Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Maxton

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My noble friend knew but I can tell that there are others in the Chamber who did not.

[Lord Maxton]

I am not absolutely sure about this but I seem to remember that this happened to me once. I could take the postal vote with me and hand it in at the polling station, rather than be barred from voting, as such.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

That may well be the case. There may well be an explanation as to how it can be done. All I am saying is that there will be some people who will have a postal vote, not use it and go into a polling booth to cast their votes. It may well be that Members of this House did so formerly; of course, they cannot vote now.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Maxton

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is splitting hairs. There is a principle behind the amendment, which my noble friend is saying is that the register is incomplete and there must be some way of adding to it those groups of people who should be on it but who are not for all sorts of reasons. In trying to identify them, socio-economic data based on the profile of any particular constituency should be taken into account. That is a perfectly reasonable argument, but the noble Lord is splitting hairs on whether the Electoral Commission is equipped to carry out that function.

This is a particularly important case. It goes to the heart of many of the amendments that we have moved and dealt with over the past few weeks and no doubt will deal with over the next few weeks as well, which is that the register is inaccurate and that population is important. Therefore we have to find a formula for establishing what the population is in any given constituency in the United Kingdom.

I have been following the debates on the question of the census. Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading a report from the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I suspect that Ministers have not read it. Indeed, I would ask the noble Lord whether he has actually ever read it. It is impossible to consider this legislation without reading this report because it repeatedly draws attention to all the concerns that were expressed, and in some areas it does so in greater detail than the report produced by our own Constitution Committee in the House of Lords did.

I refer to a particular section in which the Minister responsible for the Bill in the House of Commons was asked questions by Ms Catherine McKinnell on the census. At the end of the quotation, I ask the Minister to note what I am asking for because it would be helpful to have the answer set out. I will read out what is unhelpful to my case and what is helpful. On the 2011 census, Mr Harper said:

“There are two difficulties with using Census data. The first is that Census data is of population and does not look at whether people are eligible to vote, and of course many people who live in the UK are not citizens and are not eligible to vote for various reasons. The second difficulty relates to the level of detail of the information collected in the time available. Clearly, Electoral Registration Officers are able to access Census data and use it, but Census data at the individual level that could be used to track whether actual people exist, so that they could be approached, is not published at that level of detail, but it is aggregated”.

When it is aggregated, I presume that there must be some data behind the aggregation. I wonder what those data are. They may not be published, but I wonder whether they are available.

Mr Harper goes on to say in his reply:

“Therefore, with regard to electoral administrators using it as a source to identify people who exist in an area and who are not registered, they can look at overall number and make some assumptions, but it does not really give them the detail to drill down”.

That is based on the aggregated data. Again, what is the material behind those aggregated data? He then says—and this is where my noble friend Lord Maxton has become involved in the debate, unless we are talking about other matters here:

“There are other data sets that might be more helpful in that regard that we are going to pilot in 2011”,

to which the noble Lord has referred.

“There is no bar on them using the data that is published.”

Can we have a list of all those sources of data? I have seen references in various documents to bits and pieces of data, but I have not seen an aggregate list of all the additional sources of data that can be taken into account by registration officers when they carry out their functions.

I am also trying to establish whether there is some way in which those additional data can also be used by the Boundary Commission in carrying out its work, or are those additional data somehow excluded because of the fact that we seem to be confined to the use of data that were drawn up in 2010? We should have a very clear statement as to what actual data the Boundary Commission can take into account when it draws up its reports on individual constituencies.

I have always presumed that when the Barnett formula was established, the allocations for Scotland took into account the data that my noble friend is referring to, but perhaps I misunderstand how the Barnett formula is calculated. I also understand that some areas of local government finance are also influenced by socio-economic data at the local level. Is that not the data source that my noble friend Lord Lipsey is referring to? Is it the kind of source that my noble friend is referring to? I do not know. Perhaps the Minister might be able to clarify whether that could be the source of the additional information that my noble friend would seek to include in the information that is necessary to draw up the boundaries.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I hope to be brief and hope that the cameramen from the Independent are taking photographs on that side this time to note those who are closing their eyes and going to sleep.

We have been talking about the 3.5 million who are not registered. I think in a modern democracy everybody has a right to be on the register and therefore a right to vote. It is not just a matter of taking the 3.5 million people into account in dividing up the various constituencies. It should be their right. Whether they vote or not is a matter for them; that is their right. But in my view—and as I listen to these debates it has increasingly become my view—that it should be the responsibility of Government to make sure that people are on the register, not the right of the individual to take that decision. It should be the Government’s decision.

