Oral evidence: Voter engagement in the UK, HC 1059Thursday 27 February 2014

Oral evidence, 27 February 2014.

Witnesses

Professor Patrick Dunleavy, Co-Director, Democratic Audit, and Richard Berry, Managing Editor, Democratic Audit, gave evidence.

Chair

We are going to move quickly on to Professor Patrick Dunleavy and Richard Berry. Please come and join us. You have heard the debate this morning. No doubt there are things that you might want to pick up on in your own evidence, but we have colleagues who are going to kick you off by asking a couple of questions. Paul, I think you have the first one.

Paul Flynn

The 2012 Democratic Audit suggested certain improvements to the efficiency of our democracy. What are the most important ones?

Professor Dunleavy

We need to think about what arrangements we are thinking of. The 2012 Democratic Audit was designed to assess overall effectiveness, and we would say that changes to the electoral system were the key ones at that time, and they remain very important. Any change in the electoral system that would tend to bring more people into being involved in the election of representatives would be the suggestion that we would make.

Paul Flynn

In the first 1974 general election, the Liberal Democrats had a huge increase in votes without any relative increase in the number of MPs. For two general elections in Wales, the Conservative Party secured 20% of the vote without a single MP of the 40 Welsh MPs. Isn’t the lack of proportional representation the most outrageously unfair part of our democracy?

Chair

And therefore may have an impact on turnout, I think is your point.

Paul Flynn

The results in most constituencies were entirely predictable, have not changed in donkey’s years, and the number of people who actually change Governments, whose votes matter, is tiny.

Professor Dunleavy

That is true, and there are very well rehearsed arguments for improving the electoral system, but I think we need to situate where we are now in terms of recent context, particularly the vote on the alternative vote proposal in 2011. At the moment we would suggest that the only really viable and effective cross-party-supported kind of change that would be feasible in British political settings would be possibly looking at proportional representation for local government, which has been introduced in Scotland and has worked well in terms of improving voter engagement and political diversity there. It is also being looked at in Wales, and it is likely to be considered by some of the political parties in their general election manifestos next year. The one change that we would strongly recommend, which is a very minimal change that might well prove to be in line with British voters’ attitudes, as expressed recently in the AV election, would be to think about something like the supplementary vote, the system that is used for the London mayoral election. This is a British system. It has been used many times in Britain for electing the London mayor and other mayors. It was used in the police commissioner elections very successfully nationwide in England and Wales. It is a very small change, but it would mean that a much larger proportion of voters would be engaged in the selection of representatives than is happening at the moment.

Paul Flynn

During the vote on AV, I drove through Vauxhall Cross every morning and saw a poster there that said that if we had AV in this country, more of our soldiers would be killed in Afghanistan and more babies would die in hospital. Do you think when public debate is on a level of that kind there is any real chance of getting reforms?

Professor Dunleavy

I can’t quite see the logic of that particular advertisement.

Paul Flynn

The logic was that they were saying it was going to increase Government spending to run AV, therefore there would be less for spending on protective equipment for troops in Afghanistan and less money to spend caring for babies in hospital. It was a base political argument. This is rock-bottom—subterranean probably—in terms of political debate. But those arguments won and the public voted against AV for that reason.

Professor Dunleavy

I think that the public voted against AV because it was seen as more complex than it needed to be, and as potentially able to be manipulated and likely to produce representatives who were not genuinely enjoying majority support, whereas I think the supplementary vote is a very simple-to-use system. You can only win the election if you are in the top two, but it does encourage candidates who are likely to be winning candidates to reach out a little bit beyond their party and to actually get more than 50% plus one of the votes. That would be the great advantage.

Paul Flynn

Do you think that politicians are so deeply enmeshed in their own political aspirations and futures that there is a case for putting the decisions for how the electoral system is run to an independent body outside of political control?

