Automatic Registration: UK Elections

(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)

Wednesday 29th June 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (John Penrose)]

It is a pleasure to have you looking after us this afternoon and to serve under your sure guidance, Mr Howarth. I congratulate the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) on bringing forward this extremely important issue. It is tempting in such moments, when the entire world is running around with its hair on fire, worrying about all sorts of other admittedly incredibly urgent, big problems, to forget that there are some important critical pieces of democratic plumbing that need to be attended to, no matter what else is going on. I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on not losing sight of that essential, fundamental truth. I will try to make sure I leave him with a couple of minutes at the end to respond or sum up if he wishes.

A number of important points have been made. I have always promised myself that if I ever start quoting my own speeches, I will know that it is time to leave. I promise not to do that, but hon. Members might want to have a look at a speech I made at Policy Exchange about a year ago. What I said was very much along the lines of some of the criticisms that have been levelled at the voter registration system. What we have is a system that is, to put it charitably, in transition. Some good work has been done. The system of online registration is new and, by any account, an awful lot better than what went before, even though it was so popular that it fell over rather embarrassingly just before the registration deadline. There have been changes, but we are still battling with the problem that a vast proportion of our registration process is designed for an analogue age. It is based on an old-fashioned approach that is paper-based and process-driven, rather than focused on outcomes and anything that is remotely digital. Clearly, as we have heard from right across the political spectrum, a huge amount needs to be done to update it.

I am delighted that the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), who speaks for the Scottish National party, pointed out that there is clearly a substantial cross-party backing for progress here. He is absolutely right. As a number of people have said, for this to work well, it will be best of all if it can be done on a cross-party, non-partisan basis. Voter registration is something that we all, as democrats, ought to be in favour of and ought to try to push forward. It works better, in combating voter disillusionment, which all hon. Members mentioned, if people can see that not just one party or the other is pushing this; otherwise, they will assume that that one party has a particular axe to grind. It is far more powerful if everybody says the same thing and sings from the same hymn sheet. I am particularly pleased that we are all on the same page.

I would like to talk a little about what we are already doing. I am delighted to tell the hon. Member for Midlothian that I think we are heading in a very similar direction. There are some definitional questions and important points of detail that we need to bottom out, but we are heading to a very similar destination. Last month, I introduced a statutory instrument in this place that began the very early steps in that process. It contained a couple of very modest proposals, which are actually quite significant, to begin to digitise our process. One of them was simply to make it possible to use emails, rather than having to send a snail-mail, old-fashioned paper letter, when confirming whether someone is being registered. That might sound like a really basic change, but it required a legal change in this place. We had to pilot an SI, which contained a number of other measures, to take it through. It will make a very significant alteration to the speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of registration. I hope that it gives everybody here an idea of where we are starting from and how much further we have to travel.

I can also confirm to the hon. Gentleman that a further SI is due to come to this place on Monday that will take us a couple more steps down the road. I am not going to over-claim on this, but it is moving in the direction in which everybody has said they want to move. On Monday, we will talk about changes that will be piloted, to begin with, in three local authorities: Ryedale, Birmingham and South Lakeland. Following up on the idea that localism and devolution are important sources of ideas, many of these ideas have been proposed by local authority electoral registration officers, who are on the frontline and understand which bits of the process still work and which are, frankly, a waste of time and cause them to chew their arms off in frustration because they are so slow and inefficient. They are the ones coming up with many of the most creative and practical proposals. We are encouraging them to submit ideas and are trying to take those forward. We will look at the issue in more detail in Monday’s statutory instrument debate. They are talking about changing from a household inquiry form arriving on the doorstep to check who should be registered to vote to something called a household notification letter that says, “We think the following people are in this place and should be registered; please tell us if not.” That change in the process would be far more efficient, would not require the same degree of response and could be done much more electronically.

In two of the three local authority pilot areas, we will be matching data using local data sources, so that we can focus effort and not require local officers to knock on doors when they already know who lives behind those doors, which is clearly a massive waste of effort and resources. Those resources could be better targeted on places where we do not know who lives there. If we know that somebody has been living somewhere for the past 20 years, there is no point going and knocking on the door to confirm it—why not take that time and effort and go and spend it in the block of flats at the other end of the road, where there are huge gaps in the register and there is much more of a problem? That is a step in the right direction—but it is only a step. We are still only in the foothills of the transition that hon. Members have been talking about, which I completely endorse.

