COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE EVIDENCE OF:   KEN RITCHIE, ELECTORAL REFORM SOCIETY, HELD AT COMMITTEE ROOM 4B,   HOUSE OF LORDS, WESTMINSTER ON THURSDAY 13 MARCH 2003

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much indeed for coming. We are very grateful to you. This is the first evidence session we have had on the electoral side of our work, so I think it would be of great help to the Commission if you were to open up the argument, so to speak, on the present system, the pros and cons and the alternatives.

MR RITCHIE: Yes, certainly. Thank you for the invitation. If I am going to spend most of my time being critical of the present electoral system, I would want to begin by saying it was absolutely right that a move was made towards having a proportional system. If we are criticising it is not because we feel that back in 1999 the wrong thing was done, we would have just liked the issue to be approached in a different way.

As to how we regard the system: I think that there is still a difficulty. If we had the first past the post system, if we look at the constituency seats in the Assembly, I think that Labour won about a third of the votes but got two-thirds of the constituency seats. That would have been nonsense if we had been using first past the post. If two-thirds of the voters were not represented I do not think the Assembly would be a legitimate voice for Wales and the other parties would not regard it as a terribly meaningful institution. Even as it is, with just a little bit more than one-third of the party vote, the Labour Party came very near to winning an outright majority.

Our Society would not say that you needed to have pure proportionality but I just wonder whether the proportionality that has been achieved in the present system is really sufficient. There is a danger that a party with less than 40 per cent of the vote could find itself in a position where it could impose its will on the rest of the Assembly: it could have the voting power within the Assembly to actually do that, and I am not sure whether that would be acceptable.

It is very difficult to say at what percentage it would become acceptable. If they had 45 per cent of the vote would it be acceptable? Well, perhaps. At present the proportionality of the Welsh Assembly, with the system that has been used, is less proportional than the system that was used for the Scottish Parliament, considerably less than the proportionality of the system used for the London Assembly. I feel that there is an issue there.

We also feel a concern over the additional member system. The additional member system creates two types of representative, as you will know. It has been a source of some tension - I do not think as much as it has in Scotland where a big issue for Scotland has been the difference between those who are elected on the list and those who have been elected through constituencies. That may be because for the Scottish Parliament, having more powers than the Assembly, there may be greater casework responsibilities that may be attached and it is therefore possible if the Assembly were to increase its powers to match those of the Scottish Parliament it may be a similar issue for the Assembly.

I know that additional member systems are used around the world. They have been used for decades in Germany quite successfully, but the evidence in Germany is that those who are elected do not think of themselves so much as constituency representatives with casework in the same way as they do in this country: there is not that same tradition of politicians engaging in casework and, therefore, the issue is not so strongly felt. I feel it is something that here we need to address.

In our Society we would have been happier if the Assembly had moved straight into a system, either open lists or preferably the single transferable vote, where all people would be elected with the same mandate. I say very much open lists because if we are talking about improving the electoral system then, of course, party proportionality is only one factor. The extent to which it gives the voter as wide a choice as possible, the extent to which it creates the link between those who are elected and their electors, are also things that we need to consider and for these reasons we feel that we would have gone for a different system.

Of course, one of the criticisms that comes up with an additional member system is the criticism from the constituency member that the list members are free to go around and interfere in their patch. We do not actually hold with that argument. If you are going towards a proportional system then you have got to accept that within an electoral area people are going to have a choice of representation. That is good. We do not regard it as necessary and desirable that one person ought to have a monopoly of representation in any area.

I have got no doubt that most Assembly Members if they are elected in the constituencies attend to the casework that is brought to them by their constituents whatever party their constituents might support. But, for example, if I were passionately opposed to fox hunting I would find it very difficult to get satisfactory representation on that issue from an Assembly Member who might be a keen fox hunter. You can come up with all sorts of different examples where it is difficult to imagine that one person could provide that representation.

However, instead of what I would almost describe as the fudge of the additional member system by which you have a constituency member and then a range of others that have got responsibilities, we would prefer to move either to an open list or preferably to the single transferable vote where you have in smaller clusters a number of members representing the same area, but that, of course, introduces a lot of other issues that I suspect the Commission might want to discuss.

Shall I pause there if people wish to pick up on these issues?

LORD RICHARD: Yes, thank you.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: I wonder if you can go on to describe the constituency base for the multi-member system in terms of the ideal size of population or geographic area. What consideration should there be? Is there an argument to say that the constituency base for an MSP or a Welsh Assembly Member should be contiguous with the boundaries for parliamentary seats or any other things that are associated with government?

