STV is used within the House of Commons, so why can’t we use it for Westminster?

Author:
Thea Ridley-Castle, Research and Policy Officer

Posted on the 25th July 2024

On the 4th July an estimated 29 million people voted in the General Election, for the vast majority of us that was the end of our voting in 2024. However, for our newly elected representatives they still had more voting to do, on the 23rd July the election of the Deputy Speakers took place.

Interestingly the election for Deputy Speakers was held under a different more representative system – the Single Transferable Vote. This begs the question, if it’s good enough for them to use, then why isn’t it good enough for us?

Elections within the House of Commons

This time around there was no Speaker election as the former Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle stood again unopposed. The Speakers’ election is the first order of parliamentary business following a General Election and has to be completed before any MP can be sworn in.

As per convention the Speaker stands unopposed by the major parties in the General Election and ceases to have any party allegiance when they are sworn in as Speaker.

One system for them, a different system for us…

However, Deputy Speakers are always elected at the beginning of a new Parliament, this time around 3 brand new Deputy Speakers were elected; Nusrat Ghani, Judith Cummins and Caroline Nokes. The three Deputy Speakers support the work of the Speaker in the House of Commons and since 2010 this job has been directly elected in a secret STV ballot by MPs.

In 2010 the House of Commons Procedure Committee noted that STV would ensure that no votes are wasted, guarantees successful candidates have a significant level of support and makes it more difficult for the system “to be manipulated by majority parties in order to thwart the opposition in its choice of candidates”.

With our voting system, all votes cast are equal, but all votes cast don’t have equal weight

We believe that the use of our current system, First Past the Post, in our General Elections means that Westminster does not represent the UK. The link between the ballot box and the make-up of the House of Commons is broken. Millions of people can support one party and get a single MP, while a few hundred thousand people who support a different party can get ten times as many.

In the 2024 General Election it took 23,615 votes to elect a Labour MP, in contrast it took around twenty times as many votes to elect a single Green Party MP (485,814) and around thirty five times as many votes to elect a single Reform MP (821,332).

When Parliament doesn’t represent public opinion it has a real impact on life in the UK – it’s time we made sure seats matched votes to put voters back in control.

Furthermore, the Deputy Speaker elections aren’t the only election in which STV is used in the UK. The Single Transferable Vote is tried and tested in the UK with great success at creating a more representative elected body.

By adopting proportional representation methods like STV for our elections to Westminster, we can ensure fair representation and empower voters to have their voices heard.

Would you like to see the Single Transferable Vote used for all our elections?

Add your name to our call for a fair, proportional, voting system in the UK →

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