The Bill introduced by Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) is an amendment to the Amendment of the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986. The amendment Bill aims to significantly reduce the number of constituencies in the United Kingdom to approximately 581 seats, allocated with a more even ratio of electorate to each constituency.

In order to reduce the number of constituencies to 581, the number of constituencies in the area of the UK with the largest electorate will be reduced.

During second reading, Lord Baker of Dorking (Con) opened the bill and said that his Bill would reduce the size of the House of Commons by 10 per cent. He went on to discuss Sir Hayden Phillips report from earlier this year entitled ‘Strengthening Democracy: Fair and Sustainable Funding of Political Parties’. 

He said that his proposal would “equalise the size of electorate constituencies throughout the United Kingdom, which is only fair, but very radical”. He also stated he believed that Wales was “over-represented”.  

He noted that the United Kingdom, with a population of 60 million people, has 646 MPs; and America, with a population of 293 million, has 430 Congressmen, “by any standard internationally we are massively over-represented”. He added that he hoped the Bill would be a “constructive contribution to the debate and the major national review that the Boundary Commission has asked for”.  

Lord Norton of Louth (Con) said that the House of Commons “remains an extremely large elected assembly, too large in the eyes of some”. He added that the Commons was under great strain because of the “demands” increasingly placed on it. He said that the Members were both “part of the solution and part of the problem”, he said that they were “great absorbers of resources and utilise the opportunities available, such as to table Questions, to their full extent, making it difficult for the House to cope”.  

Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab) suggested that Norton and Baker were “somewhat out of touch with how the other place lives, moves and has its being”.  He went on to say that “our democracy has the real merit of easy access to Members. There is an impeccable logic to the fact that the fewer Members there are, the more difficult it is to have that sort of personal relationship”.  

Lord Rennard (Lib Dem) said that the Bill had a “very worthy aim” that would certainly have “popular appeal”. He added that the Bill’s greater significance lies in its proposal to equalise the size of electorates between constituencies.  

Justice minister Baroness Ashton of Upholland responded on behalf of the government and said that on matters that affect the Houses of Parliament, it was for the Houses of Parliament to decide and that was why the government have taken a neutral stance on the matter. 

She went on to say that the Bill raised some “interesting questions about elected representation and constituencies in the House of Commons”. She added that because there was a formal recommendation before the House from the Committee on Standards in Public Life that the whole area should be the subject of an independent review, she said she did not “want to leave any hostages to fortune in predicting a response, except to say that we are very interested in what the committee has said”.