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Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to speak in this debate. I will be brief. I want to address in particular the length of the proposed fixed terms and how, by choosing the dates that have been chosen, we are running into totally unnecessary conflict with the devolved Parliaments. In opening the debate, the Deputy Prime Minister suggested that he had now realised there was an issue with this. When he came to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee before the recess, that issue was pointed out to him very clearly, but until today he appeared to have chosen to ignore it or to brush it off as irrelevant. There may have been confusion in some people's minds between the potential coincidence of next year's Scottish Parliament elections and the AV vote and the potential clash in 2015. There are some problems with both things, but I concede that next year's clash is not in any way as serious as the potential clash in 2015 and the one that would come along some years further into the future, although most of us would probably not be around to deal with it—not as elected Members, at least. The coincidence of the two general elections is a serious issue. I do not know whether everybody is aware that in Scotland a decision has been taken to move the local elections, which should have been due next year, to another year, to avoid the clash that happened in 2007; that was between local elections and the Scottish Parliament election. We have already made that move, only to discover that in some ways it has been completely undone by what might be allowed to happen here in Westminster. The matter has been raised not only by the Select Committee but by many other commentators and it should have been addressed before now. There is no reason not to address it. Given that the bulk of the information and evidence that has come to the Select Committee also supports four-year terms, the easiest way out of the difficulty is for the Bill to be amended to allow for such terms. All the complications about whether to have the elections a month apart, which, as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, would be absolutely ludicrous, or six months apart, which would be equally unacceptable, would disappear if we set four-year terms in train. The change would be simple to make and it would be nice to think that we could carry it out without getting into complicated cross-jurisdictional issues about election dates. The elections are different and the issues are very different. It is undoubtedly true that the issues that the devolved Parliaments would want people to pay attention to will simply be swamped if there is a Westminster general election at the same time. I do not mean that we as politicians would cause that to happen; the media, however, would certainly concentrate on what they would see, rightly or wrongly, as the big election. Let us not underestimate the differences between boundaries. When the Scottish Parliament elections take place next year, my Westminster constituency will have four different MSPs in it; that is how different the boundaries are. These are no minor differences.