PCC Voting

So the voting is over, the votes have been counted and now the post mortem begins....

The voting process is reported as having cost £100m but only 15% of those eligible actually bothered to vote (for the record, yes I did and so did my wife).

Why did I vote? Simply because I cannot be shot down when I comment on the result for abstaining from the process.

Why did most people not vote? My view is a number of factors came together...

1. We (the British public) do not need another layer of bureaucracy put in place during a time of austerity which will deliver no additional benefit but will incur significant additional cost.

2. The level of additional cost will not be limited to paying a salary to the new commissioners, they will require administrative staff, and a whole shed load of facilities (office space with furniture, computing power, communications, and that's just for starters) and none of this will be cheap. When people are struggling to pay household bills and the government wants to reduce it's borrowing, why are we as tax payers being lumbered with this expense?

3. The choice of candidates - to say it was poor was an understatement. Most people received no communication about the candidates standing in their area. We got hold of a leaflet that was worthless.

4. If policing in the UK now needs Commissionaires then they should be appropriately qualified AND experienced AND politically independent - not as we saw on the balot papers, members of the UK political parties.

In my mind there was more wrong with what has been done and the way it was done than there was that was right with it, for example:

At a local level: Our local Polling Station is in a sports hall, and there are 3 stations in the one room. Each of these for local elections is normally 1 presiding officer and 1 poll clerk, sometimes 2. That in itself is over staffing based on normal the normal turn-out of voters (around 30% - 35%). Yet for this vote each Presiding Officer had 3 clerks for a turn-out of less than 10%.

Across the Country: Communication was so poor it bordered on abysmal. This was a classic example of politicians creating "jobs for the boys" and barely bothering to tell the public at large who was being put forward, why and what they were bringing to the table.

And the result: A damp squib. Even the press and media couldn't work up any enthusiasm for the biggest political non-event overseen and delivered by David Cameron's coalitian government. 15% average turn-out by British voters meant more cast their vote with their feet than did with the pen.

Many more correspondents considered more worthy than I will be picking the bones over this and already it has been announced that there will be an official enquiry into the whole thing. One thing is certain - the boys that got the jobs will keep them far longer than we will have any use for them.