Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill

I hesitate to turn this into a seminar on voting systems but I think that it is necessary to point out one or two of the Minister's comments which I do not think are quite accurate. First, on behalf of my noble friend who is proposing STV in local elections, it is rather odd that the Government are not going to allow some councils that might want to move to STV as a pilot scheme to do so, particularly as most of those councils are currently controlled by a majority of Liberal Democrats and would almost certainly go without overall control under STV. In terms of political advantage, I would have thought that the Minister would be grabbing our hands off, but never mind. The Minister also said that STV would do away with the link between the geographical area, the councillor and the electors. That is not true. STV requires multi-member electoral areas which we have, as we discussed, in many areas in local government. They might be a bit bigger than three-member wards or they might be three-member wards, but the Scottish local government system has just moved from single-member wards towards those with two, three or four councillors. They retain as much of a link as I have in my ward, where two colleagues sit on the council with me. Whether I get elected by STV is a different matter, but who knows? The other inaccuracy was that I am not proposing that the supplementary vote system should be replaced in favour of either the additional member system or STV; I am proposing that it should be replaced by the alternative vote system. That is not a proportional representation system; it is a different way of electing a single person. I hope that those are helpful comments. I shall also reply very briefly to the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham. Again, we are not proposing proportional representation for the election of mayors because you cannot divide one mayor between different people; it is just a different way of electing the mayor. I ask her whether she and the Conservative Party support the supplementary vote system or whether they would like to abolish it and go back to first past the post for elections of mayors. We already have a different system for electing mayors. My submission is that it does not work; the system was bust before it started. It ought to be replaced with a system that actually does what the supplementary vote system sets out to do. The noble Lord, Lord Graham, said that we had lots of outlandish electoral systems, but I do not think that the one which I am trying to abolish—the supplementary vote system—exists anywhere else in the world. It is not outlandish in a technical sense; it is an invention of this country and it is time that we uninvented it. I hope that this was a useful discussion. There is a problem here: the supplementary vote system does not work properly. It has all sorts of problems. Whatever system is used in future for mayors and for any elected executives that ever get off the ground, this system is not the answer. I hope that as part of their review the Government will seriously think about it. My question for the Minister is whether this review of electoral systems includes a review of the supplementary vote specifically. Will the supplementary vote be included in the review when it comes out later this year? It is good to hear that that will happen later this year.