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Why does London need 11% of all UK MPs?

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Like many of the changes proposed by the coalition, it seems the proposed cull of MPs in the Commons will be an underwhelming and missed opportunity to radically change how the UK is Governed.

Calculations suggest the capital will lose just 5 MPs, retaining 68 of its current 73 seat allocation – more than 11% of the seats in the reformed Parliament.

Despite having a directly elected executive Mayor to speak up for it, the capital will tie the North west for the English region with the largest number of MPs.

What do we need them all for?

Obviously it’s important that London has a voice and input into legislation which affects its residents but does it need quite so many voices pocketing taxpayer money to sit on the green benches?

Could we not get by quite happily with a smaller number of MPs – say 34 – speaking for the capital on the floor of the chamber and allow City Hall – ideally both the Mayor and Assembly – a statutory consultation role in any legislation which directly affected Londoners?

Unlike MPs, the Mayor and Assembly Members aren’t ruled by Westminster’s whip system, their scrutiny of new laws wouldn’t be influenced by the desire for promotion or favours.

This isn’t as revolutionary as it might first sound.

Ministers already hold meetings with the Mayor, coalition ministers have appeared before the Assembly and the Mayor has given evidence to Parliamentary select committees.

With just the tiniest amount of Parliamentary time and a fairly small add-on to the localism bill, these exchanges of views could have been set on a statutory footing.

As with the failure to hand the NHS in London to City Hall, passing up the chance offered by the boundary review to re-examine how the capital interfaces with national government is a missed opportunity from a coalition which is nowhere near as radical as it claims to be.

Comments

  1. Because, according to the 2001 census, it has over 14% of the UK population; it’s probably even more now. And because those people deserve to be represented in Parliament, where decisions of national significance are taken, and not just in City Hall.

    AMs represent constituencies that are vastly bigger, in both geographical and population size, than normal Parliamentary constituencies; your proposal would set up a democratic deficit between Londoners and everyone else. Also, the idea that they’d have the capacity to go from scrutinising London-specific planning, police numbers etc to covering national issues like foreign policy, free schools, libel laws, etc as well seems ill-considered.

  2. Hi Ellie

    I’d intended to address the population issue so thanks for reminding me! While London does have 14% of the UK population, it is democratically richer than the rest of England which lacks any devolved Govt. So along with out current 73 MPs, London also gets the Mayor championing it face to face with Ministers – effectively we get two goes at getting out point across. Is that fair if outside the Greater London border people are getting less representation at Westminster?

    I’m not sure how much London-specific input review of libel laws need and with some London MPs in the commons the capital would still get a voice during the various parliamentary stages.

  3. My point was that I don’t think you’re distinguishing between the types of issues addressed by Boris et al, and by Parliament; there’s very little crossover so it’s really not two bites of the cherry. Your proposal to cut MPs would leave the remaining ones representing far too many constituents on those issues which are national-only, of which libel was one example. It would dilute London voters’ voices enormously.

    And it’s my understanding that devolved governance structures are being proposed for other cities, perhaps as part of the Localism Bill? Even if this doesn’t happen, it seems a bit unfair to punish London instead of pushing to secure devolution in other places where it’s needed.

  4. I’m not really sure why you suggest the rest of England has no devolved government. In some respects parts of England are better represented than London. My parents live in a small village with a population of about 5,000 that has its own parish council. A quick check of the Parish website suggests it has five councillors. Additionally it is covered by both a borough council and a county council. Of course, some may argue that a multitude of small councils leads to confusion and, there are various unitary authorities around England with similar powers to that of the GLA and borough councils combined. Indeed, London is unusual as it is England’s only major city that has both borough and city-wide government.

  5. We have National Government, a Mayor of London, a London Assembly, Mayors of individual boroughs, borough Council’s, elected Councilors & 73 elected MP’s – My god, how will we cope if we lose 5 MP’s!?

  6. MP’s provide more than just a voice for the Capital on the chamber floor, or at least they are suppose to. MP’s also offer help to locals experiencing problems locally (Imigration, housing & social matters for example).

    Before we decide whether ot not we should decrease (or even increase) the number of MP’s in London, we need to know & see/hear more on how these MP’s spend their working day. What they do, how long they spend doing it, how much it cost’s us and some how try to measure the service an MP’ provides to local residents & if they can financally justify their cost & wage. I’m expected to justify every minute of my 7 hours & 12 minutes at work and so should an MP. If more of us knew how our local MP’s spent their time, earning the money we pay them, the question of how many MP’s should we axe may have been much easier for more people to make. I suspect many have no idea what their local MP does & would say scrap em all.

