UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 640-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

ELECTORAL ADMINISTRATION

 

 

Wednesday 2 November 2005

SAM YOUNGER and PETER WARDLE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 73

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Constitutional Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 2 November 2005

Members present

Dr Alan Whitehead, in the Chair

David Howarth

Barbara Keeley

Mr Piara Khabra

Jessica Morden

Mr Andrew Tyrie

Keith Vaz

Jeremy Wright

________________

Witnesses: Sam Younger, Chairman and Peter Wardle, Chief Executive, the Electoral Commission, examined.

Q1 Chairman: Good morning, Mr Younger, Mr Wardle. Thank you very much for being with us this morning. Welcome. Perhaps I could start our question session off by asking you how difficult it has been to maintain the balance between partnership with Government and the scrutiny of the Government's proposals in cases such as the all-postal ballot experiment in 2004 and indeed the more recent issues of electoral fraud. I do apologise, Mr Younger. You indicated you might wish to make a few remarks to us before you started. Perhaps that question could remain on the shelf for a few minutes. We welcome your contributions.

Sam Younger: Thank you very much. If I may make a few opening remarks, first, to welcome this opportunity. Thank you very much for inviting us here today. It is the first time we have come in front of the DCA Select Committee on its own, and I hope it is something that can become a regular feature of the Electoral Commission's life. We are now nearly five years old, and it is a good time to begin to take stock of how well we have done so far and what needs to be done in the future. Very briefly, looking at our key areas of activity and summarising them, the first key area, which was, after all, the driver for setting us up in the first place, was the regulation of political party finances. I think it is fair to say that the provision of transparency that the Commission has been involved with producing after the legislation has actually broadly gone quite well, though there are clearly issues at the edges, issues about whether there is excessive bureaucracy, whether we could further simplify the processes while maintaining the outcomes that we are after, and recognising particularly that the bureaucracy involves pressures on people within parties who are volunteers and that we have to be very careful to make sure we minimise the disincentives to volunteers to participate in party work. The second area, advice on electoral law and practice, again, it has been very busy. Quite apart from the statutory reporting requirements on the conduct of elections, there have been all the reviews arising out of those statutory reports, particularly initially the general election of 2001 and all the propositions coming out of that which have fed into the current Electoral Administration Bill, which I will come back to in a moment very briefly. It is important not to forget all the other advice and consultation that we have with Government, whether it is things the Government asks us to comment on or whether things that there is a statutory requirement to consult on, secondary legislation, for example. A lot of that has gone on very effectively, out of the public eye, I think it is fair to say, and it is important to remember also that there are significant relationships of the same ilk outside. It is not just Westminster; it is in Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland as well where those relationships have developed, and I think have been valued. On the issue of advice on electoral law and practice, also there is advice to returning officers and electoral registration officers, and that has been a very key element, both in terms of guidance, trying to move towards greater consistency in the conduct of administration, and of course, that is part of the Electoral Administration Bill in terms of a development of that into setting and monitoring of standards, but also training of registration officers and of those involved in the poll. Voter awareness is the third area we took on. The broad advertising campaigns we have done I think have become increasingly successful as we have learnt more about the nature of them, and certainly the ones in 2004-05 have been very successful by industry standards in terms of impact. Then the work to get to harder to reach groups: I think we are beginning to shift the strategy there, because we are conscious that we have been demand-led up to now, and we feel there is a need to put a slightly more strategic intent behind it to be clear about what audiences we are targeting. That is not forgetting the other two areas of local government boundaries, where we have just completed the periodic electoral review cycle of local authority boundaries in England, and work on referendums. Of course, a year ago we did have a referendum under PPERA, but it was a relatively small-scale one, in a single region. Just to come on very briefly to the Bill that is currently before Parliament, I would emphasize that we warmly welcome the Bill. There is an awful lot in it that I think will make a difference, an accumulation of modest measures in themselves but I think cumulatively very important for the future. I should perhaps say a word on one of the issues on which we do have a difference with what is in the Bill at the moment, and that is over the question of registration of voters, just to note that our view is that individual registration is right in principle, for a number of reasons, which I am happy to go into later if Members wish, but is also vital to secure an underpinning for the security of postal voting, which is now up to a pretty significant proportion of the electorate, just over 12% at the 2005 general election. We do understand concern about levels of registration, and indeed, it was our own research only a couple of months ago that actually indicated the current levels of under-registration under the existing system, so we are very conscious of that and very much welcome a number of measures that are in the Bill to improve registration levels. Those are very important and very valuable, but we do believe that pilots are not the best way forward. We are nevertheless - I am very happy to talk about this later - keen to see whether a way forward can be found that can command widespread support.

Q2 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. I am certain we will have questions on the Bill as it is going through the House a little later on in our proceedings, but perhaps I could revive the question off the shelf, particularly on the relationship of the Commission and the Government, and ask you how you do maintain that balance between partnership and when there are proposals such as the all-postal ballot experiment - you have mentioned that - and of course, the more recent question of electoral fraud.

Sam Younger: One thing I would like to say, which I alluded to earlier on, is that I would not want the fact that we have not had full agreement with Government on a couple of quite significant issues to obscure the fact that there are an awful lot of areas where there is a very good level of cooperation on a practical level, not only at Westminster but also around Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well. That said, of course, we are conscious that that balance is not easy to keep. What I keep in mind above all is that, if the existence of the Commission is to have any value, then that value has to lie in its independence, whether of the Government of the day or of any other influence, and that is terribly important. That said, we cannot operate in an ivory tower, and clearly, in not operating in an ivory tower, there is a particular relationship with the Government of the day because of the day-to-day business, a lot of it uncontroversial, but where the health of those working relationships is very important. We have always recognised that when it happens it is not comfortable, but that if we have a view that we have stated clearly to Government and it does not fit with government policy, that is the nature of having an independent body. I think it is significant here that our accountability line is directly to Parliament, not to the Government of the day, and therefore when we do take a view that is not in line with government policy, I think we have a duty to Parliament to say that that is our view and to make sure that all Members of Parliament on whatever side of the House are aware of that. Our primary duty as an independent organisation I would say is to Parliament. That does not make it always comfortable. It is terribly important to work very hard at maintaining and sustaining relations with the Government of the day at all levels, but also with other parties within Parliament as well. We seek to do that. I would be the first to acknowledge that I am sure there are ways in which we can improve it. I do think in particular there are ways in which we can improve our links to Parliament and to Members of Parliament. I do not think we have yet got that right. I do not think the fault is wholly on our side. I think there are a number of issues at stake in getting it right. Indeed, the establishment now, since the changes in Government of this Committee is one way forward because, of course, before the issues that related to the Commission were spread across more than one Select Committee of the House. I think it is a good thing that it has now come together so that, as it were, when it comes to holding the Commission to account there is a logical committee that does that alongside the more specific role of the Speaker's Committee. It may be Peter Wardle, as somebody who came into the Commission a little bit later, and has only been with us for just under a year, might have a perspective to add, Chairman.

Peter Wardle: Thank you. As Sam says, I have been here for just under a year, and have been interested to see and hear about the way in which the Commission's role has evolved. I would agree with Sam's analysis of the way relationships are at the moment, and I think that both the Government and Parliament and the Commission have learnt over the past five years how to get the relationship better and how to recognise the realities of the relationship. Certainly, it seems that in the summer of 2004, when the first big issue arose which hit the headlines, around the all-postal voting pilots in four regions of the country - and this was before I was in the Commission but looking and listening to people who were around at the time - I think it is fair to say that the Government and Parliament and the Commission all learnt a little bit about their respective roles and have handled what is clearly a difference of opinion at the moment about the way forward with the registration system in a way which is informed and better for the experience that all parties went through at the time of the all-postal discussions.

Q3 Mr Tyrie: I think most people agree, but challenge it if you do not, Sam, that the experiment with postal voting, the scandals that we had, eroded some of the credibility of the electorate in the voting system. Given that, if you had the opportunity again, would you have made more noise about your concerns about the extension of the postal ballot system?

Sam Younger: It is always difficult to look in retrospect. You are quite right to say that the accumulation of experience over the period, particularly 2004-05, has actually led to, and public opinion surveys have shown that there is, a lessening of confidence in the integrity of postal voting, more people expressing themselves distrustful of its security.

Q4 Mr Tyrie: Have you published that?

Sam Younger: Yes, indeed. It is a MORI poll that we published not very long ago. As to the question of whether we should have shouted more loudly, this is really quite a difficult one, because I am very conscious that the role that we have as an organisation is in all of these areas to be advisory to Government and Parliament. This is why I said, for example, in relation to the all-postal pilot in 2004, the thing that we learnt there was that our initial statements of our position were statements that were made to Government, and I do not think we brought in Parliament as a whole adequately until a slightly later stage. We learnt from that and then made sure that the view we took was well-known and therefore the position we had would not be misunderstood. But I am a little bit wary about spending a lot of time getting up on a soapbox. I think it is important that those to whom we report and to whom we are responsible know what our view is as an independent organisation.

Q5 Mr Tyrie: I ask, because you might be in the same position all over again, might you not, if we were to find ourselves going into the next election with broadly the same system in place, with the same risks which you had identified before the last election, which turned out to be correct, but with the improvements to the postal ballot system not being pushed through adequately, the move to individual registration and only pilots, which you have already raised, being in place? How much noise are you going to make about this?

Sam Younger: Our whole approach on this is that we do not wish to go into another general election in effectively the same position that we went into the 2005 general election. We had, after all, been saying there needed to be an improved underpinning for postal voting going way back to 2003. It was not something that came out of the all-postal pilots of 2004 and the controversy surrounding those; it predated that, where we said any extension of the use of postal voting needs an underpinning which is absent at the moment. That is of critical importance to us. All I would say at this stage, because it is difficult to anticipate the future and I would not want to anticipate what the outcome of the Bill is going to be in its passage through Parliament, is I would hope that a way forward can be found that reconciles the security requirements that we see to be there for postal voting with the concerns about what happens to the register, but clearly, we will have to look hard at our own position at a certain point in the future if that is not achieved.

Q6 Chairman: We will certainly come back to specific questions on the Bill a little later on, but in terms of the Commission's work itself, and, as you have mentioned, the policy suggestions that are made by the Commission, is there at least a potential problem of duplication between the work that the Commission does and the work undertaken by the Department of Constitutional Affairs itself in reviewing electoral processes? Do you think perhaps those roles could be made a little clearer?

Sam Younger: It is an interesting point. I would say that the experience up to now has been that there has been a strong enough relationship between the two that there has not been a great deal of duplication, but I could imagine that danger is there.

