Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, the introduction of personal identifiers for postal voters under the Electoral Administration Act 2006 has been a key measure in strengthening the integrity of postal voting. Under amendments made to the Representation of the People (England and Wales) Regulations 2001 following the introduction of the 2006 Act, we specified that at elections returning officers were required to check at least 20 per cent of returned postal votes. That is the minimum requirement, but they have a discretion to check 100 per cent if they wish to do so. If the returning officer considers that there is a real risk of fraud, he may specify from the outset that all postal voting statements will be checked. The current statutory provisions also provide the returning officer with the flexibility to begin with 20 per cent checking but to increase that level at later postal vote-opening sessions if any evidence of fraud emerges. I repeat what I said in Grand Committee: we agree in principle with the desire for 100 per cent of postal votes to be checked and we will make that a statutory requirement once it is safe and appropriate to do so. The regulations for the recent European parliamentary elections followed the provisions for parliamentary and local elections, and therefore required that at least 20 per cent of returned postal votes were checked. However, at the request of the regional returning officers, we made funding available to local returning officers to cover the costs for administrators in checking all returned postal votes. While we have been supportive of the 100 per cent checking of all returned postal votes, we continue to believe that it would be premature to mandate 100 per cent checking in law at this stage given, as I said in Grand Committee, that we cannot be certain that the necessary software systems are in place to deliver 100 per cent checking across all regions in Great Britain. In order to establish when it will be appropriate to move to mandatory checking of postal votes, it is imperative that we work with the Electoral Commission, electoral administrators and software suppliers to carefully review how the 100 per cent checking of postal votes worked in practice at the European parliamentary elections. For that reason, we do not consider it appropriate today to accept the amendment. It is possible to make the change to mandatory 100 per cent checking of postal votes through amendments to the existing secondary legislation. I want to reassure the noble Lord and other noble Lords that there will be no need to rely on there being a suitable Bill before Parliament for this change to be made. I hope that on that basis the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment.