Elections Bill (Instruction)

8.17 pm

Before I call the Minister to move the motion, I should confirm that the amendment has not been selected.

I beg to move,

That it be an instruction to the Elections Bill Committee that it has power to make provision in the Bill about the use of the simple majority voting system in elections for the return of—

(a) the Mayor of London;

(b) an elected mayor of a local authority in England;

(c) a mayor of a combined authority area; and

(d) a police and crime commissioner.

The motion seeks to widen the scope of the Bill to provide for these measures to be introduced. I do not intend to outline the purpose and effect of the proposed amendments in detail, because the House will be well versed in parliamentary procedure and will doubtless remind us that this debate focuses on the motion before us. If the motion is agreed tonight, we will have the opportunity to debate the substantive issues fully as the Bill progresses through Committee and its other remaining stages.

However, it may help hon. Members if I briefly set out the Government’s reasons for the change, without prejudice, of course, to the outcome of any substantive debate we may subsequently have on the amendments themselves.

I congratulate the Minister on his achievement in arriving at the Dispatch Box to move this instruction motion. Will those of us who are on the Committee enjoy the pleasure of his company as we seek to scrutinise the Bill, or will one of his hon. or right hon. Friends be taking that spot?

I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman thinks my eloquence, or otherwise, would be of benefit to the Committee. I assure him that the Committee will have sufficient expertise to properly scrutinise the Bill, not least because he is also on the Committee. Her Majesty’s Government speak with one voice.

Supporting first past the post is a long-standing Conservative commitment. It is in our manifesto and it reflects the view of the British people, as expressed in the 2011 referendum, when 67% of them voted for first past the post. The House will of course want to know that in my constituency of Tamworth 77% of electors voted for it. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary announced in March that the Government intended to introduce legislation to change the voting system for all combined authority Mayors, the Mayor of London and police and crime commissioners to first past the post, as soon as parliamentary time allowed. We now have before us an opportunity to consider and make this change in its proper context—the wider electoral law system. The amendment I propose to make to the Elections Bill will, for consistency, also extend the change to include directly elected mayors of local authorities in England. I am therefore today inviting the House to agree that parliamentary time be allowed for this important measure and by agreeing to the instruction before us, that it may make provision in the Bill about the use of the simple majority voting system in elections for the return of the Mayor of London, an elected mayor of a local authority in England, a mayor of a combined authority area and a police and crime commissioner. I commend the instruction to the House.

The Minister is telling us that we will have time to scrutinise and debate the amendment he is proposing tonight, but he might not be aware that this Bill has already started; we have already had Second Reading, where all Members of the House were able to debate the merits or otherwise of the contents of the Bill, and the Bill Committee has already met four times. We have already finished our evidence taking. I say to the Minister that on page 114 of the transcript of the Committee he can see that, as a member of that Committee, I made a point of order to the Chair, asking whether or not we could take evidence from witnesses on the issue of electoral systems. The Chair was very clear in saying that that was out of the scope of the Bill and so Committee members were not able to take evidence on electoral systems. So I have to question why this was not included already in the legislation. On 16 March, the Home Secretary announced that the Government planned to change the voting system for all PCCs, combined authority mayors and the Mayor of London from the supplementary vote system to first past the post. If the Government had wanted this to be in the Elections Bill, surely they should have put it in the Bill from the beginning, allowing Members to scrutinise it on Second Reading and in Committee.

The supplementary voting system that is used for all those different types of elections—

Does the hon. Lady agree that we should find a way, through the usual channels, to make sure that the Bill Committee can take some supplementary evidence and we can schedule in some additional sessions so that, assuming the instruction is passed tonight, the Committee can have that level of scrutiny that has so far been denied to the House on Second Reading?

I find myself in agreement with my fellow Bill Committee member; I hope that the usual channels will find time for extra evidence sessions so that the Committee can be informed on the different types of electoral systems.

On PCC elections, is my hon. Friend as staggered as I am to learn that the Conservative party’s PCC for Cleveland, Steve Turner, who was elected earlier this year, was sacked in the early 2000s for systematic theft of merchandise from his then employer, Safeway supermarket, at its Norton store? Does she agree that it is totally untenable for someone who was engaged in such criminal behaviour to hold the position of PCC and that he must resign from his role with immediate effect?

I am as staggered as my hon. Friend to learn that the Conservative party’s PCC for Cleveland was sacked for theft from a Safeway supermarket. I would certainly agree that it is totally untenable for a criminal to hold the position of PCC, and if what my hon. Friend has shared with the House tonight is true, I would expect a resignation and some kind of by-election for that PCC role with immediate effect.

Turning back to the instruction, the supplementary vote system has been used to elect the Mayor of London since 2000, so it is certainly not a new system of voting. The instruction on the Order Paper suggests that it is somehow something that has come to light since the Bill has been published, but if we have been using this system of voting for the London Mayor for well over two decades, it seems inconsistent for the Government not to have been able to see fit to put this in the Bill before this late stage.

The Minister said that this measure was in his party’s manifesto, and indeed the 2017 manifesto stated:

“We will retain the first past the post system of voting for parliamentary elections and extend this system to police and crime commissioner…elections.”

