Procedure and House Affairs Committee on Oct. 2nd, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

I call to order the 50th meeting of the procedure and House affairs committee.

We have a special guest today from Westminster. Mr. Beamish, can you hear us?

[David Beamish, Clerk of the Parliaments, House of Lords of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland]

Mr. Chairman, I can hear you very well, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you. It's great to have you with us today. We hope that you can help us with the motion that we're working on.

We'll go right to it since we have Mr. Beamish by teleconference.

Mr. Beamish, I understand that you have an opening statement you'd like to share with us, and then the members here will ask you some questions.

[David Beamish]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'm sorry that we weren't able to have this discussion a week ago when I would have had with me Lord Tyler, who is a member of the House rather than an official and would have been free to express views more trenchantly than I can, but I'll do my best.

Perhaps at this stage I should briefly explain my own involvement with the election process we use in the House of Lords for our Lord Speaker.

Until 2006 the Lord Chancellor, who is a cabinet minister, was ex officio presiding officer in the House of Lords, albeit in a rather ceremonial role. In June 2003 proposals were announced for initially the abolition, and later the reform of the office of Lord Chancellor, and the House of Lords was invited to choose its own Speaker. In July 2003 a select committee was appointed. I was clerk of the journals at the time and therefore served as clerk of that committee, which in November 2003 recommended the system of election which we've now used twice. The election of a Lord Speaker was then put on hold for awhile because there was controversy about removing the Lord Chancellor as presiding officer until the future of his post had been resolved. Following the passage in 2005 of our Constitutional Reform Act, a similar committee was reappointed and reported again in December 2005, basically with the same recommendation in relation to the method of election. Once again I was the clerk of the committee.

The only reason the committee gave for adopting the alternative vote was the statement that it had been “successfully used in the first by-election to elect a hereditary peer, in March 2003”. As clerk of the journals I was the official mainly responsible for running that byelection and indeed for running the first eight byelections. When the first election came in 2006, again as clerk of the journals, I was the official principally responsible for running the election, and then we used it again in 2011. By then I was holding my present post of Clerk of the Parliaments, the equivalent of Clerk of the House, and was returning officer. I've been very closely involved in both elections and in the use of the alternative vote for electing hereditary peers.

I hope this is helpful to the committee. I put in a two-page note with some background, including a rather curious history of how we have come to elect hereditary peers, which I hope will provide a basis for your questions. I won't try to summarize what's in the note, but I'll be delighted to answer any questions the committee may have.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you very much, Mr. Beamish.

We will go to questions by members.

Mr. Lukiwski, are you going first?

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I think so.

Mr. Beamish, thank you very much for being with us. We apologize for not being able to meet with you last week, but I'm sure you understand how Parliament works. Sometimes Parliament gets in the way.

In any event, I appreciate your being here and I appreciate the fact you have a wealth of knowledge on the subject. You're probably well aware that there is a lot of discussion on whether or not we should change the current method of electing the Speaker and to go to the alternative vote system. That's what the private member's bill before us proposes that we do.

My first question for you would be, what has been the reaction of parliamentarians in the U.K. since you have changed to the alternative vote system? Are they in favour of this? Are there still some wishing that they would go back to the old system? Perhaps you could give me a sense of how the feeling is among your parliamentary body.

[David Beamish]

Well the old system didn't actually involve any form of election. The Lord Chancellor was a cabinet minister who, having been appointed as such, presided in the House of Lords, even on rare occasions when not a member of the House, though only briefly. So it wasn't so much a change of system as the introduction of a new system.

I suppose the first experience the House had of elections was in 1999, when most of the hereditary peers left. We had a very convoluted system then, which I won't try to describe and which I doubt anyone would want to go back to. In one election, for example, members were required to list 42 candidates in order of preference. So this was a novelty for the House of Lords.

I think the most useful thing I could say is that I have heard no suggestion at any stage that we should move to any other system. I should perhaps qualify that by saying that the exhaustive vote system, as I think you call it, in which you have a succession of elections, which you use at the moment and which indeed the House of Commons at Westminster has been using recently, is probably not one that would be acceptable in the House of Lords. But no complaint, either at the working of the system or at the outcome it has produced, has come to my ears.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

You mentioned that, at least with respect to the House of Lords, there would probably be no appetite to go to the exhaustive voting system currently used in the other house. Have you any sense of what parliamentarians in the other house feel about the preferential ballot system or the alternative vote system? In other words, do you believe that the other place might be inclined to entertain a notion to switch to the alternative vote system, or are they quite happy with the current system they are utilizing?

