Northern Ireland

Nigel Evans Excerpts

Wednesday 17th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

With the leave of the House, we shall take the two motions on Northern Ireland together.

[The Minister of State, Northern Ireland Office (Mr Hugo Swire)]

I beg to move,

That the draft Local Elections (Northern Ireland) Order 2010, which was laid before this House on 25 October, be approved.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

With this we shall take the following motion:

That the draft Northern Ireland Assembly (Elections) (Amendment) Order 2010, which was laid before this House on 25 October, be approved.

[Mr Swire]

These orders update the law governing elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and to district councils in Northern Ireland in advance of elections in 2011.

I will deal first with the Assembly order, which is much the smaller of the two. That is because the law governing elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly was substantially amended as recently as 2009. Since then, some minor procedural updates have been applied to European and parliamentary elections that, for consistency, should also be applied to Assembly elections. For example, article 3 of the order makes provision to allow a candidate standing in the name of two or more parties to have one of those party’s emblems on the ballot paper.

It also enables a person who cannot sign his or her signature to use a mark in place of any signature required at the nomination stage. Article 4 requires individuals to give reasons if they request their absent vote to be sent to a different address from that at which they are registered. Those are clearly relatively small changes, but they nevertheless mirror updates made to the law since 2009 that apply at other elections in Northern Ireland, and they will provide for greater consistency.

The draft Local Elections (Northern Ireland) Order 2010 is the more substantial order, and provides a much-needed update of the law governing local elections in Northern Ireland. The Electoral Administration Act 2006 made a considerable number of changes to the law governing parliamentary elections across the United Kingdom. As I have indicated, those changes were applied to Northern Ireland Assembly elections and European elections in 2009, but have not yet been applied to district council elections in Northern Ireland. They are set out in schedule 1 to the order, and they include allowing returning officers to correct procedural errors and supply documents in other languages and formats.

Schedule 1 also makes provision for the control of donations to candidates in local elections in Northern Ireland, in line with the donation controls that apply at all other elections in Northern Ireland and across the UK. Schedule 2 makes changes to absent voting procedures, which again already apply at other elections in Northern Ireland. They include adding registered social workers to the list of those who may attest absent vote applications on the grounds of illness and disability, which will make it easier for people with disabilities who live in the community to apply for an absent vote. Schedule 3 aligns the law relating to access to and inspection of documents at local elections with procedures at all other elections in Northern Ireland.

The order also amends the local election rules contained in schedule 5 to the Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1962. That includes updating the list of acceptable forms of photographic ID that can be presented in order to vote in Northern Ireland, which is of course crucial to ensure consistency of approach for all polls in 2011.

The order is substantial, and I would not wish to detain the House by providing an in-depth description of each provision. I hope the House is satisfied that it contains small but important changes to the law that will provide much-needed modernisation of local election procedures in Northern Ireland and greater consistency with other elections across the UK.

Finally, article 3 of the local elections order sets the date of the next district council elections in Northern Ireland as 5 May 2011. Hon. Members will be aware that in 2008, the previous Government agreed to a request from the Northern Ireland Executive to postpone the local elections that were scheduled to take place in May the following year. The House subsequently approved legislation to postpone the election until 2011, on a date to be specified nearer the time. The postponement was to allow time for new local government boundaries to be redrawn as part of the overall review of public administration that was taking place in Northern Ireland. That review was to provide, among other things, for the number of district councils in Northern Ireland to be reduced from 26 to 11.

I regret to report that that reduction did not proceed as planned. Although the local government boundaries commissioner reported to the Executive with proposed new boundaries on time in 2009, an order has still not been brought before the Assembly to give effect to them. This June I made it absolutely clear to the Executive that there could be no prospect of further postponement of the elections beyond the two years previously agreed. I was also advised that further delay in passing the order to give effect to the boundaries would seriously jeopardise planning for elections in May 2011. The Executive therefore needed to take an urgent decision on whether the proposed new councils could be delivered in time to allow for elections to them in May 2011.

On 15 June I received confirmation from the Minister for the Environment in the Executive that the reorganisation would not now go ahead in 2011. I announced shortly afterwards that there was now no option but to hold elections to the existing 26 councils in May 2011. The local elections order will provide for that. I know that some hon. and right hon. Members may have concerns about those elections being combined with both Assembly elections and a potential referendum on the alternative vote. I have received the advice of both the Electoral Commission and the chief electoral officer on this matter, and both are confident that a combined poll in May 2011 can be successfully delivered if the risks are properly managed.

My officials are working closely with the commission and the chief electoral officer in the run-up to the polls to ensure that there is an early identification and resolution of any potential problems.

--- Later in debate ---

[Eric Joyce]

Yes, of course. The votes will take place on the same day, so the arguments that apply to the rest of the UK also apply to Northern Ireland. A particular complication is that, as a consequence of the orders, Northern Ireland will also have local government elections on the same day.

Indeed, taken together with the Government’s plan for fixed-term Parliaments, the Parliamentary Voting and Constituencies Bill appears to be designed simply to assure the coalition a five-year term, with constituency redesign giving it the best chance of re-election. We therefore believe that it sits outside the margins of acceptable democratic practice.