Professor Dunleavy

I think there is a case for that, and if you look at the mayoral elections and police commissioner elections, Parliament did delegate the choice of the final system that was to be used in those cases to the Electoral Commission, and the Electoral Commission did come down in favour of the supplementary vote both times. As I say, it is a system we have used a lot. A lot of British voters have used it. There have been no criticisms that I know of that are of any substance about the system. It certainly does not cost any more to administer than ordinary voting procedures. We think that is an immediate step that would have very positive effects in making sure, for example, that every MP had majority support in their local constituency—genuine majority support and not just 45% or whatever.

Richard Berry

You mentioned the cost of moving to AV. I think it brings up an interesting point about the cost of elections generally. We had a quick look, and it is a rough estimate that over the past five years, the UK spent £687 million administering elections[1]. That is over a wide variety of different systems and different levels, and it is a huge amount of money. I know there is room within that to do things a little differently and allow information on different systems, so I would not suggest that the cost should be a barrier to changing systems.

Professor Dunleavy

I think where the cost of elections is particularly important is that almost all of the £690 million, or whatever it is, is being spent on producing elections, if you see what I mean. If you were a company and you were running an activity that costs £135 million a year, how much would you spend on marketing and trying to engage customers with your system? If you were a charity and you were spending that amount of money or raising that amount of money, how much would you spend on marketing? The public sector seems to be peculiarly averse to spending any money on election communications and encouraging people to vote, providing information to voters. Most of our written submission to you today deals with the very poor and ineffective means of election communication that are currently in existence, which we think is very largely responsible for some serious problems that we also identified.

David Morris

To what extent, relevant to turnover, is the problem of failing to get people registered and therefore able to vote as compared to people being disengaged with the political system more generally?

Professor Dunleavy

I think if you look at our written evidence you can see that the proportion of people who are voting in the over-55 group, among people who have degrees, is 91%, according to the British election study. That is probably slightly overstating it, but if we compare it on the same basis with young people of 18 to 34 with just GCSE or less qualification, the proportion voting is 44%. That is a huge difference, from 44% to 91%. If you look at the OECD data, which just compares voting among young people and voting among older people, you will see that the UK has triple the OECD average age gap between young and old voters. It is three times worse in Britain, and it is much worse than any other country. The only two countries that are even remotely close are Japan and Korea, which also have quite a problem with an ageing population. That is one and a half times greater than any other country in the EU. That is a structural problem. You can’t think of that as being a motivational problem. It is a structural problem. It is down to young people’s position in the housing market, the fact that they are moving, the fact that people don’t have jobs for life any more. They have portfolio careers where you have to move quite regularly to get jobs if you are a young person. Also, a lot of young people are in the rental sector, which has also much less structural registration. These problems have been known for a long time. Very little that is effective has been done about them. We are urging you to ask the Electoral Commission to think about ways in which they can counteract these structural limits.

David Morris

Are there any specific causes you would see as having a particularly significant effect on voter registration and turnout?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes. Whenever we do focus groups, we always divide the focus group into two. We have one for people who are aged under 40 and one for people aged over 40. I can’t tell you the extent of the difference. People over 40 have their children in school, they are engaged in the local community, they are using the health service, they are getting their granny looked after, they are driving around on roads with potholes and so on. They have lots of experience of how to deal with government, how to deal with public service agencies. They know the names of their local MP and so on. People aged under 35 don’t really know any of that. Young people particularly don’t. They can’t get that very diffuse, informal, multiple-channel, local community information about when elections are, who is standing and what the issues are. If they do go and vote, they never find out what happened to that vote. They never get any feedback from councils on what the results were. It is quite a disappointing thing to show up at an old primary school that is empty, full of echoing halls, there is nobody else there, you vote, you go away and you never find out what happened. We have a lot of structural factors that are putting people off voting, especially young people, and are delaying people’s engagement with the political process. What we are suggesting is a proper, modern, well organised, online digital communication strategy, spending a decent amount of money on marketing elections. Why produce something but not market it at all? It is a completely counterproductive stance at the moment from the Electoral Commission and from many local authorities.

Tracey Crouch

What are your views on the comments that we had earlier about the link between low participation rates and confidence in politicians? I could see you nodding in the gallery, so I just wanted to know what your views were on that.

