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Finally, I move to my own thoughts on the first past the post system, though I could have said that it is all in the report: there is no great public support for a change in the electoral system. The link between the Member and his or her constituents is at the heart of our democracy. I find it slightly paradoxical when I look at the Liberal Benches because they are always, quite rightly, very proud of their constituencies. Although I disagree with them on many things, I acknowledge freely that the majority worked assiduously on behalf of their constituents. They get their sustenance from that. When I was doing constituency work, it was for my benefit as much as for the constituents. It is where you recharge your batteries and have your values reinforced. Breaking that link by having bigger constituencies, as the noble Lord, Lord Steel, has said, would remove something precious. We should be extremely careful about that.
In conclusion, far from this report giving us evidence that might help us to make a decision to change the electoral system in the House of Commons, which was part of its remit, it has given an awful lot of evidence why we should not change the electoral system in the House of Commons. Although I would not recommend vast changes quickly, it raises serious questions about the claims made in the abstract for proportional representation in the various systems that have been tested and how they worked out in practice. They have almost completely, it seems to me, failed to live up to the dream. I hope that my noble friend can reassure me that no drastic changes down the other end will be proposed imminently.
1.24 pm
Lord Rennard: My Lords, nearly 12 years ago, I was the joint secretary for the talks between the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties, looking at cross-party co-operation in the very likely event of the Conservatives
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We felt, collectively, that progress had been blocked during a long period of Conservative Government that had little interest in constitutional reform. Much in those talks was agreed between the two parties and published prior to that general election. Many of the measures in our joint agreement were enacted fairly quickly after the 1997 election. These included the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, using systems of proportional representation. They also included the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law and the establishment of freedom of information legislation; and the creation of a London Assembly on the basis of proportional representation, and the election of a London mayor using a system of supplementary vote that, again, showed movement away from first past the post.
The system for electing Members of the European Parliament was changed to one of proportional representation, albeit one about which those on these Benches were exceedingly unhappy. Problems with that system have been referred to by the noble Lords, Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Grocott. On the whole, in this period we felt that much was achieved to devolve power, enhance the rights of citizens and make many levels of government more representative of those people voting for them. Throughout this period, the concept of first past the post was abandoned in these cases. Subsequently, things have gone further as the Scottish Parliament has legislated to abolish first past the post in Scottish local elections and to hold these elections in future by the single transferable vote.
However, some important business that was agreed in this period remains unfinished, most notably the reform of this place and of the voting system in the other place. It has been suggested that consideration of reform of the voting system for MPs should await consideration of a voting system for reform of this place. There is no logical reason for this whatever. Reform of the Lords and reform of the electoral system were both under consideration at the time of the First World War. Surely 100 years should be long enough for consideration of all these issues.
The debates in this House on the first Speaker’s Conference, held in 1916, resulted in amendments being agreed in this House that would have resulted in general elections being conducted by a system of proportional representation, but the moment was lost at that point. We have continued since with a system fit for purpose only in a two-party system. We have
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Problems with the unfairness, the unrepresentative nature and the ineffectiveness of first past the post have been recognised by the Government since they were elected in 1997. New voting systems have been introduced at other levels in the UK. It must be appropriate now, in this report and our debate, to consider what we have learnt from these changes. We also know that there will not be a general election for more than a year and, in my view, probably not for more than two years. There is time now to consider what appropriate changes could be made in electing Members of the House of Commons. The Government review, published in January, could perhaps be the start of considering again the process of constitutional reform that was begun in 1997. It could, if the Government so wished, be a significant step towards improving the reputation of politics, giving more power to voters and making our political system more responsive to their desires.
Let us look again at some the problems of the present system for election to the House of Commons. For the past 25 years or so, I have been employed to organise election campaigns. Most of them have been under the first past the post system, and I think that I can claim some credit for helping my party to learn how better to cope with it than perhaps was the case previously. But other parties have now copied the targeting and campaigning skills of the Liberal Democrats and the result is that almost all attention is now paid by political parties to perhaps no more than a quarter of the seats that are deemed to be potentially marginal. No wonder that turnout, membership and interest in party politics declines when the system encourages parties to ignore three-quarters of the constituencies.
The situation is even worse than that. Increasingly, parties are simply targeting the swing voters in their target seats, at most a quarter of the voters within them. So much of the parties’ efforts are directed at a quarter of the voters in a quarter of the seats. The fact that parties are increasingly engaging with only 5 to 10 per cent of the electorate cannot be healthy for any democratic system. Moreover, as my noble friend Lord Tyler highlighted, the political parties are now becoming even more sophisticated, targeting perhaps no more than 80 constituencies and focusing on 8,000 voters within them—a mere 2 per cent of the electorate. This is not healthy.
