Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayman and Lord Lipsey

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Lords Chamber

[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.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayman and Lord Lipsey

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)]

Because the point that the noble Lord is making is quite complicated, it would be simpler if I put the question first and then we had contributions after that.

[Lord Lipsey]

I beg to move.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Hayman and Lord Lipsey

Monday 17th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Speaker (Baroness Hayman)]

I have to inform the Committee that if Amendment 59 is agreed to, I cannot call Amendments 60 to 63ZA for reasons of pre-emption.

[Lord Lipsey]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 60, which is a companion amendment to that moved by the noble Lord, Lord Soley. Before I go into the substance of the argument, perhaps I could make an offer—I must say that this is without any permission from my Front Bench—to the party opposite. We will happily stop accusing you of gerrymandering if you stop accusing us of filibustering. I heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Soley. It was all material and to the point. If I was filibustering, I would have been extraordinarily grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Garel-Jones, who unfortunately is not still in his place—I expect he thinks that he has made his point—for prolonging the debate. Yet I was not grateful for it because it seemed to do what we all want to avoid doing: to turn this into a party political argy-bargy instead of being, as it should be, a proper scrutiny of the Bill before this House of Parliament.

In the interests of proceeding reasonably rapidly, I shall not go over again the arguments that my noble friend Lord Soley put so well for an independent look at this. My remarks are devoted more to the case for that being done by a Speaker’s Conference. A range of views have been expressed on the substantive issues of whether we should stick with 650—my conservative noble and learned friend Lord Falconer has strongly argued that case; or whether we should reduce the number—the reductionists include the noble Lord, Lord Maples, and my noble friend Lord Rooker; or should, like me, sit on the fence but say that there are arguments against a reduction. I am bound to say that I did not find the Minister’s response to the earlier debate terribly convincing on why the number should be 650. He did not say the figure was plucked out of the air because he is too shrewd an operator to do so, but it did not sound very different from being plucked out of the air to me. I am therefore taking as made the case for independent inquiry, and I will detain the House only to make the case that that should be by a Speaker’s Conference and not, for example, by a royal commission, an independent inquiry headed by a judge or whatever.

The main reason that I think it should be by a Speaker’s Conference is that this is essentially a matter for parliamentarians. I say “parliamentarians” because I should want this House to be represented on any such Speaker’s Conference. This is not because it is Members of another place who are going to be most adversely affected by what is being proposed. That is an issue—they have trade union rights, if you like—but that is not a good reason why they should be involved. The first reason that they should be involved is that they are the most knowledgeable about the issues involved. They may not all agree, but they have the experience of representing their constituents and existing in the House of Commons to weigh the arguments. There are arguments for a reduction; there is no doubt about it. It is difficult, for example, to get to speak in a debate in the Commons now. It is important that they should be weighing those arguments with the issue of which they have more knowledge than anybody else, which is whether the workload can be coped with by the average MP with the current level of staffing or even an increased level of staffing. They would bring that wisdom to bear, and we need it.

The second reason for thinking that a Speaker’s Conference is right is that however wise the verdict, if it does not attract political consensus, it will not be right and it will not necessarily stick. It is important that we achieve such a consensus, and it is important that all parties are agreed on it. A Speaker’s Conference could achieve this. The coalition should be very sympathetic to this line of argument because the figure we have came about not because either one of the two parties involved was committed to it but because they sat down together and this was the figure they came up with. Widening the consensus to embrace all parties would seem to be an argument that should appeal to the coalition. It seems to me that those are the two fundamental cases for a Speaker’s Conference.