General Election

Inflation and Local Authority Budgets

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Andrew Coulson

Our two main political parties are locked in a strange debate about the next budget, on 6 March. The elephant in the room is the underfunding of local government.

In the nearly 14 years of Conservative government, the core spending power of local authorities has been cut by 27% in real terms.[1] The County Councils Network has “warned that its members are under extreme pressure, and that the authorities they represent are set to overspend by almost £650m this year due to spiralling costs, particularly in children’s social care and home to school transport, which was contributing to a £4b funding deficit for those authorities over the next three years”. In addition an increase in the National Living Wage is expected to costs these councils £230m next year.[2] This has happened at a time when the ability of councils to raise their council taxes has been held down, for 2024-5 to below 5% for all but a tiny number of councils.[3]  One of its consequences has been the inability of the employers in local government and the NHS to negotiate pay settlements which reflect the rate of inflation, or anything near it.

My reading of the present position is that Gove on the one hand and Rachel Reeves on the other are playing chicken. Each are waiting for the other to move first. They both know that after the general election a new government will have to settle the long-standing pay disputes in the public sector, and that it is not possible, year after year, for the pay of staff employed by local government and the NHS to rise by less the rate of inflation. The consequences are visable: depressed morale, a haemorrhage of experienced staff, and dependence on immigration to employ new staff. Rachel hopes that the Conservatives will be forced to confront this before the election. Gove wants the Labour Party to commit to doing it, because as of now any settlement is unfunded.

My view is that the understanding of inflation both by the two main political parties and the Bank of England is naive, especially as it relates to government policy. The starting point should be that inflation affects the distribution of income. It is an intrinsically political process. Most large companies and the richest people have means through which they can compensate for any inflation. Those who do not have the power or muscle to do so pay the price. Thomas Piketty[4] showed that inflation was the main means by which the middle classes paid for much of the costs of two world wars.[5]  In those inflations, and in the last significant inflation in the UK, which followed the OPEC hikes in oil prices in the 1970s, the trade unions were strong enough to ensure that wages rose at around the rate of inflation. This is no longer the case.

Yet the recent inflation has given the Government unprecedented increases in tax, which means that, if they so choose, they can afford wage increases. Most of this extra income arises from not raising the ceilings on higher rates of tax. Jeremy Hunt would like to use it to lower rates of income tax. The IMF (no less!) has told him that it is not appropriate to do so at this time.[6] The main reason, not always clearly stated, is that there are many unfunded challenges, but of these the public sector pay disputes (and perhaps the need for additional spending on defence, where difficulties in retention and recruitment are also partly a matter of pay settlements not keeping up with inflation) are top of the list. 

Economists in the UK, the USA and other developed countries have had little to say in recent years about inflation. As if it is no longer a problem, which it probably isn’t if inflation stays at around 2%. But the present inflations, driven by wars, the climate crisis and the lockdowns, are another matter. Economic theory is little help. All the traditional theories have been shown to be false. It is not true that inflation and unemployment are opposites: we can have both together, so-called stagflation. Or that it can be controlled by limiting the supply of money, which is not possible when most of it is created by banks which lend far more than they hold in deposits. Or that it is either created by unexpected demands or by unexpected costs.

The British Government urgently needs to resolve the disputes about pay in the public sector, and to do so recognising that most local government employees are substantially worse off than they were before. The Labour spokesperson Angela Rayner has made the practical proposal of negotiating a three year settlement.[7]  It cannot come soon enough.

Andrew Coulson is a nationally-recognised expert on scrutiny in local government and is particularly interested in governance by committee.

