COMMISSION ON THE POWERS AND ELECTORAL ARRANGEMENTS OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR WALES

MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF:

DR DENIS BALSOM

held at

Committee Rooms

County Hall, Haverfordwest

on

Friday, 11^th April 2003

LORD RICHARD: Thank you very much for coming. What we have been doing with all the other witnesses is first of all asking you to name yourself for the purpose of the transcript and then if you would be kind enough to open up the discussion for perhaps five or ten minutes and then the Commission can pursue that which it thinks it wants to pursue.

DR BALSOM: Thank you very much. I am grateful for the opportunity to come and fly a few kites with you. First of all, I must apologise that the paper has not been circulated earlier. It was not ready until early yesterday morning, I still hoped that you might have been in electronic contact with Cardiff and that you might have had it to look at overnight but, as I say, my apologies.

Because you have not had a great deal of time, I will summarise the points there. It seems to me, that this is an extremely pertinent time to look at the electoral system because we are at the commencement of an election campaign. Although I am broadly in favour of the present hybrid system of election, it seems to me that there are a number of flaws associated with it and these are being illuminated at the moment, so it is a good time to reflect or perhaps bring your attention to them.

If I can briefly summarise the points that I have made. I have not addressed every single question that was raised in the consultative document but I am happy to discuss other points that are not included in the paper. As I said a few moments ago, I am broadly in favour of the hybrid electoral system that we have. It seems to me that because this system formed part of the initial White Paper, and in a sense was part of the compact that was put before Wales at the time of the referendum, we have some obligation to this kind of system. Clearly it was felt that the electoral system for the Assembly ought to be addressed, that people should not necessarily fear that Wales could conceivably become a one-party state, however it has been projected in the past. Because this compromise was part of the compact we should think very, carefully before we move on to another method of election.

There are two essential points that the present system delivers. One is the retention of the constituency - Member link, which I think is extremely important and is an embedded part of the British political tradition. Secondly, within Wales it has allowed all the principal parties to participate in the work of the Assembly. This seems to me to also have been very important and stands in stark contrast to representation in the House of Commons where we have not had a Conservative Member since 1997. This means that in all sorts of ways we do not get a full discussion of political issues. Political programmes cannot be put on the media with a balance of MPs because of political imbalance.

Taken overall however, because of the size of Westminster, issues of disproportionality in a first-past-the-past election system are not exactly resolved but they apply to all parties and whilst you might have electoral distortion in Wales, Scotland, northern England or the south of England so these inequalities balance themselves out within 650 Members. Within Wales alone, and a 60 Member Assembly, that disproportionality is extremely serious and therefore any change to the present system which reverted back to a solely FPTP system, - and there are people I know who would like to see, for example, two Members elected for each seat on a straight plurality system, possibly one man, one woman. There are various ways you might do this - but if one went back wholly to a simple plurality system it could be dangerous in the sense it would go against part of the compact that was there at the time of the referendum.

Looking at the constituency section of the present system, I would say the familiarity for electors with first past the post electoral system (FPTP) is important. People understand it, they know how to work the system. The outcome however, is disproportionate. There is not a lot one can do about that but, as I say, the second ballot does enable some compensation to take place. The important part for me of the constituency election is that it does allow the continuity of the principle that an elected Member represents their whole community, irrespective of partisanship, rather than being a purely party representative. I know people will argue that elections are primarily between parties, but it seems to me within a constituency, and many of you have had a personal experience of this, it is possible (and one sees it all the time) for an individual Member to build up a very close association with their constituency, become associated with it and come to personify it in many ways. I think it would be very dangerous to lose this link.

Last night I was involved in the publication of an opinion poll in Wrexham where clearly an individual politician who has been a Member for Wrexham as a MP and now an AM since 1983 has built considerable local standing as an individual. Irrespective of his own problems with his political party, it seems to me that the electorate should have the opportunity to still engage and support that person if they wish.

TED ROWLANDS: Tell us the result of your opinion poll in Wrexham please, Denis.

