European Union Referendum: Young Voters

Baroness McDonagh Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McDonagh (Lab)]

My Lords, 14,000 in Liverpool, 17,000 in Birmingham, and 6,000 in Lewisham —these are all voters lost to the register in areas where the eligible voting population has increased. Never has so much money been spent on registering so few voters. Perhaps the Minister can remind us of how much money this whole exercise has cost.

It was a good idea to do this at the time and, after all, it did not really matter. I remember the jokes in the bars and restaurants on the Estate about the types of voters that would be lost to the register and their voting preferences. I also remember the debate in this House, when we confused the matter and made out that there was criminalisation in the voter registration system when there has not been a prosecution since the Second World War. No one would take it seriously, and perhaps they would not take seriously the parallels with that situation and the exclusion of some groups of voters in the southern states of America, and say that it does not really matter. But it does matter, for the following reason.

The voters lost to the register are not a random selection. I will give noble Lords one fact. If you look like us and are an older person living in your own home in the shires, you are more than 90% likely to be registered. If you are young, from an ethnic minority, male and living in an urban area in private rented accommodation, you are less than 10% likely to be registered. This is storing up a huge amount of alienation for the future. It divides our society rather than unites it, and it is a stain on the conscience of all democracies to have this many missing millions.

Now it matters not only to us and to this country but to the Government, for this reason: the missing voters are also those who are more likely to vote “in” in the European referendum. That is why the Prime Minister has taken to Tinder and Facebook to encourage young voters to register.

However, I am not here just to criticise. I also want to make some practical suggestions about what we can do. Last year, I introduced a Bill on automatic registration, and I ask for the Minister’s support in bringing forward such legislation. It would be cheaper and would register over 95% of voters. I also ask for the Minister’s support for the Greater Manchester initiative to bring through automatic registration. However, neither of those suggestions will sort out this problem for 7 June, which is the deadline for voters to register. I therefore ask him to do all he can in his power to reach out to universities with halls of residence, schools with sixth-forms and further education colleges to get young people registered. The referendum is the most important decision that our country will take in a generation. It must be wrong if those who will be most affected by it do not have a say in it.

Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015

Baroness McDonagh Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

No, I am not precisely wrong at all. We are dealing with the electoral register for the United Kingdom as a whole, a country in which I believe. I have to say again, with great charity—difficult as it is to summon it up on occasions—that the party that prevented the boundary changes going through, in a fit of petulance and pique, has no right to talk to us on this.

[Baroness McDonagh (Lab)]

My Lords, can I bring the House back to the matter under debate? That is what I would like to speak about this afternoon. I speak in favour of the annulment and the amendment.

Much has been said about Northern Ireland. The real story of Northern Ireland is that when individual electoral registration was introduced, the register collapsed. The registration officers then had to find people, without speaking to them, and put them on the register—a very unsafe process. It has taken several years for them to reach their current situation; we have five weeks. Northern Ireland is a small, homogeneous society in terms of housing tenure, the mobility of the population and so on; we have much more complex problems in terms of registration.

We already know that some 8 million voters are not registered, and we may be in the process of knocking off a further 2 million. We know about those people—real people—because we know the census data, the gaps in properties and the number of young people in school. If the noble Lord opposite would like to meet some of these people, I will be going out and knocking on doors this Sunday. If we meet outside the Chamber, I will arrange to bring him to some of these households to understand some of the problems with registration. This is about 10 million people versus this secondary issue, which has become a bit of—

[Lord Dobbs]

Since the noble Baroness raises the point, what we are talking about is those who are on the register, who she claims are going to be knocked off the register. We all want those who are not on the register, but who ought to be, to be on it. The whole House wants as complete a register as possible, but this is not what we are talking about. We are talking about these ghost votes, which should not be there in the first place.

[Baroness McDonagh]

I am not talking about these ghost votes—I do not believe them to be ghost votes. We know that they have not returned a registration form but we know that they continue to pay council tax. We know that they are there. If the noble Lord does not agree with me, I ask him again to accept my invitation to come out on Sunday and we can talk to these voters together. I can reassure him that they do exist. We know they exist.

We have the problem affecting in the region of 10 million voters versus this smokescreen of fraud, which is the obsession that has hindered us from properly scrutinising this regulation. When has there ever been a case of registration fraud—ever? How many people have registered wrongly? Tell me the numbers we are talking about. Can any noble Lord tell me when they have ever met such a voter? I have been knocking on doors since 1978 and have never come across anybody who has fraudulently completed a registration form. Nor have I spoken to a registration officer who has seen this taking place. I think your Lordships are getting confused with postal vote fraud. Even the impact assessment for the Bill from which this regulation was drawn up says that it is a very rare occurrence, yet it does not name any occurrence ever happening. There has never been a proven case of registration fraud in this country.