Mike Wright, Head of Communications

“It was clear this was going to be a busy year for the ERS media-wise, with a likely general election and change of government, as well as local elections, making our issues prominent at various points in the year. The first quarter was largely dedicated to preparing for those set pieces to ensure we were able to maximise the coverage and then land effective messaging that resonated with the public. As such, a predominant focus was the messaging project we carried out with research colleagues to ensure we had tested arguments and lines on electoral reform ready for the election. The other key strategic focus for the comms team was building deeper relations with journalists, particularly in broadcast, to ensure we could pre-brief influential figures on our issues before the elections, and this led to better informed coverage when our issues did arise.”

The start of the year was dominated with Liz Truss’s resignation honours list, which put a sharp focus on the House of Lords, peerages and cronyism. The ERS was quoted in the BBC News story on the list, and Jess Garland was also interviewed on a number of outlets, including Channel 4 News, ITV, and Sky. This allowed us to frame the issue of Lords reform as pressing for the then current and next government.

The rest of the first quarter of the year was then dominated by the build-up to the local and mayoral elections, which were seen as a key test for the beleaguered Sunak government and to see if Labour was making serious electoral inroads. There was also a growing focus on our issues and we were quoted in stories on tactical voting in Politico, voter ID in the Express, and Police and Crime Commissioner elections on ITV.

In May, the local elections saw the media take an interest primarily in voter ID as it was the first time millions of voters would be encountering it. ERS spokespeople did numerous broadcast interviews, largely on BBC Local News radio, on how the issue could affect people, with Darren’s comments being picked up by the Express and other news outlets. After the local elections, our analysis showing that mayors had been elected with smaller mandates than previous incumbents due to the switch to FPTP was also picked up by the media.

In the period following the general election, the media focus shifted to the new government’s agenda, with the majority of the media interest being in the reforms to the House of Lords. The ERS has featured in coverage of this issue in a number of publications, from the New Statesman, i News to the Daily Mail. Darren appeared on BBC News discussing the Lords reform proposals in the Kings Speech.

The ERS had over 800 hits in different media outlets over 2024 to date. This is similar to 2023, when there was a high media interest in the roll-out of voter ID for the first time. However, the focus this year, when the spotlight was likely to fall on our issues, was to aim for higher cut-through media outlets, with appearances on the Today Programme and BBC Breakfast as particular highlights.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

Ian Simpson, Research Officer:

“Across this year the research team has continued to conduct independent, in-depth and timely research into the state of our political system. Conducting high-quality research is key to achieving our strategic goals as it provides the evidence base for our policy and campaigns. Research was central to our work on the General Election and provided the basis for our media and digital campaigning. We had prepared for the General Election by mapping the changes that had occurred to the UK parliamentary constituencies following the boundary reviews. This ensured we had a thorough understanding of the electoral landscape prior to the election and enabled us to produce interesting data during the campaign and after the results were announced”
At the start of the year the research and communications teams together drew up a new messaging guide for use by the Democracy sector. This was the final thread of the messaging research project which took place in 2023 in which we engaged multiple research agencies and tested messaging on PR on the general public. We shared this messaging guide with National Campaign for PR early this year and the messaging we created was used during the general election.

In May there were local council elections in many places in England, and once again we highlighted places that saw highly disproportional outcomes, with voters failing to be represented properly. We renewed our call to replace FPTP with STV for English local elections, matching the tried and tested system used for Scottish local elections, which produces outcomes that much more closely match how people have voted in their local area.

There were also Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections across England and Wales and a number of elections for directly-elected mayors, including high profile contests in Greater London, Greater Manchester, West Midlands and Tees Valley. These were the first set of PCC elections held under the First Past The Post (FPTP) electoral system after the previous Conservative government scrapped the use of the Supplementary Vote (SV) system for PCCs and elected mayors as part of the Elections Act 2022. We highlighted how this reduced the mandates of the mayors and PPCs who were elected and called for FPTP for mayors to be scrapped. We also gave evidence to the Greater London Authority elections committee on the impact of using FPTP for these elections.

