In his first party conference speech as Prime Minister, Andy Burnham raised expectations across the UK political landscape with his official announcement to establish a national commission on electoral reform. The message was clear: the old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system was no longer fit for purpose and lets increasingly unpopular governments into power.
Still, the announcement stopped short of endorsing another electoral system. Burnham did say that he would include electoral reform in Labour’s next election manifesto, but he did not commit Labour to endorsing the recommendations of such a commission. The pressing question now is how the commission can be structured to win the public’s trust, and the answer will decide whether it becomes a genuine route to reform.
Non-Partisanship and Inclusivity are Essential for the Commission’s Legitimacy
A national commission will only be successful if the British public sees it as legitimate. For that to happen, the commission must be politically independent, carry expertise on the theory and practice of different electoral systems, and evaluate how each electoral system might better represent what the UK public wants. These factors were all present in successful electoral reform efforts in New Zealand and Wales.
The Wales case and the Terms of Reference provided by the Fair Elections All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) can offer guidance on how the national commission can be structured. By these examples, the national commission would have a three-tier structure: seven independent commissioners, seven experts to set out the options, and 100 citizens to debate them, with wider transparent consultations conducted with the public at large.
As the commission will be set up by the Prime Minister’s office, Burnham will have a direct say over who will be nominated as commissioners to sit on its executive board. He must use that power to ensure a membership that favours no party or political interest. That means no sitting MPs (especially from the Lords) should serve on the commission.
Nevertheless, in line with Burnham’s invitation for “all the political parties to be part of [the commission’s] work,” parties should be able to provide non-partisan nominees for Burnham to consider. The executive should likewise have a balanced demographic profile that is representative of British society.
The executive should then select a panel of experts. These independent experts must be academics and civil society practitioners with knowledge of the Westminster parliamentary system and PR electoral systems around the world, such as in Ireland and Germany. The objective of this panel would be to produce evidence and a list of recommendations for the executive and the citizens’ assembly to consider.
The citizens’ assembly, or voters’ forum as the APPG called it, should be composed of around 100 members and be representative of the British public at large. Members should be chosen by lot, and weighted so the assembly reflects the country by age, ethnicity, gender, class, and region. That way, this assembly would better reflect the public discourse on the trade-offs of each recommendation made by the expert panel. The goal of this assembly would be to inform the work of both the executive and the experts’ panel.
Upon considering the findings of the experts’ panel and the citizens’ assembly, the executive should then produce a report with the commission’s final recommendations. The Labour government must commit to responding to the report’s findings in a timely manner, with full debates in Parliament before and after the next general election. Parliament must have time to engage with the report’s findings to ensure further scrutiny and to give the public more chances to be heard as well.
How This Structure Avoids Previous Pitfalls
The outlined commission structure avoids the mistakes that sank previous commissions. To begin with, this commission should not be a royal commission. These tend to be slow, and a royal commission on electoral reform would likely not have its findings ready in time for the next general election. Nor would it bring any extra powers: royal commissions cannot compel witnesses to give evidence, and in any case such powers are unnecessary for a commission on electoral reform.
The requirement for the government and Parliament to respond to and scrutinize the findings of the report directly addresses the causes of failure for the Jenkins Commission as well. The Jenkins Commission, named after its chair Roy Jenkins, came about in 1997 because Prime Minister Tony Blair had committed to holding a referendum on replacing the system. The commission did its job and proposed a hybrid system, Alternative Vote Plus (AV+), that was partly proportional. Yet its findings received only scant debate in Parliament and were quietly shelved before the 2001 general election. This commission will likely avoid a similar fate if the Burnham government commits to publishing a formal response and Parliament has plenty of opportunities to debate its findings.
A Real Opportunity for Change?
Burnham’s announcement does provide a genuine opening for the most significant electoral reform since 1918, but a commission can only be as strong as the commitments that surround it. The Jenkins report demonstrates what happens when commission recommendations can be quietly shelved as political incentives shift. Labour’s FPTP-enabled supermajority carries similar temptations for the very MPs who support Burnham’s government.
But the outlined structure alone cannot deliver electoral reform. Burnham must bind his government to a clear timetable, with a formal response and a manifesto commitment that acts on the commission’s findings rather than merely acknowledging them. If Burnham does, the commission could be the first step towards a voting system that the British public chooses rather than one inherited by default. If he does not, then the commission will be just another footnote in the history of failed electoral overhaul campaigns in the UK.