The House of Lords has narrowly decided that the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill is not hybrid, yet it is strange that the Government should decide that two Scottish constituencies will be treated as special cases and exempted, while Northern Ireland, where the Assembly may be directly affected by the measure, is not to be a special case. The strength of Northern Ireland’s democratic institutions is crucial to the peace process, and the legislation governing the running of Northern Ireland Assembly elections was constructed specifically to ensure wide community representation. In his winding-up speech, will the Minister assure the House that the changes that he intends to make will not affect the delicate balance in the Northern Ireland electoral system, especially for smaller parties?

Another primary concern is that the strict 5% thresholds, which are explicit in the Bill, will reduce the scope for the boundary commissioners to take local variables into account. Arithmetic will trump all other considerations and local communities will be split between constituencies. Professor Ron Johnson of Bristol university, for example, said that splitting some wards between constituencies will be inevitable. The Boundary Commission has confirmed that. Wards will no longer be the building blocks of constituencies. In many cases, natural geographical boundaries such as rivers will have to be ignored, as will community links and historical factors, which are so important in Northern Ireland.

According to the Boundary Commission, the threshold is also likely to lead to frequent reviews, which means that some constituencies will change with each review. That will further destabilise the relationship between local communities—

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. The orders do not relate to thresholds. Can we please focus on the orders?

[Eric Joyce]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

In the context of the reduced sensitivity to local variables, we believe that the constraints on local inquiries are especially serious. At a time of such significant changes, that is particularly important.

The political ecology in Northern Ireland is particular; it is different from that in the rest of the United Kingdom. The Government plan to change the electoral system and the constituencies in Scotland, England and Wales, and they are not taking sufficient account of the peculiar variables that apply in Northern Ireland. As a consequence of the orders, local elections will take place on the same day as other elections, and there could be additional complexity. It is important for the Government to take into account the different nature of Northern Ireland. We do not believe that they are doing that. Consequently, the best interests of the people of Northern Ireland, and of the United Kingdom as a whole, will not be served.

[Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)]

We do not often get three hours to debate Northern Ireland business. It is good that we will be here possibly till 10 o’clock.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Order. As the orders are being taken together, we have just an hour and a half.

[Mr Dodds]

May I express my great frustration and annoyance at our being denied time to debate these important matters? However, I am sure that your statement will come as a great relief to other hon. Members, Mr Deputy Speaker.

In all seriousness, as the Minister said, the orders are technical, although they flow from significant primary legislation, which we have already debated at some length since we returned from the summer recess.

On the issue of having the three elections on one day, the orders are designed to make the elections run smoothly and prevent difficulties in the conduct of the elections for the chief electoral officer, his officers and, not least, the electorate. That is welcome, particularly on issues such as making sure that the timetable is consistent for both the council elections and the Assembly elections. There has been some criticism in previous years in Northern Ireland about the rather strange timetable adopted for council elections compared with Assembly and parliamentary elections. If my memory serves me right, when I served in local government and had to submit nomination papers, that had to be done four and a half weeks before election day, so there seemed to be an inordinately long campaign for local government elections compared with others.

Obviously it is important that the timetable is synchronised and that issues such as postal and proxy votes are properly managed so that people applying for them receive one package through the post containing the necessary forms and one containing the three ballot papers. I am glad to hear that there will be three separate, differently coloured ballot papers. I am sure that we have all learned the lesson from Scotland—this never happened in Northern Ireland—when there was an attempt to have two different kinds of ballot on one paper. That was a big mistake and I am sure that it will never happen again.

We are where we are as far as the coincidence of the council and Assembly elections and the referendum is concerned. Obviously, it is preferable that, where possible, there are not so many choices on so many matters before the electorate on any given date, but people in Northern Ireland are used to having joint elections. Indeed, the council elections in 2001 and 2005 coincided with a Westminster general election. If memory serves me right, it may have happened before that. I know that at one time elections were deliberately brought together by the then leader of the Ulster Unionist party, which is no longer represented in this House, because he thought that it would increase turnout and support for his party. As with so many of his calculations, it did not quite work out that way on the day.

This is a sensible set of provisions for 5 May next year. The Minister referred to the date of the council elections for next year, and said that it was the result of the Executive not acting on the recommendation to proceed with the reform of local government. He did not go into the reasons for that, of course, but I would not want the House to be under the impression that this was the result of a lack of desire among most of the parties in the Assembly to make progress on the issue. Even if the reform did not lead to a reduction in the number of councils, other reforms were proposed, such as greater collaboration among councils and the various departments for which they are responsible. Unfortunately, it was not possible to achieve the major cost saving that would have accrued to councils in Northern Ireland because of the intransigence of one party, Sinn Fein, which rejected that constructive proposal. Therefore we are left having to proceed with the election with no real reform to local government due.

When costings were carried out for the council reforms, it became clear that there would have been considerable up-front costs. Given that the Northern Ireland block grant has been severely hit as a result of the recent comprehensive spending review, and the already severe restrictions, difficulties and challenges facing the Northern Ireland Executive on public expenditure, it was felt that this was not an appropriate time to proceed with that particular reform. Obviously, when it comes to choosing between council reform and health expenditure, education and so on, people are right to choose the latter. That is the background to the reason for the proposals for the date of the election and why they will involve the same number of councils as previously.