19:00 - The House divided: - Ayes: 234 / Noes: 321 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)
It is good to be having this debate at, I think, the third time of asking. Before I explain the rationale for our proposals and deal with the motion, I want to thank the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) for the tone in which he has engaged with the debate. I have certainly engaged with it in such a way, and I do not think that he will mind if I point out that his party did not adopt that approach from the beginning. Last autumn, the right hon. Gentleman’s party leader said that we were making registration individual rather than household, and that the Labour party was going to go out and fight against that change, stating:
“One of the most basic decent human rights…is the right to vote.”
I absolutely agree, but I do not know why he wanted to campaign against our proposals.
The shadow Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), said at the Labour conference that our proposals were
“a shameful assault on people’s democratic rights”,
and that Labour would expose and campaign against them. I thought that that was nonsense at the time. Clearly, the right hon. Member for Tooting thought so, although he could not say so, and he has adopted a much more sensible tone.
Finally in that vein, in an article on the Labour Uncut website, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David), said that the Conservative-led Government had taken the Labour Government’s proposals—these are his words, not mine—and
“infused them with its own distinctive venom.”
I have been accused of many things, but never that.
People got carried away with those remarks, which were rather absurd, and I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has returned to a more sensible tone whereby we can debate these sensible proposals. There is a lot of agreement on the move to individual registration, which will improve our system, and we can consider our specific proposals and the response that we make to the Select Committee report. I am happy to conduct the debate in that spirit.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
In view of the fact that the Electoral Commission is saying that there may already be as many as 8 million people who are entitled to be on the register but are not on it, is it not, shall we say, counter-intuitive for any of us to discuss proposals that are likely to reduce the number of people on the register? Surely the objective of the Electoral Commission and the rest of us should be to maximise the number of people who are entitled to take part in our democracy legitimately. Individual registration is not likely to achieve that, particularly as it is in response, apparently, to just six prosecutions for electoral fraud.
Mr Harper
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s conclusion, which is that we should try to maximise the number of eligible voters—obviously, people who are on the register are entitled to vote—but I do not agree that individual registration is likely to reduce that number. To return to the matter of Northern Ireland—I shall expand on this later—given what we now know about the register in Great Britain, which is that about 85% of voters are registered, that register is in no better shape than that in Northern Ireland, where individual registration has already been introduced, as have a number of measures on continuous registration, such as data matching, which we propose to have at the same time. There is good evidence that if individual voter registration is introduced properly, with some of those other measures, a register may be achieved that is both more accurate and more complete than the one we have today.
Dr Julian Lewis
In general, I am happy with my hon. Friend’s proposals, but the one thing in the Opposition motion that strikes me is the abolition of the sanction if people do not register. We do not believe in compulsory voting, but up to now we have always believed in compulsory registration. Will he reassure us on that specific point?
Mr Harper
Let me come to that point in a moment, because I want to spend a little time on it, if I may. If my hon. Friend does not think that I have addressed it, I shall be happy to take another intervention from him.
Let me run through one or two parts of the motion that are defective, and which lead me to urge my hon. Friends to oppose it. I hope that I shall do so with the same tone with which the right hon. Member for Tooting introduced it. It is true that we supported the proposals for individual registration in the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, but it is worth reminding the House that the previous Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to include them. They were not in the Bill when it was introduced in the House of Commons, which is why we voted for a reasoned amendment. In fact, they were not in the Bill at all when it left the House of Commons, although by that stage the Labour Government had made a commitment to include them, and they were introduced in the other place.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), who was leading for us on the issue at the time, said:
“I am glad that at the eleventh hour the Government have, at last, agreed to move ahead with individual voter registration, albeit in what still seems to be a lamentably leisurely time scale. They committed to the principle of individual voter registration many years ago, but a bit like St. Augustine, they seem to be saying, ‘Make me chaste, but not yet.’”—[Official Report, 2 March 2009; Vol. 488, c. 695.]
My right hon. Friend made it clear that we approved of the decision to proceed with individual registration, which we thought could be accomplished earlier. We said that it would be our intention to do so, but that is not what the right hon. Gentleman said. On page 47 of our 2010 manifesto we made a commitment to
“swiftly implement individual voter registration”.