DR BALSOM: John Marek was ahead with 40 per cent, the Labour Party was 29 per cent, but of course there are three weeks of campaigning to go. This demonstrates how one can move from a purely party association, where some political scientists would argue no candidates with more than 500 votes. After a period of time it seems to me that an MP or AM does genuinely become an ambassador for that region to whom, in the best of cases, all people will feel very closely related.

The principal problems with the system we have in place at the moment are with the regional list and the election of additional Members. The electoral regions that have been defined have the advantage of being broadly equal in size. They derived from the previous Euro constituencies which had no great intuitive sense of identity in themselves in the first place, and of course that association has subsequently been lost as European elections have gone to an all-Wales list.

At one level it means the present electoral system gives each elector five AMs and I think this raises several problems. First of all, there is a spectrum of representation where not everyone shares the same mandate, in the sense they have been elected on a different basis, and I think there is some genuine uncertainty amongst people as to who really is their AM. It undermines the single ambassador role, or champion role, that I mentioned earlier but has possibly the advantage of people with a distinct partisanship feeling that they have a representative of similar partisanship rather than being a lone Conservative in the Rhondda or wherever it might be, feeling they will never have their case articulated by someone of a similar political persuasion. I can see some advantages here, but it is extremely confusing.

The election is further undermined in the way parties presently use the system, particularly in the candidates they put forward. If we look at the list for the present election, particularly in the case of the Labour Party, who, of course, have little interest in this level of election, this is a problem because the four parties do not each share the same commitment to fighting the election. If you have no expectation of winning seats then there is a real issue here. We see how the lists are manipulated in a way to present high profile names as number one candidates. The leader of the list in South Wales Central is Rhodri Morgan and number two is Sue Essex. It is almost inconceivable that those two Members will not be elected in their constituencies, so why are they being offered as lead names as candidates? It seems to me that this is a trick being played on the electorate to encourage them to vote the party ticket even though that second vote is largely going to be wasted. If the Labour Party were to be entitled to an additional Member in that region, or any other region, the real candidate is lost on the list, maybe down at four or five, and I do not this approach as defensible at all.

I think there is also an issue where candidates use the list as a kind of insurance policy. I can understand how this happens. It raises an issue which I do not think for the duration of the first Assembly has been too prominent. It is occasionally used, however, as a stick to hit individual Members. People are elected on the basis of being the fastest loser, or something like that. This creates two problems. One is obviously the stigma they carry of having been defeated, but still returned. It also denies the electorate the idea that they can vote somebody out and they feel that even if they do vote somebody out they will re-emerge through some other door.

For my sins I had to give a talk about the election to Aberystwyth Rotary Club about a fortnight ago. When it came to discussing points of this kind somebody made a comment that, in fact, it was a little bit like elections he was familiar with in the golf club, where there would be four posts to be filled and five candidates nominated. They would all elected and the fifth co-opted. Where are the winners, where are the losers in this electoral system? I think in this particular election this is being shown most graphically in the constituency of Clwyd West where there is every expectation that all four principal party members will end up being elected. I do not think the electorate understands this.

LORD RICHARD: Can you tell us why?

DR BALSOM: If the sitting Member Alun Pugh is returned, his three principal opponents are respectively number one on the North Wales List for the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party and Plaid Cymru. There is obviously a chance that the Labour Party might be defeated, quite a good chance even, so inthat case only three would go to the Assembly because poor Alun Pugh is number seven on the North Wales Labour list. I do not think people quite understand what is going on, and in another sense ,that they are being offered a false prospectus.

TED ROWLANDS: These names are not on any ballot paper?

DR BALSOM: Yes, we call it the second vote, and this perhaps suggests that it is some kind of second choice, but of course it is not really, it is the regional ballot which lists the candidate’s names in their rank order. But it is not an open list so voters can only vote for the party.

TED ROWLANDS: They cannot vote for the individual.

DR BALSOM: They cannot name an individual.

