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Orders of the Day

European Parliamentary Elections Bill

Lords Reasons for insisting on certain of their amendments to which the Commons have disagreed, considered.

Lords Reason:

The Lords insist on their Amendments in page 2, lines 2, 15 and 18, to which the Commons have disagreed, for the following Reason:


Because electors should be able to vote for the individual party candidate of their choice.

7.15 pm

The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr. Jack Straw): I beg to move, That this House insists on its disagreement with the Lords in their amendments.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin): With this it will be convenient to discuss also the Government amendment in lieu of the Lords amendments, in page 3, line 46, at end insert--

'Review of electoral system
(1) The Secretary of State shall appoint one or more persons--
(a) to review the operation of the system of election provided for by section 3 of the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1978 as substituted by section 1 of this Act, and
(b) to make a report to the Secretary of State within six months from the day of appointment.
(2) The Secretary of State shall carry out his duty under subsection (1) within one month from the date of the first general election to the European Parliament which takes place after the coming into force of section 1.
(3) The Secretary of State shall lay a copy of any report received under subsection (1)(b) before each House of Parliament.'.

Mr. Straw: I hope that I can be brief because we are covering some well-trodden ground. The other place has now voted twice to amend the Bill to change the nature of the list system for which it provides. On both occasions, I should add, had it not been for the votes of the hereditary Conservative peers, the Government would have won the day comfortably. The issue has now gone way beyond whether we have closed lists, open lists or Belgian lists: there is now a challenge to the authority of this democratically elected House by hereditary Conservative peers.

The Government have carefully studied reports of the debates in another place, as would be expected, and the arguments advanced in support of the amendments that were made, including the arguments advanced by the hereditary peers. However unsatisfactory its composition might be, of course we accept that the other place is a revising chamber. We therefore give proper consideration to any suggestion that it might make that a piece of legislation ought to be revised. Having done so, I am moving an amendment to make one important change to the Bill which we hope will meet some of the concerns that have been expressed.

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The amendment would provide for a review of the new system to be carried out shortly after the first elections using it. It makes it clear that there will be a thorough examination, that one or more persons will be appointed by the Secretary of State

"to review the operation of the system of election"

and make a report to the Secretary of State

"within six months from the day of appointment",

and that any such report shall be laid before each House of Parliament. I then anticipate that it will be subject to a very full debate.

Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold): Will the Home Secretary say according to what criteria the review will be undertaken, and what the terms of the review will be?

Mr. Straw: The review will be very wide, as set out in the amendment--should the House and the other place approve it. The amendment states:

"The Secretary of State shall appoint one or more persons--


(a) to review the operation of the system of election provided for by . . . the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1978"--

as amended by the Bill--and

"(b) to make a report to the Secretary of State within six months from the day of appointment."

Mr. Dale Campbell-Savours (Workington): Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Straw: I shall give way in a moment.

I must make it clear that a review of the operation of the system does not simply mean a review of the counting process. If this House and the other place approve the amendment, the review will consider whether the closed list system itself operated satisfactorily. We are dealing with fundamental issues.

Mr. Campbell-Savours: I welcome the review. It is very good news, and it will be greatly appreciated by people across the country.

Mr. Straw: For all the mocking laughter from the clones from the Opposition Whips Office, any welcome from my hon. Friend the Member for Workington(Mr. Campbell-Savours) comes at a very high price.

Mrs. Margaret Ewing (Moray): Will the review enable the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly to review in their own right how the lists operate in Scotland and Wales?

Mr. Straw: The review relates only to the operation of European parliamentary elections. The Bill is concerned only with European parliamentary elections, so it could not possibly refer to any other elections. With respect to the hon. Lady, that has to be a matter for inclusion in the Scotland Bill and the Government of Wales Bill. I do not doubt that, once the elections are over, there will be many reviews of the way in which the system works; that is entirely right, as they are all new systems.

Mr. Desmond Swayne (New Forest, West): The review is a wonderful idea that has been much greeted by

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Labour Members, but would it not have been better, given the views expressed by their Lordships, by Opposition Members and most importantly by Labour Members when we debated the issue last week, to have an open list and review that?

Mr. Andrew Lansley (South Cambridgeshire) rose--

Mr. Straw: I shall come to the fundamental issue in a moment, but first I give way to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: I call Mr. Graham Brady. [Interruption.]

Mr. Lansley: If such a review were to conclude that the closed-list system had operated in an unsatisfactory way, would it be possible to revert to an open-list system or another system without primary legislation? If that were not possible, the entire structure of the proposal would be undermined.

Mr. Straw: Before replying, let me remind you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that this is the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley), a very fine Member of Parliament.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: It is just as well that I was not drawing up any lists.

Mr. Straw: I shall work that into my speech later, when I come to the problem that the British public will encounter in differentiating between one Conservative candidate and another. Although the correctly named hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire is in error over his views, he is otherwise okay, as he went to a good school--the same one as I did.

There is a very good reason why it should not be possible to change the voting system by statutory instrument. We are dealing with fundamentals of our democratic system, and it would be wrong to change them by statutory instrument. If the review concludes that the closed-list system is the wrong system as it has produced all sorts of perverse results--and if that is what Parliament finally accepts, and I hope it is--there will be huge pressure on the Government to change. In any event, there will have to be a debate on the result of the review.

Several hon. Members rose--

Mr. Straw: As I have taken five interventions in eight minutes, I should like to make some progress. I shall then take interventions from my hon. Friends.

The other place decided to push for a fully open system in place of a closed-list system, which we believed was the most appropriate way for voters in Great Britain to elect their Members of the European Parliament. Let me explain--particularly to Opposition Members--how an open-list system would work, as the results of an open-list system are not quite as they might anticipate.

Under such a system, the elector casts his vote for a particular candidate on a party's list, or for an independent candidate. He cannot cast his vote for the party's list as a whole. The votes received by each candidate on a party list are then added together to give the party total. That figure is used to determine how many seats the party

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has won using the method devised by our old and sadly departed friend Victor d'Hondt, the famous Belgian. That is already set out in the Bill, and is relatively straightforward.

The party candidates must then be ranked in the order of the number of votes they have each received, and the seats are allocated in that order. So if the party wins three seats in a region, the seats are allocated to the three party candidates who won the most votes.

On the face of it, it seems a simple and fair system. However, as I explained previously--and with the approbation of the House--it has some perverse results and some major drawbacks. The first is that, under the open-list system, the candidate with the most votes is not necessarily elected. To the Conservative party, which believes so strongly in the first-past-the-post system for every election, that would be an overwhelming objection.

Let me explain how distortion and perverse results can occur. Under the open-list system, a party's total vote is the sum of the votes cast for its individual candidates. It may well happen that the total vote of one party--as I wish to be neutral, we shall call it party A--is high, but that that is due almost exclusively to the popularity of the first candidate on its list. Another party--party B--may have a smaller total vote, but that vote may be more evenly spread among all the candidates on its list. Each party B candidate could poll more votes than all but one of the candidates on party A's list, but party A would win more seats. I am glad to see that the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) is looking confused.

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