Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell), whose remarks have been very supportive. The amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) is very interesting, but I fear that it does not do what he seems to think it does. As he is an experienced Member, I say with some trepidation that his amendment is defective. He seemed to be explaining that, in effect, it delivers a supplementary vote system under which only the top two candidates are capable of winning the election and all the other candidates are eliminated, and therefore voters only express two preferences. That is not what his amendment does, however. It limits the number of preferences to be expressed to two, but that does not have the effect he was hoping for. Under his amendment, it would still be possible for a candidate who had come third and been eliminated to win the election if they were the recipient of many second preferences. I therefore fear that his amendment is technically defective, because it does not do what he clearly outlined he wished it to do. Given that, I ask my hon. Friend to withdraw it. In choosing the form of AV that is proposed in the Bill, we were very clear that we wanted the optional preferential system as we did not want voters to be forced to vote for candidates they could not stomach. We thought it was not right to force voters to have to express a preference for a British National party candidate, for instance, when they think that the views that that candidate espouses are repugnant. However, we also thought that voters should be free to vote for just one candidate if they so wished. There should be maximum choice for the elector. That is why we chose the system that is in the Bill as the one to put to the electors, and I recommend it to the Committee.