Electoral Commission

I have served on the Speaker’s Committee almost continuously since it was created. I now do so ex officio as chairman of the Constitutional Affairs Committee. I used to do the job that the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) did so well tonight. The Constitutional Affairs Committee has the Electoral Commission as well as the Department for Constitutional Affairs within its remit. I should also mention that I have given evidence to the Committee on Standards in Public Life for its review of the commission. As a declaration of interest, I should mention that my wife serves on the Committee on Standards in Public Life, but I am not speaking on behalf of any of those aforementioned bodies. As time is limited, I just want to refer to the governance points, and to follow some of the arguments made so far. Generally, as the debate has revealed, the Electoral Commission has done several good things, but it has not dealt successfully with several areas, and several problems have been identified. Some internal problems were identified by the scrutiny unit report, to which the hon. Member for Gosport referred, and which I agree was a very good piece of work. My first key point about the commission is that I think it needs authority in the political world. It ought to be a body whose recommendations it is very difficult for the Government and Parliament to turn down. That is what we want for electoral commissions in all other countries, and it is what I want for our Electoral Commission. As a number of Members have said today, however, it is undermined by the lack of political experience on the commission. It is too easy for us in Parliament to say, ““Sorry, but you do not know enough about it. You have good intentions, but we know what it is like.”” Sometimes that it true. We may indeed be more aware of, for example, the fact that proposed improvements would not achieve their intended purpose, because we know how parties operate. I think it would be right for the commission to include a minority of members who have experience of the various political parties but are no longer in the front line of activity in that context, and I think we should change the statute to make that possible. As was pointed out earlier, it was not originally envisaged that Mr. Speaker would chair the Speaker’s Committee. His chairmanship was seen as a way of giving the committee, and hence the Electoral Commission, more authority. That places limitations on the committee. It is clear that if the Speaker’s valued independence and impartiality are to be preserved, the minuted discussions about whose absence—in a thoughtful speech—the hon. Member for Chichester (Mr. Tyrie) complained cannot be allowed. If they are, the possibility will arise that the Speaker’s views will start to be quoted. Similarly, the Speaker cannot be questioned on the Floor of the House. The hon. Member for Gosport does the job in his place. The Speaker is a very busy man. The decision to give the committee authority by making the Speaker chairman had certain consequences for the way in which it could operate. It is important to remember, however, that it does not operate in quite the same way as a Select Committee. Its responsibilities are comparable to those of a Minister in relation to a Department: it is responsible for the Electoral Commission’s estimate, and effectively it brings that estimate to the House. It does not merely scrutinise how the commission has spent money; it decides in the first place whether it can spend that money—whether the money can be allocated for its purposes. The Speaker’s Committee does a great deal of work of that kind. It challenges the commission’s budget. It makes the commission very aware that certain areas of expenditure are under-challenged, that they may not be continued, and that the budget may have to be varied. It does its work through a regular cycle of meetings, with the assistance of the scrutiny unit and, of course, the National Audit Office, which provides it with extremely helpful material. Its function is different from the normal function of a Select Committee. At the same time, the Constitutional Affairs Committee has a scrutiny role in relation to the Electoral Commission’s work, its policy proposals and the Department’s relationship with it. It is necessarily an intermittent role. Our Committee has numerous other responsibilities concerned with numerous other aspects of the Department’s work—including legal aid, the judiciary, other public bodies, national archives and the Public Guardianship Office—although we do question the chairman of the Electoral Commission, and also the chief executive. A number of our recent reports have involved questions to him. We are currently engaged in an inquiry into party funding, an issue that has been mentioned a good deal this evening. We have elicited the views of the commission and many others on that. Nevertheless, it is the case—and will remain the case following any future changes—that the Committee has few responsibilities in this regard. Do we need to modify the system? There are obviously clear advantages for the Electoral Commission in its being responsible to the House directly, rather than through the Department. I am very glad that that was made part of the system. Indeed, the Constitutional Affairs Committee has suggested that a similar route would be appropriate for the Information Commissioner. We have observed the difficulties presented to him by the fact that his budget was set by the Department and set very late in the day, and the problem—a theoretical problem, at least—that one of the Departments he is scrutinising is responsible for his budget. The direct route to Parliament is therefore valuable. The hon. Member for Chichester and others have suggested that a new committee, perhaps chaired by a senior member of the Opposition, could conduct its proceedings openly. We might then lose something of the authority conferred by the Speaker’s presence, and it might become a little more difficult to resist Government pressure. It is quite useful to have the Speaker on one’s side if one has to do battle with the Treasury over the estimates. However, it is a serious proposition that we should look at. Even if such a committee were created, the Constitutional Affairs Committee would still be involved because the policy issues that the Electoral Commission is involved in are very much its sphere. The logical division of responsibility between the Speaker’s Committee and the Constitutional Affairs Committee is that the Speaker’s Committee does pay and rations and the Constitutional Affairs Committee does policy, to put it broadly. It never works out quite like that, for reasons that I will not go into in this short debate. I do not think that we could put all those responsibilities and the responsibility for presenting the estimate in one body, but now that we have established the authority of the Speaker's Committee and the relationship is clearer—it is not as messy as has been suggested by some—we should perhaps consider moving to an arrangement in which the Speaker did not need to chair it and its role could develop from there. I do not have a rigid view about that, but I suppose I would be staking my Committee’s claim if in conclusion I said that any Constitutional Affairs Committee, whatever its membership—four of its members have taken part in today’s debate—would want to continue its scrutiny of the key areas of policy of great constitutional importance with which the Electoral Commission is concerned.