UK Parliament / Open data

European Parliamentary Elections (Amendment) Regulations 2014

I share the noble Lord’s feeling on streamlining. There are of course some problems in that, as we have devolved authority to the devolved Assemblies, and as we have introduced a number of different electoral systems—I think there are three or four electoral systems operating now within Scotland, for example—some of this stuff becomes more complicated. We are, as the noble Lord knows, balancing between doing everything we can to make it easier for people to vote and encouraging that, and guarding against fraud. That also requires a delicate balance. However, I agree with him: I hope that it will be possible at some point to simplify the extremely complicated legislation that we now have for these different sets of elections and referendums. Referendums are, after all, still a relatively new dimension of British democracy and perhaps the next Government will take that on, with the assistance of the Law Commission.

On the particular questions that the noble Lord asked, there is no formal process for consultation with the political parties, but I understand that a number of informal conversations are had with them. I will check on that and I promise to write to the noble Lord if there is anything useful that I can say on it, because I take his point about the political parties. Miraculously, I discover that I now have an answer. We meet the Electoral Commission’s political parties panel quarterly and raise the question of new SIs being made. I expect that the noble Lord will be familiar with who attends the political parties electoral panel from the Labour Party. It may indeed have been him—yes, I see that it was.

On the closing of polls, let me say in passing that this was a very small issue last time. It happened in a total of 27 polling stations in 10 constituencies at the 2010 election, with just over 1,200 people being affected. We do not know whether this will turn out to have been a one-off or whether it will become a wider phenomenon in future. We took this decision because we had come up with this problem in 2010, and we expect that the Electoral Commission will provide additional guidance on how we manage this in the future. The noble Lord is entirely right, of course, to say that a situation in which a large number of people attempted to storm a polling station at 10 pm would be very difficult for anyone to handle. We have to hope that that sort of event will not happen. Guidance will certainly be offered to returning officers on the close-of-poll provisions and the Electoral Commission will assist with that. I hope that I have now covered most of the noble Lord’s questions. I am glad that these regulations have received a general welcome and commend them to the Committee.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
753 c227GC 
Session
2013-14
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords Grand Committee
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