---

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

To fill the silence for a minute, my noble friend is of course right on his first point that this could lead to a small rise in the number of constituencies—I said half a dozen to a dozen. However, if the Government do not like that, since we are in Committee and these are exploratory proposals, they could remove rule 1 from my amendment and apply the other three rules as the exception. They would then need to change the formula, for reasons which will be evident, but they might have to change that anyway. On my noble friend’s second point, it is inconceivable in view of the guidance given to the Boundary Commission in the Bill on its general rules, that it would consider crossing a national boundary. What he describes is a perfectly fair theoretical possibility and if the Committee wished to nitpick, it could draw the Bill accordingly to prevent that in law. I do not think it would make any practical difference to his very good point.