Today (25th July 2012), on the Bristol 24-7 website, I have an article published regarding Bristol City Council's plans to charge some as yet indeterminate amount but estimated at somewhere around £2,000 (but potentially higher) to candidates for the right to be included in the Election Address Booklet that the Council is, by law, required to send out to every voter in the city.
This proposal by Bristol
City Council to charge Mayoral candidates 3 or 4 times as much as was charged
by Liverpool, Salford or Leicester to be included in the Booklet
demonstrates what happens when we reduce discussions about the democratic
process to one essentially based on costs to the taxpayer rather than benefits
to the voter.
There is a democratic
tradition in this country, going back well over a century, of funding at least
one free delivery of a campaign leaflet for candidates in a General Election. This
was and remains an attempt to both create a more informed electorate, and to
alleviate some of the negative effects of funding disparities between
candidates.
The system used in the
General Election process is flexible, allowing a candidate to have almost total
control over the printing and production of their campaign leaflet (so they can
choose between, say an A4 full colour leaflet at, maybe, 2p per leaflet or
perhaps an A5 black and white leaflet at 0.5p per leaflet) but also allows them
to choose whether to have a leaflet delivered to every voter in the
constituency (say 85,000) or, alternatively, to every household (40-50,000).
As a result, a candidate
can spend £1,700 on an A4 leaflet to every voter, or £200 on an A5 to every
household thus offering a wider range of cost options to a candidate.
However, even the cheaper
option might be beyond the reach of some candidates.
In which case you can still
hand-deliver to a smaller, possibly more focused group of households and still have
some hope of competing with your better funded rivals.
Nevertheless, as far as the
receiving household is concerned your campaign leaflet landing on the doormat
has as much potential impact as the one delivered by freepost.
Compare this to the
Election Booklet for the Mayoral election. The Returning Officer decides on the
costs and whether to use full colour or not, A4 size or A5, even if you choose
to use black and white there will be no financial benefit in doing so because,
in Bristol, your costs are simply based on the amount of space you have.
Further, if you cannot
afford to be included in the Election Booklet you are at a further disadvantage
because even if you do deliver your own campaign leaflet there is now a subtle
but important distinction between your election address and those from other
candidates.
The Election Booklet, by
its very nature, is the “official” book of election addresses – any election
address outside of this context is likely to be seen as somehow less official because
it is not in the official election booklet.
The concept of equality of
candidate's election addresses when they hit the doormat of any single
household has been compromised and the candidates have been divided into "official"
candidates and "fringe" candidates.
On the other hand, there
are also benefits to the Election Booklet system, and these benefits are
largely in terms of costs to the taxpayer. It is only the production and
printing costs that the candidate is expected to contribute to, not the
delivery costs -these are entirely borne by the taxpayer.
Delivery to every voter in
Bristol costs about £88k, delivery to every household about £43k. Thus, if all
the election addresses are in a single booklet delivered once to every voter
then the cost to the taxpayer will be £88k. On the other hand, if the freepost
system was used this delivery cost will increase considerably.
In assessing the options
for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections, the government calculated that
delivery costs using the Freepost system as opposed to the single booklet used
in Mayoral elections would be three times as high (£35m vs £12m) - applying
that ratio to the Bristol Mayor elections implies a delivery cost under Freepost
of £257k, all of which would have to be paid by the Bristol taxpayer.
In other words, the use of
a single booklet is a cost saving exercise for the taxpayer, and it is with
this in mind that the cities of Liverpool, Salford, Leicester, London and so on
decided that they would ask for only a relatively nominal contribution from
candidates towards the cost of producing and printing the booklet.
This constitutes a passing
on to the candidates of a small proportion of the much larger cost savings to
the taxpayer of this method of delivering an election address to every voter,
and recognises the importance of ensuring that this cost-saving method is able
to fulfill its role of informing the electorate about ALL of the candidates.
It is Bristol, and Bristol
alone, that has decided to interpret the legislation in such a way as to try to
recoup all of the production and printing costs applicable to each candidate
and by doing so potentially undermine a process that offers benefits to both
voter and taxpayer alike.
