Political and local government reform policies - Wandsworth Liberal Democrats

As of February 2023

Political and local government reform

The processes and structures we have for deciding how to govern our country are dangerously out of date and need revitalising

Key Policies

Shift the power to make decisions, and the money to fund them, out to the UK's regions rather than continuing to decide much of what happens across Britain from Westminster.
Change our voting system so people's votes count for more and their diverse views result in real representation in government.
Turn the House of Lords into an elected body and so extend modern democratic principles across Parliament.
Make the Ministerial Code legally enforceable and hold our leaders acountable for their actions.
Produce a written constitution to define modern Britain and guide us into the future.

The UK used to be at the forefront when it came to political systems, acting as one fo the world's first democracies. But our systems have become outdated and slowly eroded confidence in government and politics. We need to revitalise Britain for the modern world.

The best way we can do that is to put more power in people's hands: from changing the voting system, to doing away with unelected members of the House of Lords, to shifting decision-making and money to local and regional government.

Many of these plans were developed years and sometimes decades ago but because the current political system tends to favour whoever is in charge, reform keeps being put off. It's long past time to make necessary change.

Solutions

There are many different ways we can improve how this country makes decisions:

Institutions

Turn the House of Lords into an elected body. There are still 91 members of this key legislative body that are there solely because their ancestors were favoured by long-dead kings. There are nearly 800 members, fewer than half of which turn up on a daily basis, and new members are most frequently added by whoever is prime minister in return for political or financial favours. It's time to bring Britain into the modern era and made the House of Lords elected by the people.
Make the Ministerial Code legally enforceable. It's become clear through a series of recent scandals that the top of government is accountable to no one but itself and is even willing to ignore its own rules.
Develop a written Constitution in which the UK defines itself in modern terms as a Federal structure, empowering the UK's different nations and regions to make their own decisions on issues that affect them, and allow central government to decide on matters that affect everyone.
Consider a cap on political party donations limiting financial influence to £10,000 a year for individuals.

Political processes

Move the power to make decisions outwards to the regions and away from central government so that local and regional governments can decide what is best for their communities. Economic growth would become a regional concern rather than a national one, and much more public spending would be decided by those that know better how to spend it effectively, reversing a slow and damaging process of local government cuts. Our plans for how this would work in practice are set out in the LibDem document A Framework for England in a Federal UK.
Change our voting system to a more modern version that empowers the individuals. At the center of all our political systems is the method by which we choose who gets to represent us. The current "First Past the Post" system no longer serves us well, embedding a two-party system, producing a political class increasingly insulated from the rest of society, and leading to decades of short-term decision-making that causes long-term harm. We won't progress until people's individual votes mean more and the outdated form of politics that the voting system protects is allowed to fail.

A core belief for the Liberal Democrats is the need to shift to a proportional representation voting model. This would see Parliament represented in the same proportion as voters e.g. if three per cent of the population vote for the Green Party, it would have roughly the same proportion of seats in Parliament: around 20.

In reality, the situation is complicated by the fact everyone lives in a specific part of the country and typically votes for their "their MP." Our current voting system is a horse race (First Past the Post) in every constituency where whoever gets the most votes wins. That system has been increasingly criticized as embedding the same political parties in power over many decades, with half the seats never changing hands, and politics becoming increasingly separate from the lives of the public.

Over time, voting systems have changed to produce a better version of democracy for people. New political bodies whether it's the Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament or elected mayors have almost always been done under a form of proportional representation. And some countries, like New Zealand, have decided to shift their voting systems to provide a more modern and vibrant democracy.

Despite the Labour Party having long agreed in principle with changing the current voting system, when it has been in a position to change the system, it has held off; in large part because the current system rewards the party in power. At its most recent party meeting, a majority of members voted to change voting to proportional representation but current Labour leader Keir Starmer has so far refused to accept the change.

The Conservative Party has long been opposed to proportional representation because the current system disproprotionately favours them and has led them to being in power more often than they would have under a different voting system.

The Liberal Democrats favour a system called the single transferable vote (STV) which is used for elections in Ireland, the Northern Ireland Assembly and Scottish local elections, for future elections. There are other variations, however, which are outlined in useful detail by the Electoral Reform Society.