[David Beamish]

I think you'd have to ask somebody from the House of Commons. I have no idea what the feeling is about it.

It's perhaps worth pointing out that they are in a different situation from ours. The membership of the House of Lords is relatively static, and when there's a general election, we don't have any sort of wholesale change in the membership, whereas in the Commons at the start of a new Parliament, if the former Speaker has stepped down, there are obviously a lot of new members. It might be thought that the exhaustive vote would have the advantage of giving those new members an opportunity of sorts to find their way around the place, which wouldn't apply in the House of Lords. So there are perhaps arguments in favour of the exhaustive vote system in a House, the membership of which is reconstituted at each general election, but that doesn't apply in the House of Lords.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I think you've just put your finger on the main point of contention. There are many people here who believe that the exhaustive vote system is a good way to elect a Speaker, primarily because it starts at the beginning of each new Parliament when undoubtedly there's always a bunch of new members. I think in the last Parliament we had probably the highest level of new members of Parliament that we've seen in many years. Although it takes a number of hours to select and elect a new Speaker, it gives an opportunity for all of those new members to, in a sense, get their feet wet and to learn a little bit more about the parliamentary system. It's collegial. I think one of my colleagues opposite called it almost a bonding moment where everyone has a chance to get to know one another over a period of time. So that's the argument we have in front of us.

It's unfortunate that we don't have a member of the House of Commons from your side of the pond to be able to tell us his experiences. But since we don't, let me just then concentrate on the technical aspect of the alternative vote system. You mentioned, I believe only a few moments ago, that you have had really no problems, no glitches, in the system. Can you confirm that? Has there been any technical difficulty whatsoever in utilizing the alternative vote system since you've incorporated it in the House of Lords?

[David Beamish]

Before I answer that, I would like to pick up on the first part of your remarks. Although I have no expertise in relation to the House of Commons, it's perhaps worth pointing out that at Westminster the system is, I believe, a little bit different from yours in that the voting figures are announced. That might be something you'd want to look at, because it can have an impact in that candidates who are not doing very well have the opportunity to withdraw, which thereby speeds things up, whereas I understand that in your system nobody knows beyond the candidate who's being eliminated.

Coming to your question, in a technical sense I can confirm that the operation has been smooth and trouble-free. We use an organization called Electoral Reform Services that is widely respected in this country to help us run the elections.

The one aspect that I thought was disappointing is that some voters may have been under the impression that they could strengthen their preference for their preferred candidate by not using all their later preferences. At the time of the elections, I would say to anyone who would listen that you in no way hurt the chances of your favoured candidate by putting later preferences and that the danger with not putting them is that you may end up having no part in the final decision. As my note mentioned, in both elections the final margin of victory was actually rather smaller than the number of votes that had ceased to count because the voters hadn't put enough preferences. That's perhaps not a glitch but a factor. If you were going to decide to recommend the alternative vote, it might be advisable to try to educate members on the advantages of using all of their votes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Mr. Scott, you have seven minutes.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Beamish, for being here.

I want to go back to the origins of the House of Lords system. You've emphasized both in your note, for which I thank you, and in your remarks that it's a very short recommendation in the report. It basically said, “We recommend the system“ and it draws attention to one precedent. You weren't able to go behind that and say there were further reasons. You said they just did not give reasons beyond that.

Could I probe a little to ask are you indeed not in the position to elaborate on what the reasons were? Was it literally the fact of the example of that one byelection that triggered it?

[David Beamish]

I confess that in preparing for this session I scratched my head as to what had happened back in 2003 and couldn't honestly remember. Whether I would find something instructive in the minutes of the committee meeting, I'm not sure. But I think I'd say that the main rival that members would have been interested in would have been the first-past-the-post system, as used in elections to the House of Commons at Westminster. I think members would have recognized that it was likely that there'd be quite a few candidates. We had nine candidates in the first speakership election and six in the second. I mentioned one of the issues might have been that you could then have had a successful candidate with very many fewer than half the available votes. I think that's probably the main reason.

