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3 Feb 2010 : Column 78WH—continued
David Cairns: May I finish the point first? There is a lot of room for improvement, and we all know it, but unless the inspection regime is significantly more rigorous than the one being followed by the Electoral Commission, areas with poor practice will carry on and local authorities will not devote the time, money and personnel needed to improve performance.
I shall give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) and then to my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd.
Mr. Hoyle: My hon. Friend is generous in giving way. It concerns me that returning officers are self-assessed. I would be intrigued to know what the returning officer did at Chorley. In a marginal seat that we lost, we found that 25 votes had disappeared, but we did not know about it until 10 days later. I still cannot understand where they went; they must be somewhere, but nobody can give us an answer. I wonder how returning officers would mark themselves following an incident like that. My hon. Friend raises concerns that we are all very worried about.
David Cairns: I can help my hon. Friend on that latter point. If he goes to the Electoral Commission website, he will see a table showing how returning officers rate themselves. I have not studied the Chorley self-assessment, but the general trend is that almost everyone did very well at almost everything.
Chris Ruane: I thank my hon. Friend for giving way yet again. On the question of assessment, for me the key performance indicator is the number of people on the register. It is quite easy to set performance indicators. According to the written answer to parliamentary question 311930, which gave registration rates in descending order, Kensington and Chelsea has a registration rate of 55 per cent. To be a good indicator, it should be 95 per cent. or even 100 per cent. If registration rates improved, that would be an acid test-proof positive-that the electoral returning officer was performing.
David Cairns: My hon. Friend proves something that I mentioned earlier-that what gets measured gets done. If there is no specific target to aim for, how on earth can one measure whether performance is adequate? You might as well ask whether literature is easily understood; it is a subjective matter, and it is difficult to put a target on it. Getting people on the register is a matter of simple arithmetic.
I am shocked to hear of a registration rate of 55 per cent.; that is an appalling figure. The chief executive of Kensington and Chelsea should hang his head in shame. There is no excuse for that. I know that area a little; it has many houses in multiple occupation and many large families, and people move around. None the less, no matter what the council's political persuasion, it is a matter of shame to have only 55 per cent. registration.
Bob Spink: Another difficulty is the relationship of CEOs-they generally act as returning officers-with the controlling political party. They rely on that party to fix their salaries and their pensions; they have a comfortable relationship. My feeling is that they may become politically biased in their work. We should address that point. Super-returning officers could control them, and I congratulate the Government on going in that direction.
David Cairns: The hon. Gentleman pre-empts my very next sentence. As well as an inspection regime that is properly monitored and enforced, instead of one under which people get to say how well they did and are then told, "No, you did better than you thought. Mark yourself higher", we need a proper inspection regime.
Other steps need to be taken right away. It took two and a half years to get the current inspection regime. I am not confident that we will move any more quickly away from it, but three things could happen soon. First, returning officers should be permanent, properly resourced, senior council officers. The job should not be done by well-paid chief executives moonlighting for a few extra quid.
David Cairns: My hon. Friend asks from a sedentary position how much extra. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South has been mining away at that question; he may be able to tell us if he catches your eye, Mr. Wilshire, so I shall not be drawn on that question.
Secondly, local returning officers should have responsibility for the educational and promotional functions currently undertaken by the Electoral Commission; that would be carried out much more effectively locally. It could be allied to the council's work in schools, and the community and other literature issued by councils. It would be better than having posters at bus stops, which is an expensive waste of money, although that is what happens with a national campaign. That function and the budget that goes with it should be transferred to local returning officers.
Thirdly, picking up the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd, returning officers should have proper targets for getting people on the register. In Scotland, returning officers should be given responsibility for voter registration, which currently resides with joint valuation boards. Taken together with an inspection regime that has some teeth, I believe that these changes would help bolster the standing of returning officers and council electoral services. In turn, that would drive up performance.
I shall skip along a little more briefly, as I have taken rather longer than I anticipated. I turn to a specific area that I know is a cause for concern for colleagues and others-namely, the timing of the election count. The heart of the current dispute, as I said earlier, is the tension about which decisions should be set out in rules and guidance from Parliament and which should be left to the discretion of returning officers.
Legislation states that the count should begin "as soon as practicable" after the poll. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale said, for decades most of the country have taken that to mean that the count should begin as soon as the polls close at 10 pm. It is no secret that, for many years, returning officers have wanted to move away from overnight counts. Indeed, they made that view abundantly plain to me when I was a Minister in the Scotland Office in the run-up to the Scottish parliamentary elections of 2007.
