Sir Julian Lewis: I preface my remarks by saying that I have a high personal regard for the Minister [for Local Government and Homelessness (Alison McGovern)] and I am sure that she would never personally wish to do anything unfair or politically partisan. However, there are very good reasons why, when changes are made to anything to do with constituency arrangements or democratic arrangements, they are normally carried out under the authority of an impartial body. I believe, as I suspect my Conservative colleagues believe, that if a body such as the Boundary Commission had been in charge of this operation, the results would have been very different. A coach and horses has been driven through anything to do with local, cultural or historical, as well as, shall we say, orientation among communities – all those ideas have been totally disregarded.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) on securing the debate, but I must say to him and to you, Dr Murrison, that we would need a much longer debate if we were to do justice to the enormity of what has been proposed. My hon. Friend laid out the fact that totally inappropriate areas will be subsumed under and swallowed up by the city of Leicester. That is exactly what is happening in the city of Southampton, with the naked land-grab of huge areas of the New Forest East constituency – wards known collectively as the Waterside – coupled with another land-grab of wards from Test Valley borough council that are contained in the Romsey and Southampton North constituency.

I must emphasise that the changes were first proposed long after the general election and were not in Labour’s general election manifesto. Labour rightly thought it proper to put in its manifesto the fact that there would be elected mayors and strategic authorities, but the abolition and merging of historic borough councils, district councils and county councils was nowhere flagged up in advance of anybody’s vote.

The Government like to trumpet the fact that they are strongly in favour of the devolution of political power and of listening to what local people want. Well, I have some data for the Government. Ever since this outrageous proposition that Southampton should take over vast areas of my constituency – splitting the constituency and the New Forest apart and tearing the Waterside away from the New Forest, which Waterside inhabitants have for hundreds of years viewed as part of their community – an online petition has been gathering signatures. This issue is relatively local to a part of the south of Hampshire, so we might think that, if we were lucky, the petition might get 5,000 or 6,000 signatures. I checked at exactly 10 o’clock this morning and there are 22,812 signatures so far, and I am sure that the total is well over 25,000 with paper signatures taken into account. What sort of issue must there be for 25,000 people in a local area to say that they utterly reject the tearing apart of the New Forest in this way and its takeover by the city of Southampton, which, as we have heard is the case in other scenarios, is in a far worse financial position than the people who live at present under the aegis of New Forest district council are accustomed to being in?

I have many more points that I would like to make, but, out of consideration for my colleagues, I am not going to make them. I will make just one final point. We have tried – we really have – to engage in a sincere way with the Government. When the original Minister, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon), wrote to us, he set out what appeared to be reassuring criteria: there would be no unnecessary duplication or fragmentation, and the building blocks of the new unitary authorities would be the areas covered by the existing borough and district councils unless – as an exception – there was a very strong reason for interfering with boundaries. However, the only reasons given have been vague comments about maximising economic prosperity or something, which could be said in justification of any change, no matter how politically outrageous.

I am sure that if this Minister had full strategic authority – to make a bad pun – over this policy, we would not be experiencing what we are experiencing. There is total outrage about this matter. It needs to be put right, and I hope the Government can be persuaded to think again.