Electoral Commission

Before I call the Leader of the House to move the motion, I inform the House that Mr Speaker has not selected the amendment in the name of Mr Peter Bone.

I beg to move,

That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that Her Majesty will appoint John Pullinger CB as the Chair of the Electoral Commission with effect from 1 May 2021 for the period ending on 30 April 2025.

The Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission has produced a report—its first report of 2021—in relation to the motion, which sets out in some detail the process by which Mr Pullinger was selected. It may help if I set out the key points for the record. Electoral commissioners, including the chairman of the commission, are appointed under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, as amended by the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. Under the Act, the Speaker’s Committee has a responsibility to put in place and oversee a procedure for the selection of candidates for appointment to the Electoral Commission.

On this occasion, the Committee asked Mr Speaker to appoint a panel to recommend a preferred candidate for the post. The panel consisted of Philippa Helme CB, independent chairman; Tony Hobman, a former electoral commissioner; Sarah Laessig, a former civil service commissioner; and two members of the Speaker’s Committee: the hon. Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), the Chairman of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. Following an open competition and interviews with shortlisted candidates, the panel’s unanimous view was that John Pullinger CB should be appointed as chairman of the Electoral Commission.

The Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission considered the panel’s report and recommendation at its meeting on 26 January. It agreed to put John Pullinger’s name forward for the statutory consultation with the leaders of each registered party to which two or more Members of the House of Commons belong. That consultation provides an opportunity for the party leaders to comment, but they are not required to do so. No objection to John Pullinger’s appointment was received in response to the consultation.

The Speaker’s Committee subsequently held a public hearing with John Pullinger on 1 March to test his suitability for the role. A transcript of the hearing has been appended to the Committee’s report. Following the hearing, the Speaker’s Committee agreed to recommend to the House that Mr Pullinger be appointed as chairman of the Electoral Commission for a four-year term.

John Pullinger was Librarian of the House of Commons from 2004 to 2014—he is remembered by many hon. and right hon. Members, and I hope that gives them confidence that a friend is being appointed—and he was the UK national statistician from 2014 to 2019. He is currently a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a visiting professor at Imperial College London, and a governor of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. I hope that the House will support this appointment, and I wish Mr Pullinger every success in his important role.

I thank the Leader of the House for moving the motion. May I start by thanking the outgoing chair of the Electoral Commission, Sir John Holmes, for his four years of service in what is a very important role? I am sure many hon. Members will remember that, before chairing the Electoral Commission, Sir John spent his career working in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and as a foreign affairs adviser to two Prime Ministers of two different parties. We thank Sir John for his leadership and his work to support our democratic process.

As the Leader of the House set out, the panel was appointed by Mr Speaker to oversee the selection process for Sir John’s successor. I want to place on the record my thanks to all those who served on that panel: my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester (Christian Matheson), the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), Philippa Helme, Tony Hobman and Sarah Laessig.

The full transcript of the interview on 1 March 2021 with seven hon. Members and Mr Speaker is available, as the Leader of the House said, in the report of the Speaker’s Committee. In recommending John Pullinger, the panel said:

“John gave full and wide-ranging answers that persuaded us that he had the knowledge and experience necessary to perform strongly in this role. He had a clear appreciation of the range of issues the Commission was facing and of the complexity of its stakeholder base.”

We remember John fondly as the Librarian until 2014. He then became the UK national statistician between 2014 and 2019. He developed and delivered a strategy to enhance the trustworthiness, quality and value of official statistics to support political debate and decisions. He said that it is

“unacceptable for people to either not use evidence, or to misuse it.”

He has also helped to strengthen democracies in places such as Myanmar and Iraq. That emphasis on transparency and evidence-based decision making means that he is suitable for the role, which safeguards the integrity of our electoral process.

Realising the hour, I shall not detain the House long at all, which I know will come as a great relief to colleagues. Let me just say that, as a member of the panel appointed by Mr Speaker to conduct the interview process, I have no doubt whatsoever of the sterling abilities of Mr John Pullinger and therefore recommend him wholeheartedly to Her Majesty for appointment as chair of the Electoral Commission for a four-year period. He will do that job with great ability without fear or favour. I was struck particularly by his understanding of the word “impartiality”.

I will also be very brief in welcoming the proposed appointment of Mr Pullinger. The extensive and vigorous process that has been gone through to reach the point we are at tonight is certainly telling. The public session of the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission at which he was questioned went a long way to giving confidence to Members who I know have had questions around the role of the chair of the Electoral Commission in the past. I add my thanks to the former chair, Sir John Holmes, and to the selection panel. They have clearly done an excellent job in meeting their remit.

The period ahead will be very interesting for the new chair. I hope it is one in which we can start to deal with how we properly monitor digital campaigning, digital issues around elections and the online activities of political parties. It is certainly a big task, but I am pretty sure from what I have seen that Mr Pullinger will be up to it.

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) and the speakers before him, who clearly made the point that the panel has done a very good job in the selection of Mr John Pullinger.

The chairman of the Electoral Commission is an extremely important appointment. This evening, we have to decide whether a humble address be presented to Her Majesty requesting her to appoint John Pullinger as chairman of the Electoral Commission, with effect from 1 May 2021 to 30 April 2025. In making this decision, we should consider two factors: first, whether Mr John Pullinger is a fit and proper person to chair the Electoral Commission; and, secondly, whether there will be an Electoral Commission for him to chair until 30 April 2025. In helping me to consider this issue, I met Bob Posner, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, and Louise Edwards, the commission’s director of regulation, on Monday 1 February. I also took the opportunity to watch the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission on Monday 1 March, which held an appointments hearing with Mr Pullinger.