LAURA McALLISTER: They are publicised but you cannot choose.

TED ROWLANDS: I just want to clarify.

DR BALSOM: That is right. It also raises other oddities, in that any list candidate not returned in the constituency, and there are some, is put in the invidious position where they have an interest in their party colleagues not winning constituency seats.

LORD RICHARD: Spell that out for us.

DR BALSOM: For example, the obvious case would be something like Mid and West Wales. As it happens,the list candidate selected at the last election was Alun Michael, But how does a more mundane list candidate go round constituencies advocating that people should support their local candidate? (Alun was the leader and it was easier) Do you go and support the Labour candidate in Llanelli, for example, knowing that if your campaign is successful you have denied yourself the opportunity of being elected from the list? It is totally contrary.

LAURA McALLISTER: The logic of this argument is you seem to be saying there are almost two campaigns going on, both within the party and within the public's mind, and the evidence suggests otherwise really, that there are not two campaigns, there is only one campaign for these elections. There is very little evidence in the last election of split ticketing in terms of the two votes. That might change this time.

DR BALSOM: I would disagree.

LAURA McALLISTER: Between the two big parties in terms of the vote. It was not a massive change, less than anticipated.

DR BALSOM: The statistics from the last election somewhat masked what went on. The data has been released from the Institute of Welsh Politics and shows that it was about a third of voters who switched. There was a great deal of swapping, but of course most of it cancelled itself out. If you look at the aggregate figures there appears to be much less movement than did in fact take place. The point is there are really two campaigns because for some parties they really know they can only win off the list.

LAURA McALLISTER: You mentioned Rhodri Morgan and Sue Essex in Cardiff West.

DR BALSOM: It does not apply to the Labour Party. If I were directing the Conservative Party campaign I would have to start from the assumption that at best there were perhaps only three or four seats that were winnable, therefore to get anything like a sizeable group we would take a different approach because that second election becomes very important.

TED ROWLANDS: Obviously I am involved in the Llanelli campaign and people are not campaigning on the assumption "if I do this, this will happen". You just campaign to get the maximum vote turn-out wherever it can be obtained and the consequences follow.

LORD RICHARD: Dr Balsom is not convinced.

PAUL VALERIO: For the party it would also be relevant.

LORD RICHARD: Tell us at a practical level what the linkage is between the constituency Member and list Member? How does it work? What is the percentage to knock down the Labour candidate in Llanelli to get your candidate? What is the mechanism? How does it work?

DR BALSOM: A ballot was held in the Labour Party to promote candidates from ethnic minorities. Mid and West Wales has been given the candidate that won in that election. Cherry Short has been made number one on the Mid Wales list. This is probably the area where Labour has the most probability of electing a list Member. That is a calculation that has been made within the party. I take Ted's point that the parties are just out there to maximise their vote but in fact this system allows a rather more sophisticated view than that. I would have thought from a party point of view, that if you take South Wales West, for example, seven pretty safe Labour seats, and given that the winning of a majority is uncertain, if not highly unlikely, maybe those Labour voters should be advised to vote for a potential coalition partner with their regional vote. Wherever these systems are used elsewhere the alternatives that electors have are really quite sophisticated and we have not really made that adjustment, I think.

LAURA McALLISTER: You are talking about shifts in political culture here of a quite dramatic nature.

DR BALSOM: This is only our second election.

LAURA McALLISTER: You are quite a way down the line before any political parties campaign on that basis. Far be it for me but I would say that.