[1] Local Government Association, https://www.local.gov.uk/about/campaigns/save-local-services/save-local-services-council-pressures-explained 2024

[2] https://www.countycouncilsnetwork.org.uk/councils-in-significantly-worse-financial-position-after-the-autumn-statement-with-seven-in-ten-now-unsure-if-they-can-balance-their-budget-next-year/

[3] A prescient academic law professor, writing as long ago as 1984, wrote “It seems to me that the provisions for rate-capping … are little removed from a proposal to replace elected councils by administrative units. For a very long time, local inhabitants have enjoyed the right to elect local representatives with the power to tax, and so to determine, within modest political limits, what level of services shall be provided in the locality. … I have no difficulty in saying of an Act to put a limit on the rates leviable by a local authority that it is politically unconstitutional”. John Griffiths, in the Preface to Half a Century of Municipal Decline 1935-1985, George Allen and Unwin, 1985, p.xii

[4] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014

[5] The point was also made by one of his critics, Joseph T Salano, “War and the Money Machine: Concealing the costs of War beneath the Veil of Inflation” in John V Denson (ed.) The Costs of War, Routledge, 2nd edn. 1999 

[6] David Milliken and William Schomberg,  https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/imf-cuts-uk-growth-outlook-2025-after-stronger-past-performance-2024-01-30/

[7] “Rayner floats three year pay deal”. Municipal Journal, 14 Feb. 2024

Lessons from former ministers could help a new government prepare properly

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Leighton Andrews

Keir Starmer’s shadow ministerial team has now started the access talks with the civil service which Prime Ministers traditionally permit in the run-up to a general election. These talks are designed to help the civil service familiarise itself with both shadow ministers and the potential policies of a new government, and to help shadow ministers understand the mindset of senior civil servants.

Not all shadow ministers transition to the same policy role in government, of course. Tony Blair’s former chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, revealed in his 2010 book The New Machiavelli how in their access talks, they had to arrange for one Permanent Secretary to meet two different shadow ministers – the one who currently had the portfolio, and the one they intended to do the job if New Labour won the election.

There is no manual on how to be a minister, and new ministers have often found themselves taking time to adapt to their new roles, aided by their private offices whom they meet on their first day after their appointment. Interviews contained in the Ministers Reflect archive of the Institute for Government, now almost 150-strong, confirm the centrality of the private office to a new minister’s life. They help them settle in, introduce them to the routines and artefacts of ministerial life, and prepare them for their first performances in the role. But private offices are double agents, warns former Conservative Cabinet Minister Ken Clarke, feeding information to ministers on the running of the department and feeding information back to the Permanent Secretary on the new minister.

The civil service is not, most former ministers believe, a conspiracy designed to stop ministers carrying out their objectives. Most praise the support they had from civil servants. But there is a genuine tension between the activist desire of ministers to ‘make a difference’ and the long-established processes of the civil service machine. My research in the Ministers Reflect archive suggests that over the last quarter-century, ministers have taken a stronger interest in issues of delivery and implementation, and ministers from all parties have come to express frustration with the delivery capacity of the civil service.

The interest in delivery and implementation has been driven from the centre of government: the Prime Minister’s Office, the Cabinet Office and also the Treasury. New Labour established a Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. The Coalition abolished it – a mistake, admitted David Cameron and his fixer Oliver Letwin later – and then created an Implementation Unit to take things forward. Ministers developed their own techniques for checking their department’s delivery performance. Of course, an interest in delivery does not itself mean delivery has got better!

Traditionally ministers were appointed to leadership roles without any formal training. Learning was something you did on the job., Ministerial training is now on the agenda, and there have been training sessions organised both informally outside the government machine and more recently within it. But former ministers tend to believe it is their prior political activity which gets them appointed as ministers, while it is their prior work experience which helps them navigate their roles.

Ministers are appointed to positions of leadership by prime ministers and first ministers. Of course, it is what they do with that position that matters, and not simply their possession of authority deriving from appointment. Former Conservative Cabinet Minister Eric Pickles tells new ministers ‘don’t occupy the post, do something with it’. Former Labour Home and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw reminds them ‘you’re not just a place-holder’ .

Ministers perform a range of forms of leadership work. Their leadership identity – their ministerial mindset – necessarily develops over time as they work to understand their role. Their leadership takes a number of forms – collective, as members of a ministerial or Cabinet team; departmental, in a dual leadership role with their Permanent Secretary, Director General of divisional director; or as system leaders (for example in Education or Health). They perform as leaders publicly and privately; they take leadership decisions; they carefully manage their time as leaders. At some point, for whatever reason, they exit the leadership stage.

Will we see a new set of UK ministers soon? Are some now set for the exit? Time will tell. But time spent learning from the experience of former ministers is never wasted. After the minister is appointed, there’s little time left for learning….or life outside the job, come to that.

Leighton Andrews’ book Ministerial Leadership is published by Palgrave Macmillan on 17 February. More information here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-50008-4

Leighton Andrews is Professor of Practice in Public Service Leadership at Cardiff Business School and teaches and researches government and leadership. Formerly Minister for Education and Skills and Minister for Public Services in the Welsh Government from 2009-16, he was Assembly Member for the Rhondda from 2003-16. www.leightonandrews.live

Picture credit: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1tvcrzdvsbtj4pQQ1g7N2Tn/rare-photos-from-inside-number-10-downing-street

Voter ID – A “Poisoned Cure” and Other Verdicts

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Chris Game

It’s easy to claim, but there are times when I miss not having classes of students to endeavour to entertain – partly because, at least from a distance, it can seem rather easier now than back when I had that responsibility.

One gift I’d certainly have used during this year’s exam revision period was the YouTube rap video made by T-Dawg – aka Broadland and South Norfolk Councils’ Managing Director, Trevor Holden – ‘reminding’ intending voters in the May local elections to take photo ID with them to the polling station. Like the whole topic, the video received a mixed reception, but it certainly got my vote (sorry about that!) as an introduction to this split-blog’s attempted overview of the profusion of recently released Voter ID material. I’ve at least flick-read most of it, so you won’t have to worry about not doing so.

First, though, an additional declaration of personal interest, referring back to that  opening paragraph. My students weren’t, of course, learning directly about ‘political literacy’, but high on my short list of ‘research stats I’ve managed to remember for more than a few weeks’ was the depressing finding in the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Political Literacy’s 2021 report that, of a 3,300 sample of secondary school teachers in England, only 1% [felt] “fully prepared” to teach courses aimed at developing young people’s political literacy.

The ”fully”, omitted in some reports, was in the question and doubtless partly explains the dispiriting response. But anyway the finding was highlighted by the APPG, led directly to the creation of the social enterprise Shout Out UK (SOUK), and these two bodies’ influence is clearly evident in some of the Electoral Commission’s recommendations for more focused information and awareness raising.

There had, of course, been earlier assessments of May’s elections – principally the Electoral Commission’s Interim Analysis in mid-June, reporting the anonymised returns from the Voter Identification Evaluation Forms (VIDEF) that Returning Officers were required to complete (see table below), plus results of three YouGov pre- and post-election public awareness surveys of between 1,700 and 3,700 adults each.

This first, stat-heavy part of the blog will present, in highly summarised form, some of the key data, with the second covering some of the more recent interpretative contributions – including that of the All-Party Parliamentary Group, from which I’ve appropriated the blog’s slightly giveaway title.

First, some scene-setting stats, taken from the final report. The total electorate was 27.3 million, ballot box turnout 32%. For the record, Labour took 33% of the vote and control of 70 councils; Conservatives 28.6% and 33; Lib Dems 37% and 20.  5.2 million postal ballots were initially issued to 19% of the electorate, 3.5 million (67%) of which were returned, of which 89,000 were rejected, mainly for missing or mismatched signatures or dates of birth. OK, it’s only 2.6%, but, after making the effort, it was higher than I might have guessed.

 Key findings from the analysis included that:

  • Immediately post-election, in areas with elections, 92% of people in England were aware they now needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station. They weren’t asked, however, if that awareness extended to knowing that they couldn’t obtain ID – e.g. the Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) – on polling day itself.
  • Awareness was significantly lower (74%) among those who didn’t already have an accepted form of ID – and, unsurprisingly, among youngest age groups (82% for 18-24 year olds), Black and minority communities (82%), etc.   
  • Approximately 89,500 people applied for a VAC before the 25 April deadline, some 28,000 certificates being subsequently used – i.e. under one-third of the 250,000 to 350,000 estimated likely not to have any other acceptable ID.
  • At least 0.25% of people (c.14,000) who had tried to vote at a polling station were not issued with a ballot paper because of the ID requirement, but this excludes those who reacted to the ID reminder before they could be recorded in the data – thereby inevitably underestimating, as do the post-election analyses generally, the actual impact of the voter ID requirement.

