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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, the Government have asked the Boundary Commission to fit 597 out of 600 seats within a 5 per cent margin either way. I have tried to argue before that, in terms of statistical distributions, this will be an immensely difficult task because a standard deviation of 1.7 per cent is too small. If the Boundary Commission were allowed to fix 95 per cent of the seats within the Government’s favoured margin of 5 per cent and the remaining 5 per cent of seats—30, perhaps 25, seats—were allowed to fall under the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, it would make the tasks of the Boundary Commission and the Government simpler. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has not tried to subvert anything the Government want to do; he has been very helpful in making it much easier for the Government to achieve what they want to achieve. Otherwise it will be very difficult to carry out the task.