DR BALSOM: If you are the party professionals I would have thought you would try to maximise the return. Perhaps if I can move on to some of the recommendations which might deal with some of that. The real problem as currently constituted is there is an imbalance and so the parties do not share an equal commitment to both parts of the election because, in particular, the Labour Party, the largest party, has very, very low expectations of any returns from the list and therefore is not competing in that election in the same way as the other political parties are. So the recommendation I would make is, if there are to be any changes, first of all the balance between the proportion of constituency seats and list seats should be altered away from the two to one and closer perhaps to the Scottish ratio which, first of all, enables the result to be become more proportional because there are more list Members to distribute to correct the imbalance of the first vote. If there are going to be recommendations that the number of Assembly Members be increased I would suggest that they be added to the list and not apply to constituencies, however defined. Also the list should be contested on an all-Wales basis and not on the basis of five rather artificial regions. It seems to me that this would negate the question of wasted votes and every party would have an equal incentive to compete because they would all have seats to win, large numbers or small numbers, but at least they have an incentive to compete on that basis. It would allow candidates from minority parties, like the Greens or whatever, to effectively compete with their top two or three spokepersons rather than having to find a slate to put up across five areas where perhaps they would not be able to go. Something that was offered as part of the pre-devolution debate around the referendum was that people from outside mainstream politics might be encouraged to stand in this way. I think it is extremely difficult at the moment but in the context of a national list, a person of national stature from some other area, be it business or sport, could conceivably stand if you felt that it was important to broaden the Assembly’s membership.

LORD RICHARD: If you say the Assembly increases by 20, so you had the existing 20 plus the extra 20 elected from an all-Wales list, what would the ballot paper look that?

DR BALSOM: That would be the second point in the recommendations. The ballot paper would be extremely simple because I would not list the names.

LORD RICHARD: Not at all?

DR BALSOM: The constituency Members of course would be elected by name but the AMS election would be between parties. That is what it is now. Although the names are listed, there is an element of deception there about who the real candidates are.

LORD RICHARD: A closed list.

DR BALSOM: It is a closed list already.

LORD RICHARD: That is what you are recommending?

TED ROWLANDS: You are advocating a closed list.

DR BALSOM: A ballot to vote for the party. It would be up to the party whether they wished before the election to publish their pool of candidates. They could do that, they may wish to demonstrate who was there.

The other point is that you would not have such a direct association between loss in the constituency and election from the list. It may well be that after the election if the party is entitled to eight additional Members then the party would nominate those from their list.

LORD RICHARD: I do not see how that equates with your idea of getting Independents.

DR BALSOM: That is as it happens now. John Marek is standing on the North West list as John Marek, and that is how it will work.

LORD RICHARD: The rest of those individuals would not be named but Marek would be there named as an independent?

DR BALSOM: An individual rather than an independent.

PAUL VALERIO: As an individual he would have a better chance than any of the party nominees because his name is there and everybody gets the opportunity to vote for him directly. If you are number one on the political party list and your name is not there and it is up to your good behaviour with your party ---

DR BALSOM: The point is the lists would not be ranked, we would move away from ranking. It would be up to the party to nominate their additional Members after the election, at which point they may well wish to nominate defeated constituency Members but there would not be the obvious linkage of the persons who come second, third and fourth in Clwyd West, but rather are elected because they are part of the party leadership.

PAUL VALERIO: I can see a great many people who would fear coming lower down on their party list suddenly ditching ship and you would have an awful lot of people standing like John Marek.

DR BALSOM: At that point there are not many constituencies where you would argue that an individual can campaign more effectively than a party.

TOM JONES: When you say that proposal moves away from a fairly non-recognisable regional system but identifies particular regions, the danger might well be that everybody who would then be on the list would be within ten miles of Cardiff and the disenfranchisement of the western and northern areas would be greater.

DR BALSOM: That is up to the parties. The point I make strongly, which follows on from the previous session you have had, is it seems to me that questions of representation for minorities, for gender balance, for regional allocation are entirely up to the party in the nominating processes. This is a competitive context. In a sense parties are marketing themselves.

LORD RICHARD: If you are an elector you will not know who the party is putting up until after the election.

DR BALSOM: It is up to the parties whether they tell you or not.

LORD RICHARD: But your system is they wait to see what the result of the election is and then ---

TED ROWLANDS: If you turn up the ballot paper, there is no name, there is just a party.

