Professor Hazell:

Shall I answer that question? The first point to make is that the greatest risk of political interference is the one that Alan Renwick referred to in his first answer—namely, the ability of Parliament at the final stage to vote down the orders made by the boundary commissioners for their proposed changes. The strongest single point in our submission to the Committee is that in future the boundary commissions’ reports should be implemented automatically, without any opportunity for Parliament to intervene at that final stage.

As we also argue in our submission, however, there is a risk that once Parliament loses the ability to control the final decision, the Government may seek to influence the work of the boundary commissions prior to that final stage. I think, Ms Smith, that was the burden of your question, and in our submission we propose four ways in which the independence of the commission in future should be strengthened, mainly through tightening up the appointments process.

Briefly, those four ways are as follows: first, that in future the commissioners should be appointed for a single, non-renewable term, as with many other constitutional watchdogs, which I can enumerate if you want further details; secondly, that they should be subject to the same political restrictions as members of the Local Government Boundary Commission for England, which performs a very similar boundary defining function; thirdly, that the deputy chair of each commission should sit on the appointments panel, as indeed they did last year in the selection of two new boundary commissioners; and fourthly, that the appointing Minister should be required to appoint only from the names recommended by the panel.

Therefore, we are recommending that paragraphs 3.2 and 3.3 of the “Governance Code on Public Appointments” should be disapplied for these appointments. I remind members of the Committee that those paragraphs allow Ministers in some cases to appoint someone who has not been deemed appointable by the assessment panel, and in exceptional cases Ministers may decide to appoint a candidate without holding a competition.