Clive Efford
MP for Eltham and Chislehurst · Labour · United Kingdom
“Thank you for allowing me to take part in this statement, Madam Deputy Speaker, given that I was not here at the beginning—I was carrying out my duties elsewhere in the House. I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement. What is she likely to do in my part of south-east London for technical and vocational places?”
“I rise to speak to amendment 97 in my name, which would remove clause 10 from the Bill. Clause 10 gives powers to the Secretary of State to vary the proportion of public and private provision of health services if they consider that to do so is in the interests of the health service.”
“Labour’s 2024 plan to make work pay set out a welcome desire to bring more essential services back into public control—something that is welcomed by health workers across the country, because so far the “biggest wave of insourcing in a generation”, as was promised, has felt more like a trickle when it comes to the NHS.”
“The explanatory notes for the Bill say that this new flexibility is necessary “where there may otherwise be a breakdown in provision of a health service.” Can we imagine a situation where the Secretary of State has concerns about a health service and that an approach to assist a local provider would be rebuffed?”
“There are ample powers to enable the Secretary of State to intervene and resolve breakdowns in the provision of a health service. On clause 10, we must balance what it adds in those situations against its potential misuse by an ideologically driven Government that are determined to privatise our NHS.”
“It was a pleasure to join my right hon. Friend at Greenwich council’s development of 435 council properties in my constituency for the launch of the social and affordable housing programme. Some 70,000 homes are planned, and that is welcome and overdue.”
The complete record
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“Q Hi Peter. What are the additional problems that are created for electoral registration officers when a constituency goes into two local authority areas that are under the purview of different local authorities and EROs? Peter Stanyon: In local authority A, the electoral registration officer will cover the area for that local authority, maybe giving that register away. That is reasonably straightforward in terms of polling stations and the like, but slightly more complicated with absent votes and postal votes. There need to be agreements about who will be leading on each individual process. In some areas, the give-away authority will administer parts of the process for the authority that has taken it in, because of software incompatibility or different approaches being taken.”
“Q For local administration purposes, would it be better to go to sub-ward level to keep a constituency coterminous within a local authority area than to go across two local authority areas? Peter Stanyon: It would really depend on the nature of the split in the area, but, generally speaking, it is far easier to manage a constituency within a local authority area in which you are normally running elections. Equally, splitting down to polling districts, and going lower than the ward building block, may be preferable in some areas, but it could add different issues, depending on the nature of those splits. We would probably be able to cope with the odd one here and there, but if it were across the board of a local authority on a consistent basis, I could foresee that being as complicated as it would be across boundaries.”
“Q Are there any sources of information that electoral registration officers would like to have access to and that they currently cannot access, which would assist them in maintaining an accurate electoral register? Peter Stanyon: Much of what is going on as we speak in terms of the changes to the canvass process is about data. As you are aware, the new IER process involves inviting people to register. More access to data that allows registration officers to target those who could potentially be on the register would be welcome, be that local, national or regional. It depends on the type of data source; equally, it needs to be the right sort of data so that register updates can be done in an accurate and convenient manner.”
“Q Has your association identified the sources that you would like to be able to access? Peter Stanyon: I think the Department for Work and Pensions database is, at the moment, pretty robust in terms of checking. The Electoral Commission has done a lot of work on other sources that we have been a party to, including HM Passport Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. Each comes with its positives and negatives; there are lots of pros and cons. One of the things we want to avoid is the provision of data for the sake of the provision of data, because sometimes the data that we already have is more accurate than the data coming in, throwing EROs off course in terms of registration.”
“Q Is the simple answer to the question that yes, there are sources that you would like access to? Peter Stanyon: There are potential sources. We need to see the quality of those data sources before we can jump that way.”
“Secondly, if there are mechanisms to get very good quality information about what the general public think, like deliberative consultation processes enable you to do, that is pretty rich information for the commissioners to receive in addition to the demography data that they would be using as well.”
