Parliamentary Constituencies bill (Fourth sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateClive Efford
Main Page: Clive Efford (Labour - Eltham and Chislehurst)Department Debates - View all Clive Efford's debates with the Cabinet Office
(4 years, 4 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Peter Stanyon: Absolutely. It comes back to the electoral figures that are being dealt with. Certainly, the proposed reduction of seats from 650 to 600 exacerbated it. It is 20 years since the review was undertaken, so there will be significant changes in some areas. Over time, hopefully they will be negated as we go forward, but yes, it is difficult to cope with at the moment because it has been a long time since the last boundary review.
Q
Peter Stanyon: In local authority A, the electoral registration officer will cover the area for that local authority, maybe giving that register away. That is reasonably straightforward in terms of polling stations and the like, but slightly more complicated with absent votes and postal votes. There need to be agreements about who will be leading on each individual process. In some areas, the give-away authority will administer parts of the process for the authority that has taken it in, because of software incompatibility or different approaches being taken.
Most of the challenge is about: how do you mirror local authority A’s working practice on to local authority B? Despite the fact that the law that everybody is working to is exactly the same, there are local practices that are slightly different. That comes down to the real nitty-gritty of things like how many staff are appointed to polling stations, the processes used for the opening of postal votes and things like that. It is more an administrative approach that is difficult, which means that the respective returning officers need to communicate very closely with each other, to make sure that there is no element of doubt as to the way in which processes are administered.
Q
Peter Stanyon: It would really depend on the nature of the split in the area, but, generally speaking, it is far easier to manage a constituency within a local authority area in which you are normally running elections. Equally, splitting down to polling districts, and going lower than the ward building block, may be preferable in some areas, but it could add different issues, depending on the nature of those splits. We would probably be able to cope with the odd one here and there, but if it were across the board of a local authority on a consistent basis, I could foresee that being as complicated as it would be across boundaries.
Q
Peter Stanyon: Much of what is going on as we speak in terms of the changes to the canvass process is about data. As you are aware, the new IER process involves inviting people to register. More access to data that allows registration officers to target those who could potentially be on the register would be welcome, be that local, national or regional. It depends on the type of data source; equally, it needs to be the right sort of data so that register updates can be done in an accurate and convenient manner.
Q
Peter Stanyon: I think the Department for Work and Pensions database is, at the moment, pretty robust in terms of checking. The Electoral Commission has done a lot of work on other sources that we have been a party to, including HM Passport Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. Each comes with its positives and negatives; there are lots of pros and cons. One of the things we want to avoid is the provision of data for the sake of the provision of data, because sometimes the data that we already have is more accurate than the data coming in, throwing EROs off course in terms of registration.
Q
Peter Stanyon: There are potential sources. We need to see the quality of those data sources before we can jump that way.
Q
Peter Stanyon: It will vary across the UK. A statutory review must be undertaken every five years. One has just finished, and the next one is due to report between October 2023 and January 2025. In some local authorities, polling district reviews are undertaken after each major poll, just to make sure that the scheme is suitable. It depends on the fluidity of local authority areas.
Q
Darren Hughes: I do agree with that analysis. Sometimes things are important but not very popular, or not very—[Inaudible]— or not very engaging. When we conduct elections, they are very important to millions of people, which is why around two thirds of people on the register turn out. We all wish that that was higher, but there is still a lot of interest in elections. Some of the mechanics of how we build the demographic architecture does not result in a huge amount of engagement. I think that on parliamentary boundaries, if you were wanting to involve them in a submission process, you either hire somebody to run that for you or you ensure that tweets and letters go out and so on. As I said before, it takes on an incredible cloak of authority for that community, even though it might not be entitled to the status that it receives. I agree that it is possible to happen, and I think in some cases the community argument is very strong, but in a lot of cases it is a shield for more of a partisan argument for that particular electoral cycle, which, as I say, is the sort of thing we should avoid.
Being able to have things like citizens’ juries or —[Inaudible]—citizens who are asked to come together to assist the commissions with information, with their feelings and the values of that area, and with people saying what they think the community interests really are, might be a more real way of being able to include the community, getting better quality information and ensuring that the final decisions reflect the reasonable view of the public, as opposed to those who knew that the consultation was on.
Q
Darren Hughes: I do not know, is the answer to that. I assume not, but sometimes when these processes are going on for a long period of time, and if people are appointed who might not have a lot of experience in dealing with active organised citizens pushing a particular view, these are the risks you run. It might not be the case in every cycle, but you would want to make sure that organised political activity dressed up as the concerned citizen was not able to take hold. That is an important thing. Secondly, if there are mechanisms to get very good quality information about what the general public think, like deliberative consultation processes enable you to do, that is pretty rich information for the commissioners to receive in addition to the demography data that they would be using as well.
Q
Darren Hughes: Not that I can provide you with right now, no. I have never sat on one of those commissions, so I do not have personal experience there. There is plenty of both academic and more political-style literature that is available to describe some of the tactics that can go on. All I am saying is that those things are really easy to avoid, and we should build it into the process.
Q
Darren Hughes: The main suggestion I have on that would be to move proactively to an overt position of automatic voter registration where we basically said that every time a citizen makes contact, or touches base in any way, with the Government or Government agencies, there is an ability to register—and that that is proactively put to people: we do work with people before they attain registration age to explain what democracy is, why participation is important and how you can have your say, and we really try to increase the amount of information that our younger citizens have. Then, with an automatic voter registration model where they would go on the register, you would hope that that would lead to participation in elections. Even if it did not, it would then get more accurate and complete data for the drawing up of boundaries.
