CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE
To be published as HC 804-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

ORAL EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

Political and Constitutional reform Committee

Parliamentary Voting system and Constituencies Bill

Thursday 10 February 2011

Jenny Watson, Peter Wardle and Andrew Scallan

Professor Ron Johnston

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 78

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee

on Thursday 10 February 2011

Members present:

Mrs Eleanor Laing (in the Chair)

Mr Christopher Chope

Sheila Gilmore

Andrew Griffiths

Simon Hart

Tristram Hunt

Mr Andrew Turner

Stephen Williams

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Jenny Watson, Chair, Electoral Commission, Peter Wardle, Chief Executive, Electoral Commission, and Andrew Scallan, Director of Electoral Administration, Electoral Commission, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: Thank you very much indeed for coming back to see the Committee again. We greatly valued the evidence that you gave us when you came before us in the autumn. What we are now doing is updating the position with a view to keeping the House of Commons updated on the position, although I think probably the newspapers in a factual way are doing that. We want to make sure that we are able to assist in putting before the House the actual facts straight from you, and we are very grateful to you for coming back again this morning.

We appreciate that the Bill that we discussed last time you were here has gone through various stages-it has been pummelled about a bit-and is currently being squeezed one way and another by the House of Lords, including in a fairly dramatic vote last night. We appreciate that some of these things that have happened don’t affect the way in which you are operating, but we would like to bring up to date the areas that do.

First of all, before we ask questions, would you like to make a statement or give us your views on the current position?

Jenny Watson: Thank you for inviting us back. I don’t have a statement but I could start, if it would help the Committee, by just outlining what has been happening and what we have been doing since we last came to see you. I know at that time we talked about the fact that we would be issuing a statement on preparedness around the six months before Royal Assent. So, if it is helpful, I can start by outlining what we said then and what we have doing since.

Q2 Chair: That would be very helpful indeed.

Jenny Watson: Previously at the Select Committee, we talked to you in September about the fact that we would be putting out a statement six months ahead of Royal Assent, giving an assessment of preparedness. We did that on 11 November, thinking about the assessment of risks that we had set out originally that we thought had to be met to be clear that the proposed referendum could safely go ahead. We said the rules needed to be clear six months before the referendum. We said that we needed to be able to be supported by the Government in our planning to make sure that we were bringing together those who would be the regional counting officers to plan successfully, and we said that we needed the rules for combination of the poll to be clear. Just grouping those together, our assessment on 11 November was that there was sufficient progress against all of those for us to be able to move ahead.

Since then we have obviously shared our assumptions with counting officers around the country so that they could prepare for planning for the referendum. We did that in November. That is my assumption as Chief Counting Officer as to the directions that I would issue for the referendum. We have also now issued all the modules of detailed preparation to counting officers around the country. We have also issued the templates for the voter-facing materials that, as you may remember from the previous discussion, as Chief Counting Officer I have the power to modify. Just to give you some examples, that is things like poll cards and postal voting statements. So that is all out there with electoral administration staff and they are pushing ahead with that.

We had, when we saw you, held the first meeting of our steering group. We have now had several subsequent meetings. We are meeting every month. That includes all the regional counting officers who are supporting me in my role as Chief Counting Officer. We are able to consult them before we issue directions, and we can get their views about things where there perhaps isn’t consensus. That also includes the territorial departments and others with an interest in delivering the elections and referendum. We have also now started to hold our regional seminars, which means that I, as Chief Counting Officer, and Max Caller, my deputy Chief Counting Officer, can go out around the country and talk directly to electoral administrators about the safe and successful delivery of the polls on 5 May-both the elections and the referendum.

There were two other areas that we flagged in that statement. One was about sufficient resources to be able to carry out a public awareness role. To be clear, that is the commission rather than me as Chief Counting Officer. On 11 November, we said we had secured the funds to do that. Since then we have been developing the material that will form the text of a booklet that will go to people saying, "There are elections, there is a referendum; here’s how you vote in the elections and here’s what the referendum question is," and some basic information to help people understand the question. So that is now on our website and I am sure that many of you will have seen that text. We are also developing an advertising campaign that will come into place in due course, if Parliament votes for the referendum to go ahead.

Finally we said that there needed to be adequate funding for the delivery of the polls. We don’t yet have a fees and charges order, but we wouldn’t have because that is something that happens after Royal Assent. The funding assumptions for that order are based on my directions-as will be directions when I have the legal force to make them that as Chief Counting Officer-and the fees and charges order is based on data provided by counting officers around the country as to the impact of those directions.

So that is where we are now. We are ready to go and I am happy for us to take any questions that you may have. My colleagues may want to add to what I’ve said, but we can come to that in due course.

Q3 Chair: Thank you very much indeed. There has been conjecture and there have been statements about the absolute deadline that you have to work to. Is it the case that Royal Assent has to be given to the Bill by 16 February so that preparations can be properly put in place for 5 May, or is that something that has been guessed at?

Jenny Watson: No. The fact is that Royal Assent has to be given by 24 February, and those of you who are quick will see that the reason it is the 16th is because, of course, the House is in recess. So the 16th becomes effectively the last day on which we could have Royal Assent to be able to go ahead and deliver the referendum on 5 May.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to correct one part of the media reporting. There has been some reporting that this is our deadline. It is not our deadline; it is in fact Parliament’s deadline. It is a statutory deadline that exists in PPERA. Possibly the simplest way to explain it is to say that there is a four-week period for people to apply to us to be designated lead campaigners, a two-week period where we make that designation decision and a four-week period for the referendum campaign itself. So, in order to deliver that "four two four week" period, we have to have 10 weeks, and that is effectively 16 February. There are a number of other things that are contingent on Royal Assent-things like the fees and charges order, for example, can’t happen until Royal Assent-but that is the reason for the 10-week period.

Q4 Chair: It is very helpful to have that clarified-thank you.

We understand that 16 February is creeping up quite quickly. Just to make it absolutely clear, you told us last year that the six-month deadline for preparedness was from 5 November and that there should not be any significant changes after 5 November. We appreciate that there have been some changes, but are you now saying that to date the changes that are being made to the Bill, which may or may not stand, are not significant in the work that you have to do in the six-month period that you were able to start on 5 November?

Jenny Watson: Yes, that is absolutely right. We are now at a stage where we are ready to go, and I think it is important to clarify that because, again, some of the reporting has been that we need 10 weeks to prepare. I can tell you it has been a great deal longer than that to prepare for this referendum, and we obviously would have said in November had we thought that we did not have sufficient clarity to proceed. We do think that there was sufficient clarity at that time. Obviously there is one amendment-in fact it was passed this week-which is the threshold amendment, that we might want to discuss and on which we do need clarity, but we are certainly ready to go should Parliament decide that it wants to ask us to.

Q5 Chair: The threshold amendment is exactly the one that I was going to come to first. If the threshold amendment stands in the House of Commons in some form or other, will that affect the work that you have to do in the 10-week period?

Jenny Watson: There is more clarity that we need. I will perhaps give a kind of top-level overview of that and then I will turn to Andrew to amplify. First, to be clear, whether or not there is a threshold is not a matter for us. We would not take a view on that; that is a matter for Parliament. If there is to be a threshold, so that we are able to tell Parliament whether the threshold has been reached, we will need clarity about the definition of the electorate and the definition of turnout, and Andrew might want to say more about that. At the moment we don’t have that clarity. We are happy to help Parliament to understand what that clarity might be and I have written to the Minister to make that clear. Andrew, do you want to say anything more about that?

Andrew Scallan: The nature of the electorate may seem at first sight to be very obvious. However, there are any number of days at which the electorate might be assessed, including the day itself, because it is possible for people’s names to be added to a register because of a clerical error discovered on the day. We will therefore need absolute clarity about that so that all participants understand the basis on which the decision is taken and also what "vote" means, because there will be rejected votes, which will mean that a member of the electorate has voted but the vote has been rejected. We need clarity around some of those details so that we can establish the precise figures that Parliament intends.

Chair: I thought that might have been the case. Would anybody like to take that subject forward?

Q6 Mr Turner: Could I just ask a further question? In 1979, I think, there was a referendum in Scotland. What were the rules then and how are those rules different now?

Andrew Scallan: I can’t tell you the detail of the Scottish referendum.

Jenny Watson: We can certainly write to you with that detail if you would like us to.

Q7 Mr Turner: Surely that would have helped you find out what the answer was to some of your questions?

Jenny Watson: I think what we need on the face of the Bill is clarity about the way in which the terms are being used. At the moment, the amendment that was accepted simply gives us-you will have seen this-"if less than 40% of the electorate vote". What we are saying is that the two words "electorate" and "vote" are not as straightforward as might first be assumed. It might well be that the answer will be it is the same as it was in Scotland in 1979, but we need the clarity on the face of the Bill and that is what we currently don’t have.

Q8 Mr Turner: But surely the absence of anything in more detail would show you to follow the precedent, and the precedent is what happened in Scotland in 1979?

Peter Wardle: I don’t think we can make that assumption and I think I would certainly want some legal advice to tell me that I was safe in a nationwide UK referendum under one piece of legislation to follow a precedent that was established for a different referendum under different legislation. One of the important things, of course, is that the Scottish referendum in 1979 was held many years before PPERA came into force and therefore provided a generic framework for referendums, which of course we didn’t have before.

