Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I am not entirely sure why my Amendment 110ZB is grouped with the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, but it gives me a particular pleasure to follow him in the debate. We have heard only too little from his Benches in the course of this debate, and therefore I wish him well in his speech. I should perhaps add that he should mind how he goes on the way home. A vow of omerta has bound the Lib Dems together over this Bill, and he has, I am sure inadvertently, broken it by intervening for a whole two minutes this evening. So mind how you go. My Amendment 110ZB is not terribly well related to Amendment 110ZA, but is about a quite different matter. It harks back to the stain that still hangs over our democracy from the May general election. Memories in politics are, alas, short, but not in this House, of course. Therefore, I hardly need remind noble Lords of what happened. In a number of constituencies—16 in all—people turned up at the polling station before the 10 o’clock deadline wishing to cast a vote in those constituencies. They were not allowed to vote. According to the Electoral Commission’s 20 May interim report on the matter, 1,200 voters were excluded from voting as a result of that cock-up. For each of the 1,200 voters, the ban was absolute. It may not be a large percentage of the national total, but for a few days, our papers, no doubt exaggerating a little bit, were comparing us to a third world democracy. We could not even organise a vote, and when you see the way voters queue up in South Africa for hours and hours under a hot sun to exercise their right, and you find that in our own country people who have turned up on time are denied it, it leads to a shiver of shame going down one’s spine. The Electoral Commission’s interim report blamed poor planning, unsuitable buildings, contingency arrangements that were not triggered in time or proved ineffective and, incidentally, restrictive legislation that stopped those queuing getting ballot papers, even though they were in the polling station on time. Planning for the referendum is in one sense at least perhaps more difficult than planning for a general election. Yes, we should all love to see a turnout for the referendum at least as great as that in the general election, but I do not think that many psephological experts think that is terribly likely. It really is terribly difficult to predict what turnout will be. You can imagine that the campaign starts with a poll showing a great gap between the various sides, and therefore fewer and fewer people plan to vote because they do not think their vote will make a difference. As it gets closer to polling day, it may be that polls start to narrow, and a whole load of people decide that they will after all go to the polls. By then, electoral officers will have made their dispositions and decided how many staff to have, how many polling stations and so on. In this case, the Leader of the House’s technique for deciding what the turnout will be—the same technique that he used for the number of seats—by choosing a nice round number out of the air is not that much worse than any other technique. There is a danger that the accommodation will not be sufficient for the number of people who turn out to vote on the day. The Library tells me that we are still awaiting the final report from the Electoral Commission on last May’s debacle, but bits of it have leaked out. The Government’s response has left a nasty sniff in the air. The Times reported, even before the report came out on 11 November, that Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, had turned down the proposal in the commission’s interim report for a change in the legislation so that those who turn up before 10 o’clock can vote, even if they have not cast their vote by 10 o’clock. He said that the answer to poor organisation was not to reach for the statute book. Of course it is not, but it seems sensible to have two barrels to your shotgun: to try to deal with the poor organisation and to change the legislation that inadvertently caused this problem. I am therefore a little sorry and a little surprised that this legislation—absent the amendment I am now proposing—does not seem to do anything about that shortcoming. Whenever I propose an amendment of this kind, somebody stands up and asks whether I have consulted the Electoral Commission about it, and I always retort no, because we are in Committee and it is not the duty of a Member of this House to consult the Electoral Commission on every proposal he puts forward at this stage in a Bill. I am, and should be, slightly surprised that the Government have not consulted it. I am disappointed that I have not seen, although it may exist, any kind of response to such a consultation. This was a serious problem. It is not a joke. If it is repeated, it will cast permanent doubt on our electoral arrangements, and it is therefore absolutely essential that we make sure that there will be no repetition of this on 5 May. I should have said earlier that there is one other reason why there could be a repetition. If the referendum goes ahead on 5 May, and it remains to be seen whether that will be possible, it will be quite a complicated election. At the polling station, they will be dishing out one set of papers for the election of Governments in Scotland and Wales and another set of papers for the referendum, and people will be coming up saying ““Please sir, what do I do with that?””; ““I don’t know that””; ““I didn’t know I was going to get that””; and all that sort of thing. It would be quite easy to imagine circumstances in which the staff at the polling stations became overwhelmed by the sheer volume of queries. I shall not try to have a vote on this tonight. I give way to the noble Lord.