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Wales scraps gender-zip bill before PR debut

2 min read

21:56UTC

The Senedd voted 40-12 on 24 September 2024 to withdraw the bill that would have forced parties to alternate men and women on their closed lists. The 96-seat chamber now enters its first PR election with no legal floor on women's representation.

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Key takeaway

Wales enters PR with no legal gender floor because the bill designed to provide one was withdrawn in 2024.

The Senedd voted 40-12 on 24 September 2024 to withdraw the Senedd Cymru (Electoral Candidate Lists) Bill, scrapping the statutory gender-zipping rule thirteen months before nominations opened for the first election under closed-list PR. The Welsh Government had sponsored the bill as a balanced-representation companion to the wider PR reform. Its replacement is non-binding guidance, with no mechanism to force compliance if parties rank men above women on their constituency lists.

The withdrawal broke the prospectus on which the Wales Governance Centre and the Electoral Reform Society had campaigned. Both institutions had treated the zip as an inseparable element of the 96-seat expansion. The justification Welsh ministers gave in 2024 cited cross-party legal concerns about compatibility with the Equality Act 2010 and wider UK electoral law, though no court ruling was ever sought to test the proposition.

Under closed-list PR, parties publish a ranked slate; voters choose a party, not a candidate, and the D'Hondt method awards seats in list order. List ordering is a private internal decision at each party. If a party ranks male incumbents at positions 1-3 in a six-member constituency, the arithmetic of the threshold ensures those men win before any woman on the slate is reached. The new 96-seat chamber could therefore return fewer women than the outgoing 60-seat Senedd.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

Wales is electing a bigger parliament on 7 May — 96 seats instead of 60 — under a brand new system where you vote for a party, not a person. Under the old system, you got two votes: one for a local candidate, one for a regional party list. Under the new system, parties rank their own candidates internally, and seats go to whoever the party has put at the top of its list in each area. The Welsh Parliament had been debating a rule that would have forced parties to alternate men and women on those ranked lists — so position one would be a woman, position two a man, and so on. That rule was scrapped by a 40-12 vote in September 2024. There is now no legal requirement for any particular gender balance. Which women — and how many — reach Cardiff depends entirely on what order each party decided to put its candidates in.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

The withdrawal reflects a structural tension within Welsh devolution between the Senedd's ambition to legislate on equal representation and the constitutional boundaries of what the Senedd can legislate without conflicting with reserved Westminster law.

The Equality Act 2010 is a reserved matter. The Welsh Government's stated concern about compatibility was not tested in court, but legal uncertainty at a late stage of a legislative term creates a credible incentive to withdraw rather than challenge.

The timing is also a product of the broader electoral reform timetable. The shift from AMS to closed-list PR was agreed late in the Sixth Senedd term, compressing the window for companion legislation. The gender-zipping bill was drafted and introduced in the same compressed period, giving it less scrutiny time than a structural electoral change of that magnitude would normally receive.

What could happen next?

Risk
The 96-seat Senedd may return fewer women than the outgoing 60-seat chamber if parties rank male incumbents at winnable list positions.
Immediate · 0.72
Precedent
Wales becomes the first UK legislature to use closed-list PR without any statutory gender floor, making the 2026 result a live test of voluntary guidance efficacy.
Medium term · 0.85
Consequence
If women's representation falls, pressure will mount in the 2026-2031 term for statutory intervention, potentially reopening the Equality Act compatibility question in a UK Supreme Court context.
Long term · 0.6

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Scotland's first Holyrood election in 1999 used AMS without a statutory gender quota but with voluntary twinning arrangements by Labour and the SNP. It returned 37 per cent women — a UK record at the time — demonstrating that voluntary party action can substitute for statute when parties choose to prioritise it.

Counter-parallel: The 2019 Welsh Assembly (as it then was) returned 47 per cent women under AMS with no statutory floor, the highest of any UK legislature. The move to closed-list PR with voluntary guidance alone risks that figure falling, not rising, if parties rank male incumbents first.

Consensus view: The Wales Governance Centre (Cardiff University) and the Electoral Reform Society both argued that closed-list PR without a statutory gender floor transfers representational power entirely to party selection committees, removing any public accountability mechanism for the gender composition of the new 96-seat chamber.

Counter-view: The Institute of Welsh Affairs noted that non-binding guidance may prove more durable than a statutory zip if parties internalise it voluntarily, and that the Equality Act 2010 compatibility question raised by the Welsh Government was a genuine legal risk rather than a pretext.

Key tension: Whether closed-list PR in Wales will in practice produce better or worse gender balance than AMS did, since the evidence from comparable European PR systems is mixed.

Sources:Welsh Government

Mentions:Senedd Cymru (Electoral Candidate Lists) Bill →Senedd →UK Government →Wales Governance Centre →Wales →Prima →Parliament →D'Hondt method →Welsh Labour →Electoral Reform Society →Equality Act 2010 →

First Reported In

Update #1 · Wales rewrites parliament no voter has used

Welsh Government· 7 Apr 2026

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Causes and effects

This Event

Wales scraps gender-zip bill before PR debut

Closed-list PR without a quota hands parties, not voters, the final call on gender composition for the full 2026-2031 term.

Led to

Six Reform Wales Candidates Gone, Three From One Seat

Occurred 7 Apr 2026

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Different Perspectives

Electoral Commission

The Electoral Commission confirmed Christopher Harborne's £9m Q3 2025 donation as the largest from a living individual in UK party finance records, noting compliance with PPERA 2000 permissibility rules; its enforcement function extends to permissibility, not scale. No party has formally challenged the declarations, leaving structural concentration of party finance without a statutory trigger for the current parliament.

Welsh Labour

Welsh Labour enters the Senedd election projected to fall from 29 seats to 12 under a closed-list PR system the party introduced, with First Minister Eluned Morgan polling below the constituency entry threshold. The party faces becoming third-largest in the chamber it redesigned, a devolution-era first.

Scottish National Party

The SNP is projected on 67 Holyrood seats, two above the majority threshold, on the first election under redrawn boundaries; John Swinney has stated a majority constitutes a mandate for a second independence referendum. A confirmed majority would reopen the constitutional question dormant since 2014 with no current Westminster route to a Section 30 order.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

MHCLG reversed the postponement of 30 elections under Divisional Court pressure, committed £63m to affected LGR areas, paid approximately £100,000 in Reform UK's legal costs, and has not published the legal advice justifying either decision. Robert Jenrick's Hansard account that prior advice already judged postponement unlawful has not been addressed or refuted by the department.

HM Government / UK-wide parties

The government frames the Representation of the People Bill as a proportionate foreign-influence response implemented at unusual speed. Reform UK holds its polling position while staying silent on crypto donation quantum. The Liberal Democrats frame the English local elections as a binary contest against Reform.

Scottish parties (SNP, Conservatives, Labour)

The SNP enters the regulated campaign as projected majority government through opposition fragmentation, not a vote surge. The Scottish Conservatives defend a manifesto the IFS dismisses and face zero constituency seats. Labour is the only party projected to retain any constituency presence beyond the SNP.