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

Debate between Lord Dobbs and Baroness McDonagh

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[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.