In May this year we also launched our report Pursuing Parity: Examining Gender Quotas Across Electoral Systems, with a webinar in May for our members and supporters as well as others in the sector. The report laid out how the electoral system can impact the diversity of an elected body and how gender quotas can work in conjunction with different electoral systems to produce more gender-balanced legislatures. This piece of research found that elected bodies which use proportional representation are more likely to have larger numbers of women in their elected bodies than countries which use majoritarian systems.

With the anticipated change in Government came an increase in conversations around the second chamber and ERS published our views on the way to an elected second chamber in our report, Unfinished Business: Routes to an Elected Second Chamber. With the first steps towards Lords reform passing through parliament this year in the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill we have been using our work on options for reform to inform and press the case for stage two.

Following the Electoral Commission estimates of the number of people missing from or incorrectly registered on the electoral rolls, we used census data across England, Scotland and Wales to estimate the numbers of eligible voters missing, or inaccurately registered. This work was used to further our campaign for automatic voter registration (AVR), highlighting to MPs, policy makers and the general public, the vast numbers of eligible voters who could be enrolled under AVR.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

The Most Disproportionate General Election Ever

General Election years are always significant for us, but this one was particularly so with results being the most disproportional in history, and many people voting as if we already had PR.

During the election campaign we highlighted the many barriers facing voters at the polls, from our analysis of the numbers missing from the electoral register, to the challenges of voter ID and of course, the results themselves. Our analysis featured throughout the campaign in the media, in print, broadcast and online.

Many of our members and supporters joined our campaign actions and thousands signed our PR pledge. Our supporter numbers grew extensively in this period.

The election itself provided the strongest case for PR yet with not only the most disproportional result, but also a significant shift away from two-party politics and the second lowest turnout since universal suffrage. We highlighted the failures of FPTP as soon as results were out on our General Election 2024 dashboard. We will be sharing our full analysis in our General Election 2024 report, which will be released in early December 2024.

You can read more on our team’s work during the General Election campaign here.

Winning Fair Votes for Welsh Councils

Three councils in Wales moved to the consultation phase on adopting STV voting systems this year. Gwynedd and Powys voted to move to consultation last December with Ceredigion joining them this year. The response to the public consultations across the board was an overwhelmingly positive one with 67% backing STV in Ceredigion, 72% in Gwynedd and 61% in Powys.

Despite this clear signal from their residents, in Powys, councillors chose not to back the change to a fairer electoral system. In Gwynedd, the result was one vote short of the two-thirds super-majority needed, with over 65% of councillors supporting the change. Ceredigion Council also voted by a majority in favour of the change but again this was short of the two-thirds majority required. All three councils failed to reach the high bar of a two-thirds majority, despite the majority of the public backing moving to STV and the majority of councillors in two councils also backing the change.

This has been a significant piece of work for the ERS this year. We have been working with councillors in the three consultation areas for nearly five years now and ran significant campaigns in each of the areas to encourage residents to respond to the consultations. The evidence is clear, there is appetite to improve local democracy from both the public and councillors in Wales, but the piecemeal approach of the Welsh legislation and the high threshold needed remains a barrier to change.

You can read more about our team’s work on the Wales STV campaign here.

140 Years of the ERS

On the 16th January 2024 we celebrated the 140th anniversary of the Electoral Reform Society.
Across those 140 years, the Electoral Reform Society was involved in the successful adoption of the Single Transferable Vote in the Republic of Ireland, and helped to defend it twice against politicians’ attempts to return to Westminster’s electoral system. The Society was also involved in the adoption of the Single Transferable Vote in Malta and aided the campaign in Australia.

In the UK, our advocacy for proportional representation paid off with fair elections now held in Northern Ireland for the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont and all local councils. In Scotland, proportional systems are used in the Scottish Parliament and for all local councils, and in Wales, a proportional system is used for the Welsh Assembly and councils have won the right to choose STV. London also now has an assembly elected on a fair basis.

Over the last 140 years of our advocacy, First Past the Post has changed from the default electoral system to an outlier.

The Best System

To mark the first 100 years of the Society in 1984, the Electoral Reform Society commissioned a history of the Society, modestly called  The Best System. 40 years later, to mark the 140th anniversary, we have made it publicly available once again. The publication is now available on our website, and we published an article to mark the occasion. This is a historic document, reproduced in its entirety. If you are interested in the history of the Society, the earliest records are held at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.