Q7 Chairman: That relationship is a happy accident perhaps?

Sam Younger: I hope not an accident altogether, but it happens to have worked really pretty well. That said, I think if you go back - and one can see how this tension appears - when the Commission was established and when the PPERA was passed, there was intent that a lot of the effort in terms of reviewing electoral law and practice that had previously resided in, at that time, the Home Office would transfer to the Commission, and Government would look at what came back from the Commission and respond to it and legislate or not legislate as a result. I think the reality has been that, because the Commission has been quite active in this field, and things are coming back at Government, the Government has felt the need, in a sense naturally, to make sure it builds up its own capacity to analyse those proposals and decide whether to go with them. So I think there is a potential danger there in terms of how the resources are used. It seems to me it is perfectly healthy in the way it operates, but I think it maybe is not entirely consonant with what the original intention was in terms of where the bulk of the work would be carried out.

Q8 Chairman: Of course, the other new relationship is between the Commission and returning officers at local level. Do you meet them on a regular basis? Do you have a forum to discuss matters with them?

Sam Younger: Yes. I think the area where our networks and relationships have probably developed most comprehensively is in relation to returning officers and registration officers. We have regular contact and meetings with SOLACE for the chief executives and broadly the returning officers, also with the Association of Electoral Administrators, and we have relatively recently set up something that I think is potentially very important and valuable, which is called the Electoral Leadership Forum, which brings together on a regular basis effectively those who were the regional returning officers in the European Parliament elections and have therefore got used to playing some form of coordinating leadership role within different regions, to talk about strategic issues inrel elections. This has worked as quite a happy marriage at the moment, in the sense that it allows that group both to talk about the strategic issues but also to be kept in touch collectively with the specific issues of the moment. I think that is extraordinarily important and when the Bill talks, for example, about the Electoral Commission having a role in setting standards, I do not see that, and it cannot be the Electoral Commission sitting in isolation in an ivory tower pontificating about standards. Those standards have to be rooted in the experience and the perspectives of those who are actually doing the job. One has to remember in this that the Electoral Commission is not line-responsible for any of the actual management of elections, and therefore we can only be as effective as the inputs that we get from the community and we are very conscious of that.

Peter Wardle: Perhaps I could just mention a couple of the initiatives we have taken on the ground from day to day. We have a very healthy programme of secondment and exchange with electoral services staff around the country, so at any time we have a couple of people working with us who have recent experience of work in electoral services, and we build that up at the time of elections specifically to make sure we can deliver our role of giving advice and guidance - and very quick advice -to returning officers and electoral registration officers around the country. We also maintain a dedicated area on our website which is specifically for electoral services officers, and there they can get guidance, exchange views, and see what the latest developments are. So in addition to the face-to-face meetings we have, we have some very good day-to-day links that are informing the work we do and, as Sam says, it is very noticeable that this is an area where there was clearly a vacuum in terms of the relationship between those making policy in London and the capital cities around the country and electoral services officers around the UK, and that is one that I think most electoral services managers think we have stepped up to quite well and have developed a very good relationship.

Q9 Chairman: Do you see perhaps the need for a more formal arrangement for both consultation and review between the three ends of the triangle, the Department, the Commission and the administrators themselves?

Peter Wardle: I think it works pretty well at the moment. Whether it is a happy accident and we have the right people in place and the right relationships in place or not is difficult to say. You can always envisage a situation where relationships broke down, the wrong people are around. I do not see that risk as a high one at the moment. There genuinely is day-to-day contact between the Commission and officials in the Department of Constitutional Affairs and with electoral services managers around the country, both at the high level of the Electoral Leadership Forum Sam was describing but also in terms of day to day. There are a lot of good relationships where people can pick up the phone and have a quick meeting and discuss an issue because they know there is a particular issue in that area that there is some expertise to tap into.

Sam Younger: I would just add that I think there is a case for having a slightly more formalised relationship, particularly in relation to standards, if that comes out of the Bill, because those are standards that the Commission can only derive in full consultation with those on the ground who are going to implement them, and at the same time those standards need to be agreed by the Secretary of State, so we need to find a way of making sure that that is joined up. So I suspect we would need something more formal. In terms of the consultation and the links, it seems to me, with the returning officers and with Government at civil service level in particular, those are pretty good links. I do think where we have not done as well, as I think I mentioned at the beginning, is the links particularly for advice and perspective in Parliament, and I think that is something we do need to develop. As you know, nobody can be a commissioner and nobody can be a member of staff of the Electoral Commission at present - and that is another issue I think worth looking at - who has had a specific connection with a political party or elected politics in the previous ten years, and that does make it incumbent on us to find a way of making those links. We do that in a formal sense through one of the things that was provided in the PPERA, which was the Parliamentary Parties Panel, but that, both at the Westminster level and we have replicated them in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, I think has been very valuable on a day-to-day management level. What we have not managed to turn it into is a forum for real advice and experience coming from elected politicians, and that is something I would like to see developed.

Chairman: We might ask some further questions on that particular issue later on.

Q10 Jessica Morden: Has there been any research at all into the effectiveness of the Electoral Commission as a body?

Sam Younger: Not as a body as yet. The next piece of research is going to be the Speaker's Committee, in its responsibilities, has been planning a review of the effectiveness of the Electoral Commission and the appropriateness of its governance and financial arrangements and so on.

Q11 Jessica Morden: Have you done your own internal research?

Sam Younger: We do our own internal estimates of how we are viewed by stakeholders. We did a big stakeholder survey, which has raised a number of issues for us, not least the one about the links to elected politicians, which is one that has come out of that. But the formal review - and it is appropriate time now; we are five years in and there is enough experience to go on and the Speaker's Committee are looking at it and the Committee on Standards in Public Life are also planning an investigation.

Peter Wardle: Perhaps I could just add that, in terms of some of the particular activities we carry out, public awareness is one where we have quite a high profile, and we do, as any other public body would, carry out evaluation of the effectiveness of that public awareness. For example, looking at our last campaign, which was around registration and voting in the run-up to 2005 general election, we got some very good feedback. For example, 64% of adults aware of the campaign, a third of those who had seen the campaign claiming that that had been a factor in their decision to vote at the election. We also ran a helpline with 23,000 calls, 93,000 visits to the website, and 1.4 million leaflets around the place. So we are looking at the effectiveness of particular areas of work that you would expect us to evaluate and building on that experience. If you take another area, which is the whole area of advice on reform of the electoral system, looking at the Bill that is before Parliament at the moment, some 80% of the clauses in the Bill are direct results of recommendations that the Commission has made. We had a discussion with the Speaker's Committee about how you measure your effectiveness, and it seems to me that one measure of that is that if the Government and Parliament were not interested in any of the recommendations we were making, then clearly we would not be doing a good job. I think 80% of those recommendations being taken forward and we hope being taken forward on a cross-party basis - the areas of disagreement in Parliament I think are relatively limited - is quite a good indicator that we are looking at the right things and targeting the right areas.

Q12 Jessica Morden: Coming back to your stakeholder internal research, what strengths and weakness does it show?

Sam Younger: I think it is probably fair to say that among the stakeholders the key strength has been the strength of the relationship with the administrators and the returning officers. That is where we got the cleanest bill of health. It was less so among the political stakeholders, and I think there are two slightly separate reasons for that. One is an area that I think is inevitable, where I would not claim that we have done everything right but where we are intrinsically in an area that is going to provide some tension between us and political parties, and that is on the regulatory area. I think it is endemic in it that we will have a certain amount of that. Clearly, part of the concern that is coming back is people saying that the Commission is implementing this legislation; they do not necessarily understand well enough how politics works and what the pressures are at local level. We seek to do so within the constraints that we have, but conscious that that is an area we still need to work on, though, as we said, within the boundaries of the legislation, there are occasions when what is really being complained about is what is in the legislation as opposed to the way we are implementing it, but that is a slightly different issue. The other dimension is the dimension of the links to those with experience of party political activity and elections at the political level and how that advice feeds in, and feeling that the Commission does not always take proper account of or is perhaps being, as it has been described sometimes, naïve in those areas. That is why I referred earlier to one of the needs being to find a better way of plugging that in, although it is important to note that that is obviously, again, having a value as an independent organisation, especially making sure we have got the mechanisms fully to understand that input, not necessarily saying we will absolutely every time follow what is being said from there, because that is the nature of an independent organisation, and its value.

Q13 Jessica Morden: Do you think you have got the balance right then? I know one of the criticisms levelled at the Electoral Commission when it was first set up was that you were very heavy on the policing and regulation side and quite light, I thought, on the raising voter awareness of elections and advice to EROs, etc. Do you think you are now getting the balance right in terms of that?

Peter Wardle: It is very interesting. Again, taking my experience coming into the Commission four and a bit years in, I was struck by the different perceptions of the Commission. There was this strong perception that actually we were very focused initially on the regulation. It is fair to say that in the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life probably the key thing they were looking for from the Electoral Commission when it was first established was the regulation of political party finances, and that was the issue that the Committee had looked at. The Act that established us actually gave us other roles, including the public awareness role, and it was quite interesting. When I first arrived less than 12 months ago, the main criticism I was hearing from elected representatives was that we seemed to be doing an awful lot of public awareness, and was this over the top? Now, within 12 months, the key criticism I am hearing from people - not necessarily the same people, by any means - is the one you just articulated, which is that we do not seem to have the balance right. It is very difficult to get that balance. Our overall aim is that the voter can participate with confidence in an electoral system, the electoral system in this country, and when we go on to talk about the difference of views around different stakeholders on where we go with electoral registration, I think it is precisely there, about where you draw that balance without putting at risk unacceptably either the confidence that the electorate has in the system or their ability and willingness to participate.

Q14 Jessica Morden: You have recently undergone structural changes. Obviously, you have taken on the parliamentary boundaries. Are those structural changes complete and will you be needing additional staff? How many staff do you have?

Peter Wardle: We are just about 150 staff. Just on a point of information, we took on the local government boundaries not long after we were established. The Act does provide for us to take on parliamentary boundaries but that has not actually happened yet. The Government has indicated that it is minded to do that, and I believe is consulting with the Speaker and the Speaker's Committee at the moment about when and how to take that forward. Taking on the local government boundary functions, that is, reviewing local authority districts and wards, brought I think about 30 staff in, and that has in fact decreased because at that time they were in the middle of the periodic electoral review. That has roughly halved since then. They are now just carrying on one-off reviews in areas where the balance has got out of kilter from the original proposals. But looking at the possibility of taking on parliamentary boundaries, we do not think it will be anything like such an increase, partly because there is not a lot on the horizon at the moment. The first major review will be in Scotland in two or three years' time, but we think that will be a handful of staff rather than the tens of staff that were involved in the local authority work.

