Flood Defences
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves(8 years ago)
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Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, perhaps I can deal with the noble Baroness’s comment on what happens in the event that the landlord dies. This is an amendment moved by my colleague on the Front Bench, and if there is a difficulty with it there is no reason at all why the Government cannot come back with an amendment to deal with the thrust of the case laid in the amendments by my Front Bench but which includes a provision for those circumstances. That is what we are here to do: to legislate. These amendments have been proposed but Ministers could take them away and say, “Yes, there is a point here but if we build in a system of exemptions then these particular problems will not arise”.
I can also deal with the question of tenants in arrears, which the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, referred to. As I understand it, under Clause 55—in Part 3, which is headed “Recovering abandoned premises”—the Government’s position is actually to simplify the whole process of dealing with what happens where,
“the unpaid rent condition is met”.
That would cover where people are in arrears and where mortgages are being paid, as I presume that under that provision the landlord would then be entitled to secure possession of his property. That deals with one of the main objections in the contribution of the noble Earl, to which I listened carefully.
Finally, the noble Earl referred to people working at Gatwick Airport who did not necessarily need longer-term tenancies. The amendment says that,
“it is an implied term of such a tenancy that the tenant may terminate the tenancy by giving two months’ written notice to the landlord”.
The tenant is not locked into the agreement at all. The tenant can pull out of the agreement at a moment’s notice simply by saying, “I gave two months’ notice to the landlord”. What we are doing here is protecting tenants by not locking them in, in the sense that they can pull out. We are protecting landlords—or the Government are protecting them—under the provisions of Clause 55 in terms of arrears. In terms of landlords dying, as I said, that could be dealt with by further consideration by the Government.
However, what we are doing more than anything else is giving people who take on tenancies a sense of security as to where they live. From what I hear from tales brought to me by my sons’ friends, who have had different tenancies in London over a period of years, many tenants in London do not know where they are going to be. They do not know whether the landlord will want the property back at the end of 12 months. People are entitled to know that the weight is moving at least a little more in favour of the tenants to give them more rights. We are not granting people long-term security of tenure and indefinite tenancies. We are simply extending it from one to three years to give more balance to the way that tenancies operate in the United Kingdom.
Lord Greaves (LD)
My Lords, I want to put this problem in a slightly wider context. The noble Baroness, Lady Hollis, said that the present system of short tenancies was bad for tenants, bad for landlords and bad for housing. It is also bad for the local community. There are areas in the north of England of cheap, mainly terraced, housing and former council estates. The houses are cheap—as I will explain later—the rents are cheap, and keeping them in a decent condition is a constant struggle for owners, for the council and for people living in them. The result of the system is that there is a high churn—that is the technical word—of tenants. Many people live in a house for only a short period. That is clearly linked to the system of tenancies.
More than 10 years ago, I was chair of the governors of the local primary school. One problem the school had was the children who were living in that kind of property. It is a traditional area of working class owner -occupation. Some 50 or 100 years ago, people bought the houses from the mills that they worked for. When I first knew the area, owner-occupation was 80% or more, but private landlords have moved in very significantly and taken over many of the properties: one-third or more in the period I am talking about. Two-thirds of the children in the school spent most of their primary education there. In that respect, it was a very stable school: children went into the nursery or infants at the age of three or four and left at 11 when they went to secondary school. However, one-third of the children turned over every year. Every year, one-third of the children in each class were new and did not stay long enough to settle, to get a proper education and have the stability of being in the same school for some time.
That is just one example. When I first knew it 40 years ago, this was a pretty stable working class community of extended families. People who bought houses there as young couples had their parents living in the next street and their grandparents round the corner or in the sheltered housing just down the road. That has been broken down. There are lots of reasons for that, but the single most important one is the growth of private sector housing at the bottom end of the market. There are some good landlords. In that area, the best ones are those who live in the street and own one or two other properties in it. Other very good landlords are those who were left a house when their parents died, look after it well and live in the same town. However, there are absentee landlords who operate through housing agents. I have had people ringing up from Bognor Regis demanding to know why, as their councillor, I was not doing something about the rotten tenants in their house who had just done a moonlight flit and taken all the copper. I had to explain that I was not their councillor but that I was concerned about the house. But I also had to ask why they put those tenants in. I said, “Well, you know what the street is like. It is like that. We are desperately trying to hang on to the good residents there, but you know what it is like”. They said, “No, we have never been there, why should we?”. It is that kind of landlord in the private rented sector which is a disaster. That is why I would tend to support this amendment, which is just one of the things that might be done.
