Guidance for Police Area Returning Officers administering a Police and Crime Commissioner election in England and Wales

The following guidance has been produced to support Police Area Returning Officers (PAROs) in planning for and delivering a Police and Crime Commissioner election in England and Wales.

In some police areas the candidate elected to the role of PCC also holds the fire and rescue authority function [PFCC].1 Throughout this guidance, we will highlight where this added function has an impact on the forms to be used or your management of the process.  

The guidance has been developed in close consultation with the UK Electoral Coordination and Advisory Board (ECAB), the Elections, Registration and Referendums Working Group (ERRWG) and the Association of Electoral Administrators (AEA). It reflects the PARO’s legal obligations and what we, the ECAB, the ERRWG and the AEA believe that PAROs should expect of their staff in preparing for and delivering Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections. 

Performance Standards

In addition to our role in providing advice and guidance, we set standards and monitor the performance of ROs through our performance standards framework.

Our guidance to support the delivery of your functions includes what we expect PAROs will need to have in place and what we would expect to see for the key outcomes of the standards to be delivered.

The performance standards framework and guidance for local ROs should be used to inform your work to monitor and support local ROs in your area.

For more information on the framework see our performance standards guidance for ROs.

How to use this guidance

This guidance is directed toward the PARO and the duties they carry out. As these duties may, in practice, be carried out by deputies and/or appointed staff, we use the term ‘you’ throughout this guidance to mean the PARO and whoever is carrying out the PARO’s functions on their behalf.

Throughout this guidance we use ‘must’ to refer to a specific legal requirement and ‘may / should’ for recommended practice.  

You should liaise with stakeholders, particularly local Returning Officers (ROs) across the police area, to inform your planning to ensure consistency across the police area. 

This guidance covers your roles and responsibilities as PARO, the particular context and circumstances of PCC elections, planning for the election, and highlights aspects of the election process where early preparations can be undertaken.

It also covers specific parts of the elections process that you are responsible for delivering, including:  

• the nominations process
• candidates’ election addresses
• administering the poll
• verifying and counting the votes, result collation and the declaration of the result
• after the declaration of the result

Where the guidance is different for combined polls the information will be contained in an expanding section. This means that next to the relevant heading there is an icon with a + which will expand to show the relevant guidance.

To help you use this guidance we have produced a Q&A document that should answer any initial queries you may have. 

This guidance does not cover your role and responsibilities as Local Returning Officer (LRO) or as any other Returning Officer. The Commission has produced separate guidance for LROs. 

This guidance is supplemented by resources which can be accessed through links contained in the guidance. 

Should you have any questions about our guidance or any other matter relating to the administration of elections, our local Commission teams are available to provide on-going support. We also provide an out-of-hours advice service to deal with urgent electoral administration queries in the run up to and immediately following any scheduled elections. Further information on the provision of our out-of-hours service will be provided through our Bulletin for electoral administrators.