Wales Bill

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I can readily identify with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely. I agree that these matters should ideally be in the hands of the National Assembly to decide. None the less, we have guidelines that have been laid down from here. By virtue of speaking to Amendment 5, I want to draw attention to the fact that there are real dangers when a Westminster election overshadows an election to the National Assembly.

Amendment 5 provides that the poll for a National Assembly ordinary general election should not be held within 355 days of the date of a UK general election, although I accept entirely that it should be a matter for the Assembly finally to decide on these matters if we can give it the power to do so. The amendment mentions 355 days rather than 12 months to allow situations to arise whereby one vote could be held on 7 May one year, followed by a poll on 1 May the following year, or similar circumstances.

The truth, which may not be immediately apparent to colleagues from other parts of the United Kingdom, is that the UK media are heavily biased in favour of England-only issues. That is understandable because most of the media are based in south-east England and look through a prism from that perspective. In the leaders’ debates in the run-up to the previous general election, for example, party leaders answered questions relating to healthcare and education, without mentioning that those policies were applicable only in England and not in Wales or Scotland. These considerations spill over to arguments in relation to the settlement that will be made to Scotland as well.

Circumstances such as these are highly confusing for viewers, listeners or readers in Wales and can lead to voters making choices based on policies that would not in fact affect them. Wales has a number of daily newspapers such as the Western Mail and Daily Post, as well as very good local newspapers, but the majority of people still get their news and election coverage from London-based outlets. Were an election to the Welsh Assembly to occur in quick succession following a UK general election, or in inverse circumstances, it is certain that any debates surrounding Welsh policies would be totally drowned by UK election coverage. The Electoral Reform Society Wales has said that combining polls would always have a detrimental impact by causing confusion for voters, and that Welsh elections would be “subsumed” into media coverage of the UK general election.

To ensure that voters’ decisions are well informed, we believe that provisions similar to those contained in Amendment 5 would be necessary to mitigate such media distortion, although I repeat that I would prefer that initiatives along those lines should come from the Assembly itself.

[Lord Richard (Lab)]

My Lords, I agree with the thrust of the amendment but I am bound to say that I am not sure that I fully understand the wording of the first part of it. If one actually looks at the text, it would seem that the amendment proposes that the Welsh Assembly should revert to a system in which the First Minister of the Welsh Assembly, with the consent of the Assembly, would be able to determine to hold an election at any moment that he thinks fit. In other words, we would be back to the situation that we were in before we passed the Act a few years ago that set up the five-year Parliament gap.

If the intention of the amendment is that the Assembly should be able to fix in advance a particular term at the end of which an election should be held—in other words, that the Assembly should decide whether it should be a five-year, four-year or even perhaps a three-year term—that I understand and fully appreciate. If the intention is, however, to give the Welsh Assembly the additional powers that the Prime Minister had in the old House of Commons, to call an election at the time of his own choosing, I am bound to say that I am not sure I agree. I accept the thrust of the amendment, which is that decisions on the timing of an election should be a matter for the Assembly, but I am not sure whether the wording of proposed new subsection (1) in the proposed amendment goes anywhere near achieving that.

[Lord Rowlands (Lab)]

My Lords, I understand and appreciate the power of the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, has just proposed to make sure that elections are not simultaneous. However, there is a case against that. The most worrying aspect in the whole of my parliamentary lifetime is the decline in turnout. In a democracy, turnout is extremely important. In the last Assembly election, the turnout was just over 40%. In the last general election to Westminster, it was 65%. The high point was in 1950 when we had a UK turnout of more than 83%. It never fell below 70% at the United Kingdom level until 2001, when it fell to 59%. But even now, at 65%, it is some 20 percentage points higher than the turnout for the latest Assembly election. I wonder whether we ought to be concerned about that. Although I understand and appreciate completely the argument that UK issues drown out Welsh issues, there is a point to make about turnout. It is extremely important in a democracy that turnout is upheld.

The turnout when I served Merthyr for 30-odd years was 70% to 75%. It fell to 70% in the last election in which I stood and I was mortified. But at the last election it fell to 59%, and that is in a highly political kind of community that appreciates and understands the nature of politics and elections. A case could be made, contrary to the one made by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, that if you run the elections together you intensify the politics. Parties are more engaged in the streets and you raise the turnout from 40% to 65%.

I am dredging my memory but the last time elections were run concurrently was in, I think, 1979, when local elections and the general election were held on the same date. That raised the turnout in local elections to a dramatically higher level than ever before. Although I understand that there is consensus at the Assembly level on separating the elections, I wanted to register the point about turnout.

[Lord Wigley]

Would the noble Lord, Lord Rowlands, accept that one element of an election is to give a mandate to the Government? If the mandate has been generated on the basis of a different election, how on earth can it be interpreted in the context of the Assembly?