Elections and Returning Officers

Debate between Nick de Bois and Brian Binley

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Mr Binley]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s important intervention, which supports my point.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Is not part of the problem, as I found during the election, that if someone wishes to challenge a household’s electoral registration there are only 21 days in which the returning officer can do so? In the heat of the work in the run-up to an election, that is effectively impossible.

[Mr Binley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Minister should consider, and I hope that he noted it.

With postal voting we have created a frightening potential for corruption in our election system. If it were not so important, the inability to ensure good and proper elections through the postal vote would be laughable. There was a time when the whole construct of postal voting was carefully created and checked, and its efficacy was understood and known to be absolutely within the prescribed limits. That time has gone because of the machinations of the previous Government, who did not understand what they were doing in that respect. We must all recognise the faults because the issue is more important than party politics. It is about the very basis of our electoral and democratic system—[Interruption.] I am happy to give way if the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) wishes to intervene.

Those two matters are vital, and there are many others. I want to describe from my experience the reasons for the decline. The business of electoral registration officers used to be a profession. People in local government offices did the job for years and years, and they had assistants who followed them and who had learned to do the job properly. We had the money to check whether a registration was valid by visiting the home of people seeking registration. The whole process was efficient, but that efficiency no longer exists because electoral registration has been downgraded dramatically in most council office structures, and the attitude seems to be, “Who will do the register this year, Fred?” It seems to be a last resort, and that is simply not good enough.

What can we do? My hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest said that the Electoral Commission must be a more robust policing body. First, we must ring-fence the money that we allocate from national Government for the conduct of elections and registration. Money is being leached, and there is every reason why local authorities should so do. They are in trouble with money, but we must ensure that our money is used for the reasons for which it was designated. That means ring-fencing, and the Electoral Commission must be responsible for monitoring that money and ensuring that it is properly used for the purposes for which it was allocated. Secondly, we must spend money on training electoral registration staff and returning officers because the quality of their work has fallen, largely because the learning thread that goes from one officer to another no longer exists.

We must bring the law to bear much more. We must make criminal actions a higher priority in society. When someone cheats the electoral system, they cheat my vote and me. If we truly believe in a democratic process, we must ensure that the systems to undertake that democratic process are as viable and credible as possible, and they are not at the moment.

We have a good voting system, and I have made that clear in the House. It does not need to be tampered with for any reason, least of all for those that apply at the moment. The voting system is not broken, but the conduct of elections and electoral registration is a total mess, and if the Government had any sense they would recognise that democracy is in danger through those processes and not through the process of our electoral system.