Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Wayne David Excerpts

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that to suggest that holding elections and a referendum on the same day is confusing constitutes not a condemnation of the electorate, but simply a recognition that we need to have a debate on such an important issue? The very fact of elections to the National Assembly for Wales, or to the Scottish Parliament or the Northern Ireland Assembly, takes us away from the central need to have an in-depth argument about the pros and cons of the AV system.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point more eloquently than I could have done. I suspect that that is why he is an important member of our Front-Bench team and I am a mere Back Bencher, languishing and fighting my corner for aircraft carriers and others.

Let me now make a small amount of progress. I do not intend to rehearse, or rehash, the arguments presented so ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) or, indeed, Members on the other side of the Committee. They have already highlighted more than adequately the problems that occurred in 2007, particularly in Scotland, where 147,000 ballot papers were spoilt. I would, however, like to draw the Committee’s attention to some of the representations made by a number of individuals and organisations to the Scottish Affairs Committee—led by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow South West (Mr Davidson)—which, unlike the Deputy Prime Minister, actually bothered to ask for input on the date of the referendum from the people of Scotland.

Let us consider first the response of the Scottish Government, an august body to which we should all accord some respect. Scottish Ministers wrote:

“The Scottish Government believes that the lack of consultation, and the substantive decision to hold UK wide contests on the same day as devolved elections, shows a lack of respect for the devolved administrations. We also believe that it undermines the integrity of elections to the Scottish Parliament and risks voter confusion. Elections to the Scottish Parliament are important to the people of Scotland and we believe they have the right to make their electoral choices without the distraction of a parallel UK contest. Holding separate contests on one day would also create operational and practical risks for those charged with administering the elections.”

As Members have already pointed out, it is not just the SNP Scottish Government who want the date changed. My current Liberal Democrat MSP—I suspect that he may not still be my MSP after May—wrote on behalf of his party that he was

“very much against the inclusion of a referendum on the same day as the Scottish elections!”.

He put an exclamation mark at the end, which I consider particularly important.

Just in case the Deputy Prime Minister believes that the opinions of other politicians should not be given the same weight as his weighty opinion, the Minister may wish to reflect on the comments of the interim chief returning officer for Scotland, Mr Tom Aitchison, who has said:

“Combining the polls will require additional staffing at polling stations and additional ballot boxes. This appears to be a straightforward matter, but there is much scope for confusion and misallocation of ballot papers. Simply sourcing and procuring sufficient ballot boxes is also a matter that is concerning the electoral community.”

Mr Aitchison went on to say:

“with three ballot boxes from each polling station (two for the Parliamentary election and one for the referendum) there is likely to be a situation in which each box must be sifted and possibly verified before any of the three counts can commence. This will require an investment in time, space and staffing adding to the cost”—

which, apparently, so concerns those on the Front Bench—

“complexity and duration of the count. Stakeholders, including politicians and voters, need to understand that the process may take longer than they might anticipate and may certainly be more expensive. Many Returning Officers may find it necessary to hire larger venues for the count and indeed to hire them for an extended period to accommodate these additional processes.”

So much for the Deputy Prime Minister’s argument about cost.

Some Members on the other side of the Committee have suggested that the Scottish parliamentary elections could be shifted by as little as a month, but there are two serious flaws in that suggestion. First, as Members on both sides of the Committee will recall, in 1999 the European elections took place just one month after the Scottish elections. Turnout for the European elections in Scotland was a mere 26%. That, surely, is something that no one would wish to repeat. Secondly, if saving money is genuinely the argument that the Deputy Prime Minister wishes to deploy, this suggestion of shifting the election and all the associated costs fatally undermines his own logic.