Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. I appreciate entirely that he speaks with great authority from his position as leader of a local authority. Indeed, I understand the issue very well. There is a genuine concern for the noble Lord and those involved in local government to ensure that this scheme is funded properly, and that they do not find themselves with a need to find consequential funding. That could, as the noble Lord rightly indicated, have an impact on services available to local people. In a nutshell, that is what I see lies behind the noble Lord’s specific amendments. As I indicated, although the consultation has closed, we have not yet decided on the model. The noble Lord made very important points about the critical nature of electronic data being held centrally; about making sure that the models themselves were proofed against fraud; and making sure that the systems work effectively. I will ensure that those are fed into the discussions on the consultation. It is important that we keep noble Lords who have been involved in this legislation absolutely up to date with the thinking as we develop CORE, for the expertise is clearly in your Lordships’ House. The noble Lord will know that in Committee we talked about some of the funding questions. I will just run through them so that they are on the record, on Report, in your Lordships’ House. However, it is against the principle which the noble Lord rightly identified of wanting to ensure that we fund CORE properly so that it is dealt with as a separate item and is not a drain on resources from local government. I will run through those issues because in Committee we talked more generally about the Bill costs. We estimate the cost of implementing the measures in England and Wales to be about £20 million. As the noble Lord indicated, most of this, £17 million, represents additional costs to local authorities. An additional £3.8 million will be made available to local authorities for the cost of the secondary legislation measures. Some £19.9 million has been transferred into revenue support grant to cover the new burdens imposed on local authorities by the measures and by the secondary legislation package. An additional £1.2 million has been transferred to the National Assembly for Wales for the implementation of the measures there. The noble Lord knows well the Government’s policy on ring-fencing. We will not be ring-fencing this. We recognise that it is important that returning officers and registration officers receive adequate funding to enable them to implement the measures. Clause 63 provides for the Electoral Commission to collate centrally information from local authorities on their spending on elections and registrations. It is the first time that information will be collected in such a way and it is an important part of ensuring that we develop policy appropriately in future. Incidentally, the Scottish Executive have £2.9 million in Barnett consequential, for the implementation of those measures which extend to Scotland. The point about CORE, as I indicated, is that it brings together information in order to make it easy for the organisations which are allowed to access the 400 or so separate electoral registers. As I indicated, that is supported by all the political parties. As the noble Lord has indicated, each electoral registration officer will need to provide CORE with data output in a consistent format. Since 2004, we have supported implementation with funding of about £1 million to third-party software vendors and individual electoral registration officers to ensure that their systems can output data in the agreed standardised output format—which is electoral markup language, I am told. We have also sought specialist advice from the Office of Government Commerce on ensuring that we have the appropriate governance, assurance and procurement arrangements. As noble Lords will know from Committee, £10 million of capital modernisation funding has been approved for CORE, although the procurement approach will include a market sounding phase to test the preferred approach to procuring and implementing CORE and to refine the cost estimates. We are committed to continuing to support CORE when it is fully implemented, including funding new burdens. I have made that as clear as I can for the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield. I want to make a further point, which I hope will also provide reassurance for the noble Lord. We do not expect any aspect of CORE to be burdensome to electoral registration officers. They will continue to collate their registers and publish them on a monthly basis. The difference will be that, as well as publishing the register locally, they will provide an update to the CORE system. That should be as simple as a few mouse clicks or an automated system. Therefore, we do not anticipate there being an administrative burden, which, as the noble Lord will be the first to say, we need to consider in cost terms apart from anything else. As I have indicated, we have set money aside in the Bill for local government and for CORE, and we do not see the scheme being administratively burdensome in any way. I have also indicated that, should there be additional costs because of changes that might be made, we will fund them. Therefore, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Hanningfield, will have a smile in his heart in recognising that this is not in any way meant to be burdensome, financially or administratively, to local government, and that is our commitment. We anticipate this being a useful tool that political parties and the Electoral Commission will find of great value.