Elections Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Tom Randall

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because, of course, Richard Mawrey said in his evidence that the threshold for proving in electoral law as it currently stands is too high to really get over the bar. By bringing in an extra set of checks and balances, we hopefully get away from the point that we would have to try to prove these cases to get over what is a very high electoral bar.

[Tom Randall]

Following up on the point about Tower Hamlets, is it not also worth noting that that election petition was brought by a small group of volunteers, working on a cross-party basis, who put up their own money and used their own time to investigate the issue in Tower Hamlets? If they had not done so, that entire piece of work would not have been done. That helps to demonstrate how difficult it is to get a petition such as that off the ground.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because what we heard in evidence was that the financial threshold is exceptionally high for people to get over. We also heard in evidence that people did indeed risk their entire financial situation—they faced bankruptcy—to take that matter forward. There is an old phrase: criminal proceedings, or taking things to court, are free to everyone in this country just as everybody in this country is free to dine at the Ritz, but quite a lot of people are precluded when the bill arrives.

Elections Bill

Debate between Alec Shelbrooke and Tom Randall

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mark Fletcher) with whom I have campaigned for many days and hours in Tower Hamlets. My first experience of Tower Hamlets elections was the infamous 2014 election, which was later declared void. As a polling agent at Three Mills Primary School in the Isle of Dogs, I watched from afar as voters ran a gauntlet of activists brandishing leaflets. The activists were very aggressive to voters, especially women, as they entered the polling station. When I went in to speak to the police officer about it, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Tower Hamlets, innit.”

What I saw at Three Mills Primary School was not the worst. The Mawrey judgment quotes a Labour polling agent who said that she was with her husband in the car and people were banging on the windows with leaflets. She said:

“The situation was so bad that I thought there was going to be some sort of accident. I could not even open a door and we had to go down another road.”

An election was stolen in Tower Hamlets, but despite all the intimidation, it did not actually cross the threshold of an electoral offence, so I am glad that that aspect is being tightened up. There has been a constant refrain today that fraud is rare, but it is like a curate’s egg; if it is bad in parts it affects the whole, and it has been partially bad in Tower Hamlets, Slough, Birmingham and elsewhere. I welcome both the reform to handling proxy votes and postal votes and the introduction of voter ID. As Mawrey identified in his judgment, there was at that election in Tower Hamlets an appreciable amount of impersonation by false registration.

I would like to focus the limited time that I have on the police, because there has been constant talk about the fact that there is no evidence of electoral fraud. Well, there will be no evidence if the police do not investigate it. Before the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee this morning, Peter O’Doherty of Thames Valley police said that the situation was much improved. I did not embarrass him by saying that he was starting from a very low base. Mawrey, in his judgment on conduct at polling stations, said:

“In the light of the two other groups of statements, an unkind person might remark that the policemen and polling staff had appeared to take as their rôle models the legendary Three Wise Monkeys.”

There has been a whole catalogue of allegations, and I do not have time to go through them this afternoon. Many of the allegations that have arisen from the Rahman trial have not been investigated by the Metropolitan police. I think that there is scope—I appreciate that it is outside the scope of this Bill—for complex electoral fraud to be taken out of the hands of the police and possibly placed with a specialist unit.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am listening very carefully to what my hon. Friend is saying. Do his comments basically throw out this argument that only three people have ever been prosecuted?

[Tom Randall]

I will give my right hon. Friend one example, of which there are many. In the Mawrey judgment of 2014, Kabir Ahmed was found to have used a false address to register a vote, but no further action was taken. Having had no action taken against him, he was elected as the Aspire candidate in the Weavers ward by-election in Tower Hamlets last month. There are people who are getting away with it, and people will continue to get away with it if no action is taken.

I support the Bill but there needs to be a culture change, with the development of specialist officers, perhaps from a different agency within the police, other than a county force. I welcome these measures, but they are just a start. If we are going to increase the number of convictions for electoral fraud, we need to ensure that we have the systems in place properly to investigate these cases, and then we will have numbers to show how widespread the problem can be.