Ballot Secrecy Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-07-15
Topic: Civil Rights
Robert Hayward (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, on 18 July 1872, almost exactly 150 years ago to the day, what is now known as the Ballot Act received Royal Assent. On 15 August 1872, 150 years ago bar one month, a secret ballot was used for the first time in Pontefract in a by-election, which the Liberals won The Ballot Act presumed very clearly that people should have the right to vote in secret without being accompanied or intimidated in the way they vote. What we have now, unfortunately, is something called family voting. This has been a matter of discussion for a number of years and it sounds wonderfully friendly, but friendly it is not. It is a form of intimidation of people, usually females, when they are casting their vote, because somebody else is accompanying them to the polling booth. It is a very difficult situation for polling station officers and presiding officers to control, because on many occasions, as all noble Lords will recognise, the presiding officer is a female, and if they approach a male saying, "You should not be there", they feel intimidated. I shall refer to that in a minute. The issue of family voting has been a subject for discussion for about a decade. The Electoral Commission has looked at this and provided guidance in one form or another to polling station officers, the police and others in an effort to ensure that there is no accompanying family voting in any form whatever. But it is not a problem that is going away. This is an issue that the Electoral Commission has repeatedly addressed and attempted to resolve by giving more and more guidance. It has been around for a decade. Last autumn I wrote to the Electoral Commission and the Met and asked them what they were going to do in relation to family voting. In January I received the normal assurances: it is being tackled; there is training available; we will deal with it with presiding officers and the police. The Minister wrote to the Electoral Commission and the Metropolitan Police, and in early April received exactly the same response: it was all being dealt with. So it would be reasonable to presume that it was not a problem, but the Democracy Volunteers report, to which I will refer in a few moments, identified that it is still a very serious problem indeed As I have identified, this is essentially a problem of men standing alongside women and telling them how to vote, or female presiding officers not having the confidence to challenge the men. When I raised this on a television programme recently, a lady from Harrow wrote to me that she had complained because she had witnessed this family voting happening. When the presiding officer, a female, went to the male concerned and he refused to respond, the presiding officer had no other force of law on which she could act Democracy Volunteers, an excellent organisation, has produced its report on the most recent local elections. It did surveys right across the country, and I quote from its report: "Our team of observers saw several challenges to the electoral process … focused around the challenge of family voting ... Our team saw family voting in 25% of all the polling stations we observed." That is not just polling stations in Tower Hamlets—one knows that that is where all the attention has been. In Newham, 36% of polling stations were observed to have this problem at some stage. Lewisham and Croydon had 35%. All these are worse than Tower Hamlets, which was more than 30%, but in Northern Ireland—showing that this is a national problem—family voting took place in an almost unbelievable 42% of polling stations observed So, what is the current state? Efforts have been made—I referred to the training that has been undertaken—but when you raise the subject, you tend to get three basic replies. One is that the law already covers this issue. This is the response I got from the officials. If it does cover the issue, why does the Electoral Commission guidance not identify that there is a specific offence in law? Secondly, it seems to be viewed as just a Tower Hamlets problem. Even if it were, that would be bad enough, but I have just cited cases across the country and it has been running for a decade. The decade for which people have been looking at it is crucial, because the other response one gets is, "We will aim for consistent and effective enforcement". The only thing that is consistent is the ineffective enforcement, as shown by the figures from Democracy Volunteers. I specifically asked the Electoral Commission on 20 April 2022 whether it is "against the law, except in specific circumstances to be present, or attempt to be present, in a polling booth while another person is casting their vote" Shaun McNally, the new chief executive, responded with great clarity to my question on 22 April, saying that "there is no offence in law … as you have described … it would represent a breach of polling procedure" We therefore have a direct conflict between what officials in the department and the Electoral Commission are saying. You cannot have effective action if the law is unclear. When there is clear law, the guidance and the actions available to the polling station staff and police will be clearer I have had very good conversations with the Electoral Commission in the last few weeks. I put on the record my thanks to Mr McNally and his staff for their assistance on this. They have now agreed to seek counsel’s opinion on their interpretation of the law. This is enormously helpful. Mr McNally has even offered that I should be involved in drafting the inquiry to counsel. If counsel’s opinion says that the Electoral Commission is correct, my Bill is necessary and the guidance could be changed to emphasise the breach of law. If counsel’s opinion says that the officials’ interpretation is correct, the guidance can be changed without any change to the law and be much more emphatic. We await counsel’s opinion, but in the meantime I beg to move.