Representation of the People Bill

Debate between Lord Fuller and Lord Hayward

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I shall follow on from my noble friend’s comments and pick up the question that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, referred to earlier about double, if not treble, registration. The noble Baroness said that she hoped that all universities and academic centres will ensure that they have maximum registration of people resident in that town or city as voters. However, those people will have a home residence as well. Therefore, one is inflating the electoral roll in university cities to the disadvantage of those communities in other parts of the country that do not have university cities nearby.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred to boundary reviews and political advantage. I must admit that I enormously admire his comments about parliamentary boundaries in these circumstances. The places with high levels of student registration that will benefit under automatic registration are the big cities—the Londons, the Manchesters, the Birminghams. As he explained to his Lib Dem colleagues, come the next boundary review, there will be fewer constituencies in Somerset, Wiltshire, Dorset and other similar counties, such as Gloucestershire, a fair number of which, much to my chagrin, currently have rather large numbers of Liberal Democrat MPs.

I make the point quite seriously that, if one is going to include all those people who register for a second residence, one will be expanding the electoral rolls dramatically in London, Manchester and Birmingham to the disadvantage of the shire counties. I do not think that is an appropriate route to go down. There may be solutions where people register at their first home and their second residence is not included for, for example, parliamentary boundary revision, but we cannot have a position whereby large numbers of people are registered to the disadvantage of resident communities in neighbouring shire counties.

I make these comments on the basis that I have heard from a number of people, particularly the Liberal Democrats, that they want free and fair elections. Free elections are that people should be allowed to register to vote themselves—encouraged, yes, but they should have the freedom not to do so. The Bill goes through at inordinate length, saying, “Oh well, we’ll register everybody, and if you don’t want to be on the electoral roll you can deregister”. However, the process involved is pretty tortuous, and large numbers of people genuinely want to hide where they are for a whole series of reasons; I take, for example, abused women as a case in point. They are going to be on the electoral roll, and it will not be a case of, “We will take you off immediately”, because people will not know that they are on until they are notified that they are on.

That takes me to another point, which is that we have to register all these people so that we can improve turnout. Might it not be a good idea if politicians—and I include in that category noble Lords and those in the other Chamber—improved their reputation with the public at large so that those people want to turn out to vote?

Talking of which, the Government have a very good website where you can register to vote. I could walk out of this Chamber now and register immediately. People might wonder why I had nothing better to do, but on Saturday evening I actually went on that site. What astonished me was that 54 people had registered in the preceding few minutes. I challenge noble Lords to go on it on Christmas Day; they will be astonished by how many people register to vote on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. It is not that difficult.

My noble friend Lady Coffey referred just now to the fact that, in an election period, 2.8 million people registered to vote—it was just between 2.8 million and 2.9 million. The problem there was that some 40% of those people were already registered. One thing we have not done today is given enough credit to both the Public Bill Office here in the House of Lords, for the speed with which it has drafted and ordered our amendments, and the day-to-day work of returning officers around the country. I shall return to this subject at a later point, but those officers do a phenomenal job. If you have 2.8 million extra people registering to vote during an election, as I say, that seems to show it is not that difficult to do it—and, by the way, if all those students who are moving off to university are unable to go on to a website, I have a serious doubt about whether some of them should be at university in the first place.

The 40% of people who registered at the last election who were double-registered imposed an enormous burden on the returning officers. I have said over and over again that we should move to a read-only access process. In other words, if Robert Hayward wants to check whether he is on the electoral roll, he just goes on the website with his password and can check that he is there. Instead of that, because Governments of all persuasions have refused to introduce a read-only system, we impose a burden on returning officers which is unacceptable at the time of an election, when they are trying to administer all sorts of other things.

It is not difficult. We have been told by government and officials over and over again that it is an expensive and difficult process. Is it? Local authorities—

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My noble friend has correctly highlighted how the process actually works if you go on the Government’s website, and so many of the district councils or other local councils which are registration authorities have their own skin in that same machine. When you type in your name, date of birth and national insurance number, the system goes automatically to HMRC and the DWP to validate you before you have even pressed the button; they will validate you almost immediately. I think the point my noble friend is making, which is absolutely correct, is that having this unique identifier—the national insurance number or some other method that might be defined by regulations—gives an absolutely unambiguous way of determining whether you have a duplication.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for his intervention, which was slightly longer than I had hoped for, since I want to keep to my time. As I say, there is a system; we were told it is impossible, but what have the Northern Irish done? They introduced a read-only system and have done that themselves. It operates effectively in Northern Ireland without any problem.

These massive changes are, I believe, unnecessary—although, yes, they were advertised—and without great benefit. I will quote now from the impact assessment, to which I may return on another occasion. On page 113 it says that

“we assume that the completeness of registers will increase by 3 percentage points (from 85.9% to 88.9%) by the end of the 10-year … period”.

Are we going through all these changes for that?

In conclusion, I must pick up the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, on his comments about my support for automatic registration. I believed that I had made it absolutely clear that I support it for attainers, whatever age they may happen to be, because I want to introduce them to the democratic system. Thereafter, I do not support automatic registration for that very small gain.

