Clause 2 - Pilot order
European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill
12:00 pm
Mr Christopher Leslie (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Shipley, Labour)
Good morning, Mr. Cook, and welcome to the Committee.
I would like to disabuse the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) of his notion. I am afraid that we are going to resist his arguments and ask the Committee to reject the amendments. Amendment No. 3 would not allow a pilot order to provide for polling at places other than polling stations, and amendment No. 4 would allow local authorities a complete veto on the choice of places for any non-conventional polling station arrangements. Effectively, the amendments would give local authorities the chance completely to prevent remote voting if they objected to it in any way. The ability to have all-postal voting and electronic voting in pilot schemes is important in principle. We have already discussed the wider context under the amendments to clause 1, and it is necessary to make the legislative provisions to enable such voting to take place. The provisions in this clause are identical to the provisions in the Representation of the People Act 2000 that enabled local piloting to take place.
One needs the scope and flexibility to nominate places other than polling stations for all-postal voting
not only for the wider purposes of allowing the casting of ballots in people's homes where they are received, but to ensure that we have specified delivery centres instead of polling stations so that people can return their ballots if they so wish, albeit to fewer places than the conventional number of polling stations. We need the scope that was provided for in the 2000 Act to enable that to take place.