Elections Bill

Lord Grocott Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate identifies the difference, but I have drawn the parallel, and it is a parallel, between selecting an MP at a constituency meeting and selecting them at a polling station.

As far as the process is concerned, I conclude with a final question, which I put to the Labour Front Bench. I have quoted from documents regarding the requirement to produce photo ID to select an MP. I ask whichever of the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, replies to the debate to address this question. I have cited cases where people have been required to produce two forms of ID. Can the Labour Party please say whether, on occasion, at selection meetings they have actually required three forms of ID, two of which were photo and one was the address?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Has the noble Lord finished? I am sure my noble friend will deal with his query, which has been dealt with thoroughly already. The Labour Party is a voluntary organisation which you can choose to be in or not, and if you choose to, you abide by the rules thereof—rules that are democratically determined within the party itself. It is totally different, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, from a clear right to vote, which should apply to everyone, irrespective of the degree to which they wish to become involved in daily politics, which is of course a matter of choice.

I wanted to speak now because I did not quite understand what it was that the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, did not understand about my previous intervention on this subject. I shall not discuss any individual details, because we have sundry debates on those coming up. The silence of the Government Front Bench on two or three issues in the whole of this discussion seems to have permeated the Back Benches as well. One of the crucial questions for me is whether the Tory party, which is investing an awful lot of time and effort in the Bill—and money; £180 million at least and rising—is doing so on the basis that somehow, we should be disturbed by the result of the last general election, which, I sadly remind everyone, it won with an 80-seat majority.

The Government are saying—by their actions, if not by their words—that the election is a bit dubious, a bit dodgy. Every contribution from that side is more or less implying just that. If it is not dodgy at a global level—the 80-seat majority—it must surely be dodgy in respect of a number of individual constituencies. So, I would like to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, who is an expert on these things, which of the 650 constituencies he thinks should probably be declared invalid on the basis of serious doubts and misgivings about the authenticity of the voters in those constituencies?

Having fought numerous elections and, on one occasion, having won by 360-odd votes in an electorate of 90,000, I can only say to the noble Lord and to all those who say that people do not accept our election results because the system is first past the post, that no one in the ballots in individual constituencies argues for a moment with the idea that the person who was first past the post was the winner and should be declared the winner, even if it was by a short head. But the point I am making now is that no one contested that result. My opponent, to his credit, although he called for a couple of recounts, did not doubt the validity of the result any more than I did when, prior to that, I lost by rather more, it must be said—by 1,500. Likewise, I did not contest the result.

I really do want to know the answer to this, because we are in a very odd situation. You would think we would be on different sides of the argument. You would expect the Opposition to be saying that they were really worried about the last election result and that it looked very dodgy that the Tories got an 80-seat majority, with the Government saying that it was the finest election they have ever been privileged to take part in. But in this Alice in Wonderland world, it is the Government who are raising serious questions about the validity of the election result. So, I repeat that point, which is hanging in the air, and if the Minister would share with the House his deep anxieties about the last general election, I would like to hear them.

I would also like to hear from the Minister precisely what the Government’s estimate is of the effect on voter participation of the proposals in Part 1 of the Bill, which introduce a substantial new requirement for people to exercise their right to vote. This is the biggest change in the electoral requirements in my lifetime. I suppose the voting age has changed and there have been other changes of that sort, but this is a substantial one that says to electors that what they have done in the past is not good enough and there are too many risks associated with it, so they must jump over these additional hurdles.

Our contention—I say ours, but I think it is a pretty broad contention—is that the one thing you can be sure of is that introducing a brand-new requirement such as this will have a completely neutral effect on election turnout, which, I remind the House, has been going down rather badly, certainly since I first started fighting elections. I looked up the figures for a few—1970 was the first one I fought. In February 1974, the turnout was 79% and for the last five or six elections, it has been down in the 60s. That is bad news for anyone who cares about democracy. I was proud of the fact that we used to beat lots of other countries substantially on turnout at major elections. That is no longer the case. It is not credible to say that this big change in voting requirements for voters will have no impact whatsoever on turnout. I will give the Minister three options: is he saying it will have no impact whatsoever; that it risks reducing turnout; or that it is going to increase turnout? That would be an interesting intellectual case to develop.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My noble friend might be interested to know that at the end of the last day in Committee the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, pointed out that no analysis of turnout has been done. Indeed, the noble Baroness the Minister said:

“I can confirm that we have not done that impact analysis. The important impact will be after.”—[Official Report, 17/3/22; col. 568.]


So I am afraid my noble friend will not get an answer to his question, because they have not done the research.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Well, I do not suppose that surprises me. I bet one bit of research they have done and been careful to check on—I cannot be as generous as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, on this—is whether this change will have a serious adverse effect on the number of Conservatives voting at the next election.

We know roughly the demography that is most likely to be affected—and, by the way, it is not being patronising to people on low incomes to say that we know as a matter of fact that, in general terms, the wealthier the area, the higher the turnout. That is not because people in lower-income areas do not understand what is involved. There can be all sorts of practical reasons. If you live in rented accommodation, you may not get your poll card as easily. I know you do not have to have a poll card to vote—you will need a lot more in future—but, if people do not have photo identification, clearly they are more likely to miss out on voting at subsequent elections. If, in proposing this change to the requirements on voters, the noble Lord, Lord True—a lifelong Conservative, as I am lifelong Labour—had found in his research that it was going to really cost his party something, I very much doubt he would be bringing it forward, let alone bringing it forward with such enthusiasm.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way. What he and the Committee are addressing are the potentially very serious but unknown and unquantified ill effects of this reform. Normally when a measure which could have an enormously detrimental social impact of this kind is proposed in these circumstances, the proposal is to pilot it. My noble friend will remember, because we were both in government at the time, that, when this House wrecked the ID card Bill, it did so led by Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, a former Cabinet Secretary, on the grounds that, if such a major piece of legislation was being proposed, even though it was in the Labour Party manifesto, it should be piloted. It was on that basis that we lost a large part of the legislation. Does my noble friend not think that it is highly appropriate and indeed necessary that a change of this magnitude should be piloted to see what the effects are before it becomes the universal law of the land?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I absolutely agree. I would add only one point to my noble friend’s observations. If we regard the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust as a reputable research body, it is saying that something like 1.7 million people are without voter ID—I do not have the notes here, but it is a very substantial figure—and they are overwhelmingly people on lower incomes. So there is a lot that we do know, but it would certainly be a lot better to have a pilot study before this kind of change was introduced.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Before my noble friend Lord Hayward sat down, the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, rose to intervene. Perhaps we could allow the noble Lord’s intervention.