Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Review of the 2024 general election, HC 487
Tuesday 21 January 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 January 2025.
Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee members present: Simon Hoare (Chair); Richard Baker; Charlotte Cane; Sam Carling; Lauren Edwards; Peter Lamb; John Lamont; Mr Richard Quigley; Luke Taylor; Michelle Welsh.
Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee member present: Mr Lee Dillon.
Questions 81 - 170
Witnesses
I: David Gold, Director of Public Affairs and Policy, Royal Mail; Ricky McAulay, UK Operations Director, Royal Mail.
II: Peter Stanyon, Chief Executive, Association of Electoral Administrators; Laura Lock, Deputy Chief Executive, Association of Electoral Administrators.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: David Gold and Ricky McAulay.
Q81 Chair: Good morning, colleagues. A warm welcome to Lee Dillon, who returns as a guest member on this Committee. Lee, you are welcome; thank you for coming back. An even warmer welcome to our witnesses this morning. We have two panels today and we are going to kick off with the Royal Mail. Gentlemen, I will ask you to introduce yourselves in a moment but first I am just going to ask colleagues if anybody has any declarations of interest.
Michelle Welsh: For complete transparency, my father worked for the Royal Mail for about 30 years. He has been retired for quite a while now, but he receives a pension, and the Communication Workers Union donated to my election campaign.
Lauren Edwards: I worked for the Communication Workers Union for three years as the lead postal researcher and received a donation from them for the last general election.
Chair: As we know, the Royal Mail is one of the key ingredients to delivering a successful election—candidates being one, obviously, but without the Royal Mail it would all be very much more difficult. Gentlemen, can I ask you to introduce yourselves, with your roles, and then I will open the floor to questions?
David Gold: Good morning. I am director of external affairs and policy at Royal Mail.
Ricky McAulay: Good morning, everyone. I am the operations director at Royal Mail.
Chair: Thank you, gentlemen. You are very welcome.
Q82 Mr Quigley: Welcome. Now, I am not wanting to set the conspiracy theory horses bolting, because that is never a good way to start a Tuesday morning, but you said that you delivered a record number of poll cards—50.8 million—but we only have 48.2 million eligible electors. I am sure there is a very sensible explanation, but can you clear up where the extra 2.6 million polling cards came from?
David Gold: First, thank you for that question, Mr Quigley. I can only go by the number that we received from local authorities. They provide us with a work plan so that we know how many we are to expect and then we can monitor what comes in and what actually goes back out. I could speculate that possibly there were some replacement poll cards or people registering for postal votes after the start of the election campaign. As I say, that is purely speculation.
Q83 Mr Quigley: Are you concerned? It is 5%. Would something like somebody who was registered but has died affect it? Because 5% is quite a large margin of error in terms of sending out polling cards.
David Gold: I confess that I have not really given that any thought. It could, but I imagine that local authorities might be better placed to answer that question more accurately.
Chair: We may turn to that with our second panel, as they are the ones in charge of the register.
Q84 Mr Dillon: Good morning, gentlemen. I am guesting from the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which scrutinises policy for elections, since MHCLG is the main Department for that. I have a couple of questions on postal vote pack distribution. First, how many postal vote packs were delayed in the Royal Mail system, either in being delivered to the voter or in being returned to the returning officers at the general election?
Ricky McAulay: We are not aware of any postal votes being delayed in our network, just to be clear. To give some context, Royal Mail is exceptionally proud of the role we play in supporting democracy in the nation. For Royal Mail, a general election—every election, for that matter—is a significant event. We have stand-up, dedicated teams. I would like to put on record a huge thanks to the 130,000 postmen, postwomen and all our managers; that dedicated team played a critical role in the 2024 general election.
Election mail is highly visible in our network. I have some here. You probably recognise them: every envelope carries a purple stripe.
Chair: You are like Valerie Singleton: “Here’s one I prepared earlier”!
Mr Dillon: Those are two that never made it back!
Ricky McAulay: The nature of ballot packs and postal votes is that they are highly automated, so they go through our automation with great efficiency. They are also very visible, so if they come out of the automated stream on our preparation fittings in our delivery units, they can be seen. As I say, there is a huge communications effort in Royal Mail because we know the part we play is important to Royal Mail and to our country as well.
Why do I say what I say? On polling day we do something called a final day sweep, where we sweep every one of our 1,200 delivery units and all our 37 mail centres. We have around 115,000 post boxes that will be cleared, and those collections will come into our 37 mail centres. That last day is a massive event. I am very proud of the fact we recovered 70,000 postal votes on that last day and got them to returning officers. Those were actually delivered ahead of the first class service that we would normally deliver. That is the final day extraction.
We sit as part of a wider supply chain overall, so we are dependent on other people supplying into the network. In our written correspondence ahead of the Committee meeting today, we suggested some areas for improvement overall, but I would like to assure the Committee that we were not sitting on top of delay in the Royal Mail network. We have a significant focus on making sure that we fulfil the part that we play in that supply chain.
Q85 Chair: You might just want to put on the record what you think those improvements might be. It might be helpful to the Committee if you could give almost the narrative of a day in the life of a postal vote. It leaves the council office as a pack. How many eyes and hands are on it before it gets back to the returning officer? Just give us a flavour of the depth of the complexity; that might be helpful to us all.
Ricky McAulay: Local authorities will typically appoint printers to produce the outbound ballot packs once they have been ordered. Last year people were able to opt for a postal vote up until 19 June. Pre-registered postal voters come into the system much earlier—a week to 10 days earlier—which is great. The last day people could order a postal vote was 19 June. We are constantly in touch with the local authorities and the printers. Why do we do that? We get a mailing plan from them so we can make sure that they have York containers—they have our containers and our trays—and that collections are placed at the time they are ready to dispatch into the network.
Those ballot packs are then processed through the Royal Mail network. On the outbound leg, they go to the recipient through the network in the normal way another first class item would be delivered. The return postal vote is typically a local item, because normally somebody returning a postal vote is within their own constituency—not always, but normally—so that is a very local network.
The one reason I can say I am sure we did not have a delay is that when it comes to the final return of a postal vote, we are not trying to deliver to 32 million addresses around the country like a normal first class item; we are delivering to 361 returning officers, most of which have a timed delivery product, and there is huge focus on getting those back every day. Trust me, if we do not, there will be an inquiry straightaway. It is a more simplified network than a normal first class item travelling through the network, given that there are 361 returning officers that we are delivering to on a daily basis and we are not trying to get to 32 million addresses.
Q86 Mr Dillon: As a company, your performance over the last couple of years has been just under 75% against your target of 93% for first class deliveries. Given that localised delivery network that you were talking about, are you confident that all postal ballots were delivered over and above your standard operational target for the country as a whole?
Ricky McAulay: Yes. For the reasons I have just outlined, it would not be representative to use our general quality of service as a proxy for our performance on elections. The fact that we deliver to 361 addresses in the return leg, and we are not trying to deliver to 32 million addresses six days a week, means it is quite a different operation. As I have said, there is the focus we place on it, from the chief operations officer all the way through the organisation, and a daily cadence of multiple calls a day in order to stay on top of the whole supply chain, through to the fact that it can be machine sorted. It is highly visible in our network, which is why it carries the purple identifier. I am very confident that what was in our network in the lead-up to polling day, and on polling day with that final day sweep, would have been flushed through.
Q87 Mr Dillon: Do you keep separate statistics on election material?
David Gold: Yes, we do. Primarily because we are accountable to the customer—in this case the Government—for every item and the charging of every item, and not only that, but we have to be able to prove the quality of service on that.
Chair, you asked about improvements that might be made to the elections timetable. In our letter, we set out that the timeline between the final date for registering for a postal vote and polling day itself is incredibly short. With the best will in the world and despite the heroic performance of our people, it is probably indisputable now—I know the Electoral Commission gave evidence to you a couple of weeks ago—that that timeline perhaps needs to be revised to give everybody confidence that if they require a postal vote, it has a reasonable chance of not only getting to them, but getting back to the returning officer.
Let me make a couple of other points. At the moment, if somebody does not receive their postal vote for whatever reason, local authorities can only offer them a replacement postal vote no less than four days before polling day. If you required a postal vote because you were going on holiday, I imagine that probably does not seem long enough.
There is also a misunderstanding among the public, who might reasonably assume that if they register for a postal vote the day after the election is called, for example, it will go through the system and reach them fairly swiftly. Actually, postal votes are sent out in only two batches at the moment, as I am sure you know. For us, it would be incredibly helpful if those postal votes could be released as people require them. Something like 1.2 million people registered for a postal vote after the election was called, which must have put enormous pressure on the whole system. We are the last part in the chain, and that would give us that bit more time. If people understood when to expect their postal vote, it might also improve their faith in the system.
Q88 Chair: Government are effectively your customer. At the end of every electoral period, do you share key learning, best practice, lessons to learn, and tiger traps not to fall into with the local authorities, so it is an iterative, organic process?
David Gold: We have actually conducted a couple of workshops already with more than 20 local authorities. I had the pleasure of going to ones in Leeds and Sheffield, which were held at our mail centres so that the local authority officers could see the process for themselves. It was very helpful to be able to share the things that went well but also to reflect on the things that could be improved. I am sure that as we go forward—looking not only at the Electoral Commission’s report, but at the report from this Committee—we will continue to look at how we did. Nobody would ever claim that you can be 100% perfect; there is always room for improvement.
Q89 Chair: Do you produce an online, downloadable specification—well, you might as well generate some business and mail it out—showing how the local authority can help Royal Mail make sure you deliver the best election possible—the dos and the don’ts?
David Gold: Yes, there is a written specification for how we work together. I am sure you all know this, but it may be helpful to the Committee to mention that elections take place throughout the year every year because of by-elections and so on, and of course the annual elections that take place at various points. We have a dedicated elections team that works all year round, and we interact with local authorities all year round. As we go, obviously, if we identify things that can be improved, we do so. I would not want anybody to think that this is just a once-in-every-four-or-five-years occasion.
Q90 Mr Dillon: Mr Gold, you said you keep statistics on election material. Could you write to the Committee with details of those statistics and your performance against them—unless the Chair is willing to hear that now?
David Gold: Yes, I would be very happy to. We may have written some in our submission to you in advance of this hearing. Just for the record, over a quarter of a billion items were delivered in relation to the election in a very short space of time. Again, I would like to reiterate what Ricky said: I take my hat off to everybody who was involved.
Q91 Chair: Did having elections in May and then an election in July put additional strain on the system?
David Gold: Ricky would probably be better placed to answer that.
Ricky McAulay: I think the fact that in Scotland it fell in the first week of the holidays is more a question for turnout. When it comes to our leave planning, we plan it well in advance. For every seven postmen and postwomen, we have a permanently recruited, trained annual leave reserve, as we call them. They are pre-planned in to cover leave. It is more a question for turnout than it is Royal Mail’s ability to respond to the election. We have all the historical data, we get good advance notice of mailing plans from the print partners, and we flex our network to accommodate that. We have done successfully during every previous election as well.
David Gold: Anecdotally, Chair, I picked up quite a sense from colleagues that having just been through the local elections, which of course were not in every part of the country, that there was a psychological feeling within the organisation of, “Oh, good, well we know how to do this. We’ve just done it, so let’s do it again.”
Q92 Chair: It was, “Oh, good,” rather than, “Oh, God”?
David Gold: Oh yes, absolutely.