LORD RICHARD: You would not even know who the candidate for the party is.

DR BALSOM: That is not entirely true. What normally happens where this happens is you vote for the party but the party has already published in its literature its pool of candidates.

LORD RICHARD: You said a few moments ago they would do it afterwards.

DR BALSOM: The nomination would be afterwards. After the election they would know they had eight Members to nominate and those Members would be nominated from the pool, some of whom might have been elected ordinarily from seats, others would be elected from the list.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Dr Balsom, why are you against open lists? Why are you against giving the voters a greater choice? Why do you favour the party? All the evidence that one reads from polls and so on is that the electorate are not over-enamoured with party politics.

DR BALSOM: That is certainly true but in terms of ensuring delivery from the political system it seems to me that parties do perform certain functions and perhaps in this context the electors are being given rather a simplistic choice. Going back to your point about open lists, that would be perfectly feasible but of course the parties would have to play the system properly. If the way the ballot papers is currently organised were open, all the electors in Cardiff South West Central who find Rhodri Morgan and Sue Essex at the top of the list might well vote for them, but of course they are already voting for them in their respective constituencies, so what happens? At that point you would have to have a system where the candidates for the AMS section of the election would be totally different from those in the constituency section. One could go that way but, of course, for the minority parties in Wales this would be quite difficult because one would assume they want to put their leadership and their strongest candidates to fight seats and therefore you need some mechanism whereby they could also have a possibility of election because in the open list, as I am saying, you have one vote and instead of ticking the Labour Party box you go in and tick your preferred Labour Party candidate from a list of eight or ten or whatever it is.

LORD RICHARD: Far more than that.

DR BALSOM: Within the present system if the first six are already going to be elected then what do you do? Do you knock it on? Open lists are not normally transferable in that way or if you try to invent a system it is going to become really rather complex.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: It does still seem to me very surprising that you are proposing a system which is so very patronising to the electorate.

DR BALSOM: I am not sure how this does patronise. It seems to me there is nothing more patronising that what we have now.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Your arguments against the present system seem to be fully comprehensible. It is your alternative which seems to me rather more questionable, if I may put it to you.

DR BALSOM: The revision of the present system (it is not a genuine alternative) would be to retain the constituency Member and that is a relationship well understood it seems to me in British political tradition, and the imbalance of the particular political geography of Wales, which could potentially produce a very imbalanced Assembly if we had first past the post only, could be corrected by the party vote.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Why are you not in favour of STV?

DR BALSOM: Because STV would destroy the one Member/one constituency link.

LAURA McALLISTER: It does not destroy the constituency link.

DR BALSOM: You would have to have a constituency which had two, four or five Members.

LAURA McALLISTER: You have got things to weigh up here - proportionality versus constituency links versus representation, and combinations of all three. It is a bit disingenuous to say you have to have four or five. You do not have to have four or five, you could have two or three. We have looked at models where you could have two or three.

DR BALSOM: Of course, the proportionality is reduced the smaller the number.

LAURA McALLISTER: But this is not a proportional system as it stands now.

DR BALSOM: I would not hold pure proportionality as a goal.

LAURA McALLISTER: What is your other argument against STV?

DR BALSOM: Primarily, it is size and also this sense of political community. It seems to me if people identify themselves with a political entity of some sort that is quite important and something one can build on. Underlying all this, which I have not mentioned but I am sure it is part of your consideration, is there is quite a lot of evidence of political disengagement.

TED ROWLANDS: How much engagement are you going to get with a national list. European elections show, generally speaking, for other reasons maybe --- the one national list we have had is the European elections and then there is nobody who feels any sense of ownership of the four Members for Wales or whatever the number is.

DR BALSOM: The turn-out at European elections was never high.

TED ROWLANDS: But the sense of belonging ---

DR BALSOM: I think the national list reduced it.

TED ROWLANDS: The sense of accountability does not exist. At least it kind of existed. When Glenys Kinnock was Member for South East Wales we did feel she was our European Member of Parliament.

