Political

Cabinet Office rushes out amended election law after numerous financial mistakes found

On Monday this week, just days before general election polling day, the government was forced to table a new set of rules for the general election after numerous errors in a key statutory instrument drawn up by the Cabinet Office came to light.

Both the original faulty and sudden replacement statutory instruments cover the costs Returning Officers can claim from central government for the running of the election in their constituencies. The Parliamentary Elections (Returning Officers’ Charges) (No. 2) Order 2017 replaces the previous legal order from 4 May because of problems with the ‘maximum recoverable amount’ (MRA) which the original legal order set for each constituency, limiting how much can be claimed.

As the Electoral Commission’s latest bulletin to Returning Officers explains, a new legal order has been required because:

This revision is to take account of a number of incorrect MRAs that came to light after Cabinet Office received a few enquiries from Returning Officers about their level of allocation. A full review of all the allocations for England, Scotland and Wales has identified that a mixture of erroneous and inconsistent data on combinations and polling station resource, added to some clerical errors in transposing numbers, has led to a number of the MRAs being incorrect.

Or in other words, the Cabinet Office drew up a bit of legislation which was so full of errors that it had to be hurriedly replaced. Hardly a good sign for how the vastly greater and more complicated reams of legislative changes required for Brexit will go.

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