Representation of the People Bill

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Wilson of Sedgefield) (Lab)]

My Lords, before we continue to debate Amendment 10, I remind the House that this is an adjourned debate. Therefore, unless Members were present at the start of the group, they are are not able to contribute. The Clerk at the Table has a full list of those who were present.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I was here on Monday evening at the point of adjournment, and not only am I in my place but I am next to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, who was in the same place as well. Things move on.

On nearly every amendment to this Bill, and in other parts of the work of your Lordships’ House, I support my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough, but, regrettably, I cannot support his Amendment 124, which would require by law that election counts be started overnight following the polls closing. It is important to explain why.

Running an election is a complicated task for election staff. You have to recruit presiding officers, polling inspectors and count staff, and handle all matter of other ancillary tasks, such as fetching and carrying the ballot papers. I know that this happens at a general election, and it is important that we maintain the requirement for overnight counting in those contests, but we have to recognise that local government works over a much larger geographical canvas. It often encompasses multiple constituencies. There are many more electors in the race. We have multi-member wards. We have funny business when it comes to alternative and supplementary votes for some contests. More people and different and more complicated systems add complexity and time.

Local elections are different to the national elections, where, simply, the person with the most votes wins. Let us not forget that, unlike a parliamentary vote, where there is just one election to count, local elections may have many wards interspersed with town council by-elections, so the number of contests is not just greater; it is an order of magnitude larger.

Attracting presiding officers and count staff, who have historically come from our high street banks—tellers and other high street financial workers—is harder. In the age of tap and pay, we just do not have tellers who are used to handling banknotes any more, so we have ended up with a diminished pool of talent to operate the election. The facts of life are that, oftentimes, we rely on presiding officers, who have done a stretch from 7 am until 10 pm, to turn up again the following day to do the count. If we want to have confidence in our democracy, we cannot have people working for 24 hours non-stop in the most delicate and mentally taxing work, which requires huge concentration not just for validation but for the count, banding, bundling and tallying. Local elections have many more types of parties and candidates and therefore a higher propensity for recounts, where many contests are decided by just a handful of votes or even a coin toss.

As I warm to my theme, this short debate gives us the opportunity to remind the Prime Minister that if he is minded to change the current parliamentary voting system, any changes are likely to prejudice the ability for overnight counts if greater complexity is introduced. The voters rejected electoral change in a referendum in 2011, but he does not seem to be listening. The consequences of change are likely to be that the ability to count overnight is diminished or, at the very least, the announcement of the results and the clarity the electorate deserve will be delayed. I do not believe that has been taken into account in any other forum; here is my opportunity to mention it.

To return to the amendment, this is detailed work. It needs staff who are as bright as a button and on the ball to do these local elections, which are more complicated, take more time and provide more opportunities to go wrong than parliamentary contests, where there are often just two or three main candidates slugging it out and the majorities are weighed in handfuls of thousands, not handfuls of votes. For these reasons, I cannot support my noble friend in his endeavour, attractive though it may be. It is better to take your time and get it right than rush and live with the consequences.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

Does my noble friend at least concede that this is not a prescriptive amendment but rather a probing amendment? Clause 4 allows electoral returning officers to disregard the obligation in emergencies or specific circumstances. It is not a draconian amendment forcing every ERO to do the same.

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[Lord McCobb (LD)]

My Lords, I will add to the comments of the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Hayward, some of the practical implications of Amendment 124. I make it clear that, like many people here today, I love an overnight count as much as anyone else. I have been to more than I can remember—including, ironically as it happens, the count at which the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Sedgefield, was elected as a Member of Parliament in 2007.

Like everybody else, I understand that election nights are special, and I understand the desire to preserve the excitement that comes with overnight counts, as well as, for the broader public, a quick understanding of the implication of local election results for the country as a whole and what they mean for the Government of the day. However, this amendment would not deliver that in practice. It requires only that verification begins on polling night, not that a single vote is counted or a result declared. What it would do is remove a returning officer’s ability to plan a count properly on those nights where, in practice, that judgment matters most.

Let me take an extreme, but real, example. On 6 May 2021, voters in the village of Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire went to the polls, to be handed five ballot papers. They voted for their county councillor, a district councillor in a by-election, a parish councillor in a by-election, the combined authority mayor, and the police and crime commissioner. The law as it stands allows the returning officer to have ballot papers cast into either separate ballot boxes or into the same one for elections happening at the same time. Suppose the returning officer had, as they are permitted to do, provided a separate ballot box for each election. If this amendment were implemented, three of those five elections would, by law, have to have begun the verification in the two hours between the close of poll and midnight, and the other two would not.

However, it is not uncommon for voters to put ballot papers into the wrong ballot box, so in order to carry out the task in this complex scenario and make sure that, for example, a parish council ballot paper sitting in the police and crime commissioner ballot box was found and properly included in the count, in effect, all five ballot boxes would have to have been opened before midnight for those counts to be completed in parallel. Today, a returning officer can use one trained team to verify each election in turn, whereas this amendment would force all five verifications to happen in parallel at the same time before midnight. That would mean more staff, more tables and more supervisors for already pressed local authorities trying to run elections effectively. That would be simply impractical.

The exemption that the noble Lord referred to does not help either because it covers emergencies and safety risks but does not cover the ordinary, foreseeable complexity of running multiple elections on the same day using parallel or shared ballot boxes. While the Waterbeach example is an extreme example of what might happen, it is a real one that happened in practice. Returning officers are already accountable for how they run their counts and, ultimately, as one of the previous speakers said—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I would like to make a supportive comment. I used the Waterbeach example at Second Reading. Not only were there five different ballot papers, there were three different voting methods—first past the post, STV, and AV for the mayor and the PCC. That adds a further complexity to the point I think the noble Lord is trying to make.

[Lord McCobb (LD)]

I am grateful for that additional point. Returning officers are already accountable for how they run their counts, and, ultimately, accuracy matters more than speed. However much we love a traditional election night, we should not allow that desire to impose unworkable or unnecessarily restrictive practices on already stretched returning officers.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Shamash (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Hayward. I woke up this morning thinking that I would love to quote Martin Luther King—that I had a dream. I will give a tiny bit of history. The Representation of the People Act 1983 is the core legislation that everything has sprung from. It was 18 years from 1983 to the creation in 2001 of the Electoral Commission, in which I, and maybe others here, was involved. It is now 43 years since the 1983 Act came into being, and there have been repeated amendments and additions: the Electoral Administration Act, the Elections Act, and so on. We are getting to the point where, to move election law, you need a pick-up truck. It is completely crackers that we are in this situation.

The most important thing, as mentioned by my noble friend Lord Hayward, is consolidation. I have discussed the possibility of that with others, including my noble friend the Minister, and it is a major undertaking. But there is a new kid on the block, and that is AI. We must get to a situation where we can do this, because it is impossible to operate. I should have declared my interest as a former election lawyer to the Labour Party for many years. Having to deal with this legislation is very difficult, and you can miss things out very easily. My plea to the Minister is to take this idea away to the officials, so that my dream can actually come true and we can have a bit of consolidation in this Act.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, I support the comments made by my noble friend Lord Hayward and by the noble Lord, Lord Shamash. We have heard in the debate so far that we need a consolidation. The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Shamash, are very persuasive. Not only do we not have consolidation but the Bill contains all sorts of contradictory provisions and inconsistencies. I cannot wait to see what the government amendments will be—I am sure there will be several groups of them.