DR BALSOM: She is still your European Member of Parliament.

TED ROWLANDS: She is everybody's or nobody's.

DR BALSOM: The parties had the option of course of effectively allocating some kind of geographical portfolio if they wished to.

LAURA McALLISTER: Some of them did.

DR BALSOM: Yes.

PETER PRICE: Can I ask you a couple of factual points and look at some of your own criteria and match them. The two factual points are first which are the other countries where the parties are not obliged to declare in advance who their candidates are?

DR BALSOM: Countries where they work a pure list system, Israel would be one where you vote for the party. The parties have published a list beforehand, but it is not on the ballot form.

PETER PRICE: Are they required to publish that list?

DR BALSOM: I am not sure.

PETER PRICE: Are you aware of any country where there is no obligation to publish a list of candidates in advance?

DR BALSOM: I am not. It is not that there is not; it is just I am not familiar with any example. It seems to me that making it a requirement that a list be published, in a similarway that the list of seconders used to be published for nominations, is entirely feasible. What I would like to see is that list not being part of the ballot paper.

PETER PRICE: The second point, if the electoral system that you are suggesting had applied last time round and we assume the existing number of 40 constituencies (because it would be speculation to think in terms of a reduction to 32 at the moment) let's take 40 and then 40 on the national list top-up.

DR BALSOM: 80 overall?

PETER PRICE: 80 overall. If we take that as a hypothesis, I have just done some quick figures. Would this be right: that with the constituencies as before Labour would have 27 Members. I am just taking the lead party to see what would happen in that regard. Labour would have 27 and in terms of their percentage of votes, they got 36.5 per cent so of your 40 seats they would have had 14. That would therefore translate as 27 plus 14 equals 41 out of a 80-Member Assembly.

DR BALSOM: I have worked that example out. On an 80-Member Assembly split in the way we have now, the Labour Party would only have achieved three more seats on the second ballot.

PETER PRICE: Three more on the second ballot?

DR BALSOM: On the AMS ballot. They would have ended up with 30 out of 80.

PETER PRICE: 30? 27 plus 13?

DR BALSOM: No 27 plus 3.

PETER PRICE: So you are deducting the number they have already got in the constituencies?

DR BALSOM: The essence of the calculation for the AMS is the vote on the AMS election is divided by the number of seats already won plus one.

PETER PRICE: So you would still adopt that principle?

DR BALSOM: Absolutely because the idea is still to balance that inequality.

PETER PRICE: In which case if one looks at your criteria or shall we say at the objection you have to the regional basis of top-up, most of the points that you make against the regional basis would, it seems to me, apply equally well to the kind of top-up that you are recommending including, as we have now established, the seesaw effect that even if you do lose a constituency and you make it up on the region or the other way round, most of the objections you raise still apply, do they not?

DR BALSOM: Not entirely. It does seem to me that even if the Labour Party only felt it was going to win three extra seats they would be seats worth having, particularly when the party would be looking to try and get a majority, although a majority, if t Assembly membership were to be half and half, seats and list, perhaps that is never achievable. It does give the party a specific interest and it is a national election in a way that in perhaps three out the five regions now they have no particular interest at all. It also gets away from this issue offalsely running candidates. I think the wasted vote point is answered. The second half of the election is more important for some parties than others. When one removes that - whilst the balance of political opinion in Wales remains much as it is but, of course, that may not be the case forever - it gives an opportunity for parties to compete on a far more equal basis and it also gives the opportunity for other parties outside of our four main parties to compete on a much more equal basis. If you take the Greens, for example, who are contesting all regions at the coming election, they have a national leadership in Wales, the names of which are effectively two or three senior people who might have a chance of election, and they could compete much more effectively on an all-Wales list than they can spread out around five regions.

