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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Well, it is certainly true that even if we allocate using the Sainte-Laguë method—which is the one we specify in the Bill, and which is generally agreed by academics who are far more knowledgeable about these things than me to be the fairest way of allocating—it is always the case that there might be a seat that is close to the cusp of allocation. As a result, in this small part of the UK the boundary commissions might find their discretion overly constrained, and far tighter than the plus or minus 5% stated in the Bill. The measures for Northern Ireland were therefore to try to make sure that its boundary commissions were not overly constrained and unable to take account properly, as they can in the rest of the UK, of those important local ties with which the hon. Gentleman will be familiar. The Government did not think that it would be possible to limit the effect of this amendment to genuinely exceptional matters. In this respect, there is an interesting Court of Appeal judgment. In Al Rawi and others v. Security Service, the judge said:"““Quite apart from the fact that the issue is one of principle, it is a melancholy truth that a procedure or approach which is sanctioned by a court expressly on the basis that it is applicable only in exceptional circumstances nonetheless often becomes common practice.””" That is exactly what we fear here. We also think the amendment could lead to a general increase in the risk to the timetable for the review. That is important because the boundaries we used at the last general election in England were based on electoral registration data that were a decade out of date. If we do not complete the boundary review before the next general election, we will be fighting it on electoral data that are 15 years out of date, which is clearly unacceptable for those who argue that we should be using up-to-date data. We think that the terms in this Lords amendment, such as ““exceptionally compelling””, ““viable”” and ““necessary, are very subjective and would require the boundary commissions to apply new tests that they have not applied before. Because they are subjective, and also because there will be arguments between the four commissions in terms of consistency, we think they will provoke an increased number of applications for judicial review. That incentive could diminish if, and when, the first judicial reviews are not upheld, but even though successful judicial reviews are unlikely, applications for permission would have to be dealt with, which would impact on the resources of the boundary commissions and, potentially, make it impossible to achieve what is already a challenging timetable of completing the boundary review by October 2013. We also think that the case for the additional 2.5% either way has simply not been made. Increasing the band of tolerance in one constituency will mean there is less room to account for local circumstances in others. Therefore, the commissions would be asked in effect to trade off the rights of different communities both close to and far from each other. We think the Government's consistent band is much more sensible. The variation in this rule also has no objective rationale, because it does not solve any real-world problems. All the specific problems that have been advanced—such as the arguments put forward for Cornwall and for Argyll and Bute—are outside that range, so this amendment would not solve any real-world problems, but would bring with it a lot of significant potential problems.