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I call to order this meeting of the Transport and the Environment Committee. I am sorry—I mean the Local Government and Transport Committee; I was getting a bit historical there.
My wife has been an Angus councillor since 1980.
Should we just put up our hands if we have not been employed in local government?
I do not wish to make a declaration. However, it is important, given the controversy that surrounds the bill, that the committee makes it clear at the start that our evidence-taking exercise will be objective, in accordance with the principles of the Parliament. When other MSPs appear in the media and say that if the Parliament does not agree to the passing of the bill, the Scottish Executive will be brought down, and when—
If we are to have an objective evidence-taking session, it might help to get to the evidence and to take it objectively, rather than getting into a political debate before we even start.
I am reassured that you are committing to an objective process; I was sure that you would do that.
Absolutely.
Will you confirm that members are entitled to make political comments outside the committee?
Look—
It is important, convener.
We should desist from having a debate around the issue at this stage. I do not think that it is helpful to start our evidence taking in this manner.
I will make four or five short points about the bill.
Thank you for those introductory remarks. Can you outline any ways in which the bill was changed from its original draft form in the process of, and following, the consultation?
Most changes have been fairly technical and have explained or made clearer the bill's technical provisions. Sarah Morrell will give a couple of specific examples.
Key changes were made to clarify the electoral reform provisions in part 1, as Leslie Evans said. In particular, we have attempted to clarify the distinction between votes and ballot papers. That point arose both at the committee's away day in August and in the responses to the consultation. Still on part 1, we have made it clear that the transfer value of a vote cannot be more than one; that point arose during consultation. We have adjusted section 9 to make it clear that secondary legislation will cover, among other things, the definition of rejected ballot papers; that point arose in several consultation responses.
Members should stick to the first part of the bill when they ask questions.
I am not sure whether I will keep to the first part of the bill, as I have a general question about time scales. When do you envisage the reports by the three working groups being produced? Most important, on boundary reviews, when do you expect the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland's review?
The three working groups have been set up and have been asked to report fully to ministers by September next year. However, all three groups are already actively considering the bill and have been encouraged to do so in order that, if they wish to raise any issues as part of their work and deliberations that have a read-across to the bill, they can raise them now rather than leave them until the bill's parliamentary time and process have passed. The STV working group, for example, is considering issues relating to boundaries, the boundary review and guidance on boundaries that might be given to the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland, which is now live in the bill, if you like. Although the working group is not due to report until September, it has the opportunity to make comments to ministers if it wishes to do so. Ministers must then decide whether to take the group's comments on board during the bill's parliamentary process.
And the boundary review?
The latest time by which the boundary review should be completed is the end of 2006, to enable the elections to take place in 2007.
Does that time scale allow for appeals?
Yes—that is the whole process.
Could we receive information on important questions relating to the bill? What are the dates by which you expect to get such information back from the three working groups?
The working groups will give the committee their evidence and findings to date over the next weeks. I think that David Green will talk about the STV working group next week and update the committee on its findings to date. The bill is proceeding through Parliament and there are key milestones by which the working groups must speak to ministers or give them their initial findings in order that ministers can take those findings into account as the bill proceeds. The initial information that would come out as a result of what is in the bill would have to come out quite quickly. All the working groups are aware of that.
Are they?
Yes.
In your opening statement, you said that we must start from where we are in Scotland rather than necessarily take on board what is happening elsewhere. However, in section 5(4) of the bill, you have chosen to adopt provisions that apply in Northern Ireland in respect of the transfer of surplus votes. Why have you done that? The provisions mean that when votes are transferred to candidates who did not previously make the quota, not all the votes are transferred, but only the surplus.
As you know, we have taken the Northern Ireland model as our prime model for the bill because we wanted to ensure that we used a model that was already being used successfully in a similar context to that within which the Scottish democratic process operates. Perhaps Sarah Morrell would like to comment on the specifics of the provision.
As Leslie Evans said, the bill is based broadly on the Northern Irish system of STV. Under that system, after the first transfer of surpluses, only the last bundle of papers that has been received by a candidate is transferred. That means that the full votes that have so far been awarded to that candidate are not transferred.
That does not seem consistent with trying to give every vote an equal value. People who cast their first-preference votes for a candidate may find that their second preference is never counted under that system.
That is right—sorry, I had to think about that. If somebody has just failed to make the quota on the first-preference count, their votes stay with them. The bundle of papers that they receive to take them over the quota transfers at reduced value.
However, if another candidate has achieved, say, just 100 votes more, all their first-preference votes are counted for the purposes of second preferences.
Yes. For any candidate or candidates who exceed the quota after the first count, all their votes are transferred at reduced value.
Is it fair to say that, even under the system as envisaged, some people's votes count more than others?
I am not sure that they count more than others. They are transferred at reduced value, so they never count as more than one vote; they do not in some way count as two votes. However, you are right to say that some votes are transferred more often than others.
And some votes are never transferred.
Some votes do not transfer as part of the process. That is also true of candidates for whom the number of first-preference votes is somewhere in the middle. They are neither eliminated because they are so far down, nor do they manage to exceed the quota and become elected.
On that point—
Just a second, David. A couple of other members wish to ask supplementaries on this point, so I will allow them to come in.
We had a close look at the Northern Ireland model. The examples of the system that we saw in operation in a district of Belfast threw up a great many anomalies along the lines that David Mundell mentioned. Of all the STV systems that I have looked at, the Northern Ireland one is probably the worst. I am a bit concerned that we are using that as the base model.
In addition to the reasons that Leslie Evans gave, one of the main reasons for our adopting that system was that it is one of the two systems—the system in Northern Ireland and the system in the Republic of Ireland—that are closest to home, that have been in use for longest and that some people would say are working well, according to different points of view. It is clear that the system in Northern Ireland contains fewer arbitrary elements than the system in the Republic of Ireland.
In answering David Mundell's question on section 5(4), you seemed to indicate that there was a balance between practicality and purity of result. If electronic voting or counting were possible, would that get round the practicality problem, thereby allowing a system in which all votes would be counted in any transfer of a surplus?
That is certainly a possibility. My understanding is that the people who are getting nearest to introducing the purest form of STV are the people in New Zealand, who are introducing STV for some—but not all—local government elections next year. They are introducing STV and electronic methods together, from day one.
In local government elections, the electorate is relatively small. Is it not possible that using the surplus transfer system will end up giving a small number of people a disproportionate say, because their surplus will transfer and transfer and transfer, whereas other people's will not transfer? Using a sample may imbalance the result because of the relatively small numbers involved.
I suspect that that is theoretically possible—it will depend on voting patterns and the subsequent preferences of the voters whose votes are transferred.
I will explain my point a little further. Because a relatively small number of papers is involved, any sample is less likely to be representative of all the votes than it would be in a parliamentary constituency, where more votes would be transferring.
To add to that—
Can we avoid having a debate among ourselves?
This is an additional question to the witnesses, not a remark to Iain Smith. When votes transfer more often, is it not much more likely that there will be non-transferable votes because voters have not given their seventh, eighth or ninth preferences? The second preference will be much more likely to transfer.
Yes, if someone has put three or four preferences on their ballot paper but not gone any further, and if there are a number of transfers, at some point their vote will become non-transferable.
I want to explore the Northern Ireland model. The McIntosh commission highlighted five key criteria—proportionality; the councillor-ward link; a fair chance for independents; allowance for geographical diversity; and a close fit between council wards and natural communities. Was your choice of the Northern Ireland model as the "prime model", as Leslie Evans called it, based on those five criteria?
The Kerley group used those criteria and concluded—not unanimously, because some people demurred—that STV was the correct model.
Is it your opinion that the Northern Ireland model met the criteria that were established by McIntosh and recommended by Kerley?
The criteria were for whether STV should be selected for the route that we took in relation to proportional representation. We took the view that STV operated in a context in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that was similar to ours. We therefore had to decide which of those models would probably operate best in Scotland. As Sarah Morrell said, the way in which the second vote was considered in the Republic of Ireland model influenced our thinking.
How many members are elected per ward in Northern Ireland?
The number varies. My recollection is that there are between three and six members per local authority ward and that there are more members per ward—six, I think—for the Assembly.
My understanding is that there is an average of six members per ward and that only in the most rural areas are there fewer than that. Why is it recommended in the bill that we have three or four members per ward? Are there technical reasons?
That number is considered to provide a balance between proportionality and the councillor-ward link. Having three to four members per ward is deemed to be a fair reflection of the balance between those two aspects.
Based on what?
Based on studying STV and the levels of proportionality that are available when there are greater numbers of seats and the greater degree of councillor-ward link that is attained when there are smaller numbers of ward members.
Kerley said that the preferable number of seats is between three and five, and Farrell and McAllister's study stated:
Because we are trying to strike a balance between the member-ward link and proportionality. There are two further important points. First, when we consulted on the bill, we found that there was some support for the allocation of three to four seats. Secondly, I know that the STV working group is interested in the figure of three to four seats that is in the bill and is deciding whether it wants to comment on that.
How many responses to the consultation argued for larger numbers of members per ward?
My recollection is that around 40-something respondents commented on that point and that around 23 respondents expressed concern about how a system that used three to four members would operate in rural areas. I will find the exact figures.
Do you agree with the academics who have studied the operation of such systems throughout the world, who believe that, technically, the smaller the ward size, the smaller the chance that smaller parties and independents have of securing election?
As I have said, it is a question of finding a balance. At the moment, the choice is that there should be three or four members per ward, because that would give a balance between proportionality and the other factors.
It is fair to say that it is a political balance that is being foisted on the system. If the academic evidence were to be reflected, five members per ward would be selected—that is what Kerley and Farrell said.
I cannot comment on the political aspects. The bill mentions three or four members per ward, as does the partnership agreement.
We will move on, because several other members want to come in. Tommy Sheridan can pursue other issues later on, if he wishes.
The bill will provide the opportunity for ministers to revise schedule 6 to the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, which gives criteria on the size of the electorate per member and the tie between communities and boundaries. As it stands, the bill will allow schedule 6 to be repealed and replaced, with particular emphasis on those two criteria. The bill includes the power to make such revisions, which will feed into the instructions that will be given to the boundary commission to act on those criteria.
About half a dozen members have questions, but I just want to ask whether the Executive has considered making the number of members in a ward consistent, so that the degree of proportionality will be consistent throughout Scotland?
Do you mean having only three or only four members per ward?
Yes.
No—the bill states clearly that there will be "three or four" councillors in an electoral ward so that there will be flexibility.
Bruce McFee has a question on the same issue. I ask other members to be patient.
I want to return to the reasons why the bill refers to having three or four members per ward. We got to that position simply because that is what the partnership agreement says; in other words, the decision was political. Is that right?
The officials are not here to answer political questions.
I simply want to establish how we have got to the position of having three or four members per ward. My information is that we have got there because that is what is in the partnership agreement. The bill prescribes "either three or four" members, even though the proposal to have three or four members per ward had only minority support in the responses to the consultation. Having three or four members will reflect neither the balance within urban areas nor the particular problems that will be experienced in more rural authorities.
Do you have a question? It sounds as if you are developing an argument.
I have a question, but I am trying to develop the rationale behind the proposal. Instead of having a one-size-fits-all proposal, would it not have been better to have allowed rural authorities, where appropriate, to have two-member wards, which was one of Kerley's recommendations? Kerley said that, ideally, the number of members per ward should be between three and five, but that there should be the ability to have two-member wards in exceptional circumstances. For example, having three or four members per ward in Argyll and Bute would produce council wards that were larger than some parliamentary constituencies. Do you agree that the one-size-fits-all option does not address the geographical situation or the proportionality issue?
It is an attempt to create a balance between those two considerations. It is in the partnership agreement. I know that, given its remit to look at the implementation of STV, the STV working group has some views on the number of members per ward as laid out in the bill. I am sure that the group will share those views with you next week. At the moment, the bill says "three or four" and that is the intention.
That is clear. We will take that matter up.
We are beginning to hear about some of the complexities of the system. How will it cope with recounts?
The detail on recounts is not set out in the bill; it will be in the secondary legislation. My understanding is that, by and large, recounts will be carried out as they are under the existing system.
So, again, it will be left to ministers to decide by way of secondary legislation.
At present, much of the detail of the administration of elections is set out in secondary legislation. Under the bill, similar detail will be set out in secondary legislation, which will, of course, come before the Parliament in due course.
In due course, after the bill is through.
Yes. We cannot introduce the secondary legislation until the bill is through.
However, it would be possible for draft secondary legislation to be put before parliamentary committees before consideration of the bill is completed, as has happened with other bills.
Yes. That is certainly possible. We might reach the point where draft secondary legislation could be available on a number of elements of the bill. We might consult on the secondary legislation. Some of the points raised so far concern elements that we are waiting for a view on from the STV working group, for instance. Ministers will have to consider that view, which will inform how issues are handled.
You are saying that it would be possible for draft legislation to come before us. Is that likely?
Given what I know of the amount of secondary legislation that is required on the nitty-gritty of how elections are conducted, I suspect that that is unlikely. It is more likely that some of the detail of the secondary legislation on the boundary review might be produced at an earlier stage.
Boundaries are at the very heart of what goes on. What criteria will guide the boundary commission in drawing up the boundaries by 2006? Will that be done by rules or guidance? Will any of that be included in the bill or will all of it be in secondary legislation? I am thinking of the criteria for boundaries.
