The British Academy Policy Centre

Written Evidence from The British Academy Policy Centre

The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill will have a major impact on the pattern of representation in the House of Commons throughout the United Kingdom.

The impact will be especially great in Wales because the Bill both reduces the total number of MPs, from 650 to 600, and replaces the separate electoral quota for each of the four territories by a single UK quota. At the 2010 general election, there was an average of 56,545 electors across the 40 Welsh constituencies, compared to 63,101 in Northern Ireland, 65,498 in Scotland, and 71,882 in England. The UK quota for the next review of constituencies – that must be completed by 1 October 2013, according to the Bill – will be c.76,000.

Applying this quota will almost certainly mean that the number of constituencies allocated to Wales will be reduced from the current 40 to 30, a 25 per cent reduction. (The reductions for the other territories will be 17, 16 and 5 per cent for Northern Ireland, Scotland and England respectively.) This reduction, and the requirement that all constituencies have an electorate between 95 and 105 per cent of the UK quota, means that an entirely new set of constituencies will have to be drawn up for Wales. None of the existing constituencies is likely to remain in anything like its current form: at the time of the 2010 general election only one of the 40 Welsh constituencies – Cardiff South and Penarth – had an electorate within the specified range (i.e. probably between 72,200 and 79,800, given a quota of c.76,000).

The Bill includes a new set of rules that the Boundary Commission for Wales must implement when proposing new constituencies. These make equality of electorates the primary criterion and all others – such as respecting local authority boundaries, special geographical considerations, breaking local ties, and the inconveniences that would be caused by changes – are subsidiary to it. (There is a special provision that no constituency should be more than 13,000 square km and that a Commission can propose a constituency with a smaller electorate if it cannot identify one in a sparsely-populated area that meets the +/-5% size constraint. This is unlikely to apply in Wales. If it did, it would not mean that Wales obtained an additional constituency; instead the average electorate for the other 29 would have to be slightly higher than 76,000 to compensate for the smaller one.)

Because electorate size is paramount in these rules, many constituencies will have to cross local authority boundaries; many MPs will be serving a territory covered by more than one of the current local authorities: it is also very likely that some boundaries of the ‘preserved counties’ used in previous reviews will have to be crossed. Furthermore, in some areas – especially though not only urban areas – it will probably be necessary to split some electoral wards between constituencies (probably by polling districts) in order to fit every constituency within the size constraint.

The Bill also changes the method of public consultation to be used by the Boundary Commissions. In particular, it precludes the holding of public inquiries in areas where there are objections to a Commission’s provisional recommendations. It specifies a 12-week period after publication of those recommendations during which written representations can be made (previously the period was 4 weeks). If it subsequently changes its recommendations, it must publish those, but there is no provision for further representations.

Because of the major transformation that implementation of this Bill will have on the UK’s political map the British Academy asked an expert group to prepare a report on it and its implications. The report covers the entire UK but most of its points are relevant to the Welsh situation, and some of the examples are Welsh.

That report suggests a small number of technical amendments to the Bill, including:

· A provision that all four Boundary Commissions, and not just that for Northern Ireland, have regard to ward, electoral area and electoral division boundaries when defining constituencies. The Deputy Prime Minister stated in the House of Commons that this should be the case – as it has been at all previous reviews – but the Bill is not specific on that point.

· That the public consultation process be extended, allowing a further 4-week period after representations have been received, and published by the relevant Commission, for interested parties to comment on those representations. All of the representations relating to an area should then be considered by an Assistant Commissioner who prepares a report, with recommendations, for the Commission, that report to be published on submission.

· A slight relaxation of the size constraint. The Bill recognises – in rule 7 – that it may be difficult to meet that constraint in Northern Ireland because of the small number of constituencies, but the proposed formula is deficient. Similar problems may emerge in Wales. The amendment suggests that a better way is to require each Commission to produce constituencies that are within the national allowed variation (i.e. with a quota of 76,000, 5 per cent is 3,800) of the average constituency electorate in the relevant territory. (Thus if the average Welsh constituency electorate was 75,400, all constituencies there would have to fall within the range 71,600-79,200.)

The Bill requires the Commissions to deliver their reports on their first reviews after the Bill is enacted by 1 October 2013, which is 18 months before the date of the next scheduled general election – according to the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill also currently before Parliament. They are required to deliver their next review in October 2018, as part of a regular five-yearly cycle. The British Academy report notes that if Parliament is dissolved and an early general election called this would not only break that cycle and the link with boundary reviews but also, in some cases, make it very difficult to hold a general election. It recommends that Parliament consider the options in such circumstances and whether these should be catered for in the legislation.

www.britac.ac.uk

September 2010