Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Harper
I will finish my point about the civil penalty, then I will take an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson).
The Bill provides that after a registration officer has followed any specified steps and an individual has not made an application, he can require them to do so. If at that stage they fail to do so, he can impose a civil penalty. The intention is that only those who refuse repeatedly can be fined. We do not think it would be particularly helpful to democracy if we fined hundreds of thousands of people, so we expect the number of fines levied to be similar to the number of prosecutions at present. Nor do we want to create a financial incentive for local authorities to use fines as a revenue-raising measure, so any moneys collected—[Interruption.] I hear one of my hon. Friends chuckling, but one or two local authorities have been known to do such things, so any moneys collected will be paid back to the Exchequer through the Consolidated Fund.
Mr Jackson
I agree with the compromises that my hon. Friend has made on the opt-out and the civil penalty. I am sure he agrees that people’s propensity to register for elections is a function of societal change as much as anything else. The Electoral Commission has stated:
“Recent social, economic and political changes appear to have resulted in a declining motivation to register to vote among specific social groups.”
That is associated with
“changes in the approach to the annual canvass…as well as matters of individual choice and circumstances (such as a decline in interest in politics).”
Surely we need to concede that some people do not want to register because they are not interested in the process.
Mr Harper
We do. The main impact on an individual who does not register to vote is the rather obvious one that they lose their opportunity to vote and have their say in how their country is governed, but there are also some public policy reasons why we want people to register to vote. One reason is to ensure that there is a complete register for the purpose of boundary changes, and another is that the electoral register is used as the pool for jury service. We therefore want to ensure that it is as accurate as possible.
My hon. Friend is right that is up to Members and to people involved in politics of all descriptions to motivate people to register to vote and then use their vote. The use of the vote will, of course, remain sanction-free. It will be entirely up to people whether they use their vote.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I like the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David), but I fear that spending too many evenings in parliamentary Labour party meetings has made him quite paranoid, given that the previous Government advanced the same substantive proposals for individual electoral registration in Northern Ireland and that the consultation document that was published in 2005 was followed by the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2006, which gave rise to individual electoral registration in Northern Ireland. Neither we nor anyone else accused those measures of being rushed through. The hon. Gentleman must be the first Front Bencher to argue against the substantive proposals of the previous Government. The bigger question is why the integrity, autonomy and authority of the electoral register should be more important in Northern Ireland than in England, Wales and Scotland.
Mr Harper
I would have made this point to the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David), had he shown the generosity of spirit that I did. Given his complaints about the diminishing register and the risks involved, would my hon. Friend like to consider why the Electoral Commission’s research showed that in 2000, under the previous Government, 3 million people were missing from the electoral register and that by 2010, just after they had left office, the figure had risen to 6 million? If there is a party in the House that has shown itself to be a past master at driving people off the electoral register, it is not the party on the Government Benches; it is the party opposite.
Mr Jackson
The Minister makes an astute point. In 2001, the year in which the hon. Member for Caerphilly entered the House, the English electorate numbered 37.3 million. By the end of Labour’s second term, in 2005, the figure was 37.1 million. So Labour did not push up registration rates in an increasing population either.
I take with a pinch of salt Labour’s protestations and faux outrage. We have argued for many years that overseas voters should also have the right to be registered, and that active steps should be taken to achieve that. That point has also been made by the hon. Member for Caerphilly’s erstwhile right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). However, that did not happen during the 13 years of the previous Government. Indeed, they more or less ignored services voters, despite many people from military constituencies saying that that was an outrageous and egregious oversight.
Mr Evennett
My hon. Friend is making some powerful points. Does he agree that the modernisation of our system is essential, and that it should be brought in as soon as possible?
Mr Jackson
I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, who has great experience in the House.
The Bill is absolutely right, in that its central aims are to tackle electoral fraud, improve the integrity of our electoral system, particularly the electoral register, and modernise the electoral registration system, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett) says, is most important. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) was gracious in paying tribute to the Minister and the Department for engaging in an open and wide-ranging debate during the pre-legislative scrutiny and public consultation, and for producing the White Paper and a detailed, comprehensive Government response in February 2012. It is far from the truth that this is some kind of rushed, gerrymandering Bill. It has attracted a lot of support, including from organisations such as the Electoral Commission. There is consensus around the Bill.
The proposals in the Bill featured not only in the Conservative manifesto of May 2010 but in the coalition agreement, so we certainly have a mandate for carrying out this policy. If the hon. Member for Caerphilly were more generous of spirit, he would perhaps admit that the previous Government wanted to proceed in a similar way when they were in power. Reference has been made to the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 in that regard.
Chris Ruane
Will the hon. Gentleman answer a question that has so far remained unanswered? The 2009 Act was passed as a result of consensus across the Chamber, and its provisions were to start in 2015. Why is it so important to bring them back by one year? Why could we not have retained all-party consensus by keeping the date at 2015?
Mr Jackson
Because we see this as in the best interest of the body politic generally. There is a plethora of evidence to show that cumulative cases of electoral fraud—I will come on to discuss this issue later both for my own constituency and across the country—have grievously damaged the faith and trust people have in the electoral process. The Minister is quite right that we have all been complacent in assuming that we live in a society where transparency, openness and fairness exist above all in the electoral process. I did not think I would ever encounter a case in which a judge would describe a British electoral result—in this case, for Birmingham city council—as comparable to one of a banana republic, yet that happened in 2004 under the watch of the Government whom the hon. Member for Caerphilly supported.
Important parts of the Bill are uncontentious, but I will bring some concerns to the House’s attention later. Of course individual electoral registration has been broadly supported across the House over a number of years. Some elements, such as the review of polling places, are innocuous and will not be contentious, as I said.
On civil penalties, I mentioned earlier that we must be cognisant of the fact that some people are not interested in the political process. We cannot force people to register on the basis of a criminal sanction—it is not right to do so—if they genuinely do not feel part of the process. That is a function not of a political process, but of societal change over many years. International comparisons are important for understanding how to get people to register. Australia is an interesting example. The level of civic engagement in schools and colleges there and the amount of publicity given to financial education, for example, has led to school children and young people understanding the importance of being involved in the system. I think that is a much better way of proceeding than having criminal sanctions and a penalty. Our society is much changed.
Siobhain McDonagh
I am certainly no expert on the Australian system and I am sure that school education there is good. Nevertheless, Australia has compulsory voting and has far more frequent and stronger fining than we do.
Mr Jackson
We will not meander down the path of compulsory voting, which is a completely separate issue, and even the benign Deputy Speaker might rule me out of order if I did that. I think it is better to persuade than to threaten and cajole people. That is why I am not particularly concerned one way or the other about the opt-out proposals. Had they remained in the Bill and not been amended, I would still have been happy to support it. We can argue about civil penalties, but I think amounts of £60, £80 or £100 send out a powerful enough message. After all, no one wants to get a parking ticket and be fined