Postponement of Local Elections (Northern Ireland) Order 2023
(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Lord Caine
That the Grand Committee do consider the Postponement of Local Elections (Northern Ireland) Order 2023.
Relevant documents: 27th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Caine) (Con)
My Lords, before I begin, for the more historically minded among your Lordships, I was reminded this morning by my noble friend Lord Lexden that today is the 137th anniversary of a famous speech made by the former Member for Paddington South, Lord Randolph Churchill, at the Ulster Hall in 1886, in which he never actually said:
“Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right”,
but that did appear in a subsequent letter.
Lord Caine (Con)
I am grateful.
The draft order before us, which was laid before the House on 25 January 2023, will allow for a short postponement of the local elections in Northern Ireland to allow their smooth running, ensuring that they do not clash with the upcoming Coronation of His Majesty the King. As it stands, the local council elections for Northern Ireland are scheduled to take place on Thursday 4 May 2023, with counting and the declaration of results spanning Friday 5 and Saturday 6 May. As noble Lords will know well, the Coronation of His Majesty will take place on 6 May.
Statute requires that local elections in Northern Ireland must be held on the first Thursday in May every four years. All 462 seats across all 11 local authorities are contested. As noble Lords will be well aware, elections are run using the single transferable vote system, which allows electors to state as many preferences as there are candidates on the ballot paper. Each of the 11 councils is broken down into at least five district electoral areas—DEAs—all of which require a separate count, making local elections in Northern Ireland by far the largest electoral event undertaken, with a commensurately complex and time-consuming manual count.
Based on all previous local election counts, the time required for the count and verification means that this would continue well into Coronation Day on 6 May. The Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland has advised that, even if as many as possible of the counts were held concurrently and counting hours were extended into the early hours of the morning, it would still not be possible to conclude the count process in advance of Coronation Day.
It is important that all those who wish to celebrate the Coronation—I imagine most noble Lords from Northern Ireland will be in that category—can do so, as indeed I will, and it is not feasible for local councils in Northern Ireland to run celebratory events concurrently with an STV count over the same weekend. The chief electoral officer and the Electoral Commission have raised concerns that it would not be possible to secure sufficient staff over the Coronation weekend to safely deliver the count if the election took place on 4 May. Concerns have also been raised over the possible cost of casual staff over the bank holiday weekend of the Coronation.
The order therefore allows for a short, two-week delay to avoid these potential issues. It will allow everyone in Northern Ireland who wishes to celebrate the Coronation —I hope that will be the vast majority—the opportunity to do so. It is important that both these events can take place successfully, and this order will safeguard that. As a Government, we informed councils, political parties, the Electoral Commission and the chief electoral officer of our plans, and all were supportive of this short postponement.
Noble Lords may wonder why this postponement is needed in Northern Ireland but not in England, where there are also local elections to be held on 4 May, so I will briefly explain. This is entirely down to the nature of the voting systems in both places. As noble Lords know, local elections in England are conducted under first past the post and there is therefore a much shorter count process. The manual count for the single transferable vote system used in Northern Ireland will, as I have explained, take much longer. This is why a short postponement is essential for these elections but is not required for England. There are no elections planned in Scotland and Wales on 4 May, so there will be no changes required there either.
Finally, I thank the outgoing Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland, Virginia McVea, for her dedication and service to the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland and to the people of Northern Ireland, for ensuring that elections there are undertaken smoothly and providing confidence in the democratic process. I wish her well in her next career and look forward to working with her successor in due course.
I hope your Lordships agree that ensuring the smooth and effective running of local elections is a priority for the democratic process. This order will allow that while allowing, as I have said before, all of those who wish to celebrate the Coronation to do so. Therefore, I hope noble Lords will support this order. I commend it to the Committee and beg to move.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, the Opposition support the Government in this statutory instrument. When the Minister was explaining the rationale behind it, he also explained how complicated electoral arrangements in Northern Ireland are under the STV system. I had forgotten how long and complicated the process is and, therefore, it is absolutely sensible that this happens and that the elections are postponed to a later date.
I know, from reading the notes on the instrument, that the Government consulted the political parties in Northern Ireland and that no one raised objections to the elections being postponed. In a way, that is quite a good thing, because it means that parties that are not necessarily interested in the Coronation have not opposed the postponement of the elections.