As regards the sort of areas that you need for an open list or the single transferable vote, with any proportional system the more people that you are electing at the one time, the more proportional the system can be. However, the bigger the area you cover in which you are holding the election, then there may be a geographic argument about the size of the area that an individual might need to cover, and it is getting a compromise between the two. If, for example, you had an area that was only electing three representatives, then anybody would need only a quarter of the votes to be sure of winning representation because, leaving aside the possibility that you would have four candidates all on an equal number of votes, if you had three people with a quarter you could not have the fourth who actually had more than a quarter.

Similarly, if you were electing four people that sort of threshold would be one-fifth of the votes and that might give you an idea of what sort of proportionality you might seek. It is a political judgement. Supposing a party has got less than 20 per cent of the vote, at what point should you say, yes, they should get entitlement to representation?

One of the advantages of the single transferable vote system - indeed it would apply to open lists - is that you can vary the size of the constituencies in terms of the numbers of members in each, always keeping a rough ratio between the number of electors and the number of representatives, but you can vary it so that in essentially rural areas where a constituency with a small number of electors could be geographically large, you could go for a smaller number. In the Republic of Ireland, where they use the single transferable vote, constituencies range between three and five seats. I think that in some urban areas there might be a case for going further to give further opportunities for smaller parties to win representation.

But even if you had areas in which you were only electing three people at a time you are still offering the opportunity for a party that otherwise would have little chance of winning in a first-past-the-post election to get representation.

LAURA McALLISTER:   Can we talk a little bit about the open and closed lists issue. I am just interested in what you can tell us really about the advantages of each, particularly in relation to the nature of candidates' election. Because clearly when the elections took place in 1999 in a climate pre the Sex Discrimination Act election of candidates issue. We were very successful in Wales in some respects in terms of the representation of women, less so with other so-called minority groups, the ethnic minorities and the disabled. What is the trade-off between having that individuality and being able to have a form of positive action in candidate selection?

LAURA McALLISTER: Going a stage back before that, the other research suggests the problem for women candidates is actually getting nomination through the party rather than getting in afterwards.

MR RITCHIE:   I think that is absolutely right. Our own Society has had working a cross-party commission for the past couple of years on candidate selection issues. Just immediately before coming here I took a telephone call from Peter Riddell, The Times columnist, who is chairing that commission and drafting its report, which I hope will be with you before you need to prepare your final report. How that commission will view this particular issue? I am not sure that it will be terribly prescriptive because of course there are different views.

That is not an argument that I would buy. To me we have got to recognise that political parties now, in total membership, are only something like 1.5 per cent of the electorate and it puts an awful lot of power into the hands of that 1.5 per cent. An argument against closed lists is that in very many cases it is quite clear that the person at the top of the party's list will be elected, no matter whether the electorate think that they are an absolute super candidate or the worst possible person that their party has ever found, and similarly you have got people at the bottom of the lists who no matter how good they are they are never going to be elected. So it means that the actual choice is very much put into the hands of a very small party selectorate rather than being left to the general electorate.

Whilst I do recognise the arguments that in places it may be that parties are more sensitive to equal opportunities and other criteria than the electorate, my inclination would still be to leave the choice to the electorate and to try to resolve some of these difficulties in other ways.

Our argument was that therefore if they had to make such a change the logic was to use the opportunity to move straight into a system of STV because, after all, they are very close to adopting STV as their method for electing local government. They have gone through all the arguments on that one and this would have been an opportunity to make a change.

I say with STV there is the advantage that if you are dealing with multi-member constituencies you have fewer of them and therefore you have fewer boundaries in the future that you need to worry about because you can vary the number of members in each seat. You can draw boundaries in such a way that you are covering what we have talked about as more natural communities of interest than sometimes arises with Westminster boundaries. We can do because we have that added flexibility.

MR RITCHIE: That is right, yes, adding another 15.

TED ROWLANDS:   As one who represented a Valley seat for 33 years and went through one Parliamentary boundary change, which was painful for both of the parties involved, when the Boundary Commissioner came out with proposals to merge constituencies where there were mountains between us, we accused the Commission of having a flat map because they did not understand that. There was a near riot at transferring Aberfan from the Merthyr constituency to Aberdare, the most sinful thing you could do, rightly so because it was sinful, and it was squashed. We were talking about national communities of interest. The Valleys might have national communities of interest but they are also very competitive, so you have got to be very careful on these mergers. If you have got the present Welsh constituencies and you want least disruption - you have got 40 constituencies and you wanted to go to 80 members - is it possible to run an STV system on a two-member constituency?

MR RITCHIE:  Of course it would be possible.

TED ROWLANDS:   It might not be as proportional but the compensation would be that you would retain the sense of identity but maintain also or establish a sense of proportionality as well.