“Q Thanks, Darren, for giving evidence this afternoon. Following on from that, do you think that the Boundary Commission is incapable of telling the difference between political opportunism and genuine community concern about parliamentary boundaries and local representation? Darren Hughes: I do not know, is the answer to that. I assume not, but sometimes when these processes are going on for a long period of time, and if people are appointed who might not have a lot of experience in dealing with active organised citizens pushing a particular view, these are the risks you run. It might not be the case in every cycle, but you would want to make sure that organised political activity dressed up as the concerned citizen was not able to take hold. That is an important thing.”
“Q Do you have examples of where things went wrong, where local representations were dressed up in such a way as to influence the outcome, which brought about something that was regretted later? You do not have any examples of where local representation has forced errors in boundaries. Darren Hughes: Not that I can provide you with right now, no. I have never sat on one of those commissions, so I do not have personal experience there. There is plenty of both academic and more political-style literature that is available to describe some of the tactics that can go on. All I am saying is that those things are really easy to avoid, and we should build it into the process.”
“Then, with an automatic voter registration model where they would go on the register, you would hope that that would lead to participation in elections. Even if it did not, it would then get more accurate and complete data for the drawing up of boundaries. I think some improvements were made by using other sources of Government data and requiring DWP involvement when the IER changes were made. That is coming up to 10 years ago, so now the next step is to say, “What could we do to be more proactive?” I think this paper that the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has produced on automatic voter registration would be a good place to start.”
“Q Can I ask about how we devise the electoral register? Do you think there should be any changes to the way we do that, and any sources of information that are currently denied EROs, that they should be able to access to help them create an accurate list? Darren Hughes: The main suggestion I have on that would be to move proactively to an overt position of automatic voter registration where we basically said that every time a citizen makes contact, or touches base in any way, with the Government or Government agencies, there is an ability to register—and that that is proactively put to people: we do work with people before they attain registration age to explain what democracy is, why participation is important and how you can have your say, and we really try to increase the amount of information that our younger citizens have.”
“I guess the other thing is, right at the very beginning, making sure that these things are written for all time, not just one time, one particular cycle or one particular Government or Opposition—just doing these things in a very straight way so that if you are up it works for you and if you are down it works for you as well. I do not think the decision to go from 650 to 600 was driven by any particular democratic principle. It was part of a response to a crisis at the time, and that has not stood the test of time because it was not grounded in much more than that. Also, probably it is easy to agree to a cut in the number of MPs until you realise that it also involves the boundaries of the remaining 600. That might have focused minds a wee bit.”
“Q Earlier you mentioned that you favoured 650 MPs. You were concerned about going down to 600 and giving the payroll a greater proportional say. You also in answer to the Minister made a reference to political interference. Was Parliament right to stop the number being cut down to 600, or was that political interference—or was trying to go down to 600 actually the political interference? I am not sure what point you were making. Darren Hughes: I suppose it would be political involvement at both levels, would not it? It was the decision to propose going from 650 to 600, and then another decision to reverse that and go back. I think that there was a political element to that.”
“Q I am not sure which of the two of you I am aiming this question at, but how much does locality and the experience of living in a community influence the way people vote? Does it bring outcomes where people vote collectively in a similar pattern? Professor Pattie: You heard evidence from John Curtice this morning on this and I would not disagree with him. There certainly is evidence that people are influenced by the context in which they live and by what is happening around them both in terms of the economic and political environment and in terms of the climate of opinion around them. People who in a sociological sense look very similar, but live in different areas, can go in very different ways much more akin to other people within their area. Is it the biggest influence on people’s voting? No, probably it is not.”
“I listened to the evidence earlier from the person representing the electoral registration officers and I have also heard evidence given at inquiries from Members of Parliament who have repeatedly referenced the difficulties that they have when they have to deal with multiple local authorities. People deal with four. or, as recommended in one of the recent reviews, five local authorities for one Member of Parliament. That aspect of discretion is something that the Boundary Commissions over years and years have shown great ability to recognise. Again, I come back to my point: that is where their discretion and their ability to address those concerns is being curtailed.”