PETER PRICE: To pick two of your objections briefly. Falsely running - the party that published the list in advance of their candidates would have heading the list their leading figures knowing that they were still running in constituencies and would not be the people elected on the list, and in terms of your losers your three candidates in Clwyd West who currently are at the head of the North Wales list would still be so prominently featured on the party's list that they would again be elected despite having lost in their constituencies. Both those objections still apply to the system you are recommending.

DR BALSOM: There is a subtle difference and nuance here because first of all it would not be voters of Clwyd West who had rejected those candidates, this would be an all-Wales election and the leading members of the parties are the ones you would expect to get elected. Some will be elected in their constituencies and some will be elected because the party is entitled to greater representation. All the parties would have a list of candidates and all that it would require is for that pool to be published. I would assume the party would wish to publish it. Having said that, I think it is beholden on the parties to demonstrate that their candidates include young people, women, whatever. Then at the end of the election period when they know they have ten to appoint or eight or whatever it might be, they would take that decision. Whether they publish an absolute ranking and say they would take the next ones, that is entirely up to them. The public would be well aware that this, if you like, is the list of candidates of Plaid Cymru or the Labour Party or whatever and their representatives will come from that group, some in the constituencies where they fight, where they will become very much the local representative, others from the group which, post-election, will pick up various portfolios within the Assembly in a ‘shadow’ context, and some may well be given a sense of geographical responsibility to represent particular areas.

PAUL VALERIO: My point is similar. I was going to say you can see some of the problems some of us have in understanding this system. What deterrent effect do you think the PR system has in the minds of those people who chose not to vote? I would rather ask you this question after 1 May but that is not practical. However, it seems to me that we are going to have a very, very low turn-out. Although I can personally see some advantages to my party on PR, it does seem to be a turn off as far as people going to vote at elections. Have you any evidence from your polls to suggest that it is like that?

DR BALSOM: I do not have any specific evidence. I think advocates of PR would probably suggest that once voters realise they are in a far less rigid straightjacket it might encourage their participation. It seems to me what some people are looking for is a sense that their vote counts. The idea of transferability does accentuate that more so than in the system we are talking about here but there are some other costs. Before the 1999 Assembly election I was involved in a little pilot because we felt on that occasion when people were going to vote they would be presented with three ballots (because there were local government elections that day and in some areas community council elections as well) so people were going into the booths and being confronted with three or four ballots nicely colour coded and what have you. We set up a dummy polling booth in Canton and ran that for a day expecting to find a great deal of confusion and spoilt papers and what have you. It may be just that it is a sophisticated electorate of Canton but people handled it extremely well.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: My own experience was they ended up putting them in the wrong boxes.

DR BALSOM: That was then your problem!

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Building on Paul's point, in the preface to the paper you say that not all the questions that the Commission have raised are discussed and addressed in your paper. Were there other aspects you wanted to look at? For example, many local authorities currently have all out elections, but the Government has proposals that they should move to being elected in thirds, the theory being if there are elections every year it will stimulate voters to take more interest and so on. Do you have any views about the timing of elections, days of the week, frequency, anything that might be useful to put on the record for us?

DR BALSOM: I would not necessarily go for the one-third rule. It seems to me that on political accountability, the point I would make really about individual Members is it seems to me the electorate ought to have the opportunity to vote the rascals out and I think whether it is at an individual level or whether it is for a government, operating in thirds possibly denies that sense of throwing him out and starting again. I think the idea that the integrity of the Council or the Welsh Assembly Government, or whatever, is that stands and falls on one election is an important element of political accountability. In terms of some of the work that has been going on, I know the Electoral Commission is continuing to look at other ways that ballots might be cast. The only evidence I have seen (and this has obviously been taken on board now) suggests that the only thing that really has worked effectively is the extension of postal voting. I think for some of the gimmicks of e-mail and voting in supermarkets there is not much evidence that that has made a big difference. The problem about engagement is, in many ways, to do with the parties. I think the parties could do a lot more to make themselves more attractive. I think having a more diverse set of candidates, setting out deliberately to appeal to certain sections of the electorate, making their policy portfolios and the outcomes from the Assembly or Parliament more relevant is something we are going to have to address. If we perhaps look at recent experience of American politics or whatever, the idea of a "rainbow" coalition which the Democrats went down at one time made a very attractive, conscious idea to broaden one's reach. It seems to me that in Britain we are still very much focussed on white, middle-aged men in suits.