Read The Best System: An account of the first hundred years of the Electoral Reform Society

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

Darren Hughes, Chief Executive

This has been a seismic year for British politics. We have witnessed a huge change election, but also one that was the most disproportional in the history of the UK. That has thrown a spotlight onto our failing First Past the Post electoral system like never before – a system that is clearly creaking under the weight of shifting voter behaviour.

The ERS was able to play a key role in the days after the election in framing the political narrative as it was one of the first organisations to call this as the most disproportional election on record and make the case for urgent electoral reform. It is clear from the results that people in the UK are already voting as if we have PR: this was the first election where four parties garnered over 10% of the vote, and five parties over 5%.

Our work on the election helped to establish the problem with our electoral system in the minds of the public, political class and media, which is a crucial step in the advancement of PR.

A new government means new opportunities, and the ERS is now gearing up to campaign to repair the damage done to our democracy in recent years as well as to modernise and strengthen it for future generations.

The job of the ERS now is to prepare for such a moment as well as to campaign to bring it about.

The general election also highlighted the damage that has been done to our electoral process in recent years, with thousands of people yet again being turned away from polling stations due to a lack of accepted ID. Scandal and cronyism surrounding the House of Lords has also been a persistent theme throughout the year, corroding trust in our politics still further.

That work has already started with the government bringing in legislation to remove the hereditary peers from the Lords, something the ERS has long campaigned for.

Away from Westminster, there has been significant progress on electoral reform in the devolved nations. In Wales, ERS Cymru has been instrumental in helping secure reforms such as an expansion of the Senedd, which will see it come into line with the Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as the introduction of Automatic Voter Registration, which will enfranchise hundreds of thousands of Welsh voters. ERS Cymru has also led on the campaign to have Welsh Councils move to STV.

Likewise, in Scotland, the ERS was deeply involved in the Building a Local Scotland campaign to reform the nation’s democratically stretched council system. Our team in Scotland has also been working on a pioneering citizen’s assembly in Dunfermline aimed at increasing citizens’ participation in the running of their city.

This year saw the ERS’s membership grow again to 7,200, with a particular surge just after the historically disproportionate general election. This is the highest number of members the ERS has had in the two decades we have records for. We have also seen impressive growth in the number of supporters, with 180,000 people now receiving regular updates on our work into their inboxes.

It is to the members I want to pay particular thanks, as none of this would be possible without their support. The contributions they make enable the work we do and the progress we have made. Their passion for democratic fairness fortifies our efforts and is a testament to how deep the desire runs is for a better politics in this country.

I’d also like to record my thanks to the staff team who have worked so hard this year on multiple campaigns and research projects to pursue the Society’s objectives. Through our communications strategy and members and supporters engagement work the team have really broaden and deepened our presence and I appreciate their dedication and enthusiasm to our cause. Thanks are due too to members of the ERS Board who volunteer their time and expertise to the governance of the Society. Their support, challenge and goodwill make the ERS stronger.

Lynn Henderson, Chair

As I come to the end of my first year of as the Chair of the Society, I look back on what has been another significant and turbulent year in British politics.

The ERS turned 140 this year, a momentous milestone. While the political landscape today is utterly transformed from when the Society was founded in January 1884, the importance of its foundational mission remains undimmed: to fight for a democracy that better represents the people it serves. This year we saw a vivid illustration of how much still remains to be done as the UK witnessed its most disproportional general election on record.

The is evidence now that the public mood is shifting, with work from the National Centre for Social Research showing this year that 53% of people now support electoral reform. It is clear the case for PR is advancing and that is down in no small part to the ERS and partner organisations making such a clarion and passionate case for it in recent years.

I would like to put on record my thanks to the ERS staff, whose passion and hard work has shaped the national debate on electoral reform and also won concrete reforms to strengthen and repair our democracy across the country.

Finally, I would also like to pay particular thanks to the members and supporters of the ERS. The Society’s strength comes from the thousands of people who support our work with contributions, but also by signing petitions, sharing our posts and making the case for a fairer democracy every day in their communities.

I look forward to working with you all in the year ahead as we continue to build new alliances for democratic reform and make a compelling case for change.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS member from just £2 a month

Why do we go to party conferences, and what do we do there?