Chair: That is encouraging to hear.
Q93 John Lamont: Can I start by echoing your comments about your posties? My constituency covers nine sorting offices, and they did a tremendous job getting all the stuff that we were asking them to deliver through the doors, but there were delays in Scotland. Your evidence highlighted some issues with the printers. Can you expand on that a little, please?
Ricky McAulay: We have a mailing plan for all the printers via the local authorities. We have scheduled collection times from printers. The situation in Scotland specifically impacted postal votes due in Fife and Edinburgh city. We were due to collect those on 26 June, so this was in the second batch, not the pre-registered voters in Scotland. These are people who registered for a postal vote after the election had been called. When we went to collect the postal votes, they were not available from a printer in the Nottingham area, which we escalated very quickly. We established collections as they were required by the printer, so we went back on the Thursday. Again, the postal votes were not available in line with the mailing plan. We went back again on Friday, and rather than letting those postal votes come through our network in the normal way, we put on dedicated collection services all the way into Scotland so we could get those out in delivery on the Saturday before polling day the following Thursday.
If you look at the comment from the Electoral Management Board for Scotland, it said that Royal Mail’s role in recovering that situation was exemplary. I am very proud of what we did there, both in identifying and in working with the supply chain. There were issues in the supply chain to get those postal votes delivered on the Saturday; we put in some special monitoring on the Saturday and 98% were delivered—this is unit by unit confirmation—on the Saturday, and the remainder on the Monday.
Q94 John Lamont: Just for the benefit of the Committee, the failure was clearly with the printer. They were contractually not fulfilling their side of the obligation to—is it the Scottish Government? The election management team in Scotland is a separate board, is it not?
Ricky McAulay: It would be the local authorities that would appoint the printers. David?
David Gold: To be honest, I am not directly involved. I do not know where the contractual obligation is, but certainly my understanding is that, yes, the printer delay would have been a contractual issue.
Q95 John Lamont: There were other examples, though, that were Royal Mail’s responsibility. In my own constituency and others in Scotland, there were examples of posties who were on holiday for particular weeks, and rather than cover being put on to ensure that postal votes were delivered during that critical week, the postal votes remained at the sorting office until that postman or woman returned from holiday. Were you aware of cases like that or was that not supposed to be happening?
Ricky McAulay: I listened to the evidence session on the 7th, Mr Lamont, and we have since followed up. I do not recognise that delay in the sorting office you are referring to. I am not saying Royal Mail is perfect; we always have scope to improve, the same as the rest of the supply chain, but if we cannot cover a delivery one day because of an absence, our standard operating procedure is always to have somebody on that route the next day—so a maximum of one day’s delay. If an inquiry had been raised at the time, we would certainly have looked into that, but I do not recognise a delay of a route not being covered for a week. Our internal controls and certainly the focus that I have daily—not just during the election period, but trying to improve quality of service all the time—would not allow that to go for a week uncovered.
Q96 John Lamont: Obviously, the Government are a major customer of the Royal Mail during the election, but the other major customers you have are all the political parties. In previous elections, we had various phased communications that went out to electors when postal votes landed and at various other points during the election campaign. Our experience during this campaign was that we could not rely on Royal Mail to deliver phased communications.
Indeed, there were a number of examples of electors receiving bulk communications after the election was over from all the different parties, despite the fact they were posted two or three weeks prior to that. Postal vote communications were the most obvious example, which were landing two weeks before polling day and not arriving until after the election had actually completed. We had electors getting in touch with us to say, “Why are you writing to me after the election is over?” Good question.
Are you confident that the service you were previously able to offer to political parties in terms of phased communication during the campaign is as good as it used to be?
David Gold: Perhaps I could answer that, Mr Lamont. I took the liberty of checking our statistics from the election on the delivery of candidate mail. From memory, there were 184 million items of what we call candidate mail, which is the election address from candidates. To the best of my knowledge, we delivered those within a margin of error of 0.2%, so 0.2% did not arrive within the intended schedule. Now, I would not for one moment suggest that there were not errors or that some regrettably did not arrive until after polling day.
Q97 John Lamont: Forgive me, I am not talking about official election communications, although obviously I am concerned about them as well. I am talking about additional communications, for example a letter I might be writing to somebody who I know is going to be supporting me. It is not framed as an election communication; it is just a letter, posted in the same way as anybody else would post a letter to a third party, which has been caught up in the system and has not arrived within the time period we expected.
David Gold: I am aware that it is a very stressful time for candidates, and I know that a lot of thought and planning goes into certain communications landing at certain points in the election timetable. I know from having dealt with a number of those cases at the time that there were some issues, but on investigation some issues were not entirely down to Royal Mail. On a number of occasions, there was a disconnect between the understanding of a candidate as to when a mailing would be landing and when perhaps the printer or the central party organisation had actually placed the order.
Q98 John Lamont: I do not want to have any more questions on this, but I have been fighting elections since 2005 and I have never known a campaign that has been so difficult in terms of ensuring that Royal Mail was delivering communications in the window that we expected, both as a candidate and as a political party. This was by far the most challenging campaign for that.
David Gold: I will take that back as feedback.
Q99 Richard Baker: Just briefly, there were particular issues in Edinburgh city and Fife in terms of delivery of postal votes. As MP for Fife, I am very conscious of that. On the day of the election, some people had still not received their postal votes. You have helpfully provided us with a very clear case study of the problems with the contract for printing, and the electoral management board has rightly praised your response. Presumably, from your perspective, you would want some more resilience in the contract arranged by the Electoral Management Board for Scotland in terms of the printing of the postal votes. It seems fairly extraordinary to me that such a shambles resulted because a printer broke down, and some people were denied a democratic vote because of the failure to have a robust and resilient supply chain for the printing of those votes.
Ricky McAulay: One of the recommendations that we have put forward would help, and that is for the printers to move away from a batching of that second wave of postal votes to dispatching them into the Royal Mail network on a daily basis so that we have a continuous flow of the delivery of postal votes. In holding it and batching it, you are already building in somewhere in the region of a seven to eight-day delay, which is completely unnecessary. Clearly, the risk of a breakdown—as you refer to—is heightened when you are batch processing like that. Continuous processing is a recommendation we have made, and we are happy to work with the supply chain to really make the point and to bring that to life.
Richard Baker: Those are very good recommendations. I am sure you will agree that it is also important for those responsible for these issues within Scotland to ensure that their supply chain and their contractors can provide what is necessary in terms of the contracts expected to ensure the election can be run smoothly, particularly in a situation where many people are on holiday in Scotland.
Q100 Luke Taylor: I want to explore that issue in a little more detail, because I am sure that on this occasion it was not just affecting Scottish voters, and there may well be similar issues at local elections that are coming up. Was the delay at the Nottingham printers due to a machinery failure or was it due to challenges with data from local authorities? It sounds like it was a machinery failure, and then the procedure, in which they had to build up a batch and do it all at once. Looking at how we manage contracts in the future, would the change to the system that you explain mitigate a potential machinery failure?
David Gold: It would be for the printers to answer as to what exactly went wrong. All we know is that when we turned up to take the delivery of the items, they were not available. To your question about whether resilience would be improved by the change we have requested, one would hope so. What is really important is that everybody who registers to vote—whether they register to vote in person or by post—knows that they are going to be able to and that their vote is going to be counted towards the ultimate result. It is equally important that whoever takes part in the election—whether they win or lose—has faith in the result, and that means that every vote must surely be counted.
Q101 Lauren Edwards: Like a lot of MPs, I visited my mail centre in the lead-up to Christmas and saw a really efficient operation and lots of hard-working staff and management, which was great. But like a lot of MPs, I have some issues with constituents reporting non-delivery of post, largely in the Strood area in my constituency. That visit was quite useful in identifying that that was mainly an issue at the local delivery office in terms of staff sickness and recruitment challenges. Given that you are dealing with those challenges in your business-as-usual environment, can you talk us through the additional pressures that elections place on you, particularly this last general election that we have just had?
David Gold: Perhaps Ricky would like to cover that from an operational perspective. From an aerial perspective, perhaps I can just reiterate what we have said about the importance of elections. The Chair asked us earlier to describe a day in the life. The moment the election was called, from the very top of the organisation to the roots of the organisation, there was an ethos of, “We’re going to make this really brilliant.” The chief operations officer chaired a national call every day, where information was coming in from every delivery office and mail centre—every part of the operation. Where any issues were identified—whether that was a high level of absence among staff or resourcing issues—they were dealt with in real time.
Coupled with the fact that we had an internal communications drumbeat on a daily basis to remind everybody not just of the process of how everything is meant to work, but of the role we were playing in delivering a national democratic election, that meant that everybody—from the postie on the ground in your constituency to me sitting in the office possibly talking to officials in Government about how everything was going—felt we were part of a national effort to make sure that this election was delivered well. In terms of the pressures, Ricky, you would know better than me.
Ricky McAulay: As I said earlier, we get advance notice, so in terms of the timeline, it is not completely sprung on Royal Mail. We get well-rehearsed plans for general elections. The mailing plans from the printers are important for poll cards, ballot packs and, ultimately, return postal votes to come through our network. We have all the historical trends of where they land and at what rate they typically come back through the network so we can plan to that. You are quite right that some delivery units might have more of an acute issue, but regarding our transparency in reporting, and certainly within operations, our mantra is, “If we don’t know it’s a problem, we can’t help you fix it.” We demand a high level of transparency of issues.
During the election, we might dispatch a fix-it team to a local delivery unit that potentially has issues. It is something we do at Christmas. We have around 5,000 managers—a few thousand managers—who do not work directly in the operation, and they will go into the operation at Christmas. Likewise, if we have delivery units that are showing signs of distress and, as Mr Lamont said, are potentially not covering the ground every day, we say, “We need to get there next day if they need some help with that.” The call that David is referring to is about placing that support where we can. Our quality of service is improving this year compared with previous years. We have a way to go, and we are in regular dialogue with Ofcom, as a regulator, about what those improvement plans are.
Q102 Lauren Edwards: Do you know offhand how many of those fix-it teams needed to be dispatched during the general election?
Ricky McAulay: I could not say off the top. If it is of particular interest, we can provide it to the Committee afterwards, but I do not have it to hand.
Chair: Maybe you could write to the Committee with the national picture on that.
Q103 Lauren Edwards: That would be useful, thank you. I am certainly aware that over the last decade, if not longer, your business has quite rightly pivoted towards parcels, which is the more profitable part of the business. How do you ensure that letters are not being sidelined or forgotten about, which obviously is particularly important during a general election, when you face those commercial challenges? During a general election, how do you make sure that they are still prioritised?
Ricky McAulay: Letters are still massively important to Royal Mail, not just during a general election. We have been calling for some time—this is for a different Committee—for reform to the universal service. I think there is now broad acceptance that there is a need for reform. In 2004-05, the Royal Mail network carried about 20 billion letters a year. Last year, that number was 6.7 billion. We have shown resilience; we have delivered five general elections over that period, where we went from 20 billion to 6.7 billion.
With universal service reform, part of our proposal maintains a six-days-a-week standard tariff across the whole of the UK and next-day service, which is clearly essential for postal votes and ballot packs. We talk about letters all the time in terms of their importance to Royal Mail, and we fight very, very hard to defend letters and promote the use of letters in our network.
