Police and Crime Commissioner Elections (Functions of Returning Officers) Regulations 2012

Lord Rosser Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I am a member of the Electoral Commission and have been for nearly two years. Will the noble Lord tell the Grand Committee why the Home Office has been involved in this? It is as if we have tried to reinvent the wheel and ended up back where we started. There is expertise in the Cabinet Office. We may have National Park Authority elections in future and there is another unit in Defra. There seems to be complete duplication, with different units doing the same thing. Would it not be more sensible if all these things were contained in one unit which had expertise in the nuts and bolts of elections?

[Lord Rosser]

My Lords, we welcome the chance to debate the order and regulations, which address a number of matters related to the running of elections for police and crime commissioners. We strongly opposed the move to elected police and crime commissioners for a number of reasons, including the amount of money needed to conduct the elections. It could and should have been used to support front-line policing, which is being adversely affected by the cuts, contrary to government assertions that this would not be the case. However, the Government’s Bill passed through both Houses of Parliament, so elections for police and crime commissioners are a reality, and we are putting up candidates since we do not intend to let the coalition partners—I think they are still partners, just about—have a free run.

Of course, the Government originally wanted to rush through the elections in May of this year. However, eventually and grudgingly they put them back to November. The Government’s bright idea was that they could be run on the same date as a number of mayoral elections in our major cities, which would enable some of the costs of the police and crime commissioner elections to be shared. Unfortunately, that bright idea made an assumption that proved somewhat wide of the mark—namely, that the citizens of our major cities would in droves endorse and vote for elected mayors. Apart from in Bristol, they did not. Therefore, we have almost exclusively stand-alone elections for police and crime commissioners. Perhaps the Minister will tell us what will be the cost of these elections in November compared with the cost of holding them at the same time as local elections, which was clearly the Government’s intention but which has now been dropped.

Holding elections in November is not designed to maximise turnout—but to this Government, the only thing that appears to matter is getting elected police and crime commissioners in place. Other considerations that one might think were important when holding countrywide elections for these new posts for the first time seem to take a back seat.

One of the orders in front of us proposes that each candidate can have,

“an election address included on a website”,

but that there will not be any publicly funded mailing or locally distributed booklets. We know that, despite being short of money, the Government have other priorities—such as reducing government income through a 5p in the pound reduction in tax for millionaires—but trying to make up this self-inflicted shortfall by not publicly funding mailings from candidates or locally distributed booklets in what are countrywide elections for new elected posts with responsibilities over wide geographical areas, which the Government regard as of great importance and significance, is a kick in the teeth for the democratic process.

As has already been said, we will presumably have the situation in Bristol where there will be a publicly funded mailshot or locally distributed booklet for the mayoral election but no such provision for the election on the same day for the police and crime commissioner, who will have responsibilities over a much wider geographical area and bigger population than the elected mayor.

In its original submission as part of the consultation, the Electoral Commission said that the Government’s proposal was,

“a significant departure from what is provided for UK Parliamentary, European Parliament and Mayoral elections”.

The commission went on to say:

“Delivering information primarily via a website will exclude the still significant number of adults in England and Wales who do not have easy access to the internet: as many as 7 million adults in England (excluding London) and Wales are estimated not to have used the internet at all in the last 12 months”.

The commission also commented:

“Candidates for PCC elections will also need to communicate with a much larger number of voters across their ‘constituencies’ than usual; and there may be significant numbers of independent candidates who do not have the support of a party behind them to promote their campaign”.

The Office for National Statistics has said that well over 8 million people have never used the internet, of whom 5.5 million are over the age of 65, with the majority being women. The gross income figures also show that the better-off members of the community use the internet the most and it is the least well-off who do not have access to the internet. There are also regional disparities: internet usage is lower in other parts of the country than in the south-east and south-west of England.

So we have disparities of income, gender, age and region—but if you ignore all those considerations of course we have a level playing field, which is no doubt what the Government will claim. Perhaps the Minister can tell us the outcome of the equality assessment that one presumes the Government have done on the order, or will he tell us that, for obvious reasons, they have not dared to do such an exercise?

A website alone will not be enough for individual candidates, many of whom are likely to be not well known, to get their message across; leaflets to every household are also important. Only wealthy candidates will be able to afford to produce their own leaflets and then pay for their distribution, and only parties with significant numbers of volunteer supporters will be able to undertake a leaflet distribution throughout what in most cases will be constituencies of considerable geographical size and population.