Housing and Planning Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves
Lord Campbell-Savours
I will speak to the amendments moved and spoken to by the noble Baronesses, Lady Grender and Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. We all know the reality. The reality is that local authorities will be picking up this responsibility because people will be advised by the homeless charities or whatever to go to the local authority, and the local authority will have to pay. The question is: who should ultimately pay?
It may be that the Government should take upon themselves the right to take a charge on the landlord’s property. I know it would be very controversial—I am sure the lawyers would have a field day—but it would mean that the local authorities would get their money back. I therefore put that as a suggestion, which the Minister might wish to pursue when we get to Report.
Government Amendment 4, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, deals with further offences by the person who committed a first offence. What about people who transfer their interest, so that the further offence is committed by the person to whom the interest has been transferred? Clause 26 deals with the “Prohibition of certain disposals”. Subsection (1) states:
“A person who is subject to a banning order that includes a ban on letting may not make an unauthorised transfer of an estate in land to a prohibited person”.
Subsection (4) describes a “prohibited person” as,
“a person associated with the landlord”,
or , under subsection (4)(f),
“a body corporate in which the landlord has a shareholding or other financial interest”.
Subsection (5) states that an,
“‘associated person’ is to be read in accordance with section 178 of the Housing Act 1996”.
In that section of the 1996 Act, I am told that an “associated person” is someone who is in a marriage to, or is a cohabitee of, or lives with, or is a relative of the landlord, or someone whom the landlord is about to marry, or who is a child of the landlord. Does this include relationships that have developed and are registered overseas? Many landlords will be operating from overseas, so we will have great difficulty identifying who the owner of a particular property is.
This brings me to the second point, which is about,
“a body corporate in which the landlord has a shareholding or has a financial interest”.
What about companies registered outside the United Kingdom? The landlord might be in some tax haven or in some other part of the world, which is perfectly respectable but where we do not have much access to information. I think these bodies need to be more clearly defined in the law, and I wondered whether the noble Baroness might wish to comment on that as a proposition.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, the amendments put forward give rise to a very simple, brutal question—I speak as somebody who is wrestling with trying to produce a council budget at the moment, in very difficult circumstances—and that is: how much is this going to cost local authorities? I have looked at the impact assessment, and basically it talks about the cost to the private housing sector—to the providers of private-landlord accommodation. Unless I have completely missed it, I cannot find any assessment of the cost to the local authorities, who will have the responsibility of doing all this. My first question is: have the Government made an assessment of this and, if so, will they tell us what it is?
The second thing I have been trying to apply my mind to is, in my own authority, how we will deal with this. The point about local authorities, of course, is that they are very different: there are large unitary counties, there are large metropolitan and other unitary urban authorities, and there are small districts. It is the housing authorities as a whole which will have to deal with this, including the small districts. The way the small districts may be able to cope is perhaps very different to that of a large authority that employs a lot more specialist staff, such as solicitors and property management people. I have, therefore, been trying to get my mind round how local authorities will actually make the decisions about applying to the tribunal for a banning order—who will make those decisions, how it will be done, how much it will cost, how much work will go into it—and dealing with appeals, because it is quite clear that there will be a lot of appeals, assuming that a lot of people go through the banning process.
Then there is the second decision. Apart from the people who have gone through the tribunal and automatically go on the database, there is a decision about whether to put the other people who have been convicted of banning offences on the database. How much time and resource will that decision take? Again, there is the question of appeals, which are never cheap for local authorities, and then there is the cost of maintaining the database itself: whether or not that is onerous depends on how many people there are on the database. My second question is really linked to how much the Government think this is going to cost local authorities—any answer to that must be based on an idea of how many cases there are going to be over the period of a year, or whatever it might be. Do the Government have any answer at all to those questions?
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, I am not sure that the Whips’ Office has jurisdiction in these matters. The amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, deals with a local authority’s arrangements for gathering council tax payments and business rates. However, there is another very important form of taxation when discussing these matters, which is taxes raised by the Inland Revenue—that is my explicit interest in Amendment 16, as spoken to by the noble Baroness. We now have a booming rental market in the United Kingdom, with programmes on television promoting buy to rent and organisations issuing leaflets and sending them to people’s homes explaining the benefits of buy-to-rent arrangements. A lot of people should be paying taxes on rental income.