As I said or implied earlier, something like the exhaustive vote might not have been something that members would have had the stomach to engage in, sort of staying on for several hours while votes were counted and so forth.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you. I think that helps us a lot. It wasn't my impression from your note that only the first- past-the-post system was really considered as the alternative. The idea of electing somebody with a very low overall percentage didn't appeal. In your earlier remarks and now you have clarified that the successive elimination vote system just didn't quite suit the House of Lords.

I also wanted to point out and clarify that this is accurate. You mentioned that in the first hereditary peer election in March 2003, which became some sort of reference point, there were something like 81 candidates. Is that correct?

[David Beamish]

Yes. It was quite an interesting election. As I mentioned, just over 90 of the 750 hereditary peers stayed on, so that left well over 600 who had left the House. I guess quite a lot of those were hoping there would be an opportunity to come back, and perhaps none of them at that stage had any idea what the competition would be like. About half of the 81 got one or more first-preference votes, but you should see the chart we had to use as we eliminated candidates one by one to get to a result. It was quite complicated. But the system was at least workable.

Instead it's perhaps worth making a comment about the system arising from that. I guess many of those 81 had, so to speak, friends among the members who had indicated that they would vote for them, but of course with a preferential voting system, that doesn't necessarily mean they will give them their number one vote. A feature of this system is that it is only the first-preference votes that start until a candidate has been eliminated. You could be everybody's second-preference candidate, but you'd then stand no chance because you'd be eliminated at the very first stage. So one feature of this system is that although in some respects it might be thought to favour compromise candidates, it can only elect someone who has a decent amount of genuine support so that they get first-preference votes.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Okay. That helps. Thank you.

To the extent that the only choice on offer in the Lords' heads was this system or the first-past-the-post system, and with a precedent of 81 candidates I can well imagine why those two combined really didn't lead to a successive elimination ballot being in contention at all. Thank you for that.

You also spoke about how you would tell anybody who would listen that it was a waste not to go down the list and actually vote your extra preferences. You were describing how in the course of that, effectively some were thinking that a strategic way to vote would be to not do that and to just put their first and maybe their second preference, but not to actually go down the list. Did it seem to just come intuitively to the average Lord when they were voting that it was a strategic thing to do to simply put the first thing, and did you really have to make an effort to say that wasn't smart?

[David Beamish]

At the time, two or three members told me that the candidate they favoured had encouraged them not to use their later-preference vote because that would strengthen their support. I don't think it was so much intuitive as much as that one or two people had put it about. As I said, I used any opportunity I had to try to disabuse them of that idea.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

That's very interesting, because in fact in AV systems more generally candidates do actively encourage their voters to vote strategically and sometimes they will actively tell them who to put as second or third in order to increase their overall chances. They often tell them to do exactly what you said was “put about” in the Lords election, which was just to put one. So combatting people's sense that they should and can vote strategically would be an issue, from my perspective.

The last thing I wanted to ask was if you could elaborate just a little bit on what you were saying about the Lords not really wanting to go for successive elimination ballots. You said they just wouldn't have the stomach for it. You mean, I assume, that a certain degree of cobbling and politicking might go on between the rounds and that it really wouldn't suit the temper of the Lords? Is that what you were referring to?

[David Beamish]

I wasn't actually thinking of that but more of the fact that members would feel it was not good to spend several hours going round and round a voting process when the time could be better spent. We rarely have more than two or three divisions on any one day, so that was all I meant, that it would seem like an inefficient process.

[Craig Scott, NDP, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you for that clarification.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Thank you, Mr. Scott.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I have a point of order, Chair, if I may.

[The Chair, Conservative, Joe Preston]

Yes.

[Tom Lukiwski, Conservative, Regina—Lumsden—Lake Centre, SK]

I don't want to take any time away from Kevin, so my apologies.

Very quickly, I wonder if we could have agreement, if possible, around the table. Mr. Reid had originally thought he would not question our witness, only because he is the sponsor of the motion. I think it might be helpful if Mr. Reid could ask some questions. He might have some information that we would find useful to us in our deliberations.

I'm just wondering if any member has any difficulty with Mr. Reid participating in the question and answer process.