Professor Dunleavy

I agree that there are certain problems with public trust in politicians, but if you look at modern Europe now you can see that countries that have high levels of overall trust in their institutional set-ups are perhaps the most Euro-sceptical countries. Britain has quite high overall levels of trust in its institutional set-up, so I think it is a very specific, election-related thing. People have trust in their local representatives more than their remote national representatives and so on. I think we could engage a lot more people and provide a lot more information before elections, and then provide feedback immediately after elections—what happened as a result of your voting in your ward and your area—and do that very accessibly. We would like to see a web app where you just put your postcode in and it updated you when the elections were coming up and told you who the candidates were. Maybe it could provide links so you can see what the issues are and what happened last time, you could go and vote and then you would get very speedy and timely updating. You don’t want to know about it two months later. You want to know two or three days later what happened to your vote and whether it had an effect.

Tracey Crouch

Are you saying that people have trust in the institution—our parliamentary system and our local government system—but not trust or respect in the people who work within those systems, the politicians?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes. I think there is a lot more trust in the overall workings of the systems and how the different parts of the system interact: Parliament, Government, civil service, local councils. There is more trust in how they work in the aggregate, but there is a lack of trust in individual representatives, produced by, for example, many representatives not really having the moral legitimacy of 50%-plus-one support. Anything that could improve that, anything that could connect people a lot more effectively with representatives and what they are doing, we think could be very important.

Tracey Crouch

What about the question of party whipping? Do you think that politicians who are either independent or more independently minded are going to gain that confidence from their electorate?

Professor Dunleavy

I certainly think that the various moves that have been made in the House of Commons in the last four years to improve the independence of MPs have been very positively received by the public. Last time we were before this Committee we were pointing out the very radical improvements in media visibility of Select Committees and the positive impact of the Wright reforms. I do think that anything that shows that politicians are connected to voters and are acting on their behalf, and are not just there to represent the party, is going to be beneficial to electoral legitimacy.

Tracey Crouch

Richard, before I move on, do you have any comments on that specific issue?

Richard Berry

I would reinforce that and say that the first issue is probably a correlation between lack of trust and lack of knowledge. If you don’t know who are the candidates standing in your local area at the next election, you might be more likely to say, “I don’t trust the politicians who are asking for my vote”, because you don’t know who they are. It is quite hard to find out who is standing for election until it is imminent. National elections obviously have blanket coverage for years ahead of the election, but local elections don’t get much coverage in the local media. Also, the public authorities, the council itself and the Electoral Commission don’t give very much advance information that is locally relevant to people about who is standing and which elections are coming up. I think if people could access something like that online we might see a change, a shift in people’s attitudes with regards to trust.

Tracey Crouch

Do you think that engagement with voters is as important during elections as it is at election time?

Richard Berry

I think it is important throughout the electoral period and electoral process.

Tracey Crouch

Just very quickly, you heard the IPPR talking about voting being compulsory for first-time voters. What are your views on that proposal?

Professor Dunleavy

We think it is an interesting idea for discussion. We are in favour, as our written submission makes clear. We think the argument for lowering the voting age to 16 is a strong one and a very low-risk one, and could have very positive democratic gains and would not create any significant risk or partisan effects of any kind. We are in favour of that. We were not in favour of treating first-time voters differently from other people. If there was a general move towards compulsory voting, that would be fine, but I think we are long way off that and I think it would be highly invidious to impose a burden on young people at this stage.

Mr Turner

Do you think it is better to have different elections on different days or it would be, as I think happens in the United States, all the elections on one day?