I hope, as the Minister said, that the Coronation will be celebrated in a robust and worthy way in Northern Ireland, as it will be in the rest of the United Kingdom. I too will celebrate it, but it reminds me that when the present King was Prince of Wales, and when I was Secretary of State, he took a huge and very active interest in Northern Ireland matters—not simply going to garden parties and events like that but meeting the main players in civic society in Northern Ireland, in a positive way. I hope that the Coronation, in its new form, and the reign of the King, short as it will be by then, will be fully celebrated in Northern Ireland on that weekend, and that we ensure that there is also an opportunity then to take a break from the politics of Northern Ireland.
This leads me to my last point. I sincerely hope that, by the time the Coronation is held, we have an Assembly and Executive up and running in Northern Ireland.
Baroness Suttie (LD)
My Lords, the Liberal Democrat Benches also support this order and regard it as a necessary and common-sense approach to solving this issue. We also welcome this opportunity to debate it briefly—and I think that we will all be brief. As the Minister said, under the single transferable vote system—the proportional representation system used in Northern Ireland for local elections—it just would not have been possible to finish the count before the Coronation celebrations and events began. This would have had an impact on the staff and the valuable job that they do in working so hard to handle the count, because counting an STV election is very complex. It could also have an impact on the candidates and the voters.
I have a very brief point on that. It is very important for voters across the United Kingdom, including in Northern Ireland, to have confidence in the democratic system and to know that, once they have voted, their votes will be counted and that, at the next stage, the elected representatives will get on with serving the community in which they have been elected. In that regard, I also hope that, by the time we celebrate the Coronation, there will be a fully functional and active Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive.
Delaying these local elections in Northern Ireland clearly makes sense so that the count will not be interrupted. I, for one, hope that everybody enjoys the celebrations around the Coronation as much as I hope to do; I am grateful that they will be taking place in May, which is usually a wonderful month across the whole United Kingdom. I hope that we will have good weather in Northern Ireland so that people can celebrate.
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
My Lords, I am pleased to rise in support of this order. I have to admit I am old enough to remember the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953—
Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)
I was a small boy. I remember crowding into a small room in the house of a neighbour, who had invested in one of the first television sets in the street. I caught a rather blurred image of the Gold State Coach; much to my delight, my neighbour gave me a small toy replica of it. Those are happy memories.
It is only right to delay the local council elections in Northern Ireland as this will afford the people of Northern Ireland, along with the rest of the United Kingdom, an opportunity to join in the celebrations and events that follow the Coronation of King Charles III without having their TV coverage interrupted by the results of the later stages of the count, which, as we know, can take a considerable number of days.
As the Minister stated, the chief electoral officer, Virginia McVea, is stepping down ahead of the May local elections; I know that the post has been advertised. She has worked extremely well with all the political parties in Northern Ireland. She has been very effective and has helped greatly in improving every aspect of the election process—especially as it is a complicated single transferrable vote system. I am sure that we all wish her well in her new post here in England. I know that the position has been advertised, but will the new chief electoral officer be in post well before the May elections so as to give them a reasonable lead-in time?
A recent report on the May 2022 Assembly elections in Northern Ireland showed that most people were confident that the election was well run. However, there was a concern that the large number of postal and proxy applications rejected due to a missing digital registration number indicates that there may be a barrier to some voters. Does the Minister agree that the Government should undertake a review of the operation of the digital registration number? Have the Government looked at using some form of technology for these votes to try to speed up the counting?
I welcome this order. I am sure that many people in Northern Ireland will partake in the celebrations that follow the Coronation and have lasting memories of the great pageantry of the occasion, as it is unlikely to be seen until the next jubilee or Coronation.
Lord Hay of Ballyore (DUP)
My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Browne, I welcome the draft order before the Committee, which will allow the people of Northern Ireland to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III. It is something that I very much welcome; I know that people in Northern Ireland do too.
I want to follow up on what my noble friend Lord Browne said about elections in Northern Ireland generally; I indicated this to the Minister before this afternoon. We know that, in the rest of the United Kingdom, the counting of votes starts after the polling stations close that evening. In Northern Ireland, the count starts the next day. I know from history and from fighting elections for over 40 years about the complex issue of proportional representation elections, but I still do not understand the system when I go into a count.