MR RITCHIE: You could but you could have a lot of situations in many places in which Labour would win both seats, you might have a number of places where Plaid would win both seats, and many places where the Liberal Democrats would find it difficult to get a look in, and I suspect in most of Wales you would find the Conservatives finding difficulty in getting representation. Overall, I think you would be very far away from having anything that resembled proportionality in the Assembly.

TED ROWLANDS: I thought when we had some things projected to us on the two-member STV system - and I have not got the papers with me - it came out roughly the same result as the last time round but the advantage would be that you would have broken up the total dominance of one party or heavy dominance in one of the constituencies and you would have had other parties winning a bigger share of the constituency.

LAURA McALLISTER:   To develop Ted's point a little further, in the 1999 elections there was very little differential between first and second votes, which surprised everybody, who all anticipated it would be greater. Is not an issue with two-member STV constituencies that the threshold is too great for some of the parties to have. In Wales that would probably be the Conservatives and Lib Dems, as you suggest. The other thing is the AMS regional list allows those parties to be better incorporated.

MR RITCHIE: The threshold would effectively be one-third of the whole. It does not necessarily mean that one party would need to get one-third of the STV first preference vote but they would need to stay in the contest long enough to be able to pick up transfers from other parties to get to a third. Clearly there are many, many areas in which some parties do not get a vote that is anywhere near a third and great areas where people do not have representation. Under the present system there is only one region - Mid Wales - where there is not this very strong Labour dominance, and where there is not that strong Labour dominance then you effectively have a group of 12, the threshold then becomes one-thirteenth of the total.

MR RITCHIE: That could be very possible and it could make a lot of sense. I have not looked at the possibility, no, but we can do.

MR RITCHIE: That would be a matter of political judgement, but as you move from five to six to seven - from six which is about 18 per cent to seven which might give 14 per cent as the threshold - the effective threshold is only coming down very slowly. I would not advocate moving to each electoral region that now exists - electing 12 Assembly Members - run as an STV election for 12 Members. Certainly in Ireland people find that it is politically wise not to put up a full list of 12 candidates, but potentially you could have four parties putting up lists of 12 candidates and goodness knows how many other parties of independents doing it. You would have a very long ballot paper and whilst we want to extend voter choice there comes a point when the choice is far too wide and people are not in a position to make a sensible, discriminating choice between the candidates.

PAUL VALERIO: What are the relative advantages and disadvantages if we moved from a regional list system to a national list system?

MR RITCHIE:    If it were a national list in the sense of a national list as with the present additional member system, there would really be no advantage at all. Moving to a national list does make the list more proportional but while you have got the position that Labour at the moment has got, with such a high proportion of the seats from the constituencies, that would only be making it more proportional in the allocation of the other seats amongst the opposition parties, so it is certainly something that can be considered.

There are some countries that have actually two levels of top-up. They will have a regional top-up and then, accepting that there is still a disproportionality, they will have a national top-up of people there trying to correct that at a national level. But I would question whether there were not a lot easier way of doing it than constructing something as complicated as that.

PAUL VALERIO: What if you had openness against those lists, would that make any difference?

MR RITCHIE: There were two modifications to the additional member system that were made by the Jenkins Commission when it reported for Westminster. Jenkins was very keen that when it came to the additional members that people did not simply tick a party box. They had the option of ticking the party box, but if they wanted they could also select which of the party's list candidates they wanted to go for. (There are various compromises that are used in Europe between fully open lists and fully closed lists, where people have the option of either saying I want to vote for that party or I want my vote to count particularly for one candidate in that party. There are different ways in which they can balance between the individual and the party votes. The individuals votes can then alter the order of the list that was put forward by the party.) I think in theory that was an excellent proposal. You can argue that the ballot paper for AMS selection is already more complicated than ballot papers need to be, much more complicated than open lists or STV ballot papers. Whether you can go for an added level of complication and giving people that choice, my instinct is to say, yes, it is an ideal thing to have if we can find a simple way of doing it. It would not, however, affect proportionality. It might affect those who are actually elected on lists. There is an argument it could give them a greater sense of having been elected as individuals not just as party nominees.

The other innovation, of course, that Jenkins proposed was that in the constituency contests we used the alternative vote - effectively the single transferable vote when it comes down to selecting one person - the sort of system that certainly the Labour Party and most other parties use when they are selecting candidates when they just need to elect one candidate. The bottom person keeps on dropping off and you effectively re-ballot until somebody has got a majority. Rather than re-balloting, people fill in their rank order on the ballot paper.

