London: 27 June 2008

The UK Ministry of Justice has published the outcome of the consultation held on the Fees for the marked register of electors produced at UK elections.

The announcement states:

“There were 97 responses to the consultation. The majority of respondents were in favour of a change to the current level of fees as it was felt that the fees were too high. In setting the new fees we have taken account of these views and undertook some further work to establish a fuller picture of what the actual costs were to local authorities to allow for full cost recovery.”

The report titled - Response to consultation on Fees for the Marked Register of Electors produced at UK Elections, 28 pages,

On page 16 under Conclusion and Next Steps it states:

“From the analysis of the consultation responses, it is clear that there is a wide variation among local authorities on the question of how much it actually costs to produce the marked register. Of those local authorities who responded to the consultation, a third put the cost at below £20 for producing the marked register for the equivalent of up to 10,000 electors whilst another third gave figures that varied from just over £20 to over £70. The remaining third did not provide any specific data on the costs.

When asked what a reasonable cost for copies of the marked register would be for up to 10,000 electors the results also varied significantly in the supplier group with a few arguing they should stay the same and others split over a range from below £10 to over £60. These views compared with all customers who gave a substantive response suggesting that that between £10 and £30 was reasonable.”

“As a consequence of the lack of consensus on what would constitute a reasonable cost, and in light of the need to balance recovery of the costs of production of copies for local authorities and set fees at a level that support the parties and candidates in making use of marked registers, the Ministry of Justice undertook further work to identify the actual costs of production. We re-examined the information originally received from the consultation and requested further detail from a sample of ten local authorities that responded (and subsequently spoke with some others), to understand in more depth the resources and costs involved in production of copies.

This additional information confirmed a variation of costs between authorities ranging from £8 to £65 at the extremes with the majority of responses reflecting costs from just under £14 to just over £35 for a copy of the marked register covering 10,000 electors. The ‘outliers’ have peculiarities such as low staff costs and use of couriers for transfer of information within the authority, and so those were put aside. Within the remaining authorities the costs were below £30 for all but two.

What this also showed was how the costs were split and the need to take account of how varying volumes and staff costs meant that both an administration fee and a graduation fee structure for copies best suited the nature of and different customer’s entitlement to the information being provided.”

“Outcome

Having factored this additional targeted information into that coming from the consultation responses, and whilst recognising there is some polarisation of responses between ‘customer’ political parties and ‘supplier’ local authorities, and the disparity of costs among local authorities, it is, as the Electoral Commission predicted in its response, necessary for a compromise to be reached. In seeking that we have aimed to both reduce costs to customers whilst also recovering the costs of production for suppliers.

We have also decided to retain the existing fee structure in the main in order to take account of the information being available in two formats, that are often mixed to obtain the overall marked register information for a given area.

On that basis the following proposed fee structure is being put forward:

• customers would pay a single administration fee per request of £10, rather than two separate fees as now;
• customers would be charged £2 [rather than £5] for each 1,000 entries (or part of) in printed format, and £1 [rather than £1.50] for each 1,000 entries (or part of) in electronic format;
• the changes would apply for Westminster Parliamentary elections in England, Wales and Scotland, and local government elections in England and Wales; and to the supply of marked registers and lists produced at a Welsh Assembly election.

Depending on the mix of paper and electronic data provided in a given case, this would produce fees for marked register information on 10,000 electors of between £20-30 (and information for 70,000 electors – equivalent to an average “constituency” of between £80-£150) with the lower figure representing the cost for an entirely electronic dataset and the higher figure for an entirely paper version.”

There appears to be no reference to the actual costs of the financial processes involved in processing the financial transaction and that evidence shows that casts will fall if the process is electronic and no charges are levied and there is no human intervention!