LORD REA

Yes. But when the noble Viscount and I were young members of the other place, some forty years ago, we had 670 members. I am not aware that we found any particular inconvenience, although I am inclined to think that in our youthful enthusiasm we paid closer attention to the debates than Members nowadays find it possible to do, with the admittedly greater responsibilities which fall upon them from outside.

VISCOUNT SIMON

Is my noble friend allowing for the fact that at present in the other place no Members sit from the greater part of Ireland?

LORD REA

Yes, I am aware of that. That is, however, no reason why we should not take advantage of that physical fact and unduly cramp the representation of constituencies in this country. I remember that when we sat on the Speaker's Conference—and here I may refer to an allusion by my noble friend—in considering Scotland, we felt that because of the distance and the sparse population they were entitled to rather more than their proportion, although we realized that that did cut down the representation of England. I see no reason, therefore, why we' should not take advantage of the fact that the Irish no longer sit in such large numbers to enlarge the number of representatives from England. I want to urge upon the Commissioners that they should not, as they appear to have done in the last Act, take a very rigid view of the obligation laid upon them. I urge that they should expand the number a little beyond what is actually laid down in the Schedule to the Bill which we are now considering. Taking it as a whole, I desire to welcome this Bill, and I hope that the greater elasticity that is to be found will lead to the setting up of a much more representative House of Commons than was possible under the earlier Act.

4.36 p.m.

LORD ALTRINCHAM

My Lords, I should also like to say a word of special welcome to this Bill, because I came to know well the defects of the original Bill in connexion with my old constituency, which was divided into two and, because of the fact of balancing up, was divided in a way which was inconvenient from the point of view of local government. I hop that when the Boundary Commission gets to work again it may be able to consider not merely the existing boundaries of local government, which obviously have to be respected as far as possible, but the future boundaries of local government, because certain amalgamations are bound to come. I welcome this Bill most warmly and congratulate the Government on introducing it.

4.38 p.m.

THE LORD CHANCELLOR

My Lords, I may say in answer to the nobly Viscount that I feel quite certain that the Schedule will be printed all in one type. He has rightly said that the object of having thick type is to direct our attention to certain matters at the present time. What will be done about these dots I do not at present know, but I will find out.

On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.