Electoral Administration Bill

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, for setting out what he is seeking to achieve with the amendments. I recognise the hand of the DRC and my friend Mr Massey in this—quite rightly too. I have a lot of sympathy with the amendments but they contain some technical difficulties, as the noble Lord will probably realise. I shall not go into those as I would rather deal with the essence of what he is seeking to do. We were keen not to end up with a position in which you have to produce information in all languages in all places, because it would be hugely burdensome, financially and administratively, particularly in areas where it is unnecessary; I know that the noble Lord is specifically referring to disability, but this covers languages. I am not keen to have ““shall”” instead of ““may”” on that basis, because it would not be appropriate. We are obviously very interested in making sure that those with disabilities have access and that people take their responsibilities seriously. The difficulty with Easy Read is that it is not a format in the traditional sense but a set of guidance, so I am not keen to have it in the Bill, as the noble Lord would expect. There are questions about how you give information and guidance to EROs to make sure that they provide information in what the noble Lord and I would recognise as Easy Read, but there are different ways of doing that. My experience of working on the implementation of the Mental Capacity Act was of the need to work with a number of different groups that recognise the different needs that people with disabilities have, so I would not want to put that in the Bill. We can consider the inclusion of other additional formats in Clause 36—for example, large print and audio, specifically because those are very clear formats. Perhaps the biggest way in which we can achieve what the noble Lord seeks is through the performance standards, which are set out in Clause 64. They will include measurements of the provision of access to the electoral process for different groups within the local electorate. Above anything, that could be a method by which we ensure that appropriate information is provided, because it is in a sense a way of judging the access that different groups have. Perhaps I can send the noble Lord more information about how we think that might work, and copy it to the DRC as well. My sympathy lies with the amendment. It is not the way that we can achieve the aim, not least because it does not work technically, but we have to be careful about making it absolute everywhere that people have to do everything. As I indicated, we can do more on audio and Braille, and on making sure that the performance standards reflect our shared desire for people with disabilities to be able to access information that they need appropriately. We do not want to accept Amendment No. 105 on the enlarged copy due to the variation in location and size of polling stations. It is not always possible to have a paper displayed clearly within the polling station. However, Clause 36(6) makes that unnecessary because the returning officer must provide an enlarged, hand-held sample ballot paper for partially sighted people at every polling station. That should avoid, or at least minimise, the problem of any polling station being unable to display a large ballot paper. We think we have addressed the problem in a different way from that of the noble Lord. I will not go through the other technical amendments, because the essence of the matter is covered. As I indicated, we are keen to support the principle behind it. We do not want to include the Easy Read format for the reasons that I have given, but we are looking at other formats and will try to address what lies behind the amendment by performance standards in particular. We are also keen to have any discussions that might help us to pursue the issue in other ways.