Brent Civic Centre
Guest post by The SupervoteProject. Most voting reform campaigns concentrate on Westminster. The Supervote Project works on how the voting system distorts representation at the local borough level and had some interesting findings about Brent ahead of the May 2026 local election:
The last time Brent council elections were held in 2022:-
- · Labour
took 86% of the seats with only 52.6% of the vote;
- · The
Conservatives were under-represented, taking just 5 (8.8%) of the seats
for 22.7% of the vote;
- · The
LibDems had only 3 (5.2%) of the seats to show for their 13.7% of the
vote;
- · The
Greens had nothing at all to show for their 9.7% of the vote;
- · Nearly
7 out of 10 registered voters did not bother to vote at all.
Not much of a democracy is it?
...and
it’s our dodgy voting system that is to blame!
To elect the Borough’s Councillors in 2022, residents were obliged to
use an inefficient Victorian voting system known as First-past-the-post, which
wasted many of the votes cast and produced a distorted result with the
remainder. These are the party percentages in the Borough of Brent for 2022:-
There
is something very wrong with a voting system that has the ability to award over
8 out of 10 seats to a party that has won just over 5 out of 10 votes. While
Labour won a majority of votes and so should rightly take a majority of the
seats, those who voted for other parties should have fair representation as
well.
Moreover, drilling down to ward
level reveals poor levels of representation. Brent has 22 wards each returning
2 or 3 councillors but, the way our outdated voting system works, 19 wards were
monopolised by one party, no matter how people had voted. In 2 of these wards,
the dominant party took all the seats on a minority of the vote, resulting in
the ridiculous situation such as in Kenton Ward for example, where a minority
of voters (48%) enjoyed 3 councillors of their political persuasion, while the
majority of ward voters (52%) had none.
And then there is the abysmal
turnout, just 31%, with Wembley Park Ward taking the wooden spoon with just
21%. Evidently, nearly 7 out of 10 Brent voters felt so disconnected with the
democratic process that they chose not to vote. It doesn’t bode well for the
forthcoming Borough elections in 2026; declining public interest and
participation in local elections spell disaster for our democracy unless
something is done.
The extent of the disparities
between votes won and seats taken in English local government can be seen by
visiting the 2024 edition of the “Awful A-Z of Local Election Disasters”, accessible on the home page of www.supervote.org.uk, where it is estimated that,
thanks to the First-past-the-post voting system, over 4 out of 10 councils have
disparities between votes won and seats taken of over 20%. On the same page, a
“Top 10” of the most undemocratic local election results in May 2025 shows that
there was no Reform UK landslide as the media claimed, with that party taking a
majority of seats, but with a minority of the vote in all cases.
First-past-the-post is past it
and continued use of this Victorian museum piece makes about as much sense as
using Stephenson’s Rocket to haul trains on the HS2. The London Boroughs need
to have their voting system brought up to date so that results reflect votes
cast, transforming the Boroughs’ elections into a vibrant, diverse and
inclusive event where there is everything for everyone everywhere to play for,
whether they be voters, local party organisations or candidates.
To achieve this, the Borough
needs to conduct its elections using a system of proportional representation, a
type of voting system which shares out seats in proportion to votes cast. So,
if Labour were to poll 6 out of 10 votes, they would be awarded 6 out of 10
seats. Our current outdated Victorian voting system does not do this.
The Supervote: the most powerful and
democratic vote on Earth.
The Single Transferable Vote
(STV) is the British system of proportional representation. While Continental
list systems of PR are designed simply to deliver proportionality of parties,
STV allows voters to cast preferences for candidates in multi-member wards,
which gives them more choice of candidates and an ability to vote according to
what is important to them, whether it be according to party affiliation,
independence of thought, gender, culture or position on an issue. Wasted votes
are minimised because in the counting, the votes are distributed among the
candidates according to the expressed preferences of each individual voter,
allowing votes for a no-hoper or those surplus to a candidate’s requirements to
be recycled. The way the votes are counted ensures that the corporate will of
the voters in the ward is reflected in the result and that seats are awarded in
proportion to votes cast. STV is the most powerful vote you can bequeath to an
electorate and has justifiably been described as “the Supervote”.
The Irish Republic has used STV
since the 1920s. In the UK, Conservative and Labour Governments have supported
STV’s use in Northern Ireland for local council, Assembly and European
elections over a 50 year period. In 2007, STV was successfully introduced for
local elections in Scotland, and the Welsh Senedd has passed legislation that
allows local councils in Wales to use it if they so resolve. English Councils
need to catch up.
Introducing STV should be
straightforward even though English local governance is currently a hotchpotch
of single and multi-member representation. While STV operates best in 4-6
member wards, the system can still function at a reduced level of efficiency in
1,2 and 3 member situations. This would allow for the system to be introduced
immediately for all local elections pending boundary reviews for each council
by the Local Government Boundary Commission for England. It would also enable
all local elections to be held in one hit on the same day every 4 years,
thereby saving considerable amounts of money.A new dawn for UK democracy and an end to
“King of the Castle” Politics.
According to a YouGov poll last
July, only 19% of respondents believed the British political system was
working, while 74% believed the system to be wholly or partly broken. Maybe the
problem is that all the adversarial party political punch-ups alienate most
voters whose adult lives are spent trying to get along with family, neighbours
and work colleagues, even those they don’t particularly like. Ordinary folk
look askance at ”King of the Castle” politics, all the hate, all the posturing
and the name-calling. Our politics seems to have degenerated into a
round-the-clock combative sport rather than a means of considered
decision-making and so we need to reform the way we go about the governance of
our country. The introduction of STV should help by increasing voter
participation, by breathing new life into local party politics and thereby
strengthen our democracy at the grassroots. Hopefully this will in turn open
the door to a new dawn for our representative democracy, leading to more consensual
and less adversarial “King of the Castle” politics, with more input from people
with different ideas and a better quality of decision-making as a result.
