§ Mr. BeithTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to his oral statement of 25 November 1997,Official Report, columns 812–13, whether he will publish the calculations on which his statement, regarding the proportionality of the Sainte-Lague and d'Hondt divisors, was based; if he will 510W calculate the number of seats that would be won by each party in Scotland under the (a) d'Hondt and (b) Sainte-Lague divisors using the 1994 European Election results; and if he will make a statement. [23498]
§ Mr. George HowarthThe calculations were based on the votes cast in the 1994 elections to the European Parliament in six of the 11 regions for which the European Parliamentary Elections Bill provides.
In five of the six regions the choice of divisor made no difference to the final allocation of seats. In Scotland, the effect was as follows:
d'Hondt:
- 4 Labour, 1 Conservative,
- 3 Scottish National Party
Sainte-Lague:
- 3 Labour, 1 Conservative,
- 1 Scottish Liberal Democrat
- 3 Scottish National Party.
During the Bill's Second Reading debate, I gave the House figures which suggested that the two divisors produced different results in the London region.
Revised calculations show that both divisors produce the same result in London. I apologise for the original error.
§ Mr. BeithTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what divisors were used to calculate the allocation of seats between the regions of England in the European Parliamentary Elections Bill. [24043]
§ Mr. Straw[holding answer 19 January 1998]: No divisors were used. The allocation of seats to the English regions set out in Schedule 1 to the European Parliamentary Elections Bill was arrived at by dividing the total English electorate by the number of English seats (71) to produce an average figure. Seats were then allocated to regions in such a way as to ensure that the sum of the divergencies from this figure was as low as possible.