Q104 Lauren Edwards: If you had more notice of elections and a better timetable for postal votes from your perspective, would you be looking to recruit extra staff in the way that you do for Christmas seasonal work, or do you feel confident that the existing staff levels are able to cope with local and general elections?
Ricky McAulay: The upstream part of our network—not the final mile delivery part—is highly automated, so it does not have a significant impact on the resource required to process the volume through the network. We have agreements with the CWU, which represents the postmen and postwomen, to provide reward to our postal workers for the job that they do; they do a fantastic job. We provide reward, if you want, for the additional workload in the final mile that is taken on. If we are still calling at 50% of addresses—it is not far away from that—every day anyway, going up those garden paths with another item of mail does not add any additional time into the delivery network.
Q105 Lauren Edwards: You would not be looking to have additional casuals, particularly in the delivery offices, to make sure that you are meeting your targets.
Ricky McAulay: No, I do not foresee that at this stage.
Q106 Sam Carling: I want to revisit the freepost issue, which you started to mention before in terms of the election address. In my constituency, we found that it was coming out very late, and I know a lot of colleagues around the area did too. Just about the week before the election, I was out delivering what was supposed to be the follow-up leaflet to the election address, and I was actually out at the same time as some Royal Mail operatives. Do you recognise that those were delivered quite late this time? Is this something you have looked into, and do you have any reasoning for that?
David Gold: I can say only what I said earlier, which is that when we looked at the delivery performance of candidate mail, the 184 million items were delivered overwhelmingly within the timeframes that we were set. There is a set schedule for when they are meant to be delivered. There were individual candidates who contacted us and asked us to look into that, but, as I say, in the overwhelming majority of cases, items were delivered to the schedule. I am sorry if in your particular case they were not in all parts, but if we just step back for a second and reflect, from the close of nominations to polling day, it is an incredibly tight timetable. I can understand that it may be frustrating if things do not always go entirely to plan, but again, within the realms of what we are dealt by the timetable, our people did remarkably well.
Q107 Sam Carling: Absolutely, and absolute credit to you for the work that was done; I know you are under a very tight timescale. Just to bring up another similar issue, there were some boundary issues. A number of colleagues raised that the wrong freepost was being delivered in the wrong areas. Could you tell us a little more about whether that is something you are aware of?
David Gold: For clarification, I imagine these were items that were not addressed but were due for delivery to every household.
Sam Carling: That is right, yes.
David Gold: Again, you are absolutely right. There were something like 570 boundary changes; I cannot remember the exact figure. It was a vast change. For reference, when a postie is out on delivery, primarily, their items are addressed: it is clear that it is going to No. 87 and that is the door it needs to be delivered to. When they are out on delivery, there is almost an invisible boundary, and, as I am sure you know better than me from your own experience, sometimes the boundaries are not intuitive, shall we say. They stop in the middle of a road on one side, and yet on the other side carry on all the way through. I can only apologise, and again explain it as human error, that on occasions that happened.
I am aware that there were some limited occasions where we were given bundles of candidate literature and told it was to go to a particular postcode area. We were given information—I am sure inadvertently—that was not entirely accurate. In that situation, we can only deliver to the instruction we are given.
Q108 Sam Carling: When an election address is sent to you by a candidate, you rely on the candidate to tell you where it needs to go.
David Gold: Their agent normally fills in the work plan.
Q109 Sam Carling: Okay, that is interesting, and something we can certainly take away and look at. Have you done any work on how you can learn from that experience about where the issues were? Is there any guidance you are looking at producing for agents in that case, or anything else along those lines?
David Gold: It is something we keep under constant review. It goes back to the point I made earlier: elections are taking place all year round. Where we receive information, usually from the candidate’s agent, or from a member of the public saying, “I’ve no idea why I’ve received this because I don’t live in that constituency,” then obviously we go back to the local delivery office and we seek better performance in the future.
Q110 Sam Carling: Sure. It is worth highlighting that election addresses are an issue only for general elections, so they might come up less often in your constant feedback processes.
Finally, you mentioned timelines by which you are expected to deliver the election addresses. Can you let me know what those are?
Ricky McAulay: The addressed election product is within three days of receipt into our network, and it is seven days for unaddressed.
Sam Carling: Okay, that is really helpful. That may be something I will follow up with you about later. Thank you.
Q111 John Lamont: Mr Carling has just asked my question about how long you had to get those communications delivered. My follow-up question is: have those timetables changed since previous elections?
Ricky McAulay: I do not believe they have changed, no. Certainly, the three-day and seven-day specifications have not changed.
Q112 Mr Dillon: In relation to border areas, which you referred to as being a bit more complex, is there any preparation? We will probably have these boundaries now for a while, so in the run-up to the next general election, will your local delivery teams have a look at what the boundaries are and go, “Oh yes, we have a difficult area down here in the south-east of the constituency; we need to look at it”? If MPs have that experience of knowing that it was sent to the wrong constituency, should they contact their local offices so that a briefing can be held with your local postmen at the appropriate time for the next general election to make sure that they are not delivering in the wrong areas?
David Gold: Both your points are well made. The first thing I would say is that obviously it is greatly appreciated if any such incidents are reported to us in real time. Where we received information of that nature, we acted very quickly to put it right. But I appreciate that, in the heat of the election campaign, you do not necessarily have the time to report everything to us. Yes, that is a very good point and that goes in the bucket of constantly reviewing and learning from experience.
Q113 Michelle Welsh: I am not saying I have the best postal service in the land in my constituency, but I might have, because we had minimal delay of postal votes and all my literature, which was carefully planned to be posted out so that they had a letter prior to postal votes dropping and to polling day, worked a treat. I owe a lot to Royal Mail for my sitting here today, if I am quite honest. Notwithstanding what has been said about elsewhere, I had a bit of a different experience in my constituency.
As a postal worker’s daughter, I understand the complexities of getting Royal Mail out, and it is not a simple process. I fully support the fact that you are talking about how those who are employed on permanent contracts with Royal Mail can take up extra work and have an opportunity to earn additional money during elections. I have seen how that has worked from visiting Royal Mail for many years and nattering with many postal workers, who talk about it.
I want to move on to the fact that Royal Mail is undergoing a change of ownership and ask what effect that will have on the way it approaches its role in elections in the future. Is there going to be much of a change, and how are you coping with that?
David Gold: First, thank you, on behalf of the workforce, for your kind comments about the work that they do. I am sure that they will appreciate that recognition of the efforts they make.
You asked about the future ownership of Royal Mail, which of course is one of the companies owned by IDS. That process is still ongoing. If shareholders give support to the change in ownership, then, yes, it will be a change of ownership but not a change of direction.
I hope that the Committee has seen from what Ricky and I have said today, and from the letter that we submitted in advance, that elections are in our DNA as an organisation. It is something that we have done for very many years, and I hope that, despite some occurrences of performance that has caused concern, by and large people trust Royal Mail to deliver elections. I very much hope—and I know Ricky does too—that we will continue to deliver elections for many years to come. We will take on board any points that we need to so that we can continue to improve performance in the future.
Q114 Chair: Just before we leave this arena, can I contextualise something and ask for your observations? I agree with quite a lot of what Mr Lamont said. I know none of you will think I am old enough, but I have been involved in elections since 1992, not always as a candidate. The election just gone was the one where we all held our breath more. Things almost seemed to happen more by luck than by design when it came to quite a lot of the delivery network. Our constituents have become far less patient because of the click-and-collect mentality. Waiting for things to happen appears to be dropping out of our DNA.
David, you have heard me say this before, but elections work when people have faith in the results. A Rolls-Royce system is required at all times—arguably less so when you have a landslide result, because if there are delays in postal votes or election material, one or two results here or there do not sway the result, but in a very closely fought election it is pivotal. The electorate have to have faith in the robustness and honesty of the result to accept either victory or defeat.
By way of backdrop, we clearly have more political parties, more people are using postal voting, we have an ageing population, a potential increase in the overall size of the franchise, and we are sure to have an uptick in the take-up of overseas voting. Printing is getting cheaper, so more bits of paper are likely to want to be delivered by more candidates to more voters. Your overall volumes decline year on year, certainly in terms of letters, and profitability has to be a key thing, and so on. Resilience against that backdrop is what concerns me, as you know, Mr Gold. Because it has been done well before, or we just about did it—there were one or two hiccups, we have learned and we will try not to replicate them—does not mean that it is going to be the same going forward.
Against the changing backdrop, rising demand and the potential for service supply to reduce, or to be maintained and not increase, presents a challenge. If possible, I would particularly like some reference—either orally or in writing—to differentials in outcome between urban and rural constituencies. I would also like some information on how easy it is to fill vacancies between your urban and rural operations. Certainly, talking to people in my area, jobs are advertised quite a lot longer than they would be in the centre of Bristol, Southampton, Winchester, Manchester or wherever it happens to be. These are national elections, where we have to presume some degree of parity for us all, irrespective of what type of constituency we are seeking to represent.
David Gold: There is a lot to unpick there, Chair. Thank you for inviting us to write to you, because that may allow us to set out some answers to the points you made in a bit more detail. Resilience does matter, and Royal Mail is very conscious of that. Everybody at Royal Mail will have been grateful that the Electoral Commission reported that something like 89% of people who voted by post felt that they had confidence in that system. Obviously, we want to raise that figure in the future for the part that we play. You are right that about 20% of people registered to vote by post at that election, which was up from previous elections.
Going into the election, we were very mindful that we were likely to receive a lot more postal vote volume than we had in the past. Indeed, I know that the franchise was extended to more people overseas than at previous elections, although it is noted that only half actually registered to vote, and of those, only half actually sent a postal vote.
Chair: That is why I said there will be an uptick as the right to vote becomes more readily understood.
David Gold: And now people are more aware that they are entitled to vote overseas.
In terms of recruitment, yes, it is an acknowledged issue for Royal Mail, as it is for many companies. We live in an economy at the moment where employment is historically high, and therefore the availability of people to recruit is becoming tougher. Having said that, to a point made earlier, Royal Mail is a very good employer—I think that stands to scrutiny. We offer better terms and conditions than anybody in our sector. Having said that, we are competing with other sectors. I am sure that Ricky will want to say more about this, but there are parts of the country where it is really difficult to recruit. That is irrespective of elections; that is year-round. Resilience is something that we focus on every day.
Where I would perhaps take issue with the premise of your question is that, for our part, we do not think it was luck that we managed to deliver the election to the standard that we did. I pay tribute to all those people who were working on those contingency plans. We knew there would be an election. We did not know it was going to be in July, but we knew there would be an election. We were ready for it. We made sure that our people were well briefed on what was expected of them. To a large extent, our people recognise day in, day out that what they do is important, but they really stepped up to the plate, actually. In many parts of the country I visited to look at how things were going, I saw real evidence of people going above and beyond to make sure that they did not just play their part, but they really delivered.
On the broader points that you made, it may be helpful for us to write in a bit more detail.
Q115 Chair: Is there an argument for Government to give consideration to pausing and reversing the trend towards endemic postal votes? You and I, Mr Gold, are old enough to know that there were very specific circumstances in which you could request a postal vote; now people just tick the box and they have a postal vote for everything, even if they are at home twiddling their thumbs, watching UK Gold—that is not a programme about you, by the way—with nothing else to do.
If there is a resilience alarm bell to be rung, not immediately but in the future, is one way that the Government could address it by trying to reduce postal voting and have more direct democracy—that is, people just turning up and voting as we used to?
David Gold: Royal Mail does not have an opinion on whether people should be encouraged to vote one way or another. Our role is to deliver the postal votes that come through the network, and that will be our focus now and in the future. I believe it was the first election where people were able to register online to vote by post, and there was a significant uplift in the numbers. Our consideration is making sure that however many come through, we are ready and able to deliver those in good order.
Q116 Chair: Briefly on overseas voting, you will know that the Electoral Commission has highlighted some problems. We recognise that you were right to highlight that a very small additional number of overseas voters put themselves on the register, and a smaller proportion of those who qualified on the register actually took part in the election itself. Do you have conversations with your overseas counterparts to try to distil down issues and problems? It is very tricky if you are trying to send a postal vote from Dorset to Brisbane and expect it back in the timeframe.
Ricky McAulay: We always reach out to our international partners when there is a general election, particularly where we have a density of overseas voters. The bigger issue, and it is in our responses, is that 19 June was the last day to register for an overseas postal vote, the same as for people living in the UK. Our advertised transit time for a standard letter product to Europe is three to five working days, but to the rest of the world it is six to seven working days. It gets exceptionally tight. We have ongoing monitoring of the performance in the international network.
Q117 Chair: You might advocate for a differential.
Ricky McAulay: There are two things: you could go for an earlier last date to register for a postal vote if you live overseas—that would make sense given the transit time in the European and international networks—or some form of electronic distribution; a hybrid solution, with physical return of the postal vote. Having listened to the previous evidence session, I know the Electoral Commission will look at overseas voting overall, but there are a number of options there. The most immediate is to move that date to an earlier date in the timetable to provide more transit time in the international networks.
Q118 Chair: People turn up all over the globe, do they not? Do you think that the global postal network has that resilience to cope with the demands and pressures that our electoral law places on it?
David Gold: We have faith in other postal authorities, but it may be useful to the Committee to understand that not every other country has six-day-a-week delivery, and the methodology for delivering in other parts of the world differs from the UK. We come back to this point that for a postal vote pack to get from Dorset to Brisbane, it is just a simple fact that it is not being flown out for overnight delivery; it takes quite a long time. For the voter to have confidence that, once returned, their vote is going to get back in time, we really do feel that the timetable needs to be looked at.
Q119 Mr Dillon: You said that you reach out to international partners where you have a concentration of UK voters. Where do you source that data from, to know which countries have a concentration of UK voters?
David Gold: Colleagues in our international team do the reaching out, and it is widely publicised that there are large numbers of British voters living in certain European countries and others around the world. As I say, there is a process by which they do the same with us when they have elections; if they have overseas voters, or if there is a referendum, for example, we know what to look out for in our network. Even with all that good will and partnership, it still takes a certain amount of time for items to get to and fro. It is for that reason that we respectfully request that this issue be looked at.
Q120 Mr Dillon: We had some data on return of postal votes from different countries, but only from six local authorities. The information we are being given as a Committee is very limited. For example, Australia has a 6% return rate, compared with France’s 75%. You could argue it is more important to speak to the Australians to get that return rate up than it is to France, which naturally returns and obviously has closer proximity to the UK to get them back. I am just wondering how your data allows you to have the most relevant conversations with the most relevant country.
David Gold: I go back to the point I made. From memory, talking to colleagues in the international team, they had conversations with France and Spain, but I am sure they spoke to others as well. I do not necessarily know that we keep a register of where individuals live; I am not sure such a thing exists, certainly not publicly. I seem to recall the Electoral Commission’s report had a section on international voting. Forgive me, I cannot remember the statistics, but they referenced the performance of the number of people who took part.
Mr Dillon: Yes, but the data comes from only six local authorities.
David Gold: I did not realise that.
Q121 Chair: I am sure we can pick that up with the second panel. Not to be entirely exclusive on this, but if there is any way, Royal Mail, you can pull together some data on the responses to challenges from Commonwealth countries, where, by definition, a higher number of Brits go to settle, that might be quite interesting for us to see.
David Gold: I am very happy to look into that for you.
Q122 John Lamont: A very quick question: given that stranded American astronauts could still vote in the American election, do you not think there is an argument for making overseas voting online?
David Gold: That is not necessarily in Royal Mail’s remit, but I hear you.
Chair: There would be merit?
David Gold: I am not really sure Royal Mail has a view on that. I can speak personally: it is very impressive.
Chair: One less headache.
David Gold: It is very impressive if you can vote from space. I hope never to have the opportunity personally.
Chair: They are very hard to canvas.
Q123 Charlotte Cane: I am interested in resilience going forward. If I understood what you said earlier, the number of letters going through your system has reduced from 20 billion a year to 6.7 billion. You will have changed your processes and your staffing accordingly. You also said that during the election there are a quarter of a billion items in that very short space of time. What changes will you need to make, and what changes should we look at making, to ensure that you are able to continue to cope with that significant uplift in demand going forward over that very short, tight period?
Ricky McAulay: I would not understate it; 6.7 billion letters is still a lot, so we still have a very significant network of scale. We have seen the bulk of e-substitution playing through into the letters market. Letters will continue to decline in the UK and globally; we expect that to be the case. But under Royal Mail’s proposal, which we expect Ofcom to consult on shortly, we will maintain a six-day-a-week first class service at standard tariff. We still expect that for the foreseeable.
I hear the word “resilience”. I do not expect there to be a resilience issue. We may need to flex the network a little more than we have done historically when it comes to what we expect on the final mile part of the network. The upstream part of the network is highly automated. Genuinely, I am not worried about that element of the network. It is the final mile part of the network. All that is in dialogue with the CWU about how we make arrangements around the payment that we give to our final mile delivery postmen and postwomen, or other flexibility we bring in.
I really do not see there being a resilience issue for the foreseeable future. I quoted the fact that we have done five general elections, while going from 20 billion to 6.7 billion, without a resilience issue. As I say, we have taken the bulk. There will still be a decline in letter volume, which is why we need reform to the universal service, but we will still have a network of scale on our final mile that will be capable of absorbing the type of volumes we see coming through during elections.
Chair: Gentlemen, thank you. You have generated a bit of profit in the number of letters you are going to have to send us with additional information. We will track their delivery time to see how timely their arrival is. Notwithstanding the issues and questions that we have raised, can I thank all your staff and teams, who are, as I said at the start, a key cog in delivering elections in this country? Thank you very much indeed to them all and thank you for your time.
Witnesses: Peter Stanyon and Laura Lock.
Chair: Our second panel today is from the Association of Electoral Administrators. It is lovely to see you both again; we keep recycling each other, which is a very good sign. Let me start by expressing all our thanks for the work you and all your teams across the local government family do. You and Royal Mail really are the key pivots to delivering not just the mechanics of the election but the reliability and robustness of the outcomes, so thank you again for that. Let me turn to Richard Baker to open the batting.
Q124 Richard Baker: Can I throw in my praise to all those officials who do so much work to ensure that elections are well managed and efficient? However, as you know, there were problems at the 2024 general election in relation to postal voting, particularly in some parts of the United Kingdom. We had specific issues with postal voting in Scotland, no doubt because the election took place during school holidays. What do you see as the overall problems with postal voting at the 2024 election?
Peter Stanyon: I am not going to repeat what our colleagues from Royal Mail said about the quantities of postal voting. There were record numbers—up by over 1.5 million on the previous general election—so a huge strain on the delivery.
I think we almost take it back one stage: what was the challenge to delivering this election? We have made mention of the fact that there were the May elections everywhere apart from Scotland and Northern Ireland, so across the board. Coming off the back of those elections, it is fair to say the feedback we have had from our members is that they are only now getting over the whole of that period. They were punch-drunk from the amount of pressure they had to face during that time.
A lot of it goes back to the timetabling issues, and the fact we are very reliant on a very small number of suppliers who feed into the system. This was truly a snap election. I was sat there having my lunch and nearly spat my sandwich out. I thought, “Oh, we’re off.” We were all planning—rightly or wrongly—for an autumn poll, into which a degree of pre-planning had gone, and conversations had been had at the local level with printers to get into the Royal Mail plan that was mentioned earlier. Suddenly, the firing gun had gone and we were off and running, which made it very challenging in terms of the timescales. I am sure we will come back to timetables and the fact that the final deadlines for registration and postal voting are literally 11 working days before the poll, so quite constrained.
That links into the supply capacity thing, and the issues that were very well documented in Scotland were a knock-on effect through the supply chain. Data had been provided and there were issues; the contractual issue would be between the returning officer and the printer, but ultimately—putting contracts to one side—the postal votes needed to get into the system. Credit to Royal Mail and colleagues in Scotland for managing to get those postal votes out.
The final point I would like to make—I do not know if Laura wants to add anything to it—is there will always be challenges at any major poll. In a strange way, the issues that were faced in Scotland and in other areas of the UK this time around focused in on the fact that there are a lot of stressors within the system, and it does not take a lot to knock down that pack of cards.
Q125 Richard Baker: It does seem extraordinary that some people in Scotland were denied their vote because a printer broke down. I absolutely agree that Royal Mail did a great job of getting those packs out, but some people had already gone. On the day of the election itself, some people in my constituency did not have their postal votes. From a lay perspective on the other side of the election, it does seem that people in Scotland were denied their vote because a printer broke down in Nottingham.
Peter Stanyon: It goes back to the point that the Chair made earlier. I first came into elections in 1988, so I have seen that change in the system itself. Any failure of a postal vote to get to an individual is a failure within the system. Any electoral administrator would say exactly the same thing—we are there to help people do that—but ultimately, in brute reality, we have an 1872 set of legislation on to which various things have been grafted, so the timescales we are dealing with to correct errors within the system are limited.
Q126 Richard Baker: Do you think these were one-off problems, or are they likely to be repeated and increase given those timescale pressures?
Peter Stanyon: This is the first time that we have had the high-level nature of the issue. I would not say it is the first time that the issues have been there; it has been more on a localised basis. At local elections, there may well have been issues that were not as well documented as those at a parliamentary election. There will be various reasons for that. Some will be administrator error; some will be printer error; some will be Royal Mail error. It is the way it works through that process.
In terms of whether these things are going away, I would say not as things stand, because there is an inherent stress within the system that does not provide—for want of a better phrase—the wiggle room to resolve where an issue has been identified through any failure within the system itself.
Laura Lock: For the first time at a general election we had online applications for postal votes. We saw over 1.2 million people apply for a postal vote once the election was called, which is a huge volume in a short space of time.
A key concern we have is that we have lost localised messaging. Previously, at a general election, the election would be called and someone would phone up the local authority and say, “I need a postal vote,” and the local authority could say, “Okay. If you get the postal vote back to us by this date, you’ll be in our first run. If you get it to us after this date, your postal vote won’t be issued until 19 or 20 June,” which would manage electors’ expectations.
Many people had gone on holiday after applying on 22 May. We know lots of local authorities’ first issue did not go out until 18 or 19 June. To the electorate, they have waited for a month. They do not understand that nominations do not close until 7 June so we cannot print the ballot papers. When they were applying via the local authority, that messaging was up front and centre, whereas now they are using a central Government portal and everyone is posting on different dates with different data deadlines, which makes it much more difficult for the ERO to manage elector expectations.
Q127 Richard Baker: How do you ensure consistency around voter expectation and information across the country in terms of when people receive their postal votes and how the system will work in their area?
Laura Lock: We have already started conversations with the Government about what localised messaging there can be. Once an elector puts their postcode in, we know which local authority is running the poll for them. We can get EROs and returning officers to give the Government that messaging so that can be passed on at the point of application. Once someone has applied, it is then very difficult to say to them, “Actually, you’ve applied with this expectation, but really this isn’t going to be managed by us.” Now we have a portal that works very well, we are really keen for the electorate to use the “Register for a postal vote” portal. It is really good at the front end; we need to be looking at where we can enhance it.
Q128 Chair: We were not immediately sure that it would be, were we?
Laura Lock: We were always pretty confident at the front end, Chair. The back end could still do with a little work.
Q129 Richard Baker: We now have online registration for postal voting and more and more people seeking to vote by post. What do you think are the longer-term challenges in how we facilitate postal voting?
Laura Lock: As Peter said, suppliers. We have fewer and fewer suppliers. In the last six months, one major supplier has been bought out by another supplier. The amount of people who can do this work is decreasing and decreasing. We have seen companies leave the industry altogether because of the deadlines for them to work to. Suppliers are under as much pressure as election administrators. The printers have to deliver in a smaller window; they do not even have 25 working days, because we need to get these votes out.
Our concern is about the supplier market. We see fewer and fewer small local printers delivering postal votes now; it is mainly the large printers and therefore the resilience is reduced. This year, 9.5 million people were issued a postal vote and 26.2% of the voting electorate voted by post. It is a huge number, and we are going to struggle year on year without doing something about deadlines and looking at the requirements of the printers.
Peter Stanyon: What occurred at quite a high level in Scotland running up to the July elections has happened before but has not had the high-profile nature. It very much depends on the ability of suppliers, and they do a fantastic job of reacting to situations.
I will take us back one stage further and say the very snap nature of the election—with the complexity of all the changes the Elections Act 2022 brought in for the first time at a major national poll—put pressure on everybody in the system. That put us on the back foot to be able to react and deliver from day one what was ultimately the safe poll that was delivered in July.
Q130 Richard Baker: A diminishing number of suppliers who can provide a service is an structural problem that we are going to have to address. How can we make it easier for both suppliers and administrators? As you will have seen, the Electoral Commission has come forward with a number of recommendations around the current deadlines for postal vote applications and more flexible rules for reissuing postal votes where there are problems. Do you think the Electoral Commission’s recommendations would help address some challenges that we have seen?
Peter Stanyon: In the main, we support everything the commission has said. In fact, in February, we will issue our blueprint for electoral reform, which we will obviously give to the Committee.
As was mentioned earlier, we have asked for the postal voting deadline to be moved forward, away from the election slightly, to build extra capacity into the system. We have asked for 16 days, but any move away from the current deadline is sensible. We also think there should be the ability to put the elector slightly more at the centre to be able to resolve things when they do go wrong.
As our colleagues from Royal Mail mentioned, something we believe is an anomaly in electoral law at the moment is the fact that you cannot reissue a lost or undelivered postal vote until four days before the poll. If you have delivered that 12 days ago, you are hamstrung. At that stage, will a postal voter still want to vote by post, or is there a system to change them to be able to vote by proxy or vote in person at the polling station? It will add a degree of complexity into the process, but it needs to be considered in the light of the upsetting issues experienced by individuals who legitimately applied for their postal vote, it did not arrive, and they were not able to get that back.
It is a system that can be changed; it just needs careful thought as to how we make sure the postal voting system we have, which is dealing with that many postal votes at the moment, is able to satisfactorily deliver, even under the most intense pressure as it was in last year’s general election.
Q131 Richard Baker: Do you think more reforms can be made, in addition to those already recommended by the Electoral Commission?
Peter Stanyon: Yes. Principally, they are very similar to the commission’s, but we are adding a little further in those areas that we believe will add flexibility to address the voter.
Q132 Richard Baker: Finally, what do you feel has been the experience of the electoral administrators of Royal Mail’s role in the electoral system? We saw how Royal Mail took significant action to respond to the situation in Scotland, which I know was praised by the Electoral Management Board for Scotland, but clearly there may be different experiences across the UK. The Electoral Management Board for Scotland initially suggested there were problems within Royal Mail, and we have heard today that was not the case. How resilient do you feel Royal Mail is in terms of its performance in elections across the United Kingdom?
Laura Lock: Many of our members will say Royal Mail really helped us out. In the situation we had in Scotland where the printer was late printing the packs, Royal Mail went above and beyond. That does not mean the same administrator might not also find that a postman has not delivered a walk and we have streets and streets that have not received their postal votes.
We have not touched much on poll cards. Postal votes are sent first class. That is the actual ballot paper going through someone’s front door; it is vital that gets to them. We probably see more complaints within the industry about poll cards, which is the message that there is a poll and states when you have to apply for a postal vote by and where your polling station is. They are generally delivered second class or through downstream access providers and things like that, and they take a little longer to get there.
Q133 Chair: Second class or what?
Laura Lock: Or through downstream access, which is a provider that passes it on to Royal Mail to do the final leg of the journey. The printer or local authority is not always directly contracting with Royal Mail; sometimes another provider is used between the two.
Q134 Chair: Can you give an example of what that might be?
Laura Lock: Whistl is a downstream access provider, so organisations like that can do it. It is still doing a very good service, but we are talking about Royal Mail and its commitment on first class delivery. Not every element of the electoral process is using first class delivery; we are relying on second class. If your poll card does not arrive for quite a long time, you are late applying for a postal vote because you did not realise what the deadline was, and we can see the knock-on impact.
Q135 Mr Quigley: I will start with a thank you for the work you have done, especially on the Isle of Wight following PCC elections, and I know elsewhere the May elections, with very small teams. I do not just thank the Isle of Wight because of my result; I think them for the genuine hard work they have put in.
It is not my job to defend, but there is a misunderstanding of how supply chains work. The assumption is that something goes wrong and you just go out to another supplier, but that is not the case. As a Committee, we probably need to look at the Government’s understanding and responsibility for this sort of thing, because democracy is critical. A lack of a national industrial strategy may have a part to play in that, but that is not for this Committee.
The Electoral Commission said the election was well run. You have probably covered quite a lot of this, but what would be your overall assessment of the election?
Peter Stanyon: We echo that; it was well run, and that is testament to every part of the supply chain. We are very keen to make clear the amount of work, and that the electoral administrators went above and beyond. I made the point already that it was a punch-drunk feeling through the remainder of the year, because of the personal cost that put on reasonably junior staff in small teams.
I believe there is a misconception that there are huge machineries in place to run elections. There are not. You will know from your contact with your own local authorities how small it is, and pressure is being put on elections delivery because local authorities are getting smaller. If we talk about things like staff to assist—polling station staff, count staff—there are not the numbers of bodies readily available to understand the excitement of an election, quite frankly, which is adding further challenge into these sorts of processes.
We have concentrated on some issues with postal voting, but overall, the story was not of a failing election administratively; the story was the result on the Friday and the Saturday as it came out. That does not take away from the fact that, ultimately, it is a system that works but is creaking significantly, and I would argue—I think we as an association would argue—works only because of the commitment of those who will go forward. Long may that continue, but we have to rely on the officers, as you mentioned, who have that expertise and the drive to keep continuing that forward.
Q136 Mr Quigley: To be fair, you have stressed the point about the snap election. It is a bit like dad coming home on Friday night and saying, “Let’s have Sunday lunch tonight,” and you go, “We might be able to cover it,” but well done. How close would you say something was to going critically wrong in terms of you putting your hands up and saying, “This is going to fail; we’re going to have huge amounts of votes that aren’t delivered”?
Peter Stanyon: The thing with a parliamentary election is that for it to go critically wrong, it would need to go critically wrong in 650 constituencies, unlike a local government election, where the issue could have more of an effect on the outcome. Ultimately, it comes down to whether the electorate trusted the outcome. Even though there was the high-profile postal voting issue in Scotland, and there were other issues locally that were being addressed and reacted to, even going through this process, I would say we were not in a position that the whole thing would fall down. But that is more the nature of the type of poll that was taking place, rather than it being that there are lots of fundamental things within the system that make it more difficult to have that confidence that we can continue to deliver the outcome in the time that is available to us.
Q137 Mr Quigley: That is reassuring. You have stressed the point about relying on good faith in a lot of cases. Without catastrophising, what would electoral failure look like to you?
Laura Lock: We are sure a lot of people in Scotland felt they were failed by the system because they did not get their postal vote in time. We know some candidates whose result was not declared until the Saturday and who were not as thrilled as they could have been when results were declared.
The issues our members have are largely based on volumes and supply. When we look at how many applications were received—if we think about registering to vote, postal voting and voter authority certificates—we had almost 4.5 million separate applications from the time the election was called up until the deadlines. We have some stats from Birmingham, the largest local authority in England, which received 58,000 applications in that three-week period for it to suddenly staff up to deliver the level of service it wanted to deliver.
If we think about overseas electors—again, the franchise has been extended—we saw over 100,000 overseas people applying to register to vote, and we know the service that was being delivered was not as straightforward as it could have been. Sometimes that is because the person left the UK 50 years ago and they cannot remember the exact address where they were last registered, or the house has been knocked down and we have to pinpoint on a map which constituency they now sit in, and those sorts of things. Sometimes it is just because a postie has had a day off and something has not got to someone before they went on holiday.
We are so reliant on suppliers, be they suppliers of software systems, printers or Royal Mail. Even 25 years ago, we could issue postal votes sat at our desk in the local authority. As the Chair said earlier, it used to be the case that you had to have a very good reason to have a postal vote, whereas elections are now two elements in many ways. We run the postal voting and the poll, and they are very different. When more than a quarter of voters are voting by post, we have to see them as two very separate projects.
Peter Stanyon: Without trying to dramatise, in my experience, you used to come out of an election saying, “We could have done that better” or “That was really good” or whatever. Now, the general feeling is, “We survived,” and that is not a comfortable place to be.
We are delivering some training to returning officers ahead of potential elections—or not, depending on other decisions being made—in May. There is a lot of focus on the theatre of the count—the count is what it is all about—but lots of things can go wrong way before that if that has not been covered off correctly all the way through. It is not a six-week job. I am very pleased to hear colleagues from Royal Mail saying elections are not just once every five years; there is a parish election taking place every single week, and that must not be forgotten in any decision-making processes going forwards.
Q138 Mr Quigley: Listening to how you have explained it, it is almost like we have forgotten the human element; we have assumed everything is automated, but we still rely on people doing lots of physical work.
Peter Stanyon: The key element of automatisation and digital coming into processes is primarily—if not almost all—to do with registration, not the delivery of the election. It is still a piece of paper and a stubby pencil inside a booth or via post. A lot of the pressure that has been brought into the delivery of the elections is to do with registration challenges, butting up against deadlines, online absent voting, and online registration, which are all absolutely welcome additions to the process, but the other side of that hard line is still seeping through to the process of delivering the election itself.
Laura Lock: The Chair spoke earlier about people’s expectations of having things instantly. You can have your groceries delivered within an hour, but it is taking four weeks for you to get your postal vote. People cannot necessarily always understand that we have a very digital front end for registration and applications, but then it goes down to putting a piece of paper into an envelope.
Q139 Chair: You mentioned the conduct of a count. That of itself seems to be incredibly—not hit and miss, but very diverse across the constituencies. Certain things are allowed, counts are conducted in certain ways, and so on. A lot depends on the experience of the returning officer and their senior team. Speaking back to the requirement for reliable robustness, would the process benefit from—guidance might be too weak a word to use—a national modus operandi for how a count is conducted? I am talking about national elections, not local.
Peter Stanyon: Strangely enough, you would be surprised to see that the element of electoral law on the count says that you count the votes: you verify, you mix, you sort and you count. That is all it says, which is why there will be differences.
We would be reluctant to see that prescribed in legislation. It comes down to learning the good practice because there are so many variables between different constituency counts. I used to work in north London, where we had three constituency counts at a huge leisure centre with a running track around the outside. That is completely different from where I first counted, in Watford, where it was very constrained.
The principles need to be very clear: ultimately, you are talking about transparency and other participants being able to see what is going on and being satisfied that the papers are being sorted correctly. That lends itself to differences, but we would fully support the sorts of things where the commission is providing that guidance.
Q140 Chair: It does, but my point is, should it? We all sit here equally as Members of Parliament, whether we have been here for a day or 30 years. It is a national Parliament in which we sit. The rules apply to qualification for voting, how we vote, application for postal votes overseas, and so on. Yes, there is best practice, but who harnesses it and who deploys it so that all who sit here know we have come here by precisely the same route? Let us be frank: we have all seen a very large penis drawn on a ballot paper that was not counted because it started at one box and finished in the other, or whatever it may happen to be, and we have all argued with our returning officers about where it starts and where it ends, what that signifies, and so on. The criteria for a recount are very hit and miss. I have to say, Mr Stanyon, that I am not persuaded by the point that all constituencies are different. By definition they are, but the rules are uniform.
Peter Stanyon: The rules are uniform, but there will be variations. Again, I can only give you the sort of advice I would give to returning officers. A good example is that a request can be made by an agent for a recount, but it needs to be justifiable. Will it affect the outcome of the result? It is very difficult to prescribe that, because the circumstances in each individual situation will vary. They will vary on the size of the count and the staff, and it would be very difficult to prescribe, “You shall have 50 counters,” if the venue does not allow for that and there are no other venues available. It is more along the lines that the prescription, if there were any, is, “This is the expectation.”
Within the current rules, however limited they are, there is that expectation that the number of ballot papers issued has been verified and accounted for, agreed with the agents, comes out the other end counted, has been verified, and the result is as transparent as it should be, but there will be variation. That is not to say that every single count is perfect. You will see a difference between a count in Sunderland or Newcastle, or somewhere else in an urban area, and Cotswold, for example, where it could take four or five hours for boxes to get to a count venue. There are lots of different variables.
Chair: I am not particularly persuaded on that point, but I will go to Mr Lamont, and then Mr Quigley wants to come in.
Q141 John Lamont: I want to continue the discussion about the counts. The Electoral Commission confirmed that the election was well run, but it identified a few issues with postal votes in Scotland and a couple of problems at counts, one being in Wandsworth, I believe. In Putney, several thousand votes went missing, which resulted in a revised result being issued. How common is that?
Peter Stanyon: It is not particularly common. I am aware of both the instances. I have spoken to both teams subsequent to the election and they were both basically errors within spreadsheets that had not been identified before the count itself. I have to say that I am as certain as certain can be that that will never occur again, certainly in those two constituencies. A lot of the lessons learned from counts where errors have taken place are picked up throughout the electoral community and people say, “Oh, we do need to do those double, triple or quadruple checks.”
It sounds like an excuse, but part of it is that the tight nature of this particular election meant a lot of pressure was being put on all the way through, and the count was at the end of that process. I know for a fact that was a potential in that particular case.
I would also spin it around and say that the whole thing at the count is every participant being involved. I had an incident many years ago where we came very close to declaring the wrong result because we put the wrong figure in the wrong column, but it was the agents that picked that up and were able to do so as part of the provisional announcement. As an association, we stress to our members that the agents have a role as well to buy into the result; it is not just the RO making that decision.
Q142 John Lamont: The result did not change and would not have changed—
Peter Stanyon: No.
John Lamont: But the results in that area have been close in the past, so it could have done. I was wondering what additional training you are providing to your team across the country to ensure that whatever mistakes were made in Wandsworth are not made elsewhere.
Peter Stanyon: Feeding through the fact that this happened is important. Again, in that instance, there was a calculation error in the Excel spreadsheet. The lesson they learned from that is not to have anybody in the elections team doing the final checks; we need to have somebody from the accounting team or somebody with that experience doing it instead. Fortunately, it did not affect the actual outcome; otherwise, it would have been petition territory, and we all want to avoid that. But the key point is learning the lesson to make sure it does not happen again. I know for a fact that the learning has been shared within our London branch, because of the very similar nature of counts that take place.
Laura Lock: For a parliamentary election, returning officers are required to start the counting of votes within four hours of the close of the poll. It is the only election where that is a legal requirement. Tiredness is by no means an excuse, but I am sure you all know from how hard you campaign during the election that our members are working 10-hour or 12-hour days for a month, generally speaking. They are making these key decisions at 3 am, 4 am, 5 am, and while it is not an excuse, it is worthy of consideration.
Q143 John Lamont: An observation I would make—it is not a question—is that it is harder for us as candidates and agents to spot those mistakes when returning officers use mini-counts as a method to count the votes as opposed to having one big count where you can see the votes piling up if it is a very close result. If you have four or five mini-counts happening where you might be ahead in one pile and behind in another, it is very hard to make that judgment as to who actually has the most votes and who is ahead. I am not a fan of the mini-count system; one unified count is a much easier way for candidates and agents to ascertain what is going on to spot these types of mistakes.
Laura Lock: The commission recommends mini-counts, so where that is done it is because of the commission recommendation. But, again, each mini-count result should be visible to candidates and agents who wish to see all the aggregate parts.
Q144 Mr Quigley: Very briefly, do you think the day of the week that elections are held on makes any difference, positively or negatively?
Peter Stanyon: In our blueprint, we are recommending that the whole thing gets looked at. For my sins, back in 1999, before the commission came into being, I ran a weekend poll in Watford. Please feel free to go back and see how successful or unsuccessful it was. The outcome was an 8% drop in turnout, but that was partly due to timings on the back of close London elections just across the border.
There are a number of areas where we are entrenched in the way that we do things. Why do we do Thursdays? There is still some doubt, but market day or other things are the reasons why. It could be a solution, but it is something that needs to be carefully considered. Do we need polling stations in the way that we have them now? Should there be voting hubs, with the expertise? Should there be early voting and things like that? That is not to say that we recommend any of them, but it is something that is worthy of consideration, bearing in mind stresses on staffing polling stations and the stresses on the postal voting system, which have been well documented. It is about making it more suitable for the electorate that we deal with now. As I say, you order your shopping and an hour later it comes. These are the sorts of things that might be better addressed now.
Sorry, that was a long-winded answer to say yes, you could, but at the same time I would not jump to that decision tomorrow.
Laura Lock: We polled our members recently on this question and the majority supported exploring weekend voting because they think it could bring benefits in terms of staffing, turnout and venue availability. For example, returning officers have the right to use schools—they are publicly funded buildings—but they do not like using them if it means that the school has to shut. Generally, schools are not open on a Sunday, so that would give you a pool of polling stations that are avoided at other times. Where we are seeing more and more community buildings closing down, particularly since covid, or not wishing to be used as polling stations, we need to start thinking about alternatives to deliver democracy.
Q145 Chair: Can I pause you there to ask this general question? You, Royal Mail and the Electoral Commission have come up with some questions, thoughts and observations. The window between now and the next general election is narrowing, but we know it will be at some point during 2029—if I was a betting man, I would say on the same day as the local elections, but I would not bet my last farthing on it. Does it not make sense that, at this very early stage, while the memory is fresh for you, Royal Mail, and the commission, you should all sit down to work out where things all went well, where there were no problems and nothing to see, where there were some real issues that we can only see getting worse but this is how we think we solve them, what requires legislative change and what requires clarification, and then present that back to Government within the next three to four months, as a combined trio: “We are effectively the three pillars that deliver this thing called a general election and these are our recommendations”? Then the business managers could find time for SIs and so on. Otherwise, we will find ourselves having all the learning but making none of the changes that are clearly and demonstrably required in order to make it more resilient.
Peter Stanyon: A lot of work is already going on along those lines with officials ahead of the potential elections Bill in the next Session or beyond, taking on the point about the limited time Parliament has available. A lot of what we call legislative anomalies—
Q146 Chair: Do the three of you convene yourselves and get together, rather than having one traded off against the other, to come up with a uniform prospectus—although it will not be easy—for change in delivery?
Peter Stanyon: We meet regularly with the Electoral Commission and Royal Mail but not as a triumvirate. I would go wider than that and involve organisations such as Solace for the returning officers and the Election Management Board for Scotland to understand the range. It is a very sensible thing to bring that together. Our blueprint will effectively do many of those—
Chair: Sensible but not done.
Laura Lock: The Government do convene a supplier group, which includes us, the Electoral Commission, Royal Mail and print suppliers, and they meet every two to three months. We have already had one debrief from the election and there is another one coming up next month, and then each element does its own parts. But you are right that there is more to do as a group than there is separately.
Q147 Sam Carling: On the staffing of polling stations and other polling-related staff, you mentioned that there have been a number of issues in terms of both recruitment and retention. I wonder if you could go into a bit more detail about that and tell us whether you think it will get worse or better as time goes on.
Laura Lock: We have around 40,000 polling stations at UK parliamentary elections, and there are around 110,000 to 120,000 people working in those polling stations, plus others supporting on the day. Recruitment has always been a problem and covid made it worse; we have struggled much more since covid to recruit people. We think there are several elements to this. As Peter mentioned earlier, a lot of the staff used to come from local authorities. Local authority staffing is getting smaller and local authority resources are shrinking, so we are having to look in other places to find those people. Polling day is 15 hours long; it is a very long day. If you have family commitments or a job elsewhere, you might not be able to commit to 15 hours. Sometimes, we try to have two shifts of people, but again that is incredibly difficult.
This is where we think that there is merit in exploring other options for delivering polling stations and where we could have more specialist people. You also have to realise that there are 40,000 presiding officers who are responsible and could be in breach of official duty if they do things wrong and things like that. They do this job one day a year. We have identified over 40 separate forms that they have to understand in the polling station; they have to understand 22 different types of ID; they have to understand about the new postal vote handling requirements that came in in 2024. It is an incredibly technically complex job. We are also seeing more and more people turning up without ID. It is a difficult conversation to have with someone to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t allow you to vote.” The problem is it is becoming a less and less attractive job, so we need to explore long-term fundamental change and what benefits that could bring.
For example, we looked at some pilots in Wales of voting hubs where, if you lived within the local authority area, you could go to the hub; you did not have to go to the polling station in your village or your polling district. You could vote anywhere, and you could vote early. They were using technology to enable that all to happen. The time has come to explore these options to offset some risks that we find. On polling day, invariably, when something goes wrong, it is because a presiding officer has made a mistake. They have legitimately tried their best, but there is something that they have done that they probably should not have done. They have allowed someone to vote who had a postal vote, or whatever it might be. They are very isolated incidents, but when you are relying on 40,000 people to do a highly technical job for a very long day once a year, you will see people struggling to do it and struggling to recruit people to do it.
Q148 Sam Carling: Are there particular demographic patterns in the people who manage to do this job and is that changing very much over time?
