Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Does the noble Lord accept that low registration in inner-city constituencies means high-population constituencies? Is that not a central flaw in the Government’s whole approach?

[Lord Strathclyde]

No, my Lords. First, the basis of deciding constituencies based on the size of the electoral register is well precedented. Secondly, the Government will continue to seek ways of ensuring that individuals exercise their right to register. So we will want to avoid the problem that the noble Lord raises.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Does the Minister not accept that it is extremely difficult to get high levels of registration in inner-city constituencies?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, that does not negate the reason for creating fairly based constituencies of 76,000 electors plus or minus 5 per cent.

Members of this House have opposing views on which is the better system with which to elect Members of the other place, but the place for that debate is during the campaign. At the end of the campaign, it will be for the voters to decide which system will be used in the future, and this is fair too.

Before I finish, I will briefly outline the effect of the substantive clauses. I know that many noble Lords wish to speak, so I will not detain the House with a clause-by-clause commentary. I hope it will suffice to say that there are three main parts to this Bill: provisions for a referendum to be held and combined with other polls on 5 May are found in Clauses 1 to 7 and Schedules 1 to 9; provisions for implementation of the alternative vote system in the event of a yes vote in the referendum are found in Clause 9 and Schedule 10; and provisions to reform the setting of parliamentary boundaries are found in Clauses 10 to 13. The remaining Clauses 14 to 19 and Schedule 11 deal with technical and financial aspects of the Bill, and that is it.

It is not a complex Bill. It offers a referendum on the alternative vote, reduces the size of the House of Commons and makes the size of constituencies more equal. This is a fair Bill and a clear Bill. It gives people choice on how they vote and a more equal say when they do vote. The other place, which is uniquely affected by it, has approved it, and I commend it to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, my interest in this Bill is not so much in the reduction in seats and its effect on boundaries, although I regard the truncation of process in the boundary reviews as outrageous, and from what I hear it is causing concern across the Commons.

I have been through two Boundary Commission inquiries and I know that you simply cannot short-circuit the whole process—it leads to mistakes. For those MPs who do not pull their weight, it does not really matter, but for MPs who take pride in offering a service it is hugely important and can be very disruptive. Anyhow, enough of that, that is for the Committee stage.

My interest is AV and the question asked in the referendum—the Liberal Democrat agenda. Therefore, I direct my contribution to their Benches. I hope that they seriously consider my concerns. I believe in electoral reform and in a preferential voting system for the Commons which allows for the use of more than a single preference. I do not believe in STV for the Commons. I could stomach an additional member system but I am not advocating it. If AV as proposed survives the Bill, I shall reluctantly vote for it but I believe that the system is flawed and should be amended. Furthermore, I do not believe that the public will vote for it. A turnout of more than 30 per cent would surprise me.

A system which allows voters to number candidates 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, eliminating the least popular in turn, has major flaws, which will be exposed during a referendum campaign. I believe that the Liberal Democrats are allowing their electoral reform agenda to be hijacked by a system which they do not believe in and which, if defeated, will delay the electoral reform agenda for a generation. They bear great responsibility. Even at this late stage, they should take stock and change tack. Too much is at stake.

The system is far too complicated. Even the Electoral Commission reports admit that the public find it difficult to understand the numbering of candidates and their relevance to the result. The commission believes that public education will help. I do not believe that. People will not be interested. Secondly, Ministers have repeatedly stated that candidates need more than 50 per cent of the vote to win. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said it again this morning on the “Today” programme. That is plainly not true. Furthermore, they are still peddling this myth, using carefully crafted language and skilful juggling of statistical argument. It will all fall apart when exposed to public scrutiny. The 50 per cent argument has become the central plank pushed by advocates of optional preference AV. It will crumble when exposed, as indeed will the argument of those who suggest that AV is some form of proportional representation.

Then there is the argument, so clearly expressed by a Mr Attenborough of Lincoln in his article in the Daily Mail of 9 September, under the headline,

“Why this unfair system won't get my vote”.

He reveals in simple language a real concern already known to we anoraks. In tightly fought seats, the second preferences of the bottom candidate, the first to be eliminated, can determine who wins the seat. What that means is that the BNP and other extremes, can actually determine who wins, while all second and subsequent preferences of the majority are not even taken into account.

