There is a growing consensus that FPTP, the first-past-the-post system we use for Westminster and local council elections, needs to be replaced.
No one with any credibility would claim it makes sense to carry on using it in our multi-party system.
The FPTP system produces distorted and undemocratic results, and last month’s elections have given us plenty of examples. In Milton Keynes, the Liberal Democrats came fourth in vote share but became the biggest party. In Birmingham, Greens got the most votes, but Reform got the most councillors.
Here in Croydon, the Conservatives got more votes than Labour but ended up with fewer councillors, and both parties got far more council seats than their vote share deserved.
I’ve written before on why Croydon needs more and better democracy and the latest results make that even clearer.
The new map of Croydon: but does it reflect how people voted?n
Giving all the power to a Mayor who is supported only by 30% of the people who bothered to vote is clear stupidity, and I hope we can all come together to get rid of the mayoral system when the time comes.
At councillor level, the current system has also produced a result that is completely undemocratic and doesn’t represent what the people of Croydon want. A system based on Proportional Representation, where the number of councillors elected matches the votes each party receives would look very different.
While a “pure” PR system would be the fairest and most democratic way of deciding who gets elected, some people still like having a representative for their local area. Some have also pointed out that adding up all of the votes across a whole council or country would also disadvantage independent candidates, who may only have a particular link to just one area.
These are valid points, but they aren’t good arguments for sticking with the current system. Especially as we already use a type of PR election system that allows for local connections and makes space for independents to stand.
In elections for the Welsh Senedd, the Scottish Assembly and the London Assembly, we used what’s known as a “closed proportional list system”. In Wales the country is divided into a number of regions and each of them elects members of the Senedd. Each voter in that region votes for the party (or independent) that that they want elected.
The allocation of seats in the Senedd, Scottish government, and the list members of the London Assembly is made using the D’Hondt system which is also used in many other countries across the world.
So, what might this look like in Croydon?
As an experiment, I added together pairs of wards in Croydon to create 14 “regions” that elect four, or five, or six councillors. These regions match quite well with the local areas in Croydon: so you would have one region for New Addington, one for Coulsdon, one for Shirley, and so on.
I then added up the votes for each party in that region from the recent councillor elections and divided it by the number of candidates the party stood in that region to give the equivalent of a party vote. This gives a fairer estimate for parties that did not stand a full 70 candidates across the entire borough, and the independents.
The results are very interesting:
When you look at the calculations below these results, it also becomes clear how close some of these races were. For example, if the Greens had got only 20 more votes in Sanderstead and Kenley, then they would have got the fifth Councillor there instead of the Conservatives. When election races get this close, it means that parties work far harder for your vote and so the people of Croydon would probably get a much better service from their councillors, wherever they lived.
The case is clear that we need to ditch the FPTP system and this experiment shows that a regional type PR system for local councils would produce not only a fairer system but also one that works far better for residents. I believe the same would apply if we used a similar region system for electing our MPs as well.
There are also growing calls with the Conservative Party to get rid of the awful FPTP system.
If you want to join that call, then you should write to your MP and ask them why we haven’t changed to a fairer system – feel free to include a link to this article.
You can also find out more information and join the campaigns through either the Electoral Reform Society or Make Votes Matter.
- Peter Underwood was the Green Party’s candidate for Mayor of Croydon, who polled almost 20,000 votes and finished third, while also missing out on being elected as a councillor in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale, where he again finished third. According to Underwood’s sums above, he would have become a councillor under his regional PR system
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