Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
100-108)
PROFESSOR RON
JOHNSTON AND
MR ROBIN
GRAY
27 JULY 2010
Q100 Stephen Williams: I come back
to this point of building blocks. Given that polling districts
exist at the moment, is not the answer if a polling district is
used to draw up a parliamentary boundary that thereafter that
polling district itself cannot be changed if it is around the
borders of a constituency which would take away the discretion
of an electoral registration officer to change it arbitrarily,
which is what happens at the moment? Is that not a clause that
needs to be inserted in the Bill?
Mr Gray: If that were to be done
it would be an immense help. At the moment there is no proposal
to do that. Obviously our concern is that you cannot use something
that is liable to change just before you have a review or at the
time when you are doing a review.
Stephen Williams: So that would be a
good amendment to the Bill you are saying?
Q101 Chair: That is called leading
the witnesses!
Professor Johnston: On bias, on
which I have written too much in the last 30 years, the operation
of the British electoral system has been very biased over the
last five elections and has very much favoured the Labour Party.
This is for a number of reasons. One is, yes, Conservative constituencies
have tended to have more electors than Labour constituencies and
therefore there has been an advantage to Labour in that you need
fewer votes to win a seat. There has also been a very large advantage
in terms of turnout because the Labour constituencies tend to
have much lower turnout on average and so, again, it takes fewer
Labour votes to win a seat. There has been some advantage, although
it has not been very large, which has come about because of the
varying impact of other parties on the Conservative and Labour
success rates. Finally, there has been what is called the efficiency
of the vote, how well it is distributed. In general until basically
the 1990s Labour lost out on that because they tended to have
lots and lots of votes in the coalfields and in the industrial
areas and the Conservative votes were more widely spread and did
not have these very big safe seats with 80% of the vote or whatever
as you would find in a place like Hemsworth. The coal mines have
gone, the industries have gone and the Labour vote is no longer
spatially concentrated. In fact, over the last three or four elections
the Labour vote has been more efficiently distributed. You asked
if this is a partisan Bill. The Conservative Party has been aware
the system is biased against them. After all, in the 2005 election
if the two parties had got the same percentage of the vote, about
34.5%, Labour would have won 112 seats more than the Conservatives.
You understand why they are worried about it. It is very difficult
to tackle some of those sources of bias that I have just outlined.
The one that you can tackle is the size difference and the size
difference is what this Bill is about. The reduction to the number
of 600 is a separate issue I think. What the impact of removing
the size difference between the two parties will be is to remove
that advantage that Labour had, but it will not remove all of
it by any means. The advantage to Labour this time when, let us
say, the Conservatives got 36% and Labour got 28%, if we halve
it they each got 32% in the election this year, Labour would still
have got 54 more seats than the Conservatives. That is because
turnout variation is much more important than size variation.
Bias in the British electoral system is a very complex thing.
This Bill will reduce a large part of a small part of it.
Q102 Chair: Mr Gray, would you like
to round up, as it were?
Professor Johnston: I am sorry,
I did not answer the other thing about Scotland and whether it
would have been a good idea to review how well it works before
we move on and create the same dog's breakfast in England. I think
that was your term. The answer is possibly yes. There is now a
constituency for the Scottish Parliament called Edinburgh Southern
which comprises of the parts of six wards, there is no whole ward
in that constituency. I guess it will take a few years before
whoever becomes the MSP next year and for the electoral administrators
to work out exactly how it will work out. There are going to be
complexities of operating for the parties, for the administrators
and for you as MPs.[2]
Sheila Gilmore: And for the voters, of
course.
Professor Johnston: And for the
voters.
Q103 Sheila Gilmore: It will be quite
differently constituted.
Professor Johnston: Particularly
if the elections are on the same day. You might have a referendum
on the same day as well, but we are not here to talk about that.
Q104 Chair: This proposal seems to
emanate from a desire to make sure that MPs are more worthy of
the position they hold, that there is a limit and there are spending
reductions which accompany that. If it dislocates electors from
known constituencies do you feel that it might actually erode
the connection between Members of Parliament and electors?
Professor Johnston: It could do,
yes.
Chair: This has the feel of trying to
do the right thing, rather like IPSA, Government imposing something
on Parliament and not quite thinking through all the machinery
and the data processing and the rest of it and ending up with
more unexpected consequences for Members.