Having a presence at the major party conferences is a key activity in our campaigning work. Party conferences provide us with plenty of opportunities to get our issues in front of people that can make a difference. Across a typical conference we host fringe events to generate top level discussions on our issues, meet with key stakeholders in the party and MPs, and come together with our allies from across the movement to make the case for fair votes.

Liberal Democrats

At the Liberal Democrat conference, we held a packed event on how electoral reform has been achieved around the globe, with our Chief Executive Darren in conversation with Fair Vote US’s Rob Richie. We also spoke on the panel in a fringe event held by Liberal Democrats for Electoral Reform (LDER), on how reforming the electoral system can been couched in the wider need for democratic reform, which is a theme gaining traction in the national political debate. The latter event also had speakers from Unlock Democracy, Make Votes Matter and Compass, as well as MP Christine Jardine.

Read more about our team’s work at Liberal Democrat conference.

Conservative

For the Conservative conference in Manchester, we supported and worked closely with Conservative Action for Electoral Reform (CAER) to raise the profile of electoral reform in the party. To this end, we co-hosted a fringe event on reforming the House of Lords, which was well attended and lead to discussion about different forms of electoral systems that could be used in both houses of Parliament. We also supported a second fringe held by CAER with speakers from Unlock Democracy and Make Votes Matter, as well as Emma Best AM from the London Assembly.

Read more about our team’s work at Conservative conference.

Labour

At Labour Party conference we teamed up with Demos for a fringe featuring Professor Sir John Curtice who gave an overview of the current political climate with ERS on the panel responding with what this means for electoral reform. We also held a fringe event jointly with the Institute for Government focused on the constitutional issues of PR with Mick Antoniw, Counsel General for Wales and Minister for the Constitution, discussing the benefits of PR in Wales and Darren describing the change in New Zealand. You can listen to this panel discussion in full here. These highly popular events were standing-room only and gave us a great opportunity to talk about the benefits of PR and democratic reform. We also continued to support the work of Labour for a New Democracy at Labour conference, contributing to events and rallies for PR.

Read more about our team’s work at Labour party conference.

Scotland

We continue to have a strong presence at Scottish party conferences too, this year running a number of well-received fringes at SNP, Scottish Labour, Scottish Lib Dems and Scottish Greens as well as working with CAER to network at Scottish Conservatives. To pick just two of the highlights, at SNP we could have filled a room twice the size with our event on reforming local democracy, while at Scottish Lib Dems we held an ‘in conversation’ between our colleague Jonathon Shafi and their leader Alex Cole-Hamilton.

Read more about our team’s work at SNP conference.

Read more about our team’s work at Scottish Greens’ conference.

We held the second annual State of Scottish Democracy lecture, which we hope will become a fixture in the Scottish political calendar, providing a much-needed health check of Scottish democracy and institutions at a local and national level. This year’s lecture was delivered by Lesley Riddoch, who trailed the lecture with a piece in the Scotsman, and had a particular focus on local democracy and innovative uses of citizen-based decision-making.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month

Working in coalition with fellow campaigners in the democracy sector is a key part of how we will win change. By teaming up we can bring different strengths and campaigning strategies, ensuring that our impact is greater than the sum of our parts.

We are working in collaboration across all our campaigns including pushing for House of Lords reform, automatic voter registration, changes to campaign finance, transparency, women in politics and devolution.

Convening fellow organisations working on achieving PR for the Commons has been a major focus for us this year. We have brought together PR campaigners to understand how we can work effectively together in our campaigning and to share insights and research.

We continue to support the work of the Democracy Network which was established two years ago to provide a place for organisations working on democracy issues to come together collaborate, share and network to increase our campaign’s strength. We are involved in many of the Network’s activities and currently co-chair the steering group.

We also continue to work with the organisations that came together to form the Democracy Defence Coalition in response to the Elections Bill. This year we focused on raising awareness of voter ID in advance of the local elections in England with major events at parliament and in the news.

ERS Scotland has had hugely positive one-to-one meetings with over 25 different community groups as we strive to make our New City Assembly project in Dunfermline (a proposed standing assembly of Dunfermline citizens that would help govern and plan the future of the city) truly community-led.

