Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I hope that I did not give the impression that I had concluded my remarks. Of course I shall give way in a moment to the noble Lord, Lord Low, with great pleasure but I suspect he wishes to speak to his amendment and perhaps the right time to do that will be when I have concluded my remarks, which will not be very lengthy. Just before I leave the issue of the Electoral Commission, I have to respond to the Leader of the House. Those of us with a background in the private sector know that when you move offices and no longer answer your telephone you go out of business very quickly, and I do not think that that is a very satisfactory excuse coming from a public sector body either. I very much support both my noble friends Lord Rooker and Lord Lipsey in the amendments they put forward and the initiatives they have taken, although I have a number of reservations about the wording of one amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, which I shall come to in a moment. I think they must have had the same reaction as I did when I read the Bill. There is a rather marked antithesis, and a slightly disturbing one, between paragraph 9(1) of Schedule 1: "““The Electoral Commission must take whatever steps they think appropriate to promote public awareness about the referendum and how to vote in it””," and paragraph 9(2), which then states: "““The Electoral Commission may take whatever steps they think appropriate to provide, for persons entitled to vote in the referendum, information about each of the two voting systems referred to in the referendum question””." Particularly coming straight after ““must””, ““may”” reads very weakly—it seems almost a sort of casual afterthought—and I do not think that is good enough. If we are to have a referendum in this country on quite a complex new constitutional issue, it is absolutely essential that members of the public have the opportunity to understand what it is all about. I therefore think it very reasonable that we should say ““must”” in paragraph 9(2) which, of course, is the effect of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Rooker. I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Lipsey that it is right to produce a pamphlet on the subject. As one of his own amendments states, the information effort should include the publication of a pamphlet and does not exclude other things. I hope that the Electoral Commission will have a budget which can indeed be used, as the noble Lord, Lord Martin, has suggested, for television coverage of the issue as well, or even possibly local radio, as he suggested. That is highly desirable. I have to say, however, that my breath was slightly taken away by the phrase in the third sentence of my noble friend Lord Lipsey’s Amendment 110ZZA: "““The leaflet shall be impartial and unbiased””." I found myself reading that two or three times and thinking carefully whether a leaflet could be ““impartial and unbiased””—indeed, whether any opinion of this kind could be ““impartial and unbiased””. Of course, as a practical issue, we regularly expect certain people and certain functions to be impartial and unbiased—judges and juries would be an obvious example. However, they are being impartial and unbiased in relation to the establishment of a fact: whether so-and-so killed the victim or whether so-and-so stole the goods is a matter of fact. Here, we are asking for the production of an impartial and unbiased opinion—