The Mother of Parliaments need to lose some weight

One of the many conclusions that can be drawn from the Maria Miller affair is that the rules governing MP's expenses are not well understood by those they directly affect and even less well by those who elect them. Many people have questioned why an MP who could commute to Westminster in a time that many people would regard as quite normal should be entitled to financial support at all - can you imagine a business paying an employee in the same situation? Surely not. But rather than simply refine and toughen the expenses rules, the time must be right to look at the size and structure of our instrument of government.

The number and size of constituencies harks back to an era when there was no internet or e-mail, no mobile telephones, and social media was a phrase yet to be invented. If you wanted to communicate with your MP or find out what he/she was up to you had to do so face to face by visiting the constituency surgery or travelling to Westminster. In these circumstances there was clearly a limit to the number of electors that an MP could properly represent and serve. But things have moved on and we need to reform Parliament to reflect the new reality. Using the communication tools that exist an MP today can be more visible to more people more quickly than has ever been the case in the past and, on that basis, can probably represent two or three times as many electors. We need to recognise this.

The US House of Representatives has 435 members; the Senate has 100. A total of 535 representing 300 million people across an area 40 times larger. We have 650 MPs - that just doesn't make sense. If we adopted the same ratio as the US (which may be extreme for a first step), we would reduce the number of MPs to less than 100! The space freed up in Westminster would enable all those representing "out of town" constituencies to have on-site accommodation which, at a stroke, would remove the need for second home allowances and expense "misunderstandings". It would also reduce the amount of office space required and the behind the scenes administrative support and bureaucracy. We could pay higher salaries to MPs, replace expenses with fixed allowances depending on the location of the constituency, and still dramatically reduce the size of the payroll.

It all makes sense. A management consultant or a Martian would reach the same conclusions in a nano-second - so why don't we do it? The sad reality is that a change of this significance would have to be approved by…..MPs! Turkeys and Christmas springs to mind so I guess it is just never going to happen.