Take a flat in London with two bedrooms, costing £500 a week or £25,000 a year. There will be many examples in London of people gathering in very substantial rents, even on just one property, who through some means or another are simply not declaring it to the Inland Revenue. Any system, including the system promoted by the noble Lord, Lord Flight, would be helpful in itself, but the system proposed by my noble friend, of a mandatory register of all private landlords, would certainly be very helpful in enabling the HMRC— which I keep referring to as the Inland Revenue, being a bit old-fashioned about these matters—to identify those people who should be paying tax on their rental income. The Inland Revenue are missing a trick here, because I suspect that there are probably billions in unpaid taxes on rentals which are not declared to the Revenue.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I have Amendment 33A in this group. I do not want to say too much but give general support to the two amendments spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, which tackle the question of the register from opposite ends but which are mutually complementary, as far as I can see—there are two different purposes but both would be desirable. There are two points in this amendment.
First, it is our view that wherever possible, local authorities should have discretion over what they do, and therefore this question of whether a local register of private landlords should be set up and collected should be a matter for the local authority concerned. For all the reasons put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, and indeed to a degree by the noble Lord, Lord Flight—as well as those in the very interesting contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, which bring in a different dimension altogether—I suspect that most authorities would want to do it, because of the value there would be. However, the real reason we would like to see it is for local housing purposes, to enable a local authority to maintain proper scrutiny over the private rented sector in its area and to more easily take action when action is required. My amendment is a statement against “one size fits all”-ism to some extent, but if the Government were minded to set up the kind of register that the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, is proposing, and it were compulsory for all local authorities, I do not think we would squeal too much.
Secondly, it seems to us that a register ought to pay for itself. An ordinary register would not be terribly expensive to run, and it ought to pay for itself rather than requiring further contributions from local authorities. Those are the two reasons for my amendment.
I listened carefully to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Flight. I am not sure that the council tax register as such would be a particularly efficient way to do this, since as I understand it, people only really register for council tax in the sort of sense he is talking about when they are new residents in a property. Over a period of time, they might well provide the information he wants, but in the short run I do not think they would, because people simply pay the bills they get each year rather than filling a form in to register again afresh each year. No doubt these are details which could be discussed.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves(13 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours
I shall read from a report of the Constitution Committee of this House, to which I know the noble Lord will wish to defer, although he may wish to do so on his feet. It unanimously said that in general,
“it is a matter of principle that proposals for major constitutional reform”—
which is what this is; remember the Great Reform Act 1832—
“should be subject to prior public consultation and pre-legislative scrutiny. We recognise that there may exceptionally be good reasons for departing from this principle, but the perils of doing so are well illustrated in the present Bill”.
The case for proceeding rapidly with one part of this Bill is far stronger than the other. That is why I am on my feet tonight. Let me make it absolutely clear that I object, as a Member of this House, to the way in which this Bill is being driven through Parliament when it has huge constitutional significance. Everybody, including all the officers of the House who are probably worried about what is going on in the Chamber, should be well aware of that.
I now turn to the amendment, which is very interesting. It was born not in my mind but that of our very brilliant Jessica, who has been a considerable help in providing research support to a number of us during the course of the Bill. I shall refer to it as the Jessica amendment. It has been adopted by me because it gives me the opportunity to help the Liberal Democrats. I am glad to see that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, is in his place because he may wish to intervene. I was thinking of him specifically when the amendment was tabled.
Lord Greaves
Considering the quality of debate I have listened to in the past hour and a half, the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, might want to go home and go to bed.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I am in all in favour of the noble Lord going home to bed. All the Government need to do is accept that this is a constitutional Bill and proceed on that basis. They have not done that, so I find myself having to move amendments of this nature.
It gives me the opportunity to argue the case for a recalibration or readjustment in the relationship between the two elements in the coalition. The relationship at the moment is unbalanced; it is one-sided. In questions on the Statement on banking yesterday, the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, drew attention to the way in which the arrangement in the coalition agreement is unbalanced and favours the Conservative element.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Greaves(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
This is the first time that I have spoken on the Bill. I apologise that I did not speak at Second Reading and I do not expect to speak very often in Committee, which will please my noble friends.
