Meeting of the Parliament 06 February 2020
Broadly, we welcome the bill, and we will be supporting it at stage 1. It contains mainly technical, but nonetheless important, changes to aspects of electoral law.
I will confine my remarks to three areas, in each of which there are a number of questions for the minister to reflect on as the bill progresses—namely, parliamentary terms, two-member council wards, and electronic voting and voter participation. My hope is that the minister will want to engage constructively with us, and indeed with members across the chamber, on our concerns about those aspects of the bill as it progresses through the legislative process.
I will talk first about parliamentary terms. This session, the Parliament will sit for a maximum of five years, as was the case in the previous session. That reflects the change of the norm at UK level, from four-year sessions to five-year sessions—a change that moved from convention to law in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Speaking personally, I regret that change. I prefer four-year terms to five-year terms, but that ship would appear to have sailed, although—who knows—it may yet sail back.
What is important—here, as in all matters of electoral law—is that the interests of the voter are paramount. I suspect that what the voter wants is clarity. In that sense, it matters less whether terms are four years or five years; it matters more that the issue is clear and beyond unnecessary doubt.
It also matters that this session of Parliament should not set its own limits. The length of this session was set before the 2016 election; the length of the next session should be set now, and not after the 2021 election. There is no controversy on those matters. Therefore, in principle, I support the move made in sections 1 and 2 of the bill to fix the terms at five years for both the Scottish Parliament and local government in Scotland.
However, there is one fly in the ointment—and this is the matter on which I would like the minister to reflect. If the reform in sections 1 and 2 of the bill is happening because of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, what will the Scottish ministers do when, or if, that act is repealed? I suspect that its days are numbered. Most commentators think that it has not worked—after all, we have had not one but two early general elections since the act came into force. The fixed terms of the UK Parliament do not seem to be particularly fixed, and, of course, the current Conservative Government has a manifesto commitment to repeal the act. How does the minister think that we should reflect that rather fluid picture as we debate and deliberate on section 1 of the bill?
I turn to two-member council wards. As the law stands, all council wards in Scotland have either three or four councillors. The Islands (Scotland) Act 2018 allows the creation of one or two-member wards in the islands. That makes good sense. However, section 4 of the bill would allow the creation of two, three, four or five-member wards in any council area in Scotland.
As we have heard from its convener and read in its stage 1 report, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee supported that proposal, but it voiced concerns, reflected in the evidence that it received, that the degree of flexibility envisaged in section 4 is not an unalloyed good and that it comes with some potentially negative consequences, which need to be carefully thought about. I urge the minister to take those concerns seriously.
In particular, the worry is this. Two-member wards may be desirable in some sparsely populated areas that have strong community boundaries, but—and it is a big but—proportionality between votes cast and seats won is the explicit objective of the single transferable vote system that we now use in Scotland for local government elections, and two-member wards make the achievement of that proportionality much more difficult than is the case with larger, multimember wards.