LAURA McALLISTER: Can I ask you something broader. We know you as an electoral specialist but you have also done some work on the devolution settlement itself, which is an important part of our brief. Do you have any comments to make about issues relating to complexity of power or future primary legislative power, particularly what areas you think would need to be put back to the electorate through another referendum? What I am asking you is what in your opinion could become part of the current devolution settlement without another referendum and what would merit that?

DR BALSOM: Obviously I have not prepared a detailed response in this respect. I think my own feeling would be that a further referendum should be avoided. It is perhaps too subjective but it seems to me that, within the general British political tradition and that of our evolving constitution, there is lots of evidence to support not holding a further referendum and whereas a referendum might have been expedient at that time, to go beyond that is not necessary. If we take the European example, we have seen that our commitment and involvement in Europe is now very much more considerable than it was at the time of the referendum in 1975 and each time a landmark decision has come along, be it a Single Act or whatever, that has not gone to a referendum, that has gone through our normal constitutional processes.

TED ROWLANDS: We are going to have a referendum on the euro. You used the phrase compact and the reason why we should not change the hybrid system was because it was part of a compact. I think it was part of a compact and the whole package was a compact. If you fundamentally change the compact, do you not think you are obliged to have a referendum?

DR BALSOM: I am not sure you are obliged to have a referendum but I think there has to be some demonstration of political will in that direction that has got public support.

TED ROWLANDS: It is the simplest way.

DR BALSOM: Why I raised that point was I do not think one can go back to a simple plurality voting. I think that we have a mechanism whereby the range of political opinions in Wales will be represented in an Assembly and it was part of a deal, so, yes, we may move to another system but we should not go back on that. In terms of the other half of your inquiry, I have not seen the evidence that has been put before you. I think my own sense, just as an observer if you like, is that in many ways the Assembly we have had has been extraordinarily successful but the big issue is that of achieving primary legislation for Wales and it is the relationship between Wales and Westminster that needs clarification. We need a way of handling legislative proposals from a Welsh Assembly government, endorsed by the Assembly, how Westminster is going to process that and the freedom that exists to draft UK legislation in such a way as to give the Assembly a fairly open remit on how the detail is implemented through statutory instruments and secondary legislation. This principle, should be common to all legislation whereas it does seem at the moment that some bills are being written in a way to allow Wales a good deal of freedom, other bills are being written in a restrictive way and different departments seem to be taking different views.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: In your article in the Western Mail which we had have some time ago, on page 2 you say:"... propose greater legislative powers in Wales and this would get a better, more popular vote." That implies to me primary legislative powers, something like the Scottish settlement.

DR BALSOM: I do not know what I wrote in that actual piece.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: It is in the Western Mail on 23 March ---

DR BALSOM: The issue would be whether legislation can be promoted and passed. If there is a sense that greater powers, as in Scotland, are coming to Wales then that would be done entirely within the Welsh Assembly. That is fine. If we carry on within the limits of the present Act, perhaps extended a little bit at the edges, then I think we need a more effective mechanism for the legislative process than the one that exists today. Currently the four or five bills that the Welsh Assembly government puts forward every year, those they would like to see enacted, but there is no mechanism for those bills to be dealt with, rather than they go into a melting pot. There is not a very satisfactory mechanism of handling this at the moment. I know some people are talking about using the Welsh Grand and various other ways of doing it. It is a question of the legislative procedures of Westminster being adjusted so they can cope for the emerging institution that we have here in Wales.

LORD RICHARD: Can I thank you very much indeed. I think that was a refreshing and stimulating hour. We are very grateful that you flew your kite. I am not sure how long it stayed in the air but we shall see. Thank you very much indeed.