Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee

Jon Trickett Excerpts

Thursday 20th April 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett (Hemsworth) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the fairness you have always shown me in this and previous Parliaments.

The report is clear: the referendum was called to call the bluff of the Brexiteers, civil service neutrality was clearly jeopardised and, as the Chair of the Committee said, there was no preparation for the vote to leave. Is not it obvious that the referendum was held not in the national interest but in the governing party’s interest? Now, with 30 of its MPs under investigation, we are having an election, instead of focusing on the outcome of the referendum. Paragraphs 102, 103 and 104 of the Committee’s report should concern the House—and, in fact, the whole country. We have not done enough to secure our systems for either referendums or elections. In the Chair’s view and the view of his Committee, are our systems strong enough, at the time of a snap general election, in the event of a concerted cyber-attack, to which the report refers, by a foreign power or from some other source? Even at this late stage, does he think that there is anything that we can do to strengthen our systems’ resilience?

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s question. I will not tangle with all the things that he raised, but we have a pretty resilient system. The fact that the vast majority of votes cast are pencil or pen marks on bits of paper that are physically counted means that it is basically an impossible system to hack. What we need to be aware of is the vulnerability of electoral registers and systems. The dispersal of our electoral register among different electoral authorities is another source of resilience: there is not one system to hack. However, we need to be aware of what certain countries might want to be seen to be doing—what they might want to be seen to be attempting to influence the result of, or want to be thought to influence the result of. I do not think that any country influenced the result of the leave vote in the EU referendum. I do not think that the result in any election in any major country would have been altered, but we need to understand why certain countries are doing this and what psychological effect they are trying to create by attempting these things, and we need to be alert to the vulnerability of our systems.