Clause 30 - Discretion to report on certain elections
Electoral Administration Bill
10:15 am
Brian Binley (Northampton South, Conservative)
This is not a very contentious clause, and I do not want it to be one. I recognise that the training of electoral registration officers and electoral administration staff will be dealt with in another place, but the clause talks about reports on elections, and I wonder whether the report will contain reports on the quality of administration and the performance of electoral registration officers and their staff. I do not suppose that it will be a sort of school report, but that we might use it to improve our electoral administration, because there is a general impression—it is certainly mine—that the concept of good election organisation has deteriorated in the past 30 years and certainly in recent years.
Electoral registration officers and their staff used to be in situ for a very long time, but that no longer seems to happen to the same degree. Very often, a new person is in charge of a general election every time we have one. There is therefore a real need for training as a whole, which I shall discuss later when we deal with the relevant part of the Bill. In this respect, however, we need to monitor the whole process, and I wonder whether monitoring will be part of the reporting procedure.