Q15 Jessica Morden: What do you see as the rise in your budget over the next ten years?

Peter Wardle: Our five-year plan, which I think has been made available to the Committee, actually looks at our core funding as remaining roughly the same. Over the first four years of the Commission, every year something happened so that, for example, one year there was a major programme of training for electoral administrators in the run-up to the European Parliamentary elections in 2004. Before that there was the acquisition of the local government boundary work. If you look historically, the figures went up quite steeply each year but when I came into post in December 2004, at the first meeting of the Speaker's Committee I was able to say that our core funding was now stable and would remain stable. So our five-year forecasts are running basically flat. That said, the Bill is proposing to give us some new responsibilities which were not part of that core funding, so I would expect that we might be looking at perhaps up to £1 million on our core funding, certainly in the initial year, to take on and establish the new functions that are contained for us in the Bill. There is also the question, depending where the changes to the system end up from the Bill, depending on the extent of the change from the voters' point of view and from the registration officers' point of view, whether we need to seek more money from Parliament to run public awareness campaigns, which again would probably spike in the initial year or two. For example, if we were running pilots, there would be quite a lot of explaining that would have to be done to voters to get them to understand what was going on in their particular area. Equally, if we came up with any other way forward, from the debates that Sam was suggesting, it would probably be enough of a change that voters would need some education and some awareness.

Q16 Jessica Morden: You mentioned the five-year plan. What new strategies do you see the Commission coming up with over the next five years?

Peter Wardle: Having finished the periodic electoral review of local authority boundaries, we inherited that work halfway through the review, and effectively carried it on on the basis it had been run up to then. There is an opportunity for us to review the whole way in which we approach that, and I personally would not be surprised if we came up with a new approach to looking at boundaries. At one extreme, is it, for example, right simply to have a major review of the whole country periodically, or is there more of a rolling programme that could be adopted, and that would both change the way in which we do the work but also the way in which our resources flow? That is one example. Clearly, if we move into the area of setting performance standards for electoral services management, which Sam mentioned is one of the things in the Bill, then that changes our relationship with those running elections around the country, and that would require us to adopt a new stance and to consider how we make those standards work in a way which adds value, which are accepted by local authorities as useful, and which do not at the same time conflict with all the other review and audit and inspection regimes that local authorities are subject to. The third key area I would like to mention is the one of regulation of parties, where I think, as Sam has said, the feedback from our stakeholders was that we were perhaps a little bit process-oriented in the way we do things, that there was too much form-filling, and that the approach we took was sometimes perceived as too inflexible. I think there is plenty of thinking being done around the wider public sector, and certainly it is something I have focused on because I have a particular background in thinking about these things in other roles I have had. There is certainly scope, I think, for looking at more intelligent regulation of parties, understanding, for example, which parties are high-risk in terms of those who are clearly finding it difficult to comply with the requirements of the legislation, and to tailor our approach so that they get more attention, and so that parties which clearly understand and are doing their best to comply do not necessarily have to jump through as many hoops as they do at the moment.

Q17 Jessica Morden: Will that filter all the way down through the parties to the very local levels, where you have obviously got volunteer treasurers who now have an amazing amount of regulation?

Peter Wardle: We do not in fact have a one-size fits all approach, but that is certainly how it is perceived at the level of local treasurers. Frankly, it is not in our interests. It conflicts with one of our aims, which is to maximise participation in the democratic process. It is not just about voters. It is also about the ease with which people can set up a political party, run a political party, and get involved in local elections on relatively local issues as well.

Q18 Mr Tyrie: Just a couple of quick points. First of all, you said right at the beginning that you had done some private research on your effectiveness. Could you put that into the public domain?

Sam Younger: There is no reason why not. I am very happy to.

Q19 Mr Tyrie: Secondly, your budget is now £26 million.

Peter Wardle: Just under.

Q20 Mr Tyrie: When I did a back-of-an-envelope calculation to work out how much of that is basically work that would have been traditionally paid for inherited from Home Office electoral-related activities, I calculated - you may want to challenge this and come up with your own figure if it is wrong - that that is roughly three times the level of expenditure on election-related services that the Home Office was costing us. So the key question on effectiveness seems to me to be what is happening to the rest of it, and are we getting effective use of that money? You have done a number of awareness campaigns with that £16 million or whatever figure it is, and you have embarked on a number of new activities. You have spent £0.75 million on a public awareness campaign for people between the age of 18 and 24 - I think that is roughly right - but you are only spending, I think, £9,000 on a public awareness campaign for voters living abroad, for example. They are roughly the same number, 5 million against 4 million. Do you think that is an intelligent balance of the use of your resources?

Sam Younger: There are a number of questions there, and I think the broad question about the value for money of what the Commission does is a very good one. It is one the Speaker's Committee is taking up and I think the Scrutiny Unit in the House is going to be helping with that. I do not know, and I am not going to specifically challenge your figures, except £16 million for public awareness. We have a ring-fenced £7.5 million maximum that we spend under section 13 on public awareness, but I think it is important to say that there were a number of things that we took over which I think are effectively what you are referring to: what the Home Office did do in public awareness terms, which was a good deal less than the £7.5 million that is now in the budget; the issues of policy and review were taken over from there; the whole area of local government boundaries, which was being paid for again elsewhere; but yes, there was an addition. Of course, there were completely new functions. The regulation of parties is a completely new area that has not been there before. We have also had - and I think it is worth noting this, though it has not been enormously costly, though it has had peaks in what we have bid for in budgets but not in what we have actually used is the whole role in relation to referendums - to get ourselves sorted to be able to run a referendum. There was a peak in terms of the budget looked much greater than what was actually spent in the end, because originally we were planning for three referendums in the three northern regions; in fact there was only one, and of course, there had been figures flying around in some of our planning documents about what the cost would be if we had a UK-wide referendum, so there is that as well. There is also something else that has not been there, which has been quite a significant cost over the years - two things, I would say: one is the relationship with the administrators, and I think that is important. As Peter was saying, there was a vacuum there. I think we have been providing really a very significant amount of support to administrators that I think has been of great value, and of great value to them, and that is borne out by some of the research.

Q21 Mr Tyrie: Okay, there are the three categories: what you were doing that the Home Office would have done anyway, the functions that you have been specifically asked to do under new legislation, and then there is the additional activities that you have decided with the discretion that is available to you to undertake. Perhaps you could provide a note to the Committee on those amounts, broken down in that way. Then of course we want to know whether you are spending those lines where you have some discretion effectively. I wonder if you could answer the point I made about voters living abroad public awareness campaigns versus the 18-24 year old point.

Sam Younger: I think it is fair to say if you wind back probably a year plus, and this was in common with a number of others, we had not looked particularly hard at either overseas voters or indeed service voters at that point. That we have taken on. The amount of money we are spending on that is increasing but we have to look at what is appropriate and what actually is going to be effective in those areas, and that is what we have done. So I think in relation to overseas voters, whereas the vast majority of what we do spend on public awareness is spent on advertising, and that can be effective in reaching certain groups in this country, advertising to reach overseas voters is actually an extremely blunt weapon. We have done a certain amount of it, and I think it is £38,000 or something we are spending this year, which is for advertisements in overseas editions of UK newspapers for example, that is of value, providing the leaflets for people, distributed through the FCO and consular offices, and that actually is part of the equation. When it comes, for example, to service voters, again the amount that it is right for us to spend is relatively limited.

Q22 Mr Tyrie: We will come on to them in a moment.

Sam Younger: We will come back to that later. I think one has to look at what is appropriate in terms of getting to a given audience, and although I would acknowledge that when you go back 18 months we spent less than we should have done in the early stages because it was not yet on our radar screen, I think we are getting much closer to something that is appropriate to what can be an effective use of public money to meet the purpose.

Q23 Jessica Morden: You have touched on it already, but what are you doing about the charge that you are sometimes seen as politically naïve? As you have mentioned, you cannot employ people who have in the last ten years had political experience, which means you sometimes feel out of touch with the nitty-gritty of running elections on the ground. An example would be your average treasurer or constituency agent who takes on a job because they are interested in being politically active but find themselves under scrutiny like a multinational company when they put in their accounts. What can you do to help?

Sam Younger: There are two things. One was within the context of the legislation as it is, improving the forums within which we do find a way of getting to those constituencies. Funnily enough, I have been particularly conscious of it in terms of Parliament. In terms of the volunteers and local levels, I think actually the mechanism of the Parliamentary Parties Panel that we have in London, and the same thing in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast, is actually quite a significant regular means of keeping in touch with that, quite apart from all the day to day contacts. I am conscious that we have not managed to find a good mechanism yet for consultation with Members of Parliament, for example. I have tried to set up things with each of the parties in Parliament. Funnily enough, we have succeeded to a degree with the Conservative party but it is the only one so far, where there is a sub-committee of the 1922 Committee that we meet with on a quarterly basis, broadly speaking. I would like to develop those kind of things, but maybe there is something more as part and parcel of the constitution of the Commission that could bring in that on an all-party basis, which I would very much like to see. I think the other issue which you allude to is a real one, and that is this question - I know it was a very considerable area of debate when the Bill was being passed in the first place - about whether there should be this prohibition on people with experience of active politics as commissioners or staff of the Commission, and the decision went that it should be. The premium was on the independence rather than on the experience of electoral politics. I think fundamentally at commissioner level and probably at most senior staff level I feel that is appropriate. I feel it may very well not be appropriate to have that as a requirement for staff throughout the organisation, because I can see very real advantages of having in the staff people who have had some experience here. Take the regulatory area, for example, somebody who had some years ago been a local party treasurer. At the moment they cannot actually be a member of staff at any level within the Commission by statute and I think there is a real case for looking at whether that could be relaxed. I would be a little bit more wary about extending that to commissioners, and part of the reason for that is one or two people have argued that maybe you should do that on the same basis as the Committee on Standards in Public Life, for example, which has nominees of the three main parties on it. I think that might be very sensible if the role of the Commission was exclusively advisory, but of course, it is not. There are executive elements to what the Commission does in relation to boundaries, in relation to references, for example, in theory to the Director of Public Prosecutions and so on, and I think that makes it really quite difficult to have party nominees there, but I think we do need to find, as I say, within the context of the legislation as it is getting those mechanisms better, and I fully accept that they are not fully there at the moment, but I think there are some things that could be adjusted in the future in legislation. We were not homing in on this sufficiently early because we did not have much experience of it for something to have come up that is really fully thought through in time for this current Bill, but I think it is something that is well worth looking at.

