Fixed-term Parliaments Bill

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 15th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, makes an excellent point. However, I am optimistic because we are about to resume proper scrutiny in your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Tyler]

The noble Lord referred to slumbering Members on this side of the House. There is photographic evidence that the only people who actually went to sleep were people listening to his speech on his side of the House.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

On the contrary, I myself went to sleep, but not during my own speeches—although I might have done, and indeed the noble Lord might have supposed that I had done. I concede that at certain points.

We are about to resume a proper practice of scrutiny in the best traditions of your Lordships’ House. It is particularly important given that there was no Green Paper heralding this legislation, there has been no pre-legislative scrutiny, yet this Bill is of very great constitutional importance in itself and its provisions interact with other constitutional measures. For example, they interact with the provisions for boundary reviews that we just legislated in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act. They interact with provisions that we can anticipate in a draft measure for reform of your Lordships’ House. They interact with the contents that we can anticipate of a draft parliamentary privileges Bill, which we are led to expect. I think that it would have been better if the Government’s proposals in all these respects had been laid out and available for pre-legislative scrutiny rather than that Parliament was required, effectively, to legislate on aspects of the constitution without having the ability to consider the interplay between different reforming measures. However, I am encouraged by what the Deputy Prime Minister said in the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House on 13 October last year in responding to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick:

“Of course, what matters now is the degree of scrutiny that”,

the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill,

“is subject to as the legislation passes through both Houses. On that we are very clear. We want to make sure that it is subject to the greatest possible scrutiny, which it rightly deserves”.

In that spirit, I beg to move Amendment 1 in my name.

The Bill, as drafted, prescribes polling at general elections on a Thursday. It ignores the debate about the case for polling at weekends or other ways in which polling can be facilitated for our citizens. It effectively closes down that debate, which has been proceeding somewhat desultorily for a number of years. However, it is a proper debate and I do not think that it should be instantly closed down. We all have a major concern about how to improve participation in elections in this country. I am indebted to the Library of the House of Commons for a chart that it has provided in one of its notes, which shows a tendency for turnout at general elections to have declined significantly between 1950 and 2010. The bar chart indicates that in 1950 turnout in the general election of that year was of the order of 83 per cent. It fell a little bit at subsequent elections, but in February 1974 it was at or very close to 80 per cent, which is remarkable. Of course, the country was in crisis at that time and it was perceived to be an exceptionally important election. Nevertheless, looking back from where we are now, we would regard it as quite remarkable that turnout was 80 per cent in February weather conditions in 1974.

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[Lord Tyler]

I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, preceded me because it gives me an opportunity to congratulate yet another sinner on repenting when I hear from him the admission that Ministers occasionally give us honeyed words and assure us that action will be taken when, in the 13 years in which he had a very responsible role in government, there was very little action even in discussing this issue, let alone consulting on it.

I shall make two or three quick points in support of the amendments that my noble friend Lord Marks and I have tabled. First, I recall very well indeed the night of 28 February 1974. In an enormous, scattered rural constituency with snow threatened, pouring rain much of the time and a lot of wind on Bodmin moor, we managed a turnout of 83 per cent, but that was in extremely difficult circumstances. This is true of many rural consistencies in which there are big distances to travel from the place of work to get to vote. There are very difficult circumstances in many villages when the only place where you can have a polling station is the village school, so it is closed for the day. That practical point has not yet come up in the debate. It may be true in urban areas too, but I do not have the same experience. There are practical problems about the insistence on Thursday as polling day that we should address.

The other point that I shall address very briefly was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, and supported by my noble friend Lord Cormack. I am a practising member of the Church of England, by which I mean that I am never going to be perfect but am practising all the time. I recognise that there are people in all the churches who would find it difficult if Sunday were the only day. That is why our amendments specifically refer to the possibility of two days. Of course, it is also true that Saturday is a day for other faiths, as indeed is Friday.

I am chair of the Faith and Civil Society Unit at Goldsmiths College, so I take a particular interest in the way in which we are now a multifaith community. We should recognise that in the way in which we address this issue. That is why I am very strongly of the view, as my noble friend Lord Rennard said, that it would be preferable to have the choice of two days, but they should be shorter days. I also recall that on 28 February 1974 one presiding officer was so exhausted by the end of the day that he did not properly perforate the ballot papers. Since I ended up with a majority of nine after six recounts, I think that the long day is another factor that we should take into account, and a shorter working day but on both days seems to be something that we should look at very carefully.

I have some sympathy with the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, about the insistence on moving towards more and more absent voting, both proxy voting and postal voting. On balance, it is preferable to try to extend voting in person and to make that as easy as we can, not just for reasons of potential corruption and fraud but because it is part of one’s civil responsibility to come together as a community to vote. I hope that is true.

