Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker]

This is the first amendment I have moved on this Bill this year, for those who keep count of our proceedings. I kept clear of amendments relating to Part 2 of the Bill. I will not be long in speaking to this amendment. Neither the Electoral Commission nor anyone else, for that matter, has ever carried out an exercise across the United Kingdom to explain officially the mechanics of voting systems, whatever they may be. In this case, they are the alternative vote as proposed in the Bill and first past the post.

The Electoral Commission might decide to explain about the alternative vote and might need to indicate that there are at least three alternative vote systems, none of which is proportional. It might decide that it has to counteract the media referring to the alternative vote inaccurately—as, indeed, we in this House have agreed that the Deputy Prime Minister did when referring to it as a system guaranteeing that MPs would be elected by 50 per cent of the electorate, which of course is not what will happen under AV in the Bill. That simply cannot happen in every case.

It is true that I tabled this amendment a long time ago and that a lot of water has gone under the bridge. My noble friend Lord Lipsey has two amendments of substance in this group. My simple view is that it should not be left to the complete discretion of the Electoral Commission as to whether or what information it puts into the public domain. There should be some kind of constraint in the Bill, hence the modesty of my amendment and, indeed, the amendments of substance which my noble friend has tabled. He will go into those in much greater detail than I intend to do. I intend to be brief.

As I have said, I wanted to raise the issue about the discretion of the Electoral Commission over this enterprise which, I repeat, no official body has ever undertaken in the United Kingdom. It is fraught with some difficulty and, in some ways, excitement, as the project has never been undertaken. However, it is one where we in Parliament should say that the Bill should have a little more detail, rather than simply leaving it to whatever steps the commission might think are appropriate or inappropriate. I beg to move.

[The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)]

I have to inform the Committee that if this amendment is agreed to, I cannot call Amendment 109 by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 110ZZA and 110ZZB, which are grouped with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for the purposes of this debate. Quite recently, although it actually feels like months ago, these matters came up at a reasonably early stage of the Committee, when the Minister jumped to his feet and said that they fell much more naturally to being discussed under Schedule 1 to the Bill. I do not know whether the Minister—he is not with us this afternoon—hoped then that by the time we got around to Schedule 1, we would have forgotten all about them and let them go. As the Committee knows, on this Bill we are, quite rightly, grinding extremely fine so here they are again.

The amendments concern the steps that the Electoral Commission must take to get the electorate informed. Perhaps I might recap on a debate that we were having last night. The background to this is the very wide lack of understanding of the alternatives to be put before the British people in the referendum, whenever that may come. I illustrate this from a poll with a large sample taken by YouGov in September. It asked people whether they had heard of AV and, if so, whether they knew what it meant. To summarise, one-third said that they had heard of AV and had some idea of what it meant. They did not define what “some idea” meant and, if they were examined further, we might find that that was a rather optimistic interpretation of their true state of knowledge. One-third had heard of AV but had no idea of what it meant. One-third had not heard of AV; they also had no idea of what it meant, which is perhaps not surprising since they had never heard of it. That is a long way from where we would want to be when we get around to the referendum.

I am not using this to make a speech for AV or against it. My position is perfectly well known. I simply make the point that the better informed those participating in this referendum are, when it comes about, the more the result will have legitimacy and stability, because we will be able to have confidence that the people really have reached the verdict they wish to reach, on reflection, and that chance factors have not simply swayed it. This is not the job of the Electoral Commission only; it is the job of the campaign organisations on both sides, of our national media—I thought I might get a laugh for that—of politicians and of those who are not political in the party sense but who are interested in politics.

These are great issues for our future as a democracy and all those have a role to play, but the Electoral Commission has a role. It has been created to play a role and it is right that Parliament should give it some specific guidance on the minimum activity which we expect it to undertake in playing that role. If the referendum were to go ahead on 5 May—and I know there are those in this Committee and the government Front Benches who support that—there will be only some 10 weeks between the passage of the legislation and the day when the people deliver their verdict.

My two amendments are straightforward. First, they ask that the Electoral Commission prepares a leaflet that summarises the meaning of the question before people and what its implications would be. It summarises, in an impartial way—because the Electoral Commission owes its whole role to its impartiality—the arguments for and against AV and for and against first past the post, so that any elector wishing to study the matter can see a short summary of the arguments. That is then distributed to every household in the country so that everybody gets their chance to read it. A fairly straightforward proposition, you would think.

The second amendment is slightly tongue in cheek and says that the leaflet should be examined by the Plain English Campaign. Actually, from my own experience as a journalist on the Economist, I think that an Economist journalist would be an alternative because these are both groups of people who are very used to making sure that the language in which complicated ideas are expressed in order to communicate is clear. It is a serious purpose behind a tongue-in-cheek amendment because the number of people who have a natural grasp of voting systems is quite small, as I have shown. The number of people who understand the issues involved on voting reform is also quite small. To produce language which is generally comprehensible is quite complicated.

I know the Electoral Commission tries hard to get its language right. Indeed, it is contemplating producing a consultative document on a public information booklet—not exactly a leaflet but a booklet on the referendum. I have not studied it in detail but it is the kind of thing which could be done with an examination not just for the content but for the clarity of the language in which it is expressed.

It is perfectly true that there is this draft booklet; it is true that the Electoral Commission is of course planning information activities, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. But we, as parliamentarians, have a right to expect certain things of the Electoral Commission and to lay down in the Bill that it must perform certain functions. This is all going to be done in a terrific rush, and the commission may get into some sort of difficulty, as its resources are not very great for the task ahead of it, so something has to be dumped. If it is in the Bill, the thing that is dumped cannot be the exercise it mounts to make sure that the public are properly informed. In other words, it is right that the intention of the commission be underlined by Parliament and by provisions of the kind that I propose in this amendment, which is a companion amendment to the wider amendment so ably moved by my noble friend Lord Rooker.