Professor Dunleavy

Given the way the UK votes, it is quite likely that you are going to have several elections on the same election day periodically. For example, we are going to have local elections and European elections on 22 May. That is very good for turnout on these occasions. People seem to quite like having multiple elections on the same day. What you need to be sure of is to make sure that the voting systems are consistent in their design across these things. We are strongly in favour of X voting being all on the same day. If you were to have some other kind of system, such as you have in the Scottish local government, you need to be a bit careful there. I think that generally speaking it is a very good idea to have elections in a regular cycle and a very good idea to have elections being communicated to people in a systematic and integrated way, because almost everybody here in the UK has six or seven tiers of representation. If you are in London, for example, you have a local councillor, you have a borough council; you are interested in how that is made up. You have a GLA Assembly member, you have a local member and you also have list members who are London-wide members. You have the London mayor, who is also kind of a police commissioner for London. Then you have your MP and then you have your MEP. So there are a lot of elections happening all the time. We need to be presenting those as a coherent narrative that is constantly available to voters so that they know that these things are coming up every year, and we need to try to spread out the higher turnout from the general election to these other forms of election. Absolutely nothing has ever been done about that in Britain. It has been left to individual bodies to communicate their own elections. We are just pouring money down the drain on ineffective communication.

Mr Turner

Would you like to say what is the picture on the Isle of Wight or any other constituency, but not London? The trouble is, we are getting a London view and most of us come from outside London.

Professor Dunleavy

If you are outside London then usually you will have a district council and a district councillor, or you may have a county councillor and a county council. You have a police commissioner.

Mr Turner

Yes, but you are double-counting there. You are mentioning a member of the district council. That is only one; that is not two. We only have one between us. I am just pointing out that what you are saying to us for London does not apply to most of the country.

Professor Dunleavy

I think you will find there are six or seven contests that you are interested in.

Mr Turner

No, I am sorry, there are three in my constituency.

Professor Dunleavy

Which constituency?

Mr Turner

The Isle of Wight.

Professor Dunleavy

You have a council. Do you have a county council?

Mr Turner

No.

Professor Dunleavy

You have a district councillor.

Mr Turner

No.

Professor Dunleavy

You have a council?

Mr Turner

We have a council.

Professor Dunleavy

You have council wards.

Mr Turner

There is only one.

Professor Dunleavy

Is it just one ward?

Mr Turner

You only vote once for the—I am not clear that you are clear what is happening.

Professor Dunleavy

You might be interested in who represents me in my local ward, you might be interested in what is the balance of representatives on the council.

Mr Turner

I see. This is from the point of view of people voting.

Professor Dunleavy

Yes. Then you have an MEP, an MP and a police commissioner. You are probably a little bit simpler than everybody else.

Richard Berry

We are based in London but I am from Manchester, and I worked out that going forward between now and 2020 there will be an election in Manchester every year. Having those elections on different days would mean people being asked to vote twice a year. There is a general election, a city election and the PCC. The one question might be 2017, which may or may not be a European Union membership referendum, but going forward there is an election every year.

Mr Turner

I think you have answered the question about voting at 16—thank you.

Fabian Hamilton

Your written evidence says that the current provision of information about elections is “something of a scandal”. Could you expand a little on this and tell us how you think it affects voter engagement?

Professor Dunleavy

For example, the Electoral Commission has a website. We looked at it last week. We put in a Westminster postcode. It generated a result and it said there are no elections in prospect in your area, but there is a borough council election that is happening in May and there is a European Parliament election also happening in May. It is stunningly under-resourced, stunningly inefficient. It is very poor. The online provision of election information by the Electoral Commission and by a lot of councils is limited in various ways. They will give more information about elections for which they are directly responsible, and they won’t necessarily comment on other elections.

Fabian Hamilton

Most local authority websites will give details of when the next election is, though, surely.

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, but will they give timely details of who the candidates are? Will they tell people in a timely way after the election what happened in their ward?

Fabian Hamilton

They can’t give details of who the candidates are until the closing date for nominations, which is usually just a few days before the election. I know the Leeds site, for example, does publish the candidates immediately.

Professor Dunleavy

When people are nominated, why not put up the people who are nominated? Why do you have to wait until the last possible moment?

Fabian Hamilton

I suspect because the authorities feel they are giving unfair advantage to those who are nominated maybe a week before the deadline. You will find that most candidates will not be nominated until just a few days before the deadline.

Professor Dunleavy

In itself that behaviour by political parties inhibits voters’ access to information. You should encourage parties to have, for example, prospective parliamentary candidates identified as early as possible and campaigning and active in the constituency they are seeking to represent.

