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Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 126: 126: Clause 71, page 46, line 34, leave out from beginning to end of line 3 on page 47 and insert— ““(1) If there are two proposed executives, each person entitled to vote as an elector shall have one vote and the elected executive is to be returned under the simple majority system. (2) If there are three or more proposed executives, voting shall be by means of preferential voting in which electors may list the proposed executives in order of preference under the alternative vote system. (3) Regulations governing the election of an executive held under the alternative vote shall be made by the Secretary of State after consultation with the Electoral Commission, and may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment No. 225. These amendments would replace the supplementary vote system with the alternative vote system in elections for elected executives and so on. I find myself in the slightly surreal world in which my noble friend Lady Hamwee and the Minister have been, in talking about something that we have removed from the Bill. Nevertheless, we had an interesting wander down the byways of electoral systems in Committee and pursued this question of a supplementary vote—what it is and how it works. If this Bill has done nothing else so far as I am concerned, it has caused me to do some research on the supplementary vote. I have added it to those things that I shall spend some time in the rest of my life campaigning about—in this case, to try to abolish it, because it is really a silly system. I have drawn in the amendments that I moved in Committee, so that these amendments now apply only to the executive. I want to add two points to what I said in Committee. I do not want to repeat what I said; it is all there in Hansard, as evidence. First, I asked the Minister whether the Government’s famous review of electoral systems, whose results we are all agog to see, would include the supplementary vote. The information that we had from the Minister, who kindly wrote to us about this, is that the review would cover it only to the extent that it covers the Greater London Mayor. That is my understanding of it. It is a pity if that is the case, because it is the supplementary vote systems for the elected mayors that are really relevant in the context of this Bill. The extension of the supplementary vote is at a local level around the country—if the provision ever gets back in the Bill and if anywhere gets to have an elected executive—and for any more mayors who might be elected under the new provisions in the Bill. I think that the Government and other people really ought to have a look at how the supplementary vote works in practice. It is not an efficient voting system; it is a very confusing voting system. All the evidence is that it results in a lot of votes being wasted at an early stage of the count—the first and second preference. There is a very efficient, well known voting system available that does exactly what the supplementary vote is meant to do but much better. That is the alternative vote, which is the vote that we use for elections in this House—it is the vote that is used for Peers’ by-elections. Whether that is a recommendation I am not sure, but it is the voting system that this House thought was sensible to use for elections to itself, and it is the electoral system that is used in many organisations, including the Labour Party. There is a small but growing amount of evidence on whether the alternative vote is an efficient system for public elections. That is in council by-elections in Scotland because, since Scotland adopted the single transferable vote as its local election system, which was used for the first time in May, subsequent by-elections—which are obviously for single seats—have been held under the alternative vote. There have been two so far and the evidence is that it is efficient and that a large proportion of the electorate number their ballot papers to such a stage that their vote is counted between the final two candidates, which simply does not happen under the supplementary vote, on the evidence that we have. The most recent of those by-elections, in Argyll and Bute a couple of weeks ago, resulted in a Liberal Democrat victory, but that is not the basis for my arguing that it is a good system. The Liberal Democrat candidate, Andrew Nisbet, would have won under first past the post if people had voted the same way; it is just that he had a resounding democratic mandate as a result of the alternative vote, instead of being elected on a minority of 30 per cent of the people. I do not expect that the Government will suddenly say that they are going to accept the alternative vote here, but I ask them, even at this late stage, to please add the supplementary vote in mayoral elections to the review of electoral systems, because it is not working very well. Whether we agree with it in principle or not, surely we want a voting system that will be efficient in practice. I beg to move.