Chris Huhne

The expenses scandal and the need for reform

By Chris Huhne MP,

Liberal Democrat shadow Home Secretary

To Liberal Democrats in Business, National Liberal Club, London, 23^rd March 2010

It used to be difficult to get anyone interested in political reform. No longer. The expenses scandal has changed all of that. Yes, electoral reform is back on the table, but the reasons why should shame and sadden us all. Out of disillusion, we must shape hope and change.

It was after fighting my first – and losing – General Election campaign in 1983 that I understood the unfairness of our current voting system. There was nothing fair about a system under which we achieved almost the same share of the votes as Labour, yet ended up with just a tenth of the seats. Matters have got worse. The current Labour government has won more than half the MPs with just a third of those who voted, and just a fifth of those entitled to vote. This is no way to run a democracy.

This system takes lukewarm support at the ballot box and creates a majority Government with all the absolute power afforded to that majority and its leader. It creates Members of Parliament not one of whom at the last general election secured a majority of those registered to vote in their constituency. It crams all the diversity and difference in our complex society into a two-party system as if we still lived in the fifties when Labour and the Tories won 97 per cent of the vote, instead of the noughties when they won two-thirds.

For far too many people, their vote is effectively wasted and often has little impact on who ends up representing them. This is far from just Liberal Democrats. Labour voters up Welsh valleys in safe seats are taken for granted. Tories in leafy shire suburbs can be safely ignored by their party. At the last general election, the difference between a Labour majority government and a hung parliament was just 8,000 votes. This is the sum total of the numerical majorities of the most marginal Labour seats. These are the people whose votes really counted.

In the all or nothing world of our first-past-the-post election system, Labour and the Conservatives targeted only 800,000 votes based on key marginal seats, and likely or undecided voters. With less than a million key swing voters receiving the majority of the attention, it is also not surprising that so many voters feel so alienated from the system. The feel alienated from the system, because they are alienated. The surprise is not that the turnout is so low, but that it is still so high.

This is a problem for our engagement in our political system, but also for those who are elected by it. If you give someone a safe job for life, do not be surprised if they abuse that position. It’s just human nature. “It doesn’t matter what I do between now and the next election”, they think. This is why MPs in safe seats were three times more likely to be embroiled in the expenses scandal than those in marginals. If you can’t lose, why not clean the moat. Charge for the duck house. Claim for a non-existent mortgage.

And it is not just expenses abuses. We also know that if you, as a voter, live in a safe constituency, you will get a worse service. This was confirmed again in a recent survey that found that MPs were more likely to respond to their constituents if they were in marginal seats. Similar results have been found when researchers have looked at email and the use of the internet. The safer the seat, the more reluctant the MP is to engage.

These facts alone tell me that the system is rotten and needs to change. If we want hardworking, dedicated and committed MPs, we need to give them the incentives to perform. Only a proportional system can do that.

Electoral reform is about forcing all parties to fight for every vote in every part of the country, so that the votes of the poor and disadvantaged – and the votes of those badly served by government – are heard as much as the votes of the well-off and comfortable. If national politicians are seen as being out of touch with voters, and do not reflect their concerns, it is no wonder that turnout dips. The government’s own report found that turnout in countries with proportional systems was on average five per cent higher than in first-past-the-post systems. It is not rocket science.

There are, though, systems and systems. The Alternative Vote is not a proportional system. Neither is it a radical enough change to fix our broken politics. The recent Labour Government proposal for a referendum on changing the voting system to AV is a tiny step in the right direction, because at least it allows people to vote for what they want rather than against what they fear. It abolishes the need for tactical voting. But that is about the sum of it. AV continues to deliver lots of safe seats and wasted votes.

The Irish system – the single transferable vote – is the only system that makes every seat marginal. Virtually every vote influences the outcome of the election. It gives voters the chance to vote for candidates rather than parties, and to choose between candidates of the same party. It puts people in charge of the personality as well as the party that is elected.

For example, in the Republic of Ireland over the last six general elections, a total of 261 seats changed hands. Of these, 155 seats were lost by an incumbent, and 43 of these losses were to a candidate not from another party but from the same party. Nearly a third of all seat changes were to members of the same party. When candidates and parties have to compete for every vote in every seat they are forced to engage with voters they currently too often take for granted. There is a real incentive to serve your constituency and preserve the local link.

Of course, this system is complicated and can be difficult to understand. It also takes much longer to count manually. As has been seen in rural areas, it can create some very large constituencies. But voters love it. Whenever the professional politicians in Ireland have suggested a change, there was a resounding no precisely because it gives voters much more choice and power. In the current climate, that is a prize indeed. It may be the only thing that will attract them to vote at all – the feeling that their vote could change things, that people will be made to listen. A proportional voting system is not a magic bullet, but without it we have little chance of reforming our broken political system.

