Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am amazed to hear that the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, can do from north to south in the Brecon and Radnorshire constituency, where I live, in an hour and a half. It takes me two hours, or perhaps one hour and 50 minutes if my wife is driving, so it is wonderful that she can do it so speedily, But—and here is the point—at the moment the Brecon and Radnorshire constituency has 53,000 electors. The quota under the new system will be 72,000: in other words, it will have to put on 19,000 electors. Where are they to be: north, south, west or across in another valley? It beggars belief that such a proposition could be seriously put before this Parliament.

I want to join the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Hayward, in regretting the recent death of my very good friend Ron Johnston, who was the great academic expert on all things boundaries. Without him, consideration of this Bill feels a bit like “Hamlet” without the prince. This Bill is “Hamlet” without the prince. It puts right a whole lot of things in the Bill that your Lordships’ House destroyed in 2011—except its worst feature: namely, the 5% plus or minus differential between the size of electorates. I could go—and no doubt in Committee may go—into the full details of the poverty of the arguments put in favour of that, but I want to make a political argument, because that is the only thing that ever convinces this Government, in my experience.

The previous boundary reform fell apart because Tory MPs found that their constituencies were being messed with and they had to fight the Tory MP in the next-door constituency to decide who should be the candidate, when they preferred to be fighting the Labour Party—and I can understand that. The Whips got fed up, so the Minister did not lay the orders and nothing changed. Although going from 600 to 650 helps, I can tell noble Lords that the same thing will happen this time. In three years, when the penny has dropped, Tory MPs will find themselves fighting each other for the new seats that have been formed out of chunks of their old seats—and that is going to happen every eight years, ad infinitum, unless something is done about it. Indeed, I look forward, with considerable anticipation, to the moment when the then-vulnerable noble Lord, Lord True, stands up before this House and does his Callaghan, proposing that we get rid of this Bill because we have to get rid of the 5% variation.

Census (Return Particulars and Removal of Penalties) Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 4th June 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Beith (LD)]

My Lords, I support the noble and learned Lord’s amendment. I apologise to the Committee that I was not able to speak at Second Reading, but the discussions in the Constitution Committee, of which I am also a member, have brought to light the seriousness of this problem within what is otherwise a highly commendable and necessary Bill. I am afraid that I have form on this subject: on 25 March 1975, I moved an amendment to the census order—it was possible to move amendments to those statutory instruments unlike to almost all others—precisely to assert the principle that, so far as the procedure allowed in that case, the state should not turn people into criminals because they had some good conscientious reason for declining to answer questions in such areas as were not fundamental to the state knowing where its population was, how many people there were and in what kind of properties they lived.

I remain of the view that it is undesirable for the state to extend its reach by way of criminal offences that put people in that position. As my noble friend did in the context of the previous debate, I hope that the guidance and what is said to people by those who hand out and collect census forms will assist in reassuring them, but, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and the Constitution Committee, I believe we are legislating unsatisfactorily. The primary reason for doing so given by the Minister in his careful and lengthy letter was that, unless we made certain further provisions to tidy up other legislation, we might create a degree of ambiguity. I found that unconvincing; I do not think any court would be in any doubt as to what Parliament had intended if it phrased this part of the legislation so as to make it quite clear that it was not creating or continuing a criminal offence of failing to answer questions relating to sexual identity and gender.

Everybody seems to agree with what we are trying to do. Let us for heaven’s sake do it in a way that makes our legislation both sensible and not threatening to individuals who perhaps do not view these matters in the detail that we have been required to do today.

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as one would expect, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, has made an extraordinarily powerful case. I really think that the Minister, as well as restating his case, which is wide of these amendments, is obliged to expand on “why not”, preferably in words a normal person could understand and that are not deep in a complicated letter.

All sorts of people may come to us during the census period and ask, “What’s my legal position if I don’t want to fill this in?” Does everybody feel confident, having heard the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, that they could readily explain the situation to those who came in and saw them? Can they readily show that those people would understand immediately that, although they may be committing a criminal offence—though not one to which any penalty attaches—it would be perfectly all right and no future employer would ever hear about it? I am not trying here to construct a legal case, because I am not a lawyer; I am trying to reflect the reality that may exist if the Bill goes through without the amendments tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge.

Census (Return Particulars and Removal of Penalties) Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 13th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am a facts geek. I chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Statistics with Kelvin Hopkins in the Commons and am vice-chair of Full Fact, the fact-checking charity, so naturally I welcome the Bill because it is going to provide more facts.

I also welcome something that is slightly more unusual to welcome: that there is such a short speakers’ list. I think that, if we had been debating this 30 years ago, there would have been a large number of noble Lords deploring the normalising of homosexual orientation through this kind of action. Indeed, not much more than 30 years ago the Prime Minister of the day cancelled the NatCen sexual survey, then very important in the combating of AIDS, out of just such prejudices. One thing that gives me comfort in the difficult world that we live in has been the huge advance in the acceptance that people’s sexual orientation is a matter for them and no one else.

There is, however, a question about the use of the census for this purpose. Many of the facts that we have at our disposal do not come from the census, which asks the questions of everyone; they come from various forms of sample survey. Obviously, that is less intrusive and requires less work, so could we not do it for sexual orientation? Well, I do not think you get very good numbers that way. Just over 10 years ago, in 2008, the ONS did an analysis of all the sample surveys that had been done into sexual orientation, and it found that the proportion of homosexual people in the community varied from 0.3% to 3% depending on the survey—a factor of 10. So they do not mean much.

Surveys are not very good for very small numbers. I came across another survey on the prevalence of out-of-control gambling; it was a big sample, but I would not trust the figures further than I could throw them since they jerk about all over the place. The reason for that is that sample surveys do not work well when you are trying to identify small groups of people. That is even truer of much smaller groups such as transsexuals, so I would not much trust the accuracy.

