Hansard

I have prepared to speak for eight minutes, but my speech will take 10 minutes easily.

I thank the minister for his warm welcome. I was absolutely delighted when I first saw the debate’s title, because I thought that it would be a great chance to highlight the importance of local government elections and encourage people to vote in them. I also thought that it would be a great opportunity to highlight the fact that the Scottish National Party has taken a 2.9 per cent cut in its budget from the United Kingdom Government, but has passed on a 6.1 per cent cut to local government. However, when I read the motion, I realised that we would be not just debating local government, but taking part in the endless conversation that is the SNP’s mission for independence.

The local government elections will be held in their own right. It is a long time since local government elections were held separately. Turnout for local elections is always lower, and recent election turnouts have been incredibly low. Therefore, I very much welcome the minister’s comments on promoting more engagement and involvement. I will return to that issue.

Our amendment focuses on participation and voter registration in the local government elections. We wanted to put those issues explicitly on the agenda, as we think that they are crucial issues that we should note. Nothing like the full number of people who are eligible to vote do so in any elections, and I think that we all know that, having decoupled the elections for good reason, as the minister outlined, ensuring that people turn out on the day and that the elections are supported by local people are serious issues.

We supported the implementation of the Gould report’s recommendations when it was published after the 2007 elections. Like the minister, I think that what Gould said about how the voter was treated was striking. He said:

“the voter was treated as an afterthought by virtually all the other stakeholders.”

That is a damning comment. In all our discussions about the elections, we must put the electorate first.

Gould argued that parties should be involved in discussions about elections, but that we should not own the process or put party advantage above the interests of fair elections. Those are good principles that should apply to whatever election or referendum is being discussed. That is why we argued in the chamber last week for there to be discussions on the referendum not just between the First Minister and the Prime Minister; the wider civic movement in Scotland and the parties that are represented in the Parliament should also be represented and consulted. Therefore, I very much welcome the minister’s comments. He has listened to the comments from a range of parties on the amount of money that parties are allowed to spend on the election.

The only thing that concerned me about the timing of the count was that the consultation on that took place over the Christmas holidays, which will not have maximised people’s contributions to the discussion. I know that that is a technical issue, but in the spirit of Gould we should have proper and wide-ranging discussions and consultations.

I agree with the minister that the Gould report was good; it contained clear analysis and sensible recommendations for the conduct of the elections. Reading it four years on, I find it an excellent reminder of what we need to focus on in the run-up to the elections in May.

When the report was published, we argued that, as politicians, we should not pick and choose which recommendations suited us or just sign up to the ones that favoured our party and leave the others on the sidelines. One of the key recommendations was that all the arrangements should be in place in good time—ideally six months—before the elections.

As we are now less than four months away from the local government elections, the minister’s report today on what the Scottish Government has done to ensure that those elections are fair and transparent and that they are run properly is welcome. Has the minister conducted his own review of that process to satisfy himself that everything that needs to be done has been done before the elections take place?

I will focus on postal voting, which the minister did not mention. The Gould report dealt with access to postal vote registration, the opportunity to cast a postal vote and even the way in which we fold our postal votes so that the electronic counting machines can deal with them. Those might seem small issues, but as we are encouraging people to vote by post, they must be taken on board. Perhaps the minister can comment on that in his closing remarks.

Our amendment deletes the last section of the motion—or suggests that we delete it; given our numbers in the chamber, we cannot guarantee to delete anything. We do not dispute the need for consistency and a more coherent approach, and we are signed up to the Gould recommendations. However, the Scotland Bill Committee did not consider the evidence in relation to local government, yet it still made recommendations on that in its final report. It is too late to make major changes for this year’s elections; that should have been discussed before the minister’s predecessor laid the order before the Parliament in October last year.

Across the country, parties are selecting or have already selected their candidates for May’s elections, and we should focus on what happens in less than four months’ time. The turnouts for recent by-elections have been incredibly small, and this election will be the first stand-alone local government election for decades. No one group or organisation is responsible for promoting participation—the minister is right to say that we all have responsibility for that. However, I would be interested to hear how much will be invested in the discussions on promoting voter participation, particularly with regard to the key issue of voter registration.

In the run-up to the 2007 elections, there was publicity from the Electoral Commission on how the STV system worked. What similar publicity will we have this time? There is a new generation of voters who were not around to benefit from that publicity last time.

In 2007, the Electoral Commission published its report on other aspects of the election, and I will focus on the issue of electoral registration. It is now possible to register to vote much closer to polling time, but research for the Electoral Commission has shown that the percentage of people missing from the registers has grown since the last time that matter was examined more than 10 years ago. The research suggests that around 13 to 15 per cent of eligible people in Great Britain were not registered following the annual household canvass activity in autumn 2010, in comparison with 8 to 9 per cent after the 2000 canvass.

Do we have the comparable figures for Scotland? I am interested in the issue of participation, because a social justice factor is involved. In my region, the areas with higher levels of deprivation—