A further unhealthy aspect of the system is that many voters are forced to vote tactically. Much of the effort aimed at the targeted voters is not about encouraging them to vote for what they believe in, but about persuading them to vote for their second choice party to keep out the party which they most dislike. So-called tactical voting has been one of my specialities in many elections. It is, for example, about persuading Labour voters in Eastbourne, Romsey or Winchester that they have to vote Liberal Democrat to make their vote count. I make no apology for advocating that they do this; it is simply a recognition that we have a voting
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This problem could be addressed on its own relatively easily. We could simply change the system on existing boundaries and single-member constituencies so that electors could vote 1,2, 3. The Labour Party, as my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno said, uses this system of alternative voting in its own elections. If first past the post had been used in the election for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, Jon Cruddas would now be deputy leader. But the alternative vote system meant that transfers between other candidates resulted in Harriet Harman’s narrow victory over Alan Johnson. The transferred votes suggested that this was more representative of the wishes of Labour Members than the candidate who initially had the most votes. If that system is good enough for internal Labour Party elections, the question must be put as to why it might not be better to think about it for Westminster elections. It is the system used in Australia and its introduction was advocated two days ago by Kevin Maguire in the Daily Mirror.
Lord Maxton: My Lords, I assume that the noble Lord is not suggesting that the alternative vote system is somehow a proportional system. It is another system of first past the post, albeit slightly more sophisticated than the existing one. But that is all it is.
Lord Rennard: My Lords, I am not suggesting for a moment that it is a system of proportional representation, and that is why it is not advocated by my party. I am simply saying that introducing it would at least eliminate tactical voting problems and perhaps engage more people in the system. My view is that an election using the alternative vote might have fewer flaws than first past the post, but would still fall a long way short of the desired outcome, which should be to make the House of Commons properly representative of all voters.
We now have PR systems in many of the devolved assemblies, and I think that they are more representative of the people who vote for them as a result of not having the elections under first past the post. The instability which many people predicted with systems of PR has simply not occurred in those elections. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, was referring to the situation that arose at the end of the First World War and suggested that the Liberal Democrat and Labour parties turned around at the time. That may be true, but what changed fundamentally was the fact that we moved eventually beyond a two-party system and thus made the system of first past the post completely inappropriate. He asked how a coalition of two parties could be democratic by working together, but a coalition of two parties with more than 50 per cent of the vote must be more democratic than one party governing on its own with only 35 per cent of the vote.
Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, the fact that 30 per cent of the voters vote for party A and 20 per cent for party B, and after the election parties A and B get together, does not mean that they have 50 per cent of popular support. They have zero per cent because not
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Lord Rennard: My Lords, I think we should look at what happened in Scotland after 1999. The Labour Party had 33 per cent of the vote, while the Liberal Democrats secured 17 per cent, making 50 per cent. The people of Scotland wanted something different from what was done in Westminster, such as scrapping student tuition fees. The people of Scotland got more of what they wanted because of proportional representation. I believe that that was representative and fair. It was right that powers were devolved in a way that the voters could decide that. It is an illustration of the system delivering for the people in a more democratic way than is the case under first past the post.
So I hope that there will be further reform, although it could be in stages. I accept that the Government may want to see further progress before going all the way towards more proportional systems. If we had something like the alternative vote, it would address many of the concerns on the Labour Benches in the first place, but it would still be inadequate, and were we to have a general election under that system, the case would be made in the future that we need to move either to a top-up or, ideally, to the single transferable vote, which I think would be the best of all systems.
1.36 pm
Lord De Mauley: My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for bringing this subject to our attention. I come at this question as one who thinks that we have messed around with our voting system too much already. I see nothing wrong with the well-tried and trusted system of going to a polling station, taking up that stubby pencil on a string and marking my cross. As the noble Lord, Lord Roberts of Llandudno, said, it makes voting tangible, physical and deeply meaningful. Voting should mean something. It should be special and it should be different.
I am horrified when people are apathetic, and I am horrified when I hear suggestions that voting should be reduced to some kind of electronic game like picking out the name in celebrity “Big Brother”. I find it difficult to accept that we should make contrived gestures to those who cannot be bothered to go and vote at most once a year. In the past such gestures have done little to raise participation or increase respect for the democratic process. They have often spread confusion. Many of us found it deeply depressing that the systems of voting have become so complex and contradictory that in London in 2004, one vote in every 14 was spoiled and lost—that amounted to hundreds of thousands of votes. How shameful. Will the Minister say how the Government plan to tackle that problem?
I was profoundly disturbed to see that, having again ignored repeated warnings in your Lordships’ House, the Government went ahead with poorly devised and poorly administered systems of “make it easy” postal
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What we need now is simplification and a return to some of the clearly understood, harder to defraud methods we had in the past. So my answer to the question, “Should we change the Westminster voting system?” is simple and familiar: no. And my answer to, “Do we want general election voting by text message and the internet?” is the same: no.
Since 1997, Her Majesty’s Government have piloted too many voting systems at European, regional, local and devolved level government. The results have not caused the ecstatic electoral wave that Her Majesty’s Government might have hoped for. Instead, the pilot schemes have highlighted the problems of different voting systems when applied to the British system, rather than any perceived benefits.
