The committee stage is to be timetabled for 5 days. It will be taken in committee of the whole house, as is customary for bills of constitutional significance. There will then be 2 days for the report stage (when the decisions of the committee of the whole house are reported to the house in plenary session). There will then be a third reading debate and all being well, the House of Lords will then repeat the whole process.
For example Peter Hain complained that the maximum geographical size rule would lead to three smaller than average electorate seats in the Scottish Highlands. In another part of the speech Hain complained that depriving Wales of its existing over-representation would lead to two large area seats being created in mid Wales.
I expect the bill to get through without too much difficulty. Coalition backbenchers may be unhappy with some details, but not to the point of endangering the bill. The opposition on is own will not be able to delay, as the bill is timetabled.
The Liberal Democrats want the referendum, the Conservatives want constituency reform. They both have strong political reasons to ensure the bill is enacted. Labour does not have the numbers, in either House, to cause serious delay or force major changes.
For example Peter Hain complained that the maximum geographical size rule would lead to three smaller than average electorate seats in the Scottish Highlands.
This for one would cause over-representation of Scottish Nationalists at Westminster
In another part of the speech Hain complained that depriving Wales of its existing over-representation would lead to two large area seats being created in mid Wales.
Whereas in this I can speak of from practical experience, these constituencies would be intensely rural. and with the poor transport links that are only going to get worse with the current round of cuts face to face contact with the MP becomes very difficult. Depending on the final boundaries, it may be that there no direct bus links to parts of the constituency, especially on the weekends when MPs surgeries are held. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
My suspicion is that the Scottish Boundary Commission will actually be able to construct an electoral map which produces seats which fall within both the standard geographical and electorate criteria. It will probably mean seats with most of the population outside the Highlands and most of the area consisting of sparsely populated Highland territory. However it is in the interests of opponents of the bill to exaggerate the problem.
I accept that there are geographical problems in areas like the Highlands and Snowdonia. However are we really saying the difficulties are so bad that those areas should be special cases? After all the MPs in northern Canada manage to represent areas which are both much larger and far more difficult to get around, than are Scotland and Wales.
If I had been designing the legislation I would have asked "what are we representing?" The primary answer is obviously registered electors, not square miles of countryside. I would not have made the Scottish islands or very large (by UK standards) constituencies into special cases. I would have said the only criteria is that each seat, within a part of the UK, should have pretty much the same registered electorate.
My approach would mean that a few seats would be difficult for the candidates, but we could perhaps get around that by allowing a higher spending limit than in other areas.
The major purpose of electing an MP is not to provide advice surgeries for constituents. It is to represent the constituents in Parliament. It is, at least in theory, the job of the MP to exercise his or her own judgement on issues which come before Parliament, not merely to ascertain the opinions of voters and then defer to them. The voters can decide what they think of the representatives choices, at the next election.
If we take the view that some very rural constituencies need to be smaller, to make it easier to provide effective advice surgeries, we are giving the votes of the electors in those areas a higher value than those in the rest of the country. There would also be calls for inner city seats to be smaller than average, because the MPs for those areas have a higher than average caseload.
It is unfortunate that the coalition has already sold out on democratic principle, to a certain extent, by allowing two island groups and 12,000-13,000 square mile large seats to be exceptions. We should not expand the special cases any further, because the more we do that the further we depart from one person, one vote, one value.
My suggestion was that large seats, with challenging geography, might have a still larger expenses allowance. Thus a candidate might hire a helicopter, to campaign in different parts of the seat without wasting too much time travelling.
