My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, for his remarks, which ranged much more widely than the limited proposals in Clause 72. Clause 72, on the whole, makes technical
changes to the governance arrangements for the Electoral Commission. Clause 73 makes similar technical and modest changes to the governance arrangements for the Local Government Boundary Commission.
As the noble Lord said, the Electoral Commission is the independent body established by Parliament and overseen by the Speaker’s Committee with governance arrangements set out in Schedule 1 to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, known to us with great affection as PPERA.
At present, the Electoral Commission has to provide a five-year corporate plan, with the new plan having to be prepared and submitted annually. The National Audit Office is also required to undertake annual value-for-money studies. The Speaker’s Committee has reviewed these governance arrangements, comparing the Electoral Commission with other modest similar-sized organisations, and has recommended the following changes. First, a five-year corporate plan should be produced in the first financial year of a Parliament. The statutory requirement to update this on an annual basis should be removed, although the Speaker’s Committee should retain the right to request updated plans outside the five-year cycle. Secondly, value-for-money studies by the NAO should be linked to the production of the organisation's five-year plan and not on an annual basis.
Noble Lords will be aware that the approach that central government take to the funding of public bodies is through a spending review. These spending reviews are fixed and spending is planned over a number of years. As such, the existing statutory provisions for the Electoral Commission to provide annual updates to their corporate plan seem excessive.
In terms of removing the statutory requirements for annual value-for-money studies, the NAO has said that it supports such a reduction as the current statutory provisions are disproportionate to the size and spending power of the Electoral Commission. Clause 72 simply implements the recommendations put forward by the Speaker’s Committee. The Government see these as sensible and proportionate changes to the governance arrangements for the Electoral Commission
The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, raised some wider issues about whether it is not now time, after 14 or 15 years of operation of the Electoral Commission, to review the overall balance, and whether the current arrangements, including, as he said, a Select Committee as well as the Speaker’s Committee, provide sufficient oversight. That is an interesting discussion to throw out. As he rightly remarks, we will not get very far with this over the next five and a half months. But this House may appropriately return to this after the election when we have seen how the Electoral Commission has operated with its responsibilities, which are most important in the course of and the run-up to an election campaign. Perhaps at that point he and I and others might talk together about how we take such wider issues further.