Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 82. We put forward similar amendments in Committee, as a way of probing; it will only be a further bit of probing this evening. As I am sure the Minister will remember, the amendments are designed to make sure that all postal votes are checked. Given the amount of fraud in the system, it seems only sensible that that should happen wherever possible. When I moved the similar amendment in Grand Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said in response: ""We agree in principle that all postal votes should be checked, and will wish to require 100 per cent to be checked when it is practicable to do so. A key factor in determining when it will be appropriate to move to 100 per cent checking is when there is deemed to be sufficient capacity within postal voting software systems to support 100 per cent checking".—[Official Report, 13/5/09; col. GC 435.]" He went on to talk about the then forthcoming elections for the European Parliament on 4 June. As his noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours mentioned earlier, we have had the European elections between Committee and Report. Therefore, while I appreciate that on 17 June it is relatively few days since those elections, it might be useful if the Minister were able to say a little about what the Government learnt from them. I do not mean from a political point of view, as I imagine that they have been feeling fairly sore about them ever since, with a mere 15 per cent of the vote. That is the lowest percentage of the vote that the Labour Party has had in modern history, if we take modern history back to 1919; I see my noble friend Lord Bates nodding. Even in those couple of weeks, the Government might have learnt something about the need for checking, so I wonder whether the Minister can say what level of checking there was in the different regions. He said that we required at least 20 per cent at the moment; I imagine therefore that 20 per cent were checked, and I look forward to confirmation of that. Can he say whether, in any of those areas, any of the returning officers felt it necessary to go beyond that 20 per cent because they began to think that there might be some fraud? That should be known at this relatively early stage. The same would be true of the local elections, which took place on the same day but were counted a couple of days earlier. Postal voting fraud seems more likely to happen in local elections; obviously, a smaller number of votes can make a big difference. In European elections it would be quite difficult, particularly with the d’Hondt system of counting the votes, for it to make much of a difference in the long run. As I understand it, county council votes would have been counted on a ward-by-ward basis, which might have indicated to individual returning officers that it might have been better to have checked more than 20 per cent in certain wards. I think that the European votes were counted on a local government basis—roughly in constituencies, sometimes a bit bigger, sometimes a bit smaller. Again, I would be interested to know whether there were any areas where the returning officers felt it necessary to make such checks. I hope that that is sufficient and that the Minister can give us some idea of what happened, and whether that indicates that there is a need to pursue these amendments at a later stage. I beg to move.