This was essentially the ‘headline’ picture we had to content ourselves with over the summer, until quite suddenly, come September, there was a whole lot more – and it seems logical, if not strictly chronological, to start with the Electoral Commission’s full-scale Voter ID Demographic Analysis Research. The analysis aimed to identify patterns in areas where relatively higher or lower proportions of intending voters were turned away from polling stations due to the new ID requirement.

18 authorities with apparently relatively socioeconomically diverse wards were selected, including the West Midlands’ Coventry and Sandwell – the latter being the sampled borough with the nationally highest “initially turned away” percentage of 3%.  The Census-based ‘proxy’ variables measured were unemployment, ethnicity, household deprivation, and social renters.

Hyper-summarising, the analysis suggested there was “a potential linear relationship” between each selected socio-economic variable and the proportion of voters initially turned away and those who didn’t return to vote. These results are obviously tabulated, but also graphed, as illustrated in what is described as the “moderate relationship” between ethnicity and the proportions initially turned away.

Overall, 13 of the 18 authorities showed at least a moderate relationship between the independent variables and the proportion of voters initially turned away, and 6 exhibited “strong relationships between one or more independent variables”. Strongest correlations were with areas having a high proportion of non-white British individuals, higher deprivation, and higher unemployment.   

Following this specifically Voter ID-focussed report, the Electoral Commission had published in June its overall Report on the May 2023 Local Elections in England, which it updated in early September. It made nine main recommendations, including increasing awareness of the support available for disabled voters, and improving data collection at polling stations.  

Four, however, related specifically to voter ID: review the list of accepted ID; improve access to the Voter Authority Certificate (see above); improve options for voters who don’t have or can’t access any accepted form of accepted ID – e.g. allowing ‘attestation’ by a named and verified elector; and polling station staff to continue to collect voter ID impact data at future elections.

Which brings us to about mid-September, already some way over this blog’s preferred length, and quite the wrong time, therefore, to address the “poisoned cure” and other reactions to these primarily statistical analyses – which will follow, with luck, fairly shortly.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Voter ID – the warning lights are flashing

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Picture credit: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-the-governments-mandatory-voter-id-plans-are-a-terrible-idea/

Jason Lowther

Previous columns have urged a cautious approach to the introduction of photographic voter ID in England.  The May 2023 elections provided the first nationwide test of the system, and early analyses are highlighting some significant issues. 

Elections took place in 230 areas in England and around 27 million people were eligible to vote.  This week, the Association of Electoral Administrators (the people in councils who actually deliver elections) issued their post-match analysis, highlighting ‘the fragility of the system’ and recommending a fundamental review of the country’s electoral arrangements.   

With less than four months between the enactment of the new legislation and polling day, which included new statutory duties on accessibility as well as voter ID, councils faced a huge and risky task to administer the new system effectively.  They also faced significantly more paperwork, with new forms to track electors unable to vote and new data capture requirements.  The AEA report significant impact on polling officials: ‘many of our members reported POs feeling overwhelmed by paperwork and the time it takes to complete throughout polling day and at the close of poll’.

The AEA report reveals that the government’s website to provide free photo ID to those needing Voter Authority Certificates (VACs) failed to work properly from its launch in January and many functions were still not available by the deadline to apply for a VAC for 4 May poll.  Updates were still being issued two weeks before polling day.  Almost 90,000 people applied for VACs by the deadline, well short of the Electoral Commission’s earlier estimate of 250,000 – 350,000 applications based on the proportion of local election voters who did not have suitable ID.  Many didn’t know they would need one – just over half (57%) of the overall population and those who said they did not already have photo ID were aware of VACs in May, according to the Electoral Commission.