Jenny Watson: If I may be very blunt about it, as Chief Counting Officer-as the person who has to certify the result-I would want to be very sure that everybody understood exactly why I was giving the result that I was. Simply basing it on precedent and perhaps assumptions that I draw from that really doesn’t give me the confidence that I need.

Q9 Chair: It is a very good point. Electoral law has changed significantly since 1979 and, from recollection, the outcome of the 1979 referendum was not close and the arithmetic was not questioned, whereas we have a situation here-

Sheila Gilmore: It was a different kind of threshold and you didn’t have the rolling register either because, as far as I recall, at that stage it could only-

Chair: That is absolutely right. It was a different kind of threshold and, as Ms Watson has said, there is a big difference between defining the threshold in terms of the electorate and defining it in terms of one set of votes as compared with another, which is what happened in 1979, so we appreciate that that is possibly not a very good precedent.

Jenny Watson: The only other thing I would add is if the way the electorate figure was to be defined is with numbers very close to the date of the poll itself, I would need to be very certain that I had the power to get from individual counting officers around the country the information that would allow me to make an assessment about whether the threshold had been reached, because effectively that could mean people sending us data in real time and I need to be sure that they will do so.

Q10 Stephen Williams: I was about to say that the threshold, of course, is totally different. The 1979 threshold was 40% of people had to vote yes for it to be binding; this is of turnout of the whole. So it is not the same; I think it is a red herring.

Isn’t the practical issue that the franchise for the referendum on AV is the parliamentary franchise-the House of Commons franchise-but the people who will be turning up to vote, certainly in Bristol, will be voting in the local government elections, for which the franchise is different? EU citizens will be voting then, whereas-one of the very first questions I asked the Deputy Prime Minister when he came before this Committee was about the distinction between himself and his wife, for instance-it will be only UK citizens who are allowed to vote in the referendum for AV. So isn’t the practical difficulty that if returning officers around the country had to calculate a turnout, it would be quite a convoluted task to have two verifications for who has been eligible to vote in the referendum and mark those against the register, and who was eligible to vote only in the local government election? Isn’t that the difficulty?

Jenny Watson: First on the franchise: parliamentary plus peers. The turnout threshold would be calculated at a UK-wide level. So, in fact, I would expect that we would be getting that data, and from the verification data that we have, we would not necessarily be expecting that calculation to be done at a local level. However, my understanding is it would be possible for people to provide that data, because obviously people will be issuing ballot papers to some voters and not to others.

Andrew Scallan: It is possible. Combined elections or combined electoral events are not unusual, so the same issue applied at the general election in many areas, and there are calculations that are capable of being made for turnout at different elections that take place on the same day. It is entirely possible-the computer will tell you-because that there are flags put against electors’ names if they have a different franchise, so it is entirely possible to do that calculation.

Q11 Chair: Can I just make certain that what you are saying here is that you require clarification, but are you saying that it is far from impossible? You need the clarification so that you could put the necessary safeguards and information-gathering systems in place but, given all the other preparations that you have made, presumably this will just be another part of preparation-it wouldn’t be incredibly difficult.

Jenny Watson: Yes. We need to have clarity on the face of the Bill and once we have that clarity, we can continue to go ahead. Given that clarity, there is nothing that would stop us and nothing that would mean that we come back and say, "Actually, this is not possible."

Chair: Thank you, that is helpful.

Q12 Simon Hart: A quick question in the context of Wales where you’re going to have a potentially different turnout for people voting in the Welsh Assembly election and voting in the referendum. We accept that and I accept your point about it being reasonably easy to calculate. You mentioned earlier your discussions with election administrators around the country. Were any significant concerns raised by them-in my case I am particularly interested in Wales-or did they share to the letter your view about the deliverability of this in the next few weeks?

Jenny Watson: Given that we’ve been working so closely with the regional counting officers and keeping counting officers around the country very much in touch with what we are doing, I would hope that they would share our view about the deliverability of it. We have previously discussed with the Committee-for example in relation to some of the problems that arose at close of poll at the last election and some of the poor planning by local authorities that led to some of those problems-that there is a variability of practice in terms of delivering elections around the country. Many people are very good: they follow our guidance; they engage with us; they do an absolutely fantastic job. Others perhaps might not rise always to the highest standard, so I am sure that some of the directions that I intend to issue may be more of a challenge for some people than for others, but those directions are completely in line with what we would expect in best practice.

Q13 Simon Hart: Absolutely. I completely accept that. My question really is: have election administrators raised concerns with you? Would you describe those concerns as significant in certain places? If they are significant, are you able perhaps to share some of those significant concerns with the Committee?

Jenny Watson: Let me give you an example. I intend to issue a direction about the timing of the referendum count because I think it is extremely important that those who are standing for election, particularly in Scotland and Wales and for local government elections in England-I exempt Northern Ireland from this because their results would not come through for the Northern Ireland Assembly until the Saturday-know soon who has been elected and, from the voters’ perspective, that voters know the people they will be holding to account and will be forming the administration in that area. So, with that in mind, and because I want it to be a UK-wide event with one result-a UK-wide referendum result-I intend to issue a direction that the referendum count should begin at four o’clock on the Friday afternoon of 6 May, which will give time for the election results to the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament and local elections results in England to be counted.

For some electoral administrators, that has been completely fine. I should say that the regional counting officers in Wales and the chair of the Electoral Management Board in Scotland certainly very much welcomed that. Other electoral administrators have said, "This isn’t what we usually do and we’d like to start counting on the night, so why are you telling us that we have to wait until 4.00pm?" So there are sometimes concerns that are made, and that is all very public. That is on our website. We have published a response to the consultation that we issued that includes a kind of summary of the views that were expressed.

So, yes, from time to time there are concerns raised. Some of those, of course, I listened to extremely carefully because they affect the delivery of the poll and some of those sometimes can have the appearance of being occasionally, "Actually, we’ve never done it like this before so we’d rather just carry on with what we’ve always done." I think what I would say very respectfully to my colleagues in the electoral administration world throughout the UK is that sometimes doing what you have always done might not deliver the kind of consistency that we need for a UK-wide referendum. It is really important to get across that critical point. There has been a very interesting discussion with the regional counting officers.

There is something very different between a referendum and an election. A referendum is not something that happens only in one constituency. To be sure about that consistency and that voters get an equally good chance to vote in the referendum and the elections that are taking place on the same day-and that the count takes place in the same way, because of course we can’t have some people giving recounts on one basis and others not-there are a range of consistency points that need to be in place.

Q14 Simon Hart: Last question. I am less concerned about the follow-up and about how the result is announced. I am more concerned about the preplanning, which was where I was driving. Are you content that they are content-I suppose that that was where I was going? There are those who may take a different view, and I just wanted to be absolutely certain that you felt there wasn’t an electoral administrator anywhere who had raised a significant concern that had caused you concern about preplanning. Forget how they count the votes; that will happen somehow. I am talking about preplanning so they can deliver a fair election.

Jenny Watson: I don’t think there has been anybody who has raised a concern that is significant in the way that I would define it, which would be that it caused me to question whether the elections and the referendum could safely be delivered. Another way to answer the question would be to say, "Will there be things that we can learn about how we’ve worked on this referendum that we might want to share with people afterwards?" I am sure there will be. It would be a rare organisation that doesn’t sometimes say, "Actually, we could have done that a little bit differently and it might have been a better process." I am sure there will be some of those things, but there is nothing at the moment that is of a level of concern where I think it causes me, as Chief Counting Officer, to think we have to rethink the whole process. Andrew and Peter may want to add to that.

Andrew Scallan: It might just be worth mentioning that one of the things that we have asked counting officers to do is supply us with their project plans for how they are going to manage the election. We gave them a deadline of 4 February, and I think that yesterday there were five outstanding. So what we have got from each counting officer is their statement of where they are with their preparedness. They will be worked through now by our staff to make sure all the key issues are there. We have had a very good response and we’re working through them, and essentially putting into place all the things that we have been training them to do, we think, over the years in terms of our performance standards.

So there is a process in place that counting officers report to us and their regional counting officer. We have good intelligence about the individuals who work in each local authority and we are able to have good dialogue and regular updates about where they are, but there are always going to be issues, when asking people to do things differently, that people will raise. Some sometimes they get escalated into a level that is not appropriate and then they die away once people have received an answer.

Jenny Watson: The role of our steering group and the role of the regional counting officers in helping us think some of these things through have been really indispensable as a kind of framework for taking the thing forward. I am sure that you will know Bryn Parry-Jones, who is a regional counting officer in Wales and is also working with us to deliver on the Welsh referendum taking place in three weeks. They have input and are able to say, "Well, that might look fine from where you sit, but can you think about it from where we sit?" Quite a robust discussion goes on in those meetings.

Q15 Tristram Hunt: I was just going to ask what the nightmare scenario is in terms of Royal Assent not taking place, or if it goes to October. What is the file at the bottom that says, "What we don’t want to happen"?

Jenny Watson: We are ready to deliver if Parliament asks us to deliver. Some of the things like whether we have Royal Assent or not or when is it are, in a way-I know this sounds like a strange thing to say-not necessarily top of our horizon. We are obviously doing a lot of quite thorough risk management and planning around what could go wrong, and I think it is probably fair to say that most of it is not about things like that, but about working through some real scenarios that have happened in other polls and elections, such as results being transposed as they are sent back to the Chief Counting Officer so that the yes column ends up in the no column and vice versa. They are things like that; they are not things like the timing of the referendum.

