"When the party membership elected me their leader, they knew what they were voting for. I made it clear from the outset that under my leadership we would take positive steps to tackle the scandal of women’s under-representation in the Conservative Parliamentary Party.
It is of course unfortunate that we need to discuss candidates in terms of their gender and ethnicity, as if these factors matter more than their character or abilities. Commentators on this thread have made much of the reforms being anti-meritocratic. But does anyone actually believe that meritocracy has applied in the past? It cannot be that the Parliamentary party is 91 per cent male and 99 per cent white, because the men who apply to be candidates are 91 per cent better than the women, and whites are 99 per cent better than minority ethnic candidates. The sad fact is that we have not been open to all the talents of the country in the way that a properly meritocratic party should be.
Under-representation of women and black and minority ethnic candidates is not the case at the local level, where Conservative Associations and Conservative councils are far more representative than our members in the Commons. So this is a national problem and it requires a national solution.
Since the changes Francis Maude and I introduced in December 2005, there has been a considerable improvement in our representative profile. 32 per cent of newly selected candidates are women (compared to 9 per cent of MPs), and 9 per cent minority ethnic (compared to 1 per cent of MPs). So we’re on the right track – but we need to move faster.
Today I announced further changes which give party members the power to choose the shortlist of four candidates – at least half of whom must be women. The local executive will then be able to hold in-depth interviews with the four candidates, in order to identify the one with the skills most suitable to the task of representing the constituency.
Furthermore, associations will be able to choose to hold an open primary, and seats with less than three hundred members will be expected to do so.
As this suggests, the changes are not, as many commentators have said on this site, a centralising move, depriving members of their rights. Local people will still choose the local candidate, from a list drawn up by the local party. And the use of open primaries makes this a more, not a less, democratic process than the one it replaces.
Finally, it will help address the issue that ConservativeHome has identified – the under-representation of candidates with backgrounds in the public sector and in the regions of the country where we have few MPs.
I hope that members will not see this issue in terms of local power versus central power, but as a necessary change to improve the way that local associations select candidates. The aim is clear: we must make our benches in the Commons more truly representative of the country we aspire to govern. It is about fairness, it is about better representation for women – but above all it is about effectiveness. We will only be a really effective political fighting force when we are using the talents of all our people."
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David Cameron on 2nd June: Getting more women into Parliament remains top of my agenda