That would be in secondary legislation. I should point out that the STV working group is closely involved in looking at the criteria that will inform the boundary commission's actions on the review. I mentioned the criteria that will inform the commission's judgments when I referred to the ties to local communities and the electorate per ward member.
Consultation can be a much-abused word. I want to be clear about the process. The working group will make recommendations. Who will take the decision on the recommendations?
The working group will make its points to ministers. Ministers will have the opportunity to look at the most appropriate way, which will then be converted into secondary legislation.
Therefore, ministers will decide. That raises the question why the procedure has not been included in the bill. Is it without precedent in the United Kingdom for the procedure not to be included in the bill? It is crucial to the operation of the whole system.
As Sarah Morrell said, most legislation to do with the detail of how elections are administered is secondary legislation. I cannot give you an exact answer on whether there is a precedent. Perhaps Gillian Russell can.
I am asking specifically about the boundaries on which the whole system is based.
The local authority boundaries will stay the same; we are talking about the ward boundaries within those areas. Schedule 6 to the 1973 act determines how the electoral wards are made up. That schedule is due to be repealed and will be replaced with rules that are made by the Scottish ministers. It should be noted that those rules will be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure and will come before the Parliament in draft form for the Parliament to debate them and decide whether it is happy to affirm them. There is a role for the Parliament in that process.
Is that normal procedure?
I do not think that there is normal procedure in such a matter. It is a matter of policy whether something is put in the bill or whether it is left to secondary legislation. That is for discussion while the bill is before the Parliament; it is not a question of legal precedent.
I take your point, but I believe that it is without precedent in the UK for secondary legislation to be used for such rules.
We can come back to that issue. Several other members want to ask questions on this point.
I have two questions to ask, based on what Andrew Welsh has been saying. First, do you accept the fact that if the rules governing the new ward boundaries are made in subordinate legislation and come before the Parliament as an affirmative instrument, there will not be the same rigorous parliamentary debate on them that there would be if they went through bill stages 1, 2 and 3?
The affirmative resolution procedure is generally regarded as being a much tougher procedure than the negative resolution procedure and is usually thought appropriate.
That was not my question. I am not asking you to compare the affirmative resolution procedure with the negative resolution procedure; I am suggesting that if the rules were included in the bill, they would be discussed at stages 1 and 2 and there would be much more opportunity for the ward boundaries and the procedure for defining them to be discussed. Do you agree that if the rules and procedure were in the bill, they would receive a much more rigorous examination by Parliament?
I agree that we are not able to discuss that particular issue at present because the committee does not have that detail before it. Whether the order should be drafted, so that you could look at the details of it, is ultimately a matter for us to consider if the committee feels strongly about it.
I would like to press you on that issue with a straight question. Am I right in thinking that statutory instruments must be accepted wholly or rejected wholly, as they cannot be amended?
It depends on the nature of the procedure. The affirmative resolution procedure requires the Parliament either to affirm the instrument or to reject it. There is an alternative procedure, with which some members will be familiar, which allows some modification of secondary legislation by the Parliament. That is quite a rare procedure, but it is used occasionally. For example, the Parliament can suggest modifications to an order that is made under the Census Act 1920.
However, as Sylvia Jackson said, matters in secondary legislation do not receive the detailed scrutiny that they would receive if they were in a bill.
My second question relates to recounts and the point that David Mundell made earlier about the difficulties in transferring votes in Northern Ireland, compared with the situation in the Republic of Ireland, where a sample is used. When we visited the Republic of Ireland, it was suggested to us quite strongly that e-voting would get round many of the difficulties. What evidence have you received about e-voting and why are we not waiting to improve the system by introducing e-voting?
Electronic voting will be introduced for the elections that will take place in the Republic of Ireland next year. The New Zealand local government elections will also be conducted electronically. Our difficulty with electronic voting is that experience of using it in the UK is limited. In particular, experience of using electronic voting for STV elections is limited. No obvious examples exist of places that use electronic voting for STV elections.
We will move on, because several other members wish to speak.
My questions are about what is and is not in the bill. We talked about the time scale for passing the bill next year, after which the boundary commission will consider the wards. If the matter must return to Parliament for an affirmative resolution on subordinate legislation, can the new electoral system be in place for the 2007 elections? If not, is that why the requirement to introduce the system by 2007 is not in the bill?
We are speaking and will continue to speak to the boundary commission about its role in executing the review in time. The boundary commission has a good deal of experience because it has experienced commissioners, has access to more detailed information on registration and other matters now than it had a few years ago and has information technology equipment giving it the capacity to turn round review information and data more quickly than before.
I will take up Andrew Welsh's point. If the requirement that I mentioned is not in the bill, there is no guarantee that we will have a process that delivers the new electoral system by 2007.
I am not sure whether anything is ever guaranteed, but the boundary commission has the capacity to undertake the review and the STV working group is already discussing the key issues about what will go into the criteria and the guidance for the commission, so the process that is in place is designed to ensure that the programme and the review are complete before the local government elections in 2007.
A couple of members have supplementary questions, but Iain Smith and Paul Martin have not yet asked their initial questions, so I will call them to speak first, after which I will return to the people who have supplementaries.
Leslie Evans touched on voters' preference for the STV system, and East Dunbartonshire Council's submission to the committee says:
It will not be difficult to communicate to the public an understanding of what happens when they enter the voting booth. The technicalities of the voting and the transfer are much more difficult to understand—not just for members of the public, but for everyone. One has to be submerged in the issue to do that. In considering our voter education priorities and programme, we will need to be very clear about what members of the public want and need to know about the process, so that they may exercise their voter preference properly. We need to learn from other education packages that have been used how much information we need to give the public about the technicalities of transferring votes.
Are you talking about responses from community councils?
We did not receive 1,075 responses from community councils, but 1,075 responses in total.
Nine hundred postcards?
The total number of preferences expressed for STV was about 900, which included 700 from the postcard campaign. Even if we subtract those, a significant proportion of people expressed a preference for STV as against the first-past-the-post voting system, for example.
The issue is the merits of STV compared with those of the first-past-the-post system, which is much simpler.
It is not necessarily much simpler, if we are talking about what faces people when they enter the voting booth.
What about the method of counting and electing members?
Undoubtedly, the technicalities behind the scenes in STV are more complicated. We cannot pretend otherwise. The important point for members of the public to understand is what they gain from a proportional representation system, in that almost every vote counts. That is not true of the first-past-the-post system.
We take it that the purpose of the Local Governance (Scotland) Bill is to improve local government and the delivery of services. In which other places where STV has been introduced has service delivery been improved?
It would be very difficult to do a scientific study linking the change in the electoral system to the upgrading of services. I am not sure that such a study has been conducted.
So the purpose of introducing STV is not to improve service delivery.
The bill is part of the modernising government agenda. It reflects the Scottish Executive's commitment to renewing local democracy. That is what it attempts to do.
I want to ask a couple of questions about what is and is not in the bill. I have never been entirely sure why quite so much detail about how the ballot is to be counted has been included as sections of the bill, rather than as a schedule or even as regulations. What is the thinking behind that?
There are two reasons for the amount of detail in the bill. First, it is important that people understand how STV works. It is such a big change in the way that the electoral system works that it is important to spell it out. Secondly, it has been the tradition in Scotland to give such detail in the bill; the Scotland Act 1998 is quite detailed on the way in which the system works. Sarah Morrell might want to talk about casual vacancies.
The point came up during consultation. Casual vacancies are covered by section 2. The same provisions apply in any ward where there is a contested election.
Would it not be better to spell out in the bill how you intend to deal with casual vacancies? In the Scottish Parliament, the provision for casual vacancies was spelled out in the 1998 act. In Ireland, for example, casual vacancies in local authorities are dealt with by co-option. Without specifying how you are going to deal with it, are you not leaving a blank?
To clarify, you are saying that if there were a casual vacancy, there would be a by-election, and if there were only one vacancy, only one councillor would be elected at that election.
Yes. The arrangements would vary depending on the number of vacancies and candidates. If there were one vacancy and one candidate, that candidate would be returned unopposed. If there were one vacancy and two candidates, there would be a by-election but there would be no expression of preference.
Why not?
Because in effect—
Are you saying that, in the event of there being a single vacancy in a multimember ward, the procedure will revert to first past the post?
Yes, if there are only two candidates. If a quota is created and a candidate exceeds it, they are elected. If no candidate exceeds the quota, the candidate with fewest votes is eliminated and there is only one person left standing.
You seem to be making it unnecessarily complicated.
If there were one vacancy and three or more candidates, there would be an STV election.
Or an alternative vote election, to be more accurate.
I am conscious that we are running quite late and that we have a lot of witnesses to see, but there are at least four members who want to come back with questions. I want us to spend some time on the other aspects of the bill, so I ask the four members who have indicated that they want to speak—it is five now—to be brief, to avoid speeches and debates, and to put a straight question.
On e-voting, you said that the intention is to complete the work before the election and that no decision has been taken on electronic voting. However, it will require finance, planning and testing, and it will require to be implemented. Will you explain a contradiction that the committee read in a letter from Andy Kerr regarding resources that have been set aside for running elections? He said that the
I suppose that the two things are separate, in that the bill does not require us to use electronic voting or electronic counting. As the bill stands, the system could be introduced and done manually. So the costs of introducing STV are as set out in the minister's letter.
Do I take it therefore that there will not be electronic voting in that first election, and that the counting will be done manually?
It is probably too early to say. The two issues are separate because the introduction of electronic voting and the estimated costs associated with it do not depend on anything that is in the bill.
We will move on. Perhaps the witnesses could clarify that in correspondence.
I return to the question of boundaries. As I understand it, the bill seeks to repeal the rules that the boundary commission currently operates under and to replace those rules with nothing. Can you clarify that that is the case?
I am not sure what you mean by nothing. The bill gives us the opportunity to repeal schedule 6 to the 1973 act and replace it with something else.
It will repeal it but not replace it until a later date.
Yes, through secondary legislation.
That is a major omission and would be unique in UK legislation, with the exception of the example in Northern Ireland where the process seems to be split into two phases. I put it to you that the reason why the question of boundaries is not included in the bill is that it is extremely controversial and would be one controversy too many for the bill.
No, that is not the thinking behind it. We are listening to people with expertise and experience in setting boundaries—not least local authorities themselves through the STV working group—to determine how they think the boundary review would work best, both in these circumstances and in the context of the new electoral system that is being introduced. It would have been difficult for us to include that in the bill, given the timing of the introduction of the bill. We are listening to those people and they will make their views clear to ministers, who will then have to decide how the criteria and the way in which the review is to be handled are set out in secondary legislation. However, I get the feeling that the committee does not feel very happy about that.
Yes, that is it. Good.
I would like to finish my questioning, as the convener interrupted me mid-flow. Leslie, I want to pull you up slightly on something that you said. In answer to Paul Martin's question, you said that the system would be sold to voters on the basis that almost every vote will count. However, in earlier evidence we established that, under the system that you have adopted, some votes will not count in the same way as other votes. That was, therefore, a factually incorrect statement.
I am saying that every vote will count in that the vast majority of votes will count in comparison with the current, first-past-the-post system, in which a huge number of votes do not count. I was talking in relative terms. If I misled you, I apologise.
Right. They will count in a different way.
Yes. That is what was said in evidence.
So that option is still on the table.
Yes.
Given that some wards in Scotland contain 750 electors while other wards contain 6,000 electors, for the purposes of the new system some wards could contain 2,250 electors and others could contain 24,000 electors. Is that possible?
The criteria that would be applied, as far as schedule 6 to the 1973 act is concerned, would ensure that the community ties and the proportionality between the number of elected members and the number of the electorate to whom they were accountable would still be live criteria. The bill will not do away with those criteria altogether.
So the intention is to keep the current linkage between the number of electors and the number of councillors.
Sarah Morrell will keep me right if I go astray. Under the terms of schedule 6 to the 1973 act, the two criteria that operate relate to parity and community ties. Under the bill, those criteria are being considered; the bill allows for the option to repeal and replace that schedule. It is unlikely that those factors would be thrown out and not referred to at all in the criteria for the boundary commission. In producing the next set of ward boundaries, whether they are bolted on or are the result of local government suggestions, the boundary commission will need to consider the parity and community ties criteria.
Finally, on the boundaries issue, the process of reviewing the Westminster boundaries is just about complete. How will that be factored into the process? Those boundary changes are some of the most significant that have been suggested for some time.
As I understand it, the boundary commission will look at the wards within local authority areas. The local authority areas themselves are not being looked at.
That was not the question. The question was whether changes to Westminster parliamentary boundaries will be factored into the boundaries for the new wards.
That would have to be considered again as part of the review.
I think that the answer was no.
That is fine, although it is an unsatisfactory answer.
Clearly, voter education is one of the big issues. It has been an issue from the very beginning. The Executive stated—I think that it is in the financial memorandum—that it has put money aside for a voter education programme that will be aimed specifically at ensuring that people are confident about what they are going to be faced with when they enter the ballot booth in 2007. That is an important part of the implementation programme for STV. I suspect that the STV working group will have views on the issue.
Is there a view about whether there is an acceptable level of non-ability to cope with the system? I am thinking about the level of spoiled ballots.
We want to ensure that the number of spoiled ballots is as small as possible. That is our intention. We need to ensure that any education programme that we propose is undertaken on the basis that people need to be clear about what is expected of them when they go into the ballot booth.