We do need to be careful, because the idea of automatic registration is used, understandably, quite widely and loosely. We all mean slightly different things when we talk about it. Some of those things are crashingly obvious and desirable, and we should get on and do them tomorrow. Other things are potentially quite dangerous. Most people would agree that it is sensible to use more local data, as we are doing in a couple of the local pilots, to inform what we are doing on registration. Not only does that say an awful lot more about who is behind the door, because they are paying council tax or have a car-parking permit or a library card—there are many different forms of local data—but it allows us to focus efforts elsewhere, where we do not have data or there are significant question marks over their quality or veracity and we know there is further work to do to fill in the gaps.

The hon. Member for Edinburgh East anticipated my likely objections to automatic registration, or to data-driven registration, if I can be a bit more specific about what we might collectively mean here. I am happy to say that I am not going to raise any of the issues he suggested. He ran through a sort of checklist of standard Whitehall excuses about why we cannot do things. It usually starts with, “It is too expensive.” If that is not true, people say that we are doing it already. The third is that the IT will not handle it—that is a common one. It is the equivalent, for Star Trek fans, of Scotty saying, “I cannae give you any more, Captain; the engines are going flat out already.” But those excuses will not work. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: we can and jolly well should do more here.

Using local data is essential, but it is difficult to work out which bits are reliable. The principle is widely accepted, I think, but it is difficult to find out which specific fields in which database give a robust data set that confirms that we know this person lives here and is eligible to vote. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) and the hon. Member for Edinburgh East noted that we need to be careful not to end up registering people who are certainly living in a residence, but may not be eligible to vote, either because they are foreign nationals and are not eligible to vote in the UK, or for some other reason. That would end up switching from a problem of missing millions—false negatives in the jargon—to a problem of false positives, where we are enrolling people who should not be on the roll at all. We must be confident that we are using reliable local data. There is an awful lot of crashingly detailed but absolutely essential work to do to make that happen.

When we have reached the point where we all agree that data-driven enrolment is sensible, we come to the question of the degree of data-driven automaticity that we are willing to accept. At the moment, we have an opt-in system, where people have to exercise their right to register to vote. A fundamental principle about individual electoral registration that I think all parties sign up to is that it is essential in a democracy that people say, “I want to use my right to vote,” but if they have said it once, we do not necessarily have to ask them year in, year out for the rest of their lives. They are democratically entitled to change their minds, but if they have said, “I want to exercise my right to register to vote,” it should just be a question of tracking when they move house and ensuring that we have got the address changes correct. That is easy to say and extremely difficult to do, but there should not be a permission issue thereafter. We need to address that piece as well.

There is a difference between an opt-in system, where we say, “We know you’re living there, but do you want to register?” and an opt-out system, which is one possibility, or a “we’re not even going to ask you” system, which is a bit more dangerous. Whether that is really acceptable in a free society is a bit more questionable; it is tricky in some respects from a civil liberties point of view.

Those are the sorts of questions that I would be delighted if we were sophisticated enough and had updated our system enough to start worrying about. At the moment, we can make huge progress just by doing the data. The 80:20 rule applies: we will get 80% of the benefit from getting the data stuff done as fast as we can. That will not be easy, because it is so detailed. I will be delighted when we have got to the point where we can say, “Well, how much of an opt-in or an opt-out system do we want to have?” because we will have made huge progress, and as has rightly been pointed out, there are so many groups in our society where the picture of registration is uneven—in many cases, from a social justice point of view, unjustly uneven.

Interestingly, the group that is both biggest and least well registered has not been mentioned by anyone: expatriates. Several million expat voters are currently legally eligible to vote. Their registration rate is something like 5%, and there are therefore several million expatriates who are legally enfranchised but are unregistered. That is the biggest single democratic outrage—in the words of the hon. Member for Edinburgh East—that we have, but there are many others. Some BME groups have very high registration rates, but others do not. Some disabled groups have very low registration rates, but others have better rates. Many people who live in short-term rental accommodation, including students, have problems, too.

There is a huge amount that we can do. I hope that I have both reassured the hon. Member for Midlothian and perhaps tempted him a little as I have shown a little bit of ankle about where we are trying to get to and where we would like to take this issue. I think that we have a degree of cross-party unanimity on the direction of travel and the amount of work that we can do. I hope that that is reassuring. I will not go into the parallel but separate problem of individual electoral registration, on which I disagree with almost everything that has been said—that is a different conversation and a much longer debate—but on this issue we can and should make common cause, and with any luck, with a degree of cross-party unanimity, we will be able to make progress.