It is not fair—or, at least, it leaves out something quite important—to say that there was complete cross-party consensus on that measure.
Chris Ruane
I was one of those who did not want the previous Government to introduce the measure, but consensus was gained and it was introduced. That consensus has now been destroyed for the sake of a single year. The Government have shattered that consensus across the country—not just in Parliament but outside, too. Why do so just for one year? Is it anything to do with the 2015 election and the boundary freeze date of 1 December 2015?
Mr Harper
No, it is not. If the hon. Gentleman will listen, we have introduced proposals having learned from the experience of Northern Ireland, for example in the carry-forward, to make sure that we minimise the risk of any drop in the registered electorate before the 2015 election. Between that election and the drawing up of registers for the next boundary review, there will be another full household canvass. There are therefore good safeguards in the system to make sure that the general election and the 2015 boundary review are held on the most accurate and complete registers possible. I shall say a little more about that later.
I do not think that it is correct to say that the Government have eroded the civic duty of registering to vote. It is not an offence—this comes back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) made—not to be registered to vote. It is an offence to refuse to provide information to an electoral registration officer on the household canvass form when required to do so. We do not propose to change that, but I must note that there is some doubt about how effective that is, given that about 15% of electors are not registered to vote. I shall say a little more about that later.
I accept that the way in which we phrased our original proposals, with regard to the opt-out and some of the language that we used—I said this when I gave evidence to the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform—could have led people to think that we wanted to weaken the extent to which we felt citizens had an obligation to register to vote. The Deputy Prime Minister and I have both said that we are minded to change that provision when we introduce our Bill. To be fair, the right hon. Member for Tooting acknowledged that.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
My hon. Friend has half-answered my question. Why are we not making the system as effective as possible, and making people register to vote properly?
Mr Harper
We are retaining the offence of not responding to the household form. The logic is that if someone does not respond, they affect not just themselves but perhaps other people’s right to vote. That is why we have kept that proposal. We then faced the question, in the returning of the invitation to register, of whether we really wanted to create a criminal offence and criminalise people for not registering to vote. First, I start from the position of thinking that that would not be effective. The evidence at best, if I am being generous, is very mixed about whether that is effective. Secondly, we do not want to clog up the court system with a huge number of these cases. In Northern Ireland, where someone correctly said the offence of not returning the individual form exists, the provision has in effect become meaningless because when it was used in court and someone was prosecuted, the court gave them a slap on the wrist with a fine of 1p. The provision has effectively become unusable.
Chris Ruane
The evidence that I gave earlier from Rhyl in my constituency was that in the poorest ward in the whole of Wales—there are 1,900 sub-wards in Wales and this is the poorest—registration went up 2,500 to 3,500 in one year because of the threat of the fine. If the Minister does not want to make failure to register a criminal offence, how about a fixed penalty notice of £70 or £80? If people are determined to stay off the register, that is up to them, but they would face a £70 fine. If that happens time and again, perhaps he would consider making it a criminal offence after two or three times. How about that?
Mr Harper
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman raised that. He made exactly that point at Deputy Prime Minister’s questions on 15 November and my right hon. Friend said that we would look into it. Indeed, I did. Although the numbers did broadly increase as the hon. Gentleman says, they did not do so over a year. The increase in the electorate in Rhyl West from 2,474 to 3,531 took place over a period of nine years—[Interruption.] I am sorry, I have the number of electors registered in front of me. I will not bore the House by reading them out, but the increase took place over a period of eight years, so I am afraid I do not think he has got his facts quite right.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
I implore the Minister to look again at this. Clearly, if failing to send back the annual survey is to incur a penalty, it seems illogical not to insist that failing to send back the individual form should also incur a penalty. As my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) said, some sort of fine that is clearly expressed to people, rather than hidden away in the small print, is a tremendous incentive to return the form. The absence of a penalty seems like a missed opportunity.
Mr Harper
Let me skip ahead to a quotation a little later in my remarks, which is relevant. There is a purpose in doing as the hon. Lady suggests only if it is effective. The evidence from the Information Society Alliance, for example, in its survey shows that compulsory registration —in other words, saying that people have to register or there will be a penalty—does not
“yield registration rates notably above those achieved in countries without compulsory registration.”