Q16 Tristram Hunt: You are effectively quite confident about the timing.

Jenny Watson: I think what I would say is that we are ready to go. I think we will do a good job. I think we have good relationships with the regional counting officers and we are working that through very thoroughly. I don’t want to sound in any way over-confident about it. There is still a lot to be done and we are currently working on two referendums: one that happens in three weeks, which is real and very live; and one that is, at this stage, still a proposed referendum, for which I am confident that we have done the planning work that we need to deliver, and there will be a phase after Royal Assent when we will get into the actual doing of it.

Q17 Tristram Hunt: On your "four two four" model, it is only four weeks in-correct me if I’m wrong-that you begin to determine who the official advocates of yes and no are, and then apply public money to them. Is that right?

Jenny Watson: There was a stage last night when I was thinking of recommending "four two four" to the England team. There is a four-week phase during which campaigners who want to be designated as the lead campaigners can register with us. Then there is a two-week phase during which we make that designation decision, and then the campaign begins.

Q18 Tristram Hunt: So all the campaigning that is going on now, in terms of literature, activities, public meetings and all the rest of it, is paid for privately by the organisations.

Jenny Watson: Yes. The campaign regulated period starts at Royal Assent.

Q19 Tristram Hunt: So up to now it is all free money. I mean, it is not free money but-

Jenny Watson: It is not caught by the regulated period. I think we might have discussed this with you last time we came but, yes, that is right.

Q20 Chair: We did, thank you. I think you gave us information on that. Is there anything you would like to clarify on that?

Jenny Watson: No. I really just wanted to go back to Mr Hunt’s question about the level of preparedness. What we see, and obviously what members of the Committee can’t see, is the kind of risk monitoring, and relationships and processes, that we have in place behind the scenes to see whether and where problems might be developing. Perhaps because we have that information, we can see the process that we would use to spot when things might start to go wrong, if they do.

Q21 Stephen Williams: Can we come back to the information for the voters to understand what the options are before them, both in terms of the referendum and the other elections that are taking place? Jenny Watson said that there was going to be a booklet issued to each household. Is that going to differentiate in any way between areas of the country that have local government elections and Welsh Assembly elections on the same day, or is it going to be a UK-wide booklet?

Jenny Watson: There are effectively four booklets, so there is one for England, one for Scotland, one for Wales and one for Northern Ireland. Where there are polls, they will explain how you vote- "This is how you cast your vote"-and it will also then talk about the referendum question and give some very basic information. Peter might want to say more about how we have been developing that information material.

Peter Wardle: This is work that has been going on for some time. We realised quite early on that we would have to have different versions. It is important that someone in Scotland understands that there are Scottish Parliament elections and knows the importance of being registered and how to cast their ballot, but each of the booklets will include the same text about the UK-wide issue of the referendum. The text, as the Chair said earlier on, is currently more or less on our website. The language on our website is likely to find its way through to the booklet for the explanation. That language has been developed over a fairly thorough period with expert input from academics and legal checks to make sure that it faithfully reflects what the legislation says. It has also been trialled with real voters, so we have tested it to say, "Does this actually make sense? Is this the best way of explaining the concept?" We are pretty happy with where it is at the moment. We have one or two people still raising some fairly technical points about it. We will take those into account and take a decision on what finally goes in, but we are pretty confident we have the best and clearest description that we can come up with of what the two voting systems under consideration are and how they work.

Jenny Watson: It is perhaps worth adding another implication of a threshold amendment. One of the things we are doing in that booklet is saying to voters what happens next-if the vote goes this way what happens next, and if the vote goes that way what happens next. Obviously, we will have to find some language to explain the threshold amendment, but again we are confident that we can do that in the time that we have.

Q22 Stephen Williams: It seems fairly clear to me what will happen in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, because everyone will understand they need to turn up and vote for the devolved Parliament and Assemblies. In England, however, some parts of the country have all-out local government elections but parts of the country like London have no local elections. Bristol uniquely elects in a pie chart fashion, so part of the city comes up and part doesn’t. So, in my constituency, seven of the wards electing one councillor go to the vote, but two of the other wards have no election at all. Is there going to be any local discretion for giving information to people that even if you don’t have a local government election, you have the opportunity to turn up and vote in the referendum?

Peter Wardle: Everybody in England will get the booklet that will tell them there is a referendum on 5 May, assuming the Bill is passed, and we will inevitably in the booklet have to say effectively there may or may not be local elections in your area. What we are then doing is working with the local counting officers and returning officers to make sure that they do the necessary local publicity so that people can be as clear as possible, and this includes making sure that the poll cards are as clear as we can make them. Poll cards are notoriously not always terribly informative, and we are trying to take the opportunity to use the delivery of poll cards to make it clearer to people what elections they can expect in their own particular area. You are right; it is a more complex position across England.

Q23 Stephen Williams: Will there be advertising locally, or will you be expecting local authorities to put more effort into advertising locally for this round of elections than they would have done in the past, which some of them might find difficult given budgetary constraints that they are under at the moment?

Peter Wardle: We are discussing quite what it is going to mean. There are budgetary constraints in local authorities, and it is local authorities that have to fund advertising for local authority elections. This is not something that the Chief Counting Officer can direct on, because it is to do with the elections rather than the referendum, and nor is it something that can be claimed back through fees and charges. As you say, it is a local authority-funded activity, but we are working with counting officers and their communication teams to make sure they understand all the free and cheap ways that they can get the message across, and there are lots of those that do not involve running major advertising campaigns with a large cost. We have seen lots of good examples of that up and down the country, and we are trying to spread that best practice as well as we can. We hope, given the budgetary situation, that that will be welcomed.

Jenny Watson: Members of the Committee might not be aware that what we always do before any election is to have what I would call template publicity material. That could be posters, but equally it is press releases that people can simply lift and use in their local area, if that is what they want to do. We provide a number of free resources that people can use. From my memory, although we can certainly circulate the text if people would like to see it, the booklet also suggests that people visit our aboutmyvote.co.uk website, which will tell you or enable you to go and find out from your local authority if you do have elections. So there is another route there as well.

Q24 Chair: Will you be able to evaluate, after it has all taken place, how much it has cost local authorities to run the referendum? Will you be able to do that calculation and come back and tell us in another six months’ time?

Jenny Watson: Yes.

Peter Wardle: Yes, we will. Whether it will be six months, I’m not sure.

Q25 Chair: It doesn’t matter. Eight months, nine months; we will wait.

Peter Wardle: There will be an answer, and the reason we will know the answer is that the claims that the local authorities put in will come to the commission for the first time rather than to the Government. It might not be six months, but we think it will be rather quicker than it has been in the past for some elections.

Q26 Chair: So we will be able to have a figure of how much it has cost local authorities?

Peter Wardle: The cost of the referendum.

Jenny Watson: Yes.

Q27 Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you. What about the cost of the publicity material that you are required to send to-am I right in saying?-every household in the country?

Jenny Watson: It will be every household in the UK. Again, I will let Peter talk about those costs, but just to let you know that of course we will also evaluate that. We always evaluate our publicity material, and actually our voter registration campaigns do very well when they are set against other public sector spend. I think the cost of this particular campaign will work out at about 15p per elector. That is the figure that has stuck in my mind but, Peter, you might want to say more about costs in the round.

Peter Wardle: The total cost. It is by far the biggest element of what the commission will be spending on the referendum. The biggest element of what the commission spends on any poll is always the public awareness work. The latest figure we have is that will be about £6.8 million across the country. I don’t have a detailed breakdown of-

Q28 Chair: It will be £6.8 million for voter education.

Peter Wardle: For voter education, but I can give you a more detailed breakdown, although I can’t give it to you right now. It is not all the booklet; it includes work we are doing on our website and advertising campaigns, including TV advertising campaigns, which is quite a significant part of it. There will be an advertising campaign-TV, radio, online, print-to tell people, effectively, to look out for the booklet.

Q29 Simon Hart: Just on that point, obviously you will be doing it bilingually in Wales. Have you an estimate of the price per elector in Wales?

Jenny Watson: Do you mean for the referendum on 3 March or for the-

Simon Hart: Well, take your pick.

Jenny Watson: It is quite different.

Simon Hart: No, AV principally, although I did want to know, funnily enough, whether your information for the referendum in March refers in any way to the referendum in May, because some people are already confused about what is coming up and I am wondering how you are educating people to the distinction between the two referendums.

Peter Wardle: The 3 March public awareness campaign does not refer to 5 May, not least because there is no 5 May referendum yet and I think we would fall foul of the Lords if we were to do that. But that is not the only reason. We also have tested what we are doing in Wales for 3 March-and it works. We are confident that the best thing to do is to stick to the 3 March issue on its own. We will have the detail-I am afraid I don’t have it with me at the moment-but I will find the detail on cost per elector for both 3 March and 5 May in Wales and give it to you.

Jenny Watson: I can tell you cost per elector for Wales. It is 64p per elector for 3 March, and the difference between the two-15p and 64p-is simply around fixed and variable costs. It costs pretty much the same to produce an ad regardless of the number of electors who might see it. I should reassure the Committee-I am sure you will want to know this-that obviously we sought the Speaker’s Committee’s permission before we went ahead and committed any of this spend, because we are mindful of the in-general rule on public advertising. It gave us that dispensation, so we have been able to go ahead.

Chair: Thank you very much, that is very helpful.

Q30 Mr Turner: Could you tell me what you are doing about people who don’t speak or read English?

