New Clause 19
Political Parties and Elections Bill
Public Bill Committees, 18 November 2008, 12:15 pm
Eleanor Laing (Shadow Minister, Justice; Epping Forest, Conservative)
I am pleased that the Minister has tabled the new clause because we support all efforts that are made by the Government to stop electoral fraud. As I have said several times, we want the workings of our democratic system to be absolutely watertight and we are in favour of every reasonable measure taken to ensure that that is brought about. When the CORE scheme was introduced, we supported it for that reason.
However, I am worried that, in the few years since the scheme was introduced, it has not achieved anything. Little has been done, but it has cost a lot of money. If that money were invested in improving our record on electoral fraud, I would be all in favour of it, but we have seen a lot of money spent and little result. The Minister might explain that there is a long time lag in the spending of money and the setting up of some parts of the CORE scheme. If he does, I will have to accept that. However, when we first discussed the matter during consideration of the Electoral Administration Act 2006 some three years ago, we all hoped that something along the lines of CORE would happen. We hoped that by the time we were looking at another general election and the important European elections that we are about to face, the CORE scheme might be achieving something.
However, in a written answer to a question that I put to the Minister a couple of weeks ago, we discover that to date, the staff costs of CORE are £2.78 million and that £1.73 million has been spent
“to enable local authorities’ electoral management systems to output data in an agreed Election Mark Up Language (EML) format.”—[Official Report, 23 October 2008; Vol. 481, c. 559W.]
I accept that those sums, and the other several thousands of pounds that have been spent in the intervening period, are necessary. One does not get the results if one does not invest in the technology—I am in favour of that. However, I have a couple of questions to ask the Minister in this respect.