Mold and District Labour Party

1. The branch questions the legitimacy of the Richards Commission as argued by LLEW SMITH MP in his statement to Welsh PLP on voting systems and powers of the Welsh Assembly.

only one in four of the electorate voted for the formation of the Assembly,

the AMs elected in May 2003 were returned with secondary legislative powers only,

to change this to primary powers a referendum, legislation by Westminster, and AM elections would be required. The branch thought this change inadvisable as matters such as tax-raising, social security and defence etc should remain at Westminster as Wales, unlike Scotland, does not have its own legal system.

3. Increase numbers of AMs - with the present work-load the branch saw no reason to have more than 60 AMs, but this is only based on the anecdotal evidence that no AMs had been heard complaining about how much they had to do.

4. Electoral system for Welsh Assembly - the present 20 AMs elected using AMS include Œfailed¹ candidates not elected by FPTP. A modification to the current electoral system for the Welsh Assembly was proposed and the details worked out by Ken Williams [contact details supplied].

4.2 There were 849,000 cast on the list at the election in May 2003. Of these 749,049 were cast as follows: Plaid Cymru 167,653; Conservative 162,725; Lib.Dem 108,013; Labour 310,658 for the four major parties. The remaining 100,503 votes were cast for other groups such as, the Referendum Party, Arthur Scargill and an assortment of other independents.

4.3 If you accept that the others are too small to justify inclusion in the government then the number of AMs appointed proportionally correct over the whole of Wales should be:

Plaid Cymru 167,653 x 20 divided by 749,049 = 4.48
Conservative 162,725 x 20 divided by 749,049 = 4.34
Lib.Dem 108,013 x 20 divided by 749,049 = 2.88
Labour 310,658 x 20 divided by 749,049 = 8.29

4.4 Rounding up this would mean that from the party lists there would be:

Plaid Cymru 5, Conservative 4, Lib.Dem 3, Labour 8.

This gives a total of 20 AMs from the party list.

4.5 Calculations similar to the above in the present system works unfairly for the people of Wales because they are done on figures for each of the five regions separately. A correction factor is then done for each region taking into consideration the first past the post seats gained. This results in places like Blaenau Gwent having no candidates even though that area has a very high number of list votes for Labour.

4.6 If it was decided that the party list AMs should be attached to a region this could be done by simply allocating each list AM a defined geographical area. One advantage of this is that most areas would have representation from the party with the majority and it could help to eliminate the so called "North/South divide".

4.7 Even if one of the others merited one candidate you could use similar calculations to decide which. Indeed if a list party obtained more than 54,000 votes he could be entitled to one seat.

5. Welsh Assembly - the Branch feels that the autonomy, choice and inclusion of local wishes in many areas of secondary legislation such as education, health and transport are very welcome and that it is in these areas that the Welsh Assembly should focus.