I rise to speak because the debate is about the supplementary vote, which I consider to be an awful voting system. I want to explain why. Before I do, however, in response to the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, I should explain that it is not possible under AV for a candidate who gets no first preference votes to be elected. It is possible, but highly unlikely, under STV in a multimember seat; it is not possible under AV. That is a red herring.
I normally expect the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, to speak a great deal of sense and to put forward sensible proposals, even when I am not allowed to support them. Nevertheless, I am astonished that he thinks that the supplementary vote is a good system. However, as he said, he was in at the genesis of the system, which was put together at a dinner party when people were talking around the table. It was something like that, anyway; it is a nice story. The noble Lord also said that it is tried and tested—as, indeed, it is—and that many people seek to rubbish it. That may be because it is a rubbish system. It is inefficient—I shall explain why in a moment—and it results in people being cheated. They think that they are voting and expect their vote to be counted, but it is not counted.
As the noble Lord said, the system is used in 12 mayoral elections for councils and for the election of the Mayor of London, so there is, indeed, a great deal of experience. However, on the evidence that we have, it is not particularly beneficial to any of the political parties. It often seems beneficial to candidates of weird and wonderful varieties but, at the moment, of the 12 mayors, three are Labour, two are Conservative, two are Liberal Democrat, four are independent and one is an English Democrat. People ought to at least ask questions about any system that allows the election of an English Democrat, as the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, against AV included the suggestion that that system might lead to influence for BNP voters.
Lord Campbell-Savours
On that point, will the noble Lord confirm that in the cases that he referred to the successful candidates would all have been elected under first past the post as well?
Lord Greaves
They would, yes. However, whether they would have stood and whether it would have resulted in their election is a different matter altogether. It may be that the problem is with elected mayors and not with the system used to elect them. However, we will have that discussion under the localism Bill when we come to it. Indeed, at least five of the existing elected mayors were elected with over 50 per cent of first preferences, so whatever electoral system you have makes no difference whatsoever.
I think that you have to look at the outcomes, but my objections and, I think, those of the Liberal Democrats to the supplementary vote are not based on whether it is good for Liberal Democrats. The noble Lord was seductive in trying to find an electoral system that would be best for us, but that is not how we look at election systems. It is certainly not how I look at election systems. We look at election systems as a matter of principle.
Lord Greaves
That is certainly how I look at election systems. We have here a system that is bad in principle but also shown in practice to be defective. I shall refer to three or four actual elections to explain what happened.
At the last ordinary election in Bedford—we have had a by-election since then—the total number of votes cast was 43,525. The top two candidates, who, under the supplementary vote system, as the noble Lord accurately described, go through to the final round, got 26,676. That means that the first preferences of other candidates amounted to 16,849. Of those, only 6,335 transferred to one of the two candidates who remained in the final round. Therefore, of the second preference votes, 10,514 could not transfer—62.4 per cent of the second votes did not transfer. Some of them may have been spoiled, but I cannot get that information. Nearly a quarter of the total—24.2 per cent—voted for candidates in the second column, for their second preference, but their second preference was thrown away without being counted. I believe that those voters were being cheated of what the system pretends that they can do, which is to cast a first preference and then cast a second preference.
Lord Campbell-Savours
On that matter, again, if the noble Lord is comparing the system with AV and alluding to what he might regard as wasted votes, or unused votes, is it not true that under the system in the Bill a bottom-placed candidate could take a top-placed candidate over the 50 per cent limit? Therefore, every additional preference for all the other candidates would be unused under the Government’s proposed system. You would have a whole ballot paper wiped out on the basis of the simple transfer of the bottom eliminated candidate taking the first-placed candidate over 50 per cent. That is an outrageous waste of votes. If the noble Lord’s case is based on wasted votes, there are far more votes wasted under AV when you start doing research into election results.
Lord Greaves
I do not want to talk about AV; I want to talk about the supplementary vote. However, the main votes wasted under AV are where people do not express any further preferences and therefore that vote is not transferable, but that is their decision. It is their decision not to express a further preference after they have decided whom they want to vote for down to however far they vote. Under this system, people very clearly express a preference and that preference is discarded. In Bedford in 2007, as I said, it was a quarter of the vote.
In Mansfield in 2007, where the two top candidates got a much larger proportion of the total vote, it was still the case that, of those eliminated on the second count, 2,350 transferred and 3,853 did not transfer. Of those, 1,199 were void as unmarked or for reasons of uncertainty. It may be, of course, that people did not want to express a second preference, but one of the problems of the supplementary vote is that it leads to a much higher proportion of votes being void because they are not filled in accurately. For example, there are many people who vote for the same candidate in both columns. It is perfectly easy to do that, but you cannot do it under the alternative vote system, only under the supplementary vote system. It is clear that that is what people did.