Q24 Jessica Morden: I am particularly interested in how you keep yourselves in touch with the nitty-gritty of what happens on the ground. Have you considered having inward secondments from political parties, or indeed seconding people from the Electoral Commission to go and work with local parties from all political persuasions on the ground?

Peter Wardle: One of the things we have started is to try and set up arrangements with political parties. It is difficult if you are a regulator because the regulated are always a little bit suspicious, and again, I have seen this in other areas I have worked. Most political parties have actually been quite open to this, of sending certainly all our staff who work on the regulatory side, trying to achieve a situation where they can go and spend some time working with a political party, not to spy on how their system is run and so on but to see how it works. I think it is fair to say that the bigger parties are probably more nervous about that the further down within the party it gets, and so it is quite difficult. I agree with you that the real problem is not really at national headquarters of major parties. It is with smaller parties that are generally not UK-wide or GB-wide, or it is with the smaller accounting units and constituency organisations within the bigger parties. It is quite difficult to get through to that without cooperation from the parties but it is certainly something that I think both the parties and ourselves recognise we would like to achieve if we can find a way. Perhaps I could just mention one thing which is helpful for the local treasurers, which is in the Bill. Clause 51 of the Bill actually changes, very helpfully from our point of view, and I think from the parties' point of view, the bands. At the moment you have a very long band for income and expenditure. Any party between £5,000 and £0.25 million is treated in the same way, so what tends to happen is that people with £6,000 are treated in the same way as people with £249,000. There is a very welcome change in the Bill for us which arises from one of our recommendations, which introduces four bands, and means that really, everybody below £100,000 can be dealt with on a much lighter touch basis and, in line with the risks that are around it, we can concentrate the more multinational approach on the £100,000 plus parties, who are generally in our experience better organised and able to deal with some of the accounting requirements that are in the Act.

Q25 Jessica Morden: Do you accept and are you aware that a lot of the regulation you brought in early on did put off a lot of volunteers from being agents and treasurers and demotivated people, which is very difficult from the political parties' point of view?

Peter Wardle: The point has certainly been put to us. As Sam said earlier on, partly it is not always the case that it is the Commission laying regulation. Some of this is actually in the Act and we are stuck with it. You will know that in some areas we ourselves have said, "This doesn't make sense." It is not easy to apply this legislation in the 2000 Act, and some of what is in the Electoral Administration Bill is responding to that and putting it right. It is important to think back to the climate in 2000, when this was introduced. One of the things which surprised me, and I think still surprises me, is that the issue of sleaze in terms of financial affairs of political parties was such a big issue in the run-up to PPERA 2000 and really is not a big problem at the moment, by and large. Parties have adapted to this and, on the whole, it is working pretty well. But I think it is true that we were probably a bit over-zealous in the way we approached things and, to be fair to my colleagues in the Commission at the time, this was new legislation in a new area; there was no model readily available and some mistakes were made; we did not always get it right. Sometimes I think it is fair to say that some of the headquarters staff in political parties encouraged us in the belief that this would work and we were both wrong about it and we both agreed after a couple of years that this needed to be looked at again. All I can say, I think, is that there is genuine recognition of that between parties and the Commission, and a desire to make it work as well as possible, while at the same time making sure that we keep the public interest benefits that the Act was designed to achieve.

Sam Younger: I think it is fair just to add that one of the real bugbears in terms of volunteers at local level in the early stages was that the way the penalties in the Act were constructed, there was very little between a mild rap on the knuckles and a criminal prosecution. That meant a lot of volunteers at local level thought, "My God, if I get into this, I could be criminally prosecuted." One of the things that we do need to look at strategically is looking at having a much more sensible and proportionate sense of what the penalties can be, because I think that did scare people, quite fairly but unnecessarily in reality, but it was a real issue and I hope that is fading a bit.

Q26 Barbara Keeley: I was actually slightly surprised to hear you say that you are meeting with a sub-committee of the 1922 Committee quarterly and not with other parties. I think that is rather astonishing for an independent body. I am really quite surprised at that. Just on this, secondments are not the way. Certainly, where electoral innovations have been piloted round the country, it is quite common for local authorities to have all-party working parties. There are simply enough solutions to finding a way to bring together groups of politicians. We have all-party parliamentary groups here. I do not think it would be beyond the wit of any of us to come up with some sensible suggestions. I have to say, I do think meeting separately with sub-committees of one party is perhaps a bit disturbing.

Sam Younger: Just to respond to that, we have been meeting with this group on the 1922 because we were able to set it up. I have been in touch with a number in the Labour Party, including the Chief Whip, the Chair of the Party, and it has always been about to happen but it has not actually happened so far. What I have done, which is, if you like, a substitute - because part of this from our point of view is just to have a sense of where people within the party are coming from and it has not got any executive function of any kind - I have been, through the good offices of David Kidney, who runs the DCA backbench group, he brings together people for a periodic meeting, so that is a way of getting to it there in the first instance, but I would like something more formal if we could manage it.

Q27 Barbara Keeley: Up and down the country the people who run the elections every year and are charged with that are the local activists and local councillors. We, happily, only come to elections every four or five years. If you need that relationship, it has really got to be with those people over the next few years. For instance, the changes that we are talking about here are going to affect people other than us before they affect us.

Sam Younger: I think it is fair just to note there was something I did not mention earlier on that is important. One of the areas where we do actually have quite good links established has been through the LGA, which again is an all-party group of the LGA, sometimes the leaders, sometimes an all-party group of people who have a particular interest in elections issues, but that liaison actually is quite strong and valued.

Q28 Barbara Keeley: I think we should take this away and look at it actually, because I think it is quite important that you get this proper relationship with the parties.

Sam Younger: I absolutely agree.

Q29 Barbara Keeley: It does not sound as if it has been addressed in anything like a satisfactory way up to now. It is a big issue. It is a big issue to colleagues, I think, and I think we should look at it.

Sam Younger: I am very happy that that should be done.

Q30 David Howarth: If the Commission expands its role, obviously it will come up against similar models in other countries. I was wondering whether there are lessons to be learnt from other places, perhaps on the question we have just been talking about and other things?

Sam Younger: Clearly, there is a whole range of models elsewhere. There is one area where our Commission is dissimilar from really any of the others. The big difference in models elsewhere is that in some places you have an independent electoral commission and in others you actually have electoral issues that are managed by a department of government, a ministry of justice, whatever it is. When one looks at the independent electoral commissions, in almost all the other examples, the independent electoral commissions actually have the function of running elections. Clearly, that is something we have looked at quite a lot and scratched our heads about. Our own view at the moment is that we do not think the right way would be to go down that path. That is partly for historically reasons. We have got such a long tradition of decentralisation in running elections in this country, and also it seems to me that link, in terms of running elections, to local authorities is one that makes much more sense in resource terms than having some big central body running elections. What we are looking at in the experience elsewhere is how, without going down that road, we can help get better consistency. This is where the standards issue is a key element. On the question of links politically and so on, I am not sure how much we can learn very directly. One of the things that strikes me about a lot of our counterpart organisations is that they deal with the running of elections, and that will keep the politicians and the political parties very much at arm's length. We do not run elections. We have a significant role that is actually advising on law and policy. For that there is a necessity, it seems to me, to have those kinds of things. There is a bit of a tension there. As we say, and as we have been acknowledging, we do not think we have quite got through that to the right model. Indeed, frankly, I would be surprised if one could have the right model only a few years into a completely new organisation operating in this kind of field. I do think there is room to get that better. I am not sure in that way what the experience elsewhere really tells us because the model is quite different from what there is elsewhere.

Q31 David Howarth: I come back to the first point that a national body might be separate from electoral commissions, a separate body running elections on a national basis. When I was leader of a council, the chief executive used to say to me, "Why do we want this? Should not some national body be running this?" I am not too sure whether the point about decentralisation applies here, especially since we are now talking about national standards and ring-fencing. Is it right that funding, say, for canvassing to get people on the register should compete against other local services when you might say that the electoral register and better arrangements are rather fundamental and run at a different level of activity than the services themselves?

Sam Younger: You make a fundamentally important point in terms of the resourcing of electoral activity. In particular, I think this is very relevant in the context of the Bill. There is resourcing to encourage registration, for example. I think there is a real fear, and it is a fear that has been expressed to us by chief executives of local authorities among others, that there may be some more money coming to help with registration but if it is not ring-fenced, the chances are that it is quite likely, maybe not in year one but subsequently, to disappear into something else that is seen as a necessity. A report we did a couple of years ago on funding of electoral services did very much argue for some form of central ring-fenced funding that would allow these things to be done discretely. I think there is a difference between that and a national organisation actually running elections. There may be a half-way house. One of the things we are looking at, for example, at the moment, is to say: if you move beyond standards, is there some arrangement whereby you use the model of the regional returning officers who are there for European Parliament elections and extend that model across the piece so that you have a degree of co-ordination above the local level, which might or might not be under the aegis of the Commission or A. N. Other body. The key point to me about keeping the embedding in local authorities in general terms is that electoral costs are episodic. While there is a good case for core funding coming from a central ring-fenced source, local authorities do have the capacity to flex the resource they put in so that they can cope with the peak at election time but they are not carrying a body of staff that are elections specialists and who then might not be fully employed the rest of the year. Particularly at election time, that ability for a local authority to call on a resource at short notice to support an election is of value. It is an open debate. Certainly, from our point of view, it seems to me it is right to go down the road of standards and monitoring standards and ask whether that and some ring‑fenced funding work well. There may, in the long term, be a case for changing the system altogether, but it is not one that we will be pressing for at this stage.

Q32 David Howarth: The basic idea is that simply getting people to count the votes is something that local authorities have traditionally been able to do and have the network connections to do. Could you not envisage rather simple ways in which that knowledge could be handed over to a regional or a national body?

Sam Younger: Yes, I think a regional body is one that is genuinely worth looking at. It is interesting that one of the things that came out in the European Parliament elections was the real value of regional level people who have real expertise and experience and who could help others in their region. There is a variation of models you could go to but the point is, it seems to me, to make sure that you keep the best of the local plug-in of electoral services while improving that co-ordination. I think what is in the Bill is a good start.

