Election delays are wrong, says watchdog

The bar should be set 'very high' for local councils postponing votes at the ballot box, the head of the Electoral Commission has warned. 

Chief executive Vijay Rangarajan has spoken out against the decision to allow 30 local councils to delay elections due to have taken place in May despite warnings the move is 'almost certainly illegal'.

Communities secretary Steve Reed said polls could be postponed to free up resources for a costly shake-up of local government.

The move will deprive 3.7million people of the vote, but could boost Keir Starmer's chances of survival.

Some 21 of the councils involved are currently controlled by Labour - more than two-thirds of the total. 

In some cases, the elections are being delayed for a second consecutive year creating 'double delays'.

Five county councils - West Sussex, East Sussex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Surrey - all fall into this category, with councillors elected in 2021 now set to serve seven-year terms.  

Polls suggest Labour is on course to take a drubbing in this May's elections, and the contests are widely seen as a litmus test of Sir Keir's survival prospects. 

Postponement however could limit the party's losses - and deprive Reform UK of the chance to gain further political momentum against both Labour and the Conservatives.

Mr Reed insisted the process for delay was 'locally led' - and said holding elections for councils that are due to be abolished could slow down vital reforms that will save money in the long run.

But shadow communities secretary Sir James Cleverly accused him of political 'cowardice', while Nigel Farage has branded the decision the act of a 'banana republic'. 

He has already launched legal action to force the elections to go ahead.

While Mr Rangarajan agreed with the logic of delaying elections where councils are due to be abolished, he said the bar in other cases needed to be high. 

Speaking on Friday, he said: 'We would hope that no government would go and say that somehow elections are fungible with other parts of council money.    

'It's a fundamental point that they have to run elections on those timescales, and we would put the bar very high for postponement.'

He added that there was a 'conflict of interest' in asking councils to decide how long voters should wait before they can go to the polls. 

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'We think it should be the other way around – the voters should decide how long it is before they [councillors] face voters.' 

Mr Rangarajan's comments follow the publication of Labour's elections bill this week, which is seeking to lower the voting age to 16.

The Electoral Commission previously said the delays are not justified and warned that they risked 'damaging public confidence'.

Robert Jenrick added his opinion to the debate, saying the scale of the postponement was far greater than in the past - and there was no precedent for cancelling elections two years running.

Mr Jenrick, who defected to Reform last week, served as communities secretary in the last Conservative government.

He told MPs: 'When I was secretary of state, the legal advice that I received, including from the government's chief legal adviser, was that it was not legally sustainable to delay for a second year.

'Hence, we didn't, even during Covid. We kept the elections going. Did not delay for two years.

'What the Secretary of State is doing is almost certainly illegal.'