Oral Answers to Questions

Mark Lazarowicz Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I strongly agree. It is very good indeed that something close to a cross-party consensus has emerged over the last few years in favour of dealing with generations of discrimination—and it is discrimination—against mental health in the NHS and, within that, an almost institutionalised form of cruelty through which very vulnerable children and adolescents with serious mental health conditions have not been treated and cared for. This cannot be reversed and corrected overnight, but we can make a start. We have done that, and last week’s announcement in the Budget of a £1.25 billion investment in children and young adult mental health services will have a transformative effect on the tens of thousands of children who will now be better treated than they have been for a long time.

[Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)]

My constituents, I am happy to say, voted for AV in the recent referendum, but they were not among the majority. Does the Deputy Prime Minister agree that with a five-party system at the UK level—and even more throughout the nations and regions of the UK—we need to look again at the electoral system and that this should be a priority for a constitutional convention hopefully set up under a Labour Government?

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

One should not expect to ask a Liberal Democrat about electoral reform and fail to get a hearty answer—well, perhaps not a hearty answer, but the hon. Gentleman knows what I mean. The electoral system we have is woefully unrepresentative of the way people vote. As he rightly suggests, it is becoming ever more unrepresentative as the old duopoly of politics gives way to something much more fluid and plural. Our electoral system—and, indeed, the way in which we conduct our business here—is stuck firmly in the past. It is anachronistic; it will have to change; in my view, it will change one day.