Peter Wardle: We have tended to talk in this last conversation mainly about the actual voting. One of the benefits of having local authorities involved is at the registration stage. Whatever system of registration you have, looking at international models, there are some that do that on a national basis. You do get then the problems of lack of local knowledge. It seems to me that if the local authority is doing its job well, it is pretty well placed to get at the community it serves at the widest level, to reach the hard-to-reach groups. There are lots of parts of local authorities whose business that is. One of the things that sometimes happens is that the electoral services part of the local authority is slightly insulated from those other bits of expertise in the local authority, for all sorts of historical and sometimes good reasons. If, for example you were to ask a national body like the Electoral Commission or some other national body to get down and find really difficult to register groups in Liverpool Riverside, for example, the area where registration is one of the lowest in the country, I am not sure a national body would be able to claim it could do it any better than a local authority which had better links into the local community.

Q33 Mr Tyrie: I have a couple of questions on political donations. Is the Electoral Commission happy with the powers that you have, the sanctions, over the political parties which do not meet your reporting requirements?

Sam Younger: The answer to that in general terms is "no". That relates back to what we were saying earlier, that there is a disconnect between, as it were, the nature of the crime and the punishment. The two do not fit at the moment. In many areas, there is simply nothing between an informal or a formal rap over the knuckles and a criminal prosecution of the treasurer of a party. We have certainly not had a single case where it would be anything other than absurd to go for a criminal prosecution of a treasurer of a party. That is why I say we need something that moves towards some more technical level penalties which encourage compliance without criminalising non-compliance unreasonably. Most of the cases we have had of non-compliance have not been deliberate subterfuge; there might have been a change of treasurer at local level, whatever it might have been, and something slips through the net and so we get reporting late. At the moment, we are hobbled. We are not satisfied with that. That does need to change.

Peter Wardle: One particular area that I think it is worth exploring is the penalty clause 49 of the Bill which provides for a party to be deregistered if, in this case, it does not submit its annual return confirming who its officers are. There are two other areas where quite a few parties failed to comply and that is in sending in their reports of donations and sending in their annual statement of accounts. If we arrive in a world where the statement of account regulation applies only to the bigger parties as a consequence of the change we were talking about earlier - I think sometimes it is genuinely difficult for smaller parties to get their accounts prepared and in on time - and if only those parties that you can reasonably expect to achieve that were required to do so, then also, in relation to returns of donations, it would be well worth exploring the possibility, frankly, if someone is not playing by the rules, of kicking them out of the game until they are prepared to pay. That is the way that the legislation is framed. From talking to parties of all sizes, this would not be the day after the thing does not appear, but if a few months later there was no sign that the party was prepared to comply with the rules that all the other parties are complying with, then it seems the more appropriate sanction would be to remove their registration rather than to take a personal prosecution against the party treasurer, for example. That just seems the wrong response.

Sam Younger: May I add something that we have noted, that has been taken up and is under discussion now in the context of the Bill? There is one area of donations that we feel from our point of view has not worked at all, and that is the role of the Commission in donations coming to Members of Parliament or local councillors and others, where we feel we are effectively duplicating existing arrangements and not adding value. That is one particular matter that was put into the Bill five years ago and we think there is a strong case for it not being there.

Q34 Mr Tyrie: Do you think that the public have a deeply entrenched view that money can buy access and influence? If so, do you see it as a key part of your role to think of ways of dealing with that?

Sam Younger: I think that is certainly true. As you know, we did a review on the issue of funding of political parties. The public opinion that came out of that did say that people have a concern about that in terms of large donations.

Q35 Mr Tyrie: But you shied away from the key recommendations which might have addressed it, did you not?

Sam Younger: Yes, I suppose it is fair to say we did, but that was on the basis that we felt essentially there was a contradictory view at the time expressed in public opinion with people saying, "We do not like the idea of big money being able, as we see it, potentially to buy influence that makes us feel uncomfortable". At the same time, when you ask the following question as a consequence of that, "Is it right that public money should go to political parties", the answer is "no".

Q36 Mr Tyrie: True, but that is why a body like yours knows the cost of this.

Sam Younger: It is fair to say our view was at the time that this is a debate that should go on but it is not a debate that has got to the point where we would recommend firmly that we do that.

Q37 Mr Tyrie: So they believe this but not too strongly and you are not too worried about it?

Sam Younger: It is a concern but if we felt it to be so fundamental 18 months ago to say that we actually need to move now, I think that is what we have said, but I do not think we feel it is quite that fundamental at the moment.

Q38 Mr Tyrie: We note those views. We have spoken on public platforms together on this. One last question in this area very quickly: do you think that the recent attention that is being paid to the possible misuse of MPs' allowances, which should be spent for constituency purposes but about which allegations have been made that they are used to secure party political advantage in specific constituencies, is one that you need to address?

Sam Younger: I am very wary about it. At one level, you could say the Commission is involved in everything to do with elections and should take an interest in all of this. It seems to me that the use of parliamentary allowances should be a matter for the parliamentary authorities. We would say that allowances for Parliament should not be used for purposes other than those for which they are intended. It is no part of what we police. There is another body that does that. I am very wary about getting into areas that are not ours to run.

Q39 Barbara Keeley: You have welcomed the Bill. I think others have said that perhaps they were looking for a clearer consolidation of existing electoral law. Could you comment on that? Do you think there is enough done there to consolidate electoral law?

Sam Younger: The answer to that is "no". We have always found, and I am sure others have, that when people from any other country come to this country and ask, "Can we have a copy of your electoral law, please", the answer is always, "Well, err, that is a pretty difficulty thing to do". In principle, we would very much like to see a consolidation of all electoral law, but that is a very major undertaking. Our feeling is that we should not delay putting in some of the very important measures that are in this Bill by two, three or maybe more years in getting a consolidation. There is a very strong case for consolidation because I think it is for everybody. It is not just for those administering elections; it is also for candidates and agents who have to deal with elections. It is supremely complicated, with the result that I think it is fair to say on all the points of electoral law there are very few people who thoroughly understand it. Consolidation is very important.

Q40 Barbara Keeley: There are quite a few questions on individual registration. You have already referred to that. Are there any other provisions in the Bill, things that are not there or matters you would like to see extended or changed? Is that the key one?

Sam Younger: The key one is individual registration. There are a number of others where there are provisions that I know have been subject to debate and questioning in Parliament and where I think there is a debate to be had and a judgment to be made. When it comes to registration, because of issues of principle but probably even more in terms of urgency, we feel that are the issues of security underpinning that. That is the key area where we feel what is there in the Bill does not at present go far enough. I am happy to elaborate on that if you like.

Q41 Barbara Keeley: I move on to thinking about registration, there are a number of points. When we had a Second Reading of the Bill, the Minister of State referred to places in the country which he called democracy deserts where there was low registration and a low turnout. Is that helpful? I think people are talking here about registration in some places reaching crisis level. Terms like that are going to be used. Is that a useful way for us to start thinking about it, that there are spots in the country where we do not have the same democratic involvement? Those are serious issues that we need to look at in some depth.

Sam Younger: I think they are very serious issues. That is one of the reasons behind particularly the research that we published in September on under-registration, which was done on the basis of looking at the comparison with census figures. Yes, it goes back, but it is the first time we have been able to get some really authoritative figures cross-referenced against other sources for some years. That does show that the percentage of non-registration for England and Wales - we have not yet been able to get the figures for Scotland, those will follow, and Northern Ireland is in a different position - was going up to 9%. That is a lot of people, 3.5 million in England and Wales. It is a very critical area. It is one that we take seriously and we are very pleased to see in the Bill a number of things that we think are important in terms of encouraging registration.

Q42 Barbara Keeley: There are other points where that figure might be discussed. I have heard colleagues talking about wards and polling districts where the figure may be 20%. People say there are some streets where nobody was registered in every other house. We are not really talking about less than 10%; we are talking about much more than that, are we not?

Sam Younger: That is fair enough. The detail of the research we did shows inner city areas in particular. There are geographical areas of under-registration; there are also particular categories of people under-registered. One of the things that is important about that research is that it does identify some particular targets for particular campaigns to get people on to the register. We know we are going to be dealing, even in the best of all possible worlds, with what are limited resources and will always be limited resources to do this. We hoped there would be a good deal more there for registration than there has been up to now and different approaches to registration. Nevertheless, it is terribly important that this has to be done particularly area by area to target that effort.

Q43 Barbara Keeley: Should that be the priority now in encouraging participation in turnout? I think there is a view that there has been a focus on turnout and participation perhaps at the expense of registration?

Sam Younger: After all, registration is the precondition for turnout, is it not? It is not a precondition necessarily for what the turnout percentage might look like, but in the real world it is a precondition for the numbers that are going to be in a position to go out and vote, so it is absolutely critical. That is why our own view has been that, when it comes to the system, there is tension at certain points between participation and security. You have to make a judgment about where you are on that continuum. It is important in what we are putting forward as necessary for integrity that we make sure that, parallel to that, there is an enormous effort to make sure you keep people on the register. That said, we are very conscious of the points made in the Second Reading debate, and indeed elsewhere, about the difficulties of registration. Partly as a result of that and what we know to have been those issues, we have been looking at whether there is another way. We do not regard pilots as satisfactory, and that is, above all, because we think it is urgent to get something in place. The problem with pilots is that it takes a year or two for anything to be shown. One item we are looking at is: are there any other ways of delivering the sort of security benefit we want while minimising the effect on the register? There are one or two things worth nothing and perhaps putting in for consideration in that context. We have said that in terms of pure individual registration, which is what we think ought to be the end game that one could move back from, in the rest of GB we do not feel national insurance numbers are something we should be asking people to provide at registration if we are looking at the comparison with the Northern Ireland model. Although in human rights and data protection terms individual forms on the register are better than household forms, we certainly would not go off the wall if household forms were a way of smoothing that change. One of the things we thought might be worth looking at as a transitional phase towards individual registration that would deliver what is most urgent, in terms of the security underpinning, is whether it is worth considering, as it were, extending the fields in the existing registration form to have a signature and a date of birth; you would not require that signature and date of birth in order for people to be on the register, but those details would have to be provided before somebody was issued with a postal vote. That is one way, because we are very conscious of the danger of people dropping off and there are enough people who are not there already. I just note that to the Committee as one possible way through the dilemma.*

Q44 Barbara Keeley: The sensitivity about this for a lot of people, both locally and nationally, is that where other countries have tired individual registration, it has caused a drop of 10%. For many people a figure like that is their majority, either as local councillors or as members here. If you are talking about a period of a number of years when people will disappear, it can clearly be seen that, based on that, elections will be lost. It is understandable that that is the case. That is the concern. You seem to be saying that if personal identifiers include signature and date of birth, that is something which would be tried on a basis that is not mandatory but people will start to get used to it.