However, if he reads his party’s 2019 manifesto, as I have done, he will not see it anywhere there. So this was not in the last manifesto and it has not been in the Bill since the beginning. Is this not just another example of Tory arrogance and some kind of apparent allergy to scrutiny and accountability? This Bill has been utterly chaotic and it seems increasingly likely that we are going to get a new Minister on the Bill Committee, although we do not yet know who it will be, and a new Government Whip mid-Committee. To top it all off, we are now not entirely sure whether the Bill sits within the Cabinet Office or the newly renamed “Department for Levelling Up”. So let me level with the Minister tonight: this instruction motion stinks of gerrymandering and we will vote against it.

I thank the Minister and welcome him to his place, temporarily or otherwise. I was incredibly surprised by the length of the introduction he gave on this important change to this Bill. During my time in this Parliament, the first occasion we have had an instruction motion was last week, when the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) moved one. To his enormous credit, he was thorough, considered and detailed, and he gave a lengthy explanation as to why he wanted his instruction to take place. The Minister has absolutely failed to do that this evening. It is astonishing. Just when we thought the Government could not be any more obvious or blatantly self-serving or go further than what is already contained in the Elections Bill, here they are trying to change the rules for their own electoral advantage. Not content with silencing judges, stripping power from the Electoral Commission, privatising critical media, banning public protests and cleansing the register, the Government now want to do away with an electoral system that promotes plurality of voice, encourages participation and, more importantly, delivers a fair result. It is pretty obvious that the Conservative party has absolutely no interest in fairness, plurality or the extension of participation; the Conservatives seem interested only in retaining power, and they are prepared to change the rules and game the system to make that happen. In short, the Conservative party is quickly becoming a danger to democracy.

My hon. Friend says that the Conservatives are prepared to game the system; they are gaming the system not only by changing the electoral system but by using this instruction to change the way the House is supposed to scrutinise the Bill. It is totally outrageous that they are changing the scope of the Bill once we have already begun its consideration.

I absolutely agree. If this was a casino, we would demand that it be shut down and the owners arrested for loading the dice, marking the cards and allowing the croupiers or whoever to have an ace hidden up their sleeve. Why should we accept that a party in power can get away with giving itself every conceivable unfair advantage to remain in power, including by changing the voting system on a whim? The Tories are undermining the electoral watchdog and introducing barriers to voting, particularly among folk who would see hell freeze over before they would vote Tory. Throughout our discussions of the Bill, we have been told, “It was in our manifesto—that’s why we’re obliged to do it.” It is remarkable that Government Members can ignore the absurdity of that argument, given the manifesto commitments we voted on earlier.

The voter ID pilots suggested that 0.16% of people who tried to vote were sent back to get identification, but in the London mayoral elections 5% of ballots were rejected because of confusion. Is that not the loss of franchise?

I share the confusion of the 5%, because I have absolutely no idea what the hon. Gentleman is talking about. Confused on what point—that they could not understand how to use proportional representation? Just because people cannot get it right the first time round does not mean that we should bin an entire system. Elections have to be fair and people have to trust the election system in place. This instruction is a retrograde step. It is about turning the clock back to an outdated, past-its-sell-by-date voting system.

As the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith) asked, where was this proposal when all the experts spoke to the Bill Committee? For four sessions over two days, countless experts came and talked to us about the Bill. The Government must have known that, like the dodgy croupier, they had this idea up their sleeve, waiting to come out; where was it? Why was it not presented before now? Why was the Bill Committee not allowed to investigate this topic and question experts on it? The Government had ample opportunity to float the idea but decided to wait until the Committee had started to sit and not allow a single opportunity for us to question expert witnesses on why it was appropriate. I would love to say I am shocked by this behaviour, but let us be honest, none of us are shocked by it. It has become par for the course.

Are Conservative Members really going to allow this to happen? Is a healthy, robust democracy really worth sacrificing on some vague promise of achieving short-term personal electoral gain? Are Conservative Members really going to meekly acquiesce and turn another blind eye to another full-on attack on our democracy? If they do, it will confirm what many of us on the Opposition Benches have suspected for quite some time: that in its deal with the devil, the Conservative party has given itself over completely to the UK Independence party and retained only the naming rights. Unfortunately, the rest of us will have to live with the consequences of that Faustian pact.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara).

Today, we are faced with yet another example of a Government with absolutely no respect for democracy, demonstrated both by this process and by the use of it in relation to a policy change of such huge electoral importance.

Ironically, the Minister who tabled this instruction—the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith)—was the very Minister who recently criticised the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) for using this little-used mechanism himself. The irony is compounded not least because the hon. Gentleman used it as a Back Bencher, with few other options at his disposal, faced with a Government blatantly leaving the issue of suspending Parliament out of a Bill that should have included it. By contrast, in this case, the Government of the day are abusing parliamentary process in two ways: first, they did not give notice of this extension of the scope of the Bill; and secondly, there is no good reason for using this instruction mechanism in the first place.

That raises questions as to why this attempt to foist the undemocratic and unfair first-past-the-post electoral system on mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections was slipped in as quietly as possible. For example, why was this silently published on the day of the reshuffle? More substantively, why did the Government not include this issue in the Bill in the first place so that the principle could have been debated on Second Reading?

Frankly, the disrespectful nature of this instruction is compounded by the fact that this is an Elections Bill—a Bill of constitutional importance, which requires those in power to behave with the highest respect for due process in order to protect our democracy and trust in Government. Anything else looks like rigging the system to the Government’s own electoral advantage. Extending the use of first past the post, and stripping out the proportional aspects of mayoral and police commissioner elections are not changes that should be bounced on MPs of other parties with no pre-legislative scrutiny or discussion.