Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lipsey

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I put my name to this stand part debate. When I was in journalism, people used to say of me, “He may be no good, but at least he is quick.” I will try to follow that precept this afternoon.

The first thing I wanted to say will cheer the Minister. Like him, I do not think much of single transferable votes—I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours on that. The immense defect of STV compared to its obvious alternative—the alternative vote, which is an exhaustive ballot—is that it does not produce a candidate who commands a majority of the electorate. AV infallibly does, which is why we so sensibly use it for the election of hereditary Peers. It seems very basic that, for mayors in particular, and perhaps police commissioners too, we want somebody who commands a majority of the electorate, and that STV does not do.

The second thing I want to say is about haste. More than 20 years ago, on the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform chaired by the late Lord Jenkins, we were as quick as we possibly could be. People who have served under Lord Jenkins as chair know he was not a man who permitted excess words or allowed discussions to meander. Even so, it took us about 12 months to come to a conclusion. It may or may not have been right, but it took us 12 months to get there. The complexities are enormous. At that time, I could have distinguished between three varieties of Sainte-Laguë system for the distribution of majorities, but now I can hardly remember the words, and I certainly cannot remember what those were. But these are immensely complicated matters of immense importance, and they can affect the results of elections, which are the expression of our democracy. To do this by introducing an unheralded amendment in Committee in the other place is, to use a word much used by my old boss Tony Crosland, frivolous.

The third thing is that different places need different electoral systems. It does not follow that because first past the post may be felt by some to be right for the House of Commons it is right for every election. It clearly is not. Parliament legislated for different systems in Scotland and Wales—the AMS system. A whole set of desiderata attached to electoral systems apply differently in different elections, and this is a very poor reason for having first past the post.

It is particularly poor because the winner can have a very tiny share of the vote, not much more than 20%; I can cheer the Government up for a moment by citing one such perverse result in an East Anglia PCC election in 2012. The winner on the first ballot was one John Prescott, known to many in this House. John Prescott’s lead—he had just over 20% of the first ballot votes—was soon got rid of, and his votes transferred, to elect Matthew Grove. Where is Matthew Grove now?

We cannot openly countenance a system where candidates with 20% of the vote rule over our big cities and order our police. I use the word again: this is a frivolous approach to constitutional reform in general and to electoral reform in particular. This House should have nothing to do with it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on some amendments in this group. As Members of the Committee will know, I am extremely disturbed by this Bill as a whole and by the way it has been introduced. Of all its provisions, I think Clause 11 is the least justifiable, introduced as it was after a Written Statement by a middle-range Minister last September after the Bill had already begun its Committee stage in the House of Commons, and pushed through for clearly partisan reasons.

On Monday, the Minister was asking us to look at the practice on voter ID in other countries as a justification for what the Government propose. I am sure he recognises that in the Irish and Danish constitutions, any change in the voting system is a constitutional amendment and therefore has to go through exceptional procedures. That is also true in a number of other countries. In this respect, of course, he will probably say that we should pay no attention to other countries. I deeply respect that, privately, the Minister knows this clause is impossible to defend, and I recognise that he nevertheless has to stand up for it as best he can in the circumstances that this was a Conservative pledge in 2017 and someone up there has not forgotten that.

Yesterday, I read a very good article in the Political Quarterly of 2019 entitled “The UK Politics of Overseas Voting” by Susan Collard; I will return to it when we get on to overseas voting. One of the things that struck me about the introduction was that it talked about the package of measures that might have been agreed among the parties in 2016-17 about voting reform. It was discussed among the parties in the Commons that we could have moved towards automatic voter registration to reduce the number of people not on the register—by and large, the young and the marginal. We could have had a major effort at citizen engagement to encourage people to go to the polls. We could also have included votes at 16, which would almost definitely have helped the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and others. In that context, overseas voting and the extension of overseas voting would have been part of the same package. That could have been negotiated as part of a—

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lipsey

Report stage & Report stage (Hansard) & Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 8th October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I am not going to go back over all the arguments about 7.5%, 5%, 10% and so on; they have been wonderfully rehearsed by noble Lords who are much more knowledgeable than I am. I want to take this opportunity to make a general point about the process in relation to parliamentary constituencies.

