The claim
“I don’t expect to see any increase in the cost of holding a general election if the British people vote yes.”
Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, in a letter from his private office leaked to The Independent on Sunday.
The background
As FactCheck reported on Friday, the AV campaign is fast descending into a rather nasty scrum.
Pro-AV campaigners have accused the naysayers of “scaremongering”, and continue to dispute the Prime Minister’s claim that AV would “increase the cost of politics”.
But now it’s emerged that the Treasury also disagrees with the PM – when Danny Alexander, the Lib Dem chief secretary to the Treasury, insisted that AV wouldn’t cost the country any more than a normal election.
No to AV has claimed that a new system could cost up to £250m – mainly because it will necessitate electronic voting machines costing the country £130m. FactCheck proved this somewhat spurious.
The analysis
Granted, Mr Alexander is a supporter of AV. But in a leaked letter from his private office, he revealed that the Treasury “has not received any advice on the assumptions behind the cost of the next general election should it be an AV election”.
His letter threw out claims that taxpayers would see further cuts imposed in order to scrape together cash for running an AV system.
And today, a Treasury spokesman repeated the Mr Alexander’s words to FactCheck: “The government has no plans to reopen departmental Spending Review settlements as a consequence of either outcome of the Referendum on AV.”
Mr Alexander’s letter revealed that the Treasury has set aside £120m from the Cabinet Office’s budget for the next general election.
The Cabinet Office has now confirmed this to FactCheck.
A spokesman said the 2010 General Election is predicted to have cost around £110m. This includes the £82m cost of running the election, and the £30m cost of delivering candidates’ election address leaflets. The latter cost allows for one letter per household, the Cabinet Office spokesman explained to FactCheck.
Meanwhile, Mr Alexander went on to tell The Independent on Sunday, “I don’t expect to see any increase in the cost of holding a general election if the British people vote yes. There’s no good reason to believe that even under a new voting system an election would need to be more expensive.”
Well, there’s the not-so small matter of a £10m difference between 2010’s estimated £110m cost, and 2015’s £120m budget. The Cabinet Office passed this off as an “allowance” rather than an exact prediction.
The verdict
No to AV is now attacking the government for failing to provide their own figures for the cost of changing the way Britain votes.
“Either they are trying to hide it, or the government is guilty of massive negligence by putting something to the electorate that they have not properly costed,” the group said.
This is a fair point: with less than 70 days to go until the referendum, and even after several questions in Parliament, civil servants still haven’t estimated the possible costs of this major piece of legislation.
But the Cabinet Office is sticking to its guns, saying that there are so many different factors that could affect how long an AV vote will take that it’s just not possible to come up with meaningful estimates of what the extra cost might be.
A spokesman said: “The basic difference between the costs of an election under AV and the current system will be related to the count. The exact cost is not known: it would depend on turnout, voting patterns and how many rounds of counting were necessary.”
The bottom line is that no one – not the Treasury, not the Cabinet Office and not the Electoral Commission – is seriously thinking about bringing in electronic voting.
So the main claim of the No to AV camp, that voting machines will add an extra £130m to the bill for an AV election, still looks decidedly dodgy.
As for Danny Alexander’s claim, the slightly worrying truth seems to be that he has no way of knowing whether AV will cost the taxpayer more or not, and neither does anyone else in the government.
