Representation of the People Bill

Debate between Lord McCobb and Lord Fuller

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord McCobb (LD)]

My Lords, I will add to the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Hayward, some of the practical implications of Amendment 124. I make it clear that, like many people here today, I love an overnight count as much as anyone else. I have been to more than I can remember—including, ironically as it happens, the count at which the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Sedgefield, was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2007.

Like everybody else, I understand that election nights are special, and I understand the desire to preserve the excitement that comes with overnight counts, as well as, for the broader public, a quick understanding of the implication of local election results for the country as a whole and what they mean for the Government of the day. However, this amendment would not deliver that in practice. It requires only that verification begins on polling night, not that a single vote is counted or a result declared. What it would do is remove a returning officer’s ability to plan a count properly on those nights where, in practice, that judgment matters most.

Let me take an extreme, but real, example. On 6 May 2021, voters in the village of Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire went to the polls, to be handed five ballot papers. They voted for their county councillor, a district councillor in a by-election, a parish councillor in a by-election, the combined authority mayor, and the police and crime commissioner. The law as it stands allows the returning officer to have ballot papers cast into either separate ballot boxes or into the same one for elections happening at the same time. Suppose the returning officer had, as they are permitted to do, provided a separate ballot box for each election. If this amendment were implemented, three of those five elections would, by law, have to have begun the verification in the two hours between the close of poll and midnight, and the other two would not.

However, it is not uncommon for voters to put ballot papers into the wrong ballot box, so in order to carry out the task in this complex scenario and make sure that, for example, a parish council ballot paper sitting in the police and crime commissioner ballot box was found and properly included in the count, in effect, all five ballot boxes would have to have been opened before midnight for those counts to be completed in parallel. Today, a returning officer can use one trained team to verify each election in turn, whereas this amendment would force all five verifications to happen in parallel at the same time before midnight. That would mean more staff, more tables and more supervisors for already pressed local authorities trying to run elections effectively. That would be simply impractical.

The exemption that the noble Lord referred to does not help either because it covers emergencies and safety risks but does not cover the ordinary, foreseeable complexity of running multiple elections on the same day using parallel or shared ballot boxes. While the Waterbeach example is an extreme example of what might happen, it is a real one that happened in practice. Returning officers are already accountable for how they run their counts and, ultimately, as one of the previous speakers said—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I would like to make a supportive comment. I used the Waterbeach example at Second Reading. Not only were there five different ballot papers, there were three different voting methods—first past the post, STV, and AV for the mayor and the PCC. That adds a further complexity to the point I think the noble Lord is trying to make.

[Lord McCobb (LD)]

I am grateful for that additional point. Returning officers are already accountable for how they run their counts, and, ultimately, accuracy matters more than speed. However much we love a traditional election night, we should not allow that desire to impose unworkable or unnecessarily restrictive practices on already stretched returning officers.