So it is not particularly effective. If I were persuaded that it was, I might look at it again. I certainly do not want to criminalise millions of people.
The current system, where failure to respond on the household registration form carries a penalty, is not noticeably effective because, as we now know, 15% of electors are missing. The single biggest reason why people are not registered to vote is that they move house frequently. One of the things that we need to do, which I will come on to, is to look at ways in which we can track people more quickly when they move house and get them registered to vote.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
From the perspective of individuals in households, I am concerned about what appears to be duplication under the new system. There is a household form and an individual voter registration form. This seems to go against the red tape challenge and from an individual’s point of view seems over-bureaucratic. I am worried that that will confuse people.
Mr Harper
The hon. Gentleman raises a good point, and I will come on to it when I speak about the modified canvass in 2014. Registration officers made the same point about why it was not a good idea to do a full household canvass in the traditional way in 2014 and then immediately write to everybody with an invitation to register. Their view was that as well as being costly, that would end up confusing people, which is why we set out a modified canvass, on which people also have strong views. I shall deal with that in more detail later.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
I am grateful for the tone of the debate so far. I have a constituency in Southwark where we probably have about a 25% turnover of electorate every year. I am therefore very clear in my view that it ought not to be a criminal offence if people do not send back the form, but that there ought to be an incentive to do so and failure to do so should be subject to an administrative penalty. That changes the culture and means that everybody understands that the obligation is to register—not to vote, but to register and give themselves the right to vote when the time comes. I am clear that we need that culture shift.
Mr Harper
I have listened carefully to what the right hon. Gentleman has said about the turnover of electors in his constituency. I am very clear that we want a consistent outcome from the process and for as many people as possible to be registered, but in order for that to be effective we might need to allow electoral registration officers to adapt their approach, depending on the nature of the constituency. In areas such as his constituency, or Tower Hamlets, which I have visited, where the turnover is 40%, a completely different methodology is adopted, for example by visiting every household in the first instance, rather than sending out forms. Such an approach would not be adopted in constituencies where there was much less turnover. We must allow electoral registration officers that flexibility in order to get a consistent outcome.
I have two more points to make on the motion before saying a little more about our proposals. The right hon. Member for Tooting referred to 10 million people being removed from the electoral register. He originally used that figure in a piece in the comment section of The Guardian on 13 October 2010. The Electoral Commission responded and made it clear that it did not state that 10 million people could lose the right to vote as a result of our proposals. I simply do not think that his claim is a realistic assessment based on any kind of evidence at all. I also gently point out that there is a mistake in the motion when it states that registration rates could fall by 65%. I think that it meant to say that registration rates could fall to 65%, because that is the number that some people have bandied about, but that is not what it says.
The motion relates to the 2015 boundary review, by which I mean the boundary review that will start in 2015 and use the 2015 register. As I have said, after the next general election there will be a full household canvass in 2015, at which those who have moved house since the previous registration will be invited to register. I think there is a good process in place to ensure that that register is as full and accurate as possible.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
On the Minister’s point about the views of the Electoral Commission, did not the chair of the commission say on 15 September:
“It is logical to suggest that those that do not vote in elections will not see the point of registering to vote and it is possible that the register may therefore go from a 90 per cent completeness that we currently have to 60-65 per cent”?
Mr Harper
She did, but she was talking about our proposal to allow voters to opt out by having a simple tick box on the form. We listened carefully to what the chair of the commission said, as did others, and the Deputy Prime Minister and I have confirmed that we are minded to change those parts of our provisions. The thing that she was concerned about that might have a direct effect, because people might tick the box, could also send out the message that we were less interested in people registering to vote. We have already accepted that that could have those consequences, which is why we have said that we will change it, and I think that that acknowledgment has been welcomed by the commission and its chair.
My final point on the motion is about the way it finishes by simply stating as a fact that moving to a system of individual registration
“will lead to large-scale under-registration.”
I simply do not think that there is any evidence to support that proposition. The motion is not quite in the spirit and tone with which the right hon. Gentleman introduced it. When the debate finishes, I urge my hon. Friends to oppose the motion, but to do so in the same constructive spirit with which he introduced it.
