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Returning Officers (Accountability)

Sadly, I was not present on those occasions, but I shall be this time. As I have said, the performance standards are fine and no one could take exception to them. They are all pretty high-level and broad-brush. What causes me concern is how they are enforced. Following the Euro-elections, the Electoral Commission wrote to every returning officer asking them to rate themselves against the standards. It may come as an enormous surprise to the Chamber to learn that almost everyone rated themselves rather good at almost everything. I was just reflecting that if head teachers were told that Ofsted, or Her Majesty's inspectorate in Scotland, was changing the inspection regime and would be sending everyone a questionnaire about how well the school was doing, there would be huge cheers in staff rooms throughout the country. In fairness, the Electoral Commission followed up the self-assessment with a series of face to face interviews with a percentage of returning officers. However, on its own reckoning, those interviews were aimed more at consistency in filling out the forms than at getting to grips with poor performance. This is good: in some 17 cases, the commission asked returning officers to regrade their assessment of their performance. Perhaps unusually, 15 of the 17 were asked to move their initial assessments up a level, and regrade themselves as having performed better than the electoral officers had said. Of the hundreds of returning officers in the country, only two were asked to downgrade their self-assessments by one level as part of that regulatory regime. I find it hard to take that seriously. Setting objective standards is clearly a step forward, and asking people to reflect on their performance against standards is a good thing. I do not contend that there is massive incompetence in the running of our elections, but anyone who has been a candidate, an agent, a party volunteer or a journalist covering an election count will know that there is a lot of room for improvement.