General Election: Voting Deadline

Lord Hunt of Kings Heath Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

The matter of payment for returning officers in the last election is for the local authorities concerned. The Electoral Commission, in its report, called for it to be given greater control to make sure that returning officers do their jobs properly.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, is there not evidence that some local authorities are skimping on the funding that they are making available for the conduct of elections? In particular, polling officers in the individual stations are not being given sufficient training. That is causing real problems in the way that they then deal with issues that arise on election day.

[Lord McNally]

We will learn lessons from this and there are some hard lessons to learn. For example, some local authorities looked at the three previous elections for which they had responsibility, which all had much lower turnouts. As the Electoral Commission said, that was not proper contingency planning. There is no doubt that the photographs and television pictures that went round the world were very bad public relations for British democracy. We will do all in our power to make sure that it never happens again.