Our second item of business is to take evidence from the Scottish Government’s bill team as part of our scrutiny of the financial memorandum to the Scottish Independence Referendum (Franchise) Bill. I welcome to the meeting Steve Sadler and Heather Wells—a combination of surnames that I have heard before somewhere. I do not know whether you are going to give us a wee dance or something at the end of your presentation.
Good morning and thank you, convener.
Thank you. I will open up with some questions and colleagues will come in in due course.
Between them, five different software companies provide the electoral management software for the 15 electoral registration officers in Scotland. They each cover a different number. Three of them are in-house systems that relate to a single registration area. The other two are much larger national companies that cover multiple electoral registration areas.
Thank you very much for that comprehensive answer. The financial memorandum states that
Before Christmas, we asked EROs to give us a sense of the different costs that they might expect to incur, as we did with the software companies. The financial memorandum reflects their feedback on those different areas of cost. It was not possible to specifically quantify some of those areas. Many are linked to staffing and resources, and depend on how much staffing pressure there is at that moment and whether additional staff resources would be required to do those activities.
No, I do not think that I can. That is great.
The financial memorandum is split between in-canvass costs and outwith-canvass costs, and the 40 per cent outwith-canvass cost is partly designed to help absorb any fluctuations in the staffing and resources that might not be possible to precisely predict too far in advance.
The financial memorandum notes that the United Kingdom Government intends to introduce a new registration system—individual electoral registration—under the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, which it states
We have been speaking to the Cabinet Office at official level for a couple of years in the run-up to the introduction of individual electoral registration. At the official and ministerial levels of the Scottish and UK Governments, we have agreed that in effect neither Government will do anything to get in the way of the referendum or the introduction of IER.
My final question is about the cost of sending out what has been assessed as 40,000 reminders. Paragraph 14 of the financial memorandum, which considers the cost of printing and postage, states that the return postage to send and receive 40,000 letters to random addresses across Scotland would cost £4,800, which is only 12p per household. How can that figure be accurate?
We can give you a breakdown of how the figures for printing and distributing reminders were arrived at.
I have the printing costs here; I am not arguing about that, nor about the cost of the envelopes. I am wondering how postage could cost £4,800 for sending out 40,000 letters and getting 40,000 back. If you sent them second class, that would be £1 a household: 50p there and 50p back. That would be £40,000. The difference seems massive, unless you have an incredibly special deal with the Post Office, which I doubt. If you were delivering 40,000 letters in Edinburgh, you might get a good deal, but that figure for delivering 40,000 letters randomly across Scotland seems cheap.
The figure is arrived at partly because of what you have just identified—that we are not individually sticking second-class stamps on to those letters. The printing companies have postage licences, and at least one of them is principally a postage company and so would pay very different rates from those that you or I would pay to stick stamps individually on to letters. The postage rates that we have reflected in the financial memorandum are based on the rates we have been given by the printing companies.
The figure of 12p for postage there and back still seems pretty cheap.
I want to go into another issue—the delegated powers provisions. We know that such provisions get added to lots of bills, but I do not think that I have ever seen one that says, “We don’t intend to use it, nor do we think that we will, but if we are going to use it, it won’t cost any more because the people involved will just be doing their ordinary jobs.” Can you give us an example of a precedent for this type of delegated powers provision?
The wording is partly based on the fact that we need to allow registration officers to conduct the registration of 16-year-olds for the first time. We have to ensure as best we can, and subject to the agreement of Parliament, that that is through by June—certainly by the summer recess. As we have said in the memorandum, we need to provide for possibly needing to work outside that timescale, so it is almost an insurance policy.
Is that all it is—a precaution?
Yes. At the moment, we have no intention of using the power. However, when the Government announced last October that it was looking to allow all 16-year-olds to have the vote, that meant a very short timetable. The first thing we did was to have initial discussions with registration officers, to work back from when they would want to start the canvass period in the autumn or winter of this year and when they would need legislative provision to allow them to capture the details of younger people for the first time. That is why we had to put together a parliamentary timetable that is quite tight. That is the context of the wording in the memorandum.
Is it uncommon to do it this way, or are there other examples of these types of delegated powers?
I cannot think of one off the top of my head. In the context of the bill, it is because the timing is short. We are not going outside any standing orders of Parliament. However, as the Referendum (Scotland) Bill Committee has identified, there is little scope for slippage in the timetable.
I have a couple of brief points. Is it fair to say that £25,000 for testing the young voter registration form is a concrete cost, as opposed to an estimate?
Yes.
The convener touched on the software adaptation costs of £240,000. I am no information technology expert and do not have access to the detail, but that figure seems to me to be on the low side—are you sure that that will be enough to cover the development of five software systems? How confident are you that the figure is fair?
We are as confident as we can be at this stage. As Heather Wells has said, we went to the software providers, which are both commercial companies and in-house teams within the registration units of local authorities, to ask how much it would cost to make that small change to the registration system on the basis of the specification we had. Those are the figures we were given. Although the bill’s provisions have changed slightly since December in some technical areas, we do not think that the specification has changed to the extent that the estimates are no longer valid.
The financial memorandum acknowledges that these are contractual arrangements between two parties, neither of which is us. Moreover, as with the printing companies, each of the companies the contract is held with might theoretically change in time. The financial memorandum acknowledges that there are margins of uncertainty in that respect but, as Steve Sadler has said, these are our closest estimates based on the information that we have or have sought. The quite detailed specification that we have given the companies to work with has, I hope, helped us to pin down as concrete a figure as we can get at the moment.
The convener also asked a couple of questions on the costs of sending out reminders for return of young voter registration forms. I understand that, as with every other voter form, you will be sending the initial young registration form out to every household. However, the financial memorandum says that a household
In the bill we make provision for EROs to be able to access education records as a means of cross-checking information. They can use the information from the education records to prepopulate the young voter registration forms before they are sent out and, in the event that they do not receive a form, to check whether they should have expected to have received one, in which case they should chase the matter up. The provision provides a level of verification that will allow them to focus their attention on chasing non-returns where they should have had a return instead of non-returns from people from whom they would never have expected a return anyway.
Thank you.
On the same theme, I understand that a special form for young voters will be sent out with the usual envelope; the form will—one hopes—be returned; and then, as Mr Brown has been exploring, there will be some targeting. Am I right in thinking that some councils such as Glasgow City Council have done extra work, including going round doors, to try to push up electoral registration numbers? After all, there are certain parts of the country—the poorer parts, I would suggest—where registration is low.
That is right. In the process of looking closely at and developing the bill’s proposals, it has been confirmed to us that the 15 electoral registration officers all operate independently and have different means of targeting local difficulties or, as you say, areas of non-registration. There is no one registration system or application of such a system across the country.
But we are not planning to do any extra work on targeting younger people—or, indeed, anyone. Would that be entirely up to the local authority?
I am sorry—I missed the point. In the main Scottish independence referendum bill, which will be introduced soon, the Electoral Commission will have a statutory responsibility for public awareness of the referendum campaign, which will include a registration component. Last year, the commission ran a public awareness campaign ahead of the local elections, the first part of which was to encourage people to register and the second part of which was to inform people how and when to vote.
But, given that we are examining the bill’s financial aspects, I take it that we are not putting any extra resources into local authorities to help them to knock on more doors.
Not into local authorities. However, the financial memorandum to the main bill will set out the estimated provision for the Electoral Commission, which will be a fairly sizable amount of money, including, based on the figures that it has given us, an element for public awareness in general.
I want to look at the area in the financial memorandum that relates to registration appeals and offences. Paragraph 21 sets out that the bill
The short answer is no. Off the top of our heads, we could not put a figure to that. We could certainly ask electoral registration officers for information specific to each area if that would be helpful.
Although you have discussed it with electoral registration officers and you say that they are relaxed about it, it would probably be useful to have it quantified.
I take your point that it would be helpful to the committee to have specific details. However, electoral registration officers and the Scottish Assessors Association, which we have been dealing with on this, have been happy with the description and with the general impression that registration appeals are quite rare.
I wonder whether the answer will be the same to my next question. You set out that the bill contains offence provisions relating to the registration of young voters and say:
Can we give you the same answer and say that we will come back to you soon on that?
I thought that you might.
This time it was not electoral registration officers but the Crown Office that was happy with our description. It is very rare for electoral offences to be proceeded with in that way. However, we can certainly get some figures for the committee.
The financial memorandum states:
That takes us back to an earlier question. The cost of that is part of the general processing and administrative costs, which are really staffing and resourcing. As we said earlier, it depends on the other burdens on staff at the time whether that work can be carried out by existing staff or whether additional resource is needed to make that happen.
But unless the staff are unproductive and have time on their hands at the moment, surely there must be some kind of cost to it.
Even if we got 100 per cent registration among 16 and 17-year-olds, which would be fantastic and which obviously we hope for, they would still comprise less than 3 per cent—I think that it is something like 2.7 per cent—of the number of voters. The numbers that we are talking about are not that high. In any individual electoral registration area, the numbers will be fairly small. It is additional work but not on an enormous scale.
In Glasgow, for example, if it is 2.7 per cent, that is still about 15,000 people. That is quite a lot on top of existing work.
It is. To go back to a previous answer, we have spoken to registration officers about that and, by and large, they have taken the view that 2 to 3 per cent of additional inputting of data will not create a significant burden on them. In paragraph 18 of the financial memorandum, we say that there is an amount of money within that provision that in effect provides a contingency for other anticipated costs, including basic administration costs. The registration officers to whom we have spoken were reasonably happy—I will not say that they were delighted—with the way that we have covered that cost in the estimate.
I raised the issue of the cost of posting reminder letters, which is about £60 for 1,000. Royal Mail will blanket an area for about £70 for 1,000. However, you are sending letters out to specific addresses and there is the cost of the replies as well. I know that Gavin Brown has got excited about this, and I am sure that other colleagues would be keen to know who these companies are that deliver to specific random addresses for that kind of cost. We are talking about a tenth of the cost of a first-class stamp. Apparently there are no costs for stuffing envelopes and so on—I am sure that that is done mechanically. Could we get further information on that? We must all be paying over the odds when we are circulating our parliamentary newsletters.
We can certainly get back to you quickly with some additional information on that.
That would be appreciated. If that figure is genuine, we want to know who is able to do that.
As long as it is not commercially sensitive.
Indeed.