Let me say a little more about our proposals. I am happy to take interventions, but I will try to be mindful of your point, Mr Speaker, about the number of Members who wish to speak. I am pleased that the overall shift to individual registration is supported by all parties in the House—it was in all three main parties’ manifestos. The Electoral Commission supports it, as do the Association of Electoral Administrators, a wide range of international observers and the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, whose Chair was present for the earlier part of the debate. There is much cross-party agreement on the principle and I recognise that we are effectively arguing over the detail.
The old, or current, system, involving the old-fashioned notion of a head of household who registers everyone else, is a little out of date and, as Members on both sides of the House have acknowledged, gives one person the ability to affect other people’s registration. We do not adopt that approach in other areas where people interact with the state, and the Electoral Commission has stated very clearly that the
“‘Household’ registration system means there is no personal ownership by citizens of a fundamental aspect of their participation in our democracy—their right to vote. This is too important to be left for anybody other than the individual”.
The Government agree, and I could not have put it better myself.
There is also a risk of fraud. The issue is not just about the fraud that actually takes place, but the risk of it, and even international observers, when they come and look at our system, note that we are very lucky to have a relatively low level of fraud. That is not because of our system, it is despite our system, and we would not be doing our jobs properly if we left in place a system that was open to fraud, even if we have been fortunate enough not to have had a huge amount of it to date that we know about.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
I do not necessarily accept the proposition that fraud is a major issue in Britain, but the reason for making the suggested changes within this time scale—that they were so important that they had to be speeded up—does not get away from the fraud that can be perpetrated, for example, by someone simply turning up at a polling station and saying that they are somebody else. In a flat-share situation, somebody may not have registered, but, if somebody else has and they have moved away, the former can turn up and say, “I’m Joe Bloggs, and here I am.” As long as they are the right gender, they are able to vote, so if fraud is such a major issue should we not look at what happens when people turn up at the polling station?
Mr Harper
That point has been made, and I looked at it when I visited Northern Ireland, which, for historical reasons and for the reasons it introduced the system ahead of us, requires people to have a form of photo ID when they vote. When that was introduced, it meant that many people were not able to vote, but it is now working smoothly. It has been suggested to us that we should adopt that system. The Government have decided not to do so, but we will listen to the evidence, as it certainly happens in one part of the United Kingdom. As far as I understand—I stand to be corrected—it currently works pretty smoothly, and for those electors who do not have their own form of photo ID, such as a passport or driving licence, there is a specific and very simple electoral ID card, with no database behind it, which they can use to prove their identity—and their age, for all sorts of other interesting purposes that to young people are probably more attractive than being able to vote.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the occasions of personation fraud are extremely rare, but that more fraud is thought to exist in postal voting and that, perhaps, more restrictions should be placed on that?
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and there was a certain amount of fraud in the early 2000s. That is why the previous Government, to be fair and to their credit, tightened up postal voting and introduced the system of requiring identifiers, whereby an individual has to have their date of birth and provide a signature. We can at least be sure that the person who requested the postal vote is the person casting it, but of course it does not give us any confidence in that person being the real, genuine person who lives in that house, as someone may have created a fictitious identity. We can be sure that the person who requested the postal vote is the person casting it, but they could do so on the basis of a completely fictitious identity. Postal voting has been tightened up, and that is good. It is something that we supported and which the previous Government did.
Another reason for speeding up the system is that running parallel systems—the current system and the new system—was likely to be rather confusing and was, I have to say, going to cost a significant amount. We are investing a significant sum in getting this right—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) just lets me finish, we are going to spend £108 million on moving to the system of registration, so we are fully funding the move, and by not trying to run it in parallel with the current system we have saved £74 million, which, given the state of the economy and the public finances that we inherited, a point that I will not labour, is not an insubstantial factor to bear in mind. But it is not at the expense of ensuring that we have a secure and accurate register.
Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
The Minister has mentioned postal voting and how important it is becoming in our electoral system. Why are the Government not prepared to consider a carry-forward of current postal voters on to the new register?
Mr Harper
The reason for the carry-forward was to ensure that people who had been registered to vote but had not registered once under the new system did not suddenly discover that they were not able to vote at the general election. The carry-forward was a check. In an ideal world, one would introduce a new system and not bother having the carry-forward. It was a safety net.