Laura Lock: Yes, that is safe to say.
Peter Stanyon: I think “ageing” is the best way to describe that problem. That is not to take away from the excellent work returning officers are trying to do to bring more people on to one end of the conveyor belt as other people fall off the other end, but it is definitely an ageing demographic, without a shadow of a doubt.
Laura Lock: People have never seen it as a public duty in the past, and we have seen it is generally older people or retired people. But again, covid has not helped, as people are potentially more nervous about being in that sort of setting and, where they missed a couple of years, they are not keen to come back.
Q149 Sam Carling: That makes a lot of sense. One of the other things in my mind is the way we are seeking people to do these pieces of work and whether the advertising mechanisms are appropriate. I often see adverts on social media, but if it is primarily an older demographic, perhaps that is not the most effective way of doing it. Do you do much work to try to recruit younger people—particularly students, perhaps—who are looking for odd jobs to do?
Laura Lock: Our members have done quite a lot of work with politics students and A-level students and so on. One of the challenges that we sometimes find is people think that it is a political job, and it is the opposite of a political job. As election administrators, we always say we do not care who wins as long as they win by a lot so we do not have to have a recount. That is always our preference. We have had a huge amount of help through TikTok and social influencers and so on, who have said, “Contact your council; this is an opportunity to earn a little money and to be involved.” We find more people want to be doing the count because the count is quite exciting, whereas polling day is a very long day.
Peter Stanyon: It is partly about changing the focus for returning officers and local authorities. There are often quite difficult recruitment measures. There are different routes in, but there is the need to go through the checks and everything. A returning officer may know something about the person who works in finance or resources, for example, but they may not know anything about another person that they do not have direct control over who may be the one who makes the mistake that ends up with the returning officer being before a judge explaining why it went wrong. One of the challenges is giving the returning officer reassurance about that, as it is a very nervous place to be. It is not a simple solution. The Electoral Commission did a lot of work alongside the stakeholders to work out how we can make sure that we have the resilience built in down the line. It has been tough for a long time, and it will continue to stay tough for the foreseeable.
Q150 Chair: Is it still legitimate to ask two or three people to turn up at a draughty village hall at probably about 6 am to set up and stay there until about 10.30 pm or 10.45 pm?
Peter Stanyon: Yes.
Chair: It is still legitimate to ask them to do it?
Peter Stanyon: That is the nature of the role.
Q151 Chair: They could be relieved at lunchtime, could they not?
Peter Stanyon: Some authorities will do that; some returning officers will do that. In fact, there are things such as, I would not say a skeleton staff throughout the day, but you get to 5 pm and you add a couple of poll clerks because that is when the rush comes from people coming home from work, for example. There are lots of different ways it is done, but the primary method is you are effectively working a 16-hour day—half an hour before and after the polls open—and presiding officers slightly longer.
Q152 Chair: And if the alarm bell rings, HMG has always relied upon deploying HMRC and/or DWP staff to come and augment. Was that taken up last year?
Peter Stanyon: Not massively. It is not consistent across the UK, but it was welcomed by those returning officers who took the opportunity.
Laura Lock: The HMRC and DWP staff are actually to help electoral registration officers process applications. We talked about the over 4.4 million applications, so the Government have tried to have people who can process applications in the back office. They have also extended the offer to civil servants and those who work for the Government to work in polling stations, but we find the uptake on that is very small because, to be honest, they have to take unpaid leave and it affects their pension. So not very many people are doing that.
Q153 Charlotte Cane: Picking up the Chair’s question about the long hours they work, has any work been done to look at the safety element? Certainly, where I am, someone puts the ballot boxes in their car and drives sometimes quite a long way on dark rural roads, having already been working for 16 hours. Is that safe?
Peter Stanyon: Every returning officer is the employer. They have a duty of care for every single employee that they have. In some instances where there is that long drive, they will go to hubs to be able to produce a few boxes then they will be taken on to counts, in very rural areas. It is a very long day, and it is as safe as it can be. There is a similar point about when counts start. There is a duty of care when you have staff coming on duty at 10 pm and not leaving to go home until 6 am, which also applies to candidates, agents and other attendees. That is a decision that returners have to make because of the responsibility as the employer. It is an area they have to be conscious of when it comes to employing in those sorts of scenarios.
Laura Lock: It applies more widely to our members. The longest polling day I have ever done was 42 hours straight because we had a parliamentary election combined with other polls and the local counts the next day. I did 42 hours without a break and then I drove home, and I do not feel that I probably should have driven home at that point.
Chair: Nothing to do with the three quarters of a bottle of gin you had sunk.
Laura Lock: That might not have helped, Chair. At that count, I was back again within eight hours, because we had to count the parishes the next day.
Chair: It is a very serious point.
Laura Lock: We understand that everyone wants the results as quickly as possible, but, for example, if we started counting parliamentary at 9 am on the Friday, we have delayed things. Actually, it could be much more of a spectacle with television coverage and things like that than when people are staying up and seeing results being declared at 4.30 am, which is when I think we probably peak with the results.
Chair: That is early for North Dorset. We never do it before 6 am.
Q154 Mr Dillon: I want to talk about digital systems. The Electoral Commission identified that there was a problem with digital systems. You also highlighted that in your letter to the Deputy Prime Minister on 18 July, of which we have a copy. How do you think the problems with digital systems could be addressed? Should there be integrated sets of digital systems or a single digital system?
Laura Lock: Just for background for those who may not be aware, we have electoral management software systems, and there are currently four suppliers of those across Great Britain. With all the new digital infrastructure, the Government have also set up their own portal called the ERO portal. Those systems talk to each other. It is possible that they talk to each other in the same way as a divorced couple might talk to each other about custody of their children: sometimes it is a little strained and does not work as well as you would hope it to, so we think that there is more work to do with it.
We did some work with the Government under a previous Minister a few years ago about whether the Government should just set up one electoral management system themselves, but the term “eggs in one basket” springs to mind a little, as we have seen year on year snags within certain systems where things do not quite go to plan. We also have to remember that there has been a huge amount of change within our industry, meaning what the management software does has had to change substantially. The Government have done a huge amount of work on the portal, and it is in a much better place than it was when it was launched. It needed to be launched when it was because of other legislation that came in. There is a lot more to do, but the Government working more with electoral management systems on integration would benefit everybody.
Throughout everything, one of the key things is communications and how we communicate with electors through the front end of the Government websites working with the back-end systems to update electors on every process. We now have a case, with postal voting, that we have not explored. Previously, you did not have to have any identity verification to apply for a postal vote, but since the online system came in, we have had to verify your identity. If that check fails, we need to get a message to you. It is not a requirement to give us your phone number or email address, but if you do not then that builds in a huge delay to things. So, looking at the whole process from the electors’ perspective as well would be beneficial. But yes, we are very much reliant on the digital service working as it needs to.
Q155 Mr Dillon: And a preference against having a single system because of the risk around that.
Laura Lock: Yes.
Q156 Luke Taylor: I will link that into the discussions we had last week on overseas voters and the lack of the system that is used in other countries where an individual is able to walk into the embassy and have their specific ballot printed off because the systems are integrated. They are able to get the right paper for them and they are able to vote there and then rather than having to rely on a postal vote being sent, or other complex arrangements. Is the system that you have at the moment able to offer that sort of functionality or would that require a single system, or would an overseas module that links to specific boroughs or local authorities allow that functionality to be provided?
Peter Stanyon: We are not the IT experts, but I expect that it would still need to be linked to the individual electoral management software systems, because you are dealing with the 650 sets of ballot papers that are going out. There is obviously something that could be explored around overseas constituencies, which may well resolve some of those challenges. But ultimately, the paper and pencil system that we have is very safe, in that you can recount it as many times as you want to. There is an inherent mistrust of IT systems, and it is for others to determine the safety of them. Anything can be done, but it would need to be carefully worked through. If we retain a 650 MP system and it goes into consulates or embassies, who takes responsibility for that ballot paper when it is in the consulate? Are they counting it? How do they get it back? Is it posted back? It needs to be explored, but the implications of it need to be carefully worked through.
Q157 Luke Taylor: Quite, but would you see there being an opportunity for people who are already civil service staff, diplomats and ambassadors, being appointed as returning officers and able to preside over tabulation: “One vote in this constituency for this candidate and three for this guy, so we can communicate that to the relevant returning officers to add to a tally”? We spoke earlier about there being quite different setups in different counts and exactly how that is done, but there would be guidance that just said, “There are these overseas electors who have voted in person at the embassy and therefore they can be added to the total.”
Peter Stanyon: As a returning officer, I would want to be satisfied that appointment has been made and that they are working on my behalf. That is not to say it cannot be done, but it would need to be carefully worked through, because there are 361, I think, returning officers doing the 650 constituencies. It is not insurmountable, but from a personal protection perspective, I need to be satisfied you are telling me the correct figures to add to my count. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility; it just needs to be carefully worked through and not be a knee-jerk reaction to the challenge that is currently there with overseas votes.
Laura Lock: To give you an interesting statistic, in Birmingham, 290 overseas electors asked for a postal vote after 20 June, which is still within the deadline. They were issued to them but only 15 of them—5%—got back in time to be counted. If you look at postal votes returned, 80.7% of postal votes were returned across the board, but only 51.8% of overseas postal votes were returned in time.
Q158 Luke Taylor: Do you record how many are returned after?
Laura Lock: We do not have those statistics, but the Electoral Commission does. If they are returned up to eight days or something after the close of poll, it is recorded.
Peter Stanyon: That would not be specifically for overseas electors but for all those that have arrived after 10 pm on polling day.
Laura Lock: Yes, although I believe Royal Mail has some statistics on the overseas figures, because it can see what comes back in on which different licences.
Luke Taylor: We saw what was successful. It would be interesting to see what was unsuccessful but had attempted to vote.
Chair: Yes, there is a gap in the data on overseas voters that somebody needs to retrofill. Whether you want to take that on as a job, I do not know.
Laura Lock: I think it is a job for the commission.
Peter Stanyon: That is more an Electoral Commission job, because it has access to ROs in a slightly different way than we do, but we can contextualise it.
Q159 Lauren Edwards: I have a few questions on resilience, but first I would like to pick up on some earlier comments about the capacity issues with the printers. Have you had discussions with Government about those concerns, and are you aware of any contingency measures being in place if there was a catastrophic failure of a printer?
Laura Lock: Yes, we have the conversations regularly with them. In fact, last week we knew another printer was being bought out, so we discussed that with the Government then. We had a problem during the bank holiday weekend before the polls in, I believe, 2021 when a printer said, “I don’t think we can get ballot papers to 20 returning officers,” with less than a week to go. There were a lot of phone calls between the commission, the Government, us and other partners, and we looked at where there was capacity in the sector—what other printers could start doing and what resilience there was. It is incredibly difficult because most printers will say that they are working at capacity most of the time.
We were talking about our worst-case scenario. Our worst-case scenario is that you print it on your photocopier and use a drawing pin to make the official mark on them, so we do things like that. We have to remember that these printers print the poll cards, postal votes and ballot papers, so they have a very strict ordering of when they can do things, and there is very limited wiggle room for them to do it, because the deadlines are so tight. It is very hard to get new people into the market because it is so technical. Postal voting packs are particularly technical to print as all the numbers on various elements all have to match up and so on. It is high risk. It is easy to google the stories where it has gone wrong.
