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Elections: Voting Systems

My Lords, of course I support the democratic legitimacy of the House of Commons. That is why I would welcome the House of Commons moving either to STV or to the Scottish and Welsh system of first past the post plus top-ups or alternative vote plus top-ups. That would wholly preserve or indeed improve the democratic legitimacy of the House of Commons. STV is ultimately a good system. It is likely to produce a membership of your Lordships' House that is proportional to the votes cast. The alternative to STV for your Lordships' House, although not for the House of Commons, would be the list system. One change to that, which is accepted by everyone as being needed, would be to change from a closed list to an open one, so that people could vote for the individual if they chose to do so, rather than voting simply for the party list in the order in which it appears on the ballot paper. That was the position taken by my party when the system was introduced, and that change would not be difficult to make. It is also true that an STV system would give greater diversity to the membership of your Lordships' House as shown by the fact that UKIP and the Greens have MEPs but no Members of either House of Parliament—apart from two Members of UKIP and one of the Green Party in your Lordships' House, all of whom arrived here originally as members of other parties. To sum up, I am convinced that for an elected House of Lords to carry out its duties, in particular its scrutiny of the work of the Government, first, no one party should have a majority of the elected Members of your Lordships’ House; secondly, to minimise the risk of that occurring, the system of elections to this House must be different to that for elections to the House of Commons, unless that is STV; and, thirdly, on the assumption that elections to the House of Commons will continue to be by first past the post or broadly similar systems, elections to your Lordships’ House should be by either STV or an open list system.