Elections Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Chloe SmithThursday 16th September 2021
(3 years, 3 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Elections Act 2022 View all Elections Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 16 September 2021 - (16 Sep 2021)
Chloe Smith
Thank you, Alan. As always, it is good to debate with you and really good to have your expertise.
Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
Q
Dr Renwick: No, I was not. I would not expect to have been aware necessarily of all the consultations that might have taken place, but I do not recall being aware of the proposals before they were announced by the Minister in June. To be honest, that is problematic. I have expressed concerns about the substance of the proposals, but procedurally there is a difficulty here as well because of the point that I have already alluded to. With the best will in the world, and with full respect to you as MPs, the fact that you have a vested interest in this issue means that it is incumbent upon you to proceed with particular care when you are thinking about electoral matters generally, and particularly the governance of the Electoral Commission.
I think the procedure that ought to be followed in such a case is that there is an independent review before any recommendation such as those that have been introduced here are put forward. That was the case in 2000; the introduction of the Electoral Commission stemmed, if I remember correctly, from the Fifth Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The changes in 2009, introducing, among other things, the partisan commissioners, reflected recommendations made in, if I remember correctly, the Eleventh Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. There has been no comparable process in this case. I do not think that that is an appropriate way to introduce significant changes in the governance of the Electoral Commission.
Elections Bill (Second sitting)
Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Chloe Smith(3 years, 3 months ago)
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Chloe Smith
Q Thank you very much for your insight. Is there any more that you would like to say about the particular processes that will be required to support overseas electors in demonstrating their connection to the constituency they are registering in?
Louise Round: As with all these things, some of the detail will come out in secondary legislation. At the moment, it is really tricky because registers are not nationally open. If someone has to show that they have not been on a register apart from in the constituency in which the particular registration office is operating, there is no way really of registration officers checking that, so in a sense it is taken on trust. There is no way for them to check the register even of a neighbouring constituency, let alone one at the other end of the country.
The obligation to be satisfied that someone has a local connection is obviously really time consuming, and it depends how well prepared the person wishing to register is and what evidence they can adduce. At the end of the day, the registration officer has to be satisfied. There is wording in one of the clauses around whether, had they applied a long time ago, they would have at that point been able to demonstrate a local connection, which all begins to get a little existential, almost, and very theoretical. We are not trained detectives, so there is a balance, as in all registration activity, between not wanting to make the requirements so tight that no one can ever be registered and ensuring that we are not registering people who are not entitled to be registered and might be constituency hopping, as it were, to find the most convenient place to register for a particular election depending on what is going on there.
Brendan O’Hara
Q Thank you very much for joining us. This morning, Richard Mawrey talked about the widescale postal vote fraud in Birmingham. What have you done to tackle that? What in the Bill helps you to further tackle that wide-scale postal vote fraud, and is anything missing from the Bill that would help you were it to be added?
Rob Connolly: I am not sure that something is missing from the Bill. What always surprises me is the number of postal votes that we get handed in on the day. We are talking perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 at a parliamentary election. We also recorded, as part of what happened, how many people brought the postal votes and in what numbers, and we often asked for names and addresses. There is no legal obligation to tell us, but in case there was a follow-up we tried to address that problem.
After the problems we had in Birmingham, the law was changed to deal with some of the issues that arose. To be honest, I am not aware that we have had major wide-scale problems in Birmingham, but it is not something that we can be overly confident can never happen again; it may do. We just have to be extra vigilant. That is where the joint working comes into play.
Restricting the number of postal votes that you can bring into a polling station may help, but we need to understand in a bit more detail the reasons behind it, because one of my concerns with the Bill is that you might be restricted to bringing in two postal votes into a polling station, but what is stopping you going to another polling station in the constituency and handing in another two? I also worry that by limiting it to such a small number we are potentially disenfranchising the honest person as opposed to your determined fraudster. A bit of work could be done around that.
Lobby and Media Briefings: Journalists' Access
Debate between Brendan O'Hara and Chloe Smith(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Chloe Smith
This is an important point. As we have already discussed, there are ways to do that, and this Government are committed to them. We have mentioned some points of policy, and we have looked at the business rates point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison). To that, I add the way that this Government are making sure that they are available on social media, which, by its very nature, does not require to be inside any Westminster bubble. That is a way for people rightly to be able to hold this Government to account. It is that kind of principle that we hold very highly, and what I have been able to outline today are all the ways in which we are doing that.
Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)
Clearly, the Minister cannot defend what has happened and therefore she is providing a master class in whataboutery. Yesterday, Downing Street announced that there was a new show in town and that it was doing it simply because it can. It was deliberately sinister and knowingly provocative. I am sure that those involved are celebrating the fact that they have an urgent question out of it. What happened yesterday was out of President Trump’s playbook for bullies, and I am sure that those involved are feeling pretty smug about it. Did the Minister and her colleagues know that this was the type of Government they were voting for when they so enthusiastically backed Boris?
Chloe Smith
The type of Government we are talking about is the type that has just won a resounding majority at a general election and has the support of the people. I think that is a pretty good answer to his question.