Schedule 2
Political Parties and Elections Bill
2:15 pm
Michael Wills (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice; North Swindon, Labour)
With respect, that was not what I was saying. I was saying that we need reassurance from the Electoral Commission that it will act in a timely and speedy—not hasty—fashion. That is not a precise limit set in terms of months and years, but most people would accept that it is a limit. For example, 12 years would not, by any stretch of the term, be regarded as speedy.
The problem is that, if we go to the sort of limitations that exist in other areas of the law, most members of the Committee would be horrified to think that investigations could continue for, say, six years. If we start specifying a limit, we would almost certainly get the balance wrong in some cases. Although, as always, we are willing to consider the matter again, we believe that it is better to allow some discretion—but discretion that is constrained by reasonable expectation of what timely would mean. General prescriptions of such matters probably go back to the Human Rights Act 1998, but we need to consider what reassurance the Electoral Commission can give the Committee, after which we might be prepared to revisit the matter. However, my firm instinct at present is to avoid setting fixed time scales. We would get ourselves into more trouble than we would want.