“I tend to agree with Professor McLean, who gave evidence this morning, that one person’s local ties go in diametrically opposed directions to another person’s local ties, depending on their political preferences, so I am not at all upset at the idea that arguments in terms of local ties might take a lower role in the hierarchy. In fact, I think that that is a sensible thing. What I do think—this also goes back to the previous question—is that where you have got local government boundaries and existing seats, you have inconvenience when you cross those.”
“Q Could it lead to frustration? We do not keep clearly identifiable communities with common characteristics integral within parliamentary representation, but their voices could be lost because they cannot vote collectively in response to the experience of living in their particular locality. Professor Pattie: That is rather harder to argue, to be honest. The extent to which people would see themselves as acting for their local area in a constituency sense is quite a hard one to argue. People have a sense of “my area” [Inaudible] , but is that the constituency? That is much less obvious. Dr Rossiter: Over the years, for my sins, I have attended an awful lot of what were local inquiries and I have listened to a very large amount of evidence put forward about local ties.”
“If we are looking for international standards on this, there is a clear suggestion that going right down to 5% is not necessary, and in so far as it causes change to boundaries, we would not fall foul of OSCE reports. They all seem to find that UK elections fail in one respect or another, but at least we would not fall foul on that.”
“I think there is probably an understandable source for this confusion, because an earlier edition of an OSCE publication did indeed say that a 10% tolerance—quite reasonably taken to mean no more than 5% either side of the norm—should be aimed for, but that was never referenced in that version of that booklet; a subsequent edition of that observer handbook has come out, and that reference is no longer in there. Probably the best statement of what is best in this area is the OSCE’s “Guidelines for Reviewing a Legal Framework for Elections”, which specifically endorses the “Code of Good Practice” and states that proximate equality—no more than 10% between electorates—should be the aim, but interestingly goes on to say that “frequent changes in the boundaries of constituencies should be avoided”.”
“Again, as people who write published papers, we have to do our research, and we have looked for anything that would support 5% in any of the previous discussions regarding the 2011 Act and so on, and we have struggled. I know you have had reference to the standards related to the “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters”, and there seems to have been some confusion over what that says. I am not sure whether that confusion has been sorted out; I was very surprised by what I heard the other day.”
“As soon as you go from 5% to 6%, you have a big payback from going up by that one percentage point. That payback increases to around 8%, which is why we came to the conclusion in our previous report that a figure of 8% would be much more helpful. Beyond 8%, the advantage begins to flatten off, because you are reaching a point at which any sensible commission can reach solutions. In all this, we accept and understand entirely that the 5% introduction was not an attempt to be cussed or anything of that nature. It is simply that 8% and 5% are not worlds apart. If you are able to achieve far more when you adopt one rather than the other, you have to wonder why you would want to go for the lower figure, unless there is some major negativity in that regard.”
“Q I was going to come on to that, so you have segued to it nicely. To come within the 5%, or whatever we finish up setting in this piece of legislation, requires either taking a piece of a ward—going to sub-ward level within a local authority area—or going across that local authority boundary. Would you suggest that it is better to go to a sub-ward level and stay within the local authority area, rather than having constituencies span two or more local authority areas? Dr Rossiter: Speaking personally, it would depend on the evidence in the particular case. I do not think that one is necessarily better than the other. I have noticed, when we have been looking at this, the significant help that increasing that tolerance by very small amounts will provide.”
“I have many large leisure facilities in my constituency that could open now—gymnasiums, swimming pools and even an outdoor lido, but they fear that they have been lumped in with smaller facilities that would find it difficult to open. They could open now, meeting social distancing regulations, whether 2 metres or 1 metre. How long will they have to wait for the taskforce to enable them to open?”
