English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and Lord Pack

Committee stage
Wednesday 11th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak particularly to Amendments 211 and 212 in this group, which are in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock.

On the return to this vexed question of election postponements and cancellations, as we have covered that several times already on various previous occasions—I am sure we will again in future—I will take a slightly different tack this time and focus partly on the future. I also hope, perhaps overoptimistically, that the Minister feels that these amendments are actually helpful.

Thinking about the future first, there are very clear, sad and worrying lessons from countries all around the world about how quickly democracies can become fragmented and undermined. The responsible reaction we all should have to that is to be determined to embed democratic norms as deeply and firmly as we can. That does not guarantee their future protection but it will certainly make life more likely to be successful, whether for our future selves or our successors, if we have to defend democracy. I hope we all agree on the clear principle of embedding the idea that democracy should not just be an easy thing to postpone or cancel.

However, at the moment, unfortunately, it is just a little bit too easy for elections to be postponed or cancelled. The two amendments in my name set out a very clear route, as indeed do other amendments in this group, by which we could more firmly protect our democracy against future strains.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, rightly pointed out, there are several different approaches that one could potentially take to this. I certainly acknowledge the merit of the approach taken in some of the other amendments regarding both ensuring that the 2007 and 2011 Acts referred to in them are properly catered for and, indeed, the interesting idea of the one-year limit that is present in one of those amendments.

My concern, though, with those alternative approaches —I will certainly listen carefully and with interest to noble Lords who contribute to the rest of this debate—is that those alternative approaches rest, in the end, on the willingness of Parliament to vote down secondary legislation. In the end, that is the prime safeguard in them. It is obviously a matter for another day or occasion to debate the merits of the deeply held, principled position that I know many in both the Labour and Conservative groups here take—I do not share it but I appreciate it—that the main opposition party in the House of Lords should not vote for a fatal amendment to a statutory instrument.

The problem is, whatever one thinks are the rights or wrongs of that principle, that that essentially means that any safeguard that is based on the idea that the Government have to put a statutory instrument or secondary legislation in some form to Parliament is of very little use. In the end, when push comes to shove, whatever the principal opposition party is in the Lords, it will say, “As a matter of principle, we aren’t going to vote it down”. It is a safeguard that, when needed, will not keep us very safe.

I said that I was going to be optimistic and try to persuade the Minister that these amendments are a helpful measure. I say that because I am absolutely sure that, in good faith, the Government never set out to say that some councillors who are elected for a four-year term of office should stay in office—as it will turn out under their plans—for seven years. I am sure that was not the original intention, but it is unfortunately the position that we have stumbled into through a sequence of events. That is a very significant and, outside of wartime, unprecedented extension to the term of office of councillors. We have ended up in this unprecedented and frankly unsatisfactory position because some of those councillors who have had their four-year term extended to seven years are in power, running councils, and they are being given three extra years in power without the public getting a say on that.

As I said, I appreciate that that is the result of a sequence of circumstances, and in that sense it seems that the Government have stumbled into a series of events. Whether through the mechanisms set out by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, or through mine, the advantage of making it a little harder for the Government to cancel elections in the future is that it would protect Governments from stumbling into a similar sequence of events again. So I hope we will hear some movement from the Minister in due course on this issue.

But of course, like any good Liberal Democrat, I cannot resist the opportunity to talk a little about the merits of different voting systems, so I will refer briefly to Amendment 213, although the ticking clock protects noble Lords from a William Gladstone-type speech about the relative merits of different voting systems, tempting though that may be. Although it is obviously no surprise, I am sure, for the Minister to hear me say that I certainly prefer the supplementary vote to first past the post, it is a real shame that the Government do not intend at the moment to go a step further and introduce the alternative vote. The big weakness of the supplementary vote is that you have to correctly second-guess the two parties that will be in the final round so that you can cast your second preference vote in a way that will be counted.

I will briefly make reference to the research by the Make Votes Matter coalition that was carried out a couple of years ago and which encompassed 217 different elections conducted by the supplementary vote in the UK. It found that only 46% of the second preferences that people expressed actually ended up being counted in the final run-off round. Over half of all second preferences correctly filled in on the ballot paper none the less got discarded because they were for candidates who did not make it into the second round. That is quite a flaw in the supplementary vote. It is a system essentially designed for a world in which it is pretty clear who the two main parties, or the two main candidates, in an election will be. However good or bad it may be, we are certainly not in a situation where that is the norm in our politics any more, so I very much hope the Minister will consider the merits of the alternative vote.

On Amendment 214, I simply observe that, in Scotland, the single transferable vote is used for council elections and is pretty popular with not only many members of the Labour Party but indeed many members of the Conservative Party there. If it works well in Scotland, as it does, perhaps we should be able to have it in England as well.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I will not talk about different voting systems; I cannot think of anything more boring—I am so sorry. Actually, lots of things are more boring. I could not agree less with the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about the value of first past the post. It is a thoroughly discredited system and its time is over. What we see again and again is that we have a completely unrepresentative Government, as we do at the moment: they have a huge majority on a small proportion of the vote, and the Conservatives should be thinking more about how they can get back into power—obviously, I do not particularly want that.

Under first past the post, councillors elected often bear little resemblance to how people actually vote. Large numbers of residents can turn out, cast their ballots in good faith and still see their views go completely unrepresented. That leaves too many people feeling that local government is something done to them rather them with them, and proportional representation offers a way out of that. My noble friend Lady Bennett of Manor Castle’s Amendment 215, and Amendment 214 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, would allow a shift towards a voting system that would reflect the diversity of political opinion in our communities and reward candidates who can build broad support, rather than those who simply scrape through on a minority of the vote. It would open the door to councils that would look more like the places they serve, politically and socially, and that really matters, especially at a time when councils are becoming larger, more remote and more powerful.

As the noble Lord said earlier, in Scotland local government elections have used the single transferable vote for nearly two decades. In Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, STV is well understood and widely trusted. In Wales, councils are now able to choose it for themselves. Of course, we have proportional representation in London for the London Assembly.

I have been elected under PR and under first past the post. Quite honestly, it did not feel very different, but a completely different view could be spoken and presented much more forcefully when we had more people elected under proportional representation. Voters in those countries manage perfectly well with a system that allows them to rank candidates in order of preference. The result is representation built on consent and co-operation rather than tribalism. This will be much more important as we move towards much larger councils and combined authorities. If power is to be devolved upwards, representation must be strengthened downwards.