As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), although postal voters provide identifiers, those do not provide any confidence or evidence that the voter is a real person. They provide confidence that the person casting the postal vote is the person who applied for the postal vote, but they do not get around the problem of people being able to create fictional identities and carry out postal vote fraud. We therefore did not think that it was sensible to extend the carry-forward to postal votes. There will still be carry-forward on the register, so people will still be able to vote, but we will not carry forward people’s absent vote. We do not think that that is likely to cause an enormous problem. The hon. Member for Caerphilly should wait for us to respond to the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the not-too-distant future, because I think he will be reassured by our answers.
As I made clear to the House in my statement last September, we are focused as much on completeness as accuracy. We instigated and funded the independent research by the Electoral Commission to see what state the current registration system was in. That should make us pause to reflect. When we have discussed this matter previously, there has been a complacent view that everything is fine, that there are not many problems, and that we are at risk of tampering with the system and causing a problem. The fact is that the current system is not as good as people thought it was.
I made the point that in Northern Ireland, where individual registration was introduced and where it now has a number of continuous registration mechanisms, such as putting back the carry-forward and using data matching, the system is now as complete as and more accurate than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. That demonstrates that if we do this well, learning the lessons from Northern Ireland, looking at things such as data matching and carrying out the proposal sensibly by having pre-legislative scrutiny and listening to what people have to say, we will not damage the registration system, as the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd said, but have a more accurate and complete register over time than the one we have today.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
For people such as me who are unaware of events in Northern Ireland, will the Minister inform the House how long equalisation took to take place?
Mr Harper
What the research has shown about the drop in the register in Northern Ireland is interesting. Some of the drop was expected because, after all, part of the point of introducing the system early in Northern Ireland was that it was understood that a number of people on the register there did not exist and we wanted to get rid of them. However, it is not clear that the drop in Northern Ireland was any larger than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. Therefore, there may well have been a drop in those who were eligible to vote because they did not go through the slightly increased bureaucracy. However, most of that seems to have been fixed by reintroducing the carry-forward, so that people who did not register the first time around are not penalised. We have learned from that. Having had Northern Ireland go first and having learned the lessons from what it has done, we can be reasonably confident that we will not run into the same problems.
I am also pleased that, as the right hon. Member for Tooting said, we have gone about this in a conciliatory way. We published a White Paper last year. We then published draft legislation, consulted on it and asked the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee to do full pre-legislative scrutiny on it. The Committee has taken evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, including me. It has raised a number of concerns, some of which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. The Government will respond shortly to the Committee’s report. I urge all hon. Members, particularly those who are interested in this subject, to look at our response because it will address a number of the issues that were raised. Hon. Members can be confident that we will not run into those difficulties. For example, we have already mentioned the carry-forward, and we will not require people to re-register all their details every year if they do not move house. They will simply have to confirm that they have not moved. In Northern Ireland, people have to go through the whole process every year.
I have referred a few times to data matching. We have examined other public databases in a number of local authorities to see how successful we can be in finding people who are not registered to vote. We are in the process of finalising our assessment of that programme, and the Electoral Commission will also be doing so having worked closely with us. I am confident that it will demonstrate that we can use those extra data, as happens in Northern Ireland, to improve the register.
Younger people have been mentioned, and we want to ensure that we allow people to register online in a secure way, which will particularly help younger people. To pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), it will potentially also help people who are disabled and find it easier to use electronic methods. I absolutely agree with her that people with learning disabilities are entitled to register to vote and to cast their vote. From my experience of working with Scope and attending its reception immediately after the election, and of talking to people with learning disabilities, particularly younger people, I know that they are just as able as anybody else to understand the issues involved and make decisions, and nobody should tell them that they should not. I wanted to put that on the record in strong support of what the hon. Lady said.
Bob Stewart
As the head of a household almost filled with very young people, it seems to me that the key to getting an understanding of who should be voting is the head of household registration form. When that form is filled out, it gives the key to who is living in the household, and then we can ensure that they are voting. I hope that that will be very much part of the system in future.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Just before the Minister responds, may I very gently remind him—I am sure he is bearing this in mind—that a very large number of Members want to speak in this debate? I am already going to reduce their time limit to eight minutes, so I hope that he may be reaching the point of being about to conclude.