Sam Younger: One of our starting points is that there is a real issue about a lack of security underpinning particularly postal voting, and a real issue of public confidence interest in this area. If we were in a situation where we only had elections every five or six years, then piloting and seeing how that turned out, and then seeing whether we implemented it, would be viable. The problem we have, being realistic about it, is that the first canvas in which one might pilot this would be 2006. Then you would need to do it again in 2007 in order to get any feel. By then, you would be in danger of moving into another general election, and either rolling out a completely new system, if it has worked in those pilot areas, just before a general election, or, alternatively, not rolling it out because it has not worked terribly well. Then, it seems to me, we would be in a position at the next general election much as we were at this one. That is why I think we say that if the priority is in terms of time - and we would still hold to the principle of individual registration anyway but it is not the principle that is the driver of the urgency - one way of doing it may be to think about encouraging people to provide their signature and date of birth. You do not throw them off the register if they do not provide that over a period, but you say there would have to be something that says that if you apply for a postal vote, it is going to be made clear on that application that these details will be entered on the electoral register and will be used for future comparison. After all, it is fair to say that the provision of a signature and date of birth - and I do think the national insurance number is a bit different - is not rocket science; it is relatively simply and people are used to doing it in many contexts. In that position, I would suspect that over a relatively short period we would probably find that the vast majority of people had provided those details and, as it were, at that point you could move in that direction. I throw that out. I would want to say that we would still prefer to move to something whereby we would call for individual access. I am trying to think of a way through concerns.

Q45 Barbara Keeley: Could we not start to see a range of pilots, though, as a testing ground for this? There is, on the one hand, great sensitivity about a big drop in registration and losing 10% of people off a register which we understand already has four or five million people missing off it. The notion of losing another half a million is a serious issue and a very serous issue in local places where that will make the difference to a lot of people between winning and losing an election. Would it not be possible to specify a number of pilots, which would then test the effect? There is a concern that it would have an effect. I have heard colleagues say that they do not think we have recovered in registration terms from the poll tax and people going off for that reason. Do you not see that having pilots is then a set of stepping stones and could be the way forward?

Sam Younger: I return, in one sense, to the point I made before that I think there is urgency about this. If we go down the pilot route, however good the pilot, we are not going to be in a position to have underpinned that security and reached that, even over an election cycle. That is our problem with that. It would be ludicrous for us to have anything against pilots per se. Were one, for example, to go down the road of making provision for a signature and a date of birth but not make that compulsory on the register, that still would not prevent the possibility of running a pilot for compulsory individual registration in some places. The point of the transition proposition is to try to make sure you are in a position where you get security underpinning universally across the country for postal voting without losing significant numbers of people off the register. In our view, there could be a role for piloting some different things. I suppose I go back to saying that the one thing that we would not want is to go into the next general election with really no universal underpinning of postal voting as in the 2005 election.  That is the main point.

Q46 Barbara Keeley: Given that sensitivity, and particularly perhaps in local authorities where there are the lowest rates of registration now, and I have said we are looking at a situation where there is 20% or 30% in some areas and more in some more localised areas, how can that be dealt with? Cleary it would be very difficult for those local authorities if they are required to do something which is going to make the situation worse than it currently is? Do you have any ideas about how that can be handled, where things are already very difficult and registration levels are very low? In my constituency, I think the registration level is 95% and we would not be so concerned about it. In other local constituencies it is much lower than that.

Sam Younger: I suppose it is fair to say it is in acknowledgment of that issue that I mentioned the possible transitional notion. It is worth underscoring that there is much in the Bill that does encourage registration and a lot is going to be about what the resources are and how well those resources are targeted. It seems to me that allowing people to register much closer to the date of an election is a very real encouragement to getting people on the register. What we are looking at is whether that acknowledges the problem while trying to get the best of all worlds by delivering the security underpinning that we also think is right. There is a tension there. There is no point in denying that there is a tension. It is a question of where on that spectrum you go.

Peter Wardle: If you take those constituencies where you have very high levels of under‑registration, leaving aside the timing point Sam has described, if you have a two‑year pilot, effectively at around the summer of 2008 the Government would have to take a decision on whether to roll it out now in full, possibly for a general election in early 2009, or whether nothing can be put in place. Either of those situations is undesirable in terms of the run-up to the next general election but, if you take those constituencies with high levels of under‑registration, then the transition approach that Sam has just described would allow the focus to be entirely on getting people onto the register. The signature and date of birth need not be a barrier for those people because the important thing is to get those people who have never voted before and never registered before to the polling stations. Postal voting might be something that comes later. If community postal voting is important, then the focus of the campaign would be different and it would be about encouraging people to give what are, after all, two relatively straightforward bits of information, signature and date of birth, in order to give them the flexibility either of voting in person or having a postal vote. There is the opportunity there of simply saying, "To get you on the register, we are not going to erect any barriers and you will still be able to get to the polling station. You will not drop off the register". By contrast, if you had the sort of piloting that is being discussed at the moment, if the pilot were run in that particular local authority, then it is quite likely that there would be some compulsion about the signature and date of birth. Therefore, you would have that barrier. What we are trying to look at is a way that meets the concern about not having postal votes anywhere in the country, coming in without some way of checking the identity, but also allowing areas of severe under-representation to have people on the register without necessarily having to go that extra mile in terms of the identifiers.

Q47 Barbara Keeley: As a final point, and thanks for taking these out of order because I have to leave soon, I take what you said about pilots: if pilots go ahead, what role would the Commission take on evaluation that?

Sam Younger: The Commission's position is that our role in all these areas is to advise Government and Parliament but to work with whatever Government and Parliament enacts. If that involved us in a role of evaluating pilots, that is what we would do.

Peter Wardle: That is what the Bill suggests would happen, that we would be involved in the piloting. We do have a lot of experience in evaluating pilots that have taken place between 2002 and 2005.

Q48 Jeremy Wright: May I take you back briefly to the principle of registration? The argument that Government makes, and we heard it from the Lord Chancellor when he gave evidence to us, is that they do not like the idea of individual registration - we are making some of the points that have already been made - because they conclude it will result in a drop in registration. One of the main ways in which that may happen is because at the moment with household registration 50% of those in perhaps the 18-24 age bracket are registered by mum and dad, whereas they would not bother doing it themselves. We are all clear about your position, that you believe individual registration to be the right way and you would like to see this carried forward in a clause. I just want to try and get a sense of your reasoning in that regard. Do you accept that the Government's concerns are valid, that there is a worry about that and you simply regard your perception of the advantages of individual registration as outweighing those concerns, or do you think the Government's concerns are not valid in that regard?

Sam Younger: As was indicated by answers to the previous questions, I think our view is that there are legitimate concerns there. Frankly, I think it would be absurd not to think there are legitimate concerns when you look at the incidence of under-registration, however much one might say you cannot have an absolute read-across. We have had a very significant pilot of individual registration in Northern Ireland. Yes, there was a drop but not as big a real drop as the initial 10% would indicate. While one cannot put an absolute figure on it, a goodly part of that was actually names that should not have been on the register anyway, so it may be a more limited issued. We recognise that that is a real issue. You are right that, looked at on this spectrum of absolute security at one end of it and, as it were, no barrier to participation at the other, we believe that two things, an individual signature and a date of birth, provided on the register are where the right balance is struck. You are right to draw attention to the fact that it is a matter of principle. I do think it is quite wrong in this day and age that it is not the individual who makes the decision about whether they are on the electoral register. I think the best example of this is that I am in a position at the moment where I can sign up my wife and son on the electoral register; I could sign up for them to have their details sold to commercial organisations and they have no say in the matter. I do not like that. That said, I think we would acknowledge that the security underpinnings of increasing postal voting are the key to the urgency of needing to have something in place now.

Q49 Jeremy Wright: Do you have any sense of how much of a drop in registration you think might come about if individual registration were to be the way we did it?

Sam Younger: We have obviously had thoughts about that and thought about it quite a lot. We have not tried to put a figure on it. There are so many different variables involved. One would say that probably, compared to Northern Ireland, the real drop is less than 10% in the first instance. There are a number of measures that can make sure you do not, certainly over a cycle of a year or two, lose large numbers off the register. They have reinstated the carryover in Northern Ireland. In the rest of Great Britain, probably one would include the carryover in the arrangements so that you did not lose people who did not register every year; you would allow people to register close to the date of the election. I think that is important and there is a duty in terms of maximising the register. There is no reason, if the resources are there even as a one-off, that if you once brought this in you could not have your regular canvas and then target on a re-canvas those areas where the register was deficient in the same year, in December or January, immediately following. There are a number of measures that we feel could effectively mitigate the possibilities of a downward move. Incidentally, with good campaigning at local authority level and more widely, I think there is a chance that that in itself could begin to get some of the non-registered onto the register. We are wary of putting a figure on it because in a sense you are damned if you do and you are damned if you do not. Either you put up the spectre of some massive figure that you cannot really back up or you risk looking absurdly over‑optimistic about what will happen. I think it is better to acknowledge that there is a real issue there, but there are some measures that could mitigate that.

Q50 Mr Khabra: The success of the democratic system of government depends on how efficient the electoral registration process is. How do you get people to participate? This brings to my mind that there is perhaps a need to have compulsory registration and compulsory voting. This is an old question. On the other hand, clause 63 of the Bill empowers returning officers and electoral registration officers to encourage the participation of electors in the electoral process. Should this be a mandatory requirement to prevent less active councils from not taking advantage of the new power? Some of the councils are not as efficient as they should be. Secondly, what methods would you recommend for encouraging people to register and vote? Thirdly, what checks will the Commission make to compare the active campaigns of different local authorities? The various local authorities have different abilities to conduct elections and register voters.

Sam Younger: There are two or three questions there that I will try to answer and Peter can pick up the gaps. Compulsory registration and voting: in a sense, there is a degree of compulsion in law on registration at the moment because it is an offence not to return information requested by the ERO. I think it is fair to say that the ability to make registration compulsory actually depends on having some system whereby it is the individual's responsibility rather than, as it were, that of a head of household. The other question that would have to be asked, and it is not something we have an answer to, if you were going to make registration compulsory, is: have you got the means to implement and enforce it and the will to enforce it? I think compulsory voting is different. As a Commission, we are doing some research at the moment on the experience of compulsory voting in other countries. My personal view is not very sympathetic to compulsory voting, as it happens, because I do think an individual should decide.

