Electoral Administration Bill

This is an important issue. Of course, the idea behind postal votes is that people post them. That is the first principle. However, I accept that some people, for one reason or another, do not post them. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is right about the position on polling day itself, but we think that, where appropriate, there is sufficient power in law to provide for the secure collection of ballot papers in a ballot box for those who return them by hand before polling day. We do not accept the amendment because we think it would be very prescriptive. For example, we would have to consider how to staff and manage this requirement and what the resource implications would be given that postal ballot papers are sent out to voters about two weeks before polling day. If we said that such ballot boxes had to exist as a matter of course, we would need to prescribe where they should be located, the hours they would be available to voters and other such considerations. Local areas have solved this problem quite successfully: people go to the town hall—perhaps for some other reason—and hand in their papers. Constituencies have the ability to do this within the law and we simply leave it to their discretion to take into account local circumstances and work out how best to deal with it. For example, they know the number of postal voters, the level of demand for the service, how often it has happened previously and the resources they have available. That might lead them to set up a system in a location beyond the town hall or to set up something within the town hall—we would rather leave it to them—but they already have the power in law to achieve what the noble Baroness seeks with the amendment, which is the fundamental point.