22 July 2008

The Speaker of the House of Commons announced today that he will soon be convening the first Speakers conference of this century. This cross party conference will consider a number of issues including the representation of women and ethnic minorities in parliament alongside the issue of low voter turnout, weekend voting and the voting age.

Keith Vaz MP, Chair of the Labour Party’s ethnic minority taskforce made the following statement:

“I would like to welcome the historic establishment of this first Speaker’s conference of the century. In parliament today we only have 15 MPs that are from an ethnic minority background out of a total of 646 which is 2.32 percent. This conference is an opportunity for all parties to get together to discuss what can be done to improve representation and give the public a parliament that mirrors modern society.”

“To be truly representative of modern Britain we would have 58 MPs of an ethnic minority background, at the current pace of change it would take 75 years to achieve a proportion that would be reflective of the ethnic minority population of Britain. We must not wait that long. I hope that the other parties will attend this conference and that we get the changes that we need.”