Sporting Events Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Fuller and Lord Hayward

Committee stage
Monday 22nd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her clarification; I was not absolutely clear on whether she was talking about the established principles or extending the limits in some form or another.

I want to make an observation on a comment the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, made on the last group of amendments. I think I heard him refer to sporting events as ones of “chance” on two occasions. There are a fair number of medallists in this Chamber today who may think, “Well, it wasn’t chance that got me a gold, silver or bronze medal”. Equally, when I refereed rugby, it was very rarely viewed as chance that one team or the other won—though there was the odd chance that the referee might have made an error at the time.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that I did not mean chance as in random, because I accept that in sport the harder you work, the luckier you get.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Evans and I have a lot in common—we both support Norwich City Football Club, and we show our allegiance to it—but I disagree with her in her amendments. I did not contribute to the last debate, but it is safe to say that it confirmed what I think we all know: that, while this may be an enabling Bill, if we actually capture one of these global events, we will need to have specific legislation anyway. If that is the case, we will not be doing any more than virtue signalling in the Bill. The conclusion that all the noble Lords have made is that the Bill is incomplete and half-full. I will not say that it is half-baked, but there is plenty more work to be done on it.

However, if the Bill is incomplete, I do not think that it is the right thing at all to extend it in scope to other events, because the mission creep brings politics into sport. Of course, it is very difficult to keep it there, but it brings politics into sport by law. It will prevent somebody who is interested in public discourse from having an opinion and gives them leverage over the event. It will sanitise so much of the activity that goes on around the game. It will make unlawful things that are part and parcel of what we do—certain trade, advertisements and things such as that; it stops innovation—for Wimbledon, the rugby union, the rugby league, the Grand Prix, the Open, the Test match, Premier League and, if we listen to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, cultural events such as the Proms and Taylor Swift. Where does this end?

I am concerned that, however well-intentioned it is, it could backfire. My noble friend Lady Evans talked about a gap to be filled. I see it a different way; I see this creating a chasm between the fans and the men in blazers, who want this for their own narrow purposes. We have grown the well-trusted and well-organised events of global repute that we host without the benefits of the Bill. While it is an enabling Bill and has very important new rules for traffic wardens, I am not sure that having more traffic wardens is enough in and of itself.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for giving way, but just for clarification, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, my noble friend Lady Evans, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and I made absolutely clear that it is not a case of the Bill encompassing these competitions; it is the sporting authorities asking that they might make use of some of the facilities of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friend Lord Fuller in his expression of concern about the impact on small businesses. Sadly, many noble Lords will know me as a statistician who spends all his time looking at opinion polls and numbers in one direction or another and then commenting on them. I have spent inadequate time looking at the impact assessment, to which no reference has been made yet in these debates. Despite my apparent facility for statistics, all I can say about the impact assessment is that my head hurts. I found it incredibly difficult to comprehend page after page of low-impact, central-impact and high-impact estimates.

I will comment on one section. I could comment on others, but I address my comments overall. I find it very difficult to understand the impact that each of the different events would have in terms of positives and negatives, because they are aggregated in a very odd way. Page 41 of the impact assessment refers to the impact on street traders. It says:

“The low estimate reflects that 50% of traders will be able to continue to trade due to potential mitigations”.


Therefore, 50% of the traders will not be able to continue trading—and that is the low estimate. It goes on to say:

“The central estimate reflects the likelihood that 75% of traders in the affected area will be unable to trade while the provisions are in place. The high estimate serves as an upper bound where all traders operating in areas where prohibitions apply are unable to trade”.


We are therefore talking about a very substantial impact on businesses. We debated earlier the duration under which these provisions would apply, but we are talking about potentially every single street trader in those relevant areas. There are pages identifying the numbers of traders affected, whether it be at the Everton stadium, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, at Hampden Park in Glasgow or wherever you choose to name. There are numbers and numbers of street traders. That is their livelihood. If these events are running for several weeks, which is likely to be the case, they are losing their livelihood for that period.

I therefore share my noble friend Lord Fuller’s concerns about the impact that is identified—but identified in such a complex way that it is incredibly difficult to understand what we are talking about.

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My noble friend has painted a picture and enumerated it with examples of sports stadiums. Under the Bill, there is to be a zone cast around the stadium where trading will be banned. But there are other provisions that have other events; for example, fan zones. Has my noble friend considered that fan zones could be in town centres? Town centres could be sterilised from trading. Has he considered that the net may be cast much further than just street traders, to other organisations too?

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that intervention and for identifying other areas. I tried to make it clear that I had taken only one element of one page of an impact assessment. It was on page 41. The impact assessment is over 90 pages long, with central, low and high estimates in all sorts of different categorisations There is no overall assessment of cost potential for any small or large business or the impact on the economy.

There is lots of explanation that tells us how wonderful it is going to be week in, week out, because of the benefits of sport. That is right—we have all recognised that—but there is an indistinct identification of the potential costs to some small and very small businesses, and we really should recognise the potential implications for all concerned.