    I’m not so sure I would cut the number so dramatically, by half. What would happen to the people who attend the advice surgery’s of the axed MP’s? Would the remaining MP’s have the time & resources to deal with these people who have had their MP’s axed? And so on & so on.

  7. We’re probably democratically worse off in London. The mayor’s relatively toothless, and most councils outside London elect by thirds each year, while we have to wait four years to vote in/out our councillors. And, as pointed out above, we’ve not been allowed parish councils until recently.

    The real issue is going to be what happens to London/England as devolution across the rest of the UK gathers pace, rather than our representation in Westminster.

  8. I disagree fundamentally with the idea that the Mayoral system means that there should be more Londoners to an MP than for the rest of England – in fact it strikes me as profoundly undemocratic. So long as any part of the UK remains as subject to the primary function of the Commons – the passage of primary legislation – as any other, it should not be in any way disenfranchised. Despite devolution, all legislation passed by Parliament applies to London (OK, there are a handful of exceptions to this rule, but there are localised exceptions for most parts of England). As this is not the case for Scotland and is now not the case for Wales, then there is a possible case for reducing MP:elector ratios in those parts of the UK, though I’m sceptical about that too.

    London is, in reality, hardly any more devolved than the rest of England. It is simply that we have more effective and clearer lines of democratic accountability over, for example, transport, policing and economic development than in the traditional local government structures. But given that, to take a current example, the provisions of the Health & Social Care Bill apply as much to a Londoner as it does to someone from Kettering or Kendal, how would it be fair that the former has less of a say?
    Giving the Assembly consultation rights over legislation that ‘directly affects Londoners’, as you propose, means giving them consultation rights over probably something in the region of 90% of legislation. And if that role is going to be carried out effectively, then you’ll need more assembly members – probably one per borough. I’m a great supporter of the assembly, and there’s fantastic members on all sides, but it’s an inescapable fact that assembly members are elected on far lower turnouts than MPs. Why swap more legitimate MPs who have a ready-made infrastructure for scrutiny and decision making on primary legislation for AMs elected by fewer people who lack those resources?

    And this is before we get into the fact that any cut to the number of MPs in London – or anywhere else – will make outcomes of elections within the region less proportional.

    I can also say, I think without fear of contradiction, that London MPs have some of the highest casework loads of any in the country. There are a wide range of reasons for that, but high amongst them are higher levels of immigration, of benefit claimants, and social housing. All of these tend to produce highly complex casework, often requiring dedicated specialists within the MP’s office. Immigration and benefits aren’t devolved, and housing is basically a local authority issue, as it is in the rest of the country.

    I’m afraid I simply can’t see any attraction to this idea – it seems anti-democratic, it would probably end up costing more and would damage London’s interests.

  9. Numerically the proposed 600 seats nationwide equates to roughly 10 seats per million of the population so the number of seats proposed for London fits. However I do think there’s a good case for clearly defining at London level what each elected representative (MP, AM) can do for their constituent which may ease an MPs work load as far as casework is concerned. Nationwide too there may well be a case for an education program defining who can do what surgery-wise in terms of Councillors, MPs, AMs and MEPs. Were such a program implemented we may see the electorate getting their issues resolved a lot sooner, without it MPs will continue to bear a majority of their constituents’ needs and wants in terms of first point of contact.

  10. One of the problems with this debate is in all these calls for ‘reform’ it tends to be forgotten that MPs’ roles have already been dramatically ‘reformed’: Parliament now has much less of a role in governing the UK, with so many laws now simply rubberstamped following EU Directives. The public is often some decades behind in understanding this (partly because politicians and the media do not want to draw attention to the facts). But it is not only the public. Politicians too seem sometimes not to understand this – I remember seeing a Labour election leaflet in 1997 referring to ‘removing’ VAT (I think it was domestic fuel). As was pointed out to them, they were barred from doing this by the EU…so they changed the leaflet wording to reducing VAT to “the lowest level allowable”. No mention of course as to whom was doing the “allowing”! It seems to me that the public need to have transparency as to who can change laws, who administers other bodies’ laws and who can deal with specific problems. Whether there are 73 MPs, 173 MPs or indeed 7.3 MPs for London makes no difference if everyone is confused as to what they can and cannot do. Otherwise all politicians end up as glorified social workers, with law making left to others…and ‘scrutiny’ is no substitute for the ability to make laws and repeal them.

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