Views on the Bill
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill of 2025 has drawn a range of reactions from electoral reformers. Here you can read a recent article in Chartist magazine by Mary Southcott, Vice Chair of LCER, on reforming election laws, changing voting systems and rejecting non-PR approaches, and a response by Sandy Martin, Chair of LCER.
BEWARE SIREN VOICES
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, introduced in July 2025, based on the White Paper in 2024, contained an important message promised in the Labour Manifesto, to reverse the Conservative decision to put first past the post back whenever the opportunity arose. The exact formulation in the Bill on the Voting system is: “The Bill introduces the Supplementary Vote, where voters select
first and second preferences to ensure the winner has broader support.”
Under other circumstances, this could be construed as a victory for pluralism and democracy. But now we have five or six multiparty politics, SV is just not good enough. This system was designed for two and perhaps a half party politics in London, when Professor Patrick Dunleavy was propagandising for SV. From the start, it confused voters with many LibDem and Green voters choosing to throw away their vote by voting for each other when neither was thought able to win. The other thing which recommended itself to Labour at the time was that SV didn’t require a change from X-voting.
The electorates of Northern Ireland and in local elections in Scotland have however managed to rank order their preferences by using STV, 1, 2, 3 … This, when voting for a mayor, amounts to Alternative Vote which confuses people still further as they are now being asked to consider AV for General Elections, something which was visited and rejected by the 2011 Referendum. Many PR supporters rejected it then
and now, so perhaps we should not be beguiled by the siren voices willing to consider AV as an alternative or precursor to PR. But this does not mean, as people in Hampshire see clearly – and is perhaps not so obvious in the north – that we need not think of importing STV into both Welsh and English local government, while plans are being drawn for new boundaries in non-unitary local councils. This could create
even more unchallenged and unrepresentative governance at local level if we do not address the system.
Most of the other reforms left out of the King’s Speech in July 2024, or introduced into the thinking since, were expected in an Elections White Paper before the end of July 2025. What arrived instead on schedule, just (17 July), was a policy paper, consultation not being the most reliable way of getting one’s own way. The Paper outlines the Labour Government proposals for an elections and democracy bill, Restoring trust in our democracy: Our strategy for modern and secure elections, informed by the 2025 Association of Electoral Administrators Report in February 2025, named New Blueprint for a Modern Electoral Landscape: How to bring resilience and capacity to UK Democracy, which also calls for a Commission.
The Government proposes reducing the voting age to 16, reviewing voter ID, improving voter registration and strengthening political donations rules. At Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform, we are hoping that previous legislation on citizenship education can be highlighted where it is not functioning, and that voter ID should enable everyone eligible to vote, especially young people. We also hope that automatic registration will be supported, and attempts will be made to sort out political finance from home and away, not just foreign donations.
Mary Southcott, 19-09-2025, reproduced froman article published in Chartist Magazine
House of Commons is the Prize
Sandy Martin, Chair of LCER, responds to Mary’s article
Labour Campaign for Electoral Reform (LCER) joined with Unlock Democracy, the Electoral Reform Society and others in campaigning against the Tories’ unprincipled move to First Past the Post (FPTP) for Mayoral and Police & Crime Commissioner elections. The 1997-2010 Labour Government had instituted these roles with the Supplementary Vote (SV) as part of the package, and voters had supported this in
the establishing referendums.
LCER has always been clear that we would prefer a fully-ranked system for electing people to such positions. Where there are more than two places to fill, we support the use of STV – which is of course what we use for our own Executive elections, and which the Labour Party uses for the CLP section of the NEC. If a viable amendment comes before Parliament for a fully-ranked system rather than SV, then we would support it. But the most important aspect of the proposed move back to SV is that it acknowledges that FPTP is neither a sensible nor a fair way of conducting an election, and that is the point on which we will concentrate our campaigning.
We have still not seen the Elections Bill, nor do we know what will be in it. We are hopeful that all the significant improvements to our democracy outlined in July’s Policy Paper will be in the Bill, and we strongly support every one. But the one thing we do NOT support is the absence of any mention of the voting system for the House of Commons. Labour Party policy already acknowledges that our FPTP voting system creates alienation and distrust. We will be campaigning for a National Commission to be set up by the forthcoming Elections Bill, so that a replacement electoral system can be found, in a way which is not “top-down”, and which will restore the confidence of the voters. That has to be the focus of our campaign, and the prize for which we have striven for so long.
Sandy Martin, 22-09-2025
