Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I shall not detain the House too long. I think that it was generally accepted, after the vote last Monday on Report, that Amendment A1, which the House carried by just one vote and which is now in the Bill at Clause 1(2), requires tweaking. That amendment stated that less than 40 per cent of the electorate turning out meant that the vote was not binding; in other words, it has come back to Parliament, to a Minister. We had a brief discussion across the Floor that the amendment needs tweaking—and I fully accept that, but this is not that tweak. Clause 8 is binding. That is accepted, and there is no problem about that. The amendment carried last week simply states that it is not binding if there is a turnout of less than 40 per cent, so it is not fatal. It is not a threshold, and it does not wreck the change. The amendment passed last week is a constraint that limits action. I am moving Amendment 2 today as a result of a very long discussion last Thursday in the Political Reform and Constitutional Affairs Committee in the other place after we had finished our proceedings on the Bill. The witnesses were the Electoral Commission and Professor Johnston. I have to admit that I watched all the proceedings of that committee, some two hours, on Saturday afternoon, so I gave up quite a bit of time. In all honesty, I have to say—and I watched a bit of it twice, just to get it right—that there was a misinterpretation of the amendment this House passed last Monday by the Electoral Commission, some members of the committee and the chair, which was bordering on the wilful because the context always was that of a fatal threshold. In other words, the whole lot failed without a 40 per cent turnout. That is not what the House passed last week. What it said was that if the turnout is not 40 per cent, the referendum is not binding. The implication was that we have to make it discretionary, so that the Minister can come back. If the turnout is 10 per cent, it does not matter what the result is. The Houses of Parliament could still pass it, so it is non-fatal. The whole discussion in the Select Committee was based on the fact that it is a killer threshold. I was quite astonished at that. The amendment the House passed last week was a compromise between having a consultative referendum and a binding referendum. Frankly, when the Prime Minister was asked about the issue by Christopher Chope last Wednesday at Question Time, he started to say that, generally speaking, in this country, we do not have thresholds at referendums—as I said, this is not a threshold—but generally in this country, we do not have binding referendums either. This is the first we have ever had. I do not know whether anyone has drawn that to the attention of the Prime Minister—and I add that I will be happy to share a no platform with him during the referendum. This issue goes well beyond what has happened in the past. At no time during the Select Committee discussion was the unbinding bit of the Bill ever raised. The discussion proceeded on the basis that we cannot measure turnout, because there is no national register, and cannot measure what a vote is. That is what the Electoral Commission said to the Select Committee. We cannot measure the turnout because it is too complicated. We do not even know what a vote is because it is not defined. What is a vote? Does that mean we count the spoilt papers as well as those that count? All that was trotted out before the Select Committee without any challenge. Then the size of the register was raised. Given that we have legislated on the basis that by common consent there are 3.5 million people missing from the register and hundreds of thousands of voters entered twice, either as undergraduates or second-home owners, it could be argued that there is a distinct lack of precision about the register in the first place for all purposes, let alone this one. It seems to me to be reasonable to call the electorate those people defined in Clause 2 as entitled to vote. The vote is those counted under Part 1. That gives clarity. The Bill sets out the electorate in Clause 2, on which we had long debates. The vote is defined as voters who are counted under Part 1 of the Act, namely those who are yes or no. Those are the only votes that count. Spoiled votes do not count. I would have thought the Electoral Commission would have been aware of this, yet it has raised these issues as if, if there is a little doubt about the result, the whole thing is down the plug hole. It is not. It simply becomes unbinding. That is my worry. To conclude, if it becomes the case—