We were pleased to develop our long-term relationships and support of electoral reformers in North America. We hosted a successful visit by Fair Vote USA founder and president Rob Richie in September. Darren Hughes and Dr Jess Garland have worked on the challenge to First Past the Post using the framework of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Sort the System

We were also part of a coalition of democracy organisations that ran a mass lobby of parliament in May calling for proportional representation. The ‘Sort the System’ lobby saw hundreds of activists descend on Westminster demanding MPs of all parties take action in support of proportional representation.

The lobby, which saw hundreds of voters from across the country from constituencies as far afield as Suffolk Coastal, Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, Blyth Valley and South East Cornwall met with MPs from every region of the country and every party in Parliament.

Supporters of electoral reform also attended a rally in the Emmanuel Centre to hear from a cross-party platform of speakers about the need to reform Westminster to deliver a system in which all votes count equally. Speakers included Clive Lewis MP (Labour), Cllr Hina Bokhari AM (Liberal Democrats) and Zack Polanski AM, Deputy leader of Green Party (England & Wales).

Voter ID

The Elections Act introduced voter ID for local elections for the first time this year. We fought the worst aspects of the bill with Unlock Democracy, Fair Vote and Open Britain, raising awareness of the change and highlight our concerns to parliamentarians.

ERS research was also used this year to create briefings for each stage of the Election Bill’s progress, and in March, create a giant map outside Parliament demonstrating the potential number of voters without ID. This intervention provided an opportunity to meet with parliamentarians to share our concerns ahead of the local elections.

In April, we joined together with Unlock Democracy and Open Britain to hand in nearly 119,000 signatures to 10 Downing Street. The majority of the 118,759 signatures came from the ERS’ own petition which has seen thousands of you call on the Government to scrap these new ID laws.

Our campaign was supported by the writer Armando Iannucci, who gave us the message:

“I share with the many thousands who’ve signed the petition the desire to see these measures scrapped.” 

“This is an expensive, unnecessary and democratically damaging move. How can the Government on one hand say they want more people to take part in the democratic process and then put this additional barrier in the way?”.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month

Our work behind the scenes

To change the electoral system for Westminster we need legislation to go through parliament. Building connections with politicians is incredibly important because this allows us to better understand their existing priorities and the shifting party dynamics in which they operate. We are building our reputation as a trusted source of information by providing evidence-based research on a variety of democratic issues. This work ensures politicians feel confident when approaching us with concerns regarding upcoming legislation or wider constitutional issues.

Our work behind the scenes consists of meeting with MPs and their staff to better understand their democratic concerns, gathering information to identify politicians who might share our goals and promoting our reports and events. We work closely with other organisations in the democracy sector to support MPs in highlighting democratic issues to the government and organising events to facilitate conversations amongst politicians around our policy issues.

In Westminster

The Elections Act introduced voter ID for local elections for the first time this year. We fought the worst aspects of the bill with Unlock Democracy, Fair Vote and Open Britain, raising awareness of the change and highlight our concerns to parliamentarians.

ERS research was also used this year to create briefings for each stage of the Election Bill’s progress, and in March, create a giant map outside Parliament demonstrating the potential number of voters without ID. This intervention provided an opportunity to meet with parliamentarians to share our concerns ahead of the local elections.

In April, we joined together with Unlock Democracy and Open Britain to hand in nearly 119,000 signatures to 10 Downing Street. The majority of the 118,759 signatures came from the ERS’ own petition which has seen thousands of you call on the Government to scrap these new ID laws.

Our campaign was supported by the writer Armando Iannucci, who gave us the message:

“I share with the many thousands who’ve signed the petition the desire to see these measures scrapped.” 

“This is an expensive, unnecessary and democratically damaging move. How can the Government on one hand say they want more people to take part in the democratic process and then put this additional barrier in the way?”.

Over the course of the year the research team has also responded to a number of parliamentary calls for evidence and consultations on topics such as the House of Lords Appointments Committee, improving electoral registration and the impact of the Elections Act 2022. With a General Election around the corner, we have also been focused on influencing party manifestos and have been meeting with politicians and responding to calls for policy submissions to ensure democratic reform stays on the agenda (and goes in manifestos).

The ERS Cymru team came to Westminster at the end of November 2022 for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Electoral Reform’s meeting on Senedd reform. The ERS is the joint secretary for the group, where we help to organise the meetings. Members of the Welsh Senedd spoke about the changes they were making in Wales enlarging and changing the voting system for the Senedd. This gave us an opportunity to talk about electoral system reform with parliamentarians at a UK level.

