Electoral Fraud: Tower Hamlets

Debate between John Penrose and Julian Lewis

Monday 18th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

May I put on the record my personal admiration for the heroism of those people who took this matter to the electoral court? Does the Minister agree that it would be a betrayal of their courage if the police, for reasons of political correctness, were not to follow through on what appears, in the case laid out by the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), to be an open-and-shut matter of criminality?

[John Penrose]

My right hon. Friend anticipates my next remarks, because we all owe a debt of gratitude to the four petitioners. We have heard that they were pretty heroic in the way they pursued this matter. They were not dissuaded. There were plenty of points at which lesser people might have backed away, but they did not take those opportunities and they pursued the matter through thick and thin. On occasion what they had to put up with was pretty thick and pretty thin, yet they continued throughout. We owe them a debt of thanks, particularly those local to Tower Hamlets.

It was not just those four petitioners whom we must thank, however, because other people picked up the challenge. We must thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Sir Eric Pickles), who put the commissioners in Tower Hamlets in the first place, as well as the commissioners; the presiding judge, Richard Mawrey, QC; a number of other officials, including Barry Quirk; and local councillors such as Peter Golds for their assiduous and determined campaign. Many people rallied round the cause of democracy in Tower Hamlets, which is all to the good.

I hope the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I cannot comment on specific details of ongoing investigations. As an experienced parliamentarian and former Minister, he will understand the constraints of what I can and cannot say. He is, however, doing entirely the right thing. He mentioned that he was about to have discussions and meetings with Commissioner Hogan-Howe and perhaps others. I hope that they can provide him with further reassurances about what is going on with the investigations. I understand that there are still investigations into grant fraud, for example, in parallel with the ongoing investigations into electoral fraud. They perhaps cannot be made public, but he might be able to get further reassurances.[Official Report, 12 May 2016, Vol. 609, c. 3MC.]

I am sure the hon. Gentleman will also pursue, assiduously and determinedly, the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) about the extremely trenchant criticisms in Richard Mawrey’s judgment. While many people might have expected a prosecution to be straightforward, clearly there are different standards of proof, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned, and different levels of admissibility for evidence. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service need to make a judgment, but he will want to investigate the individual cases and allegations to find out what can be pursued. Local people in Tower Hamlets and the electoral community more widely will want to know how we can be sure that these sorts of cases are pursued in the strongest possible terms, whenever the evidence allows, so I would encourage him in those meetings and in pursuing those inquiries.

The hon. Gentleman asked where the plaintiffs stood in respect of recovering costs, and then gave at least a partial answer to his question by talking about the ongoing discussions and investigations in respect of the ownership of assets associated with former Mayor Rahman and members of his family. There have been press stories and reports of court judgments about what has, and has not, been found to be the property of either the former mayor or his family. I understand that that process is ongoing, and again I cannot comment much beyond that, but this is not a finished story, or a set of conclusions finally reached. The mills of both God and, in this case, the justice system are grinding slowly but, one hopes, exceeding small as well.

The hon. Gentleman asked how we might take forward the broader question of how electoral fraud can be made less easy to perpetrate, though it is not easy in the first place, and how we can ensure that the consequences of electoral fraud are clear, swift and unappealing to those considering undertaking it. My right hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar, the former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, is working on a report on electoral fraud for the Government that I suspect will land on my desk with a satisfactorily large and weighty thud in the next few weeks or months, with a series of recommendations as to how we can tighten the rules still further.

I obviously do not want to prejudge my right hon. Friend’s recommendations, but the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that my right hon. Friend, having been Secretary of State and, before he entered the House, the leader of a local council, will have observed the local democratic process up close and in huge detail, and will have seen its strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of the parliamentary democratic process. I cannot think of anybody better placed to come up with trenchant and closely reasoned recommendations, and I look forward to receiving them. We will all want to read them and consider them in depth.

We will have to wait and see what my right hon. Friend recommends, but I can confirm that he and I have spent time with Richard Mawrey, discussing what he saw both in Tower Hamlets and in his previous judgments—he has a track record of specialising in this area, having examined a series of these problems. Thankfully, such problems are not terribly frequent, but when they have arisen, he has been the person with the single best judicial experience in the country. We have spoken to him and, in depth, to people such as Peter Golds, whom the hon. Gentleman mentioned, so plenty of care has been taken to gather whatever information is available out there. I am sure that we all await my right hon. Friend’s report.

The hon. Gentleman’s final question was where the local righting of the ship had got to in Tower Hamlets. I have made inquiries of the Department for Communities and Local Government on where we have got to. The answer is, broadly, that huge progress has been made, but there is still further to go. I understand that the council has made some progress on key areas in its best value action plan—on procurement, property disposals, and elections management—and has made particular progress since the arrival of Mayor Biggs last June and the new chief executive officer, Will Tuckley, in October. There are still concerns, however, about delays in other intervention areas, particularly in respect of grants, communications and organisational and cultural changes, some of which take longer to bed in than others. Progress in those areas will need to be continued, as will close monitoring by the commissioners to make sure that the progress made is not eroded and does not start to flag.

The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will continue to monitor the position very closely and will not consider any variation to the current directions until there is sufficient evidence that the change has been deeply embedded and the key outcomes delivered. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would want those to be the main criteria. Given the seriousness and acuteness of the problems encountered in Tower Hamlets—he ably and lucidly summarised the worst of them, but there were many others that he did not have time to go into—I am sure that he will applaud every move to make sure that there is no prospect of a recurrence, and that those standards are fully met before we get back to the widely wished-for normality in the electoral and registration arrangements there.

I hope that I have answered the hon. Gentleman’s questions. Where I have not be able to because they are the subject of ongoing investigations, he will, quite rightly—I applaud him for it—speak to the police, including the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and others. I hope that he will get the answers there that he cannot get here. If he pieces the different parts of the jigsaw together, I hope that he sees an optimistic picture, albeit one in which it cannot yet be said that the problem has been solved. At least progress has been made on a problem that is being solved, even if we have not quite reached the final destination.

Question put and agreed to.