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Political and Constitutional Reform

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord the Deputy Leader for repeating the Statement of the Deputy Prime Minister, and I am grateful to the Government for early sight of the Statement. There are some who take the view that this House has no role in these matters, that these are matters for the House of Commons and the House of Commons alone; but I believe that this House is a key part of the politics and the constitution of our country and a vital element of the constitutional checks and balances which are a central feature of the governance of our nation. There are clearly issues in the Statement repeated by the Deputy Leader for this House to consider. First, will the Deputy Leader acknowledge that the Government’s proposals announced today for an early Dissolution of Parliament following a vote of no confidence represents the first major U-turn of this Government—and in less than two months? Can he explain to the House why the Government did not think before about the impossibility of a Government hanging on after they had lost a vote of no confidence by a simple majority? To have done so would have saved the Government a lot of embarrassment. But why, having recognised that a vote of no confidence leads inexorably to a Dissolution, do the Government continue to assert the nonsense that no confidence and Dissolution are separate? They are not—the one is a consequence of the other. As to the Government’s now subsidiary proposal for a two-thirds majority of any other Dissolution, what is its purpose? Is it not completely superfluous? Either the Government are in favour of a fixed-term Parliament, as long as the Government of the day enjoy the confidence of the House, or they are not. On boundary changes, is the Deputy Leader aware that what we in the Opposition will not allow is for support for AV to be used as some sort of cover for outrageously partisan proposals in the same Bill to gerrymander the boundaries of the House of Commons by arbitrary changes in the rules for setting boundaries and by an equally arbitrary cut in the number of MPs? There is the huge problem, which the Electoral Commission highlighted in March, of 3.5 million citizens who are eligible to vote but who are not on the register. If the Government’s aim is to make the system fairer, why has the Deputy Leader said absolutely nothing about how the Government will ensure that those 3.5 million citizens are included in the Boundary Commission’s calculations about the size of the constituencies and how to get them on to the register in time for the review of the boundaries? Since the Government claim that they want to empower people, is it the Deputy Leader’s intention that local communities should continue to have a right to an independent local Boundary Commission inquiry? If it is, then when he says, ""we will ensure the Boundary Commissions have what they need"," to complete this huge task by the end of 2013, what additional resources and staff will it be given? As for the referendum on the alternative vote, this House will be well aware that just such a proposal was put forward by this party on these Benches. But does the Deputy Leader recall that during the general election the Deputy Prime Minister told the Independent newspaper that the alternative vote system was a "miserable little compromise" and that he was "not going to settle" for that?