The UK’s Flipping Gender Gap

08/03/202402/03/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Chris Game

As I’ve aged, I’ve become ever keener to find mnemonic tricks that might help my increasingly faulty memory to recall potentially useful stuff – like, this week, key dates in the history of women’s suffrage. At some point somewhere during the extended celebrations of International Women’s Day (IWD) beyond March 8th, for example, there’s almost bound to be some reference to women gaining (or, in Afghanistan, losing/regaining?) the right to vote.

I used to lecture about this historic stuff and my women’s suffrage mnemonic was/is 1869, the year at least a few women – unmarried ratepayers in GB & Ireland – gained the right to vote in local elections. Which, while obviously not globally record-breaking, sounds tolerably progressive – until you deploy the mnemonic, reverse the central digits, and recall that women in the Dutch province of Friesland had been at it for nearly two centuries – or since 1689, to be precise.

This IWD contribution, unsurprisingly, is not about women gaining the vote, but how, in post-war Britain they’ve collectively been exercising it in successive General Elections. And it’s aided by the following striking graph, whose ‘gender gap’ approach was developed by Inglehart and Norris back in 2000. They and their successors duly updated it in successive elections, drawing comparisons/contrasts with other countries, but only in the past few years has it really come into its own, and for the obvious reason: that it’s so visually, and politically, striking – as the version prepared for me by the Birmingham Post’s editorial team demonstrates.

All but one of the first 19 bars/columns are blue, showing women as more likely to have voted Conservative by varying percentages up to a mighty 17% in the early 1950s. The sole exception was 2010, the first of the recent run of ‘hung Parliament’ elections, when men and women were equally likely to have voted Conservative, so no column at all.

It had become a truism: that, certainly in Britain, women were at least marginally more Conservative or right-wing than men in their voting behaviour. Until suddenly, in both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, they weren’t – in each case being a sizeable 12% LESS likely to have voted Conservative than men.

Some unknowable proportion of what was swiftly tagged our Flipping Gender Gap was undoubtedly attributable to women’s consistently greater enthusiasm for remaining in the EU, but those striking 2019 gender gap figures are still worth detailing. Conservative: 47% of men, 42% of women; Labour: 29% of men, 37% of women – representing a massive 18% Conservative lead over Labour amongst men, and just a 5% lead amongst women.

Which begs the obvious question of whether we’ll see something comparable this time, and, if so, to what degree? Or was it, say, Brexit in those two elections that produced a kind of two-off aberration? Either way, these ‘gender gap’ statistics will be among the most anticipated and intensively studied, as commentators prepare their voting forecasts.

Indeed, they already have been, the commonest immediate reaction from those who study these things, particularly following the 2019 election, being that “at last” UK women voters were catching up.

For the stats have shown that for years now many/most other established democracies – the US outstandingly, but also the Scandinavians, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Canada, even Italy – had seen the development of a modern-day gender gap, with women more likely to vote for left-leaning parties than men, while our gender gap showed the reverse.

No longer, then, did the UK seem to be bucking the global trend. As in these other democracies, as more women entered higher education and paid work, some at least became more socially and economically liberal and supportive of gender equality, pushing them to the left of men in their party choices.

Even just typing that ‘UK women voters’ label, though, I’m conscious of risking over-simplification. And indeed, it obscures significant and unsurprising differences across age cohorts. Younger women are considerably more likely to support Labour and less likely to support the Conservatives than younger men, but this modern gender gap lessens and eventually disappears among older voters.

So how will all this affect what happens in this year’s General Election? The estimable UK Women’s Budget Group commissioned a YouGov poll last autumn which reflected and updated some of the above findings – starting with almost a law of UK electoral politics: women take their time to decide.

Asked for their voting intentions, 18% of respondents hadn’t, with no election in the immediate offing, made up their minds: 11% of men and a full 25% of women. Those that had decided split very similarly between the major parties: Men – 20% Conservative, 31% Labour, 7% Lib Dem; Women – 17%, 31%, 8%.

The big difference came with the then Don’t Knows: just 11% of the men, but one in every four women. So, if they hadn’t then decided, perhaps they won’t vote? By no means: 13% of males were ‘would not voters’, and just 3% of females.

Probably not surprisingly, their policy priorities differ somewhat too. NHS and healthcare is highest ranked by all, but that was 48% of men and 64% of women. The economy was “most important” for 44% of men, but only 28% of women, and the reverse was the case for ‘Environment and climate change’ and ‘Education and schools’ – the latter ranked “most important” by 18% of women but just 9% of men.

And, to quote the ever-flexible Forrest Gump: that’s all I have to say about that – for the time being.

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.

Inflation and Local Authority Budgets

28/02/202417/02/2024 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

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, 2^nd 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

12/02/202405/02/2024 / jlowther2015 / 1 Comment

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 – Part 2: How poisoned, how curative?

20/11/202320/11/2023 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Chris Game

In the Electoral Reform Society’s recent review of the King’s Speech the first “conspicuous omission” identified, ahead of democratically reconstituting the Lords and electoral reform, was the repeal of Voter ID – “an unnecessary step backwards for our democracy and should be scrapped before it causes any more damage”. Though I’m an ERS member, that’s not my personal view – as I’ve previously indicated, here and elsewhere – which is partly why I embarked on what has become a two-part blog, of which this is the second and – I promise! – final instalment.

Rationalising post hoc, the first part summarised the key data – published mainly by the Electoral Commission in its June Interim Analysis of the Voter Identification returns from Returning Officers, its September Demographic Analysis Research, plus its specifically Voter ID-related policy-and-practice recommendations. This second instalment covers, or at least references, some of the varying and more eye-catching reactions to all these data.

The first of which – partly for its comprehensiveness, but also because it provided the blog’s chosen title – is the early September review published on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) of senior MPs and Peers on Democracy and the Constitution and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. Undertaken by a cross-party panel chaired by Jon Nicolson (SNP), its four main conclusions were that:

The voter-ID system, as it stands, is a “poisoned cure”, disenfranchising more electors than it protects. It quotes the well publicised statistic of there having been just eight convictions/cautions for personation in person since 2013, plus that detailed in the earlier blog of more than 14,000 possibly entitled voters having been turned away by ‘greeters’ in May before even entering the polling station – sufficient, arguably, to have swung the result of up to 16 constituencies in the 2019 General Election.
The regime’s inherent ambiguity creates a real risk of injustice and potential discrimination. Most obvious – “shamelessly obvious” to quote the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee in her coverage of the topic – was the selection of documents acceptable as ID, discriminating particularly, but not only, against young persons: Oyster 60+ passes [requiring proof of name and address] acceptable, but not student IDs, library cards, bank statements, etc. The panel also noted that “independent observers” had recorded evidence of racial and disability discrimination at polling stations, with “non-white people being turned away even when they had qualifying ID, while some white people were permitted to vote without showing ID at all.”
The regime lacks the flexibility necessary to avoid injustices – being over-reliant on decisions made by polling clerks and presiding officers, against which there is no formal right of appeal.
The problems identified are systemic, but not fundamental – meaning that, with targeted reforms, the voter-ID regime can, as in many other states, be an asset to UK democracy. That was my emphasis, and, for what it’s worth, with all Europe and almost all developed countries requiring in-person voters to use photo ID, the panel give less emphasis to this point than I would have. A corollary of that point, however, is that these countries have polling station staff familiar with the demands of voter ID, and there is growing evidence of the need to address with some urgency the recruitment, training and retention of electoral staff.

Overall, the panel’s conclusion is that the regime should remain in place, subject to three main structural reforms:

Permit electors to ‘cure’ a failed ID check by utilising an existing mechanism in UK law and signing a declaration attesting to their identity and right to vote (as in Canada).
Broaden the range of accepted identification documents and in doing so set clear criteria for deciding which forms of ID are accepted.
Provide better training for polling station officers.

It’s a lengthy production (well over 100 pages, incl. research appendices) and a recommendable one for anyone new to the topic, not least in reminding us how the VID debate was actually kicked off – by a 2010 BBC Panorama investigation, leading eventually to a 2015 High Court case in which Tower Hamlets’ then Labour (and today Aspire Party) Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, was found guilty of involvement in a string of “corrupt and illegal electoral practices”, one of which was ‘personation’.

Whereupon the Cameron Government instructed its ‘Anti-Corruption Champion’, Sir Eric Pickles, to prepare a report examining electoral fraud – one of whose 50 recommendations was that it should consider options for electors having to produce personal ID before voting at polling stations. Which led in turn to the 2018/9 trials, which reported a degree of increased public confidence in elections where VID was required – but not, as the All-Party review notes (p.9), that “electoral fraud ranked consistently last in public perception of problems around elections” [and administrators’ perception – see table below], or that they are “far more concerned about political funding and the redrawing of constituency boundaries than about personation”.

If the legislation did eliminate personation, the APPG’s view was that this came at the cost of “disenfranchising” electors: preventing or discouraging certain electors from voting – considerably more than the recorded 14,000 or so without ID who failed to return after being turned away by polling station staff. Excluding those turned away by party political ‘meeters and greeters’, this number was considered for several reasons to be “a significant underestimate”.

The democratic cost, in the name of preventing in person personation – occurring, on average 0.88 times p.a. – was to deny at least 14,000 people the opportunity to cast their ballot, which is “unacceptable and unjustifiable”.

Politically, however, the Panel reckoned that even these probably undercounted numbers of non-returnees could potentially impact on a General Election result – two West Midlands examples being Sandwell and Walsall, where 1,135 and 797 electors (respectively) were turned away.

There is, obviously, a great deal more, but almost simultaneously other contributions were appearing on the scene, perhaps most noteworthy being the Local Government Information Unit’s The Impact of Voter ID: The Views of Administrators. Based mainly on a survey of 171 electoral administrators who helped deliver the May 2023 elections, some of these ‘behind the scenes’ views are almost inevitably predictable: that VID is just the latest of the pressures added to the burden of electoral administrators already contending with resource constraints, complex legislation, tight timetables, temporary staff recruitment, etc.; and that a General Election offers an “opportunity for serious disruptions” (p.5).

Perhaps most striking, though, appearing on the Introduction page (6), but without a word of direct reference, is the following bar chart. The words follow in the remainder of the report: yes, administratively elections in England have serious weaknesses: staffing pressures caused by “short timetables, convoluted legislation, inefficient processes and inadequate resourcing.” (p.11). Administrators’ question for this research is how voter ID has impacted on these issues, as well as, of course, on “personation in the polling station”.

And my carefully considered conclusion, following this attempted overview of the welter of reports and evaluations that appeared several weeks ago now? I should have done what I’ve habitually done for years in comparable situations: relied on the House of Commons Library, whose estimable staff – here Neil Johnston and Elise Uberoi – produced a characteristically thorough (and, unlike mine, unopinionated) 59-page Research Briefing covering pretty well everything I’ve attempted to. And, to quote Forrest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that!

Voter ID – A “Poisoned Cure” and Other Verdicts

27/10/202325/10/2023 / jlowther2015 / 1 Comment

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.

Voter ID – the warning lights are flashing

27/06/202327/06/2023 / jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

*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 23^rd 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.

INLOGOV Blog

The Institute of Local Government Studies, University of Birmingham

Elections