Lord Greaves
The noble Lord will have plenty of opportunities to respond. However, I will give way.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I just want to correct the noble Lord. The reason why that happened in the first mayoral elections in London was that the civil servants meddled with the drafting of the ballot paper that some of us had proposed to the Government. Thanks to that meddling, people ended up misunderstanding how to use their votes in the first London elections. Following that mistake, there was an argument in the House of Commons and the ballot paper was corrected. In the subsequent elections, the problem did not arise.
Lord Greaves
The problem did not arise to the same extent. I do not have the figures for the London mayoral elections, although those are available—for most counts, no figures are issued to show exactly why people’s votes were rejected.
In the 2007 Mansfield mayoral elections, 892 votes were rejected at the first count. At 3 per cent of the total, that is significantly higher than the normal number of rejected ballot papers in an election. Of those 892 ballot papers, 483 were rejected because the person had voted for more than one candidate in the first column. Such errors are to be expected when people are told only, “You’ve got two votes—you vote for one person as your first preference and one person as your second preference”. It is not surprising that a significant number of people vote twice in the first column. Only an inefficient voting system encourages people to make mistakes like that.
Lord Campbell-Savours
These points should be answered because this is a debate on the technical working of the system. Research into AV in Australia found that the requirement to number the candidates meant that people simply numbered “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, “5”, “6”, “7” and so on down the ballot paper, without even thinking of the candidates involved. That is how people thought that they had to use the system, so there are equally problems with AV over how people understand the ballot paper.
Lord Greaves
I am talking about the supplementary vote and trying to point out why that is a bad system. However, in any long ballot paper with lots of candidates, people near the top of the ballot paper always do better than people near the bottom. That happens with multiseat elections under the first-past-the-post system, for example. If noble Lords have ideas on how to counter that issue—there are several ideas around—perhaps they can put them forward, but that is not what we are talking about today.
In the 2010 Watford mayoral election—which was won by a Liberal Democrat, so I am not making a party-political point about rejected votes, which might have been against the Liberal Democrat candidate—the number of eliminated ballot papers was 12,202. Of those, the number of valid ballot papers was only 5,381, which is less than half.
The most ludicrous example of all comes from the most recent mayoral election in Torbay in 2005—I do not think that there has been another election since—where the 14 candidates, which I agree is an extreme example, included a Conservative, a Liberal Democrat, a Labour candidate and 11 independents. The Conservative was elected on the second count after the first preferences were added to those few second preferences that transferred to the top two candidates, with a grand total of 28.9 per cent of the vote. Surely that is not a particularly efficient electoral system. The 9,094 first-preference votes for the top two candidates—who were Conservative and Liberal Democrat—accounted for 37.6 per cent of the vote. The other candidates got 15,076 first-preference votes, which is 62.4 per cent of the vote, but only 3,199 of those 15,000-odd votes—that is, 21 per cent—could be transferred. Almost half—49 per cent—of all second preferences votes did not count because they were not transferred, although they accounted for nearly 79 per cent of second preferences. I am not complaining about the fact that the Conservative was elected—the Conservative might have been elected under AV—but what a hopeless voting system to end up with a result like that.
The supplementary vote results in people being cheated out of their second preferences. SV is an inefficient and unnecessary system that was invented for party-political reasons by the Labour Party, which imposed it on the mayoral elections. The supplementary vote is a very bad system that should be rejected.
Lord Campbell-Savours
My Lords, this clause, establishing the referendum, sets the question. This is probably my last intervention on this part of the Bill. Although I believe in electoral reform and the need for a referendum, I do not believe in this referendum because it sets the wrong question. The Bill seeks approval for a system that I believe is a nonsense.
Now, I almost want to act as a sweep and to place on record a summary of my objections to this referendum and the question being asked. I believe that the core of my objections will surface during the television campaign against the referendum question. I object on the basis that this may well be our last opportunity for a generation to put electoral reform on the agenda. If the public say no, it will be almost impossible to resurrect the electoral reform debate, so we have to get the system right.
