This year’s local elections in England saw tremendous council gains for Liberal Democrats across the country. Even after the highs of last year’s General Election, we remain a party on an upward trajectory with a clear liberal vision, international values and a determined drive to change our communities for the better.
But while celebrations were welcome and deserved, we should also take stock at how unrepresentative the elections were just months ago.
First Past the Post caused havoc across England, resulting in councils made up of seats that didn’t fairly reflect how people voted.
When it came to mayoral elections, the results were stark. Originally established with the flawed but somewhat more representative Supplementary Vote system, the Conservatives took our democracy one step backwards and replaced the system with First Past the Post. All new mayoral elections since, including the West of England and Hull mayoral elections, both up for grabs this year, also used First Past the Post.
First Past the Post for single-member executive positions means mayors elected without a broad mandate.
This is especially obvious in competitive elections, shown best by the results in this year’s West of England mayoral vote. Five parties received over 10% of the vote, including the winner, Labour’s Helen Godwin, who won on just 25% of the vote. The low turnout of 30% only further adds to weaken the mandates, but there’s a whole other conversation to be had about increasing political participation.
All mayors elected in May received fewer than half the votes available as shown below:
- Greater Lincolnshire: Andrea Jenkyns (Reform) 42.0%
- Hull and East Yorkshire: Luke Campbell (Reform ) 35.8%
- Doncaster: Ros Jones (Labour) 32.6%
- North Tyneside: Karen Clark (30.2%)
- Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: Paul Bristow 28.4%
- West of England: Helen Godwin (Labour) 25.0%
Not one mayor galvanised enough support to win 50% of the vote.
Then of course, there was the Runcorn by-election where Reform’s Sarah Pochin was elected with 38.3% of the vote. And the wider context that Labour won 411 seats on a mere 33.7% of the vote in the House of Commons election last year.
For the House of Commons and local councils, we need Proportional Representation to ensure representative local government. When it comes to directly elected executive mayors, which are here to stay in England, First Past the Post fails to fairly account for the views of voters.
Labour’s move to return to the Supplementary Vote is somewhat welcome. After all, two choices with transfers are better than one, and the democracy sector is right to welcome this abolition of First Past the Post. But the government should be bold and implement a superior system that fairly represents voters.
A fully preferential instant run-off system (Alternative Vote) is the answer when it comes to single-member elected positions. Preferential voting would ensure more voters are listened to, give mayors broader mandates and avoid the need for a multi-round system used in other counties to elect executive positions.
Our multi-party politics is crying out for a multi-party electoral system where seats match votes. Not the straightjacket of First Past the Post.
Instead of merely reversing the change made by the Conservatives, let’s go one step further and elect our mayors via a proper preferential system. Liberal Democrats will continue to lead the first for fair votes.
* Richard Wood is a Liberal Democrat member from Scotland who has been involved in the Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform since 2021. He sat on the boards of Unlock Democracy (2024 - 2026) and the Electoral Reform Society (2022 - 2023).
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15 Comments
Elected mayors are an abomination in what purports to be a democratic system – a massive centralisation of power a single person who has total control over the set up and selection of the senior officers. After that this person is totally unaccountable for four years over which time he/she can build a massive personal publicity machine to get re-elected. De-selection is avoided by total loyalty to the central party and the electoral system is designed to prevent Lib Dems having a chance.
We should should stop pretending that polishing this is in anything other than a intellectual displacement activity to hide the impotence that this system has been created to reduce us to.
I support Single Transferrable Vote for all elections, irrespective of whether there are 10, or just 1, positions to be filled. Of course, the Alternative Vote, as used where 1 position is to be filled, is STV – just with a single, rather than multiple positions to fill.
Our challenge to getting STV for Westminster elections is twofold: to get voters comfortable with ranking preferences rather than just marking an ‘X’, and to break the idea that smaller single-member constituencies are better than larger, multi-member constituencies. AV at least familiarises voters with ranked-choice voting.
The Bill which revises the electoral system for Mayors is entitled the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, something which deserves some sort of award for weaselly intellectual dishonesty, given that imposing huge unitary councils will make local government more remote from the community rather than empowering anyone other than the Secretary of State.
The change to the voting system is effected by Schedule 26, six pages of insomnia-cure seeking to set out at dreary length what this Supplementary Vote bodge actually is. You could say “shall be elected by the Alternative Vote system” and everyone would know what you meant. Eight words, not six pages.
What Schedule 26 is about is reversing the Tory gerrymander while also seeking to give the message that This Is All Terribly Complicated And Just Wouldn’t Do For Westminster Elections. And, of course, it isn’t Terribly Complicated. As the British Government itself told people, when (re-)introducing STV in Northern Ireland, “It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3…”
David Evans is spot on.
Hi Neil,
I’m not sure what you have put in your post is correct, but it may be I’m not reading Schedule 26 correctly.
As I see it, Sch 26 Para 4 (2) says “The two candidates who received the greatest number of first preference votes given in the Assembly constituencies remain in the contest.”
and Para 4 (3) adds “If, by reason of an equality of first preference votes, three or more
candidates are qualified to remain in the contest by virtue of sub-paragraph (2), all of them remain in the contest.”
with Para 4 (4) saying “The other candidates are eliminated from the contest.”
