Local Government Elections (Referendum) Bill [HL]

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, on securing a Second Reading for his Bill. I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the register of interests, in particular as a councillor in the London Borough of Lewisham and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

The noble Lord made reference to the Co-op in his opening remarks. I have been a member of the Co-op for as long as I have been a member of the Labour Party—39 years last month. Along with my noble friend Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, I sit in this House as a Labour and Co-op Peer, and we form a group of 17 Members of your Lordships’ House.

The Bill focuses on referendums for local government electoral systems and is permissive in its aim. If it is passed into law, as we have heard, it would require the Government to introduce their own Bill to bring into effect the implied intention of this Bill. I am not particularly happy with that sort of procedure as it is fairly cumbersome and uses up parliamentary time unnecessarily—and, for reasons we are aware of, parliamentary time is not in plentiful supply at the moment. If the Bill did in fact become law, we might as well have done what it is requesting that the Government do in the first place. So procedurally it would be better to have a much sharper Bill than the one before us today.

Since 1997, Governments have introduced a variety of voting systems into elections in the United Kingdom. We have a closed list system for the election of Members to the European Parliament; the supplementary vote system for the election of mayors and police and crime commissioners; and additional member closed list systems to introduce an element of proportionality into the election of the London Assembly, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. As has been said, the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition Government in the second Scottish Parliament introduced proportional representation for local government in Scotland. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, referred to the fact that we have proportional representation for local government elections in Northern Ireland.

So there are many systems and it could be argued that that itself is a problem. I would certainly favour cutting down the number of systems that are used to elect people to various offices in the United Kingdom. When I cast my vote for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly, I get three ballot papers and vote using three different systems, one for each election. I use supplementary vote for the Mayor of London; first past the post for the constituency member; and I vote for a closed party list for the London-wide members, which are allocated on a proportional basis when the count takes place.

I am aware that the Conservative party made a commitment in its manifesto to replace the supplementary vote system used for mayors and police and crime commissioners with the first past the post system. My own party’s manifesto at the general election was silent on the issue of voting systems, but there was a commitment to establish a constitutional convention—that would certainly have looked at the question of devolution in England outside London and where power is held and used at the present time. If there were to be changes to structures, consideration would have been given to the system of election used at different tiers of government.

As I said at the start of my remarks, the proposals in the Bill are a fairly cumbersome procedure. If we want to do what is implied in the Bill, I would be clearer and more direct and seek to bring about the change with the Bill before us today. There are a few issues with the Bill, some of which have been referred to by other noble Lords. In Clause 1(2), I am not sure whether another electoral system would be helpful in areas that are not unitary. As I said earlier, we need to reduce the number of systems. I would also prefer that, if we are going down this route, we should be clear about what system to introduce. An ever-expanding patchwork of different systems, with different systems side by side and at different levels in the same area, does not give us the clarity that is important.

In Clause 1(3)(a) the petition should not be coming to the Government or Parliament: it should be presented and checked by the local authority where the petition seeks to change the electoral system. That has happened for the election of mayors and also for referendums to abolish them. In Clause 1(3)(b) there is a double lock that requires the local government body to vote for the referendum by passing a resolution, having received a petition that meets the 10% threshold. That may or may not be right; it is certainly an effective blocking mechanism that could result in very few, if any, referendums taking place. The noble Lords, Lord Lipsey and Lord Tope, both referred to this.

This Bill needs a day or two in Committee to see how it can be improved before making progress and leaving this House. As I always say when speaking on Private Members’ Bills on a Friday, this can be done very effectively in the Moses Room—but the Government insist on a commitment Motion to a Committee of the Whole House rather than a Grand Committee, effectively making it difficult for all but the few Private Members’ Bills which they support to make any meaningful progress. They are caught in a log-jam and that is a real shame. The Bills that do make progress often originate in the other place, sponsored by Back-Bench Conservative MPs and may well be from the off-the- shelf collection of Private Members’ Bills which the Government are happy to see passed into law but for which they do not want to, or cannot, provide government parliamentary time at the moment.

However, that is not to say that the noble Lord’s Bill does not highlight that, in some parts of the country, things have become polarised, resulting in a situation where effective opposition is no longer evident in many of our town halls. I firmly believe that it is important to have effective challenge and opposition at every level of government; and where that is not possible because of the result of an election, it can be a problem. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, referred to such situations in her remarks. Some local authorities have sought to make some provision for opposition by allowing sole opposition councillors to table motions without a seconder or by agreeing to always formally second motions from a sole opposition councillor to enable a debate to take place. That is welcome and I congratulate the councils that do it.

I would not like to see the direct link between councillors and the electorate broken because it is one of the benefits of the first past the post system. But perhaps a think tank or some other organisation should look at what can be done to address the issue of effective opposition and challenge in our town halls. Perhaps options such as an additional member list could be thought through. Such a system could be triggered if the combined number of all opposition members is less than 10% of the total, and used to bring the opposition parties up to at least 10% of the total membership of the council by providing additional members elected on an area-wide basis. That would allow motions to be voted on, alternative budgets to be proposed, actions of the majority party to be condemned as an outrage to local democracy, and all the other things that should happen in a local council meeting. That is just a thought, not a policy, but it might be useful to look at along with other ideas.

I can tell the noble Lord, Lord Balfe, that I will think carefully about his Bill and its proposals. It is very likely that I will table amendments to bring about what I see as improvements to the current Bill. This has been an interesting and useful debate, and it is surely about to get even better with the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham.