Representation of the People Bill

Lord Pack Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

The noble Lord makes a good point. It has been touched on already that the situation is much more complicated than it used to be. But those practical angles cannot be the only thing that is brought into the debate. We have to remember what we are doing here. We are marking the achievement through democracy of a shift in political power, potentially, from one set of people to another. How that is accomplished, how people see it happening, and the media discussion of it are just as important. It should not be neglected when we consider how local elections are conducted.

That balance is important. Of course, different authorities can reach different judgments on that balance. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, as he noted, allows for that balance to be reached in certain cases, but we must not forget that these are elections about the shift of power. Administrative and bureaucratic convenience—how it is done—cannot be the only determining factor. We have to think about what is happening here and that is why the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, deserves discussion and support.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, I will start with a different amendment in this group, Amendment 123 on the issue of poll cards, because they are a topic that is well suited to the sort of scrutiny that we rightly pride ourselves on in this House. It is a niche issue and a serious one, but also, I concede, not the largest of issues. But we should not be too blasé about the issue, even though it is not the largest of issues, because a very considerable amount of money is spent on the production and distribution of poll cards. In the second half of 2019, for example, £19 million was spent, excluding the local and European elections that year. That was just for the general election. So, millions of pounds are spent each year on poll cards. And yet, I think it is fair to say, if any of us was involved in a recruitment process for a graphic designer and they were to show us proudly the main item in their portfolio a modern poll card, we would quite rapidly be thinking, “How can we bring this interview to an end?” Because, clearly, it is not very good.

In fairness, one should say that everyone involved in the process has a good alibi for why it is not their fault, because there is a complex interaction of legislative requirements, IT systems and their capabilities, and time pressures on returning officers. All of those interact. Everyone can say, “It’s not my fault”. But the reality is, we spend millions of pounds every year on something that we all know when we look at it is not very good.

We should also bear in mind that it is the one official communication that everyone on the electoral register receives about the election. If that is, as it were, the front door or the shop window of democracy to voters, it is both a poor use of money and also slightly embarrassing in terms of how we present democracy to people. So, I hope we will hear some positive noises from the Minister in due course on Amendment 123. I certainly welcome the fact that, elsewhere in the Bill, some of the proposals will simplify the legislative framework underpinning poll cards and will make it easier to improve their design in future.

I turn to the issue that has taken up most of our time on this group this morning. I, along with others, admire the irony of the timing of debating whether or not counts should be overnight on a morning when many of us would rather have been able to stay up later to watch the elections from the US. There is an important lesson from those elections, which is that we should not underestimate the importance of speedy election counts in terms of giving confidence in the security of the system.

Thankfully, in Britain, those concerns, broadly speaking, are a long way in the past, but the reason we have the system where it used to be the norm that just about everything was counted overnight was because of the fear that ballot boxes would be interfered with. We should not be blasé about the risk of those fears in the future, but, as several noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Hayward and Lord McCobb, have pointed out, there are significant good, practical reasons why overnight counts are not always possible. Indeed, in some cases, they would be so difficult to practically organise that one would even go so far as to say that on some occasions they are not even desirable. So, while I sympathise with the thrust of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I do not think a central, top-down mandate in the way that it suggests is the right way to progress on that.

I will speak more positively about a couple of other amendments in this group, including one from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson: Amendments 125 and 128. Their proposals are welcome. We saw in our discussions on the first day of Committee the value of election pilots. In this case, several references were made to the pilots that have been carried out in Wales around automatic voter registration. Those pilots properly inform our decision-making. It is fair to say that the election pilots on other topics that we have discussed so far have not been hugely successful. There seems to be a relatively small number of ideas that are piloted and never turn out to be particularly effective. So, the spirit of Amendments 125 and 128 is very welcome, and I hope we may hear in due course from the Government a willingness to be a bit more imaginative about what is piloted.

I will throw in one example of what I mean. In academic research into the turnout in local elections, the evidence is pretty strong that, if you have to walk more than 600 metres to your polling station, turnout drops significantly in local elections. There are different possible ways of piloting having more polling stations so fewer people have to travel long distances to them, which is the sort of slightly more imaginative approach to piloting I hope we can hear about in the future.

Finally, on Amendments 129 and 136, I have little to add to what my colleague and noble friend Lady Thornhill said eloquently about them and what others have contributed today. I simply add that it is fair to say that, as we saw, for example, with the Gorton and Denton by-election, there are significant differences of view about what may be the exact scale and nature of the problems that these amendments seek to address. But that seems to me a good reason to want to face up to that—to want to have a good evidence base and careful consideration, rather than simply ignoring the issue completely.

