Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2020
Because elements of the bill relate to local government, I declare an interest as a councillor in Aberdeen City Council.
The Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee has been pleased to scrutinise the bill, and I am grateful to the minister for his response to our recommendations in the stage 1 report.
Broadly, the bill seeks to make changes to electoral law—mostly to reform aspects of practice for local government elections, although it also touches on term lengths for Parliament and makes facilitating arrangements for trials of electronic voting, among other things.
I welcome making permanent the change to five-year terms for Parliament. That will provide certainty and sufficient time for the Government of the day to progress its policy objectives.
I support the move to enable the Local Government Boundary Commission to introduce two-member and five-member wards where appropriate, although I hope that more is done on assessing the effect that that would have on the proportionality of votes that are cast at elections and on wards won.
I am generally supportive of examining whether electronic voting would boost political engagement. However, we should be very careful, because any action that we take should have the validity of election results as its first priority. Nonetheless, I advocate that we work towards electronic counting; it has always struck me as being rather absurd that we sit there counting by hand when we have electronic machines that could do it for us.
I will focus the remainder of my remarks on a few areas in which there appears to be a difference between the approach that is set out in the report and the thinking of the Scottish Government. I note that the Government has supported the majority of the recommendations, and I am glad that ministers will lodge appropriate amendments at stage 2. However, it appears to be the case that there are alternative viewpoints on a couple of issues. They are not areas of huge disagreement—they are simply matters on which further reflection will be required.
One committee recommendation was that further consideration be given to the effect of postal ballots on turnout. However, it appears from the minister’s letter that the Government is hesitant to commit to such work. I hope that the minister will reconsider that, because postal votes are a valuable aspect of our electoral system. If they would boost engagement, we should reconsider them.
In addition, I am glad that the minister has agreed to consider again increasing the maximum fine for breaching election expenditure rules, which would ensure welcome consistency with the Referendums (Scotland) Act 2020.
One element that was discussed in the committee but is not included in the bill is a review of multimember wards in order to improve electoral practice and administration. The Scottish Government has stated that there is not sufficient time in the current parliamentary session to consider the issue in depth. That is a fair assessment, but given my first-hand experience in the matter, I implore those who are in Parliament after the next election to make the issue a priority, so that Parliament does all that it can to ensure that local government works as efficiently and effectively as possible.
In particular, proportionality should be examined. We know that it improves with higher councillor numbers per ward, but following that through to its natural conclusion could mean wards being replaced with area-wide proportional representation lists, which would not help the public to interact with their representatives. Perhaps a solution can be found that is based on the electoral system for the Scottish Parliament, in order to give ward and authority-wide mandates that more accurately reflect the electorate’s views.
The bill includes a couple of things that might require amendment at later stages, but I endorse the conclusion of the stage 1 report that the changes are broadly acceptable. With that in mind, I am happy for the bill to proceed and will vote accordingly on the motion, later today.
17:01