Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, this takes us to a wholly new and equally riveting topic: namely, the process of making the results public in the course of an election count. I refer your Lordships—those who are still awake—to the following: "““If no candidate is elected (as mentioned in rule 45A(2)) at the first stage of counting, the returning officer shall, immediately after that stage, record and make publicly available the following information … the number of first-preference votes obtained by each candidate … which candidate was eliminated; the number of rejected ballot papers””," so we will have a very different series of announcements during the course of an election. Obviously what happens now is that the returning officer says what votes everyone has in the first past the post system. We know who has won and who has lost. On the basis of new Section 45B(1), I envisage after the first round of counting, in which most prospective parliamentary candidates will not get 50 per cent of the votes, that there will be a public announcement in each constituency of where it has got to. I take that from the words: "““If no candidate is elected … the returning officer shall, immediately after that stage, record and make publicly available the following information … the number of first-preference votes … which candidate was eliminated””," and so on. The public will therefore know how the vote is going in each constituency and where it has got to. My knowledge of how the system worked most recently was in the Labour Party leadership election when they went through the whole calculation and then announced what had happened at each stage, so there was transparency about what happened at each stage but it occurred only at the end of the process. First, how do the Government envisage this system will work? In particular, do they envisage that the returning officer will make an announcement after each round of counting? Secondly, what is the purpose of doing it in this way? Thirdly, why not wait until the end of the count to make public how it went at each stage? I should make it clear that I do not for one moment suggest that the individual candidates and their representatives should not be told how each round has gone after each round so that they can legitimately question any aspect of what has happened in that round, but I would be keen to know what the reasons were. That may be perfectly justified, but my goodness me it will make it an extremely complicated and long drawn-out evening and next morning if you insist—I am not saying that this is the wrong thing, I just want to hear the reasons—that at each stage there be a public announcement of where it has got to. This amendment seeks to probe the Government’s picture of how this will work, their thinking behind it and how much it will elongate the process.