Fabian Hamilton

To be fair, they do. Certainly my experience, and the experience of probably everybody in this room, would be that when we were nominated as prospective parliamentary candidates, we started campaigning immediately. Obviously nominations did not close until a few days before the general election, but I was nominated in September 1990 for the 1992 election and I started campaigning immediately. A lot of people would have known that I was the prospective Labour candidate a year and a half before the election.

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, that would be the suggestion we would make. Authorities and electoral law should encourage these kinds of behaviours and not discourage them by limiting information.

Fabian Hamilton

Forgive me, I don’t think we need the Electoral Commission or any authorities to encourage us to do that. If you are anxious and desperate or really desire to get elected, which is why you have been selected in the first place, in a seat that is not already held by your party, then surely you are going to campaign immediately. I bet there is no Member in this room who did not start campaigning the minute they were selected, which is often a year, two years, sometimes three years before the general election.

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, but all I am suggesting is that if it is known that you are the prospective parliamentary candidate and you have already been nominated, why doesn’t the local authorities convey that information to people via their website?

Fabian Hamilton

Because they are very frightened of being accused of being partisan.

Professor Dunleavy

The law needs to be changed in that respect.

Fabian Hamilton

I would agree with that. Can I ask you—you have elaborated to a certain extent—what other information you think should be provided? Do you think that local authorities, electoral registration authorities and the Electoral Commission should be taking much more of a lead? From what you have said, Professor Dunleavy, it seems you do think that. I think parties do take a lead because they want their people to have an advantage, but should the so-called neutral authorities also be much more proactive?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, indeed. I don’t think if you were running a £700 million business you would spend no money on marketing. I think a reasonable proportion of the budget needs to be allocated not to producing elections but to helping people get to the elections, find out where they are and so on. In modern times there should be a well developed phone app or tablet app that you can use. You just put in your postcode and it tells you what elections are upcoming, it tells you which ward you are in, it makes sure you are registered, links to political parties who are local in the area and so on, and provides as much information as it can to make participation attractive. Then, when you have voted, it updates you very quickly and lets you know what happened as a result of your voting.

Fabian Hamilton

I think that is a brilliant idea, and I hope anybody who is listening will take that one up. Mr Berry, do you have anything to add?

Richard Berry

I would say that the Government is very keen on open data, which most people welcome and we welcome. Election results are not open data. They are published by local authorities and by other bodies as well, but not in an open and accessible way. Some councils will upload a handwritten election result form and scan it in and publish it as a PDF, and that is the only way to find out who won your ward. Nobody else publishes the information in an open way. If we had some kind of open-data principles that all organisations, including councils, used when publishing election results, that would make it far easier for people to come along and create these apps. It does not necessarily have to be the Government or the Electoral Commission who do that legwork, but if they make the data available it would be far easier for others to do that. We have seen some individuals who do that and get election results and put them into websites and make them quite accessible in a user-friendly way, but it is very hard to get the data to do that quickly.

Fabian Hamilton

I know from my own experience that all the elections that I have been involved in personally, and even the local authority elections, I have published on my website since I have been an MP and put the percentage breakdowns, turnouts and so on. You are right that it is quite hard to find them, especially in areas where the winning candidates don’t publish them.

Professor Dunleavy

If you have a PhD in political science you can do it, but you need to know in great detail what the remit of different authorities is and how the different areas interleave and so on. Older, more skilled and better-educated people can cope with this complexity, but we are doing absolutely nothing to simplify that complexity and to transmit the information in the most accessible way. That really is a scandal. Nationally our practices are worse than, let’s say, Ireland, and in many cases you could say they are almost worse than Bangladesh and places like that. It has been a very long-term decline.

Fabian Hamilton

I would agree.

Mark Durkan

You are suggesting improvements in the administration of elections, and that would include issues like online voting, getting individuals in a democracy, holding elections at weekends rather than on a Thursday. What changes do you think would be most important to increasing turnout in the first instance? Secondly, are there any particular issues in relation to registration that you would look at, based on experiences elsewhere including, as you mentioned, Ireland? Obviously there was an experience of moving some elections and referenda to a Friday, for instance, and other things like that.

