Hansard

Much rhetorical hot air has been expended on the debacle of the elections to the Scottish Parliament and Scotland's councils on 3 May last year when, as we know, failures in the organisation of the elections led to an unprecedented level of spoiled ballot papers in both elections. Suffice it to say that I trust that our recent experience has wiped the smirks off the faces of those who like to comment condescendingly on the hanging chads of Florida or who self-righteously criticise processes in countries to which it is common to send election observers. Scotland might not have passed the United Nations test.

As we have heard, in the Scottish Parliament elections, more than 146,000 ballot papers were rejected as spoiled. The rejection rates were 2.88 per cent in the regional vote and just over 4 per cent in the constituency vote. In 2003, the relevant figures were an unexceptional 0.65 per cent and 0.64 per cent. Moreover, although it received less publicity, the rejection rate in the local government elections was—as Duncan McNeil said—1.83 per cent, which compares with 0.77 per cent in 2003 and 0.59 per cent in 1999. The change to the STV system tripled the rejection rate, and those figures do not tell the whole story.

Since the debacle, there has been no shortage of inquiries, investigations, consultations and responses, which started with the inquiry by Ron Gould, whom the Electoral Commission appointed. The matter has also been investigated by the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster and our Local Government and Communities Committee, whose report we are debating. We have had the consultation paper "Sorting the Ballot" from the Scotland Office and an issues paper from the Electoral Commission. As we have heard, the Scottish Government is about to launch two further consultations. One will be on a chief returning officer for Scotland, about which the Electoral Commission is distinctly cool and Her Majesty's Government is barely tepid. The other consultation is intended to be a wide-ranging, all-singing, all-dancing paper on several operational matters. We have also had the benefit of the views of Her Majesty's Government on the Gould report and the Scottish Affairs Committee's report.

What are we to make of the frenzy of activity on how we reform the administration and organisation of elections to prevent a recurrence of what happened in 2007? An outside observer would conclude that not much has happened to date. The Scottish Government is hardly moving at breakneck speed on local government elections, which fall in its domain, but I am sorry to say that the main drag on progress is Her Majesty's Government's unwillingness to accept the conclusion that responsibility for election administration in Scotland should be transferred to a single jurisdictional entity. Gould said that the most appropriate entity was the Scottish Parliament and Government, and the Parliament and the Local Government and Communities Committee's report endorsed that. The behaviour of Her Majesty's Government is disappointing, because it precludes us from creating the office of chief returning officer for all elections in Scotland—to local government, the Scottish Parliament, Westminster and the European Parliament—to replicate the situation in Northern Ireland, which the Local Government and Communities Committee's report recommended.

The one significant step forward is the acceptance by Her Majesty's Government and the Scottish Government that the local government and Scottish Parliament elections should be decoupled. A bill to that effect will be introduced early next year. Of course, the decoupling proposal was first made by the Scottish Conservatives way back in 2002—long before the problems in 2007 emerged.

The Kerley and McIntosh committees, which examined local government, recommended decoupling. Subsequently, the Arbuthnott commission recommended it. Those independent committees recognised not only that separation was desirable to promote democratic accountability, but that voters could be confused if two different election systems were used on the same day to elect different bodies. Lo and behold, that is what came to pass. The blame lies fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the previous Labour-Liberal Democrat Executive, which opposed decoupling. It took the catastrophe of 2007 to change Labour members' minds, as we heard in David Whitton's speech, which sounded more like a confession at a show trial than a speech to a Parliament. However, the Liberal Democrats have still to atone for their sins. Like the Electoral Reform Society, they cling to the fanciful notion that there was nothing wrong with the STV system.

I say as an aside that the STV system more than decimated the ranks of Labour councillors. It was forced through in the previous parliamentary session as the price of the second Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition. It must bring tears to Labour members' eyes when they reflect that the Scottish National Party appears to be capable of running a minority Government with 47 members whereas they were incapable of doing so between 1999 and 2007 with 56 members and then 50 members. Be that as it may—this is not a time for partisan comment.

The Local Government and Communities Committee's convener, Duncan McNeil, highlighted the fact that the ballot rejection rate in the local government elections was three times higher than it was under the first-past-the-post system. That rate did not include ballots on which voters had written a cross rather than the number 1 next to a candidate's name, as the two marks were regarded as equivalent and counted. That was right, but a cross would have shown that a voter did not understand how to vote under STV. Had such ballots been rejected because of that failure of understanding—as they might well have been—the rejection rate in the local government elections would have been even higher than that in the Scottish Parliament elections.

One virtue of separating the elections is that the next council elections in 2012 can be preceded by a much better voter information campaign with a much better focus than was evident in 2007. The Scottish Affairs Committee roundly criticised that campaign.

We are a bit further forward than we were 17 months ago, but not much. I am not at all persuaded that we have taken the opportunity that the Gould report presented to put the administration and organisation of all our elections in Scotland on a sound footing for the future. We can and should do better. I commend the Local Government and Communities Committee's report to the Parliament.