There are yet other estimates. An opinion poll recently found a figure for homosexuals of 4%, while the ONS’s latest estimate is 2%. These figures are all over the place. Some people think that the census figures will be all over the place too because many will refuse to answer but, for the reasons that I have already given regarding the change in society, they will probably turn out accurate enough. The ONS itself is testing its questions really thoroughly in an attempt to ensure accuracy.

The census is the only thing that tells you facts regarding a relatively small geographical area. Samples can give you national figures and sometimes regional ones but very rarely constituency-wide figures, let alone local authority-wide figures or figures for wards. There are areas in this country where the gay population happens to be very concentrated and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, said, those areas may require something quite different from other areas by way of services. I would not push this too far, but they probably do not need quite as many schools for primary-age children, for obvious reasons. So it is going to be of extraordinary value to local authorities and others in the planning business to have this definitive statement of what percentage are gay in particular areas instead of having to rely on national figures and trying to interpret from there.

Culturally, this move represents an important step forward in the recognition that homosexuality is a perfectly natural human condition and accepting that condition with complete equanimity. I therefore welcome the Bill with unusual warmth.

Constitutional Convention

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I strongly support the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for a constitutional convention. This is as well, because I will not say a single word after now with which he will not vehemently disagree. I hope he will forgive me.

As the last two speakers have done, I want to speak briefly about electoral reform. I know that AV was decisively rejected in the 2011 referendum. As a campaigner for electoral reform, that came as no surprise to me. It was a rushed, botched referendum where the pros were destroyed by the serial misjudgments of Nick Clegg, the then Liberal Democrat leader, and the treachery of David Cameron. However, as we are fast learning, no referendum result is for ever. When the facts change, the British people are entitled to change their view, and I think the facts have changed on electoral reform.

What facts on electoral reform have changed? Most significantly, since 2011, the traditional main argument of first-past-the-post supporters—that it provides strong and stable Governments—has been left in ruins. In truth, the system has always been liable not to produce such Governments, but between 1979 and 2010 a series of flukes led to majority Governments: under Labour because the Tories were unelectable and under the Tories because Labour was becoming unelectable. It remains the case that we are now mostly getting Parliaments in which another party holds the balance of power. Currently, it is the DUP; we can all see where that is getting us.

A sharp decline in marginal seats is spotted less often in this country, although it is commonly remarked on in the United States. Even since 2010, the number of marginal seats has fallen from 85 to 74, so the chances of a huge swing leading to an influx from a different party that then enjoys an overall majority have declined greatly. It is harder than ever for a big party to build up a lead in seats big enough to outnumber the MPs who do not belong to either main party. The reality is that, except in unusual circumstances, strong and stable Governments have gone—and that defence of first past the post with them.

The change in the nature of the two parties, partly caused by first past the post, is equally important. When I was being brought up in politics, I was taught that the main aim was to attract the centre ground; if you did not, you would not get into office. Of course, it is now possible to become a successful party by appealing to just a third of the electorate, as was said to be the strategy of Mr Ed Miliband in 2015. That strategy makes sense. At the same time, perhaps more crucially, the danger of the growth of a new party to the existing two big parties has been virtually removed by first past the post. The SDP nearly did it, under peculiar circumstances, but anyone who starts a new party now would not, I think, be optimistic about their chances of success.

So we have a terrible distortion in our democracy: two monopoly parties, each aiming at a smallish section of the electorate, each ever more a prisoner of their activist members. Arthur Balfour famously said of the Conservative Party that he would rather take advice from his valet. Nowadays, the activists in each party are in charge and call the shots, so we see the Brexiteers forcing the Prime Minister into the situation we saw yesterday, with many Conservative MPs cowering for fear of their local associations, and we see what we see in the Labour Party. There is no threat to the big parties’ monopolies because it is nearly impossible to establish a new party. I am not saying that we should do so; I would like the two big parties to behave differently and start to appeal to the centre ground again, but they will not while the situation is like that. The two big parties have not just a monopoly, but a protected monopoly.

I am not a supporter of pure proportional representation on, say, the Israeli model. I sat on the commission chaired by Lord Jenkins, which came up with the attractive, if a trifle complicated, solution of AV+. Times move on and today I would be content if a referendum approved AV tout simple, but the indefensibility of first past the post is clearer than ever. A constitutional convention is the best way to start a national debate on whether it should be replaced and by what.

Before I sit down, I shall pay my own tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, of whom I was a friend before either he or I were in this place. He is the greatest Speaker that the House of Commons never had. We shall miss him terribly.

Local Government Elections (Referendum) Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, on giving the House an opportunity to debate electoral reform, albeit only one aspect of it, by introducing this Bill. Some noble Lords will know that I have previous on this: for nearly a decade I chaired Make Votes Count, a group campaigning for electoral reform. We were scuppered in the end by Nick Clegg’s eccentric decision to hold the referendum on a date in 2011 which made it absolutely certain that the cause he purported to support would go down to defeat. Incidentally, had the AV system been in place for the 2017 election he would almost certainly have won his Sheffield Hallam seat with the aid of Tory second preferences—serves him right.

The referendum of 2011 temporarily took electoral reform off the national agenda but I doubt it has gone for ever. We now have two dominant great national parties: one divided to the point of fissure over Brexit; the other with a set of policies far more left-wing than at any time in its recent history and led by a man whom few see as prime ministerial material. Under first past the post at the next general election, people—noble Lords excepted, sadly—will be able to vote for the devil or the deep blue sea, but any other choice is likely to be a wasted vote.

The case for electoral reform in local government is even stronger than in national government. Partisan party governance is gradually going out in local government. In many places now we have elected mayors. In other places we have the executive model of local government, where the role of individual councillors is more to represent their constituents than to govern. Yet we retain first past the post, which, among its many flaws, means that councillors are effectively chosen by parties, not people. Turnout is low, not surprisingly in the circumstances, so councillors have the weakest of mandates.

