Clause 67 - Financial Provision
Electoral Administration Bill
11:45 am
David Cairns (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Scotland Office; Inverclyde, Labour)
Again, the Committee is tremendously grateful to my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane). He has done a great service to the House by beavering away and collecting the statistics and information that is not centrally collected or provided. Of course, the Bill will allow us for the first time to get an accurate picture of what is spent on the provision of electoral administration and electoral expenses throughout the country. In the absence of that information, all we have to go on is the work done by my hon. Friend, so I am grateful to him for drawing our attention to it.
The Bill lays down high-level principles for electoral registration officers and the steps that they should take to raise registration levels. The performance standards, which we will see in due course, will obviously add to that. Of course, if a local authority starts with a 98 per cent. registration level and 97 per cent. of people return the form as soon as they receive it, the authority will not need to take the additional measures to drive up its registration level. In other areas, however, the authority will have to send the letter out more than once, and will have to send people round knocking on doors. My hon. Friend is right to highlight the fact that doing more things requires more money. A local authority that does not have to do any of those things will not have to spend that money. His point is therefore valid, but it will probably be addressed in practice.
I have a couple of other quick points to make. We are talking about an estimate—about what we think will be required. Obviously these matters need to be kept under review as we move forward, but we think that this is a reasonable way of setting aside an amount of money for the duties.
I am a former local councillor, and there are a number of people with experience as local councillors on the Committee. We will all have had cuts put before us in a budget round: there has to be a cut or a saving from the electoral administration budget, and a saving from social services or elsewhere. It is easy to cut the budget for electoral administration because, wrongly, we do not perceive it as a front-line service and, in the absence of the national standards, the framework and the reporting that my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) highlighted the other day, local councils have very little purchase on what electoral registration officers do. That situation is exacerbated in Scotland, where local authorities do not have their own EROs but share them.
When all these measures bed in and there is much greater transparency, there will be more—“pressure” is the wrong word, but there will be more understanding among local authorities of what EROs are doing and how important and valid that is. They will see EROs as a front-line service that they want to fund from elsewhere in their budget, from their administration budget. All these measures mean that the tide is moving in one direction, towards greater funding for precisely the services that my hon. Friend highlighted.