TUESDAY 23 JUNE 1998

MR DAVID GARDNER, MR MIKE PENN, THE RT HON THE LORD PARKINSON AND MR CHRIS RENNARD

  440. I have got some questions on absent voting. If you do not mind I will just try and rattle through the questions. There are so many different small points that it would be helpful if we do it in that form. First of all, weekend voting. I see the Labour Party has suggested voting on Saturday and Sunday mornings but the Conservative evidence said it did not support the idea of Sunday voting. Would you however support an idea such as weekend voting, Saturday and Sunday voting, which would overcome any religious problems?
  (Lord Parkinson) I had a very big Jewish population in my constituency and Saturday voting would have been extremely unpopular obviously and could have disenfranchised a lot of people. Sunday voting: there is still quite a strong body of opinion who think they should not vote on a Sunday and that Sunday is not a day for voting.

  441. If you had both would that not solve the problem?
  (Lord Parkinson) I think it would make a very long drawn out period for the electoral officer sitting for two days. It would increase the expenses of the election. I honestly do not see what the disadvantages of Thursday are. We did have weekend voting, Saturday voting in local elections some years ago and it did not give rise to any bigger turnout. I am pretty sure it gave rise to a smaller one actually because people have other things to do.

  442. We had a general election on a Saturday too. At the risk of stating the obvious people are much more likely to be at work on week days and the advantage of weekend voting is that—
  (Lord Parkinson) But actually people have a routine when they go to work. At the weekend there tends to be much less routine. They might go away for the weekend. They might do a whole variety of things. I think ways of making it easier for people to vote, early voting for instance, is something we ought to look at. Myself I think we are far too stringent on the postal vote rules. I think there is no reason why people should not have a postal vote. It should not be a privilege. What I am saying is I would like to find ways of making it easier for people to vote but I am not sure that weekend voting would actually do that.

  443. Is the Liberal Democrat view in favour of weekend voting?
  (Mr Rennard) We are in favour of experimentation. You do not really know until you have tried it whether it will prove to be popular or not. I think if we start from the basic premise that increasing voter participation is a good thing then you have to favour experimentation that might allow voting over Saturday and Sunday. In that case I do not think you would have any unfair religious discrimination and the extra costs would only be marginal.

  Chairman: Did you want to ask Mr Gardner?

  444. It was fairly clear in the evidence but is there anything you wish to add?
  (Mr Gardner) Only that a great advantage (drawing on international and historical comparisons) rests in having weekend voting and we feel that would best be allied with some early voting as well at a site within each local authority, each constituency. I think there is a significant advantage in the use of school premises for polling stations and there is an increasing reluctance on the part of headteachers to close schools or close classes to use as polling stations and clearly that would not be a problem at the weekend and schools do tend to be the most convenient and accessible base for polling stations. There would be a dual advantage of convenience for voters and I think convenience for schools.

  445. Fine. Just coming on then to personal voting, a small point first which came up in both lots of evidence, the question of GPs charging for signing absent voting forms. As I understand it, all parties are against this but what is the solution? Should it be a duty on the GPs to sign the forms free of charge?
  (Mr Gardner) Our view is in the context of the current law then yes it should be, but we do not agree with the attestation laws and we believe that postal votes should be available for those people that need them and those people that want them. Effectively postal votes should be available on demand and we think that is only fair.

  446. Lord Parkinson?
  (Lord Parkinson) I broadly agree with that.
  (Mr Rennard) We have also come round to this view more recently. Instead of the nonsense that you can apply for a postal vote straight away without having any witness for one election and I do not see why you should not be able to do it for all elections.

  447. So all parties would actually support absent voting on demand? On the question of early voting this is supported I think in certainly the Labour and Conservative evidence but I want to elucidate what you mean by it. The Labour evidence talks about Sundays in advance, maybe council offices and libraries, and the Conservative evidence talks about supporting it in principle. Would you go as far for instance as Sweden where you can vote up to 24 days in advance in any post office in the country? Would you see it as a more localised thing?
  (Mr Rennard) I would be opposed to voting more than a week in advance. It does seem to me that all the political parties contrive their arguments to come together in the week of an election and if people are voting 24 days an issue may arise before polling day and people have already voted. So I think it should be nearer to the end. I think in terms of the scale of early voting it would be an exaggeration to say it increases turnout very considerably. I witnessed this in Texas some years ago where they had it in a shopping mall two weeks prior to polling day and they thought it was marvellous and they really liked it and it was a convenience but the effect on turnout was only one or two per cent despite the fact the polling station was open for a fortnight in a busy shopping mall and was open from nine in the morning to nine at night.

  448. You can still only vote once presumably!
  (Mr Rennard) That is right but the principle partly is in improving access for disabled people. Of course every polling station should have proper disabled access but many of them still do not and will not. It seems to me if you had one polling station within each electoral area for each council election or each Parliamentary constituency for Parliamentary elections which had state of the art disabled access that would make it easier for disabled people. Some of them do prefer going to cast their vote personally rather than by proxy or by post. I think a limited amount of polling stations such as one per electoral area at a local council election and one per Parliamentary constituency on something like Monday to Thursday would increase accessibility without increasing cost disproportionately.

  449. Lord Parkinson?
  (Lord Parkinson) One has to be very careful. Disabled people might not feel you are making proper provision for them if you say you can only vote in one particular place. They might want to go and vote where their wife votes if it is a husband and where their husband votes if it is a wife. They might feel discriminated against if you say you can only vote in one place. I feel we ought to work on accessability for the disabled and that is an interesting idea, taking the ballot box with the returning officer to the person outside. That might be acceptable. I think one has to be aware of the sensitivities of this but we all share a common aim which is to make it easier for disabled people to vote.

  450. Would you be in favour of early voting?
  (Lord Parkinson) Yes but I think in the week of the election is reasonable. I do think a prolonged period is wrong, as my colleague says, the elections build up to a climax and I would have thought having a ballot box in the Town Hall that week for instance would be helpful to people and we would support that.

  451. Mr Gardner?
  (Mr Gardner) We have early voting at the moment really. Postal voting or Service voting is early voting. I think this is just an extension of that and I agree with my colleagues that it should be two or three days with a location that has extremely good access. Hopefully it would normally be the Town Hall or a community centre or whatever.

  452. What about the idea of early voting elsewhere in the country? This is thinking of early voting as an alternative to postal voting rather than as something for people with mobility difficulties. For instance, if you are a long distance lorry driver and you end up in Scunthorpe when your vote is in Exeter the technology exists now for you to be able to vote where you are when you know that you are not going to be back in your constituency. Do you think this would be a good principle?
  (Lord Parkinson) I think one has to be careful about impersonation. I think that could make it much easier for people who were not the people they were supposed to be to cast a vote. I do not think one can extend this principle too far. I remember once the old slogan in various parts of Northern Ireland at one time was "vote early and vote often" and I think it could lend itself to abuse. Provided it was done with the aim of making it easier for people to vote and could be controlled I would not be opposed to anything that made it easier.

  453. Can I move on to talking about new technology using an on-line electoral register at polling station. One could actually offer a choice of polling stations and you could vote at any polling station in the constituency. Would that be a help as well?
  (Mr Rennard) I think that can only encourage participation and if it can be done in a way that people feel confident about I do not see why there should not be a choice of polling stations. I think the demarcation line between different polling stations is often arbitrary. My first ever vote was 100 yards away from my nearest polling station but the polling station I had to vote in was about a mile away which seemed ridiculous but you have to draw the line somewhere. If practically you could do that in a way you could be confident of I would be in favour of it.

  454. You would be happy about supermarket polling stations, people voting in a place most convenient to them?
  (Mr Gardner) I think it is very important that polling stations are placed where there is greatest accessibility in terms of the majority of voters which might not always be the most obvious polling station because a school might be outlying. There is quite a degree of evidence that the greater the proximity to the polling station the larger the turnout and I think that is very important. In terms of having the electoral register in this day and age where the local authority will have at its disposal all the PCs and the schools or community centres will have the technology where they can plug in, I think the benefits are so tremendous that people should be able to vote at whatever their most convenient polling station is, albeit within that constituency or that district, and there may actually be some staffing savings as well in terms of the assistance to the presiding officers that would outweigh any additional cost in terms of the technology. That seems a very sensible step in order to promote voting. Indeed there was a lot of publicity recently about Croydon which earmarked two supermarkets but of course what people did not realise is that a lot of people went to the supermarket to vote because it was their local supermarket but they did not actually live in that polling district so while in those polling districts the reduction in turnout was five per cent less than the other polling districts within that ward, so it had some success, the real success could not be measured because most of the customers of those supermarkets could not actually use it to vote. I think the use of supermarkets and use of post offices and so forth very much comes in line and has to come along with flexibility about people's polling place.