Certainly we would like to see that introduced into additional member systems. It moves away from situations in which the person elected in a constituency can easily be the most unpopular candidate. The most unpopular candidate may have 40 per cent of the vote and win the seat if the other 60 per cent is spread between the other candidates then 40 per cent is good enough. If we had that transferability of votes at that level it would mean that the person that is going to win the constituency has got to have at least 50 per cent of the votes, not necessarily people's first preference votes, but votes that people have cast in their rank ordering. It means that you get away from situations in which people feel obliged to tactically vote where they feel that they cannot go out and vote for the candidate that they really want because they know that that person is not going to be in the running. So, again, it would be an improvement but it would not affect the proportionality and it could make the proportionality worse. It is difficult to know, but there were some simulations done for Westminster elections that suggested, based on the figures in 1992 and 1997, that what was likely to happen in Westminster would have been a ganging up of votes transferring between Labour and Liberal Democrats and it would have meant that the difference in seats between Labour and Conservative would have been even more exaggerated. In a sense it is fairer but it is certainly very much less proportional. That might actually make the problem of compensating with the list even more acute in Wales.

VIVIENNE SUGAR:   Could I ask some wider questions, I am not sure whether this is within our terms of reference or not, more generally about the electoral arrangements for the Welsh Assembly. Do you have any views about whether the term of office is right at being set at four years? Do you have any views about whether there should be a rolling series of elections so that people are elected in thirds each year? Do you have any views about whether the new legislation requiring the registration of political parties might actually have diminished the number of independent Assembly Members in Wales, given the Welsh independent politicians? So a much broader series of questions there and any other views that you have?

EIRA DAVIES: Can I ask you about public attitudes to electoral reform. Is there any particular evidence available, particularly in the Welsh context?

MR RITCHIE: Your first statement is really the hypothesis that John Curtice and others set out to examine in that opinion polling bit of work that I have referred to. I think that they concluded that, okay, of course there were people who did not perfectly understand the system - more work perhaps needed to be done, but that was not a reason that had really kept people away from the polls. I hope that is not simplifying their conclusions too much, but by and large, people knew what they were doing, or the great majority knew what they were doing in casting their votes.

TED ROWLANDS: Are you saying if you have a very large majority there is a tendency not to vote? I ended up with 77 per cent of the vote but the turn-out was as good as anybody else's round and about.

MR RITCHIE:   I suspect that you did not stand in 2001. If you look at the constituency in 2001 that had the worst turn out it was Liverpool Riverside. Nevertheless, Labour in Liverpool Riverside had a majority of something over 20,000. You can imagine that even with that low turn-out with a majority of over 20,000, Labour voters in Liverpool Riverside would say, "What was the point? I knew who was going to be elected, I knew who was going to be successful."

TED ROWLANDS:   Never once did I come across that as a sentiment nor did my neighbour in a Welsh Valley seat.

MR RITCHIE: Obviously there may be individual differences around the country but we looked at the 2001 election results and we looked at the average turn-out in the 100 seats that were safest and the 100 seats that were the most marginal and it was almost exactly a ten per cent difference in their average turn-out. When I say a ten per cent difference, the difference at the top might have been a difference between an average of 65 compared with an average of 55, and a 65 per cent turn-out was still abysmal. It would be difficult to argue that the electoral system alone was the answer to turn-out. Clearly there are a whole number of other factors that are there. Do people feel that the body they are voting for has got the powers that will make a difference? Do they believe there is sufficient difference between the parties to make it worthwhile going out and voting? Now a change is that people do not belong to tribes in the same way as they might have done before and they are not simply going out to vote through habit and they have got to feel that this is a purposeful and useful thing to do. I think a lot of changes have got to come about.

MR RITCHIE: Yes.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH:  And your second preference would be AMS with an open list system. Is that right? Can I just finish the question. The second point was are you able to give us an indication - obviously you cannot be authoritative on it - about what the attitude of the parties would be to your two preferences? I think it might be the other way round, I do not know.

MR RITCHIE:   I would go for STV first as offering by far the greatest choice. It might be a system that some would say is complicated but from the point of view of the voter it is one of the easiest to use. My second preference would be to use an open list system but not as part of AMS but simply on its own. Again in areas where you might be elected you could have slightly bigger lists within an open list system. I gave the reasons why. You could have anything between five and eight members in an area being elected simultaneously with an open list system.

The attitude of the parties? I suspect that my choices would be put bottom of the list by most party managers because one of the things that parties are not keen on, and one of the reasons parties other than Plaid and the Liberal Democrats are not particularly keen on open lists and STV is that you are offering an electorate the choice between candidates of the same party. There is a danger that you can have a situation in which the parties' candidates might be competing against each other and not simply competing against the opposition.

LORD RICHARD:  Thank you very much indeed. You have been generous with your time and you have exposed the subject to us, which I think is terribly useful.

MR RITCHIE:   I wish you well in your discussions.