“I know there are arguments about the accuracy of the register at any given point in time. I do not feel qualified to comment on that, but it is certainly true that the numbers go up around the time of elections.”
“Q I think it is the first time in all these years that I have been on a Committee that you have been chairing, Mr Paisley, so it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. My question is about electoral registration. Do you find that it fluctuates between general elections? Do we get a higher registration level at the time of a general election, and should that be the point at which we count the population for future reviews? Tony Bellringer: One of the few things that we do in between reviews is collect the electorates and see how they change from year to year, but we get only an annual snapshot. If it is around the time of a general election, the electorate numbers tend to go up. Unsurprisingly, people are encouraged to join the register and are motivated more to do so.”
“Q You might not want to comment on this, but would it then make sense to calculate from a high point like that, so that it is perhaps more accurate at the next general election? Tony Bellringer: If you are sure about the accuracy at that high point.”
“Q Could I ask about your relationship with the Minister’s office when you are carrying out a review? The Minister said in her opening remarks that she was looking forward to working with you. How much information do you share with the Minister’s office? The Bill removes the final approval from Parliament, and we would want to scrutinise how much influence the Minister’s office can have on the process. Tony Bellringer: I am very pleased to say that we hold ourselves up as a model of independence in the process. During the substance of a review, we do not share with the Government, Government officials or Ministers any information about the substance of what we are working on that is not communicated to the public at large.”
“Q Were you consulted on the drafting of the Bill? Tony Bellringer: They did communicate and trial some of the proposals in the Bill with us in advance. They sought our views, specifically on administrative points and on deliverability.”
“However, it will not be an instant knockout if somebody comes up with what we feel is a very well argued solution that might not have been proposed by anybody else previously that in our view respects more of the different factors and across a wider area and provides a better solution overall—maybe not for an individual constituency, but overall.”
“Q Perhaps you could add them to the notes that you are sending us. May I ask about consultation? There was a lot of consultation in my area that seemed to go reasonably well. Then one individual did a mathematical calculation, not taking any heed of all the local arguments made about common interests and geographical areas, and the Boundary Commission plumped for that at the last minute after all the consultation. That makes the consultation very frustrating. How much weight do you put on local input into consultations over the interests of somebody doing a disconnected mathematical calculation on a map? Tony Bellringer: We have been very clear in the past that we do recognise strength of local feeling. If there are lots of people locally saying a particular thing, that carries a lot of weight with us.”
“Q Could I add a last bit on the consultation and the issue of flexibility? When you hear the arguments about local ties and suchlike, are there occasions when, perhaps in a minority of cases, you would want to go beyond 5% and would want that flexibility in order to address that local concern? Tony Bellringer: It is something that we always used to be able to do in the past and did do on occasion. Prior to 2011, there was not this hard maximum and minimum, but we would still be aiming to keep constituencies within a broad range. Occasionally we would breach that if we needed to, to provide a better holistic solution.”
“In his statement, the Prime Minister said that “a dividing line between aid and foreign policy runs through our whole system,” but back in 1994, when that dividing line did not exist, we ended up with the Pergau dam scandal, when we poured billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money into a scheme to win a foreign trade deal on arms. That led to the introduction of the International Development Act 2002, to outlaw linking aid to foreign policy. Can the Prime Minister give us a guarantee that that is not his objective?”
“The covid crisis has demonstrated the need for international co-operation. Is it correct that the Department of Health and Social Care argued that we should remain part of the pandemic warning and response system of the European Union and, if so, why did the Government not listen?”
“What we do not need from the Government is another rabbit-out-of-the-hat announcement. My hon. Friend has just set out the sorts of things that we need in place if we are going to reopen schools in September, as the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) just suggested. That would require the Government to set out a plan now and to start to engage with teachers’ unions, teachers themselves, heads of schools, local authorities and parents to create confidence that it is safe to send children back to school. That is what is lacking from the Government; they need to engage more widely if we are going to create the confidence that children can return safely.”