If you—
I want to move on; we are overrunning.
I am sorry, but I want to complete this important point.
I hope that it is important.
I also want to put the point to other witnesses. Is it realistic to suggest that we can conduct an STV ballot on the same day as an additional member system vote is being conducted for the Scottish Parliament, in which people are being asked to put an X on two pieces of paper? I ask that question because, when that was attempted in elections to the Belfast City Council and the Northern Ireland Assembly two years ago, 3.3 per cent of the people who voted for candidates in the Belfast City Council elections failed to exercise their votes correctly. That would approximate to 62,388 spoiled ballots in the recent Scottish council elections. Is that an acceptable number of spoiled ballots? Would that number influence your decision to press ahead and have the election on the same day as the Scottish Parliament elections?
The intention is that the elections would be on the same day. Any voter education programme that we initiate needs to take account of that fact.
You would be determined to press ahead and hold the elections on the same day regardless of external evidence that a significant number of people might not be able successfully to cast a ballot.
We would want to ensure that the voter education programme took that fact into account in its intentions and in the way in which it was set out.
You would not know whether the voters understood the system until after they had voted, would you?
I think that you have had the answer, David. We must move on.
You might not be able to answer one or two of my questions at the moment, but I would appreciate it if you would write to the committee later. Can you provide any international examples of STV systems operating with as few as three or four members to a ward? Moreover, can you give us examples of thresholds for election based on a three-member ward, a four-member ward, a five-member ward and a six-member ward, if it is possible to establish that? That would allow the committee to compare the relative thresholds.
On that issue, Tommy, I intend to allow members a few minutes to ask about part 2 of the bill later. If our witnesses can answer your other questions, you can ask your question on severance pay later.
We might be able to supply you with an international comparator at the moment, but I would rather write to you on that matter to ensure that the facts are absolutely right.
About 50 respondents commented on the practical difficulties inherent in running the elections on the same day. Twenty-four respondents said that, if STV were introduced, local government elections should be held separately.
The changing of the voting age is reserved legislation.
Completely?
Yes. The Scottish Parliament would not be allowed to change it.
Will you write to us on the issue of thresholds?
Yes.
On the implementation of STV, will you provide us with a breakdown of the position of the local authorities throughout Scotland?
Based on the recent consultation?
In relation both to the first white paper and the current position. It would be useful if that were placed on the public record.
I have asked that question of SPICe. Stephen Herbert has helpfully provided a briefing on that matter. I will arrange for that to be circulated to members.
I have the briefing, but I think that it is important to set out the information on the public record.
We can give you that information in writing.
Can you tell us which councils are in favour of the implementation of STV, which ones are unclear and which ones are not in favour?
We can give you the consultation responses that we received, although I have to say that some councils did not respond directly but asked political parties to respond on their behalf. On the bill, we did not ask people whether they wanted proportional representation; our questions related more to what people thought of the bill. I can pass on the results of both of those exercises.
We have our own record of the views of local authorities. It would be useful to get that information into the Official Report.
I am happy to circulate the SPICe briefing.
In that case, let us know if you require further information.
I realise that we have a lot of evidence to hear today. I have allowed this part of our meeting to overrun, as there is a lot of political controversy over part 1 of the bill. However, as it is important that we scrutinise the rest of the bill as well, I will allow some time now for questions on the issues that it deals with, including participation and the remuneration of councillors. Tommy, I know that you have a question on part 2 of the bill.
I have a brief question. Earlier, Leslie Evans said that consultation had influenced substantive elements of the bill. Is it still the case that only councillors who do not stand for re-election will be eligible for severance payments? If it is, is there any precedent for that anywhere in the UK or Europe? Is it unfair that people who might have served 10, 15 or 20 years will lose out on severance payments simply because they competed in another election and were beaten in it?
On your first question, it is the intention that the payment of severance pay will be linked to a decision not to stand in an election. On your second question, there is some precedent. Some time ago, a scheme was used in Ireland that paid money to councillors not to stand again. I cannot recall the details of the Welsh scheme that is being introduced, but my recollection is that it is linked to a person's decision not to stand again. I can check that and write to the committee about it when we come back on the other points that have been raised.
The proposed system for councillors is perhaps not the same sort of system that applies for members of Parliament or members of the Scottish Parliament, for example. Is there any reason why consideration has not been given to bringing the system for councillors into line with the system and rules for other elected members in the UK?
The severance system is being introduced in order to acknowledge the level of public service that many councillors have given over many years and in recognition of the fact that no pension scheme has operated for councillors during that time. From the next election, a pension scheme will operate. We expect that councillors will enjoy the pension scheme that is on offer and that they will make use of it. Until then, the severance scheme is designed to allow an opportunity for long-standing councillors to be recompensed for the lack of a pension scheme. In many cases, councillors have had to give up pension schemes in which they have participated through business and so on. The severance scheme is very much about recognising such things, but it is clearly seen as a one-off.
I hope that you will reflect on what you have said. You said that the severance scheme is about recognising public service. We are discussing the introduction of a scheme whereby a person might have served as a councillor for 20 years and decided that they want to serve for another four years. If they are beaten in an election, they could end up with nothing. However, someone could stand in a Scottish Parliament election and serve for four years. When they are beaten in an election, they will end up with severance pay. Is that not completely and utterly unfair?
To use a phrase that I used earlier, it is a bit like comparing oranges and apples. We intend to recompense councillors for what has happened in respect of the lack of pension provision. The system would give councillors an opportunity to take a decision there and then—
With respect, Leslie, you said that the aim of the system was to recognise public service. Therefore, we are not comparing apples with oranges. We are talking about public service with a council and public service as an MSP.
Public service is being recognised, but we are considering public service in the context of the lack of pension provision for councillors to date. We do not know what the severance scheme will be or what the cut-off points will be for years of service or anything else. Such matters have still to be discussed and decided.
I will express Tommy Sheridan's point in another way. Someone who had been a councillor for 20 years and was beaten in an election would get no severance pay, whereas someone who had been a councillor for only one term would receive severance pay if they did not stand for election.
That is theoretically possible, but it depends on the terms of the scheme. We do not know what the terms of the scheme will be. There might be a cut-off point relating to longevity within the criteria that will inform the scheme. Such matters must still be decided and discussed.
You said that, as well as recognising public service, the severance system recognised the current lack of a pension scheme for local government councillors. Surely, if that is the case, the system is more generous than the one for MSPs. In fact, is not the proposal a voluntary redundancy package rather than a severance payment? Someone who leaves work voluntarily will be entitled to severance pay, whereas, if the electorate make someone leave work involuntarily, that person will not receive the payment.
Much of the detail of the system has still to be decided, because the criteria will all be informed by the remuneration committee. However, the bill will certainly require councillors to decide before any election is held whether to take the severance package or to stand for that election. As a result, councillors must take that decision sufficiently early to allow others to know whether they intend to stand again.
So that makes the proposal a voluntary redundancy package.
One could give it a whole range of names. However, the criteria of the severance package have still to be decided. As far as timing is concerned, the bill stipulates that elected members must decide whether to take the package before any election.
Yes, but, with respect, eligibility for the package is enshrined in the bill. Issues such as the point at which the people who qualify make a decision about the package and the amount that they get do not really matter, because eligibility is clearly set out in section 18.
As far as not standing again is concerned?
Yes.
Yes, that is stipulated in the bill.
I seek clarification on a minor point. It was suggested in some of the previous discussions on councillor remuneration that there would be fewer councillors but that they would be paid more. That would ensure that the package was self-financing. Does that approach form any part of current thinking on the matter?
There is no intention to change the current number of councillors.
So increasing the remuneration package would mean additional costs.
We know so little about the package that it is hard to draw that conclusion. Indeed, that issue has been highlighted in the financial memorandum. Because we do not know the contents of the package, we do not know what the final cost will be.
Your response to earlier questions makes it clear that the working groups have still to determine when they will report. Obviously, we will ask the groups questions directly. However, it would be useful for the committee and the Parliament in our consideration of the bill to have greater clarity about any proposals as early as possible.
Are you referring to the severance and remuneration packages?
Yes.
The remuneration progress group, which is chaired by Lord Sewel—who will visit the committee in a few weeks' time—is already examining these issues. However, the group is considering various options because recommendations on the final package will be made by the statutory committee that will be set up as a result of the bill. That will come a little further down the route, but Lord Sewel's group has already had discussions and expressed points of view, some of which he might share with the committee in a few weeks' time. I know that he is considering the pensions issue.
I am concerned about the financial implications of the severance pay proposals. It is inherently unfair to stipulate that someone who participates in a democratic process and loses out on that gamble must walk away with nothing, whereas someone who is prepared not to take part in the process should benefit financially. That sends out a highly questionable signal as far as our expectations of and attitudes to councillors are concerned.
As the financial memorandum makes clear, one of our difficulties in trying to work out the financial implications of severance payments is the fact that we do not know any of the elements of the package. As you have just indicated, we do not know how many councillors would opt for such a package, we do not know what the criteria for the scheme would be—or, in other words, how many councillors would be eligible for it—and we do not know what the payments would be, so working out the financial implications is very difficult.
Surely there should be something in the bill or in the financial memorandum that sets out the basis on which the remuneration committee should examine those issues. It should not be left open to the committee to debate the subject in the way in which we are debating it. No one knows what the implications of the loss of experience might be and no account has been taken of the financial implications on the local taxpayer. A sitting councillor's decision on whether to walk away or to fight an election could put a burden on the local taxpayer. Surely something should be produced to indicate what the committee will consider. The bill proposes to set up a committee to consider those issues, but it does not say on what basis that committee should address them.
Two sources of information could inform the way in which the statutory remuneration committee goes about its task. First, there is the progress group under Lord Sewel, which is up and running. It has the task of preparing the ground so that the statutory committee can get up and running as soon as possible after it has been established. Lord Sewel's group might well have some views on the kinds of issues that you have raised; I would be surprised if it did not. That work will have been done and will be passed on to the statutory remuneration committee.
It is not normal practice for us to be asked to consider and to pass a bill that states a desire to give powers to a minister to consider the outcome of a committee or working group when we do not know what the implications of that will be when we are discussing the bill. In our discussions, surely we should have had information about the lines that the remuneration committee would be considering, to allow us to consider whether the proposed powers should be given to the minister.
The minister has the opportunity to give the remuneration committee views and guidance, which may well include some of the points that you make.
The bill does not give us the power to tell the minister what to do. We are being asked to give ministers powers and we do not know what issues will be considered.
At the moment, we do not know what the total cost will be. If we tried to put that in the financial memorandum, that might be considered to constrain the severance and remuneration packages that the remuneration committee could produce.
It is proposed that subordinate legislation on remuneration and severance payments should proceed via the negative procedure, which is an all-or-nothing procedure that does not involve detailed parliamentary scrutiny. What is the rationale behind that choice?
Whether regulations are subject to the affirmative or the negative procedure is ultimately a policy decision. The view was taken that the negative procedure was appropriate for regulations that set out the detail of schemes. Obviously, we will listen to the views of this committee and other committees on the bill and on whether that procedure is appropriate.
The rationale is that the negative procedure was thought to be appropriate.
It was thought appropriate to have the negative procedure because the regulations are technical. Normally, the affirmative procedure is used for instruments that may amend primary legislation or because the subject is very important.
I know that we are asking the wrong people. I would like to ask the right question of the right people.
I will conclude the evidence session. What is the evidence in the bill that the Executive took full account of the mainstreaming of equal opportunities in considering the bill?
We would like the bill to be seen in the context of the work of the widening access working group, which is up and running. That group has been asked to work on its remit and to consider the bill with a view to ensuring that equal opportunities are thoroughly reflected in the bill's implementation and in anything else in the bill on which it needs to comment. Sarah Morrell will talk in detail about equal opportunities aspects of the bill.
Apart from the work of the widening access working group, the provisions that deal with the membership of local authorities are intended to provide more opportunity for some groups of people to stand as councillors. In considering councils, councillors and council membership, the working group is aware that many consider the remuneration measures in the bill to be one of the biggest aspects that could affect who can stand as a councillor. Remuneration may be one of the biggest factors in broadening the profile of councillors. That may appear slightly separate from the broader widening access agenda, but the working group is aware that the work of the councillors' remuneration working group and of the widening access working group overlaps.
That brings us to the end of the questions for this panel. The session has been lengthy and I thank the witnesses for their participation. I apologise to the other witnesses who are sitting behind the panel, waiting to give evidence. The session has been useful.
Thank you very much, convener. I shall be brief. It is clear to me, from your line of questioning to the previous witnesses, that you have read my submission and understand its implications. I will summarise where I think the bill stands in respect of the five criteria that the McIntosh commission elaborated. That is, effectively, where the bill originated.
I would like you to comment further on some of the information that we received from the previous witnesses. You talked about having a strong service function and the role of the councillor in the system. When I visited Northern Ireland to examine the system, I was struck by the fact that there is no comparability between the role of a councillor in that part of the world and the role of a councillor in Scotland. Although the mechanism for the election can be transferred from there to here, the reason for Northern Ireland having that system does not apply in Scotland. The strong service function that Scottish councillors have and under which our local authorities operate is not the same as that which operates in Northern Ireland and, therefore, a straight comparison of what is delivered by the system there and what might be delivered here might not be possible. Do you have any views on that?