We go to great trouble, as noble Lords said earlier this afternoon, to protect the effectiveness and neutrality of the Boundary Commission. It seems to me to be in complete contradiction to that to allow the Government of the day, effectively, to decide matters that are greatly going to affect the electoral geography, such as the number of years—as we debated yesterday—for which a Boundary Commission report should apply or, in this case, the degree of variety that should be permitted in their size.

Across the Atlantic, we have a dire warning of what happens when you let politicians decide for themselves on the rules that will determine whether they are elected. The danger of appearing to be partisan when doing it our way seems to me great, and more effort should have been made by the Government and, I am sure, by others to achieve a consensus reform of parliamentary boundaries—we all agree there should be one—rather than one that can be accused of being partisan and that is, in any case, not being addressed with the seriousness that should apply.

I speak as someone who worked for the late Jim Callaghan, who was for a long time an esteemed Member of this House, as well as, briefly, an esteemed Prime Minister. In 1969, Jim Callaghan got his own party to vote down a set of recommendations from the Boundary Commissions for purely partisan reasons. Lord Callaghan, being of a different mould from many of the politicians who lead us today, had the decency in later years to admit that he had made a mistake and that he deeply regretted his actions. We are making a mistake in accepting a Bill so close to the one that was presented. It would have been very much better if there had been a process of negotiation and compromise, rather than an edict brought by a political majority. It will represent a further erosion of the esteem in which our Government and our Houses of Parliament are held.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I cannot understand why the Government continue to insist on this reduction in the variation of size between constituencies. The original justification was the Conservatives’ complaint that the width of variation created a structural imbalance in favour of Labour. Others have pointed out that this arose from differences in levels of electoral registration, in turnout and in the size of majorities. The last three elections showed that this allegedly structural bias had disappeared. It must be inertia at Conservative Party headquarters that explains why the Government are persisting with it.

As the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said earlier, in our unwritten constitution the House of Commons is supposed to a body that represents communities throughout the United Kingdom, not just an electoral college that votes for the Prime Minister. The first-past-the-post voting system rests upon the principle that there is a close relationship between each MP and his or her constituency, which means that each MP, and each voter, needs to grasp which constituency they are in and its relatively natural boundaries. Throw that out—as the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, suggested that we have begun to do—and, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, argued, you have made the case for proportional representation instead. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, said that this widening of variation would be “unfair to the voter”. Let us have a wider discussion about what a fair voting system would be, if he wishes. This is nothing to with overall fairness for the voter.

This Government are chipping away, bit by bit, at many of the assumptions and conventions which constitute our constitution. Last December’s Conservative manifesto pledged to establish a commission

“to look at the broader aspects of our constitution”

before the end of this year, which is now less than three months away. Since then, we have heard nothing about this, nor does there appear to have been any consultations with other parties about the membership and working of such a commission. I do not see how a constitutional commission could possibly gain legitimacy if it emerged only from the Government, without any wider process of consultation or consent. Can the Minister tell us if the manifesto pledge has now been dropped, delayed for the indefinite future or is about to be sprung on us without prior consultation?

In the UK’s constitutional tradition, each MP represents a place, a recognisable community. To reduce the variation among constituency sizes to the narrow band which the Government propose weakens that link between MP and local community. Honest and traditional Conservatives, those who still remember and revere Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Harold Macmillan, should join others in this House in supporting the amendment.

Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lipsey

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 15th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a pretty odd grouping, is it not? You have one amendment on the links between constituencies, one on Devon and Cornwall, and one on Wales. It would have been even worse if I had not insisted on degrouping my amendment on Brecon and Radnor, for which the Committee will pay a price when I introduce it in a few minutes’ time. The grouping is so wide and disparate that I do not have a great deal to add, so I will not.

First, I totally agree with the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lord Foulkes about local ties, which seem wholly to have been ignored by the Government in drafting the Bill, and which I will come back to in the Brecon and Radnor context.

Secondly, I totally agree with my noble friend Lord Hain about the underrepresentation of Wales—the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and a few other noble Lords came in behind him. I will say only that even the 15% variant would not deal with the Brecon and Radnor problem; it deals with certain problems but not with that.