We were also part of a coalition of democracy organisations that ran a mass lobby of parliament in May calling for proportional representation. The ‘Sort the System’ lobby saw hundreds of activists descend on Westminster demanding MPs of all parties take action in support of proportional representation.

The lobby, which saw hundreds of voters from across the country from constituencies as far afield as Suffolk Coastal, Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, Blyth Valley and South East Cornwall met with MPs from every region of the country and every party in Parliament.

Supporters of electoral reform also attended a rally in the Emmanuel Centre to hear from a cross-party platform of speakers about the need to reform Westminster to deliver a system in which all votes count equally. Speakers included Clive Lewis MP (Labour), Cllr Hina Bokhari AM (Liberal Democrats) and Zack Polanski AM, Deputy leader of Green Party (England & Wales).

In Scotland

Local Democracy Reform

After being curtailed due to the pandemic, the Scottish Government’s innovative Local Governance Review – Democracy Matters – restarted this summer. This was a welcome development and follows on from regular meetings we have been having with the Bill team as well as lobbying MSPs. The fact that ERS Scotland were the only external organisation asked to provide a quote for the government press release for the launch gives an idea of our position within the long-established campaign for a renewed local democracy in Scotland.

Scottish Democracy Conversations

This year saw us give a name to a strand of work that we have been progressing alongside other projects – Beyond the Constitutional Binary. We are creating a process that allows debate on how to evolve the government of Scotland beyond the Constitutional Question. It has seen us build good relationships with the well-regarded think tanks Our Scottish Future and Reform Scotland, figures in Scottish Labour and the SNP, and academics and thinkers on both sides of the constitutional debate. Our next step is to convene a roundtable of these potential partners in the early months of 2024.

Institutionalising Citizens’ Assemblies

ERS Scotland continues to lead the lobbying for the outcomes of the Institutionalising Participatory and Deliberative Democracy report, which we formed part of the Ministerial Working Group on. We are also progressing our proposals for local standing citizens’ assemblies by looking to set up a pilot project that would test-drive these ideas, to give us something concrete to point to in our meetings with decision makers.

In Wales

Changes to Electoral administration

We kicked off the year responding to the Welsh Government’s White Paper on Electoral Administration and Reform, which suggested a series of interventions to remove barriers to voters and improve engagement in Welsh elections.

Those suggestions have now made their way into legislation with the Counsel General introducing the Elections and Elected Bodies Bill in October. The Bill proposes a series of changes we have campaigned for including automatic voter registration, pilots on voting in different places and on different days, and a new online voter information portal. We have worked closely with the Welsh Government as this has developed and have responded with both written and oral evidence to a Senedd committee scrutinising the legislation.

Local Government reform

Members may remember that councils in Wales can now vote to move to STV. This is on an individual basis for each council and requires a two thirds majority, with a vote only being able to be held once per term. As such we have continued to work with councillors across Wales to build support for this change.

We have identified priority areas with a survey of all councillors in Wales which now has over a 66% response rate, meaning that two thirds of councillors in Wales have shared their views with us. We’ve been going to these priority areas, meeting with councillors and council leaders, holding information sessions and doing presentations making the case for the move to STV. We have also been learning from how STV in Scotland works with the ERS Cymru team meeting with Scottish councillors and MSPs to hear their experiences.

The deadline for councils to vote to move to STV ahead of the next local elections in 2027 is November 2024 and we are working closely with councils across Wales to share information and build support.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month

Why research is so important to our campaign

Across this year, our research team has continued to conduct independent, in-depth and timely research into the state of our political system. Conducting high-quality research is key to achieving our strategic goals as it provides the evidence base for our policy and campaigns. Findings are fed into government consultations, presented to select committees and quoted in parliament as well as shaping and driving our commentary in the media.

Understanding public opinion on electoral reform

As we move towards a General Election, it has become increasingly important to understand the attitude of the public towards proportional representation, what the public understand about the term and how best we as a campaigning organisation can speak to the public, and other stakeholders, about PR. This year the research team engaged in qualitative and quantitative work to inform the ERS and sector-wide communications strategies; developing a fresh approach and new language to talk about proportional representation in the lead up to the next general election.