Lord Lexden (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Caine at the outset referred to Lord Randolph Churchill. He was not the kind of person to have around at the time of the Coronation. The Royal Family did not much care for him, and many in his own party did not much care for him. He was a trouble-maker; we have a certain number of those in the Conservative Party today. The heritage of Lord Randolph Churchill is not something to be carefully safeguarded.
Of course, it is imperative that nothing impedes the celebration of the Coronation in Northern Ireland. It must be enjoyed exactly the same, to the full extent, as in the rest of the United Kingdom. I agree so much with what the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, said about our monarch’s long-standing interests in so many different aspects of life in Northern Ireland, including buildings, architecture and community arrangements. He has a wide range of interests that will be reflected in his continuing interest there. I hope we can look forward to a Coronation visit to Northern Ireland, and to other parts of the United Kingdom, in conformity with past precedent. God save the King.
Lord Caine (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all those who have participated. I put on record that we have spent three times as long as the House of Commons scrutinising this order—which is testimony, again, to the rigour and diligence with which your Lordships undertake your scrutiny duties.
I am grateful to everybody for their support for this statutory instrument. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy, referred to the complexity of the single transferable vote. We all know why it is used in Northern Ireland. I would not like to see it inflicted on any other part of the United Kingdom at all—I am sorry if that upsets the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, and the Liberal Democrats. It is a very complicated system, and that is obviously one of the reasons, as I set out in my opening comments, why this order is necessary.
The noble Lord also referred to His Majesty’s interests in Northern Ireland, as my noble friend Lord Lexden echoed. I concur very much with what was said in that regard. Throughout the time I have been involved in Northern Ireland affairs, both when he was Prince of Wales and now as our King, he has had a huge affection for and deep interest in Northern Ireland and its affairs.
I can also assure noble Lords that the Northern Ireland Office is currently in discussions with DCMS and other government departments to ensure that the Coronation will be as accessible to as many people as possible in Northern Ireland who wish to celebrate it—and, of course, I echo the words that I hope that the overwhelming majority of people will enjoy the Coronation in welcoming what will be a hugely important and historic occasion in our history.
I join others in expressing some disbelief that the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Belmont, is old enough to remember the Coronation of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, but I will take his word for it. On the noble Lord’s point about digital registration, this is a security-related measure but I can assure him that the Northern Ireland Office does keep the matter constantly under review.
The noble Lord also looked for an assurance that the position of Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland will be filled. He is right to say that the post has been advertised, and the process is now well under way, with a number of applications. We are confident that the post will be filled in good time before the election so that there will be continuity within that office.
The noble Lord, Lord Hay of Ballyore, asked about overnight voting. The current position is that the legislation actually prevents the count starting until the following day. As the process is very complex and lengthy, as we have discussed, it has long been felt that it is not ideal to start the count overnight, although verification of unused ballots does take place overnight to ensure that the count can start in good order on the Friday morning. I am not entirely sure that he is right —I will have to check—that all local government election counts in England take place overnight; I think that in my own area, in Leeds, they start on the following morning, but I will check. In the past, security considerations have been paramount when it came to overnight counts in general elections, but in recent general elections in Northern Ireland we have had overnight counting just as in the rest of the United Kingdom. I will check on the point, but as things stand the legislation prevents the counts beginning in Northern Ireland until the following day.
With that, I think I have responded to all the points made; no, I see that my noble friend Lord Lexden is going to contradict me.
Lord Lexden (Con)
Does my noble friend have any information on an official Coronation visit to Northern Ireland of the kind that Her late Majesty paid in 1953?
Lord Caine (Con)
I do not have anything that I can confirm at the moment, although I think that Coronation visits are very well-established in history. When I was in Fermanagh a couple of weeks ago, I passed Castle Coole, which my noble friend will be aware is famous for having a bed that was supposed to be occupied by King George IV on his Coronation tour of Ireland—unfortunately, he never turned up and the bed remained unslept in. The point is that Coronation tours of all parts of the United Kingdom are a very well-established tradition, but there is nothing that I can confirm to my noble friend at this time.
On which note, I will concur with my noble friend in his concluding remarks, “God save the King”, and I commend the order to the Committee.