My Lords, I speak to this amendment in support of what my noble friend Lord Anderson said. When the Welsh Assembly was set up as an elected institution, it was the Labour Party that introduced PR for the regional list—along with the traditional first past the post system—which was in direct opposition to its own political interests. It is only a few years ago that we had a referendum for the people of this country to decide what system of voting they wanted. Overwhelmingly, they decided that first past the post was the best system.
Removing the ban on dual candidacy would mean that candidates who have been rejected by the electorate under first past the post could get into the Assembly via the back door. We believe that that is subverting the will of the electorate. The majority of people responding to the Government consultation on this issue disagreed with the Government’s position. We share the wider concerns of the public that removing the ban would be anti-democratic. As my noble friend Lord Anderson clearly illustrated, it would allow losing candidates to be elected by the back door. It is not what the voters want.
As I said on Second Reading, it is not surprising that two significant surveys carried out on dual candidacy have both found a clear majority in favour of a ban. One was the Government’s own consultation and the other the Bevan Foundation study. According to the Government’s own consultation, there was a small majority in favour of the ban. It does seem strange that the Government are completely ignoring their consultation—I assume because it did not give them the answer that they wanted.
The Explanatory Notes on the Wales Bill say that this change will be made to the benefit of the smaller parties in Wales. They say that studies by the Electoral Commission and others,
“have demonstrated that the prohibition has a disproportionate impact on smaller parties who have a smaller pool of potential candidates to draw upon”.
If that is the case, we are changing the law in order to help smaller parties because they cannot find enough candidates. I have seen no evidence of that. At every election, every party in Wales fields a full slate of candidates, so to me there seems to be no problem. If that is the reason for changing this, it does not hold up very well because no party has had any candidate vacancies.
There should be strong democratic reasons for a change back to dual candidacy, but I do not think that the Government have produced any. I can give a commitment that if Labour is in power after the general election, and if this is carried through, we will reintroduce the ban on dual candidacy.