My remarks were about the Republic of Ireland rather than the north of Ireland. For what it is worth, it is universally accepted in the literature that local councillors in the Republic of Ireland and TDs in the Irish Dáil spend an awful lot of time serving their constituents' needs, which includes going to funerals and shaking many hands. Representatives must be well known. There are several ways to have contact with voters—one is to hold surgeries and another is to attend funerals. We can argue about which of those is more useful to constituents.
In considering whether the system will deliver good government, is it not vital that we know why the system operates in one part of the world and why it may not operate here?
Yes.
The services that local government in Scotland delivers are not delivered by local government in Northern Ireland, so councillors there are elected for a different purpose from that for which we ask people to be elected in Scotland. That is fundamentally important.
I say with respect that county councils in the south of Ireland are reasonably analogous to Scottish local councils.
That is not the evidence that we received in Northern Ireland. It was said that centrally appointed officials on non-departmental public bodies were much more important than councillors, who advocate only for the local electorate. That point is vital.
If you asked me to make a guess that was based on what we know about how people vote in Scotland, I would suspect that we will discover that a candidate's personality is more important in rural Scotland than it is in urban Scotland. However, that is already true under the existing system. I suspect that the difference that a councillor's local reputation and popularity make to their probability of being elected will be greater in some parts of Scotland than it is in others, but that is already the case.
When we visited Ireland, we found that managers, rather than councillors, had power. I am worried that the severance pay scheme here will be based on the Irish scheme. We found that the severance pay scheme there was used to prevent TDs from also being councillors, because councillors do not have much to do. At the last moment, we discovered that the Scottish assumptions were different from the Irish assumptions. The power rests with managers for areas and the Irish situation is different.
Even if you want to argue that point, nobody argues that the Dáil does not have power. Irrespective of the powers of the institutions in the Republic of Ireland, if an electorate appear to value local contact with their politicians, that is what they will tend to have, because that is what politicians will tend to emphasise.
TDs asked us how many members of the Scottish Parliament were local councillors and were surprised by our answer, because they had totally different assumptions. The Dáil does have power, but money was provided in Ireland to ensure that people did not stand both for the Dáil and for a council and that they worked full time in the Dáil, rather than in a local authority.
With respect, you are taking what I said too literally. I suggested in my evidence that the single transferable vote does not always produce the same outcome in the degree to which the personal popularity of politicians makes a difference to how people vote. That is crucial point number 1. Crucial point number 2 is that, irrespective of the powers that politicians have, if personal popularity matters in a society, it will matter a great deal to politicians' chances of being elected. It follows that, if we accept the variance in the experience of STV as the crucial lesson and if voters in Scotland are like voters in Ireland—in that personality rather than the powers of the institution for which they are voting is the crucial point—whether the system delivers a strong councillor-ward link will in essence depend on how voters behave. The crucial issue that determines how such systems work is how voters vote in reflecting what they want.
So the matter will be down to the machinery of government. The working groups have the information that will eventually emerge. From what I heard this afternoon, I am concerned that the process will simply go from working groups to ministers to statutory instruments.
I am with you entirely. There are two issues. One is about the merits of the introduction of the single transferable vote; the other is about the technical merits of certain aspects of the bill. I am in sympathy with the argument that the bill gives too much leeway to ministers to decide on crucial aspects, for example on the rules for redistribution in part 1. Although we may need a bit of a fix to get the system in place for 2007, the Executive is failing to take on board the danger that if the bill is open to change by secondary legislation, it will be open to a future Scottish Executive—the intentions of which may not be as benign as the present Executive's intentions—to rewrite the rules through secondary legislation.
The second paragraph of your paper mentions the views of local government from
You are correct: the bill does not deal with that issue. It follows from your argument that it is at present possible for a majority administration that is backed by a minority of the votes to act in the way you describe.
I do not wish to defend first past the post. The Widdecombe inquiry south of the border established proportionality, but that was never implemented north of the border. We are talking about good governance in local authorities throughout Scotland, but the bill misses an opportunity. I have read section 18 on severance payments, and we have heard responses from the last—
May I interrupt you? I am not going to claim any expertise on part 2 of the bill. I am happy to talk about parts 1 and 3, but I know no more about part 2 than a person you might drag in off the streets of Edinburgh.
I will rephrase my question, because you do not need to know the technicalities to form an opinion. As the bill is set out, if a councillor elects not to stand at an election, they will be entitled to receive a severance payment, but they will not be entitled to stand again at a future election. That is entirely at odds with the system that we have as MSPs, or that MPs have. Are not such payments a sweetener? It is a voluntary redundancy scheme to make the selection of candidates—primarily in the Labour Party—for local government seats easier, by buying off at public expense those who are prepared to go without a fuss.
I simply say to Mr McFee that it is my understanding that it is not entirely an accident that parts 1 and 2 of the bill happen to be in the same legislation.
You heard most, if not all, of the previous evidence-taking session. As an academic studying the various advantages and disadvantages of voting systems, do you feel that the optimal proportionality has been applied in the bill in relation to three or four-member wards?
Clearly, if the only criterion that you were going to take into account was proportionality, you would not go for three or four-member wards. As I said in my evidence, the STV implementation in the bill will have the smallest seat number of any current implementation, and undoubtedly it will be less proportional as a result.
How authoritative is the Farrell and McAllister report in academic circles?
There is a simple rule with electoral systems, which is that under the class of systems that use some mechanism of proportionality to elect representatives, the thing that most determines the proportionality of the system is the number of persons elected per district. Forget whether it is d'Hondt, Sainte-Laguë, party list or whatever. The most important criterion is the number of persons elected per district. It is undoubtedly the case that if you only have three or four members per district, you will not have a system that is highly proportional—QED.
I am sorry, but I must press you on this a wee bit. Both Kerley and the Farrell and McAllister report attempted to arrive at the balance that you are talking about, but they did not conclude that there should be at least three to five members per ward in order to get the most proportional system. Farrell said that there should be at least five members to get a balance, and Kerley said that there should be between three and five members. Is it your firm opinion that—not in order to err on the side of proportionality against the member-ward link, but to get a balance—three or four members per ward is too few?
I am aware of the Kerley source that you cite. Kerley undoubtedly came to the conclusion that, given the criteria that he had inherited from the McIntosh commission—of which the councillor-ward link and proportionality criteria were the most important—a range of three to five members would be best. I am not sure about the Farrell and McAllister report to which you refer, although I am well aware of their argument that five members is the minimum number that is required to achieve reasonable proportionality under STV. However, with respect, if that is the point that Tommy Sheridan is making, it is a slightly different point from Kerley's point.
Have you been working on any outcomes of the allocation of the various numbers of members to wards—for example, of having five or three members in a Glasgow or Edinburgh ward?
I have been playing this game endlessly for the past five or six years, and various people have asked me that question, so the answer is yes.
In relation to the stability of local government, do you think that the roof will fall in if we adopt five-member wards?
Has the roof fallen in over Scotland because we have a coalition Government?
David Mundell wants to ask a question—but I ask him not to answer that last question.
My answer is that we will wait and see.
I heard you inquire about that earlier and I would like to correct slightly the line of questioning that you pursued with the previous witnesses. There is no doubt that a somewhat higher number of invalid votes will be cast under the new system than are cast under the current system. The evidence from the north and the south of Ireland—including the Northern Ireland Assembly elections, which took place last week—is that, in important elections such as those for the Dáil, there is an invalid vote rate of about 1.5 per cent.
Was there a breakdown of the reasons why the votes were invalid?
I have not seen the evidence from Northern Ireland. I do not know whether the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland has that evidence. He publishes routinely the level of invalid votes, but the documents that I have seen on that do not show the reasons for it. Having worked with the Electoral Commission on the level of such votes for the elections to the Scottish Parliament, I can tell you that that breakdown was not acquired.
In the Northern Ireland count, the overwhelming majority of the invalid votes were ruled out of order because they had more than one cross on the ballot paper. People had understood that they could vote for more than one person, but they did not understand that they had to rank them 1, 2 and 3.
There is a trade-off between a slightly higher level of invalid votes and what the advocates of STV would argue is the greater power and range of choice that voters get under that system. We all make different judgments about where that trade-off is. I quite agree that the level of invalid votes will be higher and that there will be a degree of confusion, but it is a matter of judgment as to whether the level of confusion will be so high as to be intolerable. I am happy to write to the committee citing examples of other countries in which the level of invalid votes is much higher than 1.5 per cent.
I agree with you that the issue is worth debating. It is significant that in the election that I observed in Northern Ireland, there were more than 700 invalid votes and the final margin between the candidates was 83. The numbers are significant. As you pointed out, in the most recent Scottish Parliament elections, the level of invalid votes was 0.8 per cent. The Belfast level of 3.3 per cent would approximate to 60,000 Scottish votes. Even 2.5 per cent would approximate to 50,000 votes.
The rate is 2.5 per cent for local government elections and 1.5 per cent for the Assembly election.
We are talking about more than 50,000 people. STV is presented as a somehow purer form of voting that more accurately reflects people's intentions, but one of its consequences is that a significant number of people's intentions are not reflected.
I agree with you, but with the deletion of the adjective "significant".
It is obviously possible to hold the elections on the same day, but whether doing so is desirable is another matter. However, given the desirability of having different voting systems on the same day, is there any reason to push headlong into curtailing the Local Government Boundary Commission processes, such as the bolt-on wards, as has been alluded to today? In the interests of voter understanding and getting the boundaries right, would not it be better to move the date of the elections?
Yes, and then we could decide how you want to do that. Do you want to move the election forward to 2006 or back to 2008? Both options could be defended equally. As members might have gathered, I do not want to defend the Executive, but I think that the Executive could defend the idea of bolt-on wards on the ground that the next normal redistribution of wards would not occur until after the 2007 Scottish elections because of the 10 to 15 year cycle. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to bolt wards together.
That is a good point on which to finish.
I have three questions. It is still possible to hold first-past-the-post elections under the STV system. Electors could decide to vote for only one candidate here, unlike the Australian system, in which one is compelled to vote for every candidate. If, for every electorate of 18,000 people, 50 per cent turned out, it would still technically be possible that they could take part in a first-past-the-post election by voting for one candidate each.
I have two points to make. We would have a first-past-the-post election except that, in effect, it would not be the single-member plurality system. It would be the limited vote system, whereby there are multiple members, but each voter has only one vote. That was the system that the House of Commons used before 1885. We would be reverting to British tradition, which the single-member priority system is not.
You raised some points about multimember wards. You said that there could be an informal arrangement whereby three members could decide which areas to allocate to themselves in a particular system. Would not that represent a flaw in the system if the purpose of STV is to allow the voter to select the party that they wish to represent them? If I, as a Labour member who represented the Springburn ward, made such an informal arrangement, and a constituent who stays in the Wallacewell ward said that Paul Martin had decided informally that he would represent people there, would not that be a flaw in the system?
Let me make two points. First, I would expect councillors to divide up areas in the Highlands, but I would be astonished if that happened among Labour and SNP councillors in Glasgow. In other words, I can imagine it happening where the system is less partisan, but where it is highly partisan it would not happen. To that extent, your suggestion is correct.
Other countries have scrapped the STV system. Why did they do that?
The best example of scrapping the system was in Stormont in the 1920s. It was scrapped because the unionist majority thought that it would benefit from scrapping it. A second example that I know of is the scrapping of STV in New York in 1945. If I remember correctly, that was because STV was linked to the existence of an at-large election. The system helped to ensure the election of black candidates and people wanted to stop that.
The Isle of Man?
You are one ahead of me on the Isle of Man.
I want to come back to a question that John Curtice has raised again—what voters want. In Belfast, there was a carve-up among councillors. I found it surprising because they did not divide things up in terms of geography, but in terms of particular services. What they are doing is not actually providing something for the local electorate, but they are advocating on behalf of the local electorate.
Sure.
The councillors carve things up with one person looking after planning issues, one person looking after housing issues, and one person looking after social services. Is it a good idea to have councillors elected from a wide range of areas in a ward and to have the electorate not knowing whom they should phone because they do not know the category of the particular issue that they want to phone about? Is that an improvement on our present system, in which people know their local councillors and can phone to ask them to represent them?
Two points arise from that. You are asking me whether I would prefer to have a single generalist or three specialists. When I get hold of the councillor who thinks they can deal with my particular subject, it may be that he or she at least knows something about planning law, for example. The second point to raise is that the system of multimember wards is the norm in the United Kingdom—Scotland is currently the exception.
I want to follow on from some of the points that Bruce McFee made. I am interested in the difference that the system could make. People might like the voting system better if they know that they have more choice. When we were in Dublin, it was pointed out to us that people like the STV system and that the results of two referenda showed that people want to keep it. That said, it was also pointed out that people have not known a system other than STV and do not have much to compare it to.
I will answer both of those points. I think that the answer to the first question depends on whether one takes the view that the quality of public services and policies in Aberdeen and Dundee is worse than it is in Glasgow or Edinburgh. In other words, as I said in my submission, under the existing system, hung councils—to use the colloquial phrase—have become commonplace. In recent years, they have also become commonplace south of the border under multimember plurality. The roof does not seem to have fallen in as yet. As I say in my submission, because the current system does not guarantee a majority, often a group of councillors are left with something that approaches the balance of power or at least some form of coalition arrangement.
What are your views on e-voting? Dublin was moving forward in thinking that it would give the fairest and quickest counting system.
