Green MP Proposes Hemicycle Design To Replace Parliamentary Chamber
Ellie Chowns is the new Green MP for North Herefordshire (Alamy)
6 min read
Green MP Ellie Chowns has called for the House of Commons chamber to be redesigned as a hemicycle, to foster more co-operation among parliamentarians and create a larger seating area for MPs.
Chowns, the newly-elected MP for North Herefordshire, has also called for electronic voting to replace in-person voting in Parliament to improve efficiency.
Under a programme of restoration and renewal, the House of Commons will need repair work which could cost the taxpayer between £7 billion to £13 billion over a ten year period. The Green MP told PoliticsHome this gave developers the time to restructure and knock down the voting lobbies to increase the size of the parliamentary chamber.
“There’s so many aspects of procedure and so forth that really limit productivity. You would never get away with it in business or in the charity sector,” she said.
“We’ve also got the whole business of having to decant [the Palace of Westminster]. I think that’s a real opportunity to perhaps think about how things could be physically reorganised.
“I’d love to see a hemicycle in Parliament. We’ve got this chamber that is... two-swords width apart, and there’s far too little seating for the number of people that need to be there.
“Let's take the opportunity to get rid of those walls [and] get rid of those voting lobbies. I’m sure it can be done [while retaining] of a lot of the heritage”
Prior to being elected, Chowns was a former councillor for Herefordshire in 2017. She was re-elected onto the council with almost 80 per cent of the vote share in 2019.
Chowns is an expert in international development, with a PhD in the subject from the University of Birmingham.
She was a successful candidate in the European parliamentary elections in 2019 and served as an MEP until Britain officially withdrew from the EU's institutions in 2020.
Her experience as an MEP fuelled her belief that Britain needs to move away from its adversarial style of politics. She hoped a new influx of MPs, who were not “institutionalised” to seeing other MPs as opponents, could help parliamentarians work together on key issues such as social care reform and climate change.
North Herefordshire, and Leominster which preceded it, was a stronghold for the Conservative Party for the past 100 years. It had briefly been a Labour seat for three years between 1998-2001, when the Tory incumbent defected to Tony Blair's party.
However, the seat returned to the Conservatives under Bill Wiggin, who served as the constituency’s MP from 2001-2024. He won a majority of 24,856 in 2019, which was one of the highest in the country.
Chowns told PoliticsHome there was a “generalised” sense voters were disillusioned with Westminster politics and the Conservative Party. But she said the Greens would never have won the seat from the Tories without running a “massive” and “energetic” campaign which saw hundreds of volunteers campaigning and handing out leaflets in the seat.
“What I would say is that umpteen people on the doorstep told me ‘I have been true blue all my life and I just can't vote for them this time',” Chowns said.
“That is one thing I have really learned in politics. Don't make assumptions on the basis of what somebody's front garden looks like.
“I knew throughout the whole of the campaign that we weren't going to win a seat like North Herefordshire by just trying to kind of clump together everybody who'd previously voted for anybody but the Conservatives.
“It really was about demonstrating that, as a former Conservative voter, you absolutely can vote Green and feel really positive and proud about that.”
Proportional representation and upending the current First Past The Post system has been a central issue for Chowns and the Green Party as a whole. At the 2024 election, the party received almost two million votes but won just four seats in Westminster.
Data from the Electoral Reform Society (ERS) suggests they would have secured 42 seats under proportional representation.
“I’ve always been passionate about fair voting. It’s extraordinary to me that we still have the antiquated voting system that we’ve got,” Chowns explained.
However, a concern for left-wing politicians and activists is that a more proportional voting system could increase the number of MPs on the right of politics such as Nigel Farage. Under the same data by ERS, Farage's Reform UK party would have gained 94 seats in the Commons.
“That's always the argument, isn't it. A proportional voting system creates more space for people with more fringe views,” she said.
“I am definitely worried about [Farage], it's one of the things that drove me to get involved in politics in the first place, in very direct opposition to that sort of politics." The Green MP told PoliticsHome she believed PR could serve as a “useful act of transparency” by exposing Reform UK MPs as not “terribly effective” parliamentarians.
The war in Gaza has been another issue which the Greens have tried to take ownership of on the left. Its position, which committed to a ceasefire less than a month after October 7, and suspending all arms export licences to Israel, has won plaudits from high-profile left-wing figures such as Owen Jones.
In Parliament Chowns has pressed the Foreign Secretary David Lammy for the Government to apply the "precautionary principle" to stop all arms exports to Israel.
However, with the amount of attention the international issue has taken, does she believe it has taken up a disproportionate focus in Westminster compared to other domestic issues?
“I think it's completely consistent with our principles to be very clear about our position on Gaza, calling for a ceasefire from very early on,” she said.
“It’s not only lefties that are concerned about the UK’s position on these issues. That’s really not my experience on the doorsteps in North Herefordshire.
“People of all sorts of political backgrounds in North Herefordshire are really concerned about what's happening in Gaza.”
In UK politics housebuilding and planning reform are likely to dominate this Parliament. Prime Minister Keir Starmer made building 1.5 million homes central to the party’s electoral offering. Under the government’s housing algorithm, more 27,500 homes are set to be built within Herefordshire over the next 20 years.
“I'm particularly concerned about what sort of housing it is. Green policy [is] right home, right place, right price.
“We've got to have some really fundamental reforms of the whole way that the housing market works in the UK."
The Green Party also called for rent controls in its 2024 manifesto to alleviate the housing crisis. Yet there is scant evidence rent controls work, and many examples where they exacerbate the existing housing crisis in an area.
They were removed in Berlin after less than two years, while in San Francisco it sharply decreased the housing supply within the city.
“Clearly restricting rents is not going to be the only solution. There's also an issue of increasing supply. But also, it's not just about increasing the physical supply of buildings.
“Green policy is local authorities should have the capacity to institute rent controls in areas where there's an overheated housing market."
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