The types of photo ID acceptable under the legislation proved rather esoteric.  Passports are accepted, but what about a passport from Zimbabwe or a British format immigration document?  London Oyster 60+ cards are accepted, but not the Merseytravel Over 60s pass which has similar application checks.  Photo IDs issued by councils themselves, such as taxi licences and gun licences, were presented but could not be accepted. Similarly police warrant cards, NHS and other emergency services photo ID were presented but unable to be accepted.

The Electoral Commission’s interim report on the election was issued on 23rd June.  They found that immediately before polling day, 87% of people in England (excluding London, where there were no elections) were aware that they needed to show photo ID to vote at a polling station – implying that around 3.5 m potential voters were not aware as the poll approached.  Awareness was lowest amongst young people, BME communities, those who haven’t previously voted in local elections, and people who didn’t have the necessary forms of photo ID.

To avoid voters queuing for a ballot paper and being turned away, in some areas ‘greeters’ were appointed to meet electors as they arrived and check whether they had an accepted form of photo ID with them.  Others provided posters and banners to explain the requirements outside polling stations.  Polling stations with greeters recorded a smaller proportion of people ‘turned away’ inside the polling station compared to those without greeters.  As a result of voters receiving advice outside the polling stations, and because of some other data issues, we should treat statistics on numbers of electors unable to vote with caution. Data collected inside polling stations shows that at least at least 0.7% of people (39,000 voters) who tried to vote at a polling station were initially turned away but around two-thirds of those people (63%) returned later in the day and were able to vote.  In some councils more than 1 in 100 electors were turned away.

More worryingly, the Electoral Commission found that 4% of people who said they did not vote in these elections gave an unprompted reason related to the ID rules, and the proportion of non-voters giving an ID-related reason rose from 4% to 7% when survey respondents were selecting from a list of reasons.

It was not possible to capture reliable demographic data on people who were not able to vote because of the ID requirement because electoral law did not allow polling station staff to collect demographic information about individuals who were turned away.  In the EC survey, disabled people and those who are unemployed were more likely than other groups to give a reason related to ID for not voting.

Voter confidence doesn’t seem to have been massively improved.  In fact, the EC found 68% of people were confident that the May elections were well run, compared to 73% in 2022.  For those who said they were not confident, the most common reason selected (by 46%) was that “some people were unable to vote due to the ID requirement”.

We await the Electoral Commission’s full report in the autumn.

Meanwhile, I close with an interesting comment made at the National Conservatism conference on the 15th May 2023 by former Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg:

Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.  We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

Oops!  We lost two Mayors – let’s overthrow a sensible system

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Chris Game

I assume it was the 2021 mayoral election results that finally clinched it. With the Conservatives winning just two of that year’s 13 mayoralties to Labour’s 11, it was time to enact the party’s 2019 manifesto pledge – “to continue to support the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system of voting, as it allows voters to kick out politicians who don’t deliver, both locally and nationally”.  Specifically, the Supplementary Vote (SV) system – despite also, like electoral systems generally, featuring the kicking-out of politicians – had to be replaced for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections asap.

True, the counting of electors’ supplementary – second preference – votes had just enabled West Midlands Conservative Mayor, Andy Street, to be re-elected with the useful perk of a narrow overall majority of votes cast, along with the party’s rising star, Tees Valley’s Ben Houchen, who’d swept in with nearly 73% of first preference votes.

No supplementary second round necessary there, but nor should there have been, reformers reckoned, in Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, where the established Conservative Mayor, James Palmer, had been a victim of the dastardly SV ‘system’. He’d comfortably led Labour’s Nik Johnson after the count of first preference votes – by nearly 18,000 votes or 8%. Yet, by some foul trickery, or possibly because he simply wasn’t as broadly appealing his opponent, after the counting of relevant second preference votes, he’d fallen behind: 48.7% to new Mayor Johnson’s 51.3%.  Despite Government Ministers repeatedly claiming that “the candidate with the most votes” lost, he hadn’t. He’d won – he just wasn’t Conservative.