Jenny Watson: Yes, I can give you some indication, and it might be something where we could follow up with you separately because what I don’t have, I’m afraid, is a list of the different kinds of languages that we might translate. We will have material available on our website that will mean that people whose command of English is not as great as their command of another language will be able to look at that material in a language that better suits them, but I’m afraid I don’t have the list. Peter, do you know?

Peter Wardle: As the Chair mentioned earlier on, there are about a dozen languages on that list. I don’t have the specific list with me but we can easily let you have that. The Chair mentioned earlier on the free resources that we provide to local authorities and among those are translations of common pieces of information about the poll. Local authorities with a concentration of people who are more familiar with a language other than English in their area can pick that up from us and use it rather than incurring huge translation costs themselves.

Q31 Mr Chope: I apologise for being late. I was chairing a Committee, I’m afraid.

I was just looking at schedule 3, as amended last night in their lordships’ House very late on, in relation to absent voting arrangements. My understanding is that if you are registered in a local authority area, you may be registered in two different local authority areas, and so if you have a postal voting arrangement, that is fine because in a sense you are in charge of whether you are going to be voting once or twice. If you are registered in two places for the local authority, you will only be allowed to vote once in terms of the postal vote in the referendum, because you can only have one vote in the referendum.

I wonder what the situation is where you are registered in two different localities for a proxy and those proxies are different people. How is the proxy-for example your proxy at your London address-going to know whether or not he is entitled to exercise your proxy in the referendum when your wife may be your proxy at another address? If you have two different proxies at two different addresses, how are we going to ensure that there isn’t double voting? Does this long list of amendments cover that scenario and were you consulted about these amendments?

Andrew Scallan: It doesn’t cover that scenario, just as it is very difficult to police double registrations at any election. There is no special provision that exists to prevent someone. There is not a link between individual electoral administration officers to say, "This person is registered on ours and they’re also registered on yours. This is the absent voting arrangements they have." There is no link of that type, so it would be down to the elector to be sure about what they were asking their proxy to do so that no one was committing an offence.

Peter Wardle: That is a legal rather than administrative point. When we say there is no link, there is no statutory link. It is not simply that the administrators don’t do it; there is no statutory provision for electoral administrators to cross-check their absent vote applications between different electoral registers.

Q32 Mr Chope: So there is no way to police double voting where there is double registration.

Andrew Scallan: It would be wrong to say there is no way. There is a very complicated way, and you need to be in possession of a lot of detailed facts, but it is not an easy or straightforward way.

Jenny Watson: But that would be common to any poll, not only the poll on 5 May. Just so that we are very clear, it is not a specific issue that arises in relation to the proposed referendum. It is simply an issue that is present in our system.

One other thing I might add if I can, Madam Chair, is that we are always very clear in the material that we put out for electors what they can and can’t do. So, for example, we will do a push at some point to say, "If you suddenly realise you need a proxy vote, this is what you must do if you’re going to apply for it," and we can make clear that if you were to end up with a proxy vote in more than one place, you can vote only once in the referendum. But clearly, because we have a trust-based system, that will depend on the elector exercising it in an honourable way.

Q33 Mr Chope: As I understand it from looking at the amendments proposed last night, if somebody has already appointed a proxy for a local election, that person is automatically going to have a proxy for the referendum. My concern is that that means that without any action by the elector, there could be two proxies appointed on his behalf to vote in the referendum automatically without his involvement, because of the automaticity of the arrangements that were incorporated in the amendments last night. Is that correct?

Jenny Watson: I think that would be correct, yes.

Andrew Scallan: Yes.

Q34 Mr Chope: Is that a problem then? It seems to me it is a problem because it is enabling people, without their own knowledge, to have proxies on their behalf in the referendum whereas otherwise, if it was a general election for example, they would know that if they appointed a proxy to operate for them in the general election in more than one place, they were doing something wrong, but because this is an automatic creation of a proxy, even if you have applied only for a proxy for the local elections, the proxy is going to be able to go off and vote in the referendum, even though another proxy for the same person may be doing something in a different constituency.

Jenny Watson: I wonder if it would help if Andrew talked through the genesis of that amendment, which might shed a bit more light on that.

Andrew Scallan: I think the amendment came as a result of people drawing attention to the fact that the way the legislation had been previously drafted meant that those people who did have proxy or postal vote applications approved for 5 May would have had to apply again for the referendum, or alternatively the electoral registration officer would write out to everybody again. I think this was considered to be more convenient for the elector rather than generating, as it inevitably would have done, a lot of concern saying, "Well, I’ve applied for a postal vote or a proxy vote for 5 May; why on earth am I having to apply again?" or alternatively turning up at the polling station and being allowed only to vote in one because they have absent votes for the others. It was an attempt to clarify the position and put it in its simplest way. It does raise issues, both for proxy voters and for postal voters. Clearly the number of proxy voters is not significant compared with the number of people who vote by post, but the principle applies across the two.

Q35 Mr Chope: So you have decided not to worry about the concerns I have expressed when promoting this amendment? My concern would be covered if people knowing that there is now going to be a referendum had to apply for a proxy, because they would know that they could apply only for one proxy for their vote and it would be in either of the two locations where they were registered for local voting. Without this amendment, it wouldn’t be possible for people to double-vote with proxies in the referendum, whereas with this amendment it is possible to do that. I am surprised that, as the Electoral Commission is designed to establish integrity in our voting system and to minimise the opportunity for fraud, you seem in this case to have actually facilitated fraud or double-voting with no fraudulent intent.

Jenny Watson: I don’t think that that is the intention that we have had in any way. I think what we have been trying to do is make it possible for electors who have already registered for an absent vote-perhaps a postal vote-and think, "Yes, I’ve done that in relation to 5 May," not to find suddenly that in fact they haven’t and therefore they have lost a vote that they thought they had because they had registered for an absent vote. Both these things come into play, and I think we were mindful of the need to try and minimise the complexity around this, so that is where the amendment has taken us.

Q36 Mr Chope: You recognise the consequences which we described?

Jenny Watson: There are consequences right across the piece from having what is effectively a trust-based system. We have spoken with this Committee before about things like, for example, the introduction of individual electoral registration, which is one way to change the system to one that requires more information from the person applying for the vote. We have raised with the Government the issue of having ID at polling stations. We think it is time for them seriously to consider that as an issue-of course, it is already the case in Northern Ireland. There are a number of different issues across our electoral system that arise from having a trust-based system, and this is one of those.

Q37 Mr Chope: Just finally, how many people do you think are registered in more than one location at the moment?

Andrew Scallan: It is very difficult to say because there is not one register and because people are not asked those questions. It is anticipated that the census next year will ask questions about second home ownership in a way that might allow information to be gathered that could give some indication, but second home ownership would not on its own mean that people had registered more than once, so it is very difficult to give precise details.

Q38 Mr Chope: I am asking not for absolute precision, but for a rough idea.

Jenny Watson: If we don’t have the figures now, we can certainly go away and give you how many proxy votes would be cast, for example, and that might be an indication.

Andrew Scallan: It may not be possible to say how many proxy votes are cast. It would be possible to say how many people have appointed proxies, which I think is something less than or around 2%, but I will confirm that figure. If 2% of voters overall have proxies, it is a question then of how many people are registered more than once.

Q39 Chair: The answer that you have just given, Mr Scallan, is very important. Am I right in saying that you have just told the Committee that the Electoral Commission does not know-and there is no way of evaluating-how many people are registered in more than one constituency? If that is the case, it follows that it is not possible to say what is the precise size of the electorate, and if you cannot say the precise size of the electorate, you cannot tell us what 40% of the electorate is. I am not blaming the Electoral Commission; I see why you can’t tell us, and I don’t see how you can.

Peter Wardle: It is a good point. We discussed before that the electoral register consists of entries, and entries aren’t necessarily the same as people.

Q40 Chair: No. Most of us, for example, will be registered in two places, but very carefully exercise our vote in only one, but that means that the size of the electorate cannot be accurately pinpointed. Is that correct?

Peter Wardle: It is very hard to calculate.

Andrew Scallan: Well, the electorate is what Parliament has agreed the franchise should be and the courts and Parliament have agreed that people can be registered in more than one place. We also have an infrastructure that says there are separate electoral registers for each local authority area and there is no combining of information. There is no suggestion, as a result of the referendum, that the nature of the franchise has to be changed, but there is a definition that needs to be arrived at.

Peter Wardle: If you go back to the concern, in a practical sense, if Parliament is clear what it wants as the denominator for the fraction, we can operate it. Parliament will have to consider whether it is satisfied with a denominator that may, because of the way the system works, include some double counting.

Q41 Chair: Thank you. That is a perfectly logical answer to the question.

Just coming to that then, given that effectively one week from now there has to be Royal Assent to the Bill so that that you can do what has to be done in the correct time scale, if the current amendment passed in the House of Lords stands as it is, you said that we will require clarification on the face of the Bill. Is that correct? That means that within the next week, there will have to be a further amendment to the Bill clarifying exactly the arithmetic point that we just discussed.

Jenny Watson: If that amendment is to stay in the Bill, yes, we need greater clarity and we are already talking to the Cabinet Office about the need for that clarity. I think, as Andrew just said, we know what Parliament has said it wants the franchise to be and so our assumption would be that that clarity would be predicated on the current will of Parliament around the franchise. That, I think, is as clear as we can be at this point. You raise a good and much wider point, which is again something I think we would be happy to come back and talk to you about in due course, which is the nature of the modernisation of our system, given that we are a much more mobile society and many more people do have registration perhaps in more than one place.

