Peter Gibson
Main Page: Peter Gibson (Conservative - Darlington)Department Debates - View all Peter Gibson's debates with the Cabinet Office
(2 years, 11 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesQ
Peter Stanyon: I think so. It is the sort of thing that may come into such things as performance standards, which the commission oversees. It will come down to what sorts of things returning officers should be considering, and ensuring that staff in the polling stations are au fait with the options available to them. That will come with a number of strands to it, rather than being the very tight prescription that we have at the moment, which can fail as a result of its not being used correctly.
Q
Virginia McVea: Most of the comments from Northern Ireland will have to be heavily caveated. All present will be aware that the context in which this change was brought about in Northern Ireland was very different from that in which the discussions are taking place here. That must always be borne in mind. There are some practical difficulties, which colleagues have mentioned, in terms of being ready for this. There is the initial cost. Funding was provided, as I understand it, for the Electoral Office of Northern Ireland, but the costs were considerable at a point in the early stages where, for example, the cost of card production was well over £100,000 back in 2004.
There is the cost factor, and there is also the time factor. We may have been able to reduce the cost down now to just over £2 per card, including the postage, but the time factor becomes relevant, and the fact that the photographic ID can be used for other things. People will approach us not for voting purposes, and outside election periods. For example, in January 2019 we had 517 and then 537 applications. The fact that ID cards serve other purposes for members of the public has to be borne in mind in relation to the administrative impact and the time that is taken in terms of staffing—ensuring that your process is watertight, essentially—so that there cannot be further issues in relation to fears among the public about the process itself.
There have been huge efforts in Northern Ireland to ensure that the administration works, but cost and time are big factors. We do not, unfortunately, have records. I have picked the brains of those who have gone before in relation to the difficulties experienced. The passage of time can dim some memories, but it is my understanding that it was not an easy process without its challenges and challengers. However, it is now largely accepted. It has to be borne in mind that we are talking about an almost 20-year process. We do not get conflict in polling stations or challenges in relation to the provision of ID. We do not have a lot of problems in polling stations with people bringing the wrong ID. It happens occasionally, but it is generally not a problem. The bigger teething issues will be, as Peter says, to ensure that the authorities are prepared for it, and have proper processes, sufficient funding and some expectation of the demand that is projected.
Q
Virginia McVea: No, we do not. As you might imagine, in terms of queues it would probably take too long. We have had those kinds of discussions. Where you will get it anecdotally is in polling station logs and review processes, post election, with polling staff and polling station inspectors. It is not a common occurrence or a particular difficulty, but you also have to bear in mind that the parties are also very familiar with this process, so there is a lot of messaging that goes out beyond my standard messages on radio and local television. Just prior to polling day, the parties themselves do all they can to make sure people do not forget. As I say, it is a long process—over 20 years.
Q
Ailsa Irvine: Yes, that was our finding. We found that the majority of people took their ID with them when they went to vote, and of those who did not, or did not have it with them initially, most returned to vote.
That said, there is a significant public awareness task when the scheme is rolled out. That cannot be overstated. Even in the pilot areas, significant activity was undertaken by the individual local authorities and the parties locally to raise awareness and make sure voters understood what to do. That is something that would need to be replicated on a national level to make sure that it is supported when ID is introduced in Great Britain as a whole.
Indeed, at the commission we are already thinking about what our role would be in supporting that public awareness to make sure there is the broad awareness among everybody who needs to bring ID with them. There are specific types of awareness beneath that. We are working very closely with partners from across the third sector to make sure those who are less likely to have the required forms of ID know what they need to do to be able to go and cast their vote.
Q
Ailsa Irvine: It is difficult to speculate. We always want to be led by the evidence, which is why we collect data from police forces across the UK, which are responsible for recording and investigating allegations of personation. We see from that that there are relatively low levels of reported electoral fraud. Virginia mentioned earlier the point about tendered ballot papers. If we were seeing lots of people turning up to vote whose name had already been marked off, we would see that coming through in high levels of tendered ballot papers being issued in polling stations, which we have not seen.
It is a challenge. I am not saying it is easy, with personation as an identity crime, for that to be followed through, but any speculation about the level of that would be difficult, and that is not something that I would want to get into. As I said earlier, there is a vulnerability in the process, which we have recognised and highlighted over a number of years, if there is not any requirement to provide any form of ID.
Q
Ailsa Irvine: It would be difficult to see. Obviously, access to the marked register is controlled. It is only available for inspection in certain circumstances, and the use of it is only available in certain circumstances, so it is not widely available. It would be very difficult to know in any of these instances. It would be very much dependent of the individual facts of each case.
Q
Ailsa Irvine: We have highlighted that vulnerability for a number of years. As I said earlier, we see high levels of public confidence in our electoral process as a whole. That said, there are a proportion of voters for whom this is a concern and who would be more confident if a requirement was introduced. There is some evidence to suggest that some people would become more confident if that was introduced.
However, the one thing we said in our evaluation of the pilot schemes was that, in introducing any scheme, as well as ensuring it has an impact on increasing security, we ensure that its introduction does not have an impact on the accessibility of the voting process and that it is workable in practice. While there is a vulnerability and it makes logical sense for it to be looked at, it must be looked at in a way that not only protects security, but continues to ensure the ability of everybody to cast their vote.
Q
Louise Round: I think that it will need to be tackled on a whole range of fronts. There will be a national campaign, and obviously the Electoral Commission will have a massive role to play in relation to that. However, if you take the vaccination programme, which was the most recent analogous experience, our experience is that small and local works. In Merton, as in many other councils, we used local community champions, in some cases from the same ethnic backgrounds as some of the harder-to-reach groups: younger people and older people who can actually talk to people who may be less inclined to, or may not even know that they need to, apply for voter ID in a language and with experience that those people can tune into. It will take a huge concerted effort by the Government, the Cabinet Office, the Electoral Commission and local returning officers.
To pick up what Rob was saying about voter ID cards not being an electoral services responsibility, teams in London range from three to five people, so there is no way they can take on issuing voter ID cards in the middle of an election—as I said, I suspect that, however long the run-up, that is when all the pressure will be piled on. This is a corporate responsibility, and returning officers, generally speaking, are senior managers or chief executives in councils, so they will need to mobilise all their colleagues and make sure that everybody puts all hands to the pump so that we do not disfranchise people.
Q
Rob Connelly: CCTV is something we explored in around 2010 or 2011, but we had a number of concerns, including that it might go the other way and affect people’s confidence in the system, in that they might be worried that we were spying on them or would be able to identify how they were voting. We opted not to go down that route. We invested more in additional training for our staff. We even considered looking at CCTV outside polling stations for people who were entering. Again, we did not think, if there were allegations of personation, that that would really help us. We had discussions with West Midlands police about the evidential side of that, and CCTV would not necessarily help you identify who had committed any crime of personation or when. We know it would have been very difficult to prove. As I say, we invest more in our staff who are delivering the ballot papers, and what have you.
In terms of the question about tendered ballot papers, that is something we make sure we reiterate every election. We introduced a form for our polling station staff. If they gave out a tendered ballot paper, they had to give an explanation as to why—what was the reason? We would then spend some time collating that information post-election. That would do two things. One, if there were particular problems with particular polling stations and polling station staff, we could pick that up with them to find out why they were doing those things and fix that for next time. Two, we would then report that back to our members and give out numbers over the whole city, saying that x number of tendered ballot papers had been issued and giving the reasons why. I will be honest with you: there were times when they were probably issued wrongly, but that helped identify the issue so we could eliminate that from the process.
Q
Rob Connelly: When we had our 2004-05 issue, I don’t think it was with that community.