Meanwhile, piecemeal, subnational administrations have increasingly not been elected by first past the post. Mayors are not; for example, London uses the supplementary vote. The Scottish Government and Welsh Assembly are not; they use the additional member system. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, STV is used for local elections, and the Welsh Assembly wants it to be used for council elections there, too. I do not think there are many voters who would want a return to first past the post—for example, for the London mayor—although, regrettably, a proposal to that effect was sneaked into the Tory election manifesto.

The Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, would lead in time to a further extension of electoral reform into local government, and that is to the good. But I have a couple of concerns about it. The first is that it sets the bar rather high: 10% of local voters have to sign a petition to trigger a referendum, and even that is not enough. The council has to agree and of course councillors have a vested interest in retaining the system that led to them being councillors. I would love to see the country swept by a mass movement for fair votes but I shall not hold my breath.

My second concern is more fundamental. I am not a supporter of referendums. I believe in representative democracy—actually, with a slight leaning towards epistocracy, as represented by this House—but not in direct democracy. The last two referendums we have held—on electoral reform, with a low turnout and very little information seen by the public, and on Brexit, the consequences of which we are still grappling with—have not warmed me to the device. I doubt that local referendums on electoral reform would make many hearts beat faster, and I very much doubt that the majority of electors would choose to grapple with the issues involved. Turnout would be nugatory. Moreover, if citizens voted for reform, what reform—supplementary vote, alternative vote, STV, top-up lists? Would the top-up lists be closed or open? I will not even go into d’Hondt and the many varieties of largest-remainder systems. You cannot resolve a complex set of preferences by a single vote.

There is, however, a form of direct democracy towards which I am much warmer and which has promise as a way forward. That way forward is citizens’ juries. I am sure all Members of the House are familiar with what a citizens’ jury is: you get together a group that is reasonably representative of the population, and for a day or a weekend they sit together to debate the issues in front of them. These are exposed in dialogue with the key arguments by experts. The group deliberates and then decides. Often, as a result of the education process, people change their minds. I remember one citizens’ jury that started off by saying how dreadful the House of Lords was, because it was appointed, but ended up thinking that we were about right. That warmed my heart to this device.

The Constitution Unit at UCL recently staged a citizens’ jury on Europe and the results were released this week. They are fascinating. Initially, the citizens wanted free trade and less immigration—perhaps they should all have been given positions in this Government. But then the experts said, “No, you can’t have your cake and eat it”, so what then? A clear majority prioritised free trade over immigration controls, which came as a slight surprise to me.

I would like to see this Bill amended in Committee so that either councils could decide to hold such citizens’ juries or a given percentage of electors, perhaps 10% or less, could trigger the calling of one. If the citizens’ jury opted for reform, the law would bring it into being. My own firm belief is that in most cases, an informed and engaged group of citizens would want electoral reform but if not, that is their prerogative.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Balfe]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I have obviously missed something regarding the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, who is sitting in a different position in the House. I do not know whether this is indicative of something wider, but I recall years ago arguing within the Labour—

[Lord Lipsey]

Since there seems to be some mystery about this, I clarify that I have moved to being a non-affiliated Peer on being elected to the deputy chairmanship of the charity Full Fact, which is determinedly non-partisan.

Recall of MPs Act 2015 (Recall Petition) Regulations 2016

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 11th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful, and I hope the House is grateful, to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter—I should have said my noble friend because she has been my noble friend for many years now—for putting down this amendment, because it has led us to have a fuller debate this afternoon than we might otherwise have done. She has ably made her points of substance. However, I will go a little wider and consider what this tells us about secondary legislation.

This document, which I just managed to carry from the Vote Office without being forced to my knees by its weight, is an exemplar of how secondary legislation should not be. The fact is that secondary legislation in part is being considered by the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, on the Strathclyde report. Some of the things said this afternoon may be very useful input into the work of that committee.

This is secondary legislation and it has passed through both Houses, so I will not restart a debate on its purpose. I was in error by not participating at that stage. It was of course a delayed reaction to the MPs’ expenses scandal. The Government—and the opposition parties—wanted to show they were doing something about that. However, the Government, and the opposition parties, did not want to open the door very wide. There are countries which use the recall quite widely: in the United States a governor of California was recalled not long ago, and the speaker of one state who recently had the temerity to favour gun control legislation has also been recalled, which might be a warning sign of some of the effects which recall legislation that goes wider can have. In the Andean countries of Latin America, especially in the light of the pink tide that took place there in the 1990s, there are quite a lot of recall elections—Lima is the world capital, having held some 7,000. Incidentally, I am relying for this information on a seminar I chaired at St Antony's College Oxford, at which the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, spoke—which shows that academic seminars can sometimes help us. I learned there the nearest thing to an amusing fact about recall elections that I have ever learned, which is that one of their greatest exponents was Vladimir Lenin. He was a huge enthusiast. In post-revolutionary Russia there were hundreds of thousands of recall elections, until of course Lenin established himself and his friends in power, when for some strange reason their enthusiasm for the recall ebbed away. Our Government, wisely, did not want to establish a recall on the American or Peruvian scale, let alone on the Leninist scale, therefore we remain a representative democracy.

