During the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum he signed a letter in "The Guardian" stating that he opposed AV but would continue to campaign for proportional representation. In January 2011, Owen revealed that his "heart was with Labour" and that he looked forward to the time when he could vote Labour again. He added that what hampered him in the past was the way the Labour Party elects its leader and it was very necessary for the electoral college arrangement to be reformed and he refused to rule out joining the Labour Party in the future. He vigorously opposed the Health and Social Care Bill in 2011–12. In a pamphlet, "Fatally Flawed", he demonstrated that far from the internal market, which he had championed in the 1980s, the Bill introduced an external market and he worked closely with the Labour Front Bench in the House of Lords. In March 2014, it was revealed that Owen had donated over £7,500 to the Labour Party, following the Labour leader Ed Miliband's reforms of the party's links with trade unions. No longer eligible to sit as a crossbencher, Owen now sits in the House of Lords as an "Independent Social Democrat". In the June 2017 General Election, Owen continued to support the Labour Party, though he had once been a political opponent of Labour's new leader, Jeremy Corbyn. He made political donations to the national Labour Party, as well as the Labour candidate in his former constituency of Plymouth Sutton &amp; Devonport, Luke Pollard, who successfully won the seat.