Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, Amendment 5, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Boateng, seeks to remove subsection (1) from Clause 4 and returns us to our debate in Committee on whether it is appropriate to combine the referendum with other voting: in this case, local authority elections in England, a local referendum in England or a mayoral election in England. I confess that I am currently not sure how I would choose to vote in the referendum. In many ways, I would like more time to consider the issues and balance up my feeling that the current system is probably not that fair with my unwillingness to get that worked up about it. Probably, therefore, I should just let the status quo ride, given that I am not that fussed about the change, but I need to think about that.

That is one basic, straightforward argument for not having this on 5 May, but we have had that debate already. There are specific problems with combining the poll with other elections that come down to two principal things—confusion in the campaign and confusion at the ballot box. Taking the first, I put a scenario to your Lordships, many of whom are familiar with political campaigning and the process on the ground—for many of us, that is partly how we got here. We are dependent these days on a large number of volunteers delivering leaflets, knocking on doors, phoning people up, tweeting and doing whatever else we do in modern campaigning and being, by necessity, partisan about how they do it when they are fighting things like local government elections here in England.

All this activity is geared towards polling day, when electors are to be turned out in one’s cause behind the candidate of one’s choice. I am concerned as to how, if there is a referendum on the same day as all that activity, political activists on the ground can simultaneously campaign on one or the other side of a very important question about how MPs get into the House of Commons and for their political party. They will be simultaneously what we might describe as comrades and opponents. It is very difficult to understand how that will work in practice.

I know that he is not in his place, but the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, told us that he does not pay too much attention to Members on this side of your Lordships’ House trying to be helpful to the Liberal Democrats. I do not believe that this combination is at all in the interests of the Liberal Democrats. Among political activists, those volunteers on the ground who one would expect by and large to do a lot of the work in a referendum campaign, I do not believe there will be so many in the Conservative ranks or massive numbers in the Labour ranks—I do not believe that the majority of Labour activists will be campaigning for a yes vote. That will leave the Liberal Democrat activist base having to carry a substantial part of the workload in the yes camp in an AV referendum, and it will simultaneously have to defend actions that I will not go into but which have proved slightly controversial in their association with this coalition Government. I do not think, therefore, that this gives this question the chance to be properly debated and put to the country, because I do not think we will have a sufficiently resourced and balanced set of campaigns on both sides. Thinking through the practical implications, noble Lords, with their understanding of how elections and referendum campaigns work, will see that this is not very practical.

My noble friend Lord Bach of Lutterworth raised the Leicester mayoral election on 5 May. The same issues will arise there—this is not just about trying to combine local council elections on the same day as the referendum. Mayoral candidates might be asked to take a position on the referendum, and their political parties feel that it is appropriate to put on leaflets what their position is on the referendum question. We then get into complicated questions as to how election expenses are accounted for on those leaflets. Should a mayoral candidate be endorsed, we could continue to go on and on about the consequentials, and that is not the order of the day.

There is a fundamental danger that the referendum will be ignored by electors in terms of thinking about it, but they will participate in the end because they will turn out to the poll, the paper will be given to them and they will feel that it is their duty to vote. They will not have had the opportunity to give the proper consideration that this question deserves. Like me, at the moment, they are probably pretty much undecided, although they might have a bit of a gut feeling about which way they will go, and they need more time to think about it.

The second question is confusion for electors in the ballot box itself. Most of us are not used to referenda. I voted in the referendum—no, I did not; I was not old enough to vote in the referendum for membership of the European Union, and I do not think that a referendum question has been put to me since in any of the areas where I have lived, so I have never taken part in a referendum and I am not used to that scenario. It is probably straightforward enough to work out how the mechanism of the ballot paper works, but I am familiar with the scenario of being given quite a few ballot papers on polling day.