In the modern world that is now possible. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, and I have been having this ongoing debate—it has been a very friendly debate—about the use of other databases to find people who are not on the register. When somebody is found through another data source—social security records, medical records, local government records, housing records, school records, or whatever else—it seems to me that the Government’s view is that it is useful to check the register that exists. It is not to be used to ensure that people go on the register. If you find an 18 year-old who has left school and has not registered not on the register when he is clearly living at that address—because that was where he was at school, and as far as you know he has not moved—do you put him on the register? In my view, that is exactly what should happen. He should be put on the register so that we have a register that is much more accurate than the one that we have at present, and we are also fulfilling our democratic duty of giving people the right to vote if they wish to use it. That should be key to what we are doing.

The argument in the past would be that of course you had to send people round to houses and check the register. It was the argument in the past—and listening to these debates, I sometimes wonder what world people in this House live in. It was a physical act, but it is now electronic. You do a search for a particular name on your computer, in the electoral register that you have there, and up will come the name and address. You can then cross-reference that without moving from your desk on your computer with another data source that you have, and you can see whether the names and addresses marry up. That takes a few seconds, not the hours and hours that many noble Lords seem to think it would take to carry out that task. Yes, the records exist and, yes, we should be using all the databases not just to check the register but to put people on the register when we get the opportunity to do so.

Lastly, as I know noble Lords will expect me to say, this whole process would have been so much easier if we had had compulsory ID cards from the beginning. If we had everybody with an ID card who was a British citizen, that would have become the easy, straight source of an electoral register.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Maxton

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I am not an expert on the new technology, despite what some people think. In terms of this Chamber, I am the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. Just in case the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, thinks that he has inspired me to my feet, I say that it was not him but the Minister—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. On several occasions now, in response to these debates, he has mentioned using databases in relation to the register. That gives rise to two questions.

First, which registers and databases will he ask local authorities to use? They will obviously use their own records, such as school records, local housing records and perhaps their leisure facility records. Can they use social security records? After all, many of the people about whom my noble friend has spoken may be registered as unemployed or registered for social security in some form or other. Will the local government registration officer be able to use social security records to reach them? The Government may be able to instruct them to do so, because they control social security and other areas of that nature. However, there are bodies in between that are public—they are financed by the taxpayer—but which are responsible neither to local government nor to national government. I have in mind in particular the National Health Service, which is run by a series of trusts and organisations that are supposedly at arm’s length from government. Will GPs’ records be available to returning officers? Can they go to a GP and say, “You must tell us all those who have just reached the age of 18”? GPs will know the names and addresses if they are registered. Can they, more controversially, go to an A&E hospital and say, “These people come to your hospital with accidents. Can you give us the records of where they live and the date on which they were born?”? I do not know the answer, but the noble Lord has suggested that on several occasions.

Equally, a large number of these databases are in private hands. Obviously, you can ask community organisations, but you can only ask; you cannot instruct—or are the Government intending to take powers to instruct local authorities to approach banks, local community organisations and local sports organisations that are not directly funded? Where do you go on this? How far will a local authority go?

That gives rise to the second question. If you listened carefully—and I will read carefully what the Minister has been saying—the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, implied that local authorities will positively draw up a register based on these databases. They will go to the databases to find out who left school and where they live and put them on the register. Is that what they intend to do?

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Is it not fair to say that this whole complex exercise could have been avoided if the Government had simply introduced national identity cards?

[Lord Maxton]

My noble friend, inevitably, gets there before me. I will come to that in a minute.

Is it the Government’s intention to draw up the register based on these databases, which local authorities will be able to go into, and therefore add large numbers of people who have not registered to vote? If the Government are not going to do that, what is the point of going into the databases? There is no point at all.

The Minister has implied that the Government are drawing up a register from the databases and then basically saying to people, “You’re on the register. If you wish, you can prove to us that you do not live there any more and come off the register”. However, as my noble friend has quite rightly said, all this would have been solved—and considerable sums of money saved in the longer run—if we had introduced compulsory national identity cards and a national identity register. Each local authority could have used that and drawn up its own register without any bother whatever.

That would not have been the only use. You could then use the card itself to vote electronically wherever you wished. That would have increased the number of people taking part in our democratic process, which would have been to the major benefit of our whole electoral system.