Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Williamson of Horton and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

I take a lot of responsibility for Chris Bryant. I have known him a long time. I gave him his first job in the Labour Party. That started a beautiful career on his part; he somewhat overtook me somewhere along the line.

I have indeed remonstrated with the said Member of the other place on this matter, but I think—in fact, I am fairly sure—that I have persuaded him that it is right for us to put this modest little measure to this House. There are two points here. First, if we can never put anything that was not put in the other House, what is the purpose of this House? Secondly, the longer we look at the issues of the acceptability of that referendum, whether one is in favour of AV or against it, the more important it seems to all of us that the result, whatever it is, should be endorsed wholeheartedly and that even those who have lost the argument feel that there was a good turnout and it was a good decision. That is important.

The answer is not that we should not have a threshold. It may indeed be a question of my being too modest in my proposal—it is modest—but I am confident that the acceptance of that principle is something that the Committee should agree to and should be written into the Bill. I find it worrying that otherwise we will have a Bill that makes no allowance for a very small turnout. We might then be faced with the question of how we would deal with that.

Being versed in risk management, which is how I spend most of the rest of my life—that is how we manage things in organisations—I know that one tries not to arrive at a situation without having thought about it before, assessed the risk and mitigated it to the extent that it is possible so that you do not have to scrabble around at the last minute, dealing with results that might have been foreseen.

Actually, I am confident that we will get a 25 per cent turnout, but I would much prefer that the amendment was part and parcel of the Bill. It would not necessarily negate the results of that referendum; it would bring them back to the two Houses of Parliament to say, “How do we now deal with this? Do we think that, despite the threshold being small, it was such an overriding result one way or another that we can live with it? Or maybe a slightly different question about a more proportional system than this, which some Members would like, would be better. Or do we do as the Irish did—put it to the people again until they vote the way we want?”. It gives Parliament and the Government the ability to think how to respond to a situation should it be too low a turnout.

I believe strongly that big constitutional changes should not be made without the will of the people, and the will of the people is as much about turning out to vote and expressing that as it is about the way that they cast their vote. I beg to move.

[Lord Williamson of Horton]

My Lords, noble Lords cannot imagine how pleased I am to see the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, moving this amendment. That is so for two reasons: first, because I am interested in the amendment and I support it; and, secondly, because I have sat through almost five days of discussion in the Committee and have heard a large number of extremely important interventions. Some of them did not interest me very much, I have to say, but I have been here and heard them all. I fully accept noble Lords’ right to raise points, but they have done so a large number of times.

Now we come to an amendment that I am interested in because I share the view that it is reasonable, in a situation where we continually tell ourselves that we are dealing with a constitutional issue, that we should have some threshold, as is the case in a good number of democracies in the world. It is true that there are some disadvantages. It is claimed that it could confuse the electorate, though I do not accept that argument myself. I think that the electorate will understand perfectly clearly that they were voting on a certain issue and that they had given their opinion only above a specific threshold. There is also the possibility that quite a lot of people who abstain would consider that they would have given a no vote. However, once again, I do not think that we should attribute to the electorate ideas that they might not have. They might feel quite confident that they will cast their vote and that it is perfectly reasonable that it should be laid down in the procedure that a reasonable percentage of the electorate should vote on an important issue.

Therefore, in principle, it is a good idea to have a threshold. We could have an argument about whether it should be 25 per cent—we have two more amendments here which have a different percentage—but I am very keen that the issue should be raised, as it has been by the noble Baroness. It would be a serious dereliction of duty if we went into a constitutional amendment and had not properly discussed whether or not there should be a threshold. It is an important point and we know that in a good number of other countries there is a threshold in constitutional issue referendums or votes, either in the procedure for initiating a referendum or in the threshold required to validate the vote, which is what we are talking about in this case. This is a subject that ought to be debated in this House. I support the procedure. I accept that 25 per cent is pretty low but we have to launch the debate and see what views are taken in relation to a threshold in the constitutional referendum.