Opinion: It is time we had a fairer system of voting at city council elections

:Put simply that is an electoral system where the number of seats that parties receive broadly reflects the number of people who have voted for them. Sadly that does not happen at present.

In both general elections and in local elections, the current "First Past the Post" voting system can lead to candidates getting elected with the votes of maybe only a third of the people who voted. It can lead to governments being elected with a majority of seats when many more people actually voted for other parties. In the General Elections of 1951 and February 1974 the party polling the most votes across the country ended up with fewer seats than the other major party and "lost" the election.

In local government, these distortions can be even more extreme. Some councils become effectively one party states: eg in Manchester all but two of the 100 councillors are Labour, even though Conservatives and Liberal Democrats usually get substantial proportions of the votes cast. The distortions are even more extreme when councils elect all their councillors at once, as the Government has suggested should happen in Peterborough: at least electing a third of councillors each year means that change happens more gradually as people's voting patterns alter over time.

Liberal Democrats and Greens have long supported PR for both national and local elections. The recent Labour Party conference voted in favour of adopting a PR system of voting but their party leader has said he remains opposed to it. The Conservative Party has always opposed PR and championed the First Past the Post system.

We already have three member wards in our council elections which would make it easy to adopt the system of PR favoured by the Liberal Democrats, which is Single Transferable vote (STV). Under this system, voters number the candidates in their order of preference, so they can choose between candidates of the same party, as well as choosing between parties. And these preferences are applied to determine how many seats each party gets. The system maximises fairness and maximises voter choice. STV is already used for local elections in Northern Ireland and in Scotland and voter turnout is higher than in England because people know that their votes really count. In Wales councils can choose to adopt it if they wish. It's only here in England that our Tory government refuses to let councils opt to use a fairer, more proportional voting system.

My motion asked our two local MPs to back the campaign for fairer voting in local elections in Peterborough. If you agree this should happen then why not write to your MP, Mr Bristow or Mr Vara, and let them know your views?