Jerome Mayhew
Main Page: Jerome Mayhew (Conservative - Broadland and Fakenham)Department Debates - View all Jerome Mayhew's debates with the Cabinet Office
Elections Bill (Second sitting)
Jerome Mayhew Excerpts(3 years, 2 months ago)
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Chloe Smith
Could you also lift your head up so we can lip read?
Professor Howarth: The temptation when on a computer is to bend down towards the microphone. I shall try to let you lip read.
I agree that there is a problem with clause 23. The power to add groups that can campaign as third parties is obviously justifiable. The delegated powers memorandum gives no justification for the power to remove or the power to redefine. Those are powers that could be abused.
There is also a change in clause 20 that to most people looks logical, but there needs to be a replacement provision. It is the proposal to end the possibility of parties acting as third-party campaigners. The Electoral Commission’s guidance says that is the main way in which parties can act together in electoral alliances and pacts. If clause 20 remains as it is, with no replacement provision, then parties will not really be able to operate in electoral pacts or alliances. They will be limited to £700 of expenditure if promoting a national campaign of another party. There needs to be a specific provision for pacts that is fair. Obviously, those provisions would have to apply to canvassers campaigning on common ground, but this is too restrictive.
On the question of what ought to be in the Bill, there is a massive Law Commission report on all the problems identified in electoral law, which should be part of this Bill. That report is now gathering dust, as too many Law Commission reports do.
I go back to the Constitutional Affairs Committee and Justice Committees before 2010, which came to an agreement on the crucial issue in electoral reform, which is donations. Should there be a cap on donations? We got a Committee to agree on a very high cap, but also to the principle that there ought to be a cap. If you do not have a cap on donations, the whole system is open to the accusation that it is just there for rich people to buy elections. That is the most important problem in the way we allow elections to be run. We need to get the system on to a completely different basis of small donations by ordinary people.
Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)
Q Professor, you asked where this idea of the statement of principles and the policy framework for the Electoral Commission has come from. I hope you were able to hear the evidence in this morning’s sitting, particularly that from Councillor Golds, who gave damning examples of where evidence of widespread fraud was taken by him and others to the Electoral Commission and, in his words, ignored.
Professor Howarth: Let me explain. The Electoral Commission does not have a role in legal contests about individual cases of electoral fraud. It has an overall supervisory role, but its regulatory powers are aimed at parties and their national campaigns. For example, on the spending returns of individuals in parliamentary elections, the commission has a power to look at them, but no power to enforce the law. That is all done by individuals and by the police.
The commission’s power has to do with the national spending limits of the national parties. If you think the commission should be doing more on that, you need to change the commission’s powers so that it can. What the Bill does instead is remove the commission’s power to instigate prosecutions, which makes the situation even worse.
Jerome Mayhew
Q On that point, is it not right that although the commission claims to have the power currently, it has never once brought forward a prosecution?
Professor Howarth: That is because the Government always opposed it and tried to stop it doing it.
Jerome Mayhew
Q Forgive me; if I may ask the question, I will not interrupt the answer. Given that you have never, ever used the power of prosecution, is it fair to claim that removing a power that has never been used is somehow an additional fetter to electoral law?
Professor Howarth: Yes, it is, because it is a power that exists that could have been used, and any proposal to use it makes the Government immediately decide to go back, on whatever grounds. One of the things you should have picked up from Richard Mawrey’s evidence this morning is that the police are not particularly interested in enforcing electoral law and think that electoral offences are not important. If they do not think it is, the CPS will not get many cases and no one will be prosecuted, unless local authorities take it up using their power under section 222 of the Local Government Act, which they might do.
The Chair
We have just a couple of minutes left. Perhaps Patrick Grady will ask a short question and we can have a short answer.
Jerome Mayhew
Q Ms Irvine, if I may carry on questioning you, you are obviously aware that the Electoral Commission has recommended the use of photographic ID, and you are in very good company. We heard earlier this morning from Lord Pickles who, as you will know, produced a report three or four years ago in which he listed a number of organisations that have come out in favour of photographic ID for our election system. That list includes the Association of Electoral Administrators, SOLACE and the National Police Chiefs Council domestically, but also international recommendations from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. There is a groundswell of advice coming the Government’s way to introduce photographic ID to protect our electoral system from vulnerability to fraud. Can you expound for us the impact that vulnerability has on our democracy and the way people experience it?
Ailsa Irvine: We have highlighted that vulnerability for a number of years. As I said earlier, we see high levels of public confidence in our electoral process as a whole. That said, there are a proportion of voters for whom this is a concern and who would be more confident if a requirement was introduced. There is some evidence to suggest that some people would become more confident if that was introduced.
However, the one thing we said in our evaluation of the pilot schemes was that, in introducing any scheme, as well as ensuring it has an impact on increasing security, we ensure that its introduction does not have an impact on the accessibility of the voting process and that it is workable in practice. While there is a vulnerability and it makes logical sense for it to be looked at, it must be looked at in a way that not only protects security, but continues to ensure the ability of everybody to cast their vote.
Jerome Mayhew
Q That is a very good point, and it brings me neatly on to Virginia McVea, if I am allowed one further question. You have a lot of experience of the practical application of photo ID in Northern Ireland; I heard your evidence a moment ago that, now it is bedded in, the run rate is about 1,500 card applications a month—is that right?
