Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act | The Constitution Unit Blog

The Senedd in Wales recently voted to support plans to increase its membership, following the report of a special committee, which endorsed proposals put forward by Labour and Plaid Cymru. Laura McAllister argues that the need to enlarge the Senedd is clear, but that proposed changes to the voting system are flawed and could undermine public support for reform.

That the Senedd marked its twenty-first ‘coming of age’ birthday by seeking to recast itself with a fundamentally altered institutional shape should surprise few familiar with devolved politics. Wales is often referred to as the land of commissions and inquiries. Each of these inquiries into the most ‘unsettled’ devolution settlement has recommended that the Senedd should increase from its current 60 Members (MSs) to a figure between 80 and 100. The story of these inquiries can be found on the Senedd website.

I chaired the Expert Panel on Assembly Electoral Reform in 2017, which was charged with looking at the size of the Senedd, its electoral system and extending the franchise to younger voters. Our Panel’s recommendations were that:

The number of members should be increased from 60 to at least 80, and preferably closer to 90. We concluded that this was needed because the Assembly (its name was changed to ‘Senedd Cymru/Welsh Parliament’ in 2020) had acquired a much greater role than the one it had in 1999, and also that its powers were expected to expand further. We concluded that the Senedd could not be expected to continue functioning optimally and delivering for the people of Wales if it remained at its current size.

That a new electoral system should be introduced to accommodate this increased size and to make the relationship between votes cast and seats won more proportional. Our favoured system was Single Transferable Vote (STV) accompanied by prescriptive, legislative gender quotas, though the Panel also regarded a Flexible List system of proportional representation (PR) as a viable alternative.

That the minimum voting age in Senedd elections should be reduced to 16 as a means of boosting democratic participation. We regarded it as essential that the lowering of the voting age should be accompanied by high-quality education about politics in schools and other places of learning. This last recommendation was enacted through the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020 and came into force for the 2021 Senedd elections.

There was deemed insufficient political consensus to advance our first two recommendations around size and electoral system change in time for the 2021 election, despite a report from the Senedd Committee on Electoral Reform chaired by Labour MS Dawn Bowden, which almost exactly replicated our report’s recommendations. This committee did acknowledge that time had effectively run out and instead called for legislation early in the Sixth Senedd to increase its size to between 80 and 90 Members from the 2026 election, with all MSs elected by STV.

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In September, the Committee on Senedd Electoral Reform published a report that recommended a wide range of reforms to the Welsh Parliament’s arrangements, including increasing the number of Members of the Senedd, adopting a new electoral system, and implementing measures to improve diversity. In this post, Michela Palese summarises the key recommendations and reflects on the likely next steps.

Reform of Wales’s legislature has been on the political agenda for many years. Earlier this year, the first phase of reform led to the extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year olds; to changing the name of the Welsh Assembly to the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru and of its members to Members of the Senedd (MS); and to changes around electoral administration. These reforms were part of the Senedd and Elections (Wales) Act 2020, which became law on 15 January.

Another area of reform, which has yet to be taken forward, is the size of the legislature itself. Constitutional developments in Wales, particularly following the Wales Act 2017, have meant that the Welsh legislature has acquired new, primary law-making powers, including in relation to its size and electoral arrangements, and is now recognised as permanent within the UK’s constitutional settlement, alongside the Welsh government. The 2017 Act also moved Wales from a conferred powers model of devolution (an anomaly in the UK’s set-up) to a reserved matters model similar to that of Scotland, as recommended by the Unit in 2016.

These significant new legislative powers have not been matched, however, by an increase in the number of members of the legislature (hereafter, MSs or Members of the Senedd, though note their name was Assembly Members/AMs until May 2020), which have remained at 60.

There has been much, long-standing debate around this issue – it is broadly accepted that 60 MSs are insufficient to carry out the important legislative and scrutiny work of a fully-fledged parliament, with its own committee system, particularly if one considers that 14 MSs (around 23% of the total) are part of the executive.

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