Q160 Lauren Edwards: Have there been any discussions about the Government acting as a printer of last resort?
Laura Lock: Yes. Four or five years ago, we did a big piece of work with the Government about what could be done for the printers. For example, could we start having some sort of charter mark or something where they are approved suppliers? The industry is so small, and we do not like to say that the tail wags the dog, but we have talked about not printing within the contract. At the moment, you are very lucky to find a printer that has the capacity to take this on and you often have to agree to their print timeframes and things like that because there is simply nowhere else to go.
Peter Stanyon: There is a nervousness about moving, because better the devil you know, in some respects. A couple of years ago there was a big issue with a printer. It was the worst-case scenario, because the ballot papers were delivered on the eve of the poll; they got very close. But it showed that in those sorts of situations there was a multi-agency approach to farm out to others who had the capacity at that stage. So it is not the perfect scenario, but it helped in terms of bringing it up the agenda for Government to consider what levers they can pull to help in this area.
Laura Lock: It is worth saying that a parliamentary election has 650 different ballot papers. The bigger problems come when polls are combined. As the Chair said, if the poll is combined in 2029 with locals, particularly with parishes, we could be printing tens of thousands of different types of ballot papers. Two hundred ballot papers with 13 candidates on, and things like that, will be printed, which really puts pressure on the printers. When it is a stand-alone parliamentary, the volumes are an issue, but the complexity is less of an issue.
Q161 Lauren Edwards: That is helpful to know, because we often think that it is very efficient in terms of cost and time to run them all at the same time, but it poses other challenges that we need to consider.
We have talked a little about the various data systems—the national ones and the more local ones. To what extent are you confident that there are robust cyber-defences for interference in any of our elections?
Peter Stanyon: From a national perspective, the national databases and the National Crime Agency are all over it. We have to trust what the IT experts are saying about the steps that local authorities have to go through to ensure they have that linkage in a safe, secure way. There is an obligation on the local authorities to ensure they are as secure as they possibly can be. There have been instances recently of there being, I would not say data breaches, but issues with cyber-crime, for example. Thankfully, it has been low level and minimal in terms of numbers, although it is not minimal for the authorities concerned. We have to rely on the expertise that is shared through central, local and all the relevant policing and other agencies involved. We are as secure as we can be.
Going back to a point I mentioned to Mr Dillon earlier, a piece of paper and a pencil in a polling station is a very secure system. Ultimately, once you get to polling day, you are reliant on IT to an extent, but not in the way you are two weeks prior to the poll, when the application deadlines are coming in and the like. Once you get to a polling station, we can be reasonably assured that it is difficult to affect an election unless it is humans that are affecting it.
Q162 Lauren Edwards: The cyber risks and the data risks are much earlier in the process.
Peter Stanyon: That is right—absolutely.
Q163 Lauren Edwards: Looking forward to the future challenges, particularly around resilience, what are your thoughts about how we can best deal with extending the franchise? The current Government have a commitment to extend the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds, and there is a lot of change happening at the local authority level through devolution proposals. What are you thinking about how you can address the challenges that might be posed to the system by those two changes in particular?
Laura Lock: We think that there are some benefits in terms of the local government reorganisation getting votes at 16 through and so on. The biggest challenge that our members generally face is data: we can see that the number of attainers—16 and 17-year-olds who are being enfranchised as soon as they turn 18—registered since the introduction of individual registration in 2015 has dropped off significantly. Previously, the head of the household wrote down all their children and they were registered without having to do anything themselves. Since the onus has been on the individual, attainer numbers have massively dropped.
Our members have been doing a lot of work to try to access schools data and other data within local authorities, which in unitary authorities is still a challenge, but in two-tier authorities is a much bigger challenge, because it is held by the county council and our members work at the districts and the boroughs. Our biggest worry is how we find these 14 and 15-year-olds to make sure we can get them registered so they can make the decision whether they wish to vote or not.
We need access to data to improve voter registration across the board as well. We see 2.8 million people register once the election is called, but if we can get those people registered well in advance it would give us a lot more capacity during the election timetable. So where can we start exploring national datasets to access more data? Where can we integrate government systems? For example, when someone tells the DVLA they need to change the address on their driving licence, we could say, “Have you also re-registered to vote? We can do that for you if you just add in your national insurance number.” Those sorts of things are vital to making a big impact on improving registration levels.
Peter Stanyon: In terms of the 16 and 17-year-olds, the other factor is learning from what happened initially in Scotland and more recently in Wales. What were the positives and negatives? We have already been through this on a smaller scale, and we need to learn from those things.
Chair: The ability of one side to share data with the other, and to trust how that data is going to be handled without taking ownership of it, is often quite a challenge.
Q164 Charlotte Cane: The Elections Act 2022 introduced new requirements for accessibility. How do you think those operated in practice?
Peter Stanyon: The new requirements were to open the net slightly wider, where it was prescribed previously. It is now down to local knowledge, effectively. In the main, it worked reasonably well. There are certainly some instances where it has not worked as well. Since the Elections Act 2022 came into being, and having been through the general election, we have seen the reports from RNIB and other bodies. We now need to begin understanding the challenges and the learning and what can be done realistically at a local level.
I think again—I am going to use the wrong word here: misconception. Electoral administrators will do all they can, but they do not know everything, so they need to be advised what the best solutions may be. What does “reasonable adjustment” mean? In some instances it is trying to work out what is realistically possible within the resources available, and the effects of making an adjustment in one station for one individual or generally across the board.
If anything, the key element that has come out of the new provision in the Act and the learning from the elections that have taken place since is to keep building on that with the organisations that understand the challenges and needs more, to allow returning officers to begin to develop over time. It is not an immediate, “This will be the solution.” There are lots of things that will take time to get to the best solution for the majority of electors.
Q165 Charlotte Cane: You are saying you will make the best reasonable adjustments you can, but there may be some individuals who will still struggle.
Peter Stanyon: To an extent that is fair, because it comes down to the definition of reasonable adjustment: what is reasonable in the circumstances? It is the Equality Act definition, is it not?
Laura Lock: There is a good example where one person went on social media to talk about how a particular solution for blind and partially sighted people was brilliant for her, but that does not mean that it is the right solution for everyone who is blind and partially sighted. Given the cost of that solution, would it be reasonable to put it in 40,000 polling stations?
What members would be better off doing is to start that dialogue with people on the sight loss register and, for example, in this particular scenario, to say, “Is this the best solution for you or would you prefer this? This is the range of options we have available; which one works for you?” An individual dialogue is needed. If someone is a wheelchair user, you need a ramp and a wide doorway, but if someone has other accessibility issues, you need to understand what is best for them and not assume that, as a returning officer, you know the best solution and have put that in place. Conversations with people are essential.
Q166 Charlotte Cane: In the same way you can go by a certain date to get your postal vote, is there a mechanism in place where a disabled person knows that they could go to their electoral registration officer and say, “I have this issue; how are you going to support me with it?”
Laura Lock: Yes. On the poll card it says, “If you have any accessibility needs, contact us so we are able to discuss them for you,” where they are known in advance. People can then, year on year, make sure that that solution is available for that particular elector at their polling station. The challenge comes when we have a snap parliamentary election, the poll cards go out late and the elector contacts the returning officer two days before. There are limited options that can be explored with them then. That learning needs to be built up over a period.
Q167 Michelle Welsh: Like the Electoral Commission, you have raised concerns about the rise in abuse, harassment and intimidation at this election. Could you outline how that affected electoral administrators, and how it compared with previous elections?
Peter Stanyon: We are seeking evidence from our members in terms of the actual numbers, but it is slightly symptomatic being able to order your groceries and they come an hour later. We need to explain the system that we work to. We have had it fed back almost universally across local authorities that the core teams are taking a lot more verbal abuse, which is a fair word to use. The system is there for a reason—to make sure it is structured—but sometimes it does not fit modern life. Overseas electors are a classic example where you cannot justify sending a postal vote out literally six days before a poll and expect it back. You can understand why electors will become irate in those areas.
There was not, to our knowledge, a great deal of verbal abuse or physical problems at polling stations. There is a general understanding that they are following the rules they have to follow. They are not the ones who make the rules, and that has been consistent from when it first came into being. There was, I think, only one case where a police authority was looking into something. It is more fundamental across public service that the expectations, in this case of voters, do not necessarily marry with the ability of the system to deliver in that way, in many instances for very good reasons. The timetable is there for a reason. The deadline is there for a reason. It is something that we would like to see brought into the debate that the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission is holding at the moment in terms of intimidation of candidates and elected representatives, but it would apply across most of public service in that way. So, it is anecdotal, but it is growing; there are no two ways about that.
Q168 Sam Carling: Tangentially to a question of Charlotte’s, there is a lack of clarity in the guidance about what political party tellers can do, and a lack of awareness in general about what they do. Do you think presiding officers are in a space where they are able to manage the relationships effectively, or are there problems that might need some work?
Laura Lock: There are problems because tellers have no standing in law: they are just people standing outside a polling station asking questions. The commission has a tellers’ dos and don’ts, and presiding officers will put those out to give some parameters but, being honest, if the police are called to a polling station, 99% of the time it is because of the tellers out the front having words with each other. It is also very difficult to manage them when electors complain that they feel that they are intimidating them accessing the polling station. They do not have a standing in law, but you want to be able to engage with the political process and everything. Defining the role of tellers in law is worthy of consideration, to help tellers and those who are running the poll as well as the electors.
Sam Carling: That is really helpful to hear. I would be interested to hear if you have specific thoughts on what that could look like.
Q169 Chair: We have some questions that we have not covered. Will you be happy to deal with those in writing?
Peter Stanyon: Absolutely.
Q170 Chair: That is very kind of you. We have now heard evidence from the commission, Royal Mail and yourselves. Do you think it is a fair snapshot assessment to say that we are at a bit of a crossroads? Electoral law is multifaceted and complex, and sedimentary in its build-up. Timetables are tight, and demand goes up as resource shrinks and/or is under pressure. We seem to be at a crossroads between—Peter used the phrase that David Cameron used—the reliance on the stubby pencil, and the confidence that that gives in the polling station, and investing in and trusting more digital technology, because these problems are not going to go away. Every other business and most other services have found a solution in digital. As much as I love that stubby pencil, is that almost the preordained destination?
Peter Stanyon: Ultimately, it comes down to trust in the system. Does the elector trust the result? I have experience of working in GLA elections with “electronic counting”. It was not; it was optical vote recognition, and there was still a stubby pencil and a piece of paper to go back to if there had been an issue. Over the last 25 years it has been constant change. The whole of my career—well, half of my career—has been constant change.
The issue is not so much, “Is there a preordained digital route, or do we stay as we are?” It is about taking a breath to work out what the next step is. The Elections Act 2022 brought in a huge raft of changes, as you know. They will bed in and become business as usual. That was the line that we used with voter ID all the way through: “It will become business as usual. Whether you agree with it or not, it will become what is expected.” The crucial bit is making sure we do not knee-jerk into an area that causes more unintended consequences than it achieves positives by going down a certain route.
We would welcome a full review of the way we deliver around voting hubs and other things that will make the system much as it is today—recognisable—but maintain movement forwards. The key point is that we need to do that in a very structured, sensible, organic way, which is probably the best way of describing it.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed for your time and for taking our questions. Colleagues, thank you for your time. It was a longer session than we had envisaged, but worthwhile and valuable, I hope, to our inquiry. Thank you all.