Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, we have quite properly had a very full debate on this important group of amendments. The Committee should be grateful to all those who have spoken. Our view from the Front Bench is generally supportive of the amendments in the group. I do not know whether Messrs Hegel, Heidegger and Marx would be flattered by the reference to them in the context of this Bill in the British House of Lords, but I am certain that they would be astonished to have been referred to at all. These are important amendments. The noble Lord the Leader of the House will undoubtedly be familiar with the draft leaflet that the Electoral Commission has put out. Does he have any up-to-date information on whether the Electoral Commission feels that this is a satisfactory document? How much does it intend to change it? Maybe this is the nature of the beast, but how does the page—it is just one page—on the first past the post system compare to the pages on the alternative vote system? There are four pages on how this branch of the alternative vote system works. Is that deemed to be satisfactory by the Electoral Commission? I think that it only sets up the difficulties that many noble Lords from around the Committee have mentioned in their contributions. What I am really asking the noble Lord the Leader of the House to tell us is, what is the proposal as far as the Electoral Commission is concerned in terms of a final leaflet? The Electoral Commission published on 30 September last year, Report of Our Views on the Proposed Referendum Question, to which I believe the Government responded in due course. It is worth pointing out a couple of the findings. On page 1, it states: "““Our research found the main difficulty people had in understanding the question was that they did not recognise or understand the voting systems it talks about – ‘First Past the Post’ and ‘Alternative Vote’. Accessibility and plain language specialists also commented that these were not terms that most people would be familiar with””." Then on page 2, under ““Summary of our findings””, it states: "““There were also some particular words and phrases used in the question that some people did not understand or struggled with: not everybody understood the term ‘First Past the Post’, or knew that it is the name of the system used now to elect MPs to the UK Parliament – even people who had voted before in this type of election … The term ‘Alternative Vote’ caused particular problems and was not understood, or was misunderstood, by nearly everybody taking part in our research””." That may not come as a huge surprise to Members of the Committee, but it is a warning note. Indeed, the Committee’s discussions about the various types of alternative vote—which are the most satisfactory and which are not—pale in comparison to the fact that there is, at the moment, extremely limited understanding of what this type of alternative vote procedure actually means. Whatever view we take about the referendum takes place, there will not be very long to remedy that. So that is a warning and it is why I think that the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, are so important. The Electoral Commission is, of course, an independent body created by Act of Parliament and has very strict rules, rightly, about the political activities of its staff. Nevertheless, there is no disguising the political significance and sensitivity of the decision on the electoral system which will be taken in this referendum and the role that the commission will play in it. As the Bill has demonstrated all too well, political interests are, of course, heavily engaged by this referendum. There is therefore a danger, as has been said on many sides, that in the context of this highly politicised environment, the information which the commission is due to circulate and which will impact significantly on the outcome of this referendum could become the subject of severe dispute. I want to remind the Committee, for a minute or two, of what can be described as an Irish cautionary tale. I remind the House of what happened in Ireland during the referendum not that long ago on the Lisbon treaty in 2008. In advance of that referendum, a referendum commission was appointed under Irish law to promote awareness and understanding of the Lisbon treaty so as to inform the public about the issues at stake in the referendum. Indeed, apparently it is the practice in Ireland—some noble Lords will know this—that a commission is established for every referendum to ensure that the subject matter to be voted on is explained to the electorate. The commission is also required to encourage the electorate to vote, which is another task that our own Electoral Commission has been asked to discharge in the forthcoming referendum. Like the subject matter involved in our proposed referendum, the Lisbon treaty was felt to raise issues of such complexity and technicality that it was quickly recognised that the information provided to the public by the independent commission could have a highly significant impact on the electorate’s decision. The subject matter that was distributed by the commission was therefore subject to intense scrutiny by the media and became the object of public argument between the two campaigns. This eventually spilt over into a wider spat about the commission’s independence, with claims and counterclaims being made about the connections between commission staff and individuals in the different campaigns, as well as allegations about a conflict of interest involving companies hired by the commission to help with legal work and communications advice which also worked for the Government. Many Members of the Committee will be reminded of that argument by what I have just said. Of course, I am not suggesting that we would see the same problems repeated here, but we are saying that because of what is undoubtedly at the moment a low level of public knowledge about electoral systems, that inevitably means that the information provided by the Electoral Commission could have a major bearing on the outcome of the referendum, which in turn makes it highly likely that this information will be the focus of considerable attention, to put it mildly. Perhaps I have just set out the problem in other words, but the ways in which my noble friend Lord Lipsey and others who have spoken to amendments in this group have approached this problem need careful consideration by the Government in the little time that remains. We look forward to hearing what the noble Lord the Leader of the House has to say.