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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

If the hon. Lady does not mind, I ought to make a little progress. One other significant problem with the Government amendment on hearings and inquiries is that there will be no process of resolution. There will be two days of hearings to consider some 10 constituencies, and a rush of people will come, make their case and leave. At the end, there will be only a verbatim transcript of what was said. There will be no process by which somebody weighs the arguments on different constituencies or the whole area, no summing up, and no report written for the Boundary Commission. That will give the Government two problems. First, it will almost certainly lead to a much higher number and greater frequency of judicial reviews, which was raised in the House of Lords by two noble peers. Lord Woolf said:"““If there is no provision for an inquiry””—" by which he meant a proper inquiry, not just a hearing—"““I anticipate that there will inevitably be an increase in applications for judicial review…If this amendment is not accepted, the issues that will be sought to be raised on applications for judicial reviews are ones which the courts will find peculiar difficulty in dealing with.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 26 January 2011; Vol. 724, c. 1067.]" The real danger, therefore, is that we will end up with a slower, more complicated process, because instead of taking their argument to the public inquiry, people will simply take it to court. That will be expensive, so those who can afford it will do better out of the system, and the process will be delayed, which the Government are keen to avoid on principle.