Professor Dunleavy

I think if you look across Europe the general pattern is that elections that are held on the weekend have a 10% higher turnout than elections that are held on working days. We think that is a pretty easy win. It has costs in terms of higher overtime pay or something like that, but if you were interested in increasing turnout, that would be a useful thing. We think we should definitely have a sustained, serious experiment of using online voting on a larger scale than has been tried before, and that would help reduce many people’s problems with it. Finally we think there is a lot of scope for using elections, especially general elections, as community focus events, and at the moment that does not happen. You turn up to the school, there are maybe a couple of checkers or canvassers who are checking who has voted, you go in, everything is very sterile and there is no real sense of community life going on there. Whereas if you go to some Australian elections you can see that, if the school is closed, the PTA has a craft fair and they are selling things to raise funds. The local authority has come and has a stall. The social security has a stall explaining your rights and so on. It is used as a focus for outreach and community activity, and that encourages people to come along and vote, have a cup of coffee and participate in a wider community feeling. These are not difficult things to do, they just require a bit of inventive approach by the Electoral Commission and other bodies and moving away from the 1884 practices and obsessions that we have that dominate the voting scene and make it rather unpalatable and off-putting.

Mark Durkan

Without falling into those obsessions, are content enough from what you understand from the business—and I have a firm in my own constituency whose business is electronic counts, electronic voting and all the rest of it—that that can all be done in ways that are fair and secure and that people are not going to suspect that the technology has been used or abused in any particular way?

Professor Dunleavy

There are some very big countries in the world that are using electronic voting. India and Brazil use it. You can design electronic voting systems that have high levels of audit capability to make sure you can analyse and track—

Mark Durkan

Extending that to online as well?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, that is what I would say. You could easily get to that. You would not be able to do it all in one go. You would need to start by having some trials and working through it.

Mark Durkan

I go back to a question you answered earlier relation to this question of having elections on the same day. In the context of the debate we had here on fixed-term Parliaments, there was a very strong concern from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that there was a high risk in having devolved elections on the same day as a general election, not just because of the confusion that arises when you have two different voting systems—and we have had that experience in Northern Ireland and Scotland has had it—but also because in terms of election coverage and election debate, one will eclipse the other. The media, particularly the broadcast media, will find it easy to say that in respect of the obligations they have for balance and coverage, the easiest thing for them to do is be very selective and within that very selective coverage be balanced. But you will then find that many people will say that a whole side of one or more campaigns ends up not covered.

Professor Dunleavy

I agree that devolved Government and general elections would not be elections you would want to hold on the same day. I understand there will be extensions of the timescales for that.

Richard Berry

Local media coverage of local elections is not that great to begin with. There were borough elections in London in May, but despite reading the Evening Standard and the looking at the BBC local news most days, you wouldn’t know that. I think Patrick is right that there are issues with devolved and general elections, but the local election media coverage probably needs to be boosted somehow anyway.

Mark Durkan

Particularly as local media seems to be getting less and less local.

Chris Ruane

Individual electoral registration, as you know, will require the national insurance number. Data matching for IER is as low as 55% in Tower Hamlets. The Electoral Commission are proposing to forbid MPs and political parties from touching postal ballot registration forms because there have been seven successful prosecutions in 13 years, and the Electoral Commission are proposing voter photo ID to stop voter registration fraud because there has been one successful prosecution in four years. What cumulative effect do you think that these acts or proposals will have on registration and turnout?

Professor Dunleavy

We feel that the Electoral Commission has become a bit too obsessive about the regulation and production of elections and has given insufficient time and money and attention to the promotion and encouragement of voting itself. We would be very worried that introducing any document check at the polls would have serious adverse effects on turnout.

Chris Ruane

And the others?

Professor Dunleavy

We have not investigated electoral regulation. It is obviously very important that the integrity of elections should be beyond doubt, but I agree that it would seem a bit problematic to restrict parties’ and candidates’ abilities to encourage people to be registered.

