Electoral Commission

I, too, welcome the debate. I share the view of the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) that it is important. However, as he pointed out, it is the first time since the Electoral Commission was formed that such as debate has been held. In many ways, the arrangements that the Electoral Commission has with the House—in terms of how it reports to the House, how it is scrutinised and how it performs its function—have played the role of an inspired invention. I am talking about resolving through the legislation the difficulty of how such a commission would work—deeply involved as it was going to be in matters that could be politically controversial, even though it clearly should not be politically biased in its own right. How that situation was resolved in the legislation, and the function of the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission in that respect, constituted that inspired invention. However, in reality, as the hon. Gentleman said, the Electoral Commission is the equivalent of a medium-sized non-departmental public body. It has a staff of 150 and a budget of £26 million. Normally, as far as the Government are concerned, the structure for such bodies—particularly, say, next steps agencies—will be a parent Department, a framework agreement and a series of relationships with that Department in order to specify how the accountability is to be undertaken. No such framework exists for the Electoral Commission. There are a number of other unique elements of that relationship with the House, which do not in any way parallel the relationship of any other body of similar size. In practice, the Speaker’s Committee has performed something of a scrutiny role towards the work of the Electoral Commission through its meetings. However, as the hon. Gentleman said, those are not held in public. He gives understandable reasons for that, but it does have something of a result. The Speaker’s Committee accidentally, rather than deliberately, scrutinises what the Electoral Commission is doing. We have an indirect form of running accountability to the House, through the short time allotted to questions to the Chairman of the Speaker’s Committee each month. I ask myself whether the commission might be more formally scrutinised through the medium of a Select Committee, as a departmentally attached agency might be. I can suggest a candidate for that role: the Constitutional Affairs Committee, of which I am a member. In any event, the Chair of that Committee, or a Committee designated by the legislation, sits on the Speaker’s Committee by statutory authority. It might be possible for the Speaker’s Committee to change its function. It could take upon itself a scrutinising role through the appointment of senior Back Benchers to form a scrutiny committee. Perhaps a good alternative would be for that Select Committee function to be more formalised in connection with the way in which the Electoral Commission works. The hon. Gentleman also mentioned what I think is a very restrictive definition in the legislation of who may be appointed as an electoral commissioner, or even an assistant electoral commissioner. It is enshrined in the legislation that if a person is to be appointed to such a post, they cannot have been a member of a political party or held any form of office in one, and cannot have been employed by a political party or, indeed, have been a named donor to one. It is understandable that a number of those restrictions may be imposed, but it is perhaps less known that also set out in the legislation are similar if slightly less onerous restrictions on all members of staff of the commission. Therefore, almost the entire commission will never have had any dealings with political parties, certainly not for a very long time. As the duties and responsibilities of the Electoral Commission lie at the heart of the functioning of the democratic system of government in the UK, and political parties are an integral part of that, the involvement in the political process of the electoral commissioners and the staff of the Electoral Commission is a pertinent question to consider. As I have said, those who put themselves forward as candidates for the post of electoral commissioner are outside the political process, and it might be necessary to readdress the legislation, but the question that arises is whether there should be additional commissioners appointed through the medium of political parties, or whether the nomination of commissioners in its own right should be addressed. After all, political even-handedness is not the same as political celibacy. It would be beneficial to the functioning of the Electoral Commission if the position on the political involvement of both commissioners and staff were reviewed. As the hon. Member for Gosport also mentioned, the Electoral Commission has devoted a considerable proportion of its resource not just to regulating elections but to the promotion of electoral awareness and to providing information on the practice of elections and referendums. Within the terms of that remit, it has promoted electoral awareness well, but it must be said that the limitations have meant that only one area has been addressed—voter disengagement, and the issue of not knowing what to do about voting in an era of what one might say are atomised families who might previously have gone to the polls together. The results of the commission’s audit of political engagement show, however, that other factors are at work. In particular, there is a distaste for voting among those in their 40s, not just among the newly enfranchised. The question of whether such distaste results from the inability of parties to engage voters or from a more problematic anti-politics societal norm is a difficult one to answer, but either way it presents the Electoral Commission with a difficult task if it is to promote voting on a wider basis than simply providing information about how to do it. In essence, the challenge is one of promoting the norms and necessities of democracy and politics themselves, which might be considered outside the commission’s remit. In considering what the commission does to advance awareness of the electoral process, it is tempting, therefore, to argue for a bifurcation of that promoting role. There certainly is a need for information and reminding, and for research into the process of voting—certainly about whether the present geographically based system of casting votes is seen to be appropriate to new generations of voters, and whether changes in its structure can overcome other issues such as the security and integrity of the vote. However, the process of argument about the role that politics plays in democracy in the UK and why the political process, including elections, is important might be a remit too far for the commission, and the development of political democracy foundations similar to those established in Germany, such as the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, which represent the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats respectively, might be a better course of action to address the issue. That would entail, of course, the development and resolution of the argument about state funding for political parties, since the establishment of such foundations could not be seriously contemplated within the present structure of voluntary funding of political parties. That brings me to the role of the commission in policing the regulation of political parties and the control of campaign finance. Other Members have mentioned that the Electoral Commission has in general been relatively effective—within, frankly, a flawed regulatory brief—at implementing and policing the recording and controlling role. The commission has been less effective in the regulation of donations to political parties, partly because of its own issues about asking questions about donations that might be considered at the margins of its remit, and partly because of the limitations of that remit itself. The question that might be asked of the Electoral Commission is this: what exactly does it regulate? Its name suggests that it regulates elections, but its practice suggests that it regulates the conduct and practice of elections and the functioning of political parties where they relate to elections. As elections are an important but by no means the sole activity of political parties, that entails the close regulation of some party activity relating to the democratic process, but no regulation of other matters, even where those matters are closely connected. For example, the registration of parties in order to nominate candidates is regulated, but the process of nominating candidates for elections is not. The activity of such candidates once nominated may be regulated, provided that it is within the period of an election, but the activity and funding methods of adopted candidates outside an electoral period is not regulated. In reality, political parties do not make such distinctions, and in any event they do not operate financially and in soliciting and managing donations in identical ways. Therefore, it may be said that the first problem arises from an implied assumption in the legislation that UK political parties are in essence machines for electing people to posts—essentially the American party model—and the second problem arises from an apparent assumption by the Electoral Commission that, provided certain reporting rules and accounting conventions were laid down, it would be possible to gain a coherent picture of parties’ funding and hence donations. The Conservatives and the Labour party do not work, and never have worked, in identical ways. The ways in which the parties fund themselves differ fundamentally. The Conservative party was formed in Parliament and gained supporters’ associations that raised money for the party, while the Labour party was formed outside Parliament and operated as both a federation and a centralised party, combining funds in the middle in order to get into Parliament. The regulation of donations by the commission therefore often fails to record accurately the real income of parties and does not pick up innovations such as the recent funding of local parties outside the campaign period to promote nominated candidates with the use of money that might otherwise be declared as central donations. Proper regulation under those circumstances would probably entail an extension of the assumption of regulation of political parties generally, and might therefore also entail a required operating standard for political parties themselves. That might call into question the reasonable right of political parties to organise themselves in the way that they feel is best appropriate to their political and geographical circumstances. Regulation that covered the whole range of party financial activity, locally and nationally, regardless of the method of organisation, might be more appropriate, and certainly a more transparent and understandable way for the Electoral Commission to discharge its regulatory function effectively in future.