--- Later in debate ---

I strongly support my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Shamash, in their claim that we should bring this together. The Bill, thick though it is, fails to address the fundamental problem, especially in a world of AI and the complexity of the electoral system, which I will not dwell upon again. I strongly support my noble friend.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, this may be the group on which we have the most widespread agreement from all corners of the Committee. I very much agree with the broad thrust of the comments from the three noble Lords who have spoken so far.

To give one further illustration: in preparing my ring binder of things that I thought might be useful to have with me during Committee, I thought it might be useful to print off copies of the Representation of the People Act 1983 and PPERA 2000, the two pieces of primary legislation that we will, I hope, amend through this legislation. I dutifully downloaded the PDFs for both from legislation.gov.uk. One comes in at 543 pages and the other at 524 pages, which is about the length of the last copy of War and Peace I saw. I decided not to print those off, but it illustrates the problem, which was quite rightly touched on earlier, about how staff and volunteers have to grapple with understanding large parts of what is a very complex legal landscape.

However, I would not want to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, by not taking the chance to quibble just a little over a couple of his amendments in this group. His Amendment 16 would remove a cross-reference, but I would go the other way and say that we need more cross-references in legislation. But he is absolutely right with Amendment 17. I am sure that there is some fine legal brain in this House who will be able to elucidate why the definition that would be removed by Amendment 17 is not simply a rearranging of the words. That definition adds very little meaning.

Overall, it is welcome that we have seen, in one of the more recent government amendments tabled, a tidying-up by the proposal to repeal some previously uncommenced legislation. I hope that the debate on this group will encourage the Government to look at further steps for tidying up as we progress through the Bill.

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I will be part of the agreement across the Committee on this one. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hayward for introducing these amendments and agree with all of them as a point of principle—to be slightly different from the noble Lord, Lord Pack.

We need this debate on the complexity of electoral law and administrative bureaucracy. I echo the Minister in recognising and thanking electoral returning officers for their job. It is not an easy job, as various noble Lords have made clear, to deal with all the legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Pack, said that just two Acts added up to over 1,100 pages. They are long, complex, inconsistent and, on occasion, in conflict. Electoral returning officers have to deal regularly with new regulations, guidance and changes. It is a surprise that anybody actually wants the job.

In addition to dealing with that, there is the sheer difficulty of running the operation. You may be dealing with 200-plus polling stations. You have to make sure that you get all your polling booths to them. You have to send out thousands of postal votes and rely on the postal system, which itself always has the potential for error. You have to make decisions on the spot in order to overcome all these various things. The Bill then prescribes, as my noble friend Lord Hayward has said, exactly how someone is supposed to do the job and who in the council is supposed to do the job and, as my noble friend raised, includes that specific point about requiring all staff to be made available. What happens if all staff are not willing to be made available? What sanction can the chief executive have? Will it be part of their work contract? What about needing them potentially to be made available to another neighbouring authority that needs more people? The system works. The EROs get the job done. It is a difficult job and, as I said in my previous speech, we should trust them.

I will go through some of these amendments, beginning with Amendment 13 to Clause 7(4)—reiterated in Amendment 16 to Clause 14—which defines “absent voters records”, “overseas elector lists”, “overseas elector’s declaration”, “registration officer” and “voter register”. Subsection (5) then clarifies the roles of a deputy electoral registration officer and a person assisting the electoral registration officer. My noble friend has already raised concerns over how other Whitehall departments determine this. I can go on through all the various clauses—and that is before I get on to the clauses that my noble friend has opposed in order to prompt this debate.

It is clear that our electoral system, local government and layers of administrative bureaucracy are complex. We are fortunate to live in a parliamentary democracy and to work in a system that has evolved, relatively organically, over time. Some legal complexity is perhaps expected, but we are concerned that, rather than seeking to improve the situation, some provisions in the Bill risk unnecessarily increasing the bureaucracy and practical complexity. I will not go through it all, but it is very clear from across the Committee that the Bill is overly complex, adds complexity and does not do what it should do, which is to make life simpler and more certain.

I hope that the Minister will take on board some of the recommendations made by noble Lords on how and where electoral law and administration could be made a little less complex without weakening the system’s strength, especially at the local level. In fact, by increasing consistency and simplifying where appropriate, it would strengthen the system. Perhaps the Minister can give an indication of what further government amendments we can expect.