I live in a wonderful area of Dorset where we have both a borough council and a county council, and I have lived in areas where I have served on a town council. On 5 May, in parts of the constituency in Dorset that I used to represent—Purbeck—there will be town council elections and district council elections. I do not think that there will be any local referendum questions, but I would not put it beyond the wit of the people of Swanage to want to have a referendum on whether or not they want a free school in the town, because there are some people campaigning for that, so they might already have been given a third ballot paper. To add a fourth starts to create logistical challenges for the people who are administering the elections. How many ballot boxes do you need? Should you separate them off at the point of the votes being cast? In that case, you will need four in each of the polling stations. Should you go for one ballot box and then separate them all out, with all the potential for error that goes with that? Doing this creates all sorts of logistical problems for running an election and, most importantly, it has the potential to confuse electors with all these different pieces of paper that they will have to express their opinion with.

Clearly, this referendum should go ahead. It is very important that the question should be properly debated, with a well informed campaign. I do not believe that we can have that well informed campaign by 5 May. Thanks to the excellent work of my noble friend Lord Rooker, we now have the possibility of being able to have it between now and 31 October, with a whole set of amendments voted on by this House to make that feasible. I encourage the House to say that as a matter of principle it is too confusing to combine the polls. I beg to move.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth. The issue at the referendum is simply too important for it to be right to confuse it with all the other campaigning issues that will be abroad in the land on 5 May. Campaigning armies stir up a great deal of dust, and we should not cloud this issue. It is a most important moment in the national life when people have the opportunity to decide whether they wish to change the electoral system for returning Members of Parliament. They should be allowed to consider that question in isolation, calmly and at reasonable length.

As we have noted again and again, there has simply been too little earlier and wider debate as a prelude to holding this referendum. There was no Green Paper or White Paper and no adequate scrutiny in the other place, while Select Committees of both Houses were obliged to produce their reports in some considerable haste. The quality of journalistic discussion of the issues of the referendum remains poor; as my noble friend Lord Foulkes observed just now, it is still being trotted out as a commonplace that the virtue of the optional preference system of the alternative vote will be that at any rate every Member of Parliament will be returned with no less than 50 per cent of the vote. That is not true, but journalists keep on recycling this inaccurate account of what the optional preference system of the alternative vote will provide, so we and the Electoral Commission will need longer to inform the people about what is at issue. If the people are distracted and confused by a whole lot of busy, energetic vocal contention about a series of other electoral issues, I do not think that they will be able to reflect with the care that they need and gain the clarity of view that they ought to have when they take this immensely important decision.

One of the Government’s justifications for holding the referendum on the same day as other elections on 5 May is that it will improve turnout. I question that. There will of course be plenty of voters willy-nilly in the polling booths—they may or may not wish to use all the different bits of paper that are handed to them as they go towards the booths—but I am not sure that, not having had the opportunity to consider with the care and thoroughness that responsible citizens would wish, they will necessarily be disposed to vote in the referendum as well as in the other elections. In all events, we will get a better quality of turnout and a more thoughtful one if we have the referendum on a separate date.

It seems wrong in principle and particularly inappropriate that the case should be made that having a referendum on the same date as other polls will cause a higher turnout when in London, this capital city, there will be no local elections on that day. There will be differential turnout and there will be the most detrimental effect; if the proponents of the argument that it should be held on the same day in order to improve turnout are correct, it will follow that Londoners will have less of a voice in this crucial decision.

Additionally, there is the question of respect to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The Scots have expressed themselves already in no uncertain terms; they consider that it was disrespectful to them that the coalition Government simply decided that they were going to impose a requirement to hold a referendum on the same day as the elections to the Scottish Parliament, and your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution was also censorious on that point. The Welsh, similarly, do not like it; they had already decided that the other referendum to be held in Wales in the early months of this year, on the question of whether there should be an extension of primary legislative powers to the Assembly, should be held separately in March so that it should not be confused and clouded by the other campaigns and the other voting on 5 May.

There will be problems at a practical level for returning officers and counters, and in determining what expenditure is to be attributable to which campaign. These are not negligible considerations either. Even at this stage, it would be the right thing for the House to recognise that it would be detrimental to all the campaigns—detrimental to the clarity of conduct of the referendum campaign, but equally so to the clarity of conduct of the local, Scottish parliamentary and Welsh Assembly election campaigns—if they were all to be cluttered and confused on the same day. It would be better to draw back, have a better quality of campaign over a more sensible timescale for the referendum and hold it on any of the dates that are now made possible in consequence of the amendment that the House made in Committee about the requirement regarding the date on which the referendum should be held.