This Order, on the face of it, sounds as though it were a purely domestic arrangement—an adjustment of boundaries between the three constituencies within the Borough of Harrow. That borough is at present represented, and has been since the present arrangement was made in 1948, by three Conservative Members. Whatever adjustments there may be, we hope and believe that no change in that representation will take place.

There are one or two points of principle involved here. To the Harrow local authority, and to local opinion generally, the Order appears to involve an unnecessary disturbance of three divisions which were founded, in their present form, only in 1948. Harrow is typical of the case referred to in paragraphs 13 and 20 of the Boundary Commission's Report; where the Commission has found it necessary, under what it conceived to be its terms of reference, to make adjustments in the boundaries within a borough purely for the sake of securing a better numerical equality.

In Harrow there is a numerical discrepancy. Of the three divisions one has an electorate of 61,000, another has 50,000, and the third has 47,000 electors. Those figures are all well within the bounds set by the Commission itself around which the average electorate is fixed. It appears, not only to us but to the local authority and others concerned, that there is really no adequate justification for interfering with an arrangement which is scarcely seven or eight years old. We should have been given a longer time to settle down and to allow the changes of population which are going on in Harrow to work themselves out.

My other point, and it is important. has been referred to by my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary. The Final Report of the Boundary Commission was entirely different from its Interim Report. That is a serious matter and has this effect. The Final Report now embodied in this Order has not been through the procedure laid down by the Act. It is a new scheme of which no one had heard anything at all until the Final Report was published.