4 min read18 October

“In past years, you have voted twice to support electoral reform. I hear you, I agree with you, and today I am announcing a new national commission on electoral reform,” Burnham told Labour activists in his first conference speech as Prime Minister.

“We will contest the next election with a manifesto commitment to change the electoral system so that everyone’s vote counts and everyone’s voice is heard.”

Burnham has long supported replacing first-past-the-post (FPTP) with proportional representation (PR), and reforming the Westminster voting system is supported by a majority of Labour members. Around 100 Labour MPs backed a campaign for a national commission before Burnham committed to holding one in his speech in Liverpool.

Supporters of electoral reform say it would make Westminster elections fairer. 

Earlier this year, over 50 academics wrote to the Labour government warning that FPTP risked producing distorted results on an unprecedented scale, with increasing numbers of candidates elected on low vote shares. “The collision of a multi-party electorate with a voting system designed for just two parties is creating new risks for Britain,” they said in a letter reported by PoliticsHome. 

A policy of electoral reform could also help Burnham win support from the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.

However, since the PM’s announcement, it has emerged that Labour MPs, ministers included, are far from united on moving away from FPTP – the system under which Labour under Keir Starmer won its landslide majority in 2024.

PoliticsHome understands that Louise Haigh, Deputy PM and Burnham’s close ally, has concerns about shifting to PR.

Other Cabinet members have previously voiced reservations about the idea.

In 2022, Angela Rayner, now Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said she was a “first-past-the-post girl” who was “yet to be convinced by PR”, telling The News Agents podcast that it could allow extremist parties such as the British National Party (BNP) to win House of Commons seats.

John Healey, now Chancellor, campaigned against electoral reform when voters were asked to approve the alternative vote system in a 2011 referendum, describing it as “perverse”.

He wrote for The Independent: “Immediately after an election the parties would be scrambling to do coalition deals. They would feel free to jettison policies that had been firm pledges only a week earlier. This isn’t the new type of politics people have been calling for. They want politics that treats them with respect, not as fools.”

Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, took the opposite position in that referendum.

Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh and Communities Minister Florence Eshalomi were both signatories to the Labour MP campaign for an electoral reform national commission this year.

Neal Lawson, director of the pressure group Compass and co-founder of the new Labour group Mainstream, believes some senior ministers will seek to prevent reform.

“Some people in the Cabinet who are very opposed to it, who are old-school tribal, adversarial Labour, and they will try and do whatever they can to try and kick PR into the long grass,” he told PoliticsHome.

Labour MPs who oppose PR argue it would weaken the party’s electoral position.

The question of how Labour would build a coalition government in a hung Parliament scenario has been complicated by Burnham’s refusal to work with the Green Party as long as its passed conference motion describing zionism as racism remains in place.

A Labour MP who supports getting rid of FPTP admitted that “the prospect of having to rely on Ed Davey, or even worse the Greens, to get stuff through almost makes me physically sick”.

Charlie Buckley, senior research associate at More In Common, said forming a workable majority “looks even more complicated” under PR than it does under FPTP.

“The Greens would go from a handful of MPs to a sizable bloc, while Restore Britain would arrive in Parliament in numbers, potentially giving these smaller parties a kingmaker role in the formation of coalitions,” he told PoliticsHome.

Henry Tufnell, the Labour MP for Mid and South Pembrokeshire, said his experience of PR in Wales has strengthened his opposition to changing to the voting system.

“I saw on the doorstep ahead of the Welsh elections how democratic accountability can be lost under proportional representation and the broken link between the electorate and the representative. We should think very carefully about introducing any legislation nationally on electoral reform,” he told PoliticsHome.

However, Lawson stressed that the balance of opinion within the Labour Party had shifted towards reforming the electoral system.

“You’ve got the person at the top who’s instinctively and intrinsically pro-proportional representation, and you’ve got the whole body of the membership, and now the trade unions, and a big chunk of the PLP (Parliamentary Labour Party).

 “The overwhelming mood in the Labour Party is for PR.”