3. How will the Welsh Government ensure that local authorities adopt the single transferable vote as a voting system as a result of the coming into force of the Local Government and Elections (Wales) Act 2021? OQ56641

The 2021 Act allows principal councils to choose either first-past-the-post or STV. A key principle throughout the 2021 Act is for decisions to be made locally. The Welsh Government should not interfere in that local choice by seeking to ensure councils have got one or other system.

Well, if you expect local authorities to do this voluntarily, I think you're kidding yourself to some extent, Minister. I think that the Government needs to be proactive in encouraging the local authorities to adopt this new system. So, do you agree with, for example, the Electoral Reform Society that you need to work with some local authorities to pilot this, perhaps? Perhaps there's a need to create some sort of fund to give them that incentive. There's local educational work to be doing in terms of the new voting system and without those elements being in place, it's just not going to happen. So, what I want to hear from you is whether there is an intention for you to be proactive rather than sitting back and ultimately seeing there's nothing happening.

So, of course the 2021 Act is following the same principle as the Wales 2017 Act did when it gave the Senedd the right to choose its voting system, so it is following that established process which would be applied to us here. But I did have an excellent meeting with the Electoral Reform Society earlier on this week, and they told me about work that they'd done with councillors to understand the appetite for STV amongst councillors here in Wales, and one of the things they reflected on quite significantly was the fact that quite a significant number of councillors didn't know and they didn't feel that they knew enough about STV and knew enough about the implications, how it might work and so forth, to make that decision, so I agreed that there was work that we could be doing jointly to provide information to councillors and to support that education work that the ERS wants to do to ensure that councillors are able to make at least an informed choice about the options available to them.

Minister, during my election count in May, council officers and volunteers were verifying and counting ballots for the Senedd constituency vote, the Senedd regional vote, police and crime commissioner election, and votes for council and community council by-elections. Going forward, it's not an unrealistic expectation to see a scenario where every one of these ballots could be counted under a different voting system. Does the Minister agree that this is a scenario that should be avoided, as not only will it lead to confusion amongst the electorate but it will hamper efforts to increase engagement in those democratic processes such as local council elections, that already struggle with voter turnout?

I think there is perhaps a tendency to overstate the complexities and the likelihood of voter confusion, because as you say, voters are already able to cope with a variety of voting systems, and as you've described, voters have different approaches in Senedd, UK parliamentary, and police and crime commissioner elections. So, the counting system under STV might be complicated, but the voting process certainly isn't in terms of ranking your candidates using one, two, three and so on, and it is important that ballot papers have clear instructions for voters as to how to cast their votes. So, I don't think that necessarily it will be beyond the wit of voters to be able to use a number of different systems when casting their ballots.

Can I ask the Minister to look at the number of spoilt ballot papers we had the length and breadth of Wales when we had the Senedd elections? But I can think of no worse electoral system than STV. Can I ask the Minister to look at the size of the wards and results from the Scottish council elections, which were held under STV? Can the Minister provide information to the public, not just to councils, on exactly how STV works? Because I think people talk about STV a lot and everybody says how wonderful it is until people start looking at it.

So, in terms of the Scottish council elections, I'm not aware of any problems that we've had in 2017 or 2012, but it is absolutely the case that 2007 was a very difficult year for those particular elections, which did combine the elections for the Scottish Parliament and local government on the same day. But I think the consensus is that those problems arose mainly because they were combined on a single ballot paper, and introduced a series of significant innovations on the same day, so namely the single-sided parliamentary ballot paper, electronic counting and the new STV voting system for local government. So, I think it is incumbent on us to look at experiences elsewhere to learn from the positive, but also obviously more difficult experiences, which I think that Scotland seems to have managed to have resolved.