You are obviously aware that it is currently UK Government policy to make it possible to have e-enabled elections after 2006. You will also be aware that the Electoral Commission is somewhat less enthusiastic than is the UK Government. There are a couple of clearly related issues. The first is that in the electronic voting pilots that have been undertaken south of the border there has been concern that it has not been possible, in effect, to verify the ballot. For example, there have been commercial issues about the reluctance of companies to make their code public, so it has been impossible for anybody to check that the count has happened correctly.
I understand that, with electronic voting, the transfer of votes can be made fairer, because everything can be taken into account.
Yes. Without getting into some real complexities, the Irish practice of taking a sample of ballot papers when a surplus is distributed could be avoided. The Northern Ireland rules could also be changed; they do not take a sample, but do not necessarily take all the ballot papers when a surplus is distributed. In truth, if you dislike that aspect of the system, you could change the rules and still have a manual count. If you wanted to, you could distribute all the papers of a candidate who has a surplus, whenever a surplus occurs. It would just take a bit longer.
I am glad that David Mundell has returned, because I want to say that in at least two elections to this Parliament at the last election, the numbers of spoiled papers were greater than the majorities of the winning candidates. I acknowledge the point that he tried to make, but it is not valid.
I will take the last point first. To be honest, to work out whether there needs to be a provision for casual vacancies I would have to dig into the existing legislation on casual vacancies. I assumed—but it may be incorrect—that the existing legislation would be sufficient, because the bill makes it perfectly possible to run a one, two, three or whatever-member election. To know whether anything is required, one would have to go through the legislation in detail. It was not evident to me that anything was required.
What impact do you believe the introduction of STV will have first on turnout and secondly on the representation of groups that are currently under-represented in local authorities, such as ethnic minorities and women?
I will take the first part of your question first. If the local government election takes place on the same day as the Scottish Parliament election, the answer is zero—I do not think that the introduction of the STV system will stop anyone going to the polling station. If it is reasonable to assume that the Scottish Parliament is still regarded as more important than local government—turnout for the elections to the Parliament was only somewhat higher than turnout for the most recent independent local government elections—the system will not make any difference, because the Holyrood election will drive turnout.
It was on the representation of groups such as ethnic minorities.
The impact on that will depend entirely on the voters. A political party standing in the south side of Glasgow would be pretty stupid not to put up at least one ethnic minority candidate. Whether that candidate would get elected would depend on the voters, including ethnic minority voters. Political parties would have to decide whether they thought it was sensible for them always to put up a man and a woman. That relates to party strategy. Parties are invited to think about the balance of their ticket under the STV system. In contrast to closed party list systems, under STV the parties cannot control the order of candidates and who is elected.
I think that you said this already, John, but I would like you to repeat it. Are you aware of anywhere else where STV is practised where the maximum number of seats per ward is four?
No.
Recent publicity has suggested that there is a move by some to show that STV as proposed by the Executive should be applied to the Scottish Parliament elections. Do you think that it would produce a less proportional result than does the current party list system, given the size of the seats? Given the evidence that you seem to be leading, do you agree—
Tommy, the Scottish Parliament elections are obviously not part of the bill, nor are they something over which we have legislative power.
My question is related to the previous question. Given your evidence, do you think that the suggested size of the wards has more to do with a political fix than a democratic expansion?
Discuss.
The answer to the question that you were not allowed to ask is both yes and no and I will explain that to you later in private if you want. Undoubtedly, the size of wards in the bill is as much a political fix as are the size of the Parliament and the ratio of constituency to list members. It is a general lesson of political science that electoral systems are the product of political compromise and fixes between politicians. That is probably true of all electoral systems.
That brings us to the end of questions. Thank you for your contribution, which has been very useful. We will have a short break of two or three minutes; I realise that we still have a lot of witnesses to hear from.
Meeting suspended.
On resuming—
I welcome Professor Bill Miller from the University of Glasgow. We look forward to your evidence. Before I ask you to give us some introductory remarks, I apologise to you and to other witnesses for the serious overrunning of the meeting. I am sure that you will appreciate that members are asking a lot of pertinent questions on the bill, but I apologise sincerely if the overrun is causing any of the witnesses any difficulty.
I was able to hear the last 10 minutes of John Curtice's evidence and I must say that I agreed with almost everything he said. I was greatly impressed by the depth and detail of his knowledge—you will not get that from me.
Thanks very much, Bill.
I have two points. First, in respect of the participation of candidates, one theme that has come out of the presentations is that some parties would almost be encouraged not to put up several candidates in multimember wards to give themselves a better chance of being elected. Do you see that as a flaw in the system? We want to encourage participation and democracy, but it would almost be in a party's interest not to put up three candidates in a three or four-member ward.
There might be some advantages to the parties not dividing up their votes into too small packages. The extreme example of that is the limited vote, to which John Curtice referred and which was used in the 1880s, when each person has fewer votes than there are seats to be filled. However, I do not think that that will be a decisive factor. In a list system, a party can have a very long list, at the bottom of which it puts people who have no hope of election and who are there just as decoration. Whether they are much noticed by the people who are casting their votes is another question. Down at the bottom of the list, they are in a very insignificant place. That can cause all sorts of problems.
Under the proposed system, if there are three seats available in a multimember ward, a party might put up two candidates.
Indeed. It might even go as far as running in harness with other parties. There might be some pressures towards coalition.
Secondly, you talked about preference voting, but should the electorate be forced to cast a preference vote? They may see three candidates as having an equal standing in the system.
As a general rule, in a democracy, voters should be allowed the widest possible choice and that includes the choice not to vote for candidates whom they dislike or do not particularly want. I certainly agree that they should be allowed to cast a single-preference vote. I would also advocate, in both first-past-the-post and STV elections, that voters should have the option—which they always had under the Soviet system—of voting for none of the candidates because they consider none of them worthy of election.
But why should someone be forced to choose between three candidates—
I am saying that they should not even be forced to choose one candidate. There should be a box for people who are there to do their civic duty but who do not like any of the candidates on offer.
You could find yourself in Parliament soon, by making yourself the leader of the none-of-the-above party—you might even win a majority.
I am not a strong advocate of more proportionate systems, but I recognise that there are certain circumstances in which the extreme disproportionality of the result strengthens the case for a more proportionate system. That is certainly the case in national elections. When the Liberals got within 2 per cent of the Labour Party in the UK elections but won only a tenth of the seats at Westminster, many people who had not been keen on proportional representation the year before were more in favour the year after.
Yes, but you would surely agree that, if the voters want to keep voting for the same party, that is up to them.
The people who researched the downfall of communism said that they would know that there was a democracy somewhere when the Government had been defeated twice and had left office peaceably. The problem in Russia is that that has never happened with the presidency, which is the Government. In Scotland, it has not happened either—we have not had a change of Government. It is all very well to have elections, but the glory of elections is Government defeats, not Government re-elections. What is critical is what we can do to Governments when we do not like their stewardship. In the Scottish Parliament, it looks as if it might be difficult to remove the Lib-Lab coalition—although I know that you are doing your best, Tommy.
Even after only two elections.
The more seats you have per constituency, the more proportional it is. If there are only three seats, a candidate who does not get between a fifth and quarter of the vote will not be elected. That is a very high threshold. You personally, Tommy, might get a vote that big, but it would be difficult for your party to get many people elected in such a system, which would be very biased against small parties unless high support for a particular personality is concentrated in one area.
Of course, one way in which we might get a different Government would be by voting this bill down, if we are to believe media reports. Is it common in other countries to have as many different voting systems as we will have in Scotland for elections to different institutions?
Some countries have a variety of systems and you have heard about some of them already. To give you more detailed information, I might have to get the gazetteer out, but Australia and America are two prominent examples. Several electoral systems run simultaneously for the different institutions in the Australian system of government. In the United States, they have tried anything and everything, often simultaneously, including things such as winner-takes-all slates, a system that has some charm about it for local government.
I want to come to a point that I raised earlier and that I will explain in more detail for Iain Smith's benefit. I do not think that you can say that a system is fairer if more people fail to register their vote under that system. In the Belfast City Council elections in 2001, roughly the same number of people voted as voted in the Fife Council elections in 2003. In the Fife elections, there were 962 spoiled ballots; in Belfast, there were 4,200 spoiled ballots—primarily because people had not understood how they were to vote when they were asked to use two different voting systems at the same time. That is what people will be asked to do in 2007. Is it fair to promote and introduce a system that is likely to increase the number of people who cast their votes invalidly?
Elections are confusing enough and people should not be confused further. I see no reason why there should not be different electoral systems at different levels to different bodies in the same country. However, it can be argued that if elections are going to be held simultaneously so that people go into the same polling station on the same day, too much variety in the voting systems that are used in the polling station is likely to add unnecessarily to confusion. If it is thought that simultaneity is important in order to raise turnout levels and that shifting local government elections to the same day as the national election is the only way of raising turnout levels in local government elections, there is an argument for having voting systems for the national body and the local body that are at least reasonably compatible.
The great benefit of observing an election is that one can see how spoiled votes are cast and one does not need to speculate about them. In observing, I have been clear that spoiled votes were overwhelmingly those of people who had put an X beside one or two candidates and clearly wished to vote for them, but showed no preference for them, which Mr Martin mentioned.
Interpreting such things in any reasonable way is impossible.
Finally, I want to say something about the idea that everybody's vote is equal and carries equal weight under the system in question. You alluded to section 5 of the bill and the arrangements for the transfer of preferences. It is clear that every voter's vote does not carry equal weight in the system, as the preferences of some people count more than the preferences of other people.
In a properly organised STV count, each voter's vote should be of equal value. Some votes are used up in electing people; the question then is how transfers should be carried out. The southern Irish system simply takes the top 300 votes if 300 votes have to be transferred, hopes for a random sample of the rest of the pile and transfers them. Given the numbers that are involved, the sample is probably a random sample that will not be very wrong. That is a simple way of doing an STV count and simplicity is an enormous virtue in counting votes—it should not be underestimated. Of course, the clever way of doing things is to transfer all the votes, but count each vote as worth only a fraction of a vote. The trouble is that that can be too clever by half. In the bill as it stands, the calculations are wrongly specified and the wrong proportions would be applied. That is why some people's votes would count far more than they should at the third count.
Bill Miller has raised so many issues that I am not sure where it would be best to start. You talked in your opening statement about the lack of proportionality in the system that the Executive proposes. Do you not accept that, throughout the process from Kerley onwards, the aim has been to balance proportionality with the councillor-ward link, and that the bill achieves that?
I also quoted the Jenkins report, which I prefer to the Kerley report. The Jenkins commission described STV's disproportionality as one of its virtues, even though it dismissed the STV system as too complex and troublesome, despite all its advantages.
People campaign against some Presidents.
People campaign against individual Presidents and they think that the candidate with more votes should be elected. The concept of electing one person to a supreme office is monarchical. That level of disproportionality is bad. I would not go to the other extreme of supporting the level of proportionality that applies in places such as the Netherlands or Israel, where the whole country is taken as a single constituency and where parties with 1 per cent of the vote have 1 per cent of parliamentary members. If the whole of Scotland were taken as one constituency, that would produce extreme proportionality in the Scottish Parliament. That method is an option, but it has disadvantages, some of which are especially obvious in the Israeli Parliament.
So it is a reasonable policy objective to balance proportionality and the ward-member link.
That is certainly the case. People who advocate STV should be up front about wanting as much proportionality as could benefit a party that might receive 20 per cent of the vote but not as much proportionality as could benefit parties that might receive 5 or 10 per cent of the vote. Guess which parties those might be?
My party has worked out that it would not benefit from STV and that, if anything, it is likely to be a net loser, so you cannot preach to me on that.
You are selling the system.
We sell it because we think that it is right, not because it is in our party's interest, which is unlike the way in which some others operate.
Members should not imagine that a perfect electoral system exists. Systems are rough-and-ready devices. The pursuit of perfection and the feeling that one mechanism will solve all the problems are extreme delusions that should not be pursued.
I am aware of that. I am an advocate of STV, but I do not claim that it is a perfect proportional system; I claim that it strikes a good balance between proportionality and the need to retain links between members and wards.
The issue is complex. One would have to follow a worked example to see what has gone wrong. However, I will say that, as votes are transferred from one candidate to a second and then to a third, the proportions—the transfer values—should decline sharply, but that would not happen under the proposed system.
That goes back to an issue that was raised earlier when we took evidence from Executive officials about the transferring stage. When a surplus is transferred, that might create a further surplus that will be transferred again. Is that the issue to which you are referring?
That is right. I am talking about the second transfer. When the transfers cumulate, the transfer value should go down multiplicatively, but it would not under the bill.
Is that because of the non-transferable papers?
No; it has nothing to do with that. To keep life simple, the worked example that I used was one in which there were no non-transferable papers. That is another problem: the system is complex, but if all the papers are retained, the system of transfer is too simple. The basic problem is that the bill tries to be clever, but it is not clever enough. If a returning officer from Northern Ireland looked at the bill, he or she would say that they do not work like that, although he or she might read their way of working into the bill because they would not believe what is written there. As drafted, the bill is wrong.
We note that you have drawn attention to the issue. Will you give us a copy of the worked example that demonstrates the flaw?
I can give you a sheet of paper that can be photocopied—I hope that you will be able to make deductions from it. There would be no problem explaining the matter to a school mathematics class. As the First Minister is a mathematics teacher, perhaps he would like to sponsor a competition among maths classes in secondary schools to find out whether my criticism is correct. My criticism is that votes would not always have the same value, as they are transferred too often.
