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Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I can give the noble Lord a very honest answer. It is because I, like many people in the Labour Party, woke up one day—I think that it was in December 2008—and read in the Guardian newspaper that we were going to insert an amendment into the Bill to introduce the alternative vote. We had no notice whatever that that was the intention of the Labour Government. That is the answer to the noble Lord’s question. We did not know anything, and if we had known we would have set out to block it—as happened in 1998 when Nick Raynsford was faced with having to take the decision on whether we picked SV or AV. I shall deal with one point that the Minister raised, when he talked about giving everyone the opportunity to use all their additional preferences. In the work by Dunleavy with the 8,500 samples, this was the conclusion that he drew on exactly that question—that AV would have produced the same results as SV in 1997, so far as could be determined. That conclusion raises an interesting question about whether the multiple ranking of candidates under AV is really a worthwhile feature, compared with the simpler and perhaps easier-to-explain ballot paper and counting methods used in SV. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, shakes his head, but that is based on a sample of 8,500 people in 1998. Where is the evidence to the contrary? There is none, because the homework has not been done. I have made my case. If I am still alive in 10 years’ time, and if this referendum question comes back in the affirmative on the AV system, I will have the pleasure of saying, ““I said that it wouldn’t work and I was able to forecast that freak results would completely discredit the system and lead to a further review of it””. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 2 withdrawn Amendment 2A not moved. Amendment 3 Moved by