Clause 60 - Referendum and election material
Electoral Administration Bill
2:30 pm
David Heath (Shadow Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs & Shadow Leader of the House, Law Officers (Constitutional Affairs); Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk for raising those points. An opportunity has been missed in the clause to clear up several confusions about the use of imprints, and a clearer and slightly more radical wording would be better. There is a fog of confusion about what does or does not need an imprint. I am sometimes given the advice that several parts of a single piece of paper need imprints, in case someone tears or cuts them off, leaving a piece of paper with no imprint. That seems like nonsense to me. If one publishes a document, what someone does with it later is their business. If it has an imprint on it, it should comply with the law.
Another issue is whether, in local authority elections in which a leaflet promotes several candidates—all the county council candidates in an area, for example—the name of each one is required in the imprint. It appears that at the moment that would be required. In Somerset I think that the council has 57 or 58 members, so if the names of that many candidates had to appear in the imprint to make its distribution promoting their candidacies legal, the result would be a rather long imprint, which would not improve clarity or reliability in the electoral process. It therefore seems sensible to reconsider the whole question of what is required for imprints.
Two more notes have been given to me. I do not entirely understand them, but I hope that the Under-Secretary does. One is that the 2001 legislation that suspended the introduction of new imprint rules is not repealed, so the clause will not come into effect. Is that correct? Will he also make it clear that the requirements of the Newspapers, Printers, and Reading Rooms Repeal Act 1869 does not apply to election material? I hope that he can make that absolutely clear, and I look forward to his reply with interest.