As my maths is quite good, I am interested to see your work.
I would be inclined to do that. John Curtice alluded to the particularly perverse situation in which there is a correlation between the level of party support and the degree of proportionality. That is the famous Tullymander from southern Ireland—Mr Tully deliberately tried to adjust proportionality to benefit one party. It would be perverse if there were a correlation between the degree of proportionality and the local level of support for any of the parties. However, if the two were uncorrelated and cross cut, everything would come out in the wash.
Do you agree that the rules or guidance for the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland should be detailed in primary legislation, not subject to secondary legislation? That is similar to John Curtice's proposal.
I do not have a view on that question. I defer to John Curtice on it.
If the bill is trying to be too clever, I hope that you will try to teach us to be cleverer. If I have not misunderstood you, you said that PR will bring about shifting balances between different objectives, but no real revolutionary change.
Yes. I think that John Curtice said the same.
You said that there is no perfect system, so will you make it clear to us whether you are against STV totally or whether the bill can be altered to produce practical, useful, positive alternatives?
I repeat the advice that I gave the last time that I appeared before the committee, which was taken from the great book by Taagepera and Shugart: you should not waste a lot of effort, time, money and hassle on switching electoral systems unless you are going to get enormous benefits out of it. You should also keep the system as simple as possible, unless you are going to get enormous benefits from a more complex system. Simplicity, lack of change and familiarity are enormous virtues in a democratic system. They are not absolute virtues, but they must be weighed carefully against the other possibilities. If you want to keep the system simple but use STV, you should seriously consider the southern Irish technique, which is not guaranteed to work in all circumstances, but will work most of the time to a high degree. It is most unlikely that things would often go very wrong under such a system, whereas, if you get the formula wrong in a more complicated system, big errors could be made much more frequently.
Are you saying that the STV system is bedevilled by complexity and that we cannot change that, because it is built into the system?
That is exactly what Jenkins said, and I agree with him entirely. He called STV "excessively complicated" and "incontestably opaque" and, for that reason, he advocated the additional member system, which is much simpler for people to grapple with; it is also simpler to count.
Thank you for that clarification.
I have listened to the evidence and read some of the comments around the matter and I think that it lends weight to the adage, "If you are not totally confused, you have not been paying attention." You said that you found the idea of different ward sizes to be almost indefensible. Do you mean ward sizes in terms of members per ward or electorate per member, or both?
I mean size in terms of members per ward. When we say "size" in electoral systems literature, we are almost always talking about the number of representatives rather than the number of voters, because the number of representatives affects the degree of proportionality and the number of voters does not.
I disagree. If 2,000 people were to elect one person in a council area, but 10,000 were to elect another person in the same area, that would add to disproportionality.
That is a different question.
That is why I asked you whether you were referring to members per ward or to the electorate per member. If you are referring to members per ward, that raises a question about rural areas in particular. As you are aware, the Kerley report advocated between three and five members per ward, with the possibility of two members per ward in exceptional circumstances, which some of the more rural local authorities would consider in certain areas.
That would be a very high threshold of proportionality.
It certainly would; it would be a third plus one, if my mathematics is correct.
Roughly.
I think that it is exactly a third plus one.
It is exactly that by one definition, but only roughly that depending on the number of people that we are contesting.
It is that adage again.
The difference is between effective thresholds and guaranteed thresholds.
Given the fact that neither those who want proportionality nor those who advocate keeping a ward-member link are particularly happy with the bill, would you say that, far from being a reasonable compromise, it satisfies none of the camps and is not worth a candle?
As I said before, my view should not be seen as definitive and, speaking as an individual citizen, not as an academic, I find the Jenkins commission's arguments on AMS to be persuasive: it is relatively simple and very flexible and adjustable; it is relatively easy to operate; and we can make it as proportionate as we want it to be by varying the number of additional members.
So that is a broad yes.
My broad answer is that STV is a very complex system, which I would use only if I was really driven to it, and I do not feel really driven to it. It is perhaps significant that only a handful of places in the world have adopted it. Although the fact that those places are not among the worst governed in the world tells us that the system is not a disaster, it cannot be a coincidence that it has been such an unpopular system around the world.
Am I allowed another question?
If you are brief.
I want my tea.
You can always go.
You are quite right. A PR electoral system does not guarantee PR beyond the council or the Parliament that gets elected. If proportionality is highly significant in a particular society—the obvious example that we think of is Northern Ireland—it is important to push PR beyond the level of the elected body. That means pushing it into the body's machinery of working—a process that could go beyond the committees, as is the case in Northern Ireland, where concurrent agreements that go beyond simply proportionality are necessary. Where there is a deeply divided community and it is important to engage everyone across all sides of the divide, it is possible to go as far as having intentional disproportionality, which involves being particularly kind to the minority within a system.
You mentioned the example of Northern Ireland. In its evidence, the Scottish Executive said that it based the bill on the system in Northern Ireland. You commented on the section that seeks to give a greater proportion to votes as they are transferred, which is drawn from that model. When members were in Belfast, we were given an example, and picked up that that is exactly what happens. The problem is built into the system, so it has simply been lifted from the Northern Ireland system and put into the one in the bill. Going to Northern Ireland did not help us to clarify the problem; it showed us how it arises in practice.
Much depends on the threshold. An independent will find it much easier if the threshold is low. Under the system in the Scottish Parliament, independents have done quite well both in the list system and under first past the post, where they have a high vote in a restricted area. The classic case is of campaigning against a hospital closure. That is in the interests of the people in an immediate locality and against the interests of people in the wider locality. The independent is likely to have concentrated, but possibly intense, support. At the other extreme, someone who has a degree of name recognition in a wider area but a not particularly high level of support will benefit under the list system.
You have considered that in depth. Are you concerned that the system will not meet the criterion of having independents benefit from a change to the electoral system?
The system would not lead to the election of Scottish Socialist Party members, who normally do not get the level of support that would be needed except in fairly limited areas or for a particular personality who might be seen separately from the party—we have one sitting here. It would be much more difficult for parties with the level of support that the SSP has across the whole of Glasgow to get elected under STV than it is for them to get elected under the additional member system.
But we are not talking about parties; we are talking about independents.
That applies to independents as well. Under STV, to get elected, the independent would have to have 20 to 25 per cent support broadly over a three or four-member constituency but not necessarily broader than that. The level of support needed would be intermediate in both ways—it would have to be a bit broader than under the present first-past-the-post system and a bit stronger than under AMS.
That brings us to the end of questions. Thank you for your evidence.
Can we ask Bill Miller whether he plays the lottery and, if he does, what his numbers are?
I welcome the next panel, which consists of representatives of Argyll and Bute Council. We have with us Councillor Len Scoullar, Alasdair Bovaird and Nigel Stewart. I invite Councillor Scoullar to make some introductory remarks.
I am the independent member for Bute South. I thank the committee and the convener for the opportunity to appear before members today to say a little about the likely effects on Argyll and Bute of the single transferable vote, and multimember wards in particular. I have a prepared statement, copies of which I would be delighted to give the committee.
You have given examples of geographical areas where there might be problems under STV. You mentioned the islands of Islay, Jura, Colonsay, Tiree, Coll, Mull, as well as the Lorn area. How were those areas represented on Strathclyde Regional Council?
I was not involved, but as I recollect it, Lorn, Mull, Tiree and Coll were part of a ward that contained mainland and island areas. The other Atlantic islands of Islay, Jura and Colonsay were also combined with part of the mainland. As well as the Strathclyde wards, there were also district council wards, which were at pretty much the same level as the unitary councils that we have now.
My point is that those areas did not have single representation on Strathclyde Regional Council. Under that system, some councillors had to cover vast geographical areas on their own, whereas under STV, multimember wards would cover those vast areas, so a councillor would not cover a whole area on their own. The size of the wards was not seen as a problem in Strathclyde Regional Council, but is now being seen as a problem under STV. I am not sure that that works.
Would people not have had some form of representation through the district council? The district council would also have been in place at the time and people would have been represented on it.
They would have had such representation for district council services, but they would not have had that for the range of services that were the responsibility of the regional council, such as education, roads, water and sewerage. I am not clear why you suggest that the system would not work under STV; the chances are that most communities would end up with a councillor who represented or came from their area. It could happen that they would not, but in most cases they would, and those areas did not have such representation under the regional council system.
All those issues are a matter of degree. The question is how close people wish their representatives to be and relates to the scale and complexity of the issues that councillors address. We are not suggesting that the parliamentary constituencies should be constructed in such a way as to allow single representation for those islands, but given that people have come to expect that they will have locally available representatives in the wards, it is not unreasonable that they should continue to have them in the cases that we are talking about. Otherwise, there would, in effect, be a reduction in the representation available to islanders on the island of Tiree, for example.
Only if that was the way that they voted.
Sorry, we must take into account the number of people on the island and refer to the notion of the effective threshold—Professor Miller has left. The fact is that if Tiree was put into a three or four-member ward, the islanders of Tiree would account for a proportion that would be beneath the effective threshold for being able to elect someone to represent their interests on the council.
You will remember that John Curtice mentioned competition. I think that you were in the committee room when he said that he did not see it as a big problem. From what we were told when we talked to councillors just outside Dublin, it seemed to be quite a big problem there. We would like to hear more about that issue.
We have grave concerns about how the boundary commission will be directed, because currently none of us knows. We hope that the boundary commission will have a degree of discretion, as is currently the case, so that if it realises that representation will not be fair for people in the smaller Atlantic islands, it will be able to take action as it sees fit. Our hope is that it will do so.
On practical matters, Argyll and Bute Council covers a vast geographical area and has one of the longest coastlines in the known universe. Will you clarify how many counting centres you now have? Are all election votes gathered centrally for the count?
We have one count centre, in Lochgilphead, which we use for elections to the Westminster Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, local government and the European Parliament. At each election, we have a sizeable logistical challenge in gathering in the ballot boxes and papers and bringing them to the count centre, which we do by dint of a variety of modes of transport.
So you have a geographical problem in getting the ballot papers together. Could your counting system cope with two different elections and three different systems? How long would the counting last—Friday, Saturday and Sunday, for example—and at what cost? How would you cope with the practicalities?
You ask a number of questions. The Executive wishes to continue to hold the Scottish Parliament and local government elections on the same day. At the first Scottish Parliament election, we conducted the count overnight for the first time ever in the history of Argyll and Bute—previously, the count was done the next day. We did so by conquering the logistical challenges and by making sure that we had the systems and the staff to get through the count. In the election in May this year, we completed both the constituency and the list counts by about 6 o'clock in the morning. After that, we moved on to the local government count with a fresh team of counters, but with a wilting team of four staff who are needed to control and run the count. We started that at about 12 o'clock and finished by about 4 o'clock.
We have one of the few counts that depend on the vagaries of the weather. Mr Stewart did not refer to it, but he has ballot papers coming in from all over the place by helicopter and the lighter machines cannot fly in bad weather, so we always keep our fingers crossed. The count could be delayed even longer if we had bad weather.
There would be substantial costs in time and money. You mention the demands that territories of that size place on part-time councillors. Do you think that STV would lead to more full-time councillors?
A large number of part-time councillors are already challenged in their ability to be effective as councillors and to maintain any kind of other life—whether in their employment or in their family life. We see that not only among councillors who are in leadership positions, but among councillors who need to cover large distances and travel times. Our point is that the assertion that being a councillor is a part-time role is not without controversy, as members know. The new arrangements would place further strain on councillors' ability to work part time.
To add some arithmetic to that explanation, the Lorn three-member ward would extend to 620 square miles.
My wife is from Dunoon, so I have a good idea of what you are talking about.
I want to return to the issue that Iain Smith raised about what used to happen in regional council days. I have 15 years' experience in local government—eight at district level and eight at unitary authority level. Before anybody says that that adds up to 16, I should add that there was a year of overlap in the middle. Maths has been an important subject this afternoon. My experience in a mainland authority was that the district councillor often picked up the work of the regional councillor; he or she was the first port of call. I suspect that that is what happened in some of your communities. Your submission seems to advocate that Tiree and Coll are an exceptional case and should be a two-member ward for 676 voters. Will you expand on that?
The council was simply using that as an illustration. As the map in our submission shows, we are talking about the Atlantic islands from Tiree through Coll, Mull, Colonsay, Jura and into Islay. We were simply using Tiree and Coll as an example. The boundary commission acknowledged that those Atlantic islands are an anomaly and an exception to the normal rule.
That is very much what Kerley said. In exceptional circumstances, there could be two members. However, in the circumstances that you describe, is there not a better case for a single-member ward? Would you propose that if you thought that it was possible under the alternative vote method?
Absolutely.
The ward-member link can be broken, because it is difficult to maintain that link in some areas, even if there are two members.
At the moment, the Tiree and Coll ward has 676 voters, which is much less than the ideal 2,000 that was sought. However, as I said, the boundary commission recognised that there was a special case to answer.
To have a local councillor.
Absolutely.
Could your position be summed up as being the same as that of Professor Miller, who said at the end of his evidence that all the upheaval would not be worth it in terms of what it delivered for the operation of the council and its members?
I found myself very much in agreement with a lot of what Professor Miller said. You are quite right: if three councillors are chasing across a ward that covers 620 square miles in order to respond to a local need, the cost to the council will be greatly increased.
