Voters set to get power to sack misbehaving Senedd members
Chris Haines – ICNN Senedd reporter
Voters would be given the power to remove Senedd members from office between elections under a new draft accountability bill published by the Welsh Government.
Julie James, who is counsel general, the Welsh Government’s chief legal adviser, announced publication of a draft member accountability bill in a written statement.
Voters would be given a say on whether to “remove or retain” a sitting politician through a “recall poll” and if a Senedd member was booted out, the seat would be filled by the next person on the party list, unless there are no more candidates or that the member recalled is an independent.
Under the draft bill, which was published today (October 6) following similar reforms in Westminster and Scotland, a recall poll would be triggered in one of two ways:
Conviction: If a politician was convicted of an offence and sentenced to imprisonment, including a suspended sentence.
Misconduct: If the Senedd voted by a majority to hold a poll after a standards committee recommendation as a result of serious misconduct.
Before the Senedd can trigger a recall for misconduct, the standards committee would need to publish “recall guidance” setting out more detail.
To be successful, a simple majority of those who vote in the recall poll must vote to remove the Senedd member and the draft bill does not include a minimum turnout requirement.
‘Own-initiative’
The power to recall politicians does not have an automatic start date and the draft bill states the system would come into force on a future date specified by Welsh ministers separately.
The draft bill also seeks to strengthen the Senedd’s standards of conduct committee, which is made up of politicians, and the role of standards commissioner.
The standards committee would become a permanent, legal requirement for every Senedd and independent “lay members” could sit on the committee for the first time.
Douglas Bain, the standards commissioner who investigates politicians in Cardiff Bay would be given “own-initiative” powers to launch investigations rather than rely on complaints.
The draft bill also includes a duty on Welsh ministers to prohibit false statements during election campaigns in an effort to tackle deliberate deception by politicians.
In a statement announcing the bill, Ms James stressed that the draft bill is subject to change before its formal introduction in the Senedd in the autumn.
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How about useless councillors?
Shane it didn’t extend to MP’s.
A far better idea would have been to give voters the power to remove specific Senedd members at election time, by using a better voting system than the closed list system. The Closed List voting system for future Senedd elections is rightly criticised because it requires voters to pick a party list without having any say over which candidates get elected. There are other, better systems of Proportional Representation (PR), like Open List PR, and the Single Transferable Vote (STV). These systems give voters a real choice, not only between parties, but also between candidates of the same party. Unlike… Read more »
The closed list system has already been in use to elect the Senedd’s regional MSs, but in that voters cannot elect an individual candidate it isn’t fundamentally different to the first-past-the-post method. It was nevertheless adopted, so I’m led to believe, due to its familiarity and because it better reflects the proportion of votes cast.
Changing it to a STV method in the future would be a welcome step, and one which reflects the wishes of a large number of MSs who voted this Senedd reform through.