Virginia McVea: That is usually during election periods. Outside an election period—
Jerome Mayhew
Q That is a very good indicator for us to extrapolate from the population of Northern Ireland being 1.86 million. We will all be busy with our calculators later.
The other advice you gave was that for the overwhelming of people there is not a problem—this is not an issue in Northern Ireland voting now, albeit after 20 years. Does that suggest that effective steps have been taken in the Northern Irish political process to raise awareness sufficiently to remove the concerns that some politicians expressed last week in the general debate, that many voters would be disenfranchised because they would turn up at a polling booth and they would not have the right ID? Is that a false fear once the system is bedded down?
Virginia McVea: We would have to time-travel back to the early 2000s to get a proper feel for the electorate’s response, but if there is sufficient communication and if there is availability of the ID card, much of which will be down to the capacity of the administrators, it is something that people are now accepting of. We have challenges to the office in relation to access to absent votes and discussions around that, but we do not have discussions about photographic ID with any of the parties. Ensuring that those smart passes can be used in polling stations is helpful, so yes, there is a general acceptance.
When you are doing your sums, being mathematically challenged myself on occasion, be careful: we work to the eligible electorate, which may possibly be around 1.45 million, rather than the 1.8 million, which would make the sums even harder dealing with the small figures from Northern Ireland.
The Chair
I have Paul Bristow, Chris Clarkson, Nick Smith and Fleur Anderson remaining to ask questions, and we have until 3.15 pm, so can we be kind to each other? Thank you.
Peter Gibson
Q I have two questions for Rob. In her evidence, the returning officer from Peterborough outlined that they had explored using CCTV in their polling stations. Could you comment on whether you have done the same and on whether that would be of benefit? Could you also outline whether all your polling station clerks are fully trained in the applicability of tendered ballots?
Rob Connolly: CCTV is something we explored in around 2010 or 2011, but we had a number of concerns, including that it might go the other way and affect people’s confidence in the system, in that they might be worried that we were spying on them or would be able to identify how they were voting. We opted not to go down that route. We invested more in additional training for our staff. We even considered looking at CCTV outside polling stations for people who were entering. Again, we did not think, if there were allegations of personation, that that would really help us. We had discussions with West Midlands police about the evidential side of that, and CCTV would not necessarily help you identify who had committed any crime of personation or when. We know it would have been very difficult to prove. As I say, we invest more in our staff who are delivering the ballot papers, and what have you.
In terms of the question about tendered ballot papers, that is something we make sure we reiterate every election. We introduced a form for our polling station staff. If they gave out a tendered ballot paper, they had to give an explanation as to why—what was the reason? We would then spend some time collating that information post-election. That would do two things. One, if there were particular problems with particular polling stations and polling station staff, we could pick that up with them to find out why they were doing those things and fix that for next time. Two, we would then report that back to our members and give out numbers over the whole city, saying that x number of tendered ballot papers had been issued and giving the reasons why. I will be honest with you: there were times when they were probably issued wrongly, but that helped identify the issue so we could eliminate that from the process.
Jerome Mayhew
Q Mr Connolly, you were asked a moment ago about disenfranchisement, with specific reference to the first clause in the Bill, on voter ID. Although the Bill has one clause relating to voter ID, it has five clauses relating to proxy and postal voting. We heard really powerful evidence about that from Mr Mawrey QC this morning. When he was asked his view about disenfranchisement, his evidence, which was absolutely stark, was that it was the Bangladeshi community who had had their votes stolen and harvested and who were overwhelmingly disenfranchised as a result of voter fraud. Would you agree with that expression of opinion?
Rob Connolly: When we had our 2004-05 issue, I don’t think it was with that community.
Jerome Mayhew
I should make it absolutely clear that he was making direct reference to Tower Hamlets in that series of questioning. Rather than pinning it all on the Bangladeshi community, what I really want to focus on is that it tends to be minority communities who have had serious examples of electoral fraud—the kind of fraud that is dealt with in the proposed legislation. That is the area where most disenfranchisement has taken place historically.
Rob Connolly: As an example of that, there was a local election in which complaints were raised with us about potential fraud in the community by one of the candidates. People were potentially going to polling stations, and what have you. We did additional training for our polling station staff in that particular ward—myself and a police officer from West Midlands police—to explain what the particular allegations were and also what they could do to identify offending. In the petitions we have had, people have questioned the integrity of our polling station staff, which we vigorously defend, because 99.9% of the time they are absolutely honest. As I say, they come in for one day a year and without them we cannot deliver elections.
The sort of scenario you are talking about is often identified before an election, because the communities can sometimes be split by party lines. They will flag these issues up with us and we will work not only with the police, but with the political parties. I always think that to combat fraud, there are three parts of the jigsaw puzzle: the returning officer, the police and the political parties. If they all work together, that is how you combat fraud.
Jerome Mayhew
Q You mention the police as one of the triumvirate. How important is it that the police take electoral fraud seriously and get actively engaged?
Rob Connolly: West Midlands police always have done because of what happened in 2004 and the criticism they got at the time. It was a lesson well learned for them. Ever since then, they have taken such allegations very seriously. We work very closely with them and we have a point of contact. We will meet them in early January or in February to start preparing for the next May elections.
Jerome Mayhew
Q That is a definite improvement. Prior to 2004, complaints were called “Operation Gripe” in West Midlands police.
Rob Connolly: Yes, you are absolutely right.