Then we have the work of Professors Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, of the University of Plymouth. Their research into voting behaviour in Queensland, Australia, which uses the Government’s proposed system, concludes that the most likely scenario over time is that many voters will treat an AV election just like first past the post, and not cast multiple preferences. Incredibly, in Queensland in 2009, 63 per cent of those who turned out at the state elections voted for just one candidate. It defeats the whole raison d’être of the initiative that the Government are taking. This will be music to the ears of my noble friend Lord Grocott. We then have freak results. Do we really believe that when the public learn that third-placed candidates on the first ballot and, in extremis, fourth-placed candidates, can leapfrog the top-placed candidates and win seats, that they will support the AV system proposed? I believe not.

So why did the Labour Government propose a similar system? The answer is very simple. It was due to a combination of a lack of detailed research, insufficient consultation and a failure to draw lessons from our experience in the mayoral elections. We should have acted years ago and learnt from our experience. In 1990, in an attempt to select a credible system, Labour established the Plant commission, under my noble friend Lord Plant. The commission undertook the task of examining a number of electoral systems, and in its landmark and authoritative report recommended the introduction of a variation of AV called the supplementary vote—SV. In the previous year, prior to the Plant commission being established, I had worked on this system with the support of Professor Patrick Dunleavy, of the London School of Economics, and I recommended it to the commission. The benefit of SV was its simplicity. It would be easily understood by the public and it has subsequently been described by Dunleavy as “London AV”.

With the supplementary vote, there are two columns on the ballot paper—one for first choice and one for second choice. Voters can mark an X in each column if they so wish. All the first preferences are counted. If a candidate has more than 50 per cent, they are elected. If no candidate wins more than 50 per cent, then the top two remain and the rest are eliminated. The second preference votes of the eliminated are then added to the top two candidates and counted. The candidate with most first and second preferences is then the winner. It is simple and easy to sell to the general public.

When the system of mayoralties was established in 1998, Nick Raynsford MP and his department had to select an electoral system. They opted for the supplementary vote, the London version of AV, because of its simplicity and the fact that it was easy to sell to the public. It is a well proven system, already in use in the United Kingdom, that has worked very successfully for millions of voters in multiple elections. Boris Johnson and the mayors are elected under it, so why not MPs?

Professor Dunleavy at the LSE, Professor Helen Margetts and a number of other academics, including Professor Simon Hix and a few international commentators, all seem to prefer the supplementary vote, or London AV. Peculiarly, when asked to comment on how the Bill’s version of AV would work, both Labour and government spokesmen have used SV arguments to support AV. They did not even know how the system they were supposed to be advocating works—a sort of plagiarism in advocacy. I have often asked MPs how AV works in detail, and most of them got it wrong.

London AV is very popular in London and elsewhere. If we chose the London AV system, support among Labour and Conservative voters for a yes vote would go up and the referendum would be won, whereas the Bill's complex and problematic imported Australian AV model will fail to gain public support.

How do we get ourselves out of this mess? The Liberal Democrats might wish to ask themselves that question, as they control the agenda. We could amend the referendum question in Committee or on Report. I intend to table an amendment on London AV/SV, which I regard as a form of alternative vote, as does Professor Dunleavy. Alternatively, we could amend the referendum question in Clause 1, which states:

“Should the ‘alternative vote’ system be used instead?”.

This could read, “Should an ‘alternative vote’ system be used instead?”—we could substitute “an” for “the”. The effect would be that, after a yes vote in a referendum, Parliament would have to decide between AV systems. Professor Dunleavy's view is that the electorate may have difficulty in supporting a system that had not been specified. He suggests that an amendment might refer to a question being placed before the electorate after Parliament has specified the system that it wishes to legislate for. I shall therefore also table such an amendment.

Some of my amendments will introduce delay. I am afraid that that is inevitable if we are to place a credible system before the electorate. I appeal to the Liberal Democrats, who have it in their hands to sort out this problem. I am sure that they will find support on the Conservative Benches for a tweaking of the proposed referendum question. I remind the House that it was a Conservative Member of Parliament who moved the SV amendment in the Commons only a few weeks ago. It is not too late to do the same in this House and to change the question that will be asked.

House of Lords: Working Practices

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 12th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)]

My Lords, we have a fine number of speakers on the speakers’ list this afternoon, and I welcome the opportunity of hearing the views of the many noble Lords who have set their names down for this debate. Others who have not will, no doubt, make their views known over the next few months.

