Councils are busy preparing for an unprecedented round of elections on Thursday 5 May, not least of which is the first referendum to be held in the UK since 1975. Michael Burton talks to elections expert, David Monks, about preparations

As if councils do not already have enough on their plate, the Government, as part of the pact between the two parties, late last month, confirmed that the first referendum in 35 years would indeed go ahead as expected on 5 May.

The passing of the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act on 17 February, after weeks of wrangling between the Lords and the Commons, allows not only the holding of a referendum into voting systems but also a reduction in the number of parliamentary seats from the current 650 to 600.

For the former, it means asking the electorate whether it wishes to stick to the current, first-past-the-post system, or opt for the additional voting (AV) system using top-up votes. The latter will involve redrawing the boundaries of most constituencies in time for an election in 2015.

Responsibility for ensuring the referendum passes without mishap falls on local authority chief executives – in their capacity as returning and counting officers – and electoral registration officers.

Because the referendum, estimated to cost £56m, is UK-wide and will be conducted not on constituency boundaries but on local authority boundaries, every council will be affected. Some 90% of chief executives are already returning officers.

The timetable is tight. The Act was passed on the final day of deadline, after which it would have been impossible to organise the referendum in time.

Veteran elections expert, David Monks, chairman of the SOLACE electoral matters panel and Huntingdonshire DC’s chief executive, is sanguine about the time he and his colleagues have to arrange the poll. He says: ‘We’ve been telling staff since last summer it was going to happen in May. And I’ve immense confidence in the resilience of local government officers, despite the cuts and staff shortages. At the end of the day we deliver.

‘We do not make errors. In some ways it means the Government doesn’t take us seriously enough. Our strength is also our weakness. The civil service never gives us enough time, but we’ll get through.’

The referendum will also pile on pressure to what is already a ‘super-Thursday’ for polls, being held on 5 May to coincide with a huge batch of other elections. They include parliamentary and assembly elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as in 280 English councils plus parishes.

The referendum ballot papers will not be counted until the afternoon of the next day, Friday, from 4pm, and results are expected by 6pm in time for the evening news and the weekend newspapers.

Outside the local elections, turnout for the referendum is expected at about 30%. A bid in the Lords to stipulate that any result must be based on a minimum turnout of 40%was rejected for the obvious reason that such a figure was optimistic.

David is a regional counting officer (RCO) for the East of England region, overseeing 47 other local authority areas as well as his own. All regions, plus Wales, Scotland Northern Ireland have their own RCO, mostly serving council chief executives.

In England, for example, London’s RCO is Lewisham’s chief executive, Barry Quirk, while in the East and West Midlands, it is Kettering’s David Cook and Birmingham’s Stephen Hughes, respectively, while in the North East it is Sunderland’s Dave Smith and the North West, Manchester’s Sir Howard Bernstein.

David adds: ‘The polls will close at 10pm on the Thursday, but the results will come about 4.30pm on Friday. We’ll have a pretty good idea – just seeing the number of ballot papers on the table will tell us. I reckon we’ll know the result by 6pm.’

There are concerns. The first is that the poll follows an unprecedented run of bank holidays, including Easter Weekend, the Royal Wedding and 1 May. As David jokes: ‘I don’t think we’ll be invited to the wedding. We’ll be working that weekend.’ And postal votes could, potentially, be delayed due to bank holidays.

A second worry is about staff coverage. Mindful of the scenes of queues outside polling stations towards 10pm during last year’s general election, the Electoral Commission which supervises the polls, is insisting on a maximum number of voters per voting station.

Adds David: ‘Resources are an issue because councils are shedding staff and election budgets are not immune. The Electoral Commission is specifying the number of staff, which means for Huntingdonshire – where we have local elections for one-third of the total – an extra 60 staff for our 112 polling stations.

‘But these extra costs won’t fall on the Government, but on us, as it says we have to share the costs with our local elections budgets.

‘I will be arguing vigorously that it’s an unfair cost, having to take on extra staff, but I suspect ministers will just say we have to take them on anyway, because of the local elections.’

The Electoral Commission is sending an information booklet to all 27.8 million households in the UK explaining what elections are taking place, the referendum question, and an explanation of the first-past-the-post and alternative vote systems.

The booklet will be supported by a multi-media advertising campaign.

The commission will also now start to register campaigners for the referendum, and receive applications to become the official lead campaigners for a ‘yes’ and ‘no’ vote. The lead campaigners will have access to a public grant of £380,000 each, spending limits of up to £5m each, as well as a free mailshot to voters and referendum broadcasts.   

Once the election is over, David is stepping down from his duties. As the longest-serving chief executive in the UK, with 28 years at the helm, he is retiring after May, the 2011 referendum being the swansong to his career.