Richard Berry

I would agree with that wholeheartedly. I think the bigger issue is probably that people who are very mobile in their lives, move around a lot and move house, especially young people, don’t tend to register quickly in a new place. They move to a new area and they don’t register and therefore are disenfranchised at the next election that takes place. I think that is the bigger issue. We need to make it easier for people to be able to register if possible. Some people who move house during election time—as is happening to me in May—won’t be able to register, because there is a deadline cut-off to register. I am moving 16 days before the election, so if you move in that period you cannot register.

Paul Flynn

Should registration on election day be allowed?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes.

Richard Berry

Yes, that would help address that.

Professor Dunleavy

There might need to be a safeguard where you declare that you are not registered somewhere else, and there would be a penalty if you breach that, but we would be in favour of that.

Chair

I can see there would be a strong reason on that occasion to bring in some serious identification, because obviously this would be a last-minute thing and you would not want people bringing in disrepute. But to pick up Chris’s point, it does seem rather odd that a handful of cases are generating such interest when the scandal of 30 million people not voting in the general election and over 6 million not being registered has not generated a proportion of that response. What is your view on that?

Professor Dunleavy

You are the key institutional shareholders who could ask the Electoral Commission to justify their stance. My personal position is that they seem to have become more and more concerned with party finances and regulation of elections and given less and less coverage and time and effort to encouraging a genuine participation in the voting process. That is a huge pity, I think.

Chair

Is that something that needs addressing through their terms of reference, or is it merely perhaps a nudge in the right direction and a cultural change that is required there?

Professor Dunleavy

I think it comes down to two things. The fact is that they have various legal burdens that are placed on them and they have had a restricted budget, so they have progressively focused down on doing the things that they legally are duty-bound to do. That is one thing. The second thing is that if you look at the composition of the members themselves, it is entirely weighted towards the legal, regulatory, party finance orientation. I think that there is nobody at the moment on the Electoral Commission who is in the least bit credentialled or seems to be interested in encouraging voter participation and democracy efficacy. That seems to me a huge shame. I would like to see a half-and-half balance in people who are interested in regulation and legal controls and party finances and people who are interested in trying to make elections work. That is just not represented on the Electoral Commission at the moment.

Chair

I mentioned to previous witnesses the question about the over-concentration of power in non-elected institutions. No. 10 Downing Street is not directly elected, and no one is elected in Whitehall or the media, yet institutions that are elected—your local Member of Parliament and you local councillor—are labouring under an immense burden of over-centralised power, which this Committee has looked at over a number of years. Do you feel that that is one of the reasons why people feel, “What is the point of voting? We are not going to change anything because our representatives are not in a position to change things in a way that might be satisfactory”?

Professor Dunleavy

In some parts of the country we have introduced devolution, and in other parts of the country we have, for example, a London mayor and a London Assembly. The London mayor has been quite effective in providing a focus for people to be interested in politics and to look at issues. I think that England itself, as a country with 55 million people, is a very large unit. If you look across the western world it is one of the largest undevolved bits of population that you can find. I think if people had more information about local elections and regional, national and other elections, even European elections, and they had more sense of being able to connect with those representatives—which they are not being given at the moment because of electoral communication being very focused on the general elections—that might have some positive effects. That might encourage people to ask Whitehall for more devolution, but I think you need to have that working with the grain of public opinion.

Mark Durkan

Further to the point on the powers that seem to lie with unelected institutions, you can go back to this whole issue about trust in politicians and relevance in terms of people’s vote and currency. The Houses of Parliament, of course, have two Chambers. One is unelected and the other is elected. I sometimes find it bizarre why all the main parties in this place have locked themselves into a convention that basically says amendments won’t be done in the House of Commons, amendments will be done in the House of Lords. When we find ourselves dealing with questions coming from people, including young people, about, “What do you do, what is your role as MP?” we are left with a situation where the claim rate for success in terms of amendments or Bills and all the rest of it is seen to be in the House of Lords rather than in the House of Commons. Politicians invariably—the elected politicians—end up pleading powerlessness on most of the issues about which they are asked, because they did not get time to vote: “Yes, this big Bill was passed but there was very little time because the vote was guillotined”. Things are not guillotined in the Lords. Do you not think there is a fundamental issue that, yes, we are right to look at the Home Office reform, we are right to be looking at the issues about engagement and all the rest of it, but we need to be looking at the credibility and relevance of our own processes as elected legislators?

