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Political parties should be open about the diversity of their candidate selection processes

26 November 2009

... so says the interim report of the Speakers' Conference, which was set up to examine the representativeness of MPs.

The second interim report has called for political parties to be required to make public the number of women, people from ethnic minorities and disabled people who come forward for selection as parliamentary candidates.

Summary of conclusions and recommendations

1. Nearly all Members of Parliament are elected to the House of Commons on a party ticket. This makes the political parties, effectively, the gatekeepers to the House of Commons. It means that if the House of Commons is to become more representative the political parties will, in large part, have to be the agents of change.
2. When the leaders of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, the Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown MP, Rt. Hon. David Cameron MP and Rt. Hon. Nick Clegg MP, gave evidence to us on 20th October 2009 they each agreed that the diversity of representation within their parties was neither what it should be, nor what they wanted it to be. We welcome this important acknowledgement.
3. Each of the parties monitors its progress on candidate selections internally. The fact that this information is not collected and placed in the public domain, however, means that there is no public accountability; unless the performance of the different parties can be compared with each other (and with the performance of parties throughout the world) there is likely to be insufficient pressure for the political parties to pursue the cultural change which is needed from them before we can have a House of Commons "fit for the 21st century".
4. The leaders of the three main parties also gave us their agreement in principle to publish future reports on the results of candidate selections.
5. We shall table a draft new clause to the Equality Bill which, if enacted, would require registered political parties to report every six months, according to specified criteria, on the diversity of their candidate selections; and to publish those reports online. We hope that this proposal will have the support of the House.

Key links:

• Second interim report
• About the Speakers' Conference

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