But what, the Conservatives say, about stable government? Certainly, hung parliaments would become more usual than single party majorities, but so what? Germany has thrived on coalition. Indeed, the country in most financial trouble at present is Greece, and yet it has a booster political system which means that it always has always has single party government. Britain is next in line, and so have we had majority government since 1945.

Then look at the track record. Of the ten biggest budget consolidations in the developed world since 1970, seven have been undertaken by coalition governments, and three by single party governments. Coalitions deliver for people, because the parties that participate want to be re-elected. And everyone knows that big parties are in any case coalitions, so what is all the fuss about? At least the differences can be honestly settled. So talk by the Tories of coalition Governments being bad for the economy is nothing short of cynical scaremongering.

I want briefly to touch on some other important reforms.

The first is getting big money out of politics. Elections and democracy should be about votes in the ballot box, not notes in the bank. Big money has dominated politics for far too long. Millions of pounds are spent on national campaigns at each General Election. Outside of an election, parties and individuals can pour in unlimited amounts of money into key marginal constituencies. I am course talking primarily about Lord Ashcroft, who has sat in the House of Lords, making rules and taxes for us to pay, whilst avoiding them himself. He wants to run the club, without paying the sub.

This system is not fair, and is not a level playing field. We would introduce an annual cap on donations of £10,000 to ensure that neither big business nor big trade unions can unduly influence politics. We would also cap spending throughout the year, not just during elections. Politics should not just be for the rich and powerful, it must be for everyone. We must also ensure that all MPs and members of the House of Lords are full British taxpayers. It must no longer be possible to make backroom deals to exploit loopholes in the system for the few, whilst closing them for the many.

The expenses scandal has also highlighted the need for voters to be able to get rid of the MP if there have been serious wrongdoing. People rightly want to hold corrupt MPs accountable right away, not months or years later when their local representative has lost all credibility and trust among his or her constituents. Worse still, MPs who have been exposed for wrongdoing can simply announce that they’ll stand down at the next election, continuing to claim salaries and ‘golden goodbyes’ in the process.

If we are to restore public faith in elected politicians, there must be a way for voters to say they no longer want their MP to continue. Under our proposed system, 5% of the voters in the constituency of a disciplined MP will be enough to trigger a ‘recall’ by-election. In a typical constituency, this is about 4,000 voters. This is a small enough number of signatures to be achievable but large enough to stop a small number of opponents of an MP from triggering the election. This would go some way to giving the voters the power and influence they deserve over who represents them.

Then there is the House of Lords, which currently performs most parliamentary scrutiny. The Lords have defeated the government on more than 400 occasions since 1997. By contrast, the Commons have defeated the Government just twice. With this much influence must come accountability. The Liberal Democrats will reform the House of Lords by replacing it with a fully elected second chamber. A third of its 450 members would be chosen at each election, and those elected would serve one long term of twelve years. That way, the Senate would never have a more recent mandate than the Commons, maintaining the primacy of MPs. As members would be unable to seek re-election, they would be encouraged to think independently.

Lastly, but not least, the House of Commons itself needs radical reform. The changes proposed by the Wright Committee were a step in the right direction. They will give the house back control over its own business, a control that was stripped away as an emergency measure by the wartime government in the first world war. As a result, governments have ridden roughshod over scrutiny. Since the latest version of programming motions were introduced for Bill debates in 2005-06, there have been 91 clauses of legislation passed through the House of Commons without any debate in Public Bill Committee, and 206 groups of amendments have not been reached during Report Stages.

But the Commons also needs much greater power over ‘supply’ – parliamentary speak for ‘money’. Only the Public Accounts Committee is able to draw on the resources of the National Audit Office to judge whether public funds have been well-used. Departmental select committees should have a duty to report each year on the expenditure of the departments they scrutinise. A much tougher system would benefit the taxpayer by ensuring that value for money is a concept appreciated throughout government, and not just intermittently when the Treasury has to wield its axe.

Let me end by saying again that at last we can openly talk as Liberals about the processes of government that we know shape the quality of our decision-making. That is the legacy of the expenses crisis. We have an opportunity for reform which we must not throw away. In cleaning up political funding. In asserting the power of the commons. In democratising the Lords. I could add in re-establishing our civil liberties, securing the recovery, and making our tax system fair. This is a crucial election. We just seize these opportunities with both hands, and reshape our economy, society and political system for the modern world.