Finally, on the epoch-shaking issue of Devon and Cornwall, I am in no doubt about the passions that this stirs in that part of the country, but I know nothing about it or those passions, and therefore I will remain silent.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I hesitate to intervene on Welsh and Scottish matters, in particular on the complications of the geography of Wales, beyond saying that of course all the regions of this country have large and disparate constituencies. One of my strongest memories of the early days of the coalition Government was of standing in William Hague’s office in the Foreign Office, discussing with him where exactly it was as you moved from Richmond up Swaledale that you lost mobile phone coverage, and seeing the horrified expression on the face of his private secretary as he realised that the Secretary of State would be unattainable in large areas of his extremely large and remote constituency. Yorkshire also has large constituencies.

On the question of the union as a whole, I will say only that we should all be very worried about its future. I have close relatives who live and work in Edinburgh, and each time I talk to them, I get increasingly concerned about the future of the union. The image they have of a competent Government, who also value international ties, as opposed to the incompetent and English nationalist Government in London, gives me no guarantee that if there were another independence referendum, they would not vote to support independence. We also know the games that are being played over the future of Northern Ireland. I leave it for the Minister to reflect that we have a Government who are playing fast and loose with the union even as the Prime Minister insists that he is doing his utmost to defend it, and we need to be extremely cautious about that.

I most want to focus on Amendment 18, which talks about the importance of retaining local ties. I remind the Minister that the Conservative manifesto last December made no reference to a 5% variation as the limit, but said:

“We will continue to support the First Past the Post system … as it allows voters to kick out politicians who don’t deliver, both locally and nationally.”


That is the way one can defend the first past the post system—it is about having a recognisable community which each MP represents and in which the voters are aware of the link between the constituency and the MP. When I first started out in politics, I remember many Conservative MPs who would say, “I represent all the voters in my constituency, not just the ones who voted for me”. That was the old approach to this. The noble Lord, Lord Hain, has already said that the important thing is whether you can identify with the constituency you live in. I remember in the 2010 election standing in the middle of the marketplace in Huddersfield, canvassing for the Liberal Democrats, and every other voter who came up to me on market day said, “I live in so and so—can you tell me which constituency I am in?” We are only half way towards the problem that most voters do not know what constituency they live in. If we move boundaries more and more frequently, and more and more without reference to the idea of local community, we are moving away from the principle of the first past the post system.

I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord True, knows Edmund Burke off by heart, and his references to the importance of localism—of the “little platoons” in which people live. We are in danger of losing that connection. As we lose it, we weaken the connection between the voter and their elected representatives, and we therefore weaken trust in democracy as the idea of politics becomes one of a distant game in Westminster not connected with the voter on the ground.

I fear that the devolution White Paper, when it is published next month, may make that worse. We already have in cities such as Leeds and Bradford local wards which are 12,000 to 15,000 voters per ward. That means of course that in Leeds there are only four wards per constituency, which is one of the reasons why the question of dividing wards up as you adjust the numbers for the Leeds constituency comes up so frequently. Many of these wards used to be entire urban district councils. The gap between the most local elected representative and the voter has already been severely damaged, and I fear that next month’s devolution White Paper will have little to do with devolution but much more to do with weakening local government further. I appeal to the Minister, whose distinguished record in local government I am well aware of, and as someone who cares about local government, to bear in mind how important it is to restore trust in democracy among our voters by recognising that democracy starts at the local level and requires a link between voters, their local community and democracy as such through their elected representatives.

Given that, Amendment 18 is important. We should not lose sight of this. We do not wish to follow the United States down the road where each district is redrawn after almost every election according to partisan forms. Under a Conservative Government we follow American politics far too often in far too many ways. We need politics to regain its sense of the local, the national and the regional. That is why I strongly support this amendment.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lipsey

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, had noted in previous debates on this issue, the sentiment behind the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, on behalf of the Constitution Committee, with the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, and my noble friends Lord Lexden and Lord Lang, is fully appreciated.

