Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Dubs and Lord Howarth of Newport

Monday 7th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town is unable to be in the Chamber this afternoon. She expresses her regret and asks if I might move Amendment 3, which is down in her name. I have another amendment in the group, Amendment 3A, which is intended to provide words to the same effect as my noble friend’s amendment, although my noble friend’s amendment does so more felicitously than mine.

Noble Lords will recall the arguments that my noble friend Lady Hayter put forward in Committee and the eloquence with which she did so, urging the House that those,

“who … have attained the age of 16 and who would be entitled to vote as electors at the subsequent parliamentary election”,

should have the right to vote in the referendum that will determine the electoral system under which the subsequent parliamentary election will be fought. For my part, I do not favour lowering the voting age to 16 for general elections. However, I submit to the House that the situation at this referendum will be entirely exceptional. I imagine and rather hope that it will be the only such referendum for many years, although one must acknowledge the possibility that if the choice of electoral options is not widened people may find themselves deeply dissatisfied, as my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has warned. So it is possible that there would be a public move to hold a further referendum before so very long, but at least we would not expect another referendum this side of the general election.

The future constitution and electoral system under which candidates are returned as Members of Parliament is the constitution and the system that will belong to the new generation in this country. It would be appropriate that those who have attained the age of 16 by 5 May should be entitled to participate in making this particular decision so that when they come to be able to exercise their vote for the first time at a general election, presumably in May 2015, they will have shaped the decision that determines how the election will be fought and what the voting system will be on that occasion. It is a simple matter of fairness. It would do something useful in engaging the interests and involvement of a new generation of young people, and I hope very much that the proposition will find favour with the House. I beg to move.

[Lord Dubs]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendment in my name, Amendment 4, which is on a somewhat different issue, although it has been put in the same group—so, for the sake of speed, it is probably better that we discuss them as part of the same thing. I would not normally want to raise an issue like this, but there are two reasons why I feel it appropriate to do so on this Bill. First, we are being asked to agree to a referendum—and we as Members of this House will be allowed to vote in that referendum—that will determine how the voters of this country choose their MPs. Yet we in this House are not allowed to vote for MPs. This is a total anomaly. I do not want the Government to say, “That’s fine”, that they are persuaded by my argument, and then take away our right to vote in the referendum. But it is an anomaly in terms of logic; in the way that the provision is drafted, we have reached this somewhat illogical position.

My second reason for raising this matter is that I had the privilege of serving on the Joint Committee on Human Rights. The chair of the committee wrote about the issue of Members of this House voting and received a reply from the Deputy Prime Minister. I shall quote three sentences from the letter, because they are relevant to this Bill and this amendment. I quote from the middle of the letter from the Deputy Prime Minister to the chair of the Human Rights Joint Committee on 25 January. He said:

“The Lords sit in their own right. The Commons are elected by the remainder of the estate of commoners to represent them in Parliament. There was therefore no case for the Lords to vote to elect representatives, since they were able to sit in Parliament anyway”.

He goes on to say:

“The fact that members of the House of Lords have a voice in Parliament makes it legitimate to deprive them of a right to have their voice also heard through their elected representative in the Commons”.

That is also not a very logical argument, I say with respect to the Deputy Prime Minister. The issue about voting in elections is about choosing a Government, not about having a voice here. Of course, we have that after the election, but this is about deciding and helping to influence who will vote. I appreciate that if we did have the vote, the turnout of Lords voting in elections would be pretty well 100 per cent, because I know that we would jolly well rush off and vote. But that is not the key point in the argument. It is rather anomalous, when many of us here canvass hard for our parties in elections, that we have to admit to our fellow canvassers that we do not have a vote at all—“I’m just doing it for you lot”. That is how it works. It is an anomaly.

I do not think that the Government will bow to this argument now but I hope that they will accept that the Bill is illogical in this respect, and say that it is something that we should be able to consider at an early stage in order to put right this anomaly. If the House of Commons decides to give prisoners the vote—I hope that they will, although many people do not agree—it will be even more anomalous for us to be left out of the equation.