“Before it is safe to reduce the 2 metre rule, do we not require a world-beating track and trace system to be in place? And does a world-beating track and trace system not require a fully functioning app?”
“Happy birthday, Mr Speaker. The Minister has said several times that the victims of this situation need to be heard and their cases listened to, so can he name any one of them who is in agreement with his position and is not calling for an independent judge-led inquiry?”
“How can it be that, when we are coming out of lockdown and starting to relax some of the restrictions, local authorities do not know what they are expected to do in the event of a local outbreak and they do not know what powers they are to be given? How can it be that the Government can say only that they will tell them when it is practicably possible?”
“I want to add my voice to those who have condemned the minority of people at the weekend who were acting in a violent way towards the police, and I wish those injured officers a speedy recovery, but Secretary of State, does it not just fuel the suspicion of people from the BAME community when the recommendations of something like the Public Health England report are withheld? Are they not bound to suspect that that is the establishment feeling that it is likely to be embarrassed and made to feel awkward by those recommendations? Should they not be published?”
“The Leader of the House needs to learn from this debate and from the fact that MPs are not here to debate themselves; they are debating their colleagues, and ensuring that those people are not disenfranchised and that the people they represent are not disenfranchised. It is absolutely right that Members of Parliament come here and debate that, and ensure that this place properly represents the people of this country. So the Leader of the House needs to take this matter away. We cannot have a two-tier system for Members of Parliament—that is not the Parliament we were elected to. We need to review these procedures. We need to do that through the Procedure Committee, which has been doing excellent work but, above all, the Leader of the House needs to listen.”
“We had virtual participation, which, although not perfect, allowed everyone to participate. We got rid of that and excluded Members of Parliament, but within 24 hours of being back we are reviewing the process and we are letting people vote by proxy. We have now got virtual participation back and, miracle upon miracles, we have electronic voting in the Lobby now. The right hon. Gentleman has to be commended for leaping us forward into the 21st century, but this has all changed within a week of coming back. This has been ill-thought-out and ill-planned. We came back and disenfranchised MPs, and we got rid of virtual participation, but then we had to introduce proxy voting and now it looks like we are going for electronic voting.”
“I love this Chamber and being able to come in to participate in these debates, but the biggest honour of all is representing constituents. Under the current arrangements, too many Members of this House are disenfranchised, and that is not acceptable. The Leader of the House tells us that it is important that we have proper scrutiny, but I was here last year when he went all the way to Balmoral to tell the Queen we were proroguing Parliament. That was deemed illegal because we were not talking about five days, as is normal for proroguing; he wanted to shut Parliament down for five weeks. So where is this sudden conversion to parliamentary scrutiny that we have from the Leader of the House? We came back far too soon. They had 75 days to plan for the return of Parliament.”
“Clearly, the Leader of the House rushed us back and there was not time to sort that out. We were told that voting would take 30 minutes, but two thirds of us voted last week and it took 43 minutes. So this was ill-thought-out and ill-planned, and it disenfranchised Members of this House and their constituents. Ironically, on that same day, we had a debate on the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill, in which the Leader of the House—I have read his speech—spoke eloquently about the need for constituents to have equal representation in this House. On the very same day, he voted for something that disenfranchises millions of voters. I have not totted up how many MPs were unable to participate and were excluded, but that must have resulted in millions of constituents being disenfranchised. I am delighted to be back here.”
“It is clear that the return to Parliament last week was chaotic, rushed and ill-thought-through. Members did not know where they were voting. We were told to go down to Westminster Hall to join the end of the queue, so I went down there to join it but by the time it had started moving people were queueing right out the door. For the next vote, I went down to Westminster Hall, but I was ushered out of the building and I had to queue on the green outside the Members’ entrance. I do not know who thought it was a good idea to have Members zig-zagging across the green outside, but whoever was in charge of security must have had kittens. When we voted later that evening, we did not queue out there, but instead queued around the car park. Who planned that? Who thought that through?”
