Elections Bill

Debate between Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle and Lord Kerslake

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Report stage
Wednesday 6th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerslake (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment and give it my full support. We did much of the heavy lifting on this issue in Committee, so I will keep my comments to four points.

First, contrary to the original assertion, this is not in the 2019 manifesto, and it cannot be regarded as a manifesto commitment. That is in contrast to the issue of voter ID, which was in the manifesto and my opinion was that it would be inappropriate to knock it out completely, even though I personally might have liked to. This is different, and I think the Lords is fully entitled to remove it from the Bill.

Secondly, I refer to the point made by others that this has had no meaningful consultation. In Committee we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, exactly how the mayors themselves feel about this; they are pretty angry about what is going on here. I have lost count of the number of people who did not know that this was happening. This is not the way to make major constitutional change. Let us be clear about it: it affects every voter in this country. There was no consultation on this, in contrast to the painstaking consultation that went on when the supplementary vote was established for the London mayor. It is important that we do not take these cavalier decisions without proper consultation. The key point is that this should not be part of the Bill.

Others have already touched on my third point. Whatever your view is on proportional representation for elections—this is not about that issue, as I made clear in Committee—there is a good case for supplementary votes in mayoral elections and those for police and crime commissioners. I say this because it is much more likely to give the successful candidate what I would call a majority mandate. They will, on the whole and in almost every circumstance, have more than 50% of first or second votes. That is crucial for roles that carry enormous power and responsibility for large amounts of resources. It is quite different from the debate you have about local or central elections; it makes sense for mayoral elections, and we should hold to the current system, which was introduced for good reason.

My fourth point is that the issue of difficulties with the supplementary vote system are very limited, and the case has not been made. As has already been said, in so far as there are issues with the last mayoral elections, the predominant issues were about the number of candidates and the design of the form. You do not change your entire electoral system on the strength of a badly designed form. To put it bluntly, this change is not with the flow of this Bill; it was introduced late into the Bill, it has not had proper consultation and we should remove it. If the Government want to pursue this, they should bring it forward in subsequent legislation.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I have attached my name to the amendment that Clause 12 not stand part of the Bill. I will speak briefly to it. It is a great pleasure to follow the previous three speakers, who have already covered most of the ground.

The noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, made a short assertion about this not being part of the Conservative manifesto in 2019. It is worth reading his wonderful tour de force through the Conservative manifesto from our Committee debate because it sets it out in chapter and verse. To match that, I will read out one sentence from the PACAC report:

“Regardless of the benefits or disadvantages of the changes made by the Bill to the electoral system for those offices, the manner in which the proposed legislative change was brought about is unsatisfactory. Making changes such as this after the Bill has been introduced and debated at Second Reading is disrespectful to the House.”


That was the independent conclusion about the process in the other place. It was not a manifesto commitment. Independent oversight suggests that the way in which it was done was not appropriate.

My noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb spoke for us in Committee on this point. It is also worth saying that the Government set great store by the 2011 referendum in suggesting that people somehow or other voted for first past the post. That was 11 years ago. I speak to a lot of voters who are used to voting for whom they see as the second worst candidate to stop the worst candidate getting in under first past the post. There were only two choices on the ballot paper in the 2011 referendum—neither was proportional representation. “#AVisnotPR” sums it up nicely. We really do not have any idea of the people’s view as to what our voting system should be. We should have a people’s constitutional convention. If the public were polled and asked, “Do you think our politics are broken?”, I think you would find a massive consensus. My answer to how we find a way forward is to go to the people and work out what they want. It is clear that what the Government have put before us in Clause 12 has no democratic legitimacy. Your Lordships’ House should remove it.