Having heard the view of the House and seen the cross-party support for this change, the Government are content to accept the principle of the amendment. Our resistance to it in its current form has been based on a concern about unexpected and unforeseen consequences flowing from the change, and we still have that concern. We have identified some of those consequences in debate and, in looking at them more closely since, have concluded that they need to be addressed.

The amendment as it stands brings ambiguity and uncertainty to the impact of other legislative provisions upon the broadcasting of exit polls and other matters pertaining to secrecy within electoral law that are subject to criminal penalties of fines or up to six months in prison. There are other impacts on legislation that refers to the close of poll.

The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, has brought forward a further amendment to seek to address the issue of exit polls. Unfortunately, while deferring their publication until 30 minutes after close of play might deal with some potential instances of delay, it would not catch all such instances—for example, if there were a very considerable queue. In that sense, it would defer the problem to a later time.

It is also necessary to make some drafting changes to the amendment to ensure that it applies consistently. The amendment, as a consequence of the intricacies of the current law, does not apply to Northern Ireland. It would be most regrettable if we were to accept it and have a position where voters in a queue at 10 pm could receive ballot papers and vote after that time in Great Britain but not in Northern Ireland.

On that basis, and recognising the will of the House and the laudable principle behind the proposed change, the Government propose to bring forward at Third Reading an amendment that makes the change being sought in terms of electors voting at close of poll but which also contains a provision, through a proportionately limited power, to make further amendments on commencement to deal with all the potential consequences that it has on other elements of electoral legislation.

On the basis of the Government’s commitment to bring forward a clause at Third Reading that achieves the aim of the amendment in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, on behalf of the Constitution Committee and which deals with these further issues, I trust that the noble Lords will feel able to withdraw their amendments.

[Lord Lipsey]

I beg leave to withdraw my Amendment 12.

Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Lipsey

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I was not saying that, I was simply saying that we would need to discuss it further in that context, because we will be spending a good deal of time on the Bill. However, I was saying that a number of continuing experiments are under way with the government statistics authority and with the Electoral Commission about how best to ensure that, as we move to a new register, we maximise the number of people on it. He will know, as we have rehearsed it before, that the argument in respect of the December 2015 register is that maintaining a carryover from a register made over two years before risks carrying over a large number of additional names, particularly in the inner cities, of highly mobile people and those from multiple-occupation residences. There will be a post-May 2015 canvass of all of those who are in doubt on this. We think that the occurrence of a general election in May 2015 should produce the maximum registration available then, but that the question of accuracy and completeness is not best served by maintaining, even after the election, names that have not responded to several attempts personally to canvass them.

The joy and passion that members of the Opposition have for the single-Member constituency is striking. I remind them that the single-Member constituency and the electoral system that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, went for are not necessarily part of the ancient British constitution. The official with whom I travelled to a conference last weekend admitted to me that his grandfather had been one of the two Labour MPs for Blackburn between 1945 and 1950. That was one of the last two-Member constituencies. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is perhaps not quite old enough to remember the three-Member combined Scottish university seat, which was there until 1950. However, I am sure he remembers the electoral system used for that, which was of course the single transferable vote. We now regard the single-Member constituency as the only possible thing for Britain, but other things have been tried before and might be tried again in the future. This Government’s commitment to decentralisation and the revival of local democracy means that we see casework in future more often going to the local councillor, and not always, perhaps, all the way up to the MP.

There have been suggestions of gerrymandering. Looking through my preparatory notes on this, I see that in 1978-79, the then Labour Government postponed the introduction of boundary changes. There were accusations in the right-wing press that this was “jimmymandering” by the then Prime Minister, as a means of ensuring that Labour should not lose those relevant seats. I am conscious, as we all are, that the integrity, accuracy and completeness of the register, for the next election and beyond it, matters to all of us. We are also concerned that some of the underlying causes for the decline in the completeness of the register—political disillusionment and disengagement—need to be addressed, and on an all-party basis.

[Lord Lipsey]

I do not want the noble Lord to get the records wrong. It was 1968-69 and Jim Callaghan was not Prime Minister at the time, he was Home Secretary. Other than that, the Minister’s point is absolutely right.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I stand corrected.