Clause 67 - Financial Provision
Electoral Administration Bill
11:45 am
David Heath (Shadow Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs & Shadow Leader of the House, Law Officers (Constitutional Affairs); Somerton and Frome, Liberal Democrat)
I listened with interest to the Minister’s reply. Last night I attended a dinner held by the H. S. Chapman Society, whose membership includes many electoral administrators, and those with expertise in this area forcefully made the point to me—it is a constitutional point rather than anything else—that the degree of latitude afforded to local authorities in this respect is not what they perceive. The responsibility lies with the electoral registration officer to spend what is required to do the job, and the Bill confers a stronger duty on the electoral registration officer to perform certain tasks to satisfy the guidelines set out by the Electoral Commission. In a way, however much the electoral registration officer requires to do that forms, in effect, a precept on the local authority.
That situation is analogous, in a way, to the position of the coroner, which I recall from my days as a county council leader. The coroner was funded from the county council precept, but there was no suggestion whatever that we had any control over the amount that the coroner required to do his or her job.
If we can make it sufficiently clear in the context of the Bill that electoral registration officers have a higher duty than the responsibility to the local authority—a duty to ensure the integrity of the electoral process—and that that requires expenditure that is made available, admittedly, through the local authority budgetary process, but is outside the local determination of the local authority, that will put electoral registration officers in a much stronger position to do their job effectively. That will be the case even in the circumstances described by the Minister, of budgetary constraints and people feeling that electoral administration is a budget head that can be safely reduced. We will then achieve the objectives that the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd wishes to achieve, and I think that we all share that wish.