The opponents of electoral reform will sell AV as the product of a panic-driven stitch-up between the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives in the coalition, the intention being to create a coalition. That will not fool the public. The Conservative acceptance of AV as part of the coalition deal will be seen as a cynical ploy when it comes out during the TV campaign that almost the entire Conservative Party, both inside and outside Parliament, is opposed to the AV system on offer and, to some extent, proportional representation altogether.
The coalition is taking the issue of electoral reform to the electorate at a time when there is great political and economic uncertainty. Divisions within the coalition, which will deepen, will inevitably lead to calls for strong governance. Curiously, I believe that coalitions, which I actually favour, are capable of strong government, but coalitions built on the shifting sands of economic uncertainty and the consequential public expenditure reductions are bound to lead to division and the public will inevitably identify division within the coalition with coalition Governments and, sadly, with electoral reform. This is the wrong time to be asking this question, particularly in a referendum that proposes such a controversial system.
The Liberal Democrats, in particular, will have major difficulties in the campaign in squaring their historic position. How do they answer the question: “Do you really believe in the system on offer?”. The answer has to be no. If they answer that this is the best on offer, the public will simply turn away. The truth is that the only people who have advocated this system are members of the Labour Party and, even in the Labour Party, they are a minority. Furthermore, we are opposed to this Bill because of the stitch-up on seats, which many Members find objectionable.
Then we have the false prospectus. Many people believe that they are being offered the full Australian classic AV system, but that is not so. They are getting what is being called “a miserable little compromise”. We then have those who, either through ignorance or recognition of the inherent weaknesses in multioptional, preferential AV, use arguments to support AV and to justify the system such as, “It works like the London mayoral voting system”. That is just a dishonest argument, but we shall hear it in the campaign. It will be fed on the doorstep by proponents of this AV system. They will say that it is like the system used in the London mayoral election. I regard that as fundamentally dishonest.
I also have a fundamental objection to a system that gives equal weight to voters’ least favoured preferences and the first preference votes of other voters. How can the seventh preference of a voter in a seven-candidate election be as valid as the first preference of another voter? It is a nonsense.
Equally, I deplore the myth being peddled that AV avoids tactical voting. That is simply untrue. Under the heading, “Factors determining the results in an AV election”, the Constitution Society stated in its brief on AV:
“In order to maximise the chances of a preferred candidate, a voter must rank the other candidates in an optimum order, taking account of past results and polling information. (This is a potentially complex exercise which most voters will not attempt themselves: in Australia, the Party organisations publish lists instructing their supporters how to rank the candidates for maximum advantage.)”.
In other words, AV provides for tactical voting. I have had some interesting conversations over this past weekend with people in Scotland. I can tell the Committee that the Labour Party, my own party, used tactical voting techniques—and we say it openly in Scotland—during the local authority elections in Scotland. It accepts it as part of the new arrangements that exist while that system is in operation.
Then we have leapfrogging. Under the AV system proposed, third-placed and fourth-placed candidates on the first count can break through and win seats on subsequent counts. This is particularly likely to happen in places such as Scotland, where you have a number of parties seriously contesting what could turn out to be tightly fought marginal parliamentary constituencies. I object most strongly to a system where the sequence in which candidates are eliminated can disproportionately influence who wins an election. Let us take the example of a seat where the top candidate on the first count wins 45 per cent or 46 per cent of the vote. If the bottom candidate, the BNP, wins, say, 8 per cent or 10 per cent of the vote on the first count and 50 per cent of the BNP second preferences transfer to the top candidate, the top candidate wins. The BNP will have determined the result because, following elimination of the bottom candidate and the transfer of eliminated candidates’ second preferences, the top candidate has more than 50 per cent and wins. What is most significant about that kind of result, in that count, is that all other additional preferences for all other candidates are ignored, which is the point that I was making earlier to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves.
Lord Greaves
Does the noble Lord not agree that all single-member constituency contests are majoritarian contests because the final result is a contest between the person who wins and either one other candidate or a number of other candidates? Therefore, in a majoritarian contest in a single-member seat, at the final count there are always people who have voted for the successful candidate and people who have voted for an unsuccessful candidate or candidates. That is inherent in a single-member majoritarian system. The important thing is that those votes remain in the system at the end, unlike in the supplementary vote system, which the noble Lord espouses, where votes are simply cast aside and not even included in the final count.
Lord Campbell-Savours
The noble Lord is asking me to reopen the debate that we had on the Floor in a series of interventions, when I answered that point specifically. Before Report, we might be able to do more work on this; we might be able to show that there is a greater loss under the AV system. Perhaps he could ask his researcher to have a look at some of the results in Scotland that I am going to refer to.
