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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of Straight Statistics, a group working against statistical abuse by the media, companies, advertisers and the Government. The Minister, in an earlier debate, used in justification for the cut in the number of Members of Parliament by 50 an alleged saving of £12.5 million—he will correct me if I have this figure wrong, as my hearing is not as good as it was. He is nodding in approval, but I cannot approve of that statistic. If you take the average cost of each MP and multiply it by 50, you get to the figure of £12.5 million or thereabouts. However, that is of course is an entirely phoney way to do it. There will be more constituency cases and more people for each MP to write letters to. The workload will not change. The only thing that you save by having 50 fewer MPs is the MPs’ salaries, with a total saving of about £3 million. Perhaps the difference between £12.5 million and £3 million is regarded as insignificant—