Essentially, the returning officers' argument is that many of those in charge at the count will have been on duty since early morning and will not be at their most
alert in the wee small hours of the next day, when they might have to make vital decisions. That is a serious point, and it should not be dismissed lightly. However, it is equally well known that as a rule MPs are rather keener on overnight counts, for personal and political reasons.
On a personal level, we want to be put out of the misery of not knowing our fate as quickly as possible. That is only human. The political aspect is equally important. We have a speedy transition of power in this country, which begins as soon as the result is known; not for us the leisurely two-month gap between the election and the inauguration of the American President. It may be only a matter of hours, but it has been our custom and practice for generations, and we should not abandon it without good reason.
Another factor is the undoubted drama and suspense of the overnight results coming in. I was present at the Royal Festival Hall as dawn broke on 2 May 1997, and I can testify to the extraordinary atmosphere of that occasion, which I believe was conveyed to the millions watching at home.
Mr. Tom Harris (Glasgow, South) (Lab): Was it a new dawn that had broken?
David Cairns: I was going to say that it was never to be repeated, but that is not quite our line. I am sure that we will have a wonderful new dawn on 7 May. I have not blotted out the date of the election. Strangely enough, the Prime Minister has not confided in me.
Similarly, the question that everyone asked for weeks in the aftermath of that election-"Were you still up for Portillo?"-would not have quite the same ring as, "Did your tea-break coincide with the announcement of the result from Enfield Southgate?" My view on this point is that the rules for returning officers should be more prescriptive. Unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary, the counting of ballot papers should begin on polling day itself, not the following day.
Mr. Donohoe: The issue that I discussed with my returning officer was the authorisation and validation of the postal ballot. Will my hon. Friend address that point?
David Cairns: I will address it as soon as I have taken an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale.
Geraldine Smith: My biggest concern is about the security of the ballot boxes when they are left overnight. We need assurances that they will be properly policed, because that is a real concern.
David Cairns: That is a real concern. It is not one that I was going to cite, but I have seen it expressed elsewhere, and it should be addressed by those places that have opted for the Friday count.
I return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Mr. Donohoe). Returning officers and the Electoral Commission-in its briefing for this debate-cite the new checking requirements for postal ballots as a possible reason to defer the count to the next day. The Interim Electoral Management Board for Scotland makes the entirely unsubstantiated claim
that checking the signatures and dates of birth on the postal votes received on the day could add two to three hours to the count, and it offered not a shred of justification about why that should be.
Mr. Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con): The hon. Gentleman is right; it is nonsense.
David Cairns: It is nonsense, quite right. In the words of one of my former constituents, "I don't believe it." [Hon. Members: "Who?"] A good Labour supporter. The Interim Electoral Management Board for Scotland justifies a possible move to Friday counts by referring to the problems experienced at the Scottish Parliament elections in May 2007, and it quotes Professor Gould, who was appointed by the Electoral Commission to investigate the election, to support its view.
I know quite a bit about what happened in 2007-rather more than I care to know. There were two problems at that election: the unacceptably high number of spoiled ballot papers, and the breakdown of the counting machines. Both problems would have occurred in full had the count taken place the next day. Neither of them were in any way related to overnight counts, and they should not be used as a spurious pretext to abandon overnight counts.
I accept that checking the identifiers on postal ballots is an additional burden, but it should not add three hours to the count. The vast majority of such ballots arrive prior to polling day and can be processed well in advance. Some will come through the post on polling day itself and others will be handed in at polling stations, but there is no reason why, with proper planning, the vast majority of those could not be checked prior to 10 pm, or why they should add significantly to the length of the count.
There are other arguments against moving the count, but I will not make them, because I want to finish now. Contrary to what is occasionally trotted out in some sections of the media, I do not believe that we have a serious problem of deliberate fraud or wholesale incompetence in our elections in this country. When fraud occurs, the weight of the law should be brought to bear. Most of our returning officers take seriously their responsibilities as administrators of our democratic processes, but to deny that there is room for improvement would be complacent. I hope that today's debate will contribute to the process of improvement in this exceptionally important profession.
Mr. David Wilshire (in the Chair): Before I call Mr. Pickles, may I say two things? First, we have just under half an hour before I call the first Front Bencher at 10.30, and it looks as though there are at least three people plus Mr. Pickles wanting to speak. Secondly, those Members who like playing musical chairs can now sit anywhere, because I am told that all the microphones now work.
10.3 am
Mr. Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con):
It is a great comfort to know that our words will go out. I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (David Cairns) on successfully securing this very important debate. In particular, I should like to say that I enjoy the prospect of a new dawn and people dancing in the
streets in May. I do not think that the election is in the bag, but I accept the hon. Gentleman's confidence on our behalf.
