Guidance for (Acting) Returning Officers administering a UK Parliamentary election in Great Britain

The Electoral Commission is, by law, required to monitor compliance with candidate election spending and donations.

Legislation imposes limits on candidates’ spending and sets specific deadlines for the submission of spending information. All election agents must submit a candidate’s spending return to you, together with relevant invoices and receipts, within 35 calendar days of the day of the declaration of result of the election (unless the last day of the period falls on a weekend or bank holiday, in which case the last day moves to the next working day).1

This means that if you declared a result on Friday 6 May, for example, the deadline for the submission of the spending return would be Friday 10 June.
 
A spending return must be submitted even when an election is uncontested.2

The legislation also requires election agents and candidates to submit separate declarations confirming the candidate’s election spending return is complete and correct. The election agent’s declaration must be submitted alongside the full spending return. The candidate’s declaration must be submitted within seven working days of the election agent submitting the full spending return.
 
However, if the candidate is out of the UK when the return is submitted to you, they must make the declaration within 14 calendar days of coming back to the UK (unless the last day of the period falls on a weekend or bank holiday, in which case the last day moves to the next working day).

In order to maintain a clear audit trail, you should ensure that any documentation relating to a candidate’s spending return, including the election agent’s declaration, is date-stamped on receipt.

How spending returns may be submitted

It is for you to determine how candidates can submit their expenses, either as hardcopies, by email or both. When determining this you should ensure:

• You advise all candidates and agents of the process in advance
• All candidates and agents are treated fairly and consistently
• The process for submitting spending returns is clear, easy to follow and accessible for all

If you decide to accept spending returns by email you should specify any requirements, such as:

• The specific email address(es) to be used
• How emails should be labelled
• Any requirements regarding the format of email attachments

You should also consider the internal processes you will follow for spending returns submitted by email, for example: 

• How you will acknowledge email submissions
• How you will manage spending returns sent to a different email address, such as having processes in place for monitoring email addresses that could be associated with the (Acting) Returning Officer or electoral services team
• How to make other teams across the council aware that they should contact you as soon as possible if they receive any emails regarding spending returns
• How you will store the returns electronically

You will need to think about how you will prepare returns for inspection, for example, will you allow inspection to take place on a computer under supervision, or will you print off all of the returns.

Checking of spending returns

Whilst there is no duty for you to check the completeness or validity of candidate spending returns, if you are aware that an obvious administrative error has occurred, it would be reasonable for you to advise the candidate or agent of this. For example, if you accept spending returns by email and the covering email refers to an attachment of receipts, which have not been included, it would be reasonable to highlight this to the candidate to enable them to re-send the attachment.

You should ensure that all candidates are treated fairly and consistently, and are provided with the same level of support on the submission of their expenses.