I read this as “only two go through unless there is a tie for 2nd and 3rd”
This is not the Alternative Vote System (as described by the Electoral Reform Society) which says “The counters remove whoever came last and look at the ballot papers with that candidate as their favourite. Rather than throwing away these votes, they move each vote to the voter’s second favourite candidate. This process is repeated until one candidate has half of the votes and becomes the MP.”
Am I missing something?
Thanks,
David
As a footnote to the above I look on Schedule 26 as the
“Let’s do all we can to stop Reform, so long as it gives the Lib Dems no chance whatsoever of winning from third place, that would be far too dangerous schedule”
@David Evans: No you’re not missing anything. The Government are introducing supplementary vote, not alternative vote (AV), for mayoral elections. Which is kinda part of the point of Richard’s article – to say we should be fighting for full AV.
Hi David
No, I don’t think you’re missing anything; I didn’t make my point clearly.
It would have been easy to use AV and would have required eight words in the body of the Act.
But because using proper (and straightforward) transferable vote systems for any purpose other than electing their own leaders brings the Labour Party out in hives, we instead have six pages of blah seeking to explain the Supplementary Vote bodge.
Another reason why Schedule 26 is a monstrosity is that it feeds into the idea, enthusiastically peddled by the likes of Hague at the time of the AV referendum, that a transferable vote is a second vote “And Therefore It Isn’t Fair”. There is a reason why we refer to a SINGLE Transferable vote!
I do hope elected mayors are not here to stay. As David Evans says they are an abomination, especially to liberals. The same could be said for huge unitary authorities with populations of about half a million. I do hope that the Liberal Democrats will pass policy to abolish both and re-establish councils closer to the size of the district councils, which are actually local, with the addition of regional government (at least nine English regions). Hopefully, an amendment drafted by Katharine Pindar and me to scrap the Mayoral Combined Authorities, reforming local government and providing real regional government will be accepted for debate to the policy review motion (F32).
Hi Simon & Neil,
Thanks for the clarification. As a wise man once said, The easiest thing to reach is a misunderstanding.
All the best,
David
Well said Richard. I think Mayors are here to stay, and rather than seeking to abolish them, we should be looking to make them more accountable by making the boards (why not regional councils?) they report to proportionately elected.
Regardless, we should be pushing for AV in mayoral elections.
We should also be pushing the government to allow the use of SV for the mayoral elections to be held next year. Having finally conceded that FPTP for electing mayors is not good, the Government isn’t doing anything to scrap it quickly enough. In effect it’s saying that the system is bad enough that it needs replacing but not important enough to do so in time for an election not scheduled to be held for another 7 months.
Here in Sussex we could face another five way contest which I’d guess Reform are current favourites to win.
Sorry, just to clarify my final line: “Here in Sussex we could face another five way contest which I’d guess Reform are current favourites to win.”
I don’t like Reform and don’t want them to win, but my point wasn’t that they don’t deserve power if people elect them. They are no more or less deserving of the power that comes from winning an election than anyone else.
The point is that if they do win, it will very likely be on a minority of the vote with a solid majority of residents strongly opposed to them.
To me, the important thing is for those who win elections to be supported by more than half those who vote. If we stick to this principle it is more easily communicated to the electorate because it is obviously fairer than those systems that don’t. By supporting this principle we show ourselves to value fairness, inclusivenesss and clarity.
Jonathan,
I’m sorry but not only do I disagree with you totally, you are factually wrong. Elected mayors are not here to stay, they are not even in place in Cumbria, Lancashire, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Avon and Bosnia, the rest of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Kent, West Sussex, East Sussex, Surrey, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. I think that’s all.
We need to all understand that Labour announced its proposals for MCAs solely with the aim of getting lots of Labour Mayors elected and freezing us out wherever possible: first by adopting FPTP (we have never won a 500k+ electorate election and don’t have the infrastructure to fight on such a scale anywhere (Oxfordshire alone maybe, but Thames Valley no). They only changed it to AV when it was clear Reform would win almost everywhere with FPTP and AV would give them a chance of winning from second.
However, now they are terrified of Reform winning and I think there is a great chance that they will find every excuse possible to not progress things until the tide changes as the boost for Reform of a load of Mayors getting elected would be huge.
Overall I would urge every Lib Dem everywhere we have control to do everything they can to delay things until we have a chance of getting full STV i.e. after a 2029 GE and an even bigger representation in parliament.
Jonathan and Richard,
Slight apologies to you both. I should have said I disagree with you both totally (not just Jonathan) and you are both factually wrong (and again not just Jonathan) for all the reasons I have set out.
Overall my firm view is that if we do oppose and delay, Labour will probably not force through a decision that will lay bare their own failure and humiliation and we could have a say in upgrading the electoral system for mayors after 2029.
Currently with your proposal all we will be doing is talking to is ourselves about it.
Yet again.