Mr Harper
I think, Madam Deputy Speaker, that is your rather clever way of telling me not to take so many interventions and not to be quite so generous to colleagues, so I will listen to you very carefully and move on. However, I confirm to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) that we will continue to use the household registration form.
I wish to give an example of how I believe we can improve things. On my visit to Northern Ireland, I visited Grosvenor grammar school in the Belfast East constituency and met the excellent head teacher, Mr McLoughlin, together with the head of the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland. I had a look at one of the outreach exercises there, in which people go into schools and work with 16 and 17-year-olds to get them on the register in time, so that when they turn 18 they can vote. I saw 164 16 and 17-year-olds get registered to vote. Interestingly, Northern Ireland now has a higher rate of attainers—16 and 17-year-old soon-to-be voters—being registered on its system than we do in Great Britain. The lesson of that is that if we allow electoral registration officers to be more innovative and sign up voters directly, rather than relying on the head of the household, we can do better than we do today. I hope that will reassure the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd, notwithstanding the fact that he is not in favour of the procedure. I have already mentioned that we have said that we will change the opt-out provision.
The final point that I wish to put on the record is about the transitional arrangements for 2014-15. I have said that we will undertake a modified canvass in 2014, and I explained in response to an intervention some of the rationale behind that. I have explained why we do not want to run a full canvass and then write to everybody shortly afterwards. The clear advice that we received from administrators was that that would be confusing and not very effective, as well as coming with a very large bill.
I believe that given what I have said, and given what will be in our response to the Select Committee’s report, which Members will see in the not-too-distant future, they will be reassured about how we are addressing the issue. Today, they can do what I asked them to do at the beginning of my remarks and vote against the motion in a constructive spirit and with confidence that we are listening carefully to the concerns that have been raised.
Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)
The Electoral Commission has said that the current proposals would be the biggest changes in registration since 1832. That reference to the 19th century is apt. In the 19th century, electoral change enfranchised men—much of it was geared around property ownership, but it was nevertheless progress. In the 20th century—I believe it was in 1920—the vote was extended to women. The 20th century will be remembered for that. The 21st century, however, could be remembered as the time when the Liberals and the Conservatives kept or chased 16 million British voters off the electoral register.
Chris Ruane
I have got the message, and I understand it: the message is about political gain. The Minister is right that his proposals should be judged on the impact they have on registration rates. We will hold him to that and I am glad he said it. He said his proposals would lead to a more accurate and more comprehensive register. We will be watching every step of the way.
I should also point out how the previous Labour Administration operated on crucial constitutional and electoral issues in their 13 years and beyond in office.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Office of the Leader of the House of Commons (Mr David Heath)
I, too, welcome the opportunity to have today’s debate and, generally, the tone of the debate. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) and the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David)—I think: he was a bit recidivist in places—for, generally speaking, the way they approached the issue.
I am particularly grateful to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), the Chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, for his comments. As he set out, what has happened in this case is, to some extent, the model of how we ought to approach legislation, where the Government put forward their proposals, ask for detailed consideration, ask experts and those in the House with a particular interest to make their comments, and then respond, positively wherever possible, to those suggestions. That seems to me to be the iterative process that we have followed in this instance. Indeed, the hon. Gentleman was supported in that view by other members of his Committee, such as the hon. Members for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) and for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore).
Let me deal with one issue that the hon. Member for Nottingham North raised. The Government will very soon issue a detailed response to the points raised by his Committee. The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who has responsibility for constitutional reform, has agreed to look again at whether there is any way of improving the proposal for the 2014 canvass, noting that the Electoral Commission has suggested moving the 2013 canvass to early 2014. Again, that is a recommendation that he will consider carefully.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh East, asked how the effectiveness of data matching will be assessed. That I absolutely agree that the information should be brought forward for the benefit of the House when it considers the proposals in detail, which will include not only the Government’s assessment, but the Electoral Commission’s assessment, which it is preparing.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) made one of the most important points in this debate when he said that the choice is not between integrity and completeness. That is absolutely right: we need both. Indeed, that is where the Government have continually placed the emphasis in this matter. It is right that we should move to a system of individual registration. Our current system is outdated and far too vulnerable to electoral fraud—the point raised by the hon. Members for Hendon (Mr Offord), for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), for Morecambe and Lunesdale (David Morris) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw).