Anyway, Palmer threw what looked like a wobbly, promptly retired from politics, and SV elections for Mayors and PCCs would be retired with him, though not in time for last May’s Mayorals, which very nearly produced a Croydon re-run of that Cambs & Peterborough result. First count: Jason Perry (Con) 34.8%, Val Shawcross (Lab) 32.7%. Second count: Perry 50.4%, Shawcross 49.6% – the candidate with the leadership-resonant first name just edged it.

By then, though, the FPTP legislation was well under way. The next Mayoral elections – this May – would use FPTP, as will next May’s PCC elections. It seemed a good time for a review of the whole SV lifespan, facilitated by the invaluable statistical records of my polling specialist friend, David Cowling.

Quickish review: the Supplementary Vote is obviously not a proportional system, which would be tricky when electing single Mayors, Police & Crime Commissioners, etc.  Rather, it’s a simplified majoritarian system, enabling voters to rank their two most favoured candidates on the ballot paper in order of preference.

If no candidate gets over 50% of first preference votes on the first count, just the top two candidates continue to a run-off, thereby encouraging candidates from the outset to seek support beyond their core supporter base. The winner may still get less than half the total vote, but will need significantly wider support than under FPTP, and especially under FPTP with a lowish turnout.

Both, however – ultra-topical insert – are more democratic than this past weekend’s Spanish ‘mayoral’ elections, in which Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, almost certainly the nation’s best-known mayor both at home and abroad, is seeking a third term of office … but as Leader of a two-party socialist coalition – for Spanish mayors aren’t even elected by ‘the people’, but indirectly by fellow councillors.

The name – Supplementary Vote – may have been new when it was ‘invented’ by an early 1990s Labour Working Party, but essentially similar ‘preferential’ systems had been quite widely used internationally for ages. France’s Presidential ‘double-ballot run-off’ was one example, but most obviously there was the Alternative Vote – the actual subject of Winston Churchill’s senseless but oft-recycled quote, about it rewarding “the most worthless votes given for the most worthless candidates” – although today’s Conservative critics have no difficulty unearthing and redirecting it to SV.

I’m old enough to recall lecturing about the SV’s UK ‘invention’ by a Labour Party working party in the early 1990s and the even then revered ‘psephologist’, the late Sir David Butler, getting uncharacteristically incensed about it – calling it “silly”!  But his sphere of matchless expertise was parliamentary elections, with turnouts at the time of consistently over 70%. Even they, though, have slipped a bit since, and well over a third of today’s MPs won less than 50% of their constituency vote, and that’s an awful lot of voters left feeling unrepresented.

Local (including mayoral) election turnouts, however, are proverbially in another ballpark – and this is probably the blog’s key point. Except when they coincide with parliamentary elections, they average around 40%, and that’s on good days. PCC turnouts, unsurprisingly, are significantly lower still – not one of the 39 areas in England and Wales managing even 51% in May 2021, and Durham and Wiltshire not quite achieving 17%.  All of which, under FPTP, will mean large percentages of the votes of the most civically conscientious and politically committed citizens being ‘wasted’ and, arguably even more importantly, the mandates of the elected mayors and PCCs correspondingly diminished.

And then there’s the loss of the visual aids – for SV also produces what I only recently discovered are called ‘Sankey charts’, illustrating how the second-round count both produces a winner able to claim a statistical majority of positive votes and a dramatic reduction in the proportion of ‘wasted votes’ – on the part of voters choosing not to make use of their possible second choice. Good, isn’t it!

The Supplementary Vote, then, still favours the two main parties, but, returning to recent history and as shown in the following table, one in three of the 67 SV Mayoral elections going to second counts were won by Lib Dems, Independents and other parties. Labour won by far the most mayoral contests, but they also lost most in second counts. All of which contributes to SV hovering around mid-table in global democratic rankings of electoral systems – nothing to shout home about, except when compared with FPTP’s ranking as ‘least democratic’, apart from maybe Djibouti’s ‘Party Block Voting’.

SV’s statistical merits apply in principle to any elections, but particularly to a set in which two-thirds of turnouts were under 50% and nearly a third under 40% (see table). First, it hugely reduces the number and proportion of so-called ‘wasted votes’ – those cast for neither of the leading two candidates – and secondly it ensures that the winning candidate can claim the majority backing not necessarily of all voters, but at least of those the system counted.

