Wales Bill

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 30th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Chope. I will not go over many of the issues that my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain) raised, but he is absolutely right and I shall vote against clause 2 stand part because I believe that the restriction is right. The hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) has been trying to intervene repeatedly to say that people have a choice—they could vote for an individual on the constituency basis but then have some other choice on the list. That is not quite the case. The names are listed in order and the voter might like candidate No. 3 on the list, but they do not have the choice to vote for that person—they vote for a political party, and it is the political party that selects the people at the top of the list. Usually that is either to boost its vote in an area or to get a person in by the back door who has already failed. That is the simple fact of the process before the current restriction came in; it is a back-door one.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

May I suggest to my hon. Friend that it is not so much a back door as a cat flap? You can not only go in through the cat flap but you can withdraw without the need for a by-election if you are on the list rather than being a constituency MP.

[Jonathan Evans]

It is your system.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

That is a good discussion to have and it will flow from part II of the Silk commission, which we will debate in the Chamber. It is a worthwhile debate to have in the present situation, where Parliament still has sovereign powers and still in essence passes to the Assembly the ability to do certain things, bearing in mind the commitment from our Front Bench in principle that we look favourably upon the idea of reversing the current position, where it is only the delegated powers that the Assembly can legislate on. That debate is not for today, but the time will come.

The explanatory notes, which Ministers seek to use to justify the reversal, say in paragraph 12 that the concern expressed by many people

“has been refuted in studies by the Electoral Commission and others which have demonstrated that the prohibition”

that is currently in place—the ban—

“has a disproportionate impact on smaller parties who have a smaller pool of potential candidates to draw upon.”

I am genuinely bemused by that. In my own constituency, which is a strong Labour constituency, not only are there Tory voters, but there are Tory elected representatives, a Plaid Cymru representative, and others. I cannot believe that they do not have a sufficient number of alternative candidates to put on a regional list.

All we are talking about is a handful—four candidates—appearing on a regional rather than first-past-the-post list. If they do not have the numbers, that is a real signal of a lack of confidence in the capacity of what have today been termed “minority parties” in the regions. I simply do not believe it—there are people who will and should come forward. Equally, we would have to do the same in the regions. There is an onus on the party to bring people forward in the valleys, the vale, west Wales and elsewhere. The argument that each region would not have four candidates who can be put on the list just does not hold water.

[Chris Bryant]

Does not this give the lie to the accusation that the Labour party gains a partisan advantage from the present law? Given that everybody else has mentioned the Rhondda, I will too. Leanne Wood originally said that she would stand for the constituency seat, but if the law is changed she will probably stand on both lists, and I think that undermines Plaid Cymru. If the law is changed, it will hurt Plaid Cymru in the end. It will mean that she will get fewer votes in the Rhondda than she would have got in the first place. More importantly, it undermines, and makes people more cynical about, the whole concept of the Assembly itself.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I entirely agree. We all make personal calculations in our political lives: we decide where we should stand, where we have connections and where we should cast our lot and go for it. However, the proposed system—this is the exact situation in the Rhondda—amounts to, “Well, I’m really going to go for this, but if all else fails there’s something I can fall back on.” My gut instinct is that that is not right and it does not feel right to many voters either.

The Bevan Foundation has been criticised, but it is a left-of-centre think tank—that is what it does. It is scandalous to say that it is simply an arm of the Labour party. If Members look at the work it has done on welfare issues, unemployment and economic incapacity in the valleys, they will see that some of it has been critical of the Labour party as well. When my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) was looking for someone to do a report, my guess is that the Institute of Economic Affairs and others were not available or did not have the knowledge of Wales to do it.

The majority of people canvassed were very concerned. I will not repeat the quotes, but people from across all parts of south and west Wales said that they could not understand how people who had clearly been defeated could then pop up. Of course, that was reiterated by the Government’s own impact assessment, to which I am sure the Secretary of Sate will refer when he explains why he is jettisoning its findings.

After the first set of Assembly elections, it is not just the Labour party that underwent a damascene conversion, as it has been called, but the Tories and Lib Dems. Lord Crickhowell, who has already been mentioned, is categorically opposed to dual candidacy and said back in 2005:

“The present arrangements are really pretty indefensible”.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 15 June 2005; Vol. 672, c. 1216.]

The current Chief Secretary to the Treasury made exactly the same point. It was not just us or members of the public who were saying it at the time; other politicians also said, “We made a genuine mistake.”

As I said at the beginning, we can have discussions about closed and open lists in terms of proportionality and whether there is a different way of doing it, but I say adamantly to the Secretary of State that to reverse the system again, for whatever reason, is not the way to go. It does not work and it has been proven that it does not hold the confidence of people on the ground in Wales. Let us have the wider debate on the way forward, but simply to chop and change, particularly against the recommendations of the Electoral Commission, is no way to make Acts of Parliament.