This legislation could hardly be more limited—the conditions in which it applies are very limited. If an MP is sentenced to more than 12 months in the jug, they are disqualified anyway, so the measure can apply only when the sentence is shorter than that, when they are suspended for more than 10 days by a committee of fellow MPs or when they withhold information on expenses. That is not going to happen very often and in most such cases the MP would, through shame, resign anyway. They could not hang on in those circumstances. Even if those conditions are met, you then have to get 10% of the electorate to sign your petition within six weeks. That 10% of the electorate is probably around one in five of those who voted at the last election, with turnout having been around 60% or slightly less. It is going to be one helluva job to organise that. The noble Lord, Lord Cooper, explained at the seminar how uninterested in politics people generally are. Some were asked, in a focus group, to name one politician and they were able to manage David Cameron. When pressed, they also managed Ed Miliband and his brother, Ed Balls, as the noble Lord reported to the seminar, so there is not a fantastic surge of interest. It could happen but it does not seem very likely.

The House does not need me to tell it that this is going to be a rare event. As my noble friend Lady Donaghy said, the Cabinet Office says so itself in paragraph 10.2 of the Explanatory Memorandum. It says that it is anticipated that recall petitions will occur extremely rarely. If you ask me, extremely rarely probably means never. Be that as it may, this really is a mouse of a proposition—and I am pleased that it is—but, although it is a mouse of a proposition, it has given birth to a mountain of secondary legislation.

I cannot claim to have read all 174 pages of the regulations—I defer in diligence to my noble friend Lady Hayter—but I have poked about in it. As a journalist, I always read documents from the back and usually get to the bit that someone is trying to hide. Regulation 128 deals with illegal canvassing by police officers. Can one imagine? “Mr Plod is going from house to house illegally canvassing. Let’s lock him up as swiftly as we can”. I admire the imagination that puts that into the regulations.

Another regulation bans exit polls. Why it should do that, I am not quite sure, but I can tell your Lordships that nobody is ever going to commission one. No single recall petition could possibly be interesting enough for anybody to commission an exit poll.

Parts of the regulations are wholly incomprehensible. I read Regulation 132, on the prohibition of paid canvassers, about eight times. I may not be the sharpest kid on the block but I still do not have the faintest clue as to what it means. I am reluctant to ask the Minister to explain when he winds up because we might then be here into the early hours of the morning, but I am sure that he will take the point.

We rightly deplore the growth of Henry VIII clauses. As I reflect on the legislative situation, there is one thing that has changed hugely since Henry VIII. In his day, the secondary legislation had to be written on parchment. It was a helluva process and, if anybody wanted to change it, it was a helluva process to write it on parchment again. Alas, our legislative procedure has been bugged by the discovery of the word processor. This makes it possible to add, muck about with and expand clauses, thus expanding legislation, with extraordinary facility. It is a case of, “If in doubt, put it in”. That is why the number of pages of secondary legislation has expanded from 4,800-odd in 1970 to 12,000 in the latest year for which figures are available, according to a recent Hansard Society study which was made available to the Campaign for an Effective Second Chamber this week. There is nothing to stop it.

Secondary legislation this may be but it is the law of the land. Citizens can be sent to prison for disobeying the stuff that is before your Lordships this afternoon. Ignorance of the law, as we know, is no excuse, but not necessarily every citizen is going to read the 174 pages of this—I could not even manage it.

Although the Government have made one change in response to representations made to them, neither House has had the opportunity to amend this, and that refers to the point that my noble friends Lady Hayter and Lord Campbell-Savours made: that much of this should have been in primary legislation.

I hope that this afternoon’s narrow debate, and the slightly wider but still narrow debate about the Strathclyde report, will transmute into a much wider debate, which we urgently need, and one that uses one of many ways available to Parliament to look at the whole issue of secondary legislation and of scrutiny in the round. If that happens, this misshapen monster that we have before us this afternoon may, at last, have found a purpose to serve.

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, it has been an excellent debate and I am delighted that we are having it on the Floor of the House. The noble Baroness was extremely gracious in trying to absolve me of responsibility for this misshapen monster, but I will do my very best to try to defend it, warts and all. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, described some of his points as pedantic. I do not see them as pedantic at all. That is exactly what we are here to do: to question the details, whatever they might be, in this volume before us. If what I say fails to accurately address some of the points that noble Lords raised, I will certainly write to all those who spoke and place a copy of that letter in the Library. As the noble Lord said, there are some very important points that we need to iron out.

I heed entirely what has been said about secondary legislation, especially something as long as this. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, is absolutely right: this is exactly the kind of debate that we need to be having in the weeks ahead. My noble friend Lord Trefgarne is here, and I very much hope that he heeds what was said. I will certainly endeavour to draw his attention to those points.

To pick up on a few of the points that were made, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked about people taking photos and intimidating petitioners outside the place. I want to make two points about that. First, petitioners have the opportunity to have a postal vote if they are really concerned about that happening. Secondly, and more to the point, I am told that—it is the same as for elections—anyone intimidating signers would be committing a criminal offence. I will write to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness on precisely where that offence lies.

Constitution: Gracious Speech

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, two constitutional dogs did not bark in the Queen’s Speech, although they should have done—parliamentary boundaries and the voting system. I shall say a word or two on each.

On parliamentary boundaries, under the Bill passed in the last Parliament, constituencies will have to have electorates within 5% of the average. An associated proposal would reduce the size of the House of Commons from 650 MPs to 600. In the last Parliament, noble Lords on this side of the House fought hard to stop the Bill. I am shocked to see that I spoke 166 times, according to Hansard. Noble Lords opposite accused of us of partisanship. Partisanship—moi? In fact, we had a case of great substance on two points, which got lost. One was that the 5% tolerance was too low; a 10% tolerance would mean far less disruptive change to constituency boundaries without ruining the effect of making every vote of roughly equal weight.

The second was that the reduction in the number of MPs was not justified, given that the number of electors per seat will, if that change goes through, have increased by 22% since 1950—and the workload of an MP is now many times what it used to be. I was very pleased that in March this year the now late constitutional affairs Select Committee produced a report which endorsed both these points.

