Scottish Parliament (Elections etc.) Order 2010

My Lords, the draft order consolidates the rules for the conduct of the Scottish Parliament elections and ensures that the accepted recommendations from the Gould report will apply for the May 2011 election. The draft order has been available to electoral administrators and political parties since it was laid in Parliament on 25 October, more than six months ahead of the 2011 election. Indeed, an earlier version of the draft order was circulated to electoral administrators in April and to political parties in June. Most of us in this House who are still here will recall that more than 180,000 votes were lost due to rejected ballot papers in the 2007 Scottish parliamentary and local government elections. It was agreed across the parties that that is totally unacceptable in a modern democracy and, understandably, there was widespread public outrage at the time. Mr Ron Gould, who was commissioned by the Electoral Commission to review the 2007 Scottish elections, concluded that six main factors contributed to confusion and to the level of rejected papers. First, he identified many problems on the design of ballot papers. Secondly, a new proportional voting system for local government elections had been introduced and voters were confused by combined elections that used two different electoral systems. Thirdly, there was poor co-ordination of the publicity campaigns of the Electoral Commission, the Scottish Government and others. Fourthly, Mr Gould identified problems caused by electronic counting. Fifthly, he found that there was fragmented and late legislation and a lack of involvement from electoral administrators in the legislative process. Sixthly, he said that there was a lack of co-ordination within the electoral community and a fragmented approach to planning. There is no doubt that public confidence needed to be repaired after the problems experienced in 2007, but I believe that a successfully administered UK general election in Scotland earlier this year will have gone some way towards doing that. I am pleased to say that the Scotland Office has continued the work started by the previous Administration on implementing those Gould recommendations that were accepted by the Government at the time. In relation to Gould’s recommendation that there should be a six-month cut-off period for changes in the law governing the conduct of elections, we have made sure that electoral administrators and political parties are well versed in the changes to legislation well in advance of May 2011. The target date of 5 November for making the order was always going to be challenging for whichever party won the recent general election. However, the projected date for making the order is still considerably earlier than at the previous Scottish Parliament election, for which the relevant order was made less than two months before the poll. The draft order applies to next year’s election the Gould and Scottish Affairs Committee recommendations that were accepted by the previous Government. I accept that the draft order is large, so I will focus on the main changes since 2007. However, before doing so, I want to refer to a correction slip that Members may have seen associated with the order. The correction slip makes a number of typographical corrections to the instrument that will become part of the final order for printing if it is approved by Parliament. It is also appropriate to comment on the four points on the order raised by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. Article 2 defines ““European Parliamentary Election””, although that term is not used in the text of the order. Rule 20(3)(a) in Schedule 2 includes within the minor errors in nomination papers that returning officers can correct "““errors as to a person’s electoral number””." However, unlike the nomination papers for election to the other place, the nomination papers for Scottish parliamentary elections do not contain proposers’ electoral numbers, which renders the reference unnecessary. Both those errors, while regrettable, have no effect on the operation of the order. The Scotland Office will ensure that returning officers are aware that the reference to electoral numbers can safely be ignored and the unnecessary provisions will be removed at the first suitable opportunity to amend the order. The committee also highlighted Article 3(1), which deals with disregarding late alterations to the register of electors, and Article 4(5), which deals with the effect of alterations to the register where there has been an appeal against a registration officer’s decision. Those provisions have been in substantially similar form in previous versions of the order since 2002 and, so far as I am aware, have not prejudiced voters or the effective administration of previous elections. On reviewing the articles in light of the committee’s comments, we are of the view that there is an overlap with the provisions of the Representation of the People Act 1983 that renders them largely unnecessary. Unfortunately, those points were not raised until after the draft order had been considered by the Electoral Commission and had been laid. We propose proceeding with the order in its current form and will revisit the provisions once we have had the benefit of consultation with the Electoral Commission and other interested parties. Since the equivalent provisions in previous orders have apparently not caused difficulty for voters or electoral administrators at the elections in 2003 or 2007, we do not anticipate there being any difficulty with the provisions being made as drafted.