Chair: Some of us in Parliament have been talking for over a decade about the need to clarify the franchise and to have a properly kept register of electors, but that is another point and one that we can’t expect you to address here. You have given us very clear information about the amount of work that has to be done within the next seven days to give the clarity that would be necessary if the House of Lords’ amendment on thresholds stands. I’m very biased in this matter so I shall stop now, because I did propose that amendment in the House of Commons, where it wasn’t carried. If my amendment in the House of Commons had been carried last autumn, the Government would have had plenty of time, as would you, to clarify the position, but that is another matter entirely.

Q42 Stephen Williams: It proves that the House of Commons is much more sensible than the House of Lords, Chair.

I was going to say that maybe for our next witness this issue about the double-counting of the electorate is very relevant for the construction of parliamentary boundaries, but I wanted to ask a final question to the witnesses we have before us at the moment. We are talking about preparations for elections or referendums that are on the immediate horizon. There are a couple of other bills before Parliament that introduce other new elections as well: mayoral referendums in some parts of the country and the police commissioners. I just wanted to ask briefly, although I think we will need to return to this: is the Electoral Commission already advising the Government or making preparations for those elections, particularly for the police commissioners, which will be a completely novel election for this country?

Jenny Watson: There are two more Bills where we have, I think, already provided some briefing to parliamentarians. One of those is the Localism Bill-I can despatch that one fairly quickly, I think-in which there is a proposal for local referendums. At the moment, we don’t have a role in relation to local referendums in terms of the fairness of the question, and nor do we regulate any system of campaign finance. It is possible, depending on the topics that might be proposed for local referendums, that some system of campaign finance regulation might be desirable and we have simply suggested to Parliament that you will want to think about that. So that is the Localism Bill, and we will continue to brief as that goes through.

The other is the Police and Social Responsibility Bill, which does contain the election of police and crime commissioners. Yes, we do have a number of concerns there, and I suppose I can divide them into two or three compartments. One is the framework on which the elections will be run. These are completely new elections using a voting system-the supplementary vote-that most people in England and Wales will not have used before, and they will be run on boundaries that are not necessarily coterminous with local authority boundaries, which means that local authorities will need to work with each other, for example to produce an electoral roll and to administer the election. We think there is therefore a need for some kind of leadership and strategic co-ordination in the delivery of that election.

We also think that the legislation will need to be brought forward in a very timely manner. One of the things about this proposed referendum is that there is, through PPERA, an underlying system for how we run referendums in the UK now. There is not any kind of underlying framework in legislation for how one might run elections to police and crime commissioners. So we would need that legislation, to be clear, with Royal Assent by November of this year for elections to go ahead in May 2012.

There are also outstanding questions to be answered on the party finance regime that would operate for those elections. For example, what would the spending limits be, how can we be sure that we would have the same kind of transparency around financing of independent candidates’ campaigns that we would have of party candidates’ campaigns, and indeed what is the length of the campaign finance regulated period.

So there are a number of issues there that we are going to want to, I think continue to discuss with Members of Parliament as that Bill goes through.

Stephen Williams: We might have to come back to that.

Chair: We would be delighted to come back to that.

Q43 Mr Chope: Can I come back to the point about the 40% amendment that is now in play? As I understand it, you are saying that in order to make that amendment work, it needs a further tweaking?

Jenny Watson: Yes. I’m sorry, shall I just read out-

Mr Chope: All I was going to say was that if it needs a bit more tweaking, is there any way in which you could provide us with what you consider to be the relevant draft of an amendment that would achieve that tweaking? It would then be open to this House to move that amendment to the Lords amendment when it comes up for discussion on Tuesday, thereby ensuring that if that amendment and the Lords amendment was carried in this House, everything would be hunky dory in time for Royal Assent.

Jenny Watson: I think we would be happy to provide to Parliament at the time the Bill comes back to the Commons a briefing that sets out the type of clarity that we need, which is what we would always do. We were saying to Committee members earlier that we need a clearer definition of electorate and we need a clearer definition of turnout, and we are happy to express those views to Parliament when the Bill comes back.

Chair: We look forward to receiving that.

Q44 Mr Turner: On the dates

Chair: We will have to wrap up very quickly.

Mr Turner: I know, but the problem is the dates. Is there going to be time for people who are not Ministers to have the information and to submit amendments?

Chair: I don’t think that is the Electoral Commission’s-

Mr Turner: No, it is very much a-

Chair: It is not a question that we can expect the Electoral Commission-

Jenny Watson: No, but I think we are in a position probably to tell you when we would provide a briefing. Sorry, I am just conferring with my colleagues, but our usual practice would be, if a Bill is coming to the House one week, to provide a briefing by the end of the previous week, and since it is Thursday today, I think that would probably mean tomorrow. So I would imagine that that is what we would do in this case, and I will feel a kicking of my chair from behind me if I have that wrong, I am sure.

Chair: We look forward to seeing your briefing tomorrow. Thank you very much indeed. I am going to wrap up, unless Christopher has something very urgent to say.

You have been extremely good in coming before us this morning. Thank you very much indeed. We have explored some issues that had not previously been explored and we are very grateful to you. We look forward to having you come before the Committee again in the near future, because we have earmarked further questions which can’t be answered at the moment, but we know that you will be happy to do so in due course.

Jenny Watson: Indeed, thank you very much.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Professor Ron Johnston, Professor of Geography, University of Bristol, gave evidence.

Q45 Chair: Professor Johnston, thank you very much indeed for coming back to see us again-we greatly appreciate it. You will know that the reason why-you may have heard me say this to our previous witnesses from the Electoral Commission-is that we are discussing the Bill that is currently before Parliament, which has had some amendments, and we would like to assess the significance of those amendments, if they were to stand. Before we open to questions, would you like to give us an idea of your current thinking on this?

Professor Johnston: Certainly. Thank you very much indeed. I spent the last two days preparing to talk to you about public inquiries and public hearings and undoubtedly we will. Mr Williams has just thrown a question at me that I am happy to try and answer, and of course last night the Lords bowled me another googly. Fortunately, I heard at 6.45am this morning that it had happened, and I was able to spend an hour and a half on the train coming in from Salisbury working out what I think is the consequence and-thank you very much to Hannah-I’ve also been able to scan the House of Lords Hansard from last night, so if you want to talk about that amendment, I am at least semi-prepared.

Q46 Chair: That is very good of you. We only knew about this when it happened late last night-

Professor Johnston: Indeed.

Chair: -and you have only known since this morning, but am I right in thinking, because I have not read it yet, that the change is from the 5% margin of change to 7.5%?

Professor Johnston: Well, the amendment as written says in very exceptional circumstances, where it is necessary for a viable constituency, the boundary commissions can use the 7.5% limit rather than the 5% limit, which I think opens a lot of issues for them and for you and everybody else in the political field.

Q47 Chair: It certainly does. Would you like to tell us which of those issues you think is the most significant, bearing in mind we are not starting from scratch here?

Professor Johnston: Indeed.

Chair: You have been before us before and we have discussed all these matters, so taking it on from there.

Professor Johnston: Okay, yes. I mean, first, the amendment is explicit that the boundary commissions go to 7.5% only if they see that it is necessary to achieve a viable constituency and if the arguments are of an exceptionally compelling nature. The arguments therefore from those who propose the amendment is that this is very restricted and it will not apply in many cases. The arguments against are, first, what is meant by "viable" and by "exceptionally compelling", and a lot of judgment is being thrown back to the boundary commissions, which of course they had before, or they have now unless these new rules come in. "Viable", according to the OED, as we were told in the debate last night, means "workable" and "practicable". Well, I would ask you, are all your constituencies currently workable or practicable, in which case this could never happen, but maybe that is not the case? We can look at what might be some obvious cases where this could apply. The Cumbrian fells could be an example, because of problems of crossing the high mountains. There is the Argyll and Bute issue, where I gather there are more islands than in the Western Isles, so there is a question of a "ferrymander", I understand. However, Lord Wallace said it wouldn’t apply to Argyll and Bute last night, which is interesting.

We have heard a lot from Lord Kinnock and others in the debate in the Lords about the community in the Welsh valleys. Are those exceptional cases to get viable constituencies? I don’t know. What about Ipswich? What if you had a constituency which was Ipswich less one ward to be within the 5% rule? Would it not be sensible to have that extra ward and then you have the whole of Ipswich? All I am saying is I can see the arguments coming and the boundary commissions, I’m sure, will want to be very restricted in how they apply it in the first case when making their recommendations. But then when it comes to public consultation-again, the Lords’ arguments are full of this last night-people will come in to say, "This is a special case. This is really compelling, you must go with this," and then the hearings are going to become even more important than they might have been. Who knows how many there will be, but I can imagine in many cases people will, if you like, try it on. Take the Cornwall argument. Is that exceptional? Is that compelling? It is obviously to the Cornish people.

Q48 Chair: So you are saying that the combination of the two amendments for us will have a multiplier effect?

Professor Johnston: It does indeed.

Q49 Chair: It is not merely additional, it is a multiplier.