A number among us think it may be time to review our working practices and, at the outset of a new Parliament, I share that view, which is why I proposed that this debate should be arranged. It is my intention that this debate should pave the way for a systematic review of our working practices to be conducted by a Leader’s Group that I will appoint before the House rises for the summer. I will ask the group to investigate what improvements could be made to our working practices to allow us to carry out our work effectively, while maintaining our efficiency in terms of the timeframes within which legislation is taken through the House.

That does not mean that I believe there are fundamental problems with procedure in your Lordships' House. Indeed, in the years I have been here, there have been times when I have contemplated ill digested legislation coming from the other place and reflected how much better the other place might operate if it introduced some of our own procedures. The privileges enjoyed by every noble Lord, the ability to table an amendment and have it answered, the wide freedom to speak and to question Ministers, the lack of restraint from the chair and other freedoms are immensely valuable to the House, and they are not shared by Members in another place. These open procedures enabled the House to carve out, after 1911, a role as the pre-eminent revising Chamber. Consider, for example, that over the last two full-length Sessions of the previous Parliament—2007-08 and 2008-09—we made on average over 80 amendments to each government Bill passed by this House.

As Leader of the House, I see it as my duty to defend that role and those freedoms. The essential self-regulating character of the House—rare in any legislative body—is something that I believe that noble Lords on all sides greatly value. Nothing this Government would suggest would set that at risk. I have never set my face against change; indeed, I was the other half of the conversation that led to the initiatives of my predecessor, the late Lord Williams of Mostyn, which resulted in some significant changes in the modern House, including the wider use of Grand Committees and the introduction of carry-over Bills. Furthermore, the House has regularly reviewed these matters—I need only mention the group set up by the noble Baroness, Lady Amos, in 2004, Lord Williams’s review or the Jellicoe committee of 1992—so it is time to look again at our working practices and consider ways we might refresh and improve the way we go about things.

However, we should not forget that one of the advantages of this House is that self-regulation allows us to adapt and change as we go along. Take, for example, the way we revise legislation in Grand Committees, which many of your Lordships rightly favour. After the Williams review, the number of Bills sent to Grand Committee, with full co-operation from the Opposition, rose from five in 2001-02, to 11 in 2002-03 and 18 in 2003-04. In 2005-06 there were 23, but since then their use has fallen away. In the past two Sessions, only six Bills have gone to Grand Committee, the same as in the last years of the old House in 1997-99. In 2003-04 and 2004-05, more than half the hours that your Lordships spent in Committee were spent in Grand Committee. In every year but one since 2003, the proportion of Committee time in Grand Committee has fallen from more than 50 per cent in 2003 to under a third in 2008-09 and less than 30 per cent in the previous Session. Yet the total number of hours spent in Committees of both types in our previous two full Sessions was more than 813, against 744 in the last two years of the old House and 404 hours in 1994-96. We are definitely talking more.

I use these statistics to show that our procedures are constantly evolving. It may well be that we should renew greater use of Grand Committees. The usual channels routinely consider whether the Committee stage of Bills could take place in Grand Committee, but the Leader’s Group could investigate whether morning sittings in the Moses Room might be introduced on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for Bills or for other types of business. Then again, we already have procedures to send Bills for evidence-taking to Special Public Bill Committees or to Select Committees but, save for famous examples such as the Constitutional Reform Act, we have been sparing in our use of them. A Leader’s Group might consider whether that is right.

In the case of the Constitutional Reform Act, some who were most angered by the use of the Select Committee procedure, including the then Lord Chancellor himself, came to acknowledge its value. Indeed, our Select Committees have played a vital role in examining draft legislation, including secondary legislation, and scrutinising public policy. They have provided us with the authoritative analysis and advice that enables us to perform our scrutiny function effectively. On the other hand, wider use of these procedures would detract from the important principle that every Peer can contribute to revision and amendment at every part of every stage of a Bill.

In seeking to review how we scrutinise legislation, the Leader’s Group might also consider whether we could make better use of the minimum interval between the First and Second Readings of Bills. That interval could be used to invite evidence on Bills ahead of Second Reading, as some noble Lords have proposed, without prolonging the overall timetable for the passage of the Bill. The group may even wish to look at whether the case for minimum intervals of the length we currently observe is as compelling today as when they were introduced in 1977. The House has changed markedly since then, as have the technologies used to reprint Bills and Marshalled Lists of amendments.