How proportional representation helps improve diversity

We have also undertaken a research project to explore the most effective ways to increase diversity via changes to the electoral system. Our latest research explores the relationship between electoral systems and gender parity in elected bodies in different countries around the world. This piece of research found that elected bodies which use proportional representation are more likely to have larger numbers of women in their elected bodies than countries which use majoritarian systems.

On Lords reform

At the end of last year, the Labour Party’s Commission on the UK’s Future, chaired by Gordon Brown, published its long-awaited proposals for constitutional reform. Having engaged with the process we were very pleased to see a range of ERS policies contained within the final proposals on issues such House of Lords reform, devolution, local decision-making, and mechanisms for cross-nation working. The proposals commit to a smaller elected House of Lords which would take on an additional constitutional role. We have been researching how that chamber could be elected and composed to meet these ambitions and our report on these issues will be published at the end of this year.

Our in-depth research on local councils and constituency boundaries

In May 2023, English local elections took place with over 8,000 council seats up for election across district, metropolitan and unitary authorities – all of which were elected using FPTP. We took this opportunity to highlight the problems caused by First Past the Post voting, including identifying 34 council wards where 46 councillors were elected without a vote being cast, and highlighting councils where particularly disproportional results had occurred. We continue to make the case that local elections in England should be conducted using STV.

Throughout the year we have also been undertaking a piece of research that will be crucial for our pre- and post-general election output. The constituency boundaries for UK general elections have, after many years of delay, been updated to take account of changes in the size of electorates. As the 650 constituencies are the building blocks of the FPTP system, it is vital that we have an accurate understanding of this new set of constituencies and how they relate to previous ones. Over the year, we have conducted a detailed analysis of the 650 proposed new constituencies, down to ward level, so we fully understand how the new seats relate to the previous ones. This will enable us to conduct a range of new research pieces for the General Election, and gives us a good understanding of which seats are likely to be electorally significant under the new boundaries.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month

ERS in the Press

It has been busy year for the ERS, as we’ve won a lot of media attention on our issues across 2023. Our team have worked with journalists across national and local media to provide in-depth analysis, opinion pieces and interviews, to make the case for electoral reform and push vital democratic issues higher up the news agenda to increase public support.

The year started with our Director of Research and Policy Dr Jess Garland appearing as the solo guest for a 30 min podcast with the New Statesman in January, to discuss the growing support for proportional representation in the Labour party. That month we also provided a quote from Jess for a Guardian front page story on how one in 10 Tory peers have donated more than £100,000 to the Lords. The latter started a year with growing media interest in the Lords in part due to the honours lists of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

That interest continued as Jess’ comments were picked up in a Sky News investigation into a peer’s undisclosed financial interests. In March, we pitched our Chief Executive Darren Hughes for an op-ed on how the Lords has become a ‘drag anchor’ on our democracy in the Times Red Box and in April the Sunday Mirror ran ERS commissioned polling showing that the majority of the public are against Liz Truss getting a resignation honours list.

From early in the year, the media interest in the potential impacts of voter ID on the May local elections grew, and the ERS appeared on leading outlets to sound the alarm over the damaging policy. We put forward ERS spokespeople and won coverage in numerous print pieces, from the Mirror, to the Financial Times, BBC and Telegraph. Jess Garland also featured in the Guardian with an opinion piece highlighting how the new rules were a threat to our democracy. Alongside this, ERS spokespeople appeared on flagship news programmes, with Darren appearing on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme and Kay Burley’s sofa on Sky News. Meanwhile, we organised for Jess Garland to appear on a marathon session in a BBC studio for various local news stations, all of which managed to lift the issue to the top of the news agenda.

The ERS continued to raise the issue after the local elections to highlight the damage voter ID wrought, with Jess Garland quoted in a BBC investigation into the number of people turned away and the Director of ERS Scotland, Willie Sullivan sounding the warning on Good Morning Scotland as to the impact it could have on the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election as well as the General Election. The Director of ERS Cymru, Jess Blair also discussed the potential impact of voter ID in Wales on the BBC’s Radio Breakfast Wales.

During the summer, interest reforming the House of Lords continued with the i newspaper doing a long read on the options for reform, in which Jess Garland was quoted. In August, we secured a slot for Darren to appear as the sole guest on the Bunker podcast to discuss in-depth the case for reform and making the Lords an elected chamber.