My presumptuous guess would be that West Midlands PCC Simon Foster likes knowing, and possibly even mentioning now and then, that he was elected with 53.7% of the vote, rather than 45.5%. And, while I don’t know any of these people, that Surrey PCC Lisa Townsend (one of 12 women PCCs, if you were wondering) definitely prefers her 58% to 33.5%.

Time to start closing, by checking out the arguments Ministers sought to make to justify their replacement of SV with FPTP – or, rather, plundering the critique the Constitution Unit’s Alan Renwick and Alejandro Castillo-Powell made at the time.

  1. That SV increases the number of spoilt ballots – possibly, very fractionally; but, if so, why not work on improving ballot paper design?
  2. It allows ‘loser candidates’ to win – stupid argument (see above); they won the election they were required to contest.
  3. It reduces the accountability voters have in expressing a clear choice – but increases it by saving them from calculating how best to cast their single vote ‘tactically’ to elect or defeat a particular candidate.
  4. “FPTP is the world’s most widely used electoral system.”  Tricky – needs its own separate blog; also a bit silly. Depends a bit on whether you mean number of countries or number of voters. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the US give FPTP a head start. More to the point, a 650-Member legislature isn’t the same as a single elected mayor or PCC.
  5. SV is an “anomaly … out of step’ with other elections in England.” True, it was decisively rejected in the 2011 referendum for the election of MPs, but these are the country’s only public elections to executive offices. In short, they’re completely different.  

None of which, of course, stands the remotest chance of influencing, never mind changing, anything … but it was quite enjoyable to ‘research’ and write!

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.

Picture credit: Theresa Thompson at www.flickr.com/photos/theresasthompson/

Voter ID – in theory, practice and mirrors

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Picture credit: https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/why-the-governments-mandatory-voter-id-plans-are-a-terrible-idea/

Chris Game

“ID cards for polls are nothing more than suppression of voters” – D Butler. I’d forgotten precisely when and where I first read this pronouncement – May 2021 in The Times, as it turned out – shortly after the Government’s Elections Bill, now Act, was published. But I certainly remembered it.

Partly the phrasing, as personally I’d have gone for “nothing less than”, if I was hoping to galvanise readers into outraged protest. The seriously striking bit, though, was obviously the author.

Since first becoming fascinated by elections and electoral studies – thanks initially to Prof Richard Rose at the Univ of Manchester, then the late Prof Tony King at Essex – there has only ever been one D Butler in that file of my academic consciousness. Populariser of the Greekish word ‘psephology’ for the study of elections, and original authority figure in the BBC’s General Elections coverage: Nuffield College, Oxford’s Sir David Butler, who died earlier this month, aged 98.    

I knew him – distantly, but sufficiently to know he’d never have uttered anything resembling that strongly opinionated opening sentence – and, of course, ’twas not he. Rather, as I almost immediately realised, it was Dawn Butler: recent candidate for Deputy Labour Party Leader and, it so happens, MP for the London Brent constituency in which I first voted – shortly before she was born.

All of which might have excused a quickish blog return to the contentious Voter ID issue – within weeks of its last coverage – even if it hadn’t once more been prominently in the news this past fortnight, with Parliament finally getting its first full sight of the Government’s Voter Identification Regulations and the Electoral Reform Society leading the call for a parliamentary inquiry into its implementation.

The Elections Act requires voters, from next May, to produce photo ID at UK Parliamentary and most English local elections. And now, a mere six months or so later, we – and the local election officials required to implement them – finally have the Government’s list of acceptable forms of ID and proposed guidelines governing initially next May’s council elections: Coronation permitting, in most English councils – though not Birmingham, to save you checking.

The guidelines run to just the 344 pages, taking effect probably in January. Leaving already pressured election officials with minimal time (and as yet undetailed costs, beyond a ‘ballpark’ £180 million per decade) to process and issue electoral identity documents for those who gradually discover they don’t have acceptable forms of photo ID. Plus the near certainty that at least some would-be, and quite likely upset, voters will be turned away at their polling stations – which could add to the fun for the small army of volunteer poll workers.

