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Will Powys Council adopt Proportional Representation

All councils in Wales are being given the opportunity to start electing councillors via Proportional Representation if their councillors decide to do so from the next set of council elections.

Welsh Gov has said that if a council votes with a ⅔ majority, it can choose to adopt the so called Single Transferrable Vote form of PR from the next election (in 2027)

The process is that initially, councils vote on whether to do a public consultation on this, and Powys held this vote in December and agreed to go to the next stage, i.e. a public awareness campaign and then a second vote later this year on whether to actually adopt STV.

Under STV, rather than just tick a single box, voters would be asked to rank the candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference. If a candidate that a voter placed first is either eliminated or has surplus votes, their vote can be transferred to their second choice and so on.

Present system

Under the present system, “First past the post” it is very common for the proportion of votes cast for a particular party to be completely different from the proportion of members elected for that party. For instance, in the 2019 general election, the winning party gained 56% of the total MPs elected from 44% of the share of the vote, and this is very typical of first past the past results.

STV is an attempt to correct this, and generally results in these proportions being much closer aligned.

The negative aspects to STV are that it takes slightly longer to announce results due to the more complex counting systems. Typically results may take 2 days to be produced.

Also it requires that more than one candidate is elected on each occasion, so rather than there being small wards that elect only one councillor, there would need to be larger wards that elected 3 or 4 councillors. This would make councillors rather less “local”. On the other hand, it would allow voters to choose a councillor that aligned more closely with their views rather than having to engage with a councillor with a very different set of values.

Expect to see some information about STV come out of the council over the next few months as councillors gather evidence from their wards to guide their vote when the actual vote comes to council later in the year. If you do feel strongly about this, please do contact your councillor to discuss it with them.

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