Q51 Mr Khabra: What would you say about multiple occupied properties where there is a landlord or the property is owned by a company and there are tenants? So far, the system of registration is that the local authority delivers an electoral registration form actually addressed to the landlord. The tenants in the house do not even know that the landlord is not interested at all in registering voters. Sometimes landlords are trying to avoid the local authority finding out that the property is overcrowded or they are cheating the system itself. Why do you not think that there should be compulsory registration in such a situation?

Peter Wardle: The issue there is the way the system works. That is a very good example of one of the difficulties we have with the household registration system. It is interesting to note that, in the research we were discussing earlier about registration, the evidence points both ways about household registration. In a family, say, where there is a head of household, father or mother, who registers everybody else in the household, that is great. There would be a big change for that family if we moved to a system where there was more individual registration. In the sort of circumstance you have just described, the multiple occupation of a building, the fact of household registration is actually disenfranchising all the occupants of that building. The only way they can get on to the register is to do it out of sequence, if you like, in between the annual canvases. This does not apply just to landlords; the same thing arises in student accommodation, nursing homes and other areas, where there is a single building and lots of different independent occupiers. The significance lies in the decision taken by the person who picks up the form off the mat, and the form may not necessarily be addressed to him. He can disenfranchise everybody in that house by throwing it in the bin. That is one of the arguments that led us to favour individual registration as right in its own sense. If you then go a further step and introduce compulsion, you get into the sorts of issues that Sam was discussing in the earlier question about whether society is ready for compulsion in this particular area. So far, we have not done that.

Q52 Mr Khabra: Has the Commission done any research into the reasons for people not turning up? There has been a lot of speculation in the press. Nobody knows exactly the reason why people are not interested in voting. Is that caused by apathy on the part of voters? Is it the fault of the politicians or the political parties that there is this lack of interest in participating in voting?

Sam Younger: We have done a fair bit of research on this in the context of statutory reporting at elections and in relation to registration in the report on under-registration; that has identified some of the reasons people do not register. The problem with that is that there is no particular killer reason why individuals do not either register or turn out to vote; there is a complex range of reasons. One of the things that I personally take some encouragement from in all the research we have done is that actually, by and large, the reason people are not either registering or voting is not so much apathy as disengagement for one reason or another. In a sense, I think disengagement is easier to deal with; at least it gives you a starting point to deal with it. It is not that people do not care about issues that are affecting them; it is about trying to make sure that they realise there is a connection between the issues that affect them and the electoral process and what the political parties and their candidates are offering them. To move on to one of the second questions that you asked in terms of how the Commission goes about encouraging participation - and I think probably it is fair to say that our advertising did not hit this target in its earliest incarnations and we have learnt a bit - from 2004 onwards, we have focused on trying to get across the message that politics affects everything about your life. The strap-line we have been using is that if you do not do politics, there is not much you do do. That has created quite a lot of resonance.

Q53 Mr Khabra: The young people are the least interested. What is the reason for that?

Sam Younger: I think those reasons of disengagement are very much there. After all, you can see the passion with which young people talk about issues, involve themselves in single issues and demonstrate, whatever else it is. I think it is quite wrong to say that people do not care, but they do not see the connection between that and elective policies. It seems to me that is a challenge to everybody. I think it is a difficult thing. This is not the Commission view but certainly the indications to me are it is much more difficult in an era where you do not have quite the same sharp ideological divisions that there were.

Q54 Mr Khabra: Political education: the opportunity should be available for youngsters in school to encourage them to participate in the election which is very important for the country and for them.

Sam Younger: Absolutely. I think that is absolutely critical. I think it is important to note with citizenship education, for example, in a report we put out about 18 months ago, we did not recommend lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 but acknowledged that was something that should be looked at again in the context of the development of citizenship education and thought of again, as well as in the context of a more wide debate about the age of majority generally, but I think citizenship education is absolutely critical as a role for many organisations. I think it is fair to say that in getting people to participate in the end there is no escaping the proposition that the key challenge is for political parties and candidates to have policies and ideas that people want to vote for or vote against. That said, there is an awful lot that other people can do to persuade people of the importance of the voting process because those people who are in their legislatures actually make decisions that affect their lives.

Q55 Jeremy Wright: On that subject, there is also, of course, a lot that returning officers and registration officers can, and indeed should, under the Bill do to encourage people to register and then to vote. Do you have, as the Electoral Commission, a particular view on the ways in which they ought to do that? Are you looking at ways in which you can register best practice and assist various local authorities to notice what other people are doing well? On the other side of the coin, and this is an example that I have given to Mr Wardle on a separate occasion, are there ways in which you can keep a check on what local authorities are doing? I will give you an example from my experience at the last election. What happened was the local authority sent out leaflets saying "please vote" or "don't forget to vote", words to that effect, but the colour scheme they chose was bright red and yellow so it looked like a Labour poster which I do not think was deliberate in the slightest but you can imagine how exercised my activists got about that. On that basis, are you going to not only swap best practice but also keep an eye on what various local authorities are going to do?

Peter Wardle: It is very much in that sort of field that we are planning to operate with these standards. One piece of good news that is already in place is that the ODPM have brought electoral services into their beacon council schemes, so there is already recognition that there is some very good work going on by electoral registration officers. Again, if you look at the research we did and published in September, one of the things that pointed to was areas where electoral registration officers in local authorities were using a whole battery of different methods, and in fact one of the problems the research had was that there were so many different things going on in some of these very active local authorities, it was very hard to pinpoint the ones that were making the most difference. It was clear that where people were being imaginative, partnering with other bits of the local authority, partnering with groups in the community who could act as a way into some of the hard-to-reach groups, they were getting a lot more success than in some of the sleepier bits of the country where the local authority was tending to do the same as it had done every year. I think our approach will very much be to take the good practice that we recognise already around the country and, not in a naming and shaming way, because that is not the power we are going to be given in the Bill anyway, but in an encouraging way to say "Look here .." it links in with the point Sam made earlier on about taking some of the regional expertise and trying to make that more widely available across the region. That might be one of the ways that we try to explore, certainly looking at good practice and trying to give people access to that practice and ourselves acting as a broker there. We talked about political naivety before in relation to the Commission and you gave us an interesting example there. I was talking to one of my colleagues before the session started who used to work for the Australian Electoral Commission, which of course does run elections, and the colour of choice on election day for the Electoral Commission staff was purple and she discovered you cannot do that here because of the Scottish Nationalists. It is always difficult to get that sort of thing right but I think we would try to give that sort of advice, try to get people thinking a bit more carefully. Just as an aside on that point, one of the things the Commission has found we have got a lot to add to is that there are parts of the country where electoral services' officers and candidates, although they meet at election time, actually keep themselves rather separate. We found that we can act as quite a good broker between those two groups because we recognise that both groups have an interest and need to understand that they can give offence to the other quite easily, they can support the other quite easily, and I think this is another area where there is some education to be done in the standard setting to help them.

Q56 Chairman: What do you think the public reaction is going to be when they turn up to polling stations and find they have to sign for their ballot papers? Does the Commission have any thoughts on that?

Peter Wardle: It is an interesting proposal, it is not one of the proposals the Commission made. When we were thinking about that balance, that spectrum between participation and security, we took the view that to require people on every occasion to sign for their ballot paper was a step too far and it might deter some people for the sorts of reasons we were talking about before. Looking at the evidence of the scale of any abuse that was going on in polling stations, as opposed to political voting, we held back from making that recommendation. Certainly one of the difficulties with that recommendation as it is framed in the Bill is it does raise the question of what you check it against if you are not in a pilot area. It is simply really a psychological weapon, someone has registered a signature and something might be done with that signature at some stage. If you subsequently found that they were not the person they said they were, probably it would be helpful that they have signed at some stage implying they were. I am not sure that is quite what the signature in the polling station legally does. If you had a system where people had registered a signature and date of birth on the register, and if you then had some doubts about their identity when they turned up at the polling station to vote, then it seems perfectly sensible that some of the questions that a presiding officer at the polling station might ask are "can you tell me your date of birth" and if they are still in doubt "could you provide a specimen signature". It is easy to see how that would fit in. As it happened, we thought it was probably going too far to do any more than that and require people to sign just because they have turned up to vote.

Q57 Chairman: The public also reacted rather adversely to bar codes, did they not, in the all-postal pilots? Should there be education, perhaps, on the reason for that?

Sam Younger: Yes, perhaps putting something clearly on voter information about why that is there. What the bar code represents is information that was there anyway in terms of traceability, that people by and large do not notice when it is a serial number, a bar code is much more in your face than that. Interestingly, I think it is something we need to look at. It is one of the notable things that are noticed by any foreign observers who come and look at UK elections, they are astonished that there is traceability of a ballot paper. It is something we are looking at now as to whether what we have historically achieved by having that traceability could be achieved in another way or whether it is important enough to go on with that with those associated suspicions where a number of members of the public do say, "So in the end somebody can tell how I voted". Albeit it is under very severe restriction in terms of the courts, nevertheless there is a slight discomfort about it. Even though by and large people say they do not like it when it is drawn to their attention, most people do not really notice it. Bar codes they would notice more.

Q58 Jessica Morden: The CORE project: what level of data sharing will you have between the EROs and the keepers of the project?

Sam Younger: It is not yet clear exactly how it is going to be organised or what role the Commission will be playing in it. I would have thought the data sharing should be absolute and total among EROs in terms of the register because part of the great value of CORE - yes, one of the drivers politically was being able more easily to interrogate the electoral register for the purposes of donations reporting - is the ability to use a register where you can consult it intricately to note things like duplicate applications, to indicate where somebody needs to come along to register somewhere because they have moved somewhere else. I think it is a very major step forward once it is there but it needs to make sure those information sources are all compatible.

Q59 Jessica Morden: If you do end up keeping it, being the keeper does it undermine your impartiality?

Sam Younger: I do not see why it should. I think the one thing I would be very clear about, and we have not thought about this in detail because it is not clear what the arrangement is going to be, but were we to be the keeper we would certainly need to set up something that would operate to a degree at arm's length, a little bit like the Boundary Committee for England does on local authority boundaries, which was our registration committee which would have returning officers, EROs and others on it as the experts. All I am saying is I do not want to be drawn into detail and what I have not thought about closely enough is that there would need to be a difference in the way we organise ourselves, but I do not see that it should undermine the independence or impartiality of the Commission.