The Government could just ignore the committee and plough on, but it would be a mistake—and this is the crucial point—from their own partisan point of view. The bias in the electoral system has gone. Before the 2015 election, it favoured Labour. Now it favours the Tories. Had the general election vote nationally been tied, the Tories would have won 301 seats to Labour’s 254, according to the electoral geographers Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie. However, if the changes to the rules go through, the Tories will be torn apart by internal conflict. There will be fewer seats for their MPs to represent. Even in the seats that remain, there will be fundamental changes in boundaries. These measures combined will mean a plethora of deadly duels, mostly in Tory seats, often between sitting Tory MPs, regularly involving clashes between new, young Members—winner takes all. It is a recipe for dissent.

Less obviously, it will have a terrific effect on the Prime Minister’s European goal, which I assume is to recommend to the country that we stay in. Tory grass roots are fundamentally Eurosceptic—I do not think anybody would deny that—so any MP who thinks, suspects or is worried that their seat may change or disappear will have every incentive to adopt a very Eurosceptic position. The prospect of Tory civil war—which in some ways I welcome—over Europe will be magnified several times over by these proposals. It is unusual that I appeal to the Government to exercise their self-interest, but they should have another look at the combined effect of these proposals.

I am not surprised that electoral reform was not in the Queen’s Speech. In my experience, parties rarely question a system that has delivered them an overall majority. I sat on the Jenkins commission—the result of a pledge by Labour in opposition to look at the electoral system—which somehow seemed a lot less attractive after we had just won an overwhelming majority under Tony Blair. Yet this election has again shown the unfairness in modern conditions of Britain’s electoral system. The Government’s overall majority is based on the votes of less than a quarter of the electorate. We now have a set of completely new injustices on top of the old ones. Lib Dem underrepresentation, which used to be the big concern, is now as nothing compared with UKIP underrepresentation: it got 14% of the vote and one seat. Then there is SNP over- representation: with just over 50% of the Scots vote, it got 95% of Scots MPs—so, because of the voting system, Scotland, which just last year rejected independence, now has MPs nearly all of whom favour it. This is very odd.

There was, of course, a referendum on electoral reform in 2011 which came down against change, but Nicola Sturgeon’s threats of a new Scottish referendum on independence show that in our febrile age referendum results do not last for ever. The previous European referendum has lasted for more than 40 years. Would anyone like to have a bet with me that we will have another referendum on Scotland within 20 years? You cannot say that electoral reform can never be subject to another referendum and that it will not happen but is permanent.

In the mean time, I hope that attitudes in my party will change. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but the prospect of an overall Labour majority under the present system is now, and for the foreseeable future, near to nil. This is for three reasons. First, the bias of the electoral system is now against it, and will be even more against it if the boundary changes go ahead. Secondly, the 2015 general election showed a sharp decline in the number of marginal seats; again using the evidence of Professor Johnston. Whereas at the last election 75 seats would have fallen on a 5% swing to us, now it is only 49. Thirdly, Scotland is and may well remain a virtually Labour-free zone.

Given that the Government will not do anything, I wonder whether my party ought not to take an initiative on this, get together with the other parties that have been so badly affected by the electoral system and see whether there are any outline proposals that might come about that would improve it. We will not have an overall Labour majority in the foreseeable future but there could still be a hung Parliament—we only just avoided one this time—in which case it would again be possible to change the electoral system. At any rate, this is a matter that deserves to be debated.

Regulation of Political Opinion Polling Bill [HL]

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Friday 19th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I am one of those whom the noble Lord identified who now claim to have got something right during the general election when the polls were getting it wrong, but in my case I can document the fact. I did not get the result right—I had a substantial bet on a Labour-minority Government, though I did get it at 5:1 before it went back down to 11:8—but I recovered my money from a small bet on the Liberal Democrats getting fewer than 10 seats. Sometimes your money goes where your heart lies.

What I did during the campaign, maddened by the overinterpretation of and reliance on the polls of the Guardian, was to write to point out in moderate terms—and wearing my hat as chair of the All-Party Group on Statistics—the limitations on polling, which I shall come to. So I can document it but not through showing people the pages of the Guardian, because it declined to publish the letter. I was not totally surprised because it was paying out a lot of money to commission polls and then oversold them like mad, so of course theGuardian was not very keen to publish this letter—although senior members of editorial staff say, in retrospect, that they think they should have done. Anyway, that is quite long enough on “I was right all the time”.

The performance of opinion polls in recent elections is worse than has been appreciated. Over the last six general elections, the opinion polls have got it completely wrong twice, a 33% rate. If they used that other invaluable tool of forecasting, a pin, they would have got a 50% hit rate. The amount by which you gain in having the polls over the use of a pin is not very great, but it is worse than that. First, although they got the winner right in four cases out of six they did not get the share of the vote for each party right in those cases. For example, in 2010 they overestimated the Lib Dems’ share. Secondly, even when they got right, it was often the result of pure chance. I went to a fascinating academic conference on the 2010 election, which, to summarise briefly, showed that the polls made a series of mistakes which happened to cancel each other out.

In the light of all that, I welcome the Sturgis inquiry, whose session the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, and I are both attending this afternoon. In preparation for that, I reminded myself of the study by the Market Research Society into the failure in 1992. Funnily enough, I am not sure that this inquiry will come out with anything very different. It identified three main sources of error: first, shy Tories, or people who did not like to say that they were voting for the Tory party; secondly, failures in the quotas, which I will come back to, which meant that they were not using representative samples; and, thirdly, differential turnout. Those were the main causes. Professor Sturgis may not get much further forward, although I hope he will.

The real question underlying this is whether polls technically can achieve the degree of accuracy that is necessary when they forecast elections. We had quite a lot of polls during the election, for example, that said something like Labour 30% and the Tories 30%. That could mean, within the statistical margin of error, Tory 33% and Labour 27% or the other way round. In other words, it could mean a 6% Labour lead, a 6% Tory lead or that they genuinely were neck and neck—and that is only in 19 cases out of 20, with the 20th case being even further out, as I think was true of the famous YouGov poll in the Scottish referendum.