Lord Greaves
Does the noble Lord accept that I do all my own research, as I am a poor, pauper Peer?
Lord Greaves
The noble Lord is now going back to the supplementary vote. The whole purport of what I said earlier about the supplementary vote is that not all the second preferences of those who voted for other candidates are transferred to the top two candidates. I provided a number of statistics showing that usually a clear majority—sometimes an overwhelming majority—of such votes are not transferred to the top two. That is what is wrong with the supplementary vote. If, in exercising their preferences under the alternative vote, people choose at any stage not to choose between remaining candidates, that is entirely their right. However, if people exercise their right to record a second preference, all such votes should remain in the count to the very end.
Lord Campbell-Savours
However, we are measuring the efficacy of the system. We want the system to work. We want it to make a difference in results. If we are to change to a system in which people simply do not use their additional preferences, why change the system? The advantage of the supplementary vote is that people would use their second preferences. That is what has happened in the mayoral elections, as the noble Lord will know from having seen the data.
In the by-election for the Doon Valley ward of East Ayrshire Council, 52 per cent did not use their second preference vote, 68 per cent did not use their third preference vote, 77 per cent did not use their fourth preference vote and 81 per cent did not use their fifth.
Lord Campbell-Savours
Being a Welshman, I do not know how to pronounce these names. However, 43 per cent of second preferences, 63 per cent of third preferences, 74 per cent of fourth preferences and 77 per cent of fifth preferences were not used. That is before we get into the big “plumping” campaigns that will be imported from Australia. The results indicate massive abstentions on additional preferences. What are the implications of AV for general elections?
Lord Greaves
Will the noble Lord tell us to what extent he is cherry-picking the results? Would the same sort of figures be produced if he took all 35 council by-elections in Scotland into account?
Lord Campbell-Savours
When I asked Professor Curtice for all the results that could be identified, he said that, because of the distinction between manual and electronic counting, we can identify only six results that provide us with the data. If I can secure any more, I will make sure that I make them available to the noble Lord.
The candidates who will be most under threat at the next election under AV will be the Conservatives. Let there be no doubt at all about that. The Conservatives will probably run a fairly straight-forward campaign as they normally do, but the Liberal Democrats will not. In council leaflets being put out by focus groups in parts of the United Kingdom, we are already seeing derogatory references to people in the coalition and to its policies. That is only the start. By the time that we get to the elections next year, we will see some pretty scurrilous literature coming out of the Liberal Democrats about what is going on nationally within the coalition. The Liberal Democrats will put out leaflets claiming credit for the more progressive coalition policies and advising electors to vote tactically, which they will.
The Liberal Democrats election guru—I see the noble Lord, Lord Rennard in his place—cannot stand up now and deny that they will use the AV system tactically in the way that I am suggesting, despite the fact that advocates of the AV component in the Bill say that people will not vote tactically when it is clear that they will be advised to do so. The Liberal Democrats objective will be to unseat Conservatives wherever possible by advising the electorate to use their additional preferences on outsider no-hope candidates. In seats where Labour has been marginalised, they will desperately set out to woo Labour additional preferences by disassociating themselves from their coalition partners. All I can do is warn the Conservatives in advance to watch their backs. I cannot understand why Conservative Peers are tolerating this nonsense. Liberal Democrat campaigns are unlikely to work—
Lord Greaves
I promise that this is the last time that I will intervene—I am just getting the noble Lord back for his previous interventions on me—but I am not at all sure what right and wrongs of a particular electoral system have to do with all this tittle-tattle about political campaigning at local level.
Lord Campbell-Savours
I think that there is a direct connection because the coalition is comprised of two elements, one of which—the Conservative element—is almost completely hostile to the AV system. All that I am pointing out in advance is the danger of allowing this system to slip through on the back of a referendum. I do not think that the referendum will be won, but it may be won and the Conservatives will have it historically around their necks.
I remind the House and colleagues that the three dirtiest campaigns that I have witnessed in my political life were in the Chester-le-Street by-election, the Manchester Exchange by-election and the Bermondsey by-election. It may well be that many Members here today worked in those campaigns. Those three by-elections had one thing in common: the Liberals were in contention, believed that they could win and were absolutely determined to do so. The Lib Dems believe that they can break through on the back of—