In Wales, ERS Cymru has led the discussion on reform to the Senedd, with Jess Blair appearing on Sky News, the BBC and Nation Cymru, among others, to make the case for the expanded Senedd as well as automatic voter registration. Jess also appeared on ITV’s Sharp End in September to discuss the Senedd reforms.

Likewise, in Scotland, the ERS team has been influencing the media to broaden Scotland’s political debate with its on Beyond the Binary work. This year we held the second State of Democracy lecture, now an annual event in the Scottish political calendar. This year Lesley Riddoch delivered a lecture on local democracy, with an op-ed on the lecture in the Scotsman. Willie was also quoted in April in a Ferret investigation into the number of lobbying meetings not being recorded in the transparency register at Holyrood.

Media Hits

The ERS was mentioned in just over 1,000 news and comment pieces over 2023 to date. This is a good result, although not as high as 2022 – a year that saw a couple of high-volume events, such as comment on Liz Truss’s honours list being picked up by the PA news wire and coverage of Boris Johnson’s Lords appointments. The majority of our mentions this year came in the April and May period when interest in voters ID was at its most intense.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month

Major milestones on the road to reform

Thanks to the hard work of the team, we have reached some of the key milestones we identified on the way to winning electoral reform.

Labour and Unions move towards anti-First Past the Post policy

In a First Past the Post system, it’s almost impossible to win substantial change without the support of a major party. While many individual Labour members and MPs support changing our voting system, historically the Labour party as a whole has been opposed to proportional representation. As such, convincing Labour to make a cultural shift and become a party that supports electoral reform forms an integral part of our theory of change.

The ERS provides support to the ongoing campaign by Labour members in Labour for a New Democracy to win round their party to electoral reform. This year they successfully organised around Labour’s National Policy Forum process which saw the final policy document stating that First Past The Post is flawed and damaging. This position was endorsed wholeheartedly by the Labour conference in October.

This work builds on from the vote in favour of proportional representation by Labour members at Labour Conference in 2022. The vote as supported by a huge majority of the constituency parties and a majority of the affiliated Unions. In April this year USDAW, the shop workers union, came on board as their conference passed a motion against First Past the Post.

With the support of the ERS, trade unionists in Politics for the Many are working to solidify these victories, with events and articles making the case for why electoral reform is a trade union issue.

The Senedd gains the members it needs

ERS Cymru has long been campaigning for a reform of the Senedd/Welsh Parliament. We published our Size Matters report a decade ago, calling for the size of the Senedd to be increased and since then have seen a panel of experts and numerous committees within the Senedd agreeing that the Senedd needs more members. At just 60 members, the Senedd is dwarfed by both Stormont and the Scottish Parliament and is the same size or smaller than nearly half of Welsh Councils.

Finally this is being addressed with the Senedd Cymru (Members and Elections) Bill introduced in the Senedd in September. This Bill, if passed, would see the Senedd increased to 96 members and will introduce a closed list PR system for Senedd elections.

We have responded to the Bill in the press raising concerns around the voting system chosen but welcoming the moves to address capacity issues within the Senedd. We have also submitted written evidence to the Senedd Committee scrutinising the legislation and have also appeared before the committee to share our views and research.

We anticipate a further piece of legislation will be introduced by the end of the year introducing gender quotas to Senedd elections. This is something we have campaigned for as part of the Diverse 50:50 coalition.

Building a coalition for reform

To win a reform as fundamental as changing our electoral system, we will need a broad coalition of organisations, beyond the ‘usual voices’ of democratic reform.

We are building an effective network of groups and organisations who are supportive of democratic reform. This year most of our major projects have been in collaboration or partnership with other organisations helping to maximise our impact and encourage more groups and organisations to get involved in democratic reform.

From PR to voter ID, we have formed a range of new connections across our sector, both in the UK and beyond to other Westminster-style democracies globally, to ensure that we are working as collaboratively and effectively as possible to create change.

Support the ERS

As momentum builds for electoral reform, your support is more important than ever. Members support our work in parliament, in the press and at conferences like this one – making the case, and backing it up – for how we can fix Westminster’s broken system.

Click here to become an ERS Member from just £2 a month