Hansard

I will take your questions in reverse order. Pull me up if I forget to address any of your points.First, I will address your question of whether we can have a different system for Scottish local government compared with that for Westminster or the Scottish Parliament or whatever. The question is, will voters be faced with too many alternatives? My reaction to that question is mixed. First, we are already in that world. In May, voters had to deal with first past the post and the additional member system. In June, if the same voter bothered to go to the polling station, they were faced with another party list system. In some senses it was exactly the same as the second vote for Scotland, but because the Home Office designed its ballot papers differently from the way in which the Scottish Office and the Welsh Office did, it looked horribly different. Westminster will still be first past the post, but if Jenkins is introduced, we will have yet another different system.It is not uncommon for voters to use different systems for different purposes. For example, Northern Ireland's voters happily use STV for some elections but first past the post for Westminster. In France, local elections tend to be run on a party list system whereas they use the two-ballot system for elections to the legislature. It is not often realised that in the United States local elections are not necessarily undertaken using first past the post, and that STV has been used there. Even if we look at local government in England, voters do not get terribly confused by the fact that sometimes they are asked to put two or three votes on a ballot paper because they have multi-member ward elections and only one vote in parliamentary elections. We are already in the world where different electoral systems are used for different purposes.We must think about the cognitive tasks of the voter. At the end of the day, the real reason why there was no serious problem on 6 May is that the cognitive task that the voters were being asked to engage in was exactly the same as before, which was to put an X on a ballot paper. Indeed, we made life even easier for voters because they did not even need to read the ballot paper to understand who to vote for; they could just look at the pictures. Cognitively, voting by marking an X, however the vote is then treated, is exactly the same task for the voter. That might lead people to say, "Therefore, we should not have a single transferable vote system". However, the Jenkins system, if it ever sees the light of day, requires voters to engage in two separate cognitive tasks. On the alternative vote they will be required to mark 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, and on the top-up vote they will have to mark an X. Jenkins has come to the conclusion that two cognitive tasks can be run in the same system, so I am not sure that any of the issues that have been raised are decisive. There are experiences of voters being asked to do different things in different elections, and it is even being proposed that they do different things at the same election and that that does not cause a disaster.Your last point was about different parts of Scotland. There are a couple of issues to be addressed. One point that flows from my comments is that, given that we can run, for example, STV or AMS or any other system with different ward sizes and with different tiering structures, we may want wards to elect different numbers of councillors in Glasgow compared with the Western Isles.The potential for flexibility is there, even though STV or AMS may be in place across the whole of Scotland. After all, under the first-past-the-post system, the number of electors per ward is smaller in the Western Isles than in Glasgow. It is not unreasonable for different councils to have different ward sizes, for example, two or three-member wards in the Western Isles and six or seven-member wards in Glasgow. It may be that parties that do relatively well in rural parts of Scotland will lose out, because the system will be less proportional, but at least the system will be fair within the district.It becomes rather more difficult to accept the argument for four or five-member wards in towns in the Borders, but for smaller wards in the rural districts. The danger is that that will create a bias in favour of one party. For example, when Lord Jenkins was writing his report he came up at first with the idea of STV for the cities and the alternative vote for rural districts. It took a little while to persuade him that that would mean that the Labour party did not benefit from proportionality in the rural areas, but that the Conservatives benefited from proportionality in the city areas. A little bit of computing persuaded him that it was a wonderful Conservative gerrymander and the idea was dropped. If we have smaller wards in the rural parts of a Scottish local authority and bigger wards in the cities, we may end up with another Conservative gerrymander. We need to watch out for that.At the beginning, you made two points. I have forgotten them, but you may want me to pick up on them.