Overseas Electors Bill — House of Commons, 2018-02-23
Topic: Government Operations
Catherine Jane Smith (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. My hon. Friend’s intervention was particularly about the capacity of local elections offices. Were the Bill to be successful, the impact on local elections offices in councils up and down the country would be huge, because the process of registering an overseas elector can take around two hours. If those offices were to see a huge increase in the number of overseas electors registering at a time when local councils have had huge funding cuts, the pressure would be absolutely huge There was further evidence in June about how under-resourced election staff are. My hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly) described the issues on polling day as "a shambles". Significant issues also occurred in Plymouth, with hundreds of voters unable to cast their votes in the June general election. An independent investigation found that 35,000 postal vote holders had received two polling cards—a postal vote polling card and a polling station card. In addition, 331 people who received a polling card that was issued on 5 May were removed from the register after that point These failings clearly illustrate that more action must be taken now to deal with the increasing challenges that returning officers face in delivering elections effectively. Those concerns have been raised on multiple occasions by the Association of Electoral Administrators, which has called on the Government for a "full and thorough review of the funding of the delivery of electoral services…as a matter of urgency" Not only is that impacting on voters, but it might also be having a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of electoral administrators and the public servants who work in local elections offices. Following the 2017 general election, the Association of Electoral Administrators wrote that "we have collectively been concerned for the health and well-being of…our members" As a result, the AEA contracted the Hospital and Medical Care Association to provide members with free-of-charge access to confidential counselling services. That is not an indication of healthy elections offices up and down the country In the context of austerity, we cannot allow the Government to dismantle our electoral system any further. The existing provision of checking registration against electoral registration officer records within 15 years is already a challenging and resource-intensive process. Some applications contain vague or incorrect previous addresses, which can cause problems in checking the register—so much so that the Association of Electoral Administrators has estimated that it takes roughly two hours to register one overseas elector. Because overseas electors fall off the register after 12 months, the vast majority of registration applications occur immediately ahead of a general election, when the pressure on electoral administrators is at its most intense Abolishing the 15-year rule, and therefore presumably increasing the number of British citizens overseas who can register to vote, would completely overstretch electoral administrators, who are already being pushed to the limit. In addition, the requirement to keep copies of previous revisions of registers for more than 15 years, whether in data or in paper format, will have a resource implication in the form of increased ICT server capacity or physical storage area In the light of those concerns—