As the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, explained much better than I could, Scotland encapsulates the problem. The hotch-potch of new voting systems there has something bizarre about it: the additional member system for MSPs, first past the post for MPs, a party list for MEPs and a single transferable vote for the council—a different system for each level of government. Let us not kid ourselves that legitimacy enters into all this. Why have Her Majesty’s Government created all this confusion? If the answer was to stop the SNP, then a nice mess they made of that, and they still got stuck with the Liberal Democrats as well.
The purpose of this debate is to call attention to the Ministry of Justice review of voting systems that was published in January. My noble friend Lord Norton of Louth well explained the ways in which different PR systems operate. Like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, he helped us to understand the problems of each and drew our attention to the undue influence such systems bring to political parties that have not earned the votes that justify that influence. My noble friend rightly pointed out that the great advantage of first past the post is accountability to voters. First past the post realises three major objectives: direct accountability of representatives to voters, stable government and ease of use by all—most importantly, the voter. Like the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, I say stick with it. Indeed, let us bring it back in some places where it has been lost. What really threatens our voting system is not the system itself but, as my noble friend Lord Norton said, those who abuse it. Again, that requires a bit of courage from the Government to stamp it out. I quote the words of the former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, Sir Alistair Graham:
“We cannot continue to base our electoral process on trust alone when it appears that this trust is plainly abused and risks loss of public confidence in our democratic system”.
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Why have Her Majesty’s Government done so little to combat that threat?
The Government objected to my party’s proposal to implement individual voter registration by national insurance number on the grounds that it would be too costly. But I wonder how many times the cost of testing and reviewing the many new voting systems, and of running farces such as the referendum in the north-east on a regional assembly that was wanted by no one except a single Minister, exceeded the cost of individual voter registration?
We all want to see a better turnout, and I am confident that we will see plenty of action at the polling stations when the day comes to turn out this Government. What matters in raising turnout is not the internet but meaningful, accountable, truthful politics. You can have a thousand Electoral Commission reports but, if parties like Labour and the Liberal Democrats make solemn promises to give the people of this country a referendum on something that profoundly affects their future and then break that promise, it is no wonder that cynicism about politics grows. I say to the Minister: stand up and tell us that the Government and their Liberal Democrat fellow backsliders will give us a referendum. Then he will have plenty of political enthusiasm. He might lose his job, mind you, but he would win more respect than the Prime Minister and Mr Clegg.
We all know the obsession that the Liberal Democrats have with PR. For me—I hope the Minister agrees with this—the letters PR stand not for “proportional representation” but for “permanent representation”—that is, permanent representation in office for the least popular major party. I understand why the least popular party wants that but, bitter though opposition is, I, like the noble Lords, Lord Grocott and Lord Maxton, and my noble friend Lord Norton, vastly prefer a good old first past the post system that delivers stable government, as here or in the United States, to the kind of PR that leaves politicians horsetrading behind closed doors, as in Italy.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno: My Lords, why did the Conservative Party, in choosing its own leader, not go for the first past the post system but go instead for a system of PR?
Lord De Mauley: My Lords, the situation surrounding the election by members of a party of a leader of their party, where a single person is being selected rather than a party, is completely different from that for electing a party to government, where there is a need for accountability, stability and ease of use for voters.
If there is little else in the Government’s handling of voting that I welcome, it is what I take to be their conclusion on PR for Westminster: they will have no truck with it. I hope that the Minister and I at least can agree on that.
1.45 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Hunt of Kings Heath): My Lords, we have heard some truly remarkable speeches in the debate, not least the contribution of the noble Lord,
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I particularly welcome my noble friend Lord Grocott. Remarkably, as has been said, we believe that that was his maiden speech from the Back Benches. Having served with him, I can say that he was a truly magnificent friend and a wonderful Chief Whip. It is good to have him with us today. He managed to make one brief reference to the reform of your Lordships’ House. I suspect, alas, that that will be the first of many comments that he comes to make on that issue. He will find that there is never much distance between us and another debate on Lords reform; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Steel, who is in his place, knows that we are due to have yet another Second Reading tomorrow, this time of the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, on that subject, when perhaps we can continue to have this really rather marvellous conversation.
While I welcome this debate—I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, made some interesting comments—I disagree fundamentally with his comments about the health of our democratic system as is. In doing so, I make it clear that I am not at all complacent. I take what my noble friend Lady Kennedy said about some of the challenges we face in a society that has changed so much from the old certainties over the past 50 years when, as we know, voter turnout has dropped steadily over those years. I do not underestimate the challenges that face all the established parties in terms of enthusiasm and engagement with members and the public, but nor do I think it is just a matter of voting systems. In fact I am doubtful whether voting systems in themselves have much of a part to play in developing the re-engagement of the public that we all wish to see.
The noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, was critical of the Government’s approach to constitutional change and to the development of new voting systems in different parts of the country. I am very proud of what we have achieved in the programme of major constitutional change. It was right to devolve power from Westminster to Scotland and Wales, with the introduction of new voting systems, and the Northern Ireland Assembly. It was right to enshrine fundamental rights in the Human Rights Act. These are all significant advances.
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