European Parliamentary Elections Etc. (Repeal, Revocation, Amendment and Saving Provisions) (United Kingdom and Gibraltar) (EU Exit) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am particularly delighted that it is the noble Earl who has brought this measure to the House for a reason that I will come to in a moment. However, I am not sure whether he is adding to his already substantial portfolio of responsibilities, because I do not know whether he is now permanently accountable to the House for the Cabinet Office. If so, he is of course warmly welcome, but he already carries a great many responsibilities. It might be that he is only temporary.

I and, I think, many other Members of the House feel that the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, is truly irreplaceable. Nobody could compete with his command of the issues that the Cabinet Office deals with. He was in the House only a few minutes ago, but perhaps he will read Hansard in due course.

We are in urgent need of a Minister with particular responsibility for these issues. The Cabinet Office has some important jobs to do at the moment. I am not clear whether the noble Earl is now permanently taking up residence there, or whether some other Member will be given full-time responsibility. Maybe, since the noble Earl is Deputy Leader of the House, he will be able to tell us when there might be a Cabinet Office Minister responsible to your Lordships for the exercise of the many important duties that department has.

We think that this SI is very necessary and very appropriate. In its relative clarity, it is perhaps rather easier to understand than some of the SIs that the House looked at earlier. I pay tribute to the noble Earl’s clear exposition and to the excellent Explanatory Memorandum. Like many other Members of your Lordships’ House, I always go there first rather than to the SI.

I want in particular to draw attention to paragraph 9.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum on consolidation, because it goes beyond the SI’s particular area of responsibility and has incredibly important significance for the work being done by the Cabinet Office and the Law Commission. It says:

“The Law Commissions have conducted a review into the desirability and feasibility of reforming and consolidating electoral law. The Government is continuing to work with the Law Commissions, as well as other stakeholders such as the Electoral Commission, to consider ways to streamline and clarify our electoral system in order to make elections easier to administer and therefore more resilient to errors or fraud. We will consider their proposals in full once we receive the Law Commissions’ final report”.


That paragraph has much wider significance because it relates not just to recent elections, but to any future—perhaps near future—elections. As I keep reminding Ministers, there is an urgent need to make our electoral law fit for purpose. It would surely be irresponsible to trigger an early general election before many of the defects identified have been attended to. For example, it would leave candidates and their agents at the mercy of a legal minefield if the Electoral Commission’s new codes of practice had not been considered and approved by Parliament. The same is obviously true for the lack of effective transparency for online political campaigning, its origin and funding, particularly over whether some of that is from foreign shores.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have commented on these regulations and I thank them for accepting that we need them, regardless of whether we should be in this position in the first place—I note in particular the comments of my noble friends.

Completely understandably, the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Kennedy, asked me about the Law Commission’s recommendations on electoral law. As they both will be aware, the final report has not been published yet; it is due to be published early next year. The Government will consider it as expeditiously as possible, and any actions that they need to take. It is therefore not fair to say that we are doing nothing about the reform of electoral law. No responsible Government would wish to proceed with reform in an area such as this without having the benefit of the Law Commission’s final report. I appreciate that a lot of discussion has happened, and I am grateful to noble Lords opposite and around the House for participating in that. We would like to proceed as quickly as we may, but it has to be done on a properly informed basis.

I noted the comments of my noble friend Lord Deben in particular. He and the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked me about the lessons that we have learned collectively from past elections, but the noble Lord asked me in particular whether the May election was open to any kind of abuse, what we know that arises from that, whether lessons were learned, and so on. That is the subject of the report from the Electoral Commission, and the report by the Association of Electoral Administrators called The Electoral Landscape in 2019. We will obviously wish to give careful consideration to both those reports on the matters raised. As we have done previously, we will look to consider the Electoral Commission’s report in conjunction with the AEA report, and we will respond formally as appropriate.

[Lord Tyler]

There is a specific issue about transparency of online campaign messaging, which was a major issue in May and was a big issue in the referendum and the subsequent general election. The Cabinet Office consulted about it many months ago. Evidence was taken from the Information Commissioner’s Office; the Electoral Commission also looked into it. I would be grateful if the Minister could take back to the Cabinet Office the concern from all over your Lordships’ House that there seems to be very little action taking place on this. It remains a very sensitive issue, not least because of the important report from the DCMS Select Committee.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I take the point that the Minister made about the work of the Law Commission. It is doing its work and will come back with some comprehensive reports. However, when I have sat in a room with Chloe Smith and the noble Lord, Lord Young, we have all agreed that there are things we can do now. They have never said, “We can’t do anything because we need this Bill going forward”. There are things that can be done. I would ask the Minister to talk to his officials. He would certainly be encouraged by all of us around this House to sort this out quickly, notwithstanding the much more detailed work of the Law Commission; that cannot be used as an excuse for saying, “We do not know enough about that, so we have to leave the electoral system as inadequate as it is now”.