The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred to the briefing by the Electoral Commission, and I should say en passant that I am a member of the informal advisory group of politicians of all parties who give guidance to the commission every so often. Its summary is in effect that at this stage it would be premature to insist on moving towards weekend voting, which is really why my noble friends and I have put it not in a prescriptive way but in an advisory way that we should be moving in that direction. It is disappointing that although there have been pilots for so many other aspects of improving access to the voting process, there has been so little attention to or consultation on this issue. Incidentally, I endorse the point made by the commission about the number of advantages in advance voting. This is not an either/or. They are both quite useful ways in which we could get more people to go to the poll to cast their votes.

There is an interesting opportunity here. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will at least be able to indicate that he will not adopt the attitude of the previous Government, which was personalised, illustrated and characterised by the noble Lord, Lord Bach, in his honeyed words but with mighty little action. Before we get to the definitive moment to which my noble friend referred when we will know the shape of the new constituencies in October 2013, I hope that more work will have been done to consult all interested parties and to conduct pilot schemes to see whether a two-day weekend polling period with shorter hours each day would not suit our fellow citizens much better than plumping again for a Thursday, which is so inconvenient for so many and causes so much disruption.

[Lord Grocott]

My Lords, I echo what my noble friend Lord Howarth has said about how much better debates on major constitutional reform are when we get contributions from all parts of the House, which has characterised the debate on this amendment. I welcome the fact that we have had the opportunity to discuss this amendment even though I have real anxieties about it. Perhaps it is a sign of a simple mind, but one of the tests I put to constitutions is the extent to which they are straightforward, intelligible and as simple as possible, which is one of the many reasons why I am so strongly in favour of first past the post.

While I do not doubt for a minute the good intentions of people who think that we should have a couple of days to vote, there would be a problem. It would just extend the development, which has undoubtedly occurred in most of our lifetimes—I do not want to be rude in characterising it in this way—towards a kind of rolling election as opposed to an election day when the nation makes a decision. In part, a rolling election is very much as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, has said. I know that under a Labour Government there was substantial development of postal voting. In effect, we have at least two election days, if not a longer period. There is the crucial day when the postal ballots go out and people react to that. Then there are the days between the postal ballots and the election day when more ballots come in, which makes it a kind of rolling election.

I feel a certain nervousness about extending the election over two days. At least it might mean that a lot of the drama will undoubtedly be removed from election day. Perhaps I am wishing for days that have passed to think that that drama can ever come back. The February 1974 election was certainly profoundly dramatic for me because it was one of the many elections that I managed to lose and there were several recounts into the middle of the night. We were pretty tired over that period, but that is part of the drama of an election night.

What would happen between the two polling days? Perhaps we would all sit in limbo. Again, I am trying to avoid crudely partisan points, but occasionally I cannot manage that. A rolling election period would be made worse by more complicated election systems. I genuinely respect the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, who has participated throughout. If the AV vote is passed, it will inevitably mean that counting will occur on the day after. It is inconceivable that an AV vote could be counted through the night of an election day.

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[Lord Tyler]

The noble Lord and I both served for many months on the working group chaired by his colleague, Mr Jack Straw, when we looked in very considerable detail at the various proposals for reform of your Lordships’ House. At not one single moment through the whole of that White Paper’s preparation did he or his colleagues suggest that it was necessary for those proposals to be put in a referendum for the public to take a view. Why is there suddenly this interest in making that proposal the subject of a referendum?

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

It is because it is part of a series of measures of constitutional change. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, will also know that the intention was always to produce that White Paper, which we did, then to ensure that it was in the manifestos of the three parties at the last election, which it was, then to bring forward proposals. For myself, I believe that a referendum ought to be considered in the context of the current Government’s decision to go for a referendum on AV and their other constitutional changes; and because it is abundantly clear, from all that I have read and heard, that they are not prepared to deal with the issue of powers when it comes to Lords reform.

My noble friend Lord Grocott and I do not always see eye to eye on Lords reform, but I certainly agree with him when he challenges the naive assumption that an elected senate will simply carry on in much the same way as your Lordships’ House does, without any impact on the House of Commons. I do not accept that; an elected second Chamber is bound to impact on the Commons and on our constitution in a major way. In many respects, it will be a new House even though there may well be a transition period between where we are and where we get to in the end. The same applies to the Bill. As a result of the Bill there will be less accountable Parliaments, because they will last longer, and a legislature with a more limited ability to evict a Government who have lost the confidence of the Commons. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Marks, that that is pretty fundamental to me. At the very least the Minister, whom we all value for his contributions on constitutional issues, ought to have a shot at showing where the consistency is between those constitutional changes which are to be subject to a referendum and those which are not.