That is the statistical margin of error, but it is only the beginning of the margin of error, as it assumes that you have a perfect sample which is representative of the electorate as a whole. But you do not have a perfect sample; you have a less and less perfect sample, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has pointed out. If you do it by telephone, you have the increasing problem of mobile telephone ownership, which can distort the figures. You can do it on the internet, but not everyone has access to the internet. You can also have what is called panel effect, whereby because you are asking the same people they become more informed and more interested, and they move from one party to another differently from the electorate.

In the olden days, when polling worked rather better, it was of course done by face-to-face samples, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, has reminded us. Pollsters were able to get it quite right because they were able to balance their samples to make up for these shortfalls. The crucial thing was that in those days voting very closely followed social class: working-class people voted for us, while middle and upper-class people voted for the other side. As a result, it was relatively easy to adjust your sample. As long as you had the right percentage of people from each class in it, you were probably not going to be far out, and therefore you could weight your samples accordingly. However, that relationship between class and voting has gradually been eroded, and there is not really a good substitute. Public versus private sector, for example, is something of a differentiator, but there is nothing as powerful as class used to be. It is very much less easy to weight a sample to get a correct one, although responsible pollsters make valiant efforts.

Another problem is that a lot of people just do not answer when you approach them: only one in five people who are rung up answer, because they do not know whether it is a push-pollster, somebody trying to sell them double-glazing or a genuine pollster. You do not know anything about those people, so you have no idea whether your sample is representative of the population as a whole. There are big margins of error. This is not of course helped by my old profession—I used to write up polls myself and I am guilty of all the offences I am about to accuse others of—in which you are forced to exaggerate. Suppose Labour has gone one month from 36% to 34%. The correct report of that is that there is no change in Labour’s standing; it is the same number. The report you will read will very likely say, “Labour slumped last month following Ed Miliband’s unfortunate incident with a bacon sandwich”. It had not fallen and there is no evidence that it had; there is even less evidence that it was due to Ed’s bacon sandwich. So journalism is more than a little responsible. Of course the two egg each other on, because the pollsters know that the more that journalists exaggerate the story the more publicity it will get, and the journalists want that publicity too, so the necessary caveats simply do not appear.

Having said that, I shall tell the House about the remark recorded in the Library Note about the problems of the polls and about my noble friend’s Bill in particular. The chairman of ComRes, on which I addressed the House in the Moses Room the other day, said that the Bill,

“acts on a problem that doesn’t exist”.

Most of the pollsters have been very upfront and honest in admitting that there is a problem, but not, it appears, all. This matters because—let us face it—the last general election was mostly about whether it was a good or bad thing if we had a Labour-minority Government backed by, or in some relationship with, the SNP, not a separate though equally important debate about whether people really wanted a Tory-majority Government or something short of that. Did it affect the result? We will never know, but it was important.

I turn briefly to the question raised by my noble friend’s Bill about the regulation of polling. You cannot very often separate my noble friend and me on these or indeed many issues, but I have a slightly different emphasis from him on this point. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, about the difficulties of statutory regulation was strong, as indeed were his points about the banning of polls during the run-up to an election, but there are problems with statutory regulation. My own experience of statutory regulation is that the people you are regulating spend the whole time trying to find their way around the regulations, instead of doing what you want them to do, which is to say, “We’ve got a problem and we must solve it”.

I am therefore broadly in favour of self-regulation. I sat for years on the council of the Advertising Standards Authority, which I believe to be a very effective self-regulator, though not everyone agrees. I felt that that was the right way of going about it because you have advertiser buy-in; if they had an adverse verdict from the ASA, they did not argue the toss but just withdrew the advert. Unfortunately, the existing self-regulation does not measure up. The rules of the British Polling Council, which in many ways is an admirable organisation, cover transparency only; they tell you that you have to put your samples and the questions you ask online, that sort of thing, but they do not actually cover substance at all. The Market Research Society does somewhat better; a section of its rules is about how questions should be framed so that they are neutral, but not all polling companies belong to the MRS. In the case of my own complaint against ComRes at the moment, I have to complain about the chairman as an individual rather than the company. The MRS rules are rather broad, and less specific than I would like.

So there is a shortfall in self-regulation, and this is one of the challenges that the polling industry now faces. Either it puts in place effective, wide-ranging and considered self-regulation, going beyond the very limited regulation imposed by the BPC, or it will be Foulkes. There is no doubt about it. It will not happen in this Parliament, I do not suppose, because this Government are quite well favoured by what happened when it went wrong last time, but some of us will harbour a desire for revenge. If the polling industry does not put itself right, we will put it right in a way that will be undesirable.

I have a final word to say about the banning of polls in the run-up to elections. I am afraid that here I am a feeble “don’t know”. I think that there is a case for and a case against, and although I lean towards the case against because I do not like interfering with free speech, the case for is also powerful and, as has been pointed out, other countries such as France and India already ban polls. I suggest that one or other House of this Parliament, in an appropriate committee, should look at the arguments for and against this. It would be a very useful analytic piece of work and would inform future policy-making in this field.

I very much hope that the House will give a Second Reading to this Bill this afternoon, because this is a subject that cannot be too much debated in your Lordships’ House as it is being in the polling industry. As I have said, I do not agree with every dot or comma of the Bill, but I believe that, unless the spirit of the Bill is taken on board by the polling industry, this kind of problem will arise time and again in future.

Opinion Polling

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2015 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Lipsey]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to regulate the opinion-polling industry.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, to his first debate in the Moses Room. It is a gruelling ordeal that he faces but I am sure he will come through with flying colours.

