The government has said it should be safe to stand. Now let’s write it down.

By Elect Her

Last Wednesday, MPs passed the Representation of the People Bill, the biggest rewrite of our election law in a generation.

It changes who can vote, how you prove who you are at the polling station, and where political parties can take their money from.

At Elect Her we take no side on those questions; we work with women of every party and none. But we watched the debate closely, because in the five-hour session were the words we always want to hear from a government minister.

“A democracy that cannot protect those who offer themselves for its service is not in any sense one that is secure.”

That was Florence Eshalomi, the Minister for Democracy, closing the debate.

She went on: threats to candidates and campaigners are “totally unacceptable”, intimidation “strikes at the willingness of good people to stand for office”, and the government will be “working with the Electoral Commission on a code of conduct and improved safety guidance for returning officers and candidates alike”.

For an organisation whose whole purpose is helping women stand, that is a big moment.

It means the need is understood. What comes next is turning that into law!

What the Bill already does

It’s worth being clear about how much ground has shifted. This Bill creates a new aggravating factor for offences motivated by hostility to candidates and campaigners, so courts must treat them more seriously. It extends the rules that ban convicted intimidators from standing for office to cover attacks on electoral staff. And in a change we particularly welcome, it stops the publication of election agents’ home addresses, on the grounds, in the government’s own words, that people who take part in democracy should “feel safe and secure in their home”.

Alongside that, the minister gave three further commitments during the debate:

to review the law so that domestic abuse offences count against a candidate’s right to stand, with huge thanks to Apsana Begum MP
to look again at whether parliamentary candidates should face the same checks as councillors,
and, on an amendment about helping blind voters cast their ballot in secret, to work with MPs and peers on “a suitable amendment that can be tabled in the Lords”.

There are clear gaps, and the government is closer to filling it than it may realise…

For example - addresses!

If you stand for Parliament today, your home address is published on the official notice of candidates, which goes up outside the council offices and on the council’s website, unless you know to fill in a separate form asking for it to be withheld.

Many first-time candidates don’t know. Some are advised that publishing is the open and honest thing to do. By the time they find out what that means, it is online for good.

Anna Dixon MP put an amendment to the Commons to make privacy the default. She spoke about a constituent recently convicted of threatening to kill her, who wrote that he would “work hard to find out where you live”. She had opted out of publishing her address. But as she said, opting out “does put people like me who choose to do that at a disadvantage… by creating the impression that we do not want to be open and transparent.”

**Anna Dixon told the Commons why this is personal for her.**

**A constituent was recently convicted of threatening to kill her, having written that he would “work hard to find out where you live”. She had opted out of publishing her address.**

Her amendment follows a recommendation of the Speaker’s Conference on the security of MPs and candidates. Councillors already have this protection. Election agents will get it in this Bill.

Campaigns on candidate safety have too often felt like shouting into the wind. But the government has accepted the principle for agents and staff, and said in terms that it wants candidates protected.

There wasn’t time to reach it on Wednesday; 282 amendments were tabled and only a handful could be decided. The Lords is where it can be finished.

**What happened in the Commons**

Among the amendments that fell by the wayside were ones that would have made a real difference to the women we work with.

Ministers have shown, on accessible voting, that they will use the Lords to fix what the Commons couldn’t reach. Cross-party MPs, from Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, put their names to the amendments.

Everyone agrees. The job now is to write it down!

What happens on Tuesday

The Bill has its second reading in the House of Lords on Monday 14 September.

Six days before that, on Tuesday 8 September, we’ll be in the Lords with the Women’s Democracy Group, a coalition of organisations that share one aim: a Parliament that looks like the country it serves.

Baroness Royall, who chairs the Jo Cox Foundation, is hosting. We will walk peers through the safety amendments that ran out of time in the Commons and how they can be taken up in the Lords, working with the government.

We’ll be asking peers to do a few things, including:

To help the government complete its own work on candidate safety by extending address protection to candidates, protecting families and staff alongside electoral workers, and giving the promised safety guidance a place in the Bill.
To carry the amendments on representation, including the Access to Elected Office Fund and Section 106, as a package.
And to help turn the minister’s commitments into a timetable, so that the reviews she promised have dates attached.