At which point I should indicate my personal viewpoint. Instinctively – and certainly predating Birmingham’s own 2004 embarrassment of six Labour councillors getting elected through what was judicially described as a “massive, systematic and organised” postal voting fraud campaign – I’ve long broadly supported, in principle, stronger election integrity rules in general and photo voter ID specifically.

And I have recounted in these columns the reactions of some of my overseas students to the frankly casual ID confirmation procedures they’ve observed when accompanying me to the polling station. Their surprise at the staff’s indifference to whether I’ve brought my poll card identification; and almost shock as I ‘helpfully’ point on the register to what I claim is my name and address.

So why my support in principle for photographic ID – as well as nowadays that of a substantial majority of voters themselves and the conditional backing of the independent Electoral Commission?  Simples!  Elections are the engines of our democratic system. They should be seen by all as important, and that perceived importance is diminished by not having visibly more robust voter identification procedures – like virtually all other ‘democratic’ nations.

On the Crime Prevention Research Center’s database of Europe’s nearly 50 such countries, “only the United Kingdom” does not require government-issued photo voter ID to vote in national elections.

Correction!  Not the UK, just GB. Northern Ireland introduced voter ID nearly 20 years ago, and now has numerous forms of acceptable photographic ID – including, as well as passports and driving licences, a free Electoral Identity Card, plus senior, disabled and blind persons’ ‘SmartPasses’.

Since when, the Electoral Commission has found that, far from prompting polling day protest riots, voters’ confidence that elections are well-run has steadily increased to at least match the levels in other UK regions[1]. The demonstrable message has been not that we elsewhere in the UK are uniquely virtuous and trustworthy – though even Ministers concede that fraud levels are minimal, if not invariably seen as such. Rather, it’s that for us – and successive Governments – voting has been seen as less big a deal than, say, collecting a parcel at a post office.

Until now, that is, following a decade of quite dramatic change in the voting behaviour of particularly our 18 to 24-year-olds. Their turnouts are invariably lower than the average, but still high enough to hurt. In the 2010 General Election these mostly fledgling voters split equally across the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems, roughly 30% for each. By 2019, almost overlooked in the Conservatives’ overwhelming win, it was Labour 52%, Conservatives 28%, Lib Dems 11%.

That’s what evidently prompted the rush – not ‘personation’ or fraud, which for polling station voting are acknowledged as negligible. Rather, a possible early General Election campaign in which the Conservatives don’t start way ahead of the field. It also explains why the apparently generous range of 21 acceptable forms of ID is clearly weighted towards the better paid and over-60s. Older Person’s Bus Pass, Oyster 60+ card, Freedom Pass (66+), Scottish National Entitlement Card (60+), etc. – all welcome. Those particularly applicable to younger people, like Student ID cards or Railcards, remain “unacceptable”, as in the original legislation.

Yes, as in Northern Ireland, free ‘Voter Authority Certificates’ will be available – including online – and a public awareness campaign will remind you and your selfie to apply in time.  And no, none of this remotely approaches the legalised voter suppression we saw in some of this November’s American state elections. But – to coin a dreadful cliché – it’s from the same partisan playbook.

As are the £1.3 million-worth of 40,000 mirrors and privacy screens – one of each per polling station – that desperately cash-strapped councils must provide to check on would-be voters with religious face coverings. But they may well prove worth a blog of their own sometime before next May.

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A slightly publisher-edited version of this blog appeared in The Birmingham Post, 17th November – https://www.pressreader.com/uk/birmingham-post/20221117/textview

[1] Examples from the Electoral Commission’s ‘Winter Tracker’, Jan/Feb 2022:

   “Elections are affected by fraud/corruption?”  Total agree: 37%; W Midlands 37%; NI 30%.

Those “not confident that elections are well run: Some people have difficulties registering to vote”:                                          
Total agree: 20%; W Midlands 18%; NI 10%.

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.