This is the first of two debates the House will be holding this week on opinion polls. Part two comes tomorrow on the Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, providing for the regulation of opinion polling. I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, will be discussing in particular the polls and general election of 2015. That is a very hot topic and I look forward to contributing to the debate, which has attracted some distinguished and knowledgeable speakers. This afternoon I want to concentrate on something much narrower: the increasing problem of polls conducted by pollsters that are designed to achieve only the results that those who commission them require.

Let me say straight away that many polls commissioned by bodies with an interest are scrupulously conducted. I am sure that that was true of everything done by the noble Lord, Lord Cooper, at Populus. As it happens, on the way in I was looking at a YouGov poll on immigration and it was scrupulous, with absolutely balanced questions. However, alas, other companies will stop at nothing to get the results the commissioner wants. I will concentrate today on one example, on which I wrote to all Peers on 27 March. The company concerned is ComRes and the poll was on mitochondrial transfer. It figured largely in the House’s debate on the subject on 24 February. Replying to that debate, the noble Earl, Lord Howe—for whom the adjective “saintly” might have been invented—was uncharacteristically fierce. This is what he said:

“My noble friend also referred to the ComRes poll and suggested that we had somehow unfairly dismissed it. The ComRes poll was commissioned by the CARE organisation—Christian Action Research and Education—which I understand opposes the introduction of mitochondrial donation. An evaluation of the survey was conducted by Pier Logistics and Gene Rowe Evaluations. The evaluators considered the survey to be a deeply flawed piece of work. They criticised the intentional use of what they described as, ‘sensationalist, inflammatory and misleading language to characterize the debate’. There was also considered to be, ‘An unreasonable degree of selectivity within respondents’ informational options’”—

that means what respondents were told—

“‘and the intimation of an exercise focused on the generation of self-ordained results’”—

in other words, what pollsters wanted.

“The evaluation summary commented that the survey was, ‘a good example of poor public consultation’”.—[Official Report, 24/2/15; col. 1621.]

I agree.

Now, I have some experience of polling. I advised Jim Callaghan on polls. Unfortunately, he did not take my advice to go to the country in 1978—otherwise who knows what might have happened to history since? I commissioned polls for the Sunday Times. I was a member of the advisory committee of NatCen, an academic pollster, and I am co-chair of the All-Party Group on Statistics. I believe in polling. Good polling can contribute to public policy-making in a democracy. But it has to be good polling and this ComRes poll is not good polling. It is polling ruthlessly designed by an organisation driven by faith—that is, CARE—and a polling company driven by greed to get the answers it wanted.

Moreover, ComRes has previous in this field. CARE again asked it to design a poll showing public opposition to the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Bill it was promoting. I remember being involved at the time and, again, twisted questions were shamelessly paraded in a bid to persuade policymakers that the public was opposed to legislative change. This kind of polling is not helpful to anyone. Classically, when I wrote to ComRes to say that I was approaching Peers about its poll, which I have already discussed, its reaction was to threaten me with legal action. That is not how debate should be conducted in a democracy.

So what should we do about this? One thing would be to leave it to the market. ComRes has been well and truly rumbled on this occasion, and its reputation will suffer as a result. I hope that I have had some success in persuading noble Lords not to agree to participate in future ComRes polling—I certainly will not myself after this experience. In any case, any organisation thinking of commissioning the company will think twice, because it will know that, again, it will be a twisted poll and will be the subject of ridicule by Peers, MPs, and even journalists. It is of some consolation to me that the mitochondrial poll, which was much quoted in our debate, received practically no national press publicity. I think that that was because the questions were so blatantly loaded that even without careful study it was obvious that it amounted to nothing. However, I do not think that relying on the market is good enough—not all such crooked polls will be as easily identified, other firms may be tempted down the ComRes route, and propaganda dressed as evidence may become endemic. Therefore, some form of regulation is required.

Unfortunately, existing regulation is inadequate. Faced with the ComRes poll, my first thought was to appeal to the British Polling Council—surely that is what it is for. But it is not. The British Polling Council is a perfectly good organisation—I am thrilled with the inquiry it has set up into the failings of the polls during the general election, so I do not criticise it—but its remit is incredibly tightly restricted. It makes sure that polls publish the questions that they ask—the size of their samples and the techniques they use, which is of course a very good thing—but it does not have any rules that dictate that the questions must be fair and not loaded, and so it is inadequate.

I turn next to the Market Research Society, whose slogan, with which I strongly agree, is “Evidence Matters”. The rules at the MRS are not very specific, but there is a general principle that:

“Researchers shall protect the reputation and integrity of the profession”,

on which I have hung my complaint. However, it must be said that by no means all polling companies are members of the MRS, so I have had to find an individual member within the company I am complaining about, Mr Andrew Hawkins, the chairman—who is a member—and that way I am able to pursue the complaint. I will see how I get on; I do not wish to prejudge that in any way. However, that does not amount to an adequate system of regulation.

One alternative would of course be direct state regulation—it would be easy for people reading the terms of my question to think that I am in favour of that—but despite the wording of the question, I rather hope that the Government are not contemplating statutory regulation, at least for now.

This is about what would be effective. If you put in statutory rules—I know this, having been on the Personal Investment Authority, which has incredible powers; there are papers 12 miles thick—companies then set out to find ways to evade the regulations. Again, as we know, in the area of financial services they have been pretty effective at it. What is needed in the polling industry is a change of culture—or rather the culture that is applied by the best should be applied to the whole industry and not be circumvented by Johnny-come-latelys, those on the make, and so on.

A change of culture is more likely to happen if it is done by self-regulation, where you are judged by a group of your peers, rather than by imposed external regulation. Ideally, therefore, I would like to see a self-regulator modelled on the Advertising Standards Authority, on whose council I was once privileged to sit. I know that my noble friend Lady Hayter has reservations about the ASA; that is because all my complaints are upheld and all hers are turned down, to summarise in shorthand. Seriously, however, it does have the respect of the advertising industry and the public, and I believe that most people have confidence in its rules.

