Clause 61 - Performance of local authorities
Electoral Administration Bill
3:00 pm
David Cairns (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Scotland Office; Inverclyde, Labour)
I am tremendously grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe for allowing us to tease out what we envisage will form the national standards that have been prayed in aid at various stages of the progress of the Bill. When Ministers struggle to answer a particular question, it is always a great lifeline to hold up national standards that will come over the hill and clear us from the mire. None the less, they are important.
I beg your indulgence, Mr. Conway, to move slightly beyond the narrow terms of the amendments to answer some of the questions that have been asked in this short debate. It is clear that the standards and performance of the conduct of elections throughout the country varies enormously. I, too, was a local councillor, and if we were honest we would all say that there was little direct impetus to send a lot of money towards electoral registration officers or to take a great degree of interest in what they were doing. We could not monitor them as we could the standards of social services—or, in Scotland, social work. They were not held accountable to external standards and we did not really know what they were doing with the money. We knew that we had to give money in order for them to conduct what they were statutorily required to, but beyond that, the service—at least in the local authority of which I was a member—was tucked away at the end of the corridor, and most people did not know what was going on.
We are calling EROs out into the open and saying that we value what they are doing. They are at the heart of what we are about when we talk about increasing participation in the electoral process. That is why we are committing additional resources, but with those resources must come some external measurement of how they are used, and of the outcomes. The variance may be to do with the allocation of resources and money, and staff availability. At budget time, that was always a relatively easy cut to make. Faced with cutting £20,000 from the ERO budget or losing a nursery teacher, it was easy. Those of us who made such decisions perhaps did not always understand the vital importance of the service.