I was interested in what Mr Stewart had to say. He brought a practical eye to the issue of holding the council and Scottish Parliament elections on the same day. Thinking back to my visit to the Belfast count centre, I do not think that anyone—certainly not the Scottish returning officers to whom I have spoken—could conceive that it would be possible to hold the Scottish Parliament elections and the local government elections on the same day and be able to deliver the results on the time scale that we currently expect without accumulating enormous costs, particularly the first time.
That raises a number of issues, including concern for the voters and the effective administration of polling in a system in which we would have three ballot papers, as we do at present.
Many challenges face the island and rural communities. Has electoral reform ever been a theme of concern in those communities?
No one has expressed a view to me one way or the other. I suppose that many of the Liberal Democrats in my community would be supportive of electoral reform, but the issue has never been raised with me and I have never raised it with my constituents. There has been no discussion of it at all.
Has the council formed an overall view on the matter?
Yes.
Which is?
We would prefer the current system to remain. However, if we have to live with STV, we would prefer it if the boundary commission had a degree of discretion. As Mr Stewart said, we also have grave concerns about the council's counting capability.
So it would be fair for me to amplify your concern that the island communities would say, "Let's deal with some of the other priorities that we have in local government, rather than being concerned about delivering electoral reform." Would that be a fair view? Would people say, "Let's get on with the real challenges that face us"?
Yes. I think that, in terms of priorities, they would see things in the way that you have expressed them.
Is road equivalent tariff for travel between the islands an issue that is raised in your community? Is that something that is discussed at council or raised by your constituents?
The issue is often raised. If I remember rightly, the subject was raised by the Conservative Government many years ago, but it then got lost somewhere. The islanders would certainly welcome road equivalent tariff far in front of electoral reform.
So would you ask the Executive to bring forward proposals for road equivalent tariff?
Tommy, I think that we are drifting quite a bit from the substance of the meeting.
I want to address the question of what is an issue in communities. Paul Martin is rightly asking whether local authority voting change is an issue and I am asking whether road equivalent tariff is an issue. One of those issues is being raised and the other is not.
We are discussing voting, Tommy. I think that the council will now make representations to the Executive to introduce road equivalent tariff.
Those are all the questions that we have for the panel. I thank Councillor Scoullar, Mr Bovaird and Mr Stewart for their evidence and for travelling such a distance today. I hope that our overrunning will not have caused you too many travel difficulties on the way back.
In preparing my opening remarks, I was going to say, "Good afternoon," but I shall say, "Good evening," at this point.
In point 8 on the final page of your submission, you say:
It is as easy as one, two, three. In essence, what someone has to do is to rank—
I am thinking of the calculation. Can you explain the detail of the calculation?
There is a difference between the calculation of the ward quota and the transfer value of the votes. With respect, the electorate do not usually head into the election count after they have cast their ballot.
But they understand the first-past-the-post system.
Yes, but that system sometimes delivers erratic results. If we are to move towards a different system, we should ask the electorate to take the view that they are entitled to enhance their ability to choose between candidates and parties—they will like that—by simply ranking the candidates in order of preference. In Australia, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, people more or less understand and have got used to such an approach. Although I appreciate that there will need to be some form of educative process before the next local government elections, I do not think that it will take long.
I want to separate those two points. I accept that we can educate the electorate about the preference voting system. However, you must accept that the first-past-the-post system is simple: we understand that the candidate who receives more votes than any other candidate will be elected. Do you accept that—as has happened in Ireland—the electorate will never understand that part of the preference voting system process? Surely that contradicts what you say in your paper.
In essence, there is a political and an electoral process. I tend to leave the electoral process to the chief executive of the council, who will be charged with getting it right. As someone who once stood in an STV election at the University of Glasgow student representative council elections where the system was not right and we had to have a recount, I do not particularly understand the process. However, what counts ultimately is the result and who elects the councillor. We have to separate the process from the politics and I am interested in the politics rather than in the process.
My second question is similar to the one that I asked Len Scoullar from Argyll and Bute Council. I am aware that in East Dunbartonshire you are faced with many local issues and challenges such as, for example, Stobhill hospital. Where would you place the introduction of STV in your list of priorities? Is it more important to deliver STV than to deal with other local issues?
All I can say is that the Liberal Democrat manifesto contained a commitment to introduce STV and we won more seats and votes than anyone else. Perhaps the electorate understood the issue to that extent.
Those who favour STV repeatedly point out that the current system gives parties the opportunity to have large majorities—we need only remember the Glasgow case in that respect. However, because of the first-past-the-post system, East Dunbartonshire Council now has nine Labour members, three Conservative members and 12 Liberal Democrat members. Given that you have achieved such a balanced result under that system, why do you in East Dunbartonshire think that it is so bad?
I am sure that Mr Welsh will also want to know why there are no SNP councillors in East Dunbartonshire despite the fact that the SNP has nearly 20 per cent of the vote. Only three parties are represented on the council and a party—the SNP—that received nearly 20 per cent of the vote has been utterly excluded. That might be good for me, the Labour Party and the Conservatives, but it is not good for the SNP or ultimately for democracy.
Are you absolutely confident that the SNP would be represented in a three-member or four-member ward system?
The calculation under an STV system was carried out on the 1999 election result, which—with 11 Labour members, 10 Liberal Democrat members and three Tory members—was closer than the 2003 result. Under an STV system, the four parties would have received eight seats apiece, with the SNP—[Interruption.] Sorry, I meant that the four parties would have had six seats apiece. Maths is not my strong point—I am a lawyer. In any case, the result is that the four parties would have received an equal number of seats.
I do not want to labour the point but, as I have said, you have already achieved a balance on your council. Are you saying that under an STV system you would have a balanced result with four parties instead of three?
I am saying that the SNP's democratic mandate to get at least some people elected as councillors is being frustrated in East Dunbartonshire. I should point out that Fiona McLeod was elected as a list SNP MSP in 1999 and used Strathkelvin and Bearsden as her main base. In a sense, a large proportion of voters in East Dunbartonshire have had their will frustrated in local government elections. That is all right for me, as the leader of East Dunbartonshire Council, because at the moment I am on top with 12 seats. However, the SNP has been under-represented on the council for the past 23 years. Ultimately, the issue is not about what is of benefit for me; it is a matter of principle. If we allow the SNP to win some seats, the Liberal Democrats will lose some seats and will probably lose outright control of the council. However, as Iain Smith said earlier, for the Liberal Democrats the issue is absolutely a matter of principle.
Can you do some crystal ball gazing and consider the three-member or four-member wards that may exist in the future? How do you think that the change might affect elections and strategies in your area?
We are contemplating three-member or four-member wards. If there are four-member wards, the split within Bearsden and Milngavie will be difficult, as there are nine wards there at the moment. Three-member wards would suit Bearsden and Milngavie better. Four-member wards would have to be squeezed in.
You are imagining a multimember ward in your area. What is the political complexion of the ward at the moment? Who represents it?
At the moment, all nine wards in Bearsden and Milngavie are held by the Liberal Democrats. If there were multimember wards, the Liberal Democrats would not win all nine seats. For a change, there would be plurality of representation. The Tories might win back some seats.
Let us assume that there is a three-member ward. At the moment, the ward is represented by three Lib Dem councillors. We expect that, in an election held under STV, another party would come through. In that future election, what would you do about the three people who are councillors at the moment? How many candidates do you plan to put up? How will you debate the issue internally?
Sylvia Jackson is giving away party tactics.
If the member wants to write our development plan for the next four years, she is welcome to do so. The truth is that we have not yet thought about the issue in depth. I do not think that any political party has done that. We will try to do the best that we can to win the most seats that we can. At the end of the day, that is what it comes down to.
Are the three existing councillors all of a comparable age to you? Might some of them be thinking of retiring?
One of the other councillors is younger than me and one is older.
I have a question about practical matters. What do you consider to be the financial implications of the bill for East Dunbartonshire Council? I refer to administrative costs, staff training costs and costs associated with voter education and raising voter awareness. Have you received any estimates of those costs?
We have not yet received any such estimates. Returning officers will have to calculate what the change will involve. However, the cost of running elections is part of the cost of democracy. All councils will have to fund that.
Under the new system, the count may take longer. Would it cause your council problems if the count continued to Friday and perhaps Saturday? What happens under the present system?
At present, the situation is very much as suggested by the official from Argyll and Bute Council. The first-past-the-post count begins after 10 o'clock on the Thursday evening. When that count is finished, the result is announced. The list votes are then counted and sent to an Edinburgh counting centre before the results are formally announced. After the list votes are counted, everyone goes home. They come back the next day for the local government count.
We do not have the power to change the electoral system for this Parliament; unfortunately, that power lies somewhere else.
Proportionality is important. We have proportionality in our committees because we believe in that concept. Each of our committees contains 12 of our 24 councillors, and the split in each committee is six, four, two. We have therefore maintained proportionality in the committees, although we retain the casting vote.
Is there a case for holding local government elections on a different day?
I used to believe that. There are strong arguments on both sides. To increase voter participation, there is an argument for holding the two elections on the same day. The Americans tend to hold all their elections on the first Tuesday in November, which people understand reasonably well. There would be some benefit in holding all the Scottish elections on the same day.
I concur with some of the points that you have made, Councillor Morrison. I agree that party politics come into the debate; some of your comments have clearly shown your loyalty to your party's position. I also concur with you that the status quo is not acceptable, but I say that as a Labour Party member, so I have a mind of my own on the issue. However, I am concerned that some of the evidence that we have heard indicates that the system that is being proposed might be worse than the current system. You have stated eight advantages that you believe that STV has over the current system, but some of the evidence that we have heard today and that we heard during our visit to Ireland is that those advantages are not as clear as some of the clichés that are trotted out might suggest.
It is a question of whether we believe that one system is better than another. As both Professor Curtice and Professor Miller said, no electoral system is 100 per cent proportional, with the exception of the one in Israel, and we do not want to have a national list for the whole of Scotland if we are to retain the ward-member link.
You have defeated your own argument again, because any list member can legitimately take up any issue that a constituent raises with them. List members, as well as constituency members, are elected to represent their constituents and they do so. The Scottish Parliament has managed to develop protocols to overcome the practical difficulties. You are arguing that STV would be better than another system, but other systems can deliver the same results.
We like to be trail-blazers in East Dunbartonshire.
Well, if that is your answer, I will leave it at that.
For accuracy, I should say that a second local authority supported STV, too.
I do not accept John Morrison's argument about the difference between AMS and STV. We took evidence in Northern Ireland and found that the experience there is that there is no agreement about who does what and members compete with one another in the same way as it is complained that regional and constituency members of the Scottish Parliament compete. Unless members have a clear job description, STV will never resolve the issue of who does what.
But STV places the maximum advantage in the hands of the voter and constituent. As you said, there may be a number of councillors with different party affiliations. If someone has voted Liberal Democrat or Labour or Conservative or SNP, they may wish to see the party-affiliated councillor first. If they are able to do so in a multimember ward, that places the advantage solely and firmly in the hands of the constituent and the voter. It is that maximisation of voter preference in the election, and thereafter the maximisation of constituent preference for the individuals who live in the ward, that make STV a superior system to any other electoral system.
But that preference will not be maximised if there are three or four-member wards. Specifically, you mentioned the lack of an SNP presence in your council, but with a threshold of 15 per cent, unless the SNP vote is skewed into one area or another of the constituency, there will still be no SNP representatives. There will definitely be no representatives of Mr Sheridan's party within that system.
There is a trade-off between the ward-member link and proportionality. Regardless of what you say, people who live in a ward will have greater choice than they have at the moment. While I as a single-ward councillor—and it is the same for any constituency MP or MSP—represent any constituent who comes before me, I know that some people who come to me have not voted for me, and that they may wish to go to someone for whom they voted. STV, for all its faults—and it is not a fault-free system—enhances the democratic process by allowing quite a few people, although not 100 per cent of them, to have the representative of their choice.
Could we improve the bill and maximise voter preference by increasing ward sizes to five members?
As a mere councillor, I could not possibly comment. No doubt you will lodge an amendment at the appropriate point. The Scottish Executive proposes three or four-member wards. You have heard evidence about proportionality. The reason for proposing three and four-member wards is the trade-off between the ward-member link and proportionality. This is not an exact science, but that is an attempt to balance competing interests to ensure that the best democratic result is achieved.
But it does not deliver voter preference maximisation.
Neither does first past the post, and neither does AMS entirely. No electoral system will do that. We are trying to get an optimal result that maximises the rights of the voter, and STV does that.
I have two quick questions. First, do you happen to know the average electoral division size in East Dunbartonshire in the old Strathclyde Regional Council? Secondly, on Paul Martin's point about the system being easily understood by the electorate, could you explain to us how the d'Hondt system for calculating the additional members of the Scottish Parliament works?
We do not need the d'Hondt system to be explained at this stage.
I am an anorak in certain respects, but not with regard to the intricacies of the d'Hondt system. In fact, I only learned how to pronounce it last week.
Did councillors on the old Strathclyde Regional Council complain about not having a ward-member link because of the size of their wards?
No. In fact, the wards in Bearsden and Milngavie were represented by two very good councillors who—I should add—were both Liberal Democrats. People did not have a problem when they realised that they had to go to their regional councillor. They did not feel disfranchised by that. I think that they will not feel disfranchised by larger wards, as long as they understand who their councillor is and who they want to go to see.
I must apologise to the next set of witnesses, as I need to go soon—it is nothing that they will say and it is not personal. I will read their evidence.