“The treatment of the volunteers who came forward to make the 2012 Olympics a big success is nothing short of a scandal—the Government wasted all that good will. What is being done to harness the good will of the people who have volunteered during this crisis and ask them what they would like to contribute towards the voluntary sector going forward? That could be a vital part of getting many voluntary organisations up and running when we come out of this crisis.”
“Tuesday’s voting was chaotic and brought this House into disrepute. The end of the queue was moved from one vote to another, which left Members wandering around not knowing where to join the end of the queue and inevitably breaking the social distancing rules. The organisation of this lies at the door of the Leader of the House. He was determined to bring us back, yet the organisation was chaotic. We need to end this Mogg conga that we have to participate in; we need to move into the real world, and allow virtual voting and virtual participation in this House. What does it say to our constituents if this House has to lock down again because of the chaotic organisation of the Leader of the House?”
“The Minister has mentioned several times consultation by the boundary commissions, but if their scope is limited by a plus or minus 5% variation in the size of constituencies, local communities are wasting their time invariably in putting forward those arguments. Is it not more important that people who have common interests and live in a common, identifiable community vote together than to meet these tight constraints on the size of constituencies?”
“The Government have promised to carry out routine testing in care homes, yet my local authority tells me that there is a shortage of the home-test kits needed to do that and fears that such kits will be diverted to fulfil another of the Government’s pledges on tracking and tracing as more become available. Yet again, the Government have made a claim that is not borne out by the situation in our care homes. By what date will we have enough home-test kits to carry out routine testing in care homes?”
“Without an effective and efficient tracking and tracing system, this is a reckless move. It has already caused confusion. People were given 12 hours’ notice to go back to work today, but the detailed guidance is not being published until today, with some further guidance due tomorrow. Too slow to lock down and secure the supply of PPE and testing; too rushed to end the lockdown in a coherent and planned way; the performance of the people has been superior to the Government’s. The Government must improve if we are to keep people safe as we come out of this crisis.”
“On 25 March, he said that testing will “hopefully very soon” reach 250,000 per day. On 29 March, the Health Secretary tweeted, “We’ve reached 10,000,” but that was not correct. On 2 April, the Health Secretary announced that we will reach “100,000 tests per day by the end of this month.” That was achieved by sending 40,000 tests out in the post, and the 100,000 target has been missed every day since. This is more about media management than giving the public solid facts. This far into the crisis, why are we sending tests to the USA? Why have we ignored the laboratories around the country in hospitals, universities and the private sector, many of which said they were geared up to answer the call for help that never came? The Prime Minister has changed the message to “be alert”, but it is the Government who must stay alert.”
“As late as 13 March, covid-19 guidance for care homes was issued. It stated that facemasks did not need to be worn in residential settings, and stressed: “It remains very unlikely that people receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected.” That guidance was not changed until 2 April—10 days after lockdown. Why was it not changed earlier? How has it contributed to the epidemic in care homes? There is a worldwide PPE shortage, yet we hear even now of companies in the UK offering to supply PPE and being ignored by the Government. Why did the Government not act earlier to set up a secure supply structure here at home? On testing, we have had announcement after announcement. On 18 March, the Prime Minister announced that we had a target of 25,000 tests per day. That was not reached for more than five weeks.”
“This would be a difficult situation for any Government, but there are questions that must be answered and lessons that must be learned if we are to come out of lockdown safely. The large number of fatalities in this country was not inevitable. My heart goes out to those who have suffered a loss. The Government have made a religion of cuts and non-intervention, which led them to delay the decision to go into lockdown. Why did we ignore the warnings from other countries ahead of us in the epidemic? In Italy, lockdown began on 9 March; in Spain, it began on 15 March; in France, it began on 16 March. We finally entered lockdown on 23 March. Only Italy had more deaths at lockdown than the UK. The lack of urgency was repeated over PPE and testing. We hear of frontline staff terrified of going to work without appropriate PPE.”