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Mr. Duncan: There is a clear distinction between postal votes that are specifically requested and those that are scattered willy-nilly, as if from the skies, over the entire country. An enforced system of all-postal voting entails a massive conceptual shift in the manner that we manage our elections. Instead of saying that a voter must go to a polling station in person and, from a setting of secrecy, immediately put the ballot paper into a secure box, which goes straight to be counted, or specifically requesting, as the hon. Gentleman described, a postal vote, the whole country now receives a confetti shower of charged, loaded, undetonated ballot papers that are designed to provoke higher returns but are open to all manner of maldistribution and malpractice on the way to being counted. [Interruption.] If the Minister wants to sneer, he should apply some basic common sense to the way in which a ballot paper goes from A to B to C to D and back to being counted.
The Minister for Local and Regional Government (Mr. Nick Raynsford): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Raynsford:
Why does the hon. Gentleman believe that the Electoral Commission recommended, in its
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evaluation of the 2003 pilots, that we should move towards a presumption in favour of all-postal voting in all local government elections?
Mr. Duncan: Again, I shall deal with that point shortly. Frankly, I do not care what the Electoral Commission said. I disagree and believe that experience is showing that the system is open to fraud and that the recent all-postal voting experiment is a dangerous backward step for democracy. Voters can more easily be impersonated and ballot papers can be intercepted or even bought and sold more easily under the new system. There is no similar scope for illegal practice when one votes in person at a polling station.
Mr. Duncan: I shall give way shortly. The Minister uttered one piece of good sense on 27 May when he said:
"No unexpected issues have been reported to my Department in those parts of the country where voting will occur through conventional means."—[Official Report, 27 May 2004; Vol. 421, c. 1735.]
Indeed. Voting through conventional means works.
Mr. Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe) (Lab): My hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) asked what specific issues of fraud or lack of security applied to an all-postal ballot as opposed to postal voting in general in an ordinary election. The hon. Gentleman replied with a general diatribe. Will he revert to the question and state what specific problem of fraud or lack of security applies to an all-postal ballot but would not apply to postal voting in a normal election?
Mr. Duncan: In a nutshell, when a postal vote is specifically requested, it goes directly to an individual person who wishes to participate in the ballot. That is not the case in all-postal ballots. Indeed, scattering ballot papers all over the place is a process that is almost impossible to police. One person found that their vote was up for auction on the eBay website—[Interruption.] It may be illegal, but that is just the visible malpractice. There has been talk of children selling ballot papers in return for a packet of cigarettes, and of people selling a whole batch of ballot papers for a fiver. At this rate, we will soon have a futures market in ballot papers, or a swaps market. Move over, stock exchange; soon, we will have a vote exchange. David Dimbleby's election reports will have to take on a new guise. He will be telling us: "Voting prices have collapsed today in a Blair market." Or perhaps the Prime Minister will only be happy when they are selling short.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. Christopher Leslie): The hon. Gentleman is making some very strong comments. He has made these allegations, but has he reported this information to the police?
Mr. Duncan:
The whole point is that these practices are almost undetectable, but they destroy confidence. Let us consider the basic administrative problems—[Interruption.]
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Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but I want to hear less shouting from a sedentary position. One or two hon. Members should know from their own experience of chairing that they should not be engaging in that practice.
Mr. Duncan: Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Shouting abuse is the only argument that they have.
Even before there was any suggestion of illegitimate practice, the simple administrative problems were enormous. Printing and distribution was a nightmare. Many ballot papers were delivered late and not printed properly. Barcodes did not work. Ballot papers arrived behind schedule. Emergency polling booths had to be opened in Bolton, for instance, after 6,000 ballot papers were never delivered, which I suppose gives another meaning to the name "Bolton Wanderers". In Gateshead, the constituency of the right hon. Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin), they had to put collection boxes in the town's 18 libraries because ballot papers were delivered late. More than 1,000 voters in Wigan had to go to the town hall after another distribution blunder. I suppose those ballot papers just went over the end of the pier.
Instructions were not clear, and there was massive confusion about which bits to put into which envelope. To split or not to split: that was the question. It was a sort of nationwide test in origami. Some packs were missing either envelopes or ballot papers. Some people received two EU ballot papers and no local one, while others received two local ones, and none for the European election. Some ballot papers got ripped in half during the count, or on opening, and the system was totally bemusing to blind people.
Mr. Raynsford indicated dissent.
Mr. Duncan: The Minister shakes his head, but the Royal National Institute for the Blind has cautioned, in a mood of some justified indignation, that many blind and partially-sighted voters were offered no provision whatever to assist their impairment. That was entirely the fault of the Government, and nothing whatever to do with the returning officer.
There was also a widespread problem involving the duplication of mailing lists, as my hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) has pointed out. New all-postal and existing postal lists were in some cases not scanned for duplicate distribution, so both sets were sent out. Some people were simply caught in a downpour of ballot papers, all addressed to them. In one case that has come to my attention, someone received four, which I have here. Here is one; here is another; here is a third; and, rather like on "Blue Peter", here is one I prepared earlier. With a bit more sticky-backed plastic, we could pretty well take over the whole country.
Returning officers up and down the country despaired at the process. Frankly, in the circumstances, they have all done remarkably well. They are to be congratulated for making the best of a bad job, but let us not pretend for a moment that they would ever embark on the same exercise again with any enthusiasm. They would not. Let us be absolutely clear whose fault this was. The Select Committee that looked into this issue just as the
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Government were bulldozing everything through Parliament, against the wishes of the upper House and the Electoral Commission, said that it was
"concerned by the Government's poor management of the arrangements for the pilots".
David Taylor: Would the hon. Gentleman accept that the litany of problems that he is describing was not at all evident in any part of the region that he and I partially represent, the east midlands, not least because there were few local elections? Is not the main problem the shortness of time that was available because of his colleagues in the other place delaying the legislation?
Mr. Duncan: That is not the reason at all. If the hon. Gentleman is in touch with his constituents, as I know that he is, he will have come across the widespread discontent of people being forced to vote by post.
Mr. Patrick McLoughlin (West Derbyshire) (Con): It really is nonsense for the Government—or even their Back Benchers—to blame the lateness of the determination of the Commons and the Lords on the Bill in question. We have known since before Christmas that the Government were going to combine the two elections. They had plenty of time in the parliamentary timetable to allow these things to be arranged. It was the Government leaving the legislation late because they could not make up their mind that led to this problem; it was nothing to do with the Lords and the Commons.
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