The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) talked about international election observation missions. I have been on many such missions in other countries—indeed, I have led them—and have consistently found it embarrassing to point out that we have none of the safeguards that we insist upon for other countries to keep our system free from fraud. There is a genuine threat to what we have in this country. I am therefore grateful that there is, or appears to be, general support for the move to individual registration. I accept that concerns have been raised about the detail of some of the proposals—many hon. Members have touched on those points—but the encouraging tone of this debate and the general agreement on the value of individual electoral registration are to be welcomed.
The message obviously did not quite get through to some colleagues on the Opposition Benches—whether their text messaging went awry, I do not know. Clearly the hon. Members for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane)––whose speech I have heard many times now––for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) do not entirely accept that principle. So be it. They are entitled to disagree with the manifesto on which they stood, if they wish.
Let me address some of the other points that were raised. The hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett) said that some councils do a much better job of electoral registration than others. Perhaps we ought to look more at why some councils fail in that task, whereas others do not. He thinks that there are insufficient checks on personation, which that my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary is looking at.
My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion talked about the position in areas with lots of students and people in houses in multiple occupation. It is interesting that the research shows that the biggest determinant of incompleteness in the register is actually length of residence. The completeness rate is only 26% among those who have been resident for less than a year, compared with 91% among those who have lived in their properties for over five years. That is where we need to concentrate our efforts.
My hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson) talked about second home owners. The important thing in this instance is that electoral registration officers should actually apply the law. Very often the problem is not that the law is incomplete, but that people do not apply the law as it stands.
One point that has been raised repeatedly is about the civic duty to vote. Let us be absolutely clear: the Government believe that there is a civic duty to vote, and there is no change—[Interruption.] I do apologise: to register, rather. Let us be clear: the Government believe that there is a civic duty to register—in fact, there is a civic duty to vote as well, but the point today is about the civic duty to register. It is because we have listened to the points that have been made that, as my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary repeated, we are thinking again about the so-called opt-out provision, which the hon. Member for Sheffield Central described as back-pedalling. It is not back-pedalling to put forward a proposition, listen to the response and then adapt proposals to meet those responses. We will never have a grown-up Parliament if we cannot do that without people criticising the process.
The hon. Member for Scunthorpe is normally very moderate in the way he presents his case to the House, but I am afraid that today he was a little edgy on this issue. He simultaneously said that we should learn from Northern Ireland, where there is no canvass, and then talked about the crucial importance of the canvass—a slight inconsistency. Of course we must learn the lessons from Northern Ireland, because there are important lessons to be learned. Indeed, the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) raised one of them in an intervention, when he talked about the canvass immediately after an election.
The overall position of right hon. and hon. Members who have contributed to today’s debate is that they want individual electoral registration, but not at the expense of the completeness of the register. We understand that, which is why we are determined to do everything we can not only to maintain the register’s completeness, but to go further and ensure that we reach those parts that have not been reached before. That is why my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary is working overtime to look at ways to address that issue and ensure that councils that are perhaps not as assiduous or competent in reaching the electors in their areas are encouraged to do so.
We must be careful when we talk about this issue not only to avoid plucking figures from the air or assuming that we can quote any old figure and it will be believed, but so as not to be as patronising as I felt some contributions today were to some of our electorate, by assuming that young people simply will not register if their mums do not tell them to do so. That has not my experience when talking to young people in our schools and colleges, and it has not been the experience of the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean in Northern Ireland, where this system is already in place and where there is a higher level of registration among young people attaining the age at which they can register than there is in Great Britain.
I am optimistic that we can get this right. We must continue to listen, and to bring forward our proposals. I hope that the legislation will go ahead and be successfully implemented, and that we will then continue to monitor it to see whether it is effective. That is what the hon. Member for Nottingham North was talking about, and that is the way in which the process ought to work, particularly in areas as crucial as voter registration and the electoral system in this country. I ask hon. Members to reject the motion before us today, but I ask them, as my hon. Friend the Minister did, to do so in the right spirit, and to take a constructive view of how we can move forward together to get this right.
Question put.