Professor Dunleavy

Yes, I think you have expressed it very well. Obviously I think it is very important for democratic institutions to be constantly trying to be as good as they possibly can be rather than just running along in a familiar mode. All I would say is that we have seen various changes in the Select Committee area. With the coalition Government, we have seen a higher level than normal of intra-party dissent over the last four years. We have seen, for example, the vote on Syria, which arguably had an immediate and dramatic effect on British Government policy, and that change then arguably had a pretty dramatic effect on US Government and international policy. So it is perfectly possible for a powerful House of Commons that is voting independently and looking at issues on their merits to have worldwide impacts. That is a very good example of such an effect.

Mark Durkan

Then we go back to guillotines and supported amendments never getting put.

Chair

Patrick, a final question is one that I asked witnesses previously about the media. Do you think it has a corrosive effect on our democracy? Do you think it could have a very positive effect in improving our democracy, in particular voter turnout? What is your view on the role that the media might play?

Professor Dunleavy

We are very strongly in favour of introducing more direct communication as a form of competition with the media. The problem with any media is that they are there as an intermediary, and the intermediary has their own values and their own ways of looking at things. Journalists have tended to say, “We don’t like covering politics” or, “We are going to cover it only very superficially and we are not going to give people detailed information. We are not going to give them local information, we are going to keep it very nationally focused. We are only going to cover very selected issues and will not give any enduring coverage”, and so on. There are a lot of very strong structural problems that are introduced if you rely completely on the media. What we would like to see is Parliament, councils, the Electoral Commission, everybody who is in charge of elections, having a very much more active role in direct communication to citizens, bypassing the media. We think that would have good effects in forcing the media to improve their coverage of elections and the election process. To give you an example, we are just starting a new project where we are trying to put together a library of images that shows people voting and that shows democracy in Britain in action. At the moment it is almost impossible to find any images that people can use or that people can look at that convey some of the degree of excitement and interest that people have in politics. You have this rather jaded core of journalists sitting between you and citizens, constantly imposing a pall of journalistic values, which we think deserves to be competed with. It is the same thing with academics. We are now doing a lot more blogging and direct communication with a much wider range of people and we are less reliant on the media than we used to be. I think the same could be true for voting and politicians’ relations with the public.

Chair

I get the sense in many of your remarks that you yearn for a more celebratory, exciting, lively system, where the civic duty of going to vote is something that gives you a real kick as an individual elector. I don’t want to go back to the days of Hogarth where it was bunting and beer and fistfights and the rest of it. That was exciting in its own way, I guess. My own local council, coming up to election time, just put up loads of stuff, decorated the council house, not with parties and slogans but with, “Voting coming up in May. Now is your big chance. Get out there”. There were lots of pictures of citizens. I found that really exciting and it was a tremendous thing that they were doing. Is there a way that ultimately we can try to lift people? That has to be a very quick answer.

Professor Dunleavy

We have to reduce drastically the costs of voting, the costs of finding out where to vote, who is standing, what happens after you vote. I think all of that would be tremendous. We could do a lot very cheaply and effectively via digital communications. We can get a lot more of a pro-voting, pro-participation message into the public domain, and we think there is a huge potential for making voting a lot more attractive than it is at the moment.

Chair

Fantastic. Richard, Patrick, thank you so much for your contribution this morning. Our inquiry goes on. Our hashtag is “#voterengagement”. Anyone who is following our proceedings who wishes to comment on anything they have heard, or indeed send evidence to the Committee, is very welcome to do that. Thank you so much for your time this morning. Voter engagement in the UK, HC 1059 [1] Having looked at this in more detail, we have revised our estimate of UK spending on elections over the past 5 years upward to £764 million. This does not include the cost to local authorities of registering voters. The details of this estimate are available online: http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=3537