The cross-party Association of Police Authorities has asked for the proposals for voter information and awareness-raising for PCC elections to be strengthened so that they are at least equal to those for mayoral elections, in order to help raise voter turnout on 15 November and address its concerns about the potential impact of a low turnout. I am not sure whether or not these concerns have been ignored. No doubt this is something the Minister will be able to tell us about.

Recent newspaper articles have claimed that the Home Secretary has asked the Treasury for money to fund an advertising campaign to encourage stronger candidates to come forward. One newspaper quoted a Whitehall source as admitting:

“The policy is in disarray. There is a chance it will be a damp squib”.

Perhaps the Minister can do a little bit more than his colleague in the House of Commons in answer to a straight question and tell us: is it true that the Secretary of State for the Home Department is seeking or has sought additional money from the Treasury to fund a publicity campaign to attract more people to stand for office?

Perhaps the Minister can also tell us what level of turnout the Government are expecting under their proposed arrangements, and what level of turnout they would deem had shown the new arrangements to be a success. Maybe I will be surprised, but I suspect that the last thing the Minister will do is give a specific answer to that question. Perhaps the Minister will tell us that there is no problem because the millions of people who rarely or never use the internet will of course be able to make a free telephone call to ask for written information about and from the candidates to be sent to them. If he is going to come out with that one, I hope that he can manage to keep a straight face when he says it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I am more than happy to write to the noble Lord on the matter of whether the Cabinet Office should do this or whether, if the Home Office does it, it will merely replicate what happens in other elections. I will look very carefully at what the noble Lord said.

[Lord Rosser]

I think that the Minister claimed that he had answered the questions that had been asked—and of course he did nothing of the sort. I asked him whether an equality assessment had been done and what the outcome was, or whether the Government had dared not do such an exercise. I got no answer to that question. I also asked him whether he would clarify what the Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office meant when he said on 18 June that the Government,

“may consider a similar procedure for a general election, with an eye on overseas voters”.—[Official Report, Commons, 18/6/12; col. 652.]

I asked the Minister if he could clarify whether that meant that the Government were considering a similar procedure for overseas voters in a general election, or for all voters in a general election.

I also asked the Minister what the cost would be of holding elections in November, compared to the cost of holding them at the same time as local elections. As I recall, I received no response. I also asked him if it was true that the Home Secretary, as was reported in the newspapers, had asked the Treasury for money to fund an advertising campaign to encourage stronger candidates to come forward. I do not think that I got an answer to that question either. I am not surprised. I always know when I am on to a good thing because the Minister stands up and announces that what I said was a “rant”. One always knows that this means one will get no answers to the questions one has asked or the points one has raised.

The Minister sought to argue that somehow we had opposed the police and crime commissioner elections on the grounds of cost. That is true; that was our ground for opposing it. However, the game has changed now. The Government have got their Bill through and we are going to hold the elections. What we are saying is that now that the decision has been made to hold the elections, we should do it properly—in the same way, for example, as the Bristol mayoral election. Doing it in this way, with its emphasis on a website, will make it much harder for many people to find out about the candidates and what they are saying. I do not share the Minister’s apparently complacent view that they will all phone the free telephone number to ask for a copy of the information on candidates to be sent to them.

[Lord Henley]

Oh dear. Possibly I described the noble Lord’s speech as a rant because most of his speeches are a rant, but let me answer just one or two of the points that he has made. We have already published the equality assessment and it is available on our website. I invite the noble Lord to have a look at it there. I also have a copy here. On the cost of having the elections in November rather than May, that figure has been out in the public domain for some time, as the noble Lord well knows, but I will repeat it: it is going to cost some £25 million more—so £75 million rather than £50 million—than if we could have had the election in May. I think that the noble Lord has some understanding of the reasons why it was delayed, because he may have been part of the opposition Home Office team that was dealing with the matters that caused some delays to the relevant Bill. He also asked about tailoring the website for overseas voters. Let us just get through the PCC elections; we are not considering general elections at the moment but we can look at that in the future.

I hope that I have now answered the noble Lord’s points, but if I have not, I will no doubt write to him in due course.

[Lord Rosser]

I asked whether it was true, as was claimed in the newspapers, that the Secretary of State had asked the Treasury for money to fund an advertising campaign to encourage stronger candidates to come forward.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I do not comment on what I read in the press; I leave it to the noble Lord to look at these matters.

[Lord Rosser]

And to draw his own conclusions.

Motion agreed.