Surprisingly this is one of the questions that divides those who want a Parliament for England. And yet, as a look at the arithmetic od representation shows, the answer is very simple and one on which all sides of this question can agree.
The key here are the number of elected representatives associated with national government rather than local government. The situation will be as follows after the next election. The House of Commons will have 650 seats.
England 533 seats 82%
Scotland 59 seats 9%
Wales 40 seats 6%
N.I. 18 seats 3%
If we are to continue to have an Upper Chamber then the House of Lords will have to go, to be replaced by an elected chamber. A government can then choose its cabinet, ministers and so on from both elected chambers.
The task then is to decide how many MPs will be needed to carry out the much reduced level of government expenditure that will result from devolving much of the work to the English Parliament.
Wading through the statistics of government expenditure is not much fun, nor very easy but it seems safe to make the assumption that about half of the expenditure of the government is associated with devolved matters. Another requirement is that currently a governing party has to be able to provide between 140 and 150 Secretaries of States, Ministers and so on to run the business of government. To give a reasonable choice, since not all elected MPs will be suitable, the governing party currently needs around 300 members. If this is just sufficient for a majority then there needs to be around 600 members in the House. Around half of these posts will move with devolved matters to the English Parliament. These numbers indicate that the House of Commons can reduce to half its size or 300 – 325 without causing problems. In the USA Congress and the Senate have, in total, 535 members for a voting population of around 216 million. Compare this to the 45 million voters in the UK. This would equate to a House of Commons and Upper Chamber of 112, a vastly smaller number.
It seems then that if we had a harder working Parliament we would need no more than 300 members split 200 MPs to the House of Commons and 100 Senators to the elected Upper Chamber.
How big would the English Parliament have to be? There are around 38 million voters in England. The largest constituency has around 110,000 voters. Bearing in mind that English voters would have representation through their MP and Senator it seems that an English Parliament constituency could be sized between 100,00 up to 150,000 in size. This would indicate that there could be as many as 380 constituencies or as few as 250. Given that to provide the 70 or so Ministers and parliamentary secretaries required by an English Government the majority party would need around 140 MEPs (Member of the English Parliament, sorry but the other lot wil have to rename themselves, MEuPs perhaps!) The English Parliament would have to be at least 280 in size. On this basis a total of 300 constituencies seems generous.
The question of where these various bodies would sit is now clear. They could continue to sit at Westminster. One debating chamber could be allocated to the English Parliament whilst the other would be shared by the Commons and Senate. Since much of the work of PArliament is done in committees there is no reason why, when one house is using the committee rooms the other cannot be using the debating chamber.
Such a proposal would show a savings of 100% of the current direct costs (members expenses, staff and other costs) of the House of Lords of around £50 million. In addition with a total of 600 MEPs, MPs and Senators there would be the saving of the current direct costs of 50 MPs and some savings of salaries if MEPs are going to be paid less than an MP as are MSP at the moment. Say a saving of another £10 million or £60 million in total. Finally the House of Lords overflow offices at 1, Millbank will no longer be required. This building could be rented, sold or converted into accommodation for members. The same conversion could be done to part of one or other of the buildings currently also used for office space, Portcullis House and the Norman Shaw Buildings
We started with 650 elected MPs and over 700 members of the House of Lords, of whom, on average, around 400 attend daily. We have ended up with 600 elected reresentatives, with more than enough space to do their work and a not unreasonable level of cost savings.