Professor Johnston: Of course, in one sense, the House of Lords, by accepting the Isle of Wight amendment, has already seen one compelling case and accepted it, and what sort of precedent does that set when it gets to the boundary commissions? Lord Pannick had four arguments: one was it is very exceptional, and it will be challenged, I am sure. The second is does it raise practical problems? It will, especially if a boundary commission proposes constituencies for an area within the 5% constraint, and then at the local hearing, or in the written submissions but not discussed at the local hearing-this probably might come back later-somebody comes up with an extremely compelling argument for a 7.5%, and the boundary commission accepts it. The knock-on consequences could ripple right through a region-right through a country, okay-and the boundary commission will then have to re-jig all the constituencies in that region, or country if it is Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, and that will undoubtedly delay the process. Will you make the deadline?

Then the final point is judicial review. Now, here we have separate arguments. Lord Pannick said any case for judicial review here would be hopeless because basically the amendment allows the boundary commissions-if you like-to exercise their judgement, which of course is what Lord Donaldson said in 1983. I was partly responsible in that case and it is stamped on my heart, because I discovered after the event that what we were doing was being funded by Robert Maxwell.

Chair: Well, you discovered that afterwards.

Professor Johnston: I will say no more. But Lord Woolf, of course, in his contributions in the Lords debates twice made it very clear that there are going to be problems of judicial review. Whether or not they succeed, there is the opportunity to challenge through judicial review, particularly, he said, because of the nature of the local hearings and the absence of any report on the local hearings. So it seems to me that if this amendment stays in, plus the amendments on local inquiries becoming local hearings-or no local inquiries, now local hearings-the boundary commissions are being given a much more difficult task. They are probably up to it, but it is more difficult and the time constraint is really then becoming tight and the problems of delay, I think, become more important too. The movers of the amendment in the Lords downplayed all of those. They may be right, but nevertheless the opportunity is there and I can see it becoming a very difficult task for the commission.

Q50 Chair: But in fact, am I right in assessing that what you are saying is that the combination of the change from the 5% to 7.5%, plus the local hearings amendment, plus the time constraints, and plus the possibility of judicial review that follows on from those two amendments means that that combination could be fatal to the Bill?

Professor Johnston: Well, it couldn’t be fatal to the Bill. It could be fatal to the implementation of the Bill within the deadline of 1 October 2013.

Q51 Chair: Yes, thank you. That is a very helpful assessment, because of course it has been argued that each of these amendments is only a very small tinkering amendment-I am not sure if "tinkering" is parliamentary language-but in fact the combination you have set out very clearly for us could be fatal to the implementation of the Bill.

Professor Johnston: It could be, yes.

Chair: Could be.

Professor Johnston: Yes.

Chair: Thank you.

Q52 Mr Chope: How could the problems that you have identified be mitigated? For example, would be possible to amend the Bill further to provide that in the event of a finding of these exceptional circumstances, any knock-on effect would have to be absorbed in constituencies that were immediately contiguous to the one which was found to be having exceptional circumstances, and it would then be allowed that if the consequence for those contiguous constituencies was that they were beyond the parameters of the 5% either way, that should be absorbed by those contiguous constituencies rather than spread out right across the country in the nightmare scenario you describe? I make no bones about it: I think the amendment is misconceived. However, it has been carried, and I just want to explore whether there are any ways in which it could be improved.

Professor Johnston: I wouldn’t like to try and draft that amendment. I can see the force of your argument that if, for example, we had an extremely compelling case that Devizes should have only 65,000 electors, Salisbury and Chippenham have to take up the slack, and they may then go over the 5%, but we accept that. Yes, obviously you could write an amendment that did that. That would even more go against the Government’s argument that we are doing two things here: getting more reviews more quickly so that we don’t get outdated electorates; and having greater equality. In fact, it would exacerbate the problem that the 7.5% has introduced, wouldn’t it?

Mr Chope: It could do, yes.

Q53 Tristram Hunt: Our sense, in brief discussions, is that the coalition probably will not let these amendments stand, but there is a sense that it might let the Isle of Wight amendment stand. What is the implication of that, do you think?

Professor Johnston: Well, the implication is that, quite simply, there are now three special cases rather than two.

Q54 Tristram Hunt: So it would just be sui generis, it will not-

Professor Johnston: Well, it will. I mean, there are two issues that arise out of the Isle of Wight amendment. One is the wording of the amendment, and the way it was introduced in the Lords by Lord Fowler is that there could be two seats for the Isle of Wight, not one. I presume that that is now over to the boundary commission and the residents of the Isle of Wight. In the past, the Isle of Wight I think has always argued, Mr Turner, it wanted only one seat, but it may decide, "Well, we’ll have two and we’ll find a way of splitting the island." In terms of equality, it is better to have two than to have one. That is the first point.

The second point is that they have not subsequently amended the earlier rule that says that the UK quota is the electorate minus the two Scottish constituencies divided by 598. Now, if we have another special case, the argument could be it should be the UK quota minus the Scottish constituencies minus the Isle of Wight divided by 597, but if the Isle of Wight is to have two, we won’t know until the boundary commission has sat, and you can’t do the sums with either 597 or 596, so they have created a slight anomaly there. The difference it will make is in tens of voters at most, but there is an anomaly between what the amendment says and the earlier rule. As I say, arithmetically, it is trivial, but nevertheless it is an anomaly.

Chair: Andrew, would you like to come in on that very important point?

Q55 Mr Turner: The reason why-I know I am not meant to answer questions, I am meant to ask questions-we gave the Isle of Wight, or rather the boundary commission, the option was because some people from the island felt one and some people felt two. What they didn’t want was one and a third.

Professor Johnston: Yes.

Mr Turner: Basically, I think the Liberals were happier to have two and I and the Conservatives were happier to have one, but that was why we stayed out of the decision, because we had to bring people together on that.

Following what Chris has asked, wouldn’t it be much better for counties-at least in England, because I know nothing of Wales and Scotland, or Northern Ireland come to that-to be the boundaries and then at least you do not cause this terrible rumble all the way out from Land’s End to Berwick-upon-Tweed?

Professor Johnston: It depends what you want to achieve. If you had a 10% maximum variation, the figures I was given yesterday by Lewis Baston-I thank him very much-show that there would only be two pairs of counties in which you would have a cross-boundary problem: Dorset and Wiltshire; and South and West Yorkshire. He thinks there is a way of resolving the latter, which he didn’t tell me about. If you go for 7.5%, there would be 20 cross-boundary constituencies or 20 pairs, and if you stick with the 5%, there could well be 37. That would include some counties that had two, because there would be a chain. One of the chains would be Hertfordshire, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk. There would be one constituency part-Hertfordshire and part-Essex, one constituency part-Essex and part-Suffolk, and one constituency part-Suffolk and part-Norfolk. Now we don’t know the exact figures of course, because they will not be published by the ONS until next week, we are told, and it may be that things are wrong, because populations change. I am told, for example, that the two fastest growing counties at the moment are Cornwall and Lincolnshire, and it may be that the new data resolve the Cornwall problem-who knows? But with the current data, that is the situation, so you have to go to 10% before you find that most of your counties would remain whole. That, of course, doesn’t address the problem of London boroughs, and most of the London borough boundaries will have to be crossed anyhow, certainly with 5% and 7.5% and maybe even with 10%, because so many are relatively small. That is the situation. If you want to retain counties, you are going to have to go to double the spread that the Government are currently very keen on.

Q56 Chair: But is it not the case that the boundary commission has made it clear that it would be able to cross county boundaries?

Professor Johnston: Oh, yes.

Chair: It has been the very premise of this Bill from the beginning that crossing county boundaries is a very likely outcome.

Professor Johnston: Yes, it is a necessary outcome-

Q57 Chair: A necessary outcome?

Professor Johnston: In England. In Wales, of course, we have these eight preserved counties, and I am not sure what standing they have any more. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, counties or any equivalents have disappeared entirely.

Chair: Exactly.

Q58 Andrew Griffiths: Just on that point, about the building blocks. It has been suggested that one of the building blocks that might be used is the Euro regions, so East Midlands, West Midlands. It is not that we like Euro regions on this side of the House, but that is the building block that it has been suggested. In terms of cross county, you said that you identified these problems. If we had a Euro region as a building block, do you envisage the same problems, or would you be able to then have the correct number of constituencies, give or take the 5%, in each Euro region?

Professor Johnston: There is no problem with the Euro regions. The numbers fit. There are a number of issues, however. If you didn’t have Euro regions, would you have a constituency that crossed the boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire? There are hills in the way, which make it not very sensible. More importantly, however, when I was here last time, we talked about the problem of Sheffield. Under the current proposals, Sheffield would have to have split wards, it would seem. One way of not having split wards in Sheffield would be to cross the boundary into Derbyshire, but Derbyshire is in a different region. The legislation only suggests to the boundary commissions that they use the Euro regions, it doesn’t require them to. It is therefore up to the commission therefore to say, "In this case, we think it is sensible to cross a Euro region boundary in order to get a better set of constituencies," and it would have to make the case for that. The problem for the boundary commission is that is has to start somewhere. It has to split England up somehow, and the Euro regions-I won’t call them Euro constituencies-do offer it a good basis, although they do vary in size from the north-east, which will be about 26 seats, to the south-east, excluding London, which I think will be 83. I could give you the exact number, but it is about that.

Q59 Simon Hart: Just an observation about your comment concerning Wales representing a constituency that crosses two county boundaries. If the boundary commission had no limitations in Wales, it would not go back to that particular model. It does not do anything to engender a sense of connection between the community and its elected officials, either in the Assembly or in Westminster, particularly when in Caernarvonshire and Pembrokeshire you have two very distinct cultural divides that go back 1,000 years. On reflection, I think that the boundary commission, if it was allowed to say so, would not do it again.