Speaking as someone who is a ward councillor at the moment, I think that a three or four-member ward would deliver a geographical area of a size that would be manageable for the average councillor. At the end of the day, there is a trade-off. No result will be dead certain to deliver what we are looking for, but I think that three or four-member wards are a good stab at that. At this stage, I would be happy to see wards of that size.
That brings us to the end of our questions, so I thank Councillor Morrison for his evidence. Again, I apologise for the delay before he was able to give his evidence.
If you do not mind, convener, I will make a short introduction and then bring in my colleague who has come from the Western Isles to give evidence. It is refreshing to be sitting here until this time—I now realise who the part-time politicians are. I assume that we are the back-shift.
I am the leader of the independent group at COSLA. All the independent councillors at COSLA are opposed to STV. You have already heard from an independent councillor from Argyll and Bute Council, so I do not propose to reiterate what he said.
If STV is so complicated, why is it used by so many voluntary organisations, charities, churches, students associations and all sorts of other bodies that elect people on a non-political basis as individuals?
I am not convinced that the system of STV that is proposed is the one that is used extensively. I doubt whether many people understand the percentages involved. First, there is first past the post and then the candidate at the bottom is allocated a percentage. There are so many different trawls; there are about seven or eight processes.
It depends on how many councillors are being elected to how many places and how many candidates exceed the quota for first-preference votes. Some tweaking may be needed to get the exact wording of the bill right, but the system is used in many elections. I stood in student elections in the 1970s in which it was used.
It may be very easy to operate STV when small numbers are involved, but if there are multiple wards and multiple candidates, the ballot paper may have 20 or more names on it. I suggest that that is extremely complicated.
In other countries people seem to manage to deal with it.
With regional councillors, it was extremely difficult to have a member-ward link. I speak as someone who was elected to Strathclyde Regional Council in 1982. As a regional councillor, I had the largest electoral ward in the UK, with an electorate of 24,500. As well as having an electorate of that size, I represented an area that stretched from the border of Kilmarnock and Loudoun up to what is now East Renfrewshire. I covered a large part of the new town of East Kilbride and every village outside the town.
I note what you are saying. I, too, was a regional councillor from 1982, but I do not think that I had a problem with my member-ward link.
Some of us have been dedicated and have remained councillors.
I want to pursue this point. In England, there are currently multimember wards. Most English local authorities have three-member wards. Do those authorities have a problem with member-ward links because of that?
There is a real problem with multimember wards in England. I have many colleagues who serve those wards and I meet them regularly on national bodies. The most telling aspect of the English multimember ward system is the fact that councillors are elected on turnouts of as low as 7 per cent. If people are so switched off from elections because of the way in which they are organised and run, that does not move democracy forward one wee bit. It does not serve well the people whom councillors represent.
It is interesting that you should turn voter turnout into an argument against multimember wards. Are turnouts not low because elections are annual? Do you think that there are too many elections to local authorities in England?
That is probably one of the reasons for the low turnout.
The problem is not multimember wards per se, but the fact that councillors are elected in thirds.
There is a multiplicity of factors, one of which is the fact that there is an annual election. People are not sure who represents them. If the councillors are all from one party, it takes three years and three elections for the electorate to replace them. That does not best serve the people whom councillors are trying to represent. Together, those issues cause problems of voter apathy.
I agree. That is why STV should be used for local elections in England and Wales, too.
Can you confirm that the new unitary authorities took on all former local authority responsibilities? There is a significant difference between the responsibilities of Strathclyde Regional Council and those of the current local authorities. The new unitary authorities have all the responsibilities of a local council and are significantly different from regional councils.
If you are asking me what councillors' priorities are, I would say that they are to provide services to the people whom they are elected to represent. That means education, social work and improving transport links. Those are the things that are important, and those are the priorities. Looking into the electoral process is a diversion from concentrating on those issues, and we would see problems with getting the relationship back together again between councillors and those whom they represent. Some councillors want the change to take place, but the vast majority of them would prefer there to be no change to the present arrangements. If there is to be a change, they would not wish the change that is being proposed.
Our estimates are that 22 councils oppose STV, nine are equivocal about it and one supports it. Would that be a fair analysis?
I think that two councils now support STV. One recently took a decision to do so—it is not a Liberal council. Those estimates are a fair reflection, however.
I return to a point that was made by Councillor Macdonald, which was dismissed to an extent by the witness from East Dunbartonshire Council. The transparency of the voting system is important to the voter, is it not? People should understand how the system operates so that it can be explained in layman's terms why certain people have been elected and why certain other people have not.
Absolutely. That is why people vote—if they do not know why they are voting, they will not bother. We get very good results in local elections under the current system, and I do not see any reason to depart from it.
Earlier—about six hours ago—we discussed the way in which some votes were allocated and some were not. Could things be done to improve the bill with regard to how the transfers would happen? Is it your view that STV is simply the wrong way to go, and that that aspect of the proposals should be rejected?
I discussed the question of setting out the criteria that have to be met if we are to improve the system. I heard earlier that we are getting not very much for an awful lot. We are not improving the member-ward link; we are not protecting natural communities; we are not protecting independents; and we are certainly not assisting the smaller parties. If those are the criteria that we are laying down, but we do not meet any of them through the proposals or we have to water them down, what we are doing will fail. Therefore, I argue that the proposed system is flawed throughout and that it cannot be improved through tinkering with it.
That is helpful.
The costs of running the proposed electoral system would be only the start of it. There would be a significant increase in costs and in problems—aside from getting the count done. It would probably be impossible to run an STV system at the same time as another proportional system with any degree of certainty of getting a justifiable result at the end of it—in other words, with the people doing the count not getting totally exhausted.
We talked about multimember wards in England. As I understand it, there has never been a protocol established for who does what within those wards.
No, there has not, and nor should there be. We cannot have a multimember ward and say, "You represent only a bit of it." If someone is elected by the whole of the ward, they represent the whole of the ward. At present, I do not question who comes to me. Whether they voted for me or for one of my opponents, or whether they voted at all, I am elected to represent the whole of my constituency.
Paragraph 2.1 of COSLA's response states that, if STV is introduced,
Alex Macdonald touched on that at the start. It is not a matter that we are discussing to reach a policy decision on, but if we asked council leaders whether, if STV came into force, we should split elections, their answer would probably be yes. That is an opinion based on discussions that I have had with colleagues; it is not a policy decision. I am sure that if I took the matter to our convention meeting next Friday, I would be able to give you an answer, and it would probably be the answer that I have given today.
I hear clearly the view that COSLA would prefer the system not to change to STV. However, I note in paragraph 1.10 of COSLA's evidence that, if such a change were to be made, COSLA would favour as small a multimember ward as possible—that is, a three-member ward. Is that a broad view across most COSLA members?
If we were going to have STV, we would like to see STV with as few members as possible. The broad view of people who support the present system is that, if there is a change, it should be to the alternative vote and not to STV.
I want to change tack a little. The STV part of the bill is vital, whether you support it or not, but there are other aspects of the bill—on remuneration packages—that I imagine are of equal concern to representatives of local authorities. We heard from the Scottish Executive that the current proposal is to ask the Scottish Parliament to give powers to ministers before we know what the remuneration progress group has decided on the issue. Does that cause COSLA concern?
It certainly does. I am on the remuneration progress group, and I have been to two meetings at which there were lively discussions on the subject. If we are going to the time and trouble of participating in the group, and if the Executive took the time and trouble to set it up, I hope that the Executive will give the group credibility by listening to what it says.
I advise Michael McMahon that COSLA will appear before the committee again to address part 2 of the bill. We will be able to undertake detailed scrutiny on part 2 at that time. Before then, I hope that we will be able to find out a bit more about where the remuneration progress group is going. I do not mind you asking general questions on this aspect of the bill, Michael.
Thank you. I have one follow-on question. There was some discussion on this subject earlier and it would be useful to take a sounding from Councillor Watters. Under the proposals, if a sitting councillor decided not to stand, they would receive a package but, if a sitting councillor was voted out by the electorate, they would not receive it. What are the implications of that proposal? Why would anyone want to suggest that that is the way to remunerate councillors for their length of service?
Before I deal with the present, I would like to give an example. Recently, I went to a presentation, which was being made to a councillor whom I knew very well. When I came into local government in 1982, he had been a councillor for 28 years. He was beaten in the last election—he did not stand down—and he ended up with only a long-service award from the Labour Party. He gave 58 years' service to local government and got no remuneration whatever. He was also penalised in his job by not getting any promotions. It is an absolute scandal that he got no remuneration.
Would it be a problem if a councillor who decided to stand down of their own volition received a package, as is proposed, but a councillor who was voted out by the electorate did not receive one?
I think that it would. As an elected representative at the local level, I think that I should not be treated any differently from other elected representatives.
This particular market day is wearing very late indeed, so I will be brief. We want to thank you for your patience and stamina.
I would like to see either the status quo or an exception being made for islands and remote areas such as Caithness and Sutherland. If that was not achievable, I would go for the minimum. Mention has been made of two-member, three-member and five-member wards. I would start with one-member wards. If that was not achievable, I would go for two-member wards and so forth.
Multimember wards have an inbuilt problem. We have that problem in the Scottish Parliament with constituency and regional list MSPs. How can turf wars be avoided? Will it be necessary to have protocols on conduct between members in a multimember ward? If so, who should produce them?
Multimember wards would produce turf wars—not only between parties, but within parties. Protocols would not prevent that from happening; they have not prevented it from happening in the Parliament.
So, you think that even agreements that were generally imposed would not prevent turf wars.
No, they would not prevent them. If people stand for election because they want to win, they will keep trying to win elections. They will stand every time. At the moment, if people in my ward are unhappy about something, there is only one person to blame and that is me.
I can see that electors could be very good at playing one member off against another and then going to courts of further appeal. If it is not possible to stop turf wars, would there not be a benefit in having protocols in order to mitigate the problem and to enable proceedings to be more civilised?
The Executive's STV working group, which has been looking at the issue, has asked the officers to find examples of protocols that could be used as the basis for a Scottish protocol model. The officers have not found any models. It might be useful to note the fact that, in England and other countries where there are multimember wards, there are no examples of working protocols, which suggests that it is not feasible to develop or create a protocol.
Thank you for that clarification.
Is it not possible that there are no protocols in multimember wards in STV constituencies and other areas because they are not needed, and that we are creating a problem that does not exist?
The experience of the Scottish Parliament, whereby there is some form of protocol—which is ignored as much as it is adhered to—suggests that there are problems as a result of the complications of having multimember wards, at a regional level in the case of the Scottish Parliament.
I want to ask—
I have a couple of other questions, but we will come back to you.
I will deal with the second question—perhaps Paolo Vestri will answer the first question.
In general, COSLA is concerned about the increase in legislative matters that are left to secondary legislation and not included in bills. Sylvia Jackson mentioned that issue earlier and COSLA shares her concerns. We want to see as much as possible included in the bill and as little as possible left to ministers' discretion in secondary legislation. That applies to issues that relate to the boundary commission's directions and to details about how STV will operate.
More important, so does Watters.
Some of those details must be included in the bill, which has big flaws because it does not reach that level of detail.
Although his surname starts with the letter W, Pat Watters has been elected many times.
The lists of names involved were much smaller than those that would exist under STV.
Absolutely.
Concern is felt about that because councillors who were elected under STV would have one franchise, which might be only 25 per cent of the vote plus one, whereas a councillor who was elected at a by-election would be elected on 50 per cent of the vote plus one, which would mean a different level of franchise and a different level of proportionality.
That councillor could be paid more.
Some councillors, and possibly one or two MSPs, have floated the idea that before any change is made to the local government voting system, a test of people's opinion about it, such as a referendum, should be conducted. Has COSLA taken soundings from its members about that or have any COSLA members proposed that strongly?
No, but we have heard about a proposal for a referendum. It was interesting to read the Electoral Commission's report on how people feel about their elected members. At the top of the poll, with 68 or 69 per cent, were local councillors. If the people trust us, we ask our MSP colleagues, who had only 19 per cent in that poll, to trust us too.
I trust you, Pat, and I always argue that councillors are the most important cog in the electoral machine. I genuinely believe that.
COSLA has not discussed that in any detail. If the electoral system is to be changed, starting from scratch might be an option. If electoral system changes are to be introduced, we should consider all our electoral systems. That would mean a longer-term and deeper examination that included consideration of anomalies and present boundaries. However, the easiest method is to bolt together existing constituencies. If that is an option, it should be applied to Highland Council's area, where putting together three wards might create a constituency with the size of Switzerland. I do not know whether that makes sense. Where do we go from there?
Even in South Lanarkshire, in the south of Scotland, the Duneaton/Carmichael ward is bigger than 14 member states of the United Nations. Could that ward be joined on to two neighbouring wards?
Complication is created for the electorate when there is continual change to how they elect their representatives, who their representatives are and how they access their representatives.
David Mundell's first point was about how the boundary commission might redraw the boundaries. Much evidence about that has been given to the Executive's STV working group and the boundary commission has presented various options. Bolting on wards would be the easiest and possibly the quickest option, but that would not necessarily satisfy one major criterion that we all agree is important—the consideration of natural boundaries between wards.
That brings us to the end of the session. I thank Councillor Pat Watters, Councillor Alex Macdonald and Paolo Vestri for attending the meeting. We greatly appreciate your forbearance about our overrunning.
Meeting closed at 19:35.