Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 38:"Page 5, line 40, leave out ““ERO who acts for”” and insert ““principal local authorities which include””" The noble Lord said: These are fairly important amendments. In moving Amendment No. 38, I shall speak to Amendments Nos. 39 and 40. Amendments Nos. 38 and 39 go together and Amendment No. 40 stands separately, as an addition. This part of the Bill is about the extent to which orders establishing or varying a CORE scheme have to be put out to consultation before they are made. The Bill says that the consultation has to include the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner, for obvious reasons; the ERO who acts for each area to be specified in the scheme; and the ERO who acts for an area with specifications that the Secretary of State proposes to remove from the scheme. My amendment is a probing one to discover who the appropriate people are who should be consulted. It suggests that the appropriate people to consult in these cases are not the EROs but the local authorities that employ the EROs. The relationship between a local authority and a local registration officer is obviously a very important one and the electoral registration officer must have a considerable degree of independence, just as a returning officer does when an election comes round, because it would clearly be wrong for elected politicians to be laying down the law in all sorts of areas in which the process has to be managed independently. That system works quite well. My experience is that elected councils have quite a lot of influence in how the electoral registration and election process takes place, but they do not overstep a certain boundary, which is that once the processes are in place, there must be impartiality between candidates and parties and so on. So that is an important process. Nevertheless, the question whether an area is within a CORE scheme seems to be a matter of policy rather than one of operational functions. On that basis, perhaps the EROs should be consulted professionally as EROs, but certainly it seems to me that the local authorities concerned should be consulted. Therefore, the first two amendments would make provision for the local authorities to be consulted instead of the ERO. However, if the Minister says that both should be consulted, I shall not disagree. It seems to me that all the principal local authorities in those areas should be included—even those, particularly county councils in England, which are not electoral registration authorities. Amendment No. 40 would simply add a number of organisations and bodies which I believe should be statutorily consulted. The Minister may say that when the consultations go out, anyone can put forward their point of view if they know that they are taking place, and therefore it is not necessary to say so in the legislation. But it seems to me that some bodies should be listed in the legislation. To some extent, the bodies that I have put forward are a bumper bundle and someone may say that some should be included and not others; nevertheless, I think that they are important. The amendment lists, first,"““such organisations as appear to the Secretary of State to represent local authorities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland””," of which, in England and perhaps in Wales, the body would clearly be the Local Government Association. These are important issues. They affect the functioning and the financing of local authorities, and the organisations of local authorities should be consulted. Secondly, I suggest that the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Executive should be consulted because elections in Wales and Scotland are clearly an important part of the political situation there. The Scottish Parliament is the effective legislative body for local government elections in Scotland and therefore has a direct role within the law. That is one reason why local government elections in Scotland are excluded from the provisions of the Bill in various places. Finally, it seems to me that political parties should be statutorily consulted as they are the organisations that provide the lifeblood of the electoral system. Without political parties, the system would not exist. Political parties—especially the main ones—are integrally and importantly involved in the whole electoral system. I think that political parties would expect to put in representations on all kinds of matters relating to the elections, but legitimately so, and they should be statutorily consulted over the question of CORE and CORE schemes. This group of amendments is important because it is about consultation and the debate that takes place before schemes are brought in. I beg to move.