My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, and we agree with everything he has just said. This is the beginning of our debates on the Elections Bill, so I start by thanking the Minister and his officials for taking the time to meet me and my colleagues to go through some of our concerns.
I turn to the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher—again, it is unusual to find such brevity in an introduction—which draw attention to the link between the Electoral Commission and the Government. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, gave a very clear overview of how the Electoral Commission came into being. He also talked about some of the comments from the Committee on Standards in Public Life.
Our concern is with Part 3 of the Bill, and Clause 14 in particular. We believe it represents a deeply worrying step for our democracy. The Minister and his Government might like to think that it is their party in government today, but legislation is for future Governments. This could be for other parties, including parties not represented in this Chamber. It is not for any Government to dictate the priorities of an independent watchdog, yet these proposals, as we have heard, allow the Government of the day to set the agenda of the Electoral Commission.
The Electoral Commission regulates the elections in which Governments are elected. It is very important that the Electoral Commission has independence from the Government of the day. The existence of an independent regulator is fundamental to maintaining confidence in our electoral systems and, therefore, in our democracy.
That is particularly important when the laws that govern elections are made by a small subset of the parties that stand in elections. Many parties that stand in elections in our country do not have Members of Parliament, and much of the legislation here will be
done as secondary legislation, so the commission’s independence needs to be clear for voters and campaigners to see. It must be viewed as fair and impartial. As we have heard, no organisation has given these proposals its full support.
The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, referred to the consultation around the statement, but I have to say that consultation on these proposals so far does not exactly fill me with confidence. If the Committee will bear with me, I will just refer to the Government’s response to PACAC’s fifth report around consultation. In the report, the committee
“urges the Government to provide guidance, as a matter of urgency, on the proposed consultation mechanisms, which should be agreed with the list of statutory consultees in advance of publication.”
The Government’s response says:
“The consultation mechanism for the designation of the Strategy and Policy Statement is already outlined in detail in new sections … Those statutory consultees are: the Electoral Commission, the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, and the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.”
But parliamentary consequences of the recent machinery of government changes, whereby ministerial responsibilities for elections now sit with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, will mean that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee may need to be replaced with the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee as a statutory consultee on the statement. Considering that PACAC was one of the organisations most critical of the Bill in its response, I find it very concerning that it is being threatened with removal. I would be very interested to hear the Minister’s justifications for that.
Furthermore, in the response:
“The Government notes the Committee’s suggestion to set minimum timeframes for consultation but considers it would be disproportionate and unnecessarily burdensome.”
Again, I ask the Minister why. Consultation used to be my profession; I was an associate at the Consultation Institute. We lay out best practice for consultation and that is not best practice.
The Minister has previously said that it is important that we have independent regulation so that the public can have confidence in our elections. But the implication of this is that we do not currently have independent or impartial regulation of elections. It implies that somehow the Electoral Commission, as currently constituted, is fundamentally flawed and failing in its duty. That is a substantial claim, and I have seen no evidence for it.
My noble friend Lord Foulkes talked about the importance of good governance and how the proposals in this Bill completely undermine that. He also talked about how we monitor elections in other countries and how on earth we will continue to be taken seriously in the future if we have basically kneecapped our own Electoral Commission and are bringing in many of the other measures in this Bill.
The Electoral Commission is already accountable to the House through the Speaker’s Committee. There are regular questions in the Chamber of the other place precisely to provide some of that accountability. The members of that committee scrutinise the operation of the commission, and there are also procedures at Holyrood and at the Senedd in Cymru to ensure the Electoral Commission self-accounts for its operations
in those parts of the United Kingdom. These proposals threaten to end the commission’s independence and put control of how elections are run in the hands of those who have won them, which cannot be right. These look like the actions of a Government who fear scrutiny, and I suggest we have seen that in other legislation in recent times. I ask the Minister: under the current proposals in the Bill, will Parliament be able to amend the statement?
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The government response to the PACAC report says:
“Further, to support parliamentary scrutiny during those debates, the Government also provided an illustrative example of the Strategy and Policy Statement which parliamentarians will be able to use to supplement their views.”
We have heard what that looks like from other Members so, again, I ask the Minister exactly how that is supposed to replace the current system and provide sufficient scrutiny going forward.
Elected representatives have an active and vested interest in the regulation of elections, even more so for a Government who have been elected and want to remain in power. It is not right that such a Government can direct the body that oversees what is supposed to be an impartial process. A country where the Electoral Commission is told what to do by the Executive is not a country with free or fair elections. The regulator has to be independent and impartial and must not be subject to political control. I say to the Minister that that message has come across from the majority of noble Lords who have spoken so far today.
We completely understand the aims of the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, and why she is trying to make an appalling situation better and, as the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, said, “pull it back from the brink.” But we agree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that it is grotesque while people are dying for democracy and that the most honourable thing to do is to delete these clauses from the Bill. Our position is that they should not stand part of the Bill and should be removed. I look forward to the debate on this, which we will come to later today.