Electoral Commission

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers), who gave an outstanding speech setting out what the Electoral Commission has been doing and putting the case for it extremely well. I shall be critical of the Electoral Commission, but the chairman does a very good job and is an outstanding man. We should bear in mind that it is a new institution that has been messed around by some well meaning but ill thought out Government initiatives and incomplete and defective legislation. The Electoral Commission was created because the Committee on Standards in Public Life said that the oversight of elections should be neutral and should be seen to be neutral, so the task should be taken away from the Home Office. The case for doing so was never adequately made. The Home Office system was not ideal. It gave the governing party an opportunity to rig elections but, in a typically British way, that rarely happened. Indeed, there was rarely even a controversy about the system. One would not recommend such arrangements for Guatemala or the Ukraine, but they seemed to work in the United Kingdom. The old system was also cheap, and this is an estimates debate, as my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Horam) pointed out. However, we cannot put the clock back. Any change that we make must be subject to one overriding test: does it contribute to the securing of consent from the electorate to the result? With that, we will get an increase in democratic interest and respect for democracy. Without it, we are on the slippery slope to anarchy. It is difficult to argue that the early years of the Electoral Commission have bolstered consent. Examples to the contrary are legion, such as the commission’s failure to get to grips with the service voters farrago. It is astonishing that we allowed ourselves to get into the position where we effectively disfranchised a large proportion of our service voters by mistake. The Electoral Commission was alerted to that extensively by me before the election, as was the Government, but they did hardly anything about it. Another example is the postal votes scandal. The Electoral Commission was originally bright eyed and bushy tailed about extending postal voting. It was far too weak and slow in flagging up the crisis that was developing, which we could already see early on as a result of the pilots. There is the risk of another problem being generated now in relation to the reform of the boundary commissions. If the Electoral Commission is to have such responsibility, it must open up a public debate immediately to ensure that a vote is worth the same—that is, that seats are of equal size—throughout the United Kingdom. We cannot carry on with the moribund system that was put in place after the second world war. There are several other examples, I regret to say, of the Electoral Commission’s failure to grasp the nettle adequately. I agree with the hon. Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) that we still do not really know how parties obtain their money. We are supposed to have more transparency, but we have had only a little more. The Electoral Commission should be pressing vigorously and in public debate to make sure that all necessary information is available. I also worry that we have inadvertently created the conditions in which the Government can behave as though they had been absolved of their obligation to act impartially, as they had when they had responsibility directly through the Home Office. The Government—any Government—can abuse the system more effectively now by claiming that they have been open to independent advice but, having considered it, have set it aside. That is exactly what happened with regard to postal voting. All the functions that I have described are core functions of the Electoral Commission. I deeply regret that the commission seems to have involved itself far too much in what one might call not the bread and butter, but the jam—that is, the much more interesting work of encouraging greater participation and understanding of the democratic process. We have had a stream of reports and initiatives on that. It is worth pointing out that when the Committee on Standards in Public Life began the process, it did not recommend that this role should be given to the Electoral Commission but argued that the core tasks given to the commission were already sufficient to do the job. I am not convinced that the problem of voter participation will be dealt with by anything undertaken by the commission. That work will almost certainly turn out to be a waste of money.