Professor Johnston: I totally accept that. I am sure it is right.

Q60 Sheila Gilmore: In terms of the amendment about local hearings, how do you think that might impact upon time scale and how do you envisage these working?

Professor Johnston: As they are currently proposed in the amendment, they would have a very small impact on time scale, it seems to me, because the amendment says very clearly that the hearings must be held during the initial consultation period. So when the commission has published its recommendations, there are then 12 weeks for you to make written submissions, and the amendment says that the hearings must be held in weeks five to 10. Now I find this very odd. I understand why it has been done, because they don’t want to have them afterwards and make for a delay. It would seem to me that they are saying they must be short hearings at a maximum of two days and a very different type to the public inquiry. Lord Wallace said that the public inquiries we have had over the last 60 years are no longer fit for purpose and, as I understand it, what they are proposing is very much based on the Australian model, where hearings take place in which the chair asks questions from those who are making submissions and allows some cross-questioning, but not a great deal.

If they were to hold these hearings after the submissions were in, they would add only a month or so to the period in which the whole consultation takes place and I am sure that that won’t stop them meeting the timetable. I understand why they don’t want to elongate the process and they put the hearings in the consultation period. It seems to me that creates great problems in a number of ways. Lord Woolf made this very clear in the debate with regard to judicial review, and that is also because the hearings happen, but the person who chairs the hearing, who is presumably an assistant commissioner, although that is ambiguous, to say the least, does not have to make a report, so all that the commission gets is the written submissions in the 12-week period and then the written transcript of the hearing. Lord Woolf’s argument is that without a chairman bringing together a report on that hearing, we have what he called "a very odd animal", and quite what the transcripts would provide for the commission is very difficult to know.

The question then arises: who will this help and who will this hinder? If you have a 12-week period for making submissions, which of course is the Cabinet Office recommendation for all consultations-it has never been the case for the boundary commission before; it has always been four weeks-what you are saying is, "Okay, you have 12 weeks to work up your alternative," and if you are talking about a region, it is quite a large task. The people wanting to make submissions-which obviously are particularly the political parties-may find it very difficult to get something in within four weeks and then discuss it at the hearing. This has always been the case in the past, and chief executives of local authorities have told me that they have been told, "Just put in a holding statement to make sure we have an inquiry," and then get something written in time for the inquiry, which may come four or five months later. So it will make it difficult for the parties. They will have to decide whether to put in something quickly, go to the hearing, and then maybe change it afterwards, or maybe they may decide, "We won’t bother at all. We’ll put it in in week 12. We’ll press the button on the last day of week 12 and our opponents won’t know what we’re saying." There are games that can be played there. I don’t want to go too far, but I am sure those involved are already thinking them up.

The people who will benefit from these hearings in two ways are the local community groups who go along and then make the case about their own little area. I will give you a simple example: the Chalke Valley in the Salisbury constituency where I live. The Chalke Valley is the upper Ebble Valley. It flows down into Salisbury. It obviously is part of Salisbury’s catchment. For reasons of size in the fifth review, the Chalke Valley was put in South west Wiltshire. You know, you have to go over two interfluves to get there, and the residents of the Chalke Valley-there are only 200 or 300 of them-came to the local inquiry and said, "Really, you know, it’s obviously extremely compelling that we’re part of the Salisbury area. We should be in Salisbury constituency". The assistant commissioner said, "Yes, it’s fairly obvious and the numbers make the Salisbury constituency a bit bigger than it ought to be, but that doesn’t matter." So he put them back into Salisbury and everybody was happy.

There are two problems for those groups: one is when they come along and say, "We don’t want to be in that constituency," but the answer is, "There’s no alternative." I remember one of those was some parishes around Harlow in the fourth review. They said, "We don’t want to be part of Harlow-anything but!" but the argument was, "In order to make a big enough Harlow constituency, you have to be." It was exactly the same with the residents of some parts of the South Hams, who didn’t want to be part of Plymouth because they thought it was the thin end of the wedge, saying, "The next thing, we’ll be in Plymouth City." The hearings will help them make the case, but they might not get any further with them.

The problem for those groups at these hearings in the past has been when what they propose conflicts with what one of the parties wants, and then you get the cross-examination. I have been there when I have seen groups basically taken apart unnecessarily by a barrister to prove that they in fact are making a partisan claim when they are really making a claim for their community.

Q61 Chair: That is presumably a very time-consuming process.

Professor Johnston: It is.

Chair: But even if the amendments from the House of Lords stand, would you say that that time-consuming process will not continue?

Professor Johnston: They won’t be affected as hard. I go back to the Chalke valley: you can mobilise enough of your co-residents to get something in four weeks and get to the hearing. We have to say four weeks, because if they start in week five, you have to be ready for them. Now, I am assuming that the boundary commissions will announce, when they start the initial consultation, when they are having their inquiries, which will be extremely helpful to those concerned. But they have less of a problem on the timing than the parties do, and that will create, I think, problems for the parties, although I am sure they will have geographical information systems up and running very quickly. Then there is the problem of reporting, which follows from it.

Q62 Chair: So with the knock-on effect of having the inquiries-whether the old style, the new style or the amendment style-would you say that regardless of whether the margin remains at 5% or 7.5%, the effect of the inquiries is likely to have a time effect, and also a knock-on effect in any case to the surrounding constituencies?

Professor Johnston: I think it will have a minor time effect. Let’s forget the 7.5% one for a moment and stick with the 5% constraint. It won’t in any way, I think, if these local hearings-we have to be careful; they are not inquiries-take place during the initial consultation period. I don’t think they will add very much to the time. I don’t think they threaten the 1 October 2013 deadline. Other things might, but I don’t think those do. If those hearings were held after the consultation period, they would prolong each-you know, the consideration of the north-east, for example-by at most, I would say, a month, and I don’t think that that is fatal to the implementation of the Bill.

The other thing about this is that it is mandatory that there must be two inquiries in every region. They may not be necessary. Why have two inquiries in the north-east if 26 constituencies that everybody is happy with are produced?

Chair: Yes, quite. It seems strange.

Q63 Stephen Williams: Chair, I was just wondering-while it would be nice to have a discussion about where Bristol may be discussed; and it could be anywhere in the south-west from the Scilly Islands to Tewksbury as I read this amendment-what practical effect would it have, if arithmetic trumps all, whether it is 7.5% or 5%? If, for the sake of argument, somebody in Bristol put forward an amendment saying that one part of Bristol North West should be now put back into Bristol West, where it used to be, or whatever else, surely the chairman of that inquiry will say, "Well, have you thought of the implications of this in North Somerset?", which then has an implication for central Devon or something. You then have a rippling out effect, because this arithmetic has to work within, say, a Euro region. You could not put forward-unless you spent a huge amount of time on it-a proposal that would be acceptable, whereas in the last round of inquiries, you could put forward proposals for the city of Bristol, because it was accepted that the constituencies would not cross the city boundary.

Professor Johnston: You could if it was only affecting a few hundred people, but the minute you try and move a couple of thousand people, my guess is that in most cases that will cause the ripple effect that you’re talking about. A local community group-whether it is the Chalke valley or whoever-just would not have the resources to work out, "Yes, you put us in that constituency, not that one, and this is what you do all the way down the line and we have a solution for you."

Q64 Stephen Williams: That is what I was sort of hoping you would say, so the effect of this amendment-and I see no objection to it personally-if it were stand, is that it would only help the sort of Chalke valley cases you are talking about. You could not move whole wards of 10,000 people around-

Professor Johnston: Only if you have a counter-move, and you will remember Bristol in the fourth review where between Bristol West and Bristol North West, they moved one ward in each direction, which achieved just what the Labour party wanted. It is feasible if you have a counter-move.

Q65 Stephen Williams: It did not help them in the end, though.

Professor Johnston: You have to have the resources to come up with that. Also, remember, if it is in a place where there is ward-splitting, you are going to have to have polling district data, and that will make it even more difficult. It will make it difficult enough for the parties, if there is no mapping to do it with, but also for local groups. You know, the community ties argument is still seen as central, but once you fit the arithmetic requirement, making the community ties argument will be even more difficult where you have ward-splitting, and of course that is going to be the case. If not everywhere, it is bound to happen in much of Scotland, and in parts of Wales we know it is bound to happen, too.

Q66 Mr Chope: Professor Johnston, in answering the question about whether hearings would threaten the October 2013 deadline, you said you did not think they would, but other things might. What other things does Professor Johnston have in mind?

Professor Johnston: The biggest one is judicial review. I am not an expert and I am not a lawyer-heaven forbid-but there I hear Lord Woolf, I read Lord Woolf, and I take what he says seriously. Particularly by creating these hearings and not having a report on them, and by having them mid-consultation rather than at the end of the consultation, you invite those challenges. Now, whether they are successful is separate to the time they take up while they are being heard. I don’t know whether, when an issue becomes sub judice, the boundary commissions can go on doing their work in other places-maybe they can, maybe they can’t. However, as a former deputy electoral commissioner and member of the local government boundary committee, I well recall when we were taken to judicial review in Devon, in Norfolk and in Suffolk, and basically it stopped us doing anything on those things while it was happening. So that is, I think, the major problem of delay that these things raise. It is not that holding them in themselves will cause a major delay-I don’t believe it will-but the consequences of the nature of the reportage.