Peter Wardle: I think it is perhaps worth noting that the concept as we understand it at the moment is that the national on-line register will simply be an amalgamation of all the local registers held by electoral registration officers. I think it is very unlikely that the Commission will be in a position of unilaterally taking decisions to add someone or remove someone from the register, that would be done only at the behest of the registration officers and our role would be administrative, if you like, a mechanical role, and maybe it is easier for the keeper physically to achieve that change. As I understand the concept, I do not see that it would involve the Commission taking decisions that were not signed up to by the relevant electoral registration officer, or officers, concerned.

Q60 Jessica Morden: I know you have not got the detail but have you got the IT to support the project? Will you need more IT and more staff? What will the overall budget be for it?

Peter Wardle: The IT is not there at the moment. The Department for Constitutional Affairs is running the project and I think you would have to direct this question to them.

Q61 Mr Tyrie: Service voter registration again. Sam, I have just received a letter from you, thank you very much, that I have received while I was in the meeting, although it is dated 28 October. It answers a number of questions I would have liked to have asked you but I will not go through it all for the benefit of the wider Committee. Rather than look at spilt milk - I think there is a lot of spilt milk, we have got servicemen trying to bring democracy in Iraq who were effectively disenfranchised by the decision to repeal the old service voter scheme - I just want to ask you one question about the spilt milk and then move on. You do agree, I hope, that we could have done better bearing in mind we knew this was going to happen. I warned you in October in correspondence that this was going to be a serious problem, if not a catastrophe, and that is probably what we have had.

Sam Younger: I would agree we could have done better. It is absurd to say that we could not have done better. I think one of the lessons for me was to make sure what we focused on, because it really came into our sights at that time in the autumn, was getting information out to service voters in time to hit the deadline for registration for a potential general election and actually what we should have been doing is doing what we are doing now, which is doing a campaign that is at annual canvass time too so you are getting people earlier, and that is what is being addressed now as well as the other arrangements.

Q62 Mr Tyrie: That is fair enough. So you can understand why when you wrote to me on 6 December last year saying "We will look at the possibility of producing a leaflet aimed at service personnel when we do the next canvass in late 2005" when everybody knew there was going to be an election in May or June 2005, that was the sort of letter that was likely to put the blood pressure up of any MP trying to get his service voters ready.

Sam Younger: I have to say I noticed that you had quoted that in the debate and when I looked back at the letter of course that was in relation to what we would do after the election subsequently, not in relation to what we were doing in the period before the election.

Q63 Mr Tyrie: The question is what are you going to do now? It seems to me there are two generic possibilities, one is to try and make the existing system work, and a lot of effort has been put into that already and you have described already a lot of things which were attempted before the last election, at the last minute, and I think we can find a lot of that was ineffective judging from the anecdotal evidence. The other possibility is to say we cannot afford to make a mistake like this again, let us at least for the time being put back the old service voter registration scheme which had its drawbacks but at least it worked, service voters got the vote wherever they were serving. A very high proportion of them remained entitled to vote. What is your view about putting back the old scheme?

Sam Younger: I do not have a hard and fast view which says either we absolutely must or we absolutely must not. I think you are right to say it is a practical issue of how are you going to get the result. There may be a timing issue here in terms of the legislative opportunity for going back ---

Q64 Mr Tyrie: We have got one now.

Sam Younger: Exactly.

Q65 Mr Tyrie: I have tabled a clause to the Bill, I would like to know whether it is going to have your support.

Sam Younger: The only observation I make, it certainly would not have our opposition, that is quite clear. All I am saying is we learnt something from the campaign we did at the beginning of the year to try to get people registered. There is a lot more of it now in terms of the leaflets going to everybody in terms of people designated in military units and so on and so forth, things on pay slips, new recruits, all of those things. At the end of this month the MoD are including a survey of the degree to which people are or are not registered. IT is possible that one will find at the end of that that the problem is not as acute as you thought possible. If there is any evidence that the problem is not cracked, if you like, then I think there is a good case for going back to the status quo ante. The one thing I would say is to make sure that something like the CORE projects and the registers that can talk to each other, there is going to be an element of this, one of the downsides of the old service registration was the amount of people who had left the services and were still on the register.

Q66 Mr Tyrie: It had its drawbacks.

Sam Younger: What I would want to ally if we were going to go down the route that you have put in an amendment for is a mechanism to make sure we find ways of keeping the register as up to date as possible in those circumstances.

Q67 Mr Tyrie: One final question on the timing, you are saying we are undertaking this service to find out how many people are registered now so we can work out what the scale of the problem is. We have got a Bill in Parliament at the moment, are we going to have the results of that survey and are we going to be able to take a clear decision in time to be able to table an amendment or will we find the survey identifies a continuing problem?

Sam Younger: I did not check that for you. It is a MoD survey and I am not sure, off the top of my head, exactly when the results will be available. It is being carried out in November and it is something they do regularly.

Q68 Mr Tyrie: It seems absolutely crucial. You seemed to be saying a moment ago that we should wait for the results of the survey and then decide whether to act. It will be too late if we have had the legislation.

Sam Younger: That is why I said there is the problem of timing if we do not have the information. Albeit it is fair to say that we do not have absolutely reliable information on the exact numbers of servicemen who are registered, we know how many are registered as service voters but we do not know how many are registered otherwise, I think it is fair to say, if we do not have the results and we do not know that the problem is either cracked or on its way to being cracked, and the timing does not work, it is sensible to look at going back to the previous arrangement.

Q69 Mr Tyrie: One last general question, we do seem to be spending quite a lot of time today discussing the mopping up after well-meaning initiatives which have unintended consequences, do we not? The postal ballot extension, which has had these unintended consequences which have hit at the credibility of the whole electoral system, and you have got some detailed numbers which I will not read out in the letter you have just sent me on what amounts to the collapse of public opinion faith in the election system, even people using the postal vote system think it is unsafe. Now we have had the service voter registration changes which people thought were good at the time but turned out to be quite disastrous. Does this not point to a great deal of caution rather than activism in the field of changes in electoral law, and is that a lesson you think we should start to draw?

Sam Younger: I think caution, yes; inactivity, no. It seems to me we have got to make judgments and those judgments have got to be based on where you think things can improve. You look at postal voting, I think the extension of postal voting has got a lot to be said for it, there are certain things which need to be done to underpin it. I would say you have got to be cautious in what you apply but not sit there and say it is better not to change anything because it might not work out.

Q70 Mr Tyrie: 46% of people consider it unsafe from fraud or abuse, according to your letter to me. Even among those who chose to vote by post, a fifth wrote in and said it was unsafe. These seem to be pretty catastrophic collapses in faith in the system.

Sam Younger: Hence our concern about getting the underpinning of it right, not to eliminate postal voting on demand but to get the underpinning of it right.

Q71 David Howarth: Continuing that theme, the Bill itself contains a number of anti-fraud measures to do with postal voting. There is a marked register for postal votes received which is an important measure. Do you think this adds up to enough to restore confidence in postal voting or is there anything further that should be done? I do not want to go back to the individual registration debate but is there anything else that should be done?

Sam Younger: I think there are two things to mention. One, it is impossible for us to do it without getting back into the individual registration debate because I think it is the case that the power of some of those measures in terms of increased checking, in terms of the offences, makes most sense when you have got the identification to check against. There is an integral nature to it. The other thing I would say, which is important, is that over the last year to 18 months there has been quite a step change in the co-ordination between the police and electoral registration officers, the consciousness of this among the police and that is something which needs to be sustained. It is not something specifically in the Bill, I think it is a critical component. In the last 18 months we have established a forum which is due to meet twice a year of police forces and senior registration officers and returning officers, once a year in January, to look at what measures need to be in place for a forthcoming election, whatever those elections may be in May, and a second one after those elections to look at how things went. I think it is terribly important that that concentration is there and there for the future.

Q72 David Howarth: One of the things that came out of the Birmingham case, I think, was that the police did not understand the law.

Sam Younger: It is fair to say we derived guidance for police officers jointly with ACPO and ACPO Scotland. That came out in early 2005, March 2005, before the General Election. One of the police officers I spoke to said it would have made a difference if we had had that a year earlier, and I think we need to work on that and extend it and improve it.

Q73 Chairman: You have been very thorough and wide-ranging in your answers but one perhaps small modest question to finish with this morning, your view perhaps on the proposed reduction in the threshold for lost deposits from 5% to 2% in the Bill. Has any research been conducted by the Commission on the need for this change? It was suggested it should be put in the Bill subsequently, what is the background position on that as far as you are concerned?

Sam Younger: The background to this is we published a report in 2003 about standing for election and after consultation, including with political parties, we set out two options, there was no consensus. One was to abolish the deposit and subscriber system altogether because part of the concerns which had been raised with us was that this was increasingly out of step with what had gone in other countries, particularly European countries. Some people suggested that there might be some implications under human rights law for freedom of expression, and there was a barrier here to engaging in the democratic process, but we did recognise a lot of people who had responded had concerns about going down that route. We developed a second option, and that involved standardising the deposit of £500 and reducing the threshold from 5% to 2%. We would, as part of that option, abolish the subscriber system, although it was interesting that in the Second Reading debate that was one of the alternative methods which came back into play. There was a pretty broad range but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the larger parties were less in favour of reducing the thresholds than the smaller parties. We made the recommendation of that second option reducing the threshold from 5% to 2% really in response to the concerns that people were raising that it was difficult for smaller parties to get into the system in the first place. It is interesting to see the research that the Library has produced which was mentioned in the Second Reading debate and there was a lot of debate about extremist parties but the other two parties, I think, that the Library had identified would particularly have benefited from this system at the last election were the Green Party and the United Kingdom Independence Party, and whatever else was said about them during the Second Reading debate, I do not think anyone suggested they were extremist groups. That was the thrust of it and, in fact, the question of extremist parties was not raised, I know that has been the big concern raised at Second Reading but it was not raised in the consultations we had. We did get some support from political parties, admittedly at the smaller end of the spectrum for this proposal. It was the second option that the Government chose to go with in the Bill and that is the background, that is where it came from. We were doing our best to reflect the consultation we had but I do not think we would seek to substitute our judgment with the judgment of Parliament on this.

Chairman: I see the telepathic partnership would have continued to lose its deposit whether there was a 2% threshold or a 5% threshold, you would have thought they might have known that! Mr Younger and Mr Wardle, can I thank you very much for your evidence this morning and the full and frank way in which you have addressed all the questions this morning. Thank you once again.