I would first like to say that I have absolutely no criticism of Mr John Pullinger. I do not know him personally, but his experience speaks for itself. His time as the House of Commons Librarian will certainly stand him in good stead when it comes to building a rapport with Members from across the House. His role as national statistician shows that he can run an organisation that is in trouble. I therefore think the answer to my first question is that he is a fit and proper person to carry out the role.

However, I am seriously concerned that Mr Pullinger is joining an organisation that is in very serious trouble and that I do not believe will exist in its current format by the end of this year. How can we appoint someone to an organisation that will, in my opinion, disappear in a few months? The Electoral Commission is politically corrupt, unfit for purpose and is damaging democracy in this country. The chairman of the Electoral Commission must set the overall strategic goals for the organisation and ensure public confidence in the institution and democracy. Unfortunately, I think this will be an impossible task for Mr Pullinger.

Order. I am not stopping the hon. Gentleman; I am merely drawing his attention to the fact that this is a very narrow motion. It is specifically about the appointment of Mr John Pullinger as the chair of the Electoral Commission. I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman wishes to draw to the attention of the House his concerns about the Electoral Commission, but I do hope that he is not going to give us a history of the actions of the commission with which he personally has been engaged over these last several years. Everybody here present is nodding; we all remember these matters. It has also been made clear that the Committee that took the decision to appoint Mr John Pullinger was well aware of the matters that the hon. Gentleman is bringing before the House, so I hope that he is going to be brief in his description of his concerns, which have been noted by the Leader of the House and everyone else who is present.

Of course, Madam Deputy Speaker; my remarks are in fact going to be brief, but I want to draw the House’s attention to some things, and to one particular thing that Members may not be aware of, which my experience will lead to. I hope that this will help the House to make a decision on whether we are right to make this appointment for such a long period. That is my question; it is not about Mr Pullinger, but about whether we are right to make the appointment for such a long period—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is well aware that Mr Speaker did not did not select his amendment about the time. Therefore, the House is considering not the length of time of the appointment but merely whether the appointment should be made. We are not considering how long it should be made for, or any other circumstances surrounding it. This is a simple question of yes or no.

Absolutely, Madam Deputy Speaker. I just want to point out my concerns before I decide how to vote on the motion, and before I listen to what the Leader of the House says in conclusion.

My challenge for Mr Pullinger is whether he will get the commission to apologise unreservedly for the wicked and bullying way in which it treated responsible people. Hon. Members may not know this, but each campaign group had to have a responsible person. They were not the political leaders or the politicians; they were not the David Camerons and the Nigel Farages; they were not the people on the television screens; they were not the people making political decisions. They were honest, hard-working people of great integrity who were making sure that the campaigns kept to the election rules.

I want to concentrate for a brief moment on four: Richard Murphy for Grassroots Out, Liz Bilney for Better for the Country, Darren Grimes for BeLeave and Alan Halsall for Vote Leave. I have worked with two of them, and I know one very well as a personal friend, but what linked them all was their great integrity—yet the Electoral Commission set out deliberately to destroy that integrity.

That is the challenge that I want Mr Pullinger to address. The individuals were threatened with criminal prosecution, their names were rubbished, their professional reputations were attacked and they had to endure the worst malicious treatment from a state-funded organisation that I have ever known. I do not say that lightly. In 50 years in politics, I have never known a state-funded regulator to act in such a way. Remember that these people were not guilty of any wrongdoing. Quite the contrary: they helped to facilitate the greatest democratic debate—

Order. The hon. Gentleman is giving us a long history that does not appear to be relevant to the very precise “yes or no” matter before us now, which—as on the Order Paper—is whether Mr John Pullinger should or should not be appointed. I cannot allow the hon. Gentleman to give us a history lesson at this point. I hope that he will bring his remarks to a conclusion.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you are bringing me to the very crux of the matter. I have four points for Mr Pullinger to answer; I hope that the Leader of the House will be able to respond to them, since obviously Mr Pullinger is not here.

In my opinion, if Mr Pullinger is to be the next chairman of the Electoral Commission, he must accept that what happened in the past to responsible people was unacceptable. He must offer a personal apology to the responsible people—to Richard, Liz, Darren and Alan. He must accept that the Electoral Commission acted in a totally unacceptable way and that it must offer compensation. I hope he will.

I listened very carefully to what the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission put to Mr Pullinger at the public hearing. He answered its questions very well—my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg) referred to his answer about impartiality—but we cannot forget the past when we decide the future. Mr Pullinger said that one of the Electoral Commission’s biggest mistakes over the past few years related to

“bureaucracy and timeliness—some things seem to take an inordinate length of time”.

I could not agree more. The Electoral Commission would demand answers from responsible people, but then take months and months to reply. Those delay tactics left the individuals with so much anxiety and concern, even though they did absolutely nothing wrong.

The question tonight is whether we can appoint a chairman to an organisation that has failed so badly and has treated people so badly. If I am right that the commission will be split in two later this year, which half will Mr Pullinger chair? Will it be the bit that is responsible for regulation and running elections, or will he be responsible for a separate organisation that does enforcement? At the moment, the Electoral Commission is investigator, judge, jury and executioner. That cannot continue. However, we are being asked to appoint somebody to that organisation, which is likely to be split. I ask the Leader of the House whether, in the contract that is being given to Mr Pullinger, this situation has been considered, because we cannot go on as we have.