Maybe good will triumph in this, or maybe it will not, with companies such as ComRes willing to stoop low to make a quick buck and continuing to prosper. I do not know why the noble Lord, Lord McColl, says, “disgraceful”. He will get a chance to make his own speech; if he wishes to defend these practices, he can do so then. It would be a sad outcome if companies such as ComRes triumph, and this is where the Minister comes in. As I have said, I do not look to him to promise state regulation—I hope that he will not—but I look to him to express ministerial concern and to urge the industry to consider its own regulation. If the industry had the impression that if it did not act the Government might have to consider doing so, it would be a very good thing and would get the right kind of self-regulation in place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lipsey]

May I just correct the noble Lord? He said that ComRes did not threaten to sue. It said that it was taking legal advice and would take what legal action was recommended to it. If that is not a threat to sue, I don’t know what is.

[Lord McColl of Dulwich]

It said it would defend its position, which is not quite the same.

House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Lipsey Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, the House does not often spend a day debating a report by a committee of one of the parties in it. Naturally, as a member of my noble friend Lady Taylor’s group, I hope that the quality of our report justifies it. Certainly under the admirable joint chairmanship of my noble friends Lady Taylor and Lord Grenfell—goodness, we miss him—we did not approach our task in a partisan spirit.

There is another good reason why this House should address a Labour report on this subject. We are not going to see fundamental reform of this House under a Tory Government, not under one in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and not under a majority one. Tory Back-Benchers crushed the misbegotten Clegg Bill, and the humiliation is not one that any Tory Prime Minister is likely to wish to repeat. However, it is perfectly possible that a Labour Government would contemplate fundamental Lords reform, particularly if the party required the support of any Lib Dems who may remain in the new Parliament to form a Government. What form should that fundamental reform take? That is the question our report addresses.

As several noble Lords have said, our group did not opine on election to the Lords. We agreed instead on two related propositions: first, that Lords reform needed to be looked at by a broad constitutional commission; and, secondly, that any move to election should be subject to a referendum.

We did canvass one major objection to election, which has come up in this debate; namely, that it would lead to a power struggle between the two Houses of Parliament. That part of the case has been immeasurably strengthened as a result of recent developments. We do not now have, or we cannot be sure we are going to have, a three-party system in England. We have a four or perhaps five-party system emerging. It is perfectly possible that the next Government will be formed by a party with, say, 30% to 35% of the Members of the House of Commons on a turnout of say 66%, a Government who have the support of only about a fifth of the electorate. If at the same time you had a Lords elected on a proportional basis, which has always been the proposal for this House, its Members would be sure to go for a power grab. That is what elected people do. If you have any doubts, see the present bid by the European Parliament to seize control over who becomes President of the European Commission. Unlike the situation in the French Senate, which has been referred to, we do not have a mechanism in this country to resolve contested issues where the two Houses disagree, although our report suggests that such machinery be created. So the danger of stasis would be very great indeed. The Americans, of course, put up with that, but theirs is a country which wants government to be weak. We, mostly, do not.

I add one other point on the relative roles of the two Houses, which was not considered in our report and which bears on election. Since I joined this House 15 years ago—it seems unbelievable—it has become more assertive and more successfully assertive. The evidence is laid out in Meg Russell’s magisterial The Contemporary House of Lords. This is not surprising. The removal of most hereditary Peers—the speech just made by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, will serve as a threnody to their joys—has increased the legitimacy of the House greatly while that of the House of Commons, I am afraid and regret, has unquestionably declined.

The result is a distinct shift in the balance between the two Houses. In most cases, but not all, that has been hugely to the benefit of our national governance—blocking, for example, populist snap measures in response to some alleged movement in public opinion at the cost of fundamental civil liberties. However, what we have had to throw out is as nothing compared to what would have happened if there had not been a House of Lords. Governments would then have had no need to stop at anything. I would fear for the nature of our democracy in a situation under which the House of Lords was a great deal weaker. In other words, I favour a balance of power between the two Houses. Of course, the Commons should retain ultimate supremacy, but the balance now is a great deal better than it was when I first came into politics when, frankly, the Commons got its way, this House had low attendance and with a large proportion of hereditaries was largely ignored by Ministers. The balance we have now is one thing in our constitution which is working correctly.

I have a couple of points on which to end. The Leader of the House manages to say that there is no problem with numbers. You cannot come into this House every day and believe that there is no problem with its numbers. You cannot sit through debates in which people are making one or two-minute speeches, or sit through the bear-garden that is now Question Time, and think that there is no problem with numbers. We have a double-pronged approach to this: retirement after the Parliament after which you turn 80 and a minimum attendance of 60% of sittings. There is no ideal way of getting these numbers down but, frankly, these are hardly draconian measures. The alternative is a House that grows and grows, when the aim should be to shrink the membership to 450.

My final point is that when the constitutional commission meets, it will not face a Cleggian choice between an elected House and the present House. There are many ways in which the House could be chosen. There has today been a lot of canvassing of a more federal House, such as the German Bundesrat. There is a case for that, although I have doubts about whether it is a good idea to have both Houses chosen on a geographical basis, because the House of Commons is chosen by MPs sitting for constituencies. There is a case for a different basis here. I am quite interested in an occupational basis, which is something a constitutional commission could look at.

Whatever option might be chosen, there are complex questions involved in any method of choosing the House about the interrelationship between the basis for membership and party allegiance. For there is one thing upon which our group was absolutely unanimous, and which I hope would command unanimity in this House: we do good work—by God, we do good work —only because in the House of Lords the Government can never be sure of winning.