Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, this is a serious and sensible amendment. It would take some persuading on the part of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to convince people that my noble friend Lord Grocott’s proposal is not the more sensible approach. I will explain what the Bill currently proposes for the referendum in Clause 7(2). It proposes to divide the whole country into a series of voting areas: a district in England where there is a district council; a county in England where there are no county councils; a London borough; the City of London, including the Inner and Middle Temples; the Isles of Scilly; a constituency for the National Assembly for Wales; a constituency for the Scottish Parliament; and the whole of Northern Ireland. In relation to those eight separate sorts of voting area, paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 proposes that a counting officer be appointed. In each of those voting areas, the counting officer is in charge of the vote in that area. After the votes have been cast, the counting officer hands to the regional counting officer the certificate of the votes cast. At the same time, with the regional counting officer’s permission, the counting officer makes public how everybody has voted in the voting area. That is except in Northern Ireland, where there is no regional counting officer. The counting officer in Northern Ireland hands over his votes to the chief counting officer, who also then gets all the votes from the regional counting officers. Then the chief counting officer makes an announcement about how the votes have been cast nationally. That means that the public will become aware of how people have voted in the eight different sorts of voting area specified in the Bill. For example, people will know how a London borough has voted and how Northern Ireland as a whole has voted, but not how individual constituencies have voted in Northern Ireland, whether they are individual constituencies for the Northern Irish Assembly, local authority constituencies or parliamentary constituencies. Nor will it be possible to work it out, because the voting area is the whole of Northern Ireland. In London, you will not be able to tell how individual constituencies have voted. What is the purpose of this extraordinarily complicated system? Is it, I ask myself, trying to parallel where elections are taking place on the same day as the proposed referendum, namely 5 May? No, because in Northern Ireland the whole of the country is chosen to be the voting area. No, because in London there will be no local authority elections. In Scotland there will be voting in Scottish Parliament constituencies but local authority elections will also be going on. On the face of it, this seems to be an overcomplicated system for identifying voting areas, in which the disclosure of how the votes are cast bears no relation to either parliamentary constituencies or anything else. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has pointed out that a theme has run through the responses of the noble Lord, Lord McNally, to all this. It is that the Government have tried, in putting forward practical proposals, to stick to the normal electoral arrangements. I have never seen these electoral arrangements in any other sort of election. They are overcomplicated and arbitrary in terms of the areas in which declarations will be made, whereas a network of arrangements already exists for parliamentary constituencies. Whenever an election is called, it seems possible to set up a system for declarations and results. On the face of it, the parliamentary constituencies network looks to be far and away the most straightforward and practical. It does not involve these extraordinarily complicated arrangements. Why is the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, not a simple way of giving effect to the sort of proposition that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has been making?