Dropping the gender quotas bill is a major blow to the Welsh Government’s programme of reform

Jess Blair, Director/Cyfarwyddwr, Electoral Reform Society Cymru

This week the Welsh Government made a surprise announcement confirming they were dropping a landmark piece of legislation which would have delivered gender equality in the Senedd.

The legislation proposed quotas for the Senedd elections which would have ensured an increase in the number of female candidates and likely an increase in the number of women elected from the 2030 Senedd elections.

The Senedd Cymru (Electoral Candidate Lists) Bill was already making its way through the legislative process of the Senedd and its next debate was scheduled for 1st October, but on Monday night the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Jane Hutt, published a statement announcing that the Welsh Government would be withdrawing the Bill.

The plans for gender quotas, which would have guaranteed  the representation of women in future parliaments, were part of a package of wider reforms to the Senedd.

These wider reforms will be in place for the next Senedd elections in 2026 and will see the size of the Senedd increase to 96 from the current 60, bringing the Welsh Parliament much more in line with the Scottish Parliament with their  129 MSPs and Stormont’s 90 MLAs.

New voting system

A new voting system will be in place, moving from the Additional Member System (which used a combination of the Westminster First Past the Post system with top up seats elected through Closed Lists) to a fully Closed List system. 16 new constituencies will also be created allowing six Senedd Members to be elected in each.

The news that the gender quotas bill has been dropped comes as a major blow to this programme of reform.

In terms of equality, legislative quotas would have been a first for the UK, but certainly not a first internationally. Half of the counties in the world use some kind of electoral quota for their parliament.

Wales isn’t a stranger to leading the way when it comes to gender parity. The Senedd was the first legislature in the world to reach 50:50 gender balance, way back in 2003. But since then representation of women in the Welsh Parliament has slipped back and is currently at 43%.

While this is relatively high in terms of the representation of women, it has been reliant on political parties taking the first step in the fair selection of women candidates and the placement of these candidates in winnable constituencies or high on lists. There is no guarantee of this continuing in future elections.

Backstop

That lack of guarantee is exactly what quotas would have addressed. These quotas would have been a backstop ensuring a fair amount of representation on ballot papers and in the Siambr. Without that it is now down to political parties to ensure diversity of their candidates, something we know can be patchy at best.

There is a risk that the next Senedd could be the least gender balanced in history- and it’s not as small a risk as some may suggest.

There is another problem with the ditching of this legislation and that is the electoral system that will now be used from the 2026 elections, the Closed List system. One of the only justifications for the Closed List system was the ease in which gender quotas could work with the lists. Without quotas there is now no justification for this electoral system.

Throughout the course of the process to reform the Senedd, we at ERS Cymru have repeatedly warned that this system will mean voters, for the first time, cannot vote for an individual candidate.

Rather than voting for their preferred candidate, voters will now be confronted entirely with party lists. With politicians effectively decided by party HQ rather than the electorate we will be faced with a complete lack of accountability.

While Closed Lists should improve proportionality, i.e how seats match votes, this lack of accountability and voter choice will significantly undermine this electoral system.

Good electoral systems combine two key elements: proportionality, so legislatures accurately represent the way people voted, and also accountability, so voters can reward good representatives or eject bad ones.

Disproportional

First Past the Post, which is used in Westminster, is deeply disproportional, as we have just seen with the historical disproportional result in July where Welsh Labour won 84% of the seats on 37% of the vote.

ERS has always championed the Single Transferable Vote (STV), as it provides results that far more accurately reflect how the electorate voted while also maintaining strong accountability with a clear constituency link and voting for named candidates. STV, which is already used in Scotland as well as Northern and the Republic of Ireland, should always have been the system for the next Senedd elections.

With plans now firmly in place for the next election it is unlikely that anything will change.

There is a huge risk that we will get to May 2026 and heavily regret the absence of both gender quotas and a voting system that gives people a real choice on who represents them.