Q67 Mr Chope: So are you saying that it is still linked into the introduction of the concept of hearings and that that will potentially open the floodgates to judicial review.

Professor Johnston: Yes, but also no, because Lord Woolf made it very clear that if you have no hearings at all, you are even more open to judicial review.

Q68 Mr Chope: Yes, yes. What about the point that was made by Lord Pannick yesterday that the court takes into account in the time scale for judicial review hearings very much how urgent it is and that if time is of the essence, we should not worry because all these judicial review hearings will be dealt with in a timely fashion? What do you make of that?

Professor Johnston: Well, I am sure I wouldn’t wish to disagree with him at all, but I would perhaps be cynical and say, "Well, what would be the point of somebody putting in for judicial review?" One might be a local community who feel they have really been badly treated, but the other might be a political party-I can’t imagine which-that wanted simply to delay the implementation of these rules, and it would just go on and on putting in for judicial reviews. It is open door to them, if that is what they wish to do, and that is, I think, what Lord Woolf was saying.

Q69 Chair: So with the combination of these amendments, the 7.5% amendment and also the test of reasonableness-what is it; in exceptional circumstances?-would you say that that opens the gates even wider for the possibility of judicial review?

Professor Johnston: I think it must do, because those terms are very difficult to define. I am sure that the boundary commission would do its best to define them, but somebody will say, "I want to challenge that," and quite reasonably so.-

Q70 Chair: They are challengeable, so the likelihood is even more chance of judicial review.

Professor Johnston: That may delay hearings, of course.

Q71 Chair: If there were to be one judicial review going on, which meant that one particular constituency, or let us say a group of three constituencies, was undecided for a very long time, would you say that that would mean that the whole process could not be concluded?

Professor Johnston: I honestly don’t know. I would need legal advice on that. It would particularly affect the boundary commission for England, obviously. Could it go on working on other regions while there was a challenge about the south-east? I don’t know the answer to that, and you would need legal advice on that, which I can’t give you.

Chair: Well, it is an open question.

Professor Johnston: It is obviously a possibility, yes.

Q72 Stephen Williams: Can I go back, Chair, to the point I referred to in the earlier evidence session, when the Electoral Commission confirmed-and I think we all knew this-that because there is no national electoral register, there is no way of checking whether the Stephen Williams who is registered in St Andrews, Bristol is also registered in St Vincent ward in the City of London, and the Westminster South constituency as well. I have now revealed that, but until that point there was no way of checking it. Wouldn’t that possibly be a cause for judicial review, if someone wished to challenge the outcome of an election, because there are particular constituencies in particular parts of the country where some people have dual registrations-student constituencies would be one of them-or indeed, where there are Members of Parliament? City of London and Westminster South is not a marginal seat, but Westminster North is and Streatham is, and there are significant numbers of MPs registered in both.

Professor Johnston: Yes, thank you. The answer to both you and Mr Chope earlier on is how many of these people are there? It could be every first-year undergraduate at a British university, because as a former vice-chancellor, I know that I was the head of household for everybody who lived in university accommodation and therefore I had to register them-or somebody did it on my behalf. Obviously in some universities-in Bristol, you know-that must be at least 5,000 students one way or another who are all registered by a warden of the hall or whoever, and many of whom may well have been registered by mum and dad at home or, if their parents have split, maybe by mum at one place and dad at another place, who knows? The answers that you had from the Electoral Commission were exactly right: we just don’t know how many people these are. What it does mean, of course, as you are implying, Mr Williams, is that the data on which the boundary commissions will make their determinations when they implement these rules, assuming the Bill is enacted, is the electoral roll, which is drawn up on 1 December from the canvass last September. Now, because normally you don’t knock people off a roll the first time round, the large number of people, including lots of students who registered for the general election, are there, so you have to some extent an inflated roll and it may be between 2010 and 2013 the roll declines in some areas, because there is less canvassing of students to get on the electoral roll. That is students who are not of course in university residences, because they are going to be there anyhow. There is a "but" on that one too. If we go to individual registration by 2015, which we are supposed to do-

Chair: Which we are about to do, yes.

Professor Johnston: -the vice-chancellor being head of household ends, so all those students will not be automatically registered by the university. They will have to register individually, and the canvass by the electoral registration officers will be very, very difficult if all the students in Bristol are going to be found in a short period of time, given the under-resourcing.

You may well find that the boundary commissions will produce constituencies all within 5%, on the expected rules, on the current electoral roll, but what happens by the time we get to 2015? Yes, there is always some drift and some places lose population and some gain, but one of the reasons for having a review every five years, they argue, is so that that doesn’t really make a major impact on inequalities. In fact, you are going to see, I am pretty certain, major inequalities in 2015, because of, first, the year in which the electoral roll has been compiled for the current exercise and, secondly, if individual registration is in before the 2015 election.

Q73 Chair: I will come back in a second. Would you say, Professor Johnston, that that is a different issue from the one that we were discussing with the Electoral Commission, which I think informally you heard, as far as the actual number of electors there are in terms of the referendum? Is it the case that, to a certain extent, the difference in constituencies, although of course it matters for boundaries, cancels itself out around the country, whereas it is a completely different question as far as the referendum is concerned, because then we’re looking for a finite number?

Professor Johnston: Yes, that is true, but a lot is said about the Electoral Commission research that said there were 3.5 million missing voters. What we know, because a Labour MP, although I forget which-one of the Members for Barnsley, but not Eric Illsley-received some data from ONS which showed for every constituency, the difference between the number of people aged 18 and over according to the census estimates and the number on the electoral roll. In some constituencies, there is a 30,000 difference, and nearly all those constituencies with a big difference are inner cities. So it could well be that if those 3.5 million voters were all on the electoral roll, the exercise that is coming up, if it happens, would give more seats to the cities than to the rural areas. It could also mean that Wales gets one less seat and Northern Ireland gets one more, because under-registration is quite high in Northern Ireland, too. So what you have is a change if you could find these 3.5 million or could estimate them, which is what there is some debate in the Lords about. On the other hand, there is nothing about double entries, so we could add 3.5 million, but we don’t know how many we should take off.

Q74 Stephen Williams: Where I was going, Chair, was that we know individual registration, which I know you are very much in favour of, is coming and it will probably be in place by the 2015 general election. Therefore, the automatic registration of undergraduates by hall of residence wardens will not take place and they will have to register themselves, but that is the position now. Therefore, in Stoke Bishop ward in Bristol, with which you may be familiar-it is not in my constituency-there are 2,500 first-year electors on the roll. They could quite possibly be 25 by the time we come to 2015, but many of them may not register to vote in Bristol North West, so the boundary will already be completely out from the Bill’s underlying intention of having equal size constituencies. Given that we know that already, shouldn’t the Government have come forward with a way of dealing with this dual registration issue?

Professor Johnston: The answer might well be yes, but they are not going to do it in time for the review. If the Bill is enacted, the review by the boundary commissions will start in a fortnight’s time. I am sure it has started already, in that I am sure they are working towards it. Your point may be entirely valid, but I can’t see how they can do anything for this review, if this review takes place starting now on this electoral data.

Stephen Williams: It might be an exceptional circumstance.

Professor Johnston: It might be an exceptional circumstance, indeed.

Chair: Precisely, this opens another can of worms.

Q75 Mr Chope: Just to clarify one thing: the figures are based upon last December’s electoral register. Did I understand you to say that in the case of a university town, you would have not only the people in the halls of residence who arrived in October, but you also might have some left over who had left the halls of residence because they had not been taken off the register? Why would that have happened?

Professor Johnston: No, not left in the halls of residence. The halls of residence people are there anyhow, but what happened before the last general election in some constituencies-and the Bristol ones I am sure were amongst those-is that political parties, and particularly one political party, campaigned and canvassed very hard to get students who were living in private flats or whatever to go on the roll. Now, they may not all be removed from the roll, even though they have left the flats.

Q76 Mr Chope: Why not?

Professor Johnston: Well, because, first, it is very difficult to canvass and, secondly, because electoral registration officers have some discretion, and have applied it in the past, as to how quickly they knock people off the roll.

Q77 Stephen Williams: Chair, just to follow up Christopher’s point, it is not just students, it is young people in general. If you go canvassing in city centre constituencies, you will always find people who have not lived at an address for two years or so who are still on the register, because no one who has moved in since has bothered to register themselves and therefore knock off the person who is there, so you have phantom electors-

Professor Johnston: I just raise two points about what Peter Wardle told you earlier. He said at one stage that the booklet for the AV referendum is going to go to every voter and later he said to every household. If only one went to a hall of residence in Bristol, how many of the voters would see it, but even if it goes to every voter, how are they going to find every voter? They are not.

Q78 Chair: No, it is an inexact science. Professor Johnston, thank you very much. We will have to close this session now, but would you like to say anything in conclusion?

Professor Johnston: This has been a marvellous experience for me, not just appearing before you twice, but being involved in this Bill. I have had some problems with insomnia recently, and I have found myself getting up and switching on the House of Lords late at night. I did switch on one night and in five minutes I heard Lord Wallace mention my name five times.

Chair: Yes, it is good for the viewer. Thank you very much for coming to us at short notice, and for dealing so quickly with something of which you only had information this morning. We are very grateful to you, and we look forward to speaking to you again as this process continues.

Professor Johnston: Thank you very much indeed.