Hansard

I start with the important points that Sarah Boyack and James Kelly made to the minister. It is important that we all understand that, today, the Electoral Commission said that it continues to recommend that all legislation relating to elections must be clear at least six months before it is required to be implemented or complied with. That includes this bill and any future legislative change that might be needed to accommodate or manage the next election to the Scottish Parliament, whether it takes place on schedule in May 2021, or whether it has to be delayed.

It is welcome that the minister has confirmed on the record his Government’s commitment to ensuring that that six-month timetable is complied with, no matter what. We cannot have exceptions to that. We know that we live in extraordinary times. We know that we are confronting an emergency, but we cannot make in a hurry emergency rules that change the way in which representative democracy and our elections are run in this country, pandemic or no pandemic. The Electoral Commission is unambiguous and I welcome what I have taken to be the minister’s equal unambiguity.

We have some time, because six months before next May is not until the end of this year. We have some time during the summer and the early autumn to ensure that our rules are fully in place six months before the election is held. I welcome the fact that that has been said clearly this afternoon.

I also welcome the way in which the minister has conducted himself throughout the passage of the bill.

I spoke about three aspects of the bill during the stage 1 debate, which was in early February but feels like a lifetime, if not a generation, ago. I will speak about two of those aspects today. The first is two-member and five-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-member or two-member wards in the islands. Section 4 of the bill allows the creation of two-member, three-member, four-member or five-member wards in any council area in Scotland. That flexibility is welcome, but only to an extent. We all understand that that flexibility is not an unalloyed good and that, notwithstanding the fact that two-member wards, or indeed five-member wards, might be desirable in some areas that have strong community boundaries, they should not have them at the cost of undermining the proportionality between votes cast and seats won, on which the single transferable vote system that we use across Scotland for local government elections is based. Two-member wards make the achievement of that proportionality much more difficult, as Mark Ruskell said earlier.

In its valuable stage 1 report, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee said that two-member wards should be used only in “very exceptional circumstances”. I agree with that. I welcome the way in which the provisions on the possible creation of two-member or five-member wards under section 4 of the bill have been strengthened during the passage of the bill by the Government amendments moved at stage 2 and those that were passed unanimously earlier this afternoon to require the Boundary Commission for Scotland to report in full to the Scottish Parliament about any future recommendations that it makes that any ward should be created that has only two or as many as five members.

Those are important steps in the right direction but all those steps, if they are taken at all, must be taken while bearing in mind that parties across the chamber want to see two or five-member council wards only in what the standards committee called “very exceptional circumstances”.

The final element of the bill that I want to reflect on, which has not been talked about this afternoon but is nonetheless important, is the setting at five years of term lengths for elections to this Parliament and to local government. I have not changed my mind since stage 1, when I said that I prefer four years to five years, but that boat has sailed—at least for the time being—because of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. The important thing here is not to have a largely futile argument about which—four or five years—is better but to ensure that there is clarity and certainty. Whenever we think about electoral law, the interests of the voters must be paramount. That is what the Electoral Commission is there for and why it says that all those rules, whatever they are, must be in place six months before the date of any election.

For as long as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 continues to fix the term of Westminster elections at five years, it makes sense for our term to be fixed at the same interval, so that there are not occasions when this Parliament and the United Kingdom Parliament are to be elected on the same day. However, as I said in the stage 1 debate, it is the policy of the party that won the most recent general election in the United Kingdom to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. I am not yet clear what it proposes to replace the act with, but that important clarity and certainty needs to carry forward, irrespective of the fate of the 2011 act. We should not be wedded to five years out of principle, because there is no principle that says that five years is better than four years or any other relevant period. The important thing is to make sure that the interests of the voter are paramount at all times. We—or the Parliament that is elected at the next election, whenever that takes place—might need to revisit that and keep that option open, if and when the 2011 act is repealed.