Clause 2 - Pilot order
European Parliamentary and Local Elections (Pilots) Bill
9:15 am
Mr Christopher Leslie (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Shipley, Labour)
The hon. Lady makes a fair point. There will be a dialogue about specified delivery points between the regional returning officer, who is the key official overseeing the orchestration of the poll in a region, and local returning officers. It is very likely that each local authority area will have at least one specified delivery point for the return of ballot papers. If it were an all-postal ballot, there would not be the same number and frequency of polling stations. It is a matter for the regional returning officer to deal with at a local level.
The hon. Member for Spelthorne asserted that the Government would have a blanket designation and place lots of dots on local maps, but that is not our intention. We want to leave it to the discretion of the returning officer as far as possible. In that context, the two amendments would effectively wreck the opportunity for the next stage—the scaling up of regional piloting. At a regional level, we cannot rely on the unanimous consent of all local authorities to pilot the arrangements because piloting will take place across such a wide area.
There are concerns about compulsory piloting rather than retaining the voluntary arrangement that we currently have. As we move away from local voluntary piloting to the regional stage, we must be certain that we can make the arrangements apply equally and fairly across the designated region.
Widespread involvement of all local authorities is necessary not only for economies-of-scale purposes but to avoid voter confusion in the region, given that there will be communication across the constituency. It will also avoid complications for regional returning officers. If they were to have pockets of local authorities that chose not to operate all-postal voting, for example, it would be tremendously complex for them to administer the return.
There are lessons to be learned from wider-scale regional level pilots. Even those councils that have not yet volunteered or are not yet convinced can learn lessons from new techniques as their local returning officers inevitably become involved in the new voting arrangements. I hope that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath will agree to withdraw the amendment.
Mr. Wilshire rose—