I will be brief, but I think the discussion we are having is about something more: the general degrading of politics, of this place and of government in general. It is about officials saying, "We run this, and it is nothing to do with you politicians." Let me misquote Alexander Pope, "For forms of government let fools protest; Whate'er it administer'd is best". That seems to be the general view of returning officers, although I accept that not many of them are naturally poetic. Nevertheless, they are saying that the matter is not important.
A letter from the Electoral Commission stated that the count is accurate, that voters have confidence in the election result, and that it is entirely appropriate to have a count on a Friday if it is deemed necessary to ensure an accurate result. What is frequently cited is the increased number of postal votes, particularly those delivered to polling stations on polling day. As postal votes come in during the election campaign, they are checked, verified and put to one side for counting on the night. Machines are available to check the signatures-I have seen them in operation-and those that they cannot verify can be put to one side.
Mr. Donohoe: Does the hon. Gentleman not think that with a bit of imagination and marketing, all the postal votes could be in long before the count itself?
Mr. Pickles: Sometimes people are away from their homes, and sometimes people feel that it is a bit like filling in tax forms and they can put it aside and do it another day. We must accept that numbers will come in on the day. For better accuracy, I have obtained two comparisons-one from a Conservative seat and one from a Labour seat.
In Haltemprice and Howden, 180 ballot papers were handed in on the day. I cannot believe that officers required an extra two or three hours to count 180 ballot papers; that is clearly spurious. Of course, that might be unusual, so I looked at what happened in a by-election in a Labour seat-Norwich, North-although, admittedly, it is now a Conservative seat. Again, 180 ballot papers were handed in. It is just serendipitous that the figures are exactly the same. Even if those figures were widely inaccurate, and even if we doubled the numbers, I do not believe that they would require a three-hour count. Moving the count has nothing to do with the accuracy of postal votes or the numbers.
If we were to talk to people below the level of returning officer, they would say, "Oh, well, it is rather difficult. People have been working a long time, and they want to get back and watch television. There might be a rerun of 'Star Trek' and our folks would like to see that after having a very difficult day." Well, other people ought to be put in. On grounds of health and safety and the working time-whatever it is called-people cannot work such long hours anyway. Traditionally, we have employed bank clerks, who are very dextrous in getting out the results, and we have used machines. Machines break down, but, by and large, they do not get terribly tired.
Therefore, the change has more to do with administrative convenience and the fact that money, which has properly been given by Government to local authorities for the purposes of election counts, has been hived off in other directions. It is true that the electoral registration officer is a Cinderella service of local government, which is ironic given that it is the fulcrum on which local democracy works.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Mr. Michael Wills): I do not want to interrupt the hon. Gentleman's speech for too long because my time will come, but let me clarify the point about funding. Does he support ring-fencing funding for local authorities? I am talking about the money that is given by central Government.
Mr. Pickles: No, I expect local authorities to behave reasonably. We should not stand over them in a nanny state way and say, "This is the money and you must spend it." Electoral registration officers have been saying for a long time that they need the money. I expect local authorities to express that-regardless of whether they are Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat authorities.
Mr. Pickles: I will give way to the hon. Lady, but this is the last time because I want to make a short speech.
Geraldine Smith: As the hon. Gentleman has said, the problem that has been identified is that returning officers are not behaving reasonably and they are using money allotted to them for other purposes. He cannot have it both ways. That money should be ring-fenced if they are not using it appropriately.
Mr. Pickles: I suppose that is the difference between the political parties-we want to set local authorities free and Labour wants to control them. This is an example of how the system does not work, and it is patently obvious that our approach is better. But I digress.
Mr. David Wilshire (in the Chair): Yes, you do.
Mr. Pickles: I am trying to arrive at a political consensus.
However, this issue is not about some cheery tradition, or about how lovely it would be to dance in the streets in May, or to stay up all night to watch Mr. Dimbleby, or to watch Sky News give slightly more accurate reports than the BBC. It is about accountability and about the voice of the people being heard.
One of the great joys of our political system is that one is either in office or out of office-there is no intervening period. One moment someone is jumping into the back of their Prius with their red box by their side and the next moment they are topping up their Oyster card. That is a very good system.
Chris Ruane: That is what Ministers do. [Laughter.]
Mr. Pickles: I did not want to bring back any bad memories for the hon. Gentleman.
It is different in the United States. Under the presidential system, there is a long period between the presidential election and a new President taking office. Even in local government in Britain, there is an intervening period, but that is not our system at national level.
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