  455. Turning lastly to the question of access for people with disabilities. Do you think the standards of access should be laid down at national level? There is a lot encouragement at the moment but there are no minimum standards. Do you see any dangers in this?
  (Lord Parkinson) In my old constituency there was one little area where they used to bring a caravan and park it for the election day because there just was not a suitable place. I think it would have been very hard to devise a caravan that actually met those minimum standards and it would have been very expensive to produce another sort of place. So I think it is very difficult to be rigid about this. I think perhaps it is easier for the people inside the caravan to go outside and help the disabled person, take the ballot box out and let the vote be cast there. I think where people vote does vary enormously and setting a minimum standard could be quite difficult I would have thought.

  456. Would you agree with that?
  (Mr Gardner) To some extent I think we could be firmer in terms of the minimum standards than the current Act. I understand the Home Office are considering now 100 per cent grants for permanent adaptions for polling places and I think that would be very welcome because at the moment most money is actually spent on grants for temporary ramps and so forth. You spend more in the long-term than you would do in terms of permanent adaptions. I tend to think that there is a balance to be drawn. On the one hand access for those people with disabilities is very important but it should not be at the expense of access for able-bodied people so there may be a spanking new community centre which is right on the edge of the polling district but there may be an old church hall that is not so accessible right in the middle of the polling district which is convenient for the majority of electors. I think the answer rests more in better application of grants and more flexibility about where people vote so they can vote in other polling districts if necessary.

  457. Finally a question about touch screens and telephone voting. Do you think the time will inevitably come?
  (Mr Rennard) It is unlikely to come soon and I am not sure many people would feel it was user-friendly technology. I think the older people who we have the least problem getting to vote at the moment would particularly feel this was an unfriendly way of voting and it may discourage them from voting and be anti-participation rather than encouraging it.
  (Lord Parkinson) I go back to the point I made earlier. I think we have to be careful to make sure the system is secure and personation must not become easier. The person whose vote is alleged to appear on the ballot paper has to be the person entitled to put the cross and I think until we have the safeguards that you would need in giving people this flexibility we should be a shade careful because people do cheat.
  (Mr Gardner) We have experimented with telephone voting in internal party elections and it has proved just as secure and reasonably successful in increasing participation. I think this is coming but I would agree with my colleagues that we need to be very careful in its introduction that it does not affect the integrity of the ballot or faith in the democratic process. I think we need further discussion about this and we would like to see some experimentation and piloting before it is introduced on a universal basis.

  458. Just a couple of points about candidates. Not the issue about misleading names on papers because I think my colleague is going to deal with that in a minute but issues about eligibility and particularly the issue of proliferation of candidates. While obviously that is an issue in some particular seats with a very large number of candidates, how large a problem generally do you think it is? Do you think this is something we ought to be thinking about regulating bearing in mind the balance between regulation and democratic right?
  (Mr Gardner) We need to draw a distinction between people who stand as an obvious device to confuse the electorate and those who stand for however exotic the cause to promote their views and they are just exercising their democratic right. In general the Labour Party has no problem with the increasing number of candidates in elections. We think that is healthy in a democracy and I do not think there is any evidence that it actually confuses voters but, on the other hand, we are pleased that the Government is taking legislative measures to stop copycat candidates effectively.

  459. You have indicated there might be a case for increasing the deposit, making the threshold higher. To what level? Would it be as high as the Conservative's recommendation of £2,000?
  (Mr Gardner) The deposit was last increased in 1983 and I think it might be timely to increase it from £500 to £1,000. I do not think we would favour increasing it beyond that because of the right of people who feel strongly to stand. There may also be a case for increasing the number of signatures at Parliamentary elections but while we want to stop frivolous candidates or those who are exploiting a commercial cause I do not think we would want in any way to prevent people from exercising their democratic rights.
  (Lord Parkinson) I think there is a case for increasing the deposit to £1,000 perhaps £2,000 because there is a cost to each candidate. Each candidate once you are on the ballot payment is entitled to free post. There is a cost and a frivolous candidate who is just mucking about actually puts the taxpayer to quite a lot of expense. My position is very similar once again—this is a very pleasant morning—to my colleague on my left. I do not want to discourage anyone who has a serious point to make but I think frivolous candidates who are costing the taxpayer should put some of their own money at risk and I would be in favour of increasing the deposit.