Having re-examined its own practices, the other place is implementing many of the recommendations put forward by the Wright committee. Over time, they too might have an impact on this House, not least if legislation is more thoroughly scrutinised by the time it reaches us, so it is a timely moment for us to look at our own ways. In addition to some ideas that I have already mentioned, the group may wish to explore how we could ensure that, when scrutinising Bills that have arrived from the Commons, we focus on the provisions that received least attention in the other place. Some noble Lords have called for the provision of information on which clauses of Bills arriving from another place have not been subject to debate. I understand that this would not be as straightforward an exercise as it sounds, although I favour the idea behind it, but it merits further investigation.

There is much that a group might consider without extending the time that a Bill spends in this House. The Leader’s Group might wish to look at other areas of the House’s activity. It could, for example, examine how we might avoid duplication with another place when we repeat Ministerial Statements and Urgent Questions and consider whether the Moses Room would be a better venue for such matters. It may also wish to explore how we could ensure that our procedures are more transparent and accessible to Back-Benchers on all sides of the House, including those who have joined only recently or attend less frequently. This might, for instance, mean taking another look at how Private Members’ Bills are introduced and how Questions for Short Debate are tabled, with a view to widening the range of Back-Bench Members who successfully use these vehicles to raise matters of interest.

The overriding principle of self-regulation underpins all our work. The self-restraint that characterises this House has ensured that we have never needed to resort to selection of amendments, enforced groupings, programme Motions or guillotines. I sincerely hope that we never shall. We equally need to recognise that that would change if the freedoms that we have were unnecessarily abused. I am glad that they never have been, and long may that continue.

The usual channels are essential to this alchemy. They are a conduit for the different interests in the House and a vital lubricant in the conduct of business in a self-regulating House with no overall majority. I am conscious that there are some in the House who wish to see a greater role for the chair, notably at Question Time. My view is that our existing practice, whereby it is the responsibility of the whole House—of all the Members present—to draw attention to breaches of order or failures to observe custom, continues to serve us well. The government Benches of course have a special responsibility for assessing the mood of the House and intervening accordingly, and I take my responsibilities in this matter most seriously, as I know that former Leaders have done as well. It is not as easy as it looks perhaps and sometimes there are complaints of unfairness or favouritism to certain Benches. All I can say is that, on the anecdotal evidence, the party of the Opposition is hugely favoured in Question Time, but we are looking for the scientific proof to demonstrate whether that is the case.

This does not amount to a power of direction, and nor should it. Such powers, whether exercised from the—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The noble Lord did not refer to the Speakership in the context of work which might be considered by the Leader’s Group. I wonder whether he has a view on that.

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, let me make it clear: I believe that it should consider that. It should be a widely drawn committee on working practices and not simply on the procedures of the House, so that it can examine all sorts of matters which are not strictly speaking procedural; that should, of course, include the role of the chair in the House.

As regards appointments to Select Committees—an aspect of the reforms in the other place which a number of noble Lords are keen to emulate—there is nothing to stop individual groups or political parties in this House from introducing elections for particular positions. Some have already done so, and I believe that it very much suits those groups.

I trust that this brief tour d’horizon has made clear that the Leader’s Group will have a wide-ranging remit. It will also have plenty of time in which to conduct its work, which I hope will culminate in a major piece of work that sets us on the right course for the years ahead. I hope that today’s debate will lend momentum to that process and serve as a reference point for the group in conducting its review.

There are many speakers and the debate will be wound up by my noble friend the Deputy Leader, who will also speak in his capacity as leader of the Liberal Democrat party in this House. All contributions are important in this discussion, including those from Members who will not speak today; I am sure that they will be invited to put evidence forward to the Leader’s Group. I beg to move.

Special Advisers

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 7th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathclyde]

Yes, my Lords, and naturally that is subject to the coalition agreement. However, clear rules are set out in the Ministerial Code on the number of special advisers and who is entitled to them. That, of course, speaks for itself.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, perhaps we could have this issue clarified at the beginning of the term of this Government. If a special adviser to a coalition Cabinet Member breached the code, who would be responsible for disciplining that adviser? Would it be the Prime Minister?

[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, discipline is up to the Minister who appoints the special adviser. The Prime Minister agrees the appointment, but it is the Minister who appoints the adviser who is responsible for discipline.