Contribution
My Lords, I concur 100% with the comments from my noble friend Lord Hayward. I am going to take this statutory instrument at face value and discuss the issues that it raises on the alternative vote and first past the post. As noble Lords will know, when proportional representation was tested with the electorate in 2011—in this case, the alternative vote referendum—it was lost by a margin of 68% to 32%.
Noteworthy in the statutory instrument is the paucity of intellectual rationale for why the changes are happening. I agree with my noble friend: it looks like a cynical stitch-up to avoid embarrassment in the combined boroughs of Greater Manchester. But it also potentially looks like a strategy for a progressive alliance being rolled out in the run-up to a general election—for instance, with the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats —with the stated or probably unstated aim of locking out the Conservatives and Reform UK from power.
First past the post is simple and fair, and Conservatives have always supported it. It ensures proper representation and broad campaigning by parties, rather than policies targeted on a subset of voters. It is simple and transparent. Even in a disaggregated, fragmented political landscape, it is still stable and effective at delivering governance. One person secures the plurality of votes and that is transparent. As it happens, almost 100 Labour MPs have been elected in the other place with less than 35% of the votes. So if it is good enough for this Government’s majority in the other place, it is good enough for our elections generally.
In 2016, the Home Affairs Select Committee recommended that first past the post was best to replace the supplementary vote in police and crime commissioner elections. SV causes confusion and leads to a lot of spoiled and rejected ballots. The Electoral Commission, in its September 2021 report on the 2021 elections, noted:
“A quarter of people who had difficulties filling in their ballot paper in areas holding both local government and PCC elections said it was confusing that the elections used different voting systems. A third of people voting in London said that they found the two voting systems confusing”.
In fact, the rejection rate in the London mayoralty election in 2021 was 114,201 ballots, of which 87,000 were because voters cast a vote for more than one candidate in the first-preference column; 265,353 votes were invalidated because the second preference was cast for the same candidate as the first; and 319,978 second preferences were unmarked. These void rates exceeded the votes validly transferred to the two leading candidates: Mr Khan got 192,000 votes, and Mr Shaun Bailey—now the noble Lord, Lord Bailey of Paddington —got 85,000 transfers.
First past the post focuses on clear accountability. Electors know the one individual who is responsible for the failings or the successes of public policy. SV gives a recycled second vote the same democratic credibility as voters’ first choice. Each vote should count equally. One person, one vote. In fact, a supplementary vote is used almost nowhere else across the globe. The late, much-renowned and much-missed elections expert and academic, David Butler, described SV as a silly answer, based on the need to compromise between rival factions.
First past the post is quicker to count and cheaper to administer, as my noble friend Lord Hayward said, and better understood by voters. Some very eminent people in your Lordships’ House agree with this. In fact, one of them said that “SV is one of the worst systems. We had a referendum in 2011 on changing the voting system for elections to the House of Commons. This was wholly rejected, and I have seen nothing following on from that result, or anything that has happened subsequently, which leads me to believe that the country wants to change the voting system for any elections. We have managed to heap on voters a whole plethora of voting systems. That is not a good thing to do. I thought that one of the worst systems was the SV system. I have observed many counts where people have put a cross in the second column, which means that their votes are discounted.” Brilliantly said by the current Labour Government Chief Whip—quite, my Lords. Indeed, in 2021 the UCL Constitution Unit described the supplementary vote as “an anomaly” and out of step with other elections in England.
At least AV, which is an alternative system, allows a more pluralistic preference voting. I ask the Minister directly: will she confirm that these changes will take effect in respect of a putative Greater Manchester mayoral by-election, which may or may not happen later this year? This is about raw politics. It fails to make a coherent fact-based intellectual case for reverting to an SV regime. It is about locking out Reform UK and the Conservatives from power, and therefore it fails on merit and is a retrograde step, which my party and I oppose.