Nick Boles: That was a very partial view
that you put.
Q105 Chair: It is a question to the
witnesses. Would that be your view?
Professor Johnston: I think the
more complicated you put the situation before the voters the more
difficulty they will have in responding to it and you may therefore
find they are less likely to participate. Most voters now, if
they want to, have a clear notion of what constituency they are
in. Whether they know who their MP is is less clear in some cases.
If you are going to say for something you have got to go to the
local authority and you go in that way with those people if you
are promoting something for your area and if you are promoting
something for your area at a different level you have got to go
that way with your MP or MSP you are creating complexities and
most people do not put as much time into that aspect of their
lives as we do and they may well recoil from it and say it is
too complicated to control.
Mr Gray: Two quick things, one
of which relates to what Ron has just said. What I think everybody
has been trying to do in recent years is to secure more public
engagement in political affairs and things and, whatever happens,
what needs to be taken account of in this review is that what
you are not doing is actually discouraging people from being interested
and engaged. The other point I was going to make earlier on and
I forgot, so I will just do it now, is electorates at the moment
are volatile. What I mean by that is because electoral registration
officers first of all went through a major period of cleansing
electoral registers in taking people off who had not replied to
the annual return they are now engaged in trying to encourage
as many people as possible to get on the register. Being on the
electoral register is becoming increasingly more important for
every one of us because so many things now you will not get unless
you can demonstrate that you are on the electoral register, whether
that is a loan or being on this or that. They are volatile and
it will affect what happens in these future reviews. It does not
automatically mean when we go through this first one on the new
basis that it is going to be plain sailing thereafter, I think
there will continue to be quite a lot of changes.
Chair: Final impartial word from Nick.
Q106 Nick Boles: As impartial as
yours were, Chair! The first thing I would like to say is that
I represent a constituency where I have a split ward. Are you
aware of anyone, other than a political anorak, in any way being
remotely interested or affected or even really aware of that fact?
I certainly am not. My second question is, is it not the case
that a clear majority of the Members of Parliament were elected
on manifesto commitments to reduce the size of the House of Commons
actually by rather more than is currently proposed so the idea
that this is being imposed on Parliament by the Government is
wrong?
Professor Johnston: Certainly
the latter is my understanding, that the reduction in the size
of the House of Commons was part of the main parties' manifestos.
Q107 Nick Boles: On the previous
point, are you aware of anyone other than political anoraks who
really cares about being in a split ward between constituencies?
Professor Johnston: I had a student
some years ago who did some local work in Bristol who found that
when a ward was split a lot of the ward activitists drifted away.
They had lost their rationale to represent this place, this place
no longer existed, it was in two parts and political activity
declined.
Q108 Chair: Last word, Mr Gray?
Mr Gray: Nothing to add.
Chair: Professor Johnston, Mr Gray, thank
you very much for an extremely helpful session. Thank you for
sparing the time to see us this morning. Thank you very much.
2 Note by Witness: There was a further item
about Scotland that I failed to respond to in the oral evidence-whether
the method of dealing with Scotland's two very small constituencies
is the right one. This is quite difficult: certainly those two
constituencies present particular difficulties for their MPs in
terms of accessibility-both to them from Westminster and within
them. A strong case can be made that they are very particular
cases and that no other parts of the UK present the difficulties
to the same extent. In effect, their special position is creating
one additional constituency for Scotland and one less for England
than might otherwise be the case, which I do not think is too
high a price to pay for recognising their particular character.
I also think that the proposed resolution of the problem of very
sparse populations in other parts of northern and western Scotland
is a sensible one since it does not further increase Scottish
over-representation; instead it means that if one or more constituencies
of 12,000 sq km are created with electorates below the size constraint
(i.e. more than 5% below the UK quota) the remaining Scottish
constituencies will have an average electorate slightly above
the UK quota. These are `special geographical considerations'
as they have always been understood and previously the four Commissions
have all been able to exercise their discretion to create constituencies
with relatively small or large electorates. That is now not possible,
and it could be argued that all Commissions should be given some
discretion that could be applied in particular situations (such
as Ynys Mon and the Isle of Wight). Back
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