I think some improvements were made by using other sources of Government data and requiring DWP involvement when the IER changes were made. That is coming up to 10 years ago, so now the next step is to say, “What could we do to be more proactive?” I think this paper that the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has produced on automatic voter registration would be a good place to start.
Q
Darren Hughes: I suppose it would be political involvement at both levels, would not it? It was the decision to propose going from 650 to 600, and then another decision to reverse that and go back. I think that there was a political element to that. I guess the other thing is, right at the very beginning, making sure that these things are written for all time, not just one time, one particular cycle or one particular Government or Opposition—just doing these things in a very straight way so that if you are up it works for you and if you are down it works for you as well.
I do not think the decision to go from 650 to 600 was driven by any particular democratic principle. It was part of a response to a crisis at the time, and that has not stood the test of time because it was not grounded in much more than that. Also, probably it is easy to agree to a cut in the number of MPs until you realise that it also involves the boundaries of the remaining 600. That might have focused minds a wee bit.
Q
Darren Hughes: That is a good question, because I guess it is philosophical. The duties and responsibilities of being a citizen do not actually require much, but being on the electoral register means that you can, right at the last minute, decide whether you will vote. It also helps us with the way we structure democracy and ensures that the way the boundaries are done is open and transparent. For people who want to be involved in elected politics, it is important to know the number of people in the country for whom they can campaign with their ideas and policies. Those are all some basic responsibilities that just come with the duty of being a citizen.
Q
Professor Pattie: You heard evidence from John Curtice this morning on this and I would not disagree with him. There certainly is evidence that people are influenced by the context in which they live and by what is happening around them both in terms of the economic and political environment and in terms of the climate of opinion around them. People who in a sociological sense look very similar, but live in different areas, can go in very different ways much more akin to other people within their area. Is it the biggest influence on people’s voting? No, probably it is not. Does it have an effect? Yes, it does.
Q
Professor Pattie: That is rather harder to argue, to be honest. The extent to which people would see themselves as acting for their local area in a constituency sense is quite a hard one to argue. People have a sense of “my area” [Inaudible], but is that the constituency? That is much less obvious.
Dr Rossiter: Over the years, for my sins, I have attended an awful lot of what were local inquiries and I have listened to a very large amount of evidence put forward about local ties. I tend to agree with Professor McLean, who gave evidence this morning, that one person’s local ties go in diametrically opposed directions to another person’s local ties, depending on their political preferences, so I am not at all upset at the idea that arguments in terms of local ties might take a lower role in the hierarchy. In fact, I think that that is a sensible thing.
What I do think—this also goes back to the previous question—is that where you have got local government boundaries and existing seats, you have inconvenience when you cross those. I listened to the evidence earlier from the person representing the electoral registration officers and I have also heard evidence given at inquiries from Members of Parliament who have repeatedly referenced the difficulties that they have when they have to deal with multiple local authorities. People deal with four. or, as recommended in one of the recent reviews, five local authorities for one Member of Parliament. That aspect of discretion is something that the Boundary Commissions over years and years have shown great ability to recognise. Again, I come back to my point: that is where their discretion and their ability to address those concerns is being curtailed.
Q
Dr Rossiter: Speaking personally, it would depend on the evidence in the particular case. I do not think that one is necessarily better than the other. I have noticed, when we have been looking at this, the significant help that increasing that tolerance by very small amounts will provide. As soon as you go from 5% to 6%, you have a big payback from going up by that one percentage point. That payback increases to around 8%, which is why we came to the conclusion in our previous report that a figure of 8% would be much more helpful. Beyond 8%, the advantage begins to flatten off, because you are reaching a point at which any sensible commission can reach solutions.
In all this, we accept and understand entirely that the 5% introduction was not an attempt to be cussed or anything of that nature. It is simply that 8% and 5% are not worlds apart. If you are able to achieve far more when you adopt one rather than the other, you have to wonder why you would want to go for the lower figure, unless there is some major negativity in that regard. Again, as people who write published papers, we have to do our research, and we have looked for anything that would support 5% in any of the previous discussions regarding the 2011 Act and so on, and we have struggled.
I know you have had reference to the standards related to the “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters”, and there seems to have been some confusion over what that says. I am not sure whether that confusion has been sorted out; I was very surprised by what I heard the other day. I think there is probably an understandable source for this confusion, because an earlier edition of an OSCE publication did indeed say that a 10% tolerance—quite reasonably taken to mean no more than 5% either side of the norm—should be aimed for, but that was never referenced in that version of that booklet; a subsequent edition of that observer handbook has come out, and that reference is no longer in there.
Probably the best statement of what is best in this area is the OSCE’s “Guidelines for Reviewing a Legal Framework for Elections”, which specifically endorses the “Code of Good Practice” and states that proximate equality—no more than 10% between electorates—should be the aim, but interestingly goes on to say that
“frequent changes in the boundaries of constituencies should be avoided”.
If we are looking for international standards on this, there is a clear suggestion that going right down to 5% is not necessary, and in so far as it causes change to boundaries, we would not fall foul of OSCE reports. They all seem to find that UK elections fail in one respect or another, but at least we would not fall foul on that.
Are there any other questions from Committee Members to put to our two witnesses? If there are no other questions, I would like to thank Dr Rossiter and Professor Pattie for the evidence you have given us this afternoon. We are very grateful. I am grateful to Members for their cooperation during this virtual session in these somewhat unusual proceedings.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned—(Eddie Hughes.)