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David Cairns: I am tremendously grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe for allowing us to tease out what we envisage will form the national standards that have been prayed in aid at various stages of the progress of the Bill. When Ministers struggle to answer a particular question, it is always a great lifeline to hold up national standards that will come over the hill and clear us from the mire. None the less, they are important.
I beg your indulgence, Mr. Conway, to move slightly beyond the narrow terms of the amendments to answer some of the questions that have been asked in this short debate. It is clear that the standards and performance of the conduct of elections throughout the country varies enormously. I, too, was a local councillor, and if we were honest we would all say that there was little direct impetus to send a lot of money towards electoral registration officers or to take a great degree of interest in what they were doing. We could not monitor them as we could the standards of social services—or, in Scotland, social work. They were not held accountable to external standards and we did not really know what they were doing with the money. We knew that we had to give money in order for them to conduct what they were statutorily required to, but beyond that, the service—at least in the local authority of which I was a member—was tucked away at the end
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of the corridor, and most people did not know what was going on.
We are calling EROs out into the open and saying that we value what they are doing. They are at the heart of what we are about when we talk about increasing participation in the electoral process. That is why we are committing additional resources, but with those resources must come some external measurement of how they are used, and of the outcomes. The variance may be to do with the allocation of resources and money, and staff availability. At budget time, that was always a relatively easy cut to make. Faced with cutting £20,000 from the ERO budget or losing a nursery teacher, it was easy. Those of us who made such decisions perhaps did not always understand the vital importance of the service.
Mr. Heath: I am sure that that is sometimes the case. Human issues may also be involved, as sometimes the experience, seniority and ability to canvass effectively within the organisation of those involved in the electoral registration process is relevant. Those with long-standing senior registration officers may have found that they had a better system than those where a more junior officer took the role.
David Cairns: I am sure that is correct. In Scotland there is an additional complication as, by and large—with two exceptions—local authorities do not have their own EROs. They are distributed on a sub-regional basis. Four local authorities contribute to the ERO who covers my constituency, so when the ERO is not in the building or in a particular part of the authority, it is a case of out of sight, out of mind. I think that we all agree that there are a variety of reasons for the wide variance in performance. The aim of the clause, and of my hon. Friend's amendments, is to raise the standard of all local authorities to the level of the best performing authorities.
New section 9A gives the Electoral Commission the power to set and publish performance standards for elections, referendums and electoral services. The commission must consult the Secretary of State on those standards—that goes directly to my hon. Friend's point—and the Secretary of State will lay them before each House of Parliament. It is unthinkable that the Secretary of State would not want hon. Members to have an input into that process; indeed, my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State has given a clear commitment. We want to ensure that hon. Members—not just the parties or their leaderships—get the chance to have an input into the consultation that leads to the production of the standards. We do not want to get into trenches and to argue about the issue at official level; we want to do everything as openly and as transparently as we can. When the consultation is under way, we will seek to ensure that hon. Members who want to do so are given every opportunity to participate.
Mr. Betts: I very much welcome that assurance, because Back Benchers have been led to believe in the past that consultation means a statutory instrument that we can vote for or against. Given the Minister's comments, I think that we will be going much further in this instance.
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David Cairns: Yes, there are no great ideological divides on this issue; it is a matter of getting things right and sharing best practice. My hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), who is not here, has done the whole House a great service by writing to various EROs, gathering evidence of best practice and disseminating it to other colleagues. That was certainly an eye-opener, because we do not have national standards or national tables. Of course, it should not really be left to the tremendous endeavour of one hon. Member to take those steps; it should be a collective exercise. Clearly, we shall want to proceed in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe indicated.
We expect the standards to lay down a detailed framework of good practice for electoral service administrators, returning officers and polling staff—to follow up a point that I made earlier. They will go well beyond simply stating what the law requires and will indicate what is considered to be the exemplary approach, as well as making it clear that we expect guidance to be followed.
New section 9B provides for the Electoral Commission to require the relevant electoral officials to provide it with reports on how they have met the standards that have been set and published. Those reports may be published by the relevant officer. The Electoral Commission will also publish reports from time to time, and I shall come to the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe on that point in a moment. The commission's reports will set out how the performance standards have been met in particular circumstances or over a range of authorities and/or elections.
The aim is to provide the commission with the information on which to make a judgment about where there is poor performance, which services are performed poorly and what action to take to assist authorities in reaching the required standards. We do not necessarily want to name and shame—that is what it says in my brief, although in my book a bit of naming and shaming never goes amiss. We do, however, want to identify any weaknesses to see whether they can be corrected, because it is in everyone's interests that they are. As I said, the aim is to achieve transparency and openness.
Here, we could make a link with the beacon scheme being run by my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister. Councils can apply for and achieve beacon status as a result of exemplary performance in providing a particular service. The next round of the scheme will feature the delivery of electoral services as one of its themes. Particularly good electoral services departments will be able to apply to become beacon councils in respect of that theme, so good practice will inform the process of setting performance standards.
New section 9C allows the Electoral Commission to require electoral officials to supply it with data about their expenditure on elections and election services—a point that has exercised my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd at great length. He has done his own back-of-an-envelope calculations on that. We must get
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a handle on that matter and secure greater transparency.
Turning to the specific issues, in part 2 of the Bill, in clause 9, we set out some of the great big themes that will govern how we expect the standards to be framed. We have created the skeleton on which the standards will be built. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe wishes to include further measures in the Bill. I hope that he will withdraw the amendment, because we do not wish to short-circuit the process of consultation by adding measures at this stage. However, I have no doubt that either what he has recommended or something akin to it is bound to form part of the performance standards. I hope and expect that to be the case. If one is going to make the register as full as possible, the type of steps that my hon. Friend has outlined are common-sense ways to achieve that.
As for the second amendment, my hon. Friend may be less sanguine about my answer. We do not wish to fetter the Electoral Commission's flexibility to ask for reports at an appropriate time. We want those reports to come forward on a regular basis. The two amendments together unnecessarily fetter the ability of the commission to produce reports. The Electoral Commission may, for example, wish to produce a report more frequently than on an annual basis. We have all paid tribute to the work of the Electoral Commission, which is very good at issuing reports, even if we may not always agree with them. We do not wish to tell the commission to issue reports in a certain way at a certain time. We must allow it flexibility and discretion to produce reports as and when it chooses. The commission has set a very good performance standard in producing reports. We do not have too much to fear on that front.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab): I take the point about the Electoral Commission, albeit with a little reservation. However, the essential aim of my amendments was the requirement for the electoral registration officer and other relevant officers to produce an annual report. I accept my hon. Friend's argument that my amendment might fetter the arrangements in such a way that the commission could not produce a report more often than annually. However, perhaps my hon. Friend would consider altering the clause in due course to state that reports must be produced every year and at other times as appropriate, or words to that effect. If we do not tie that down, hon. Members will lose their influence. Most people think that there should be a requirement for the electoral registration officer to produce an annual report.
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