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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

The noble Lord, Lord McNally, has the respect of the whole House. However, with regard to the two areas to which he referred, the Government’s record over the past eight months has been dismal. The first issue that he mentioned was the Government’s respect for Select Committees, but I have today been shown a letter sent by the Constitution Select Committee of this House, agreed by every single member of that committee, complaining about the fact that the Government did not provide a reply of any sort to their comments on this Bill. The Select Committee said that now that the proceedings are almost over, any reply would be ““of no value””. Therefore, the Government are wrong to claim that they have a good record on Select Committees. Secondly, as my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport said, the Government now have the biggest payroll vote in history. Therefore, in my view it is misplaced, first, to complain that we should admire the Government for what they have done in those respects over the past eight months, and, secondly, to ask us to trust the Government in relation to delaying the reduction in the size of the Executive proportionate to the reduction in the number of MPs. The noble Lord asked why we should do that now when it would not come into effect until 2015. However, we are legislating now to reduce the number of MPs, and therefore the obvious time to make the change is at the same time. I am completely unclear what further information is required to make a decision about this, the Government having said that they support such a reduction, and so I wish to test the opinion of the House. Division on Amendment 27F Contents 161; Not-Contents 222. [The Tellers for the Contents reported 162; the Tellers for the Not-Contents reported 223; the name of a noble Lord who voted in both Lobbies has been removed from the voting lists.] Amendment 27F disagreed. Amendment 28A Moved by