Emergency legislation is being rushed through the Commons this week to correct a Home Office blunder over next month’s police and crime commissioner elections that could cost up to £350,000.
The unexpected cost covers the printing of a second set of ballot papers in Wales, where an official oversight led to legislation being passed that authorised only the printing of an English version of the ballot paper.
Returning officers in Wales have a duty to see the Welsh language is given equal status to English. They have contingency plans to print bilingual ballot papers in Welsh and English for the poll to elect police commissioners on 15 November. The Home Office, which is to foot the bill, has confirmed that the cost will be up to £350,000.
The Electoral Commission said the emergency legislation on the Welsh ballot papers needed to be in place by this Wednesday when the initial issue of postal votes for the elections is due to start at 5pm. “If this order is not made, the ballot papers used in Wales will only be available to voters in English,” the commission warned MPs.
Labour’s policing spokesman, David Hanson, said: “This is another example of the slipshod way in which the government has organised these elections. The Home Office said they would sort this out with legislation early in the year but didn’t publish it until July. It still hasn’t been passed with commissioners taking up their posts in just a few weeks’ time.”
The Home Office said it was confident the legislation will be in place.
It also emerged that crime prevention and community safety funding for projects such as CCTV schemes, gang intervention programmes and police officers in schools are facing a 60% cut. Home Office figures show community safety funding is due to fall from £74m in 2010-11 to £59m in 2011-12, and to an unconfirmed allocation of only £30m in this financial year.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010
Whats new, it comes as no surprise with this bungling, baffoon led chinless Tory boy UK rabble that they forget Wales exists in the grander scheme of things, and they totally forgot that we have our own language which some like to speak and live with.
Not content with wasting £1,000,000 of tax payers money on the ill – fated changes to parliamentary boundaries, the government have now risked a further £350,000 going down the pan by failing to take account of the new Welsh Language legislation. to put this into perspective, the money squandered here could have been put towards employing a further 60 – 70 nurses or teachers. The government have a cheek to claim they are being responsible with the public finances.
What a government this Tory shower is; all they do is wrong. In any case, why was not this devolved ? It should have been . In which case no doubt our anti-devolution Sec of State David Jones would probably have said that it was not necessary, or something similar. Just one more excuse not to vote.