Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps the Government is taking to ensure that expenses claims submitted by electoral administrators are audited and settled within the same financial year in which the relevant poll was administered.

Following a poll, each Returning Officer has six months in which to submit an account of spending on a poll funded from the Consolidated Fund. Where a poll takes place six months or less before the end of the financial year, it is not possible to settle such claims within that year.

Where polls take place in May, the vast majority of these claims are received by the ECU in the last month before the deadline. This raises an issue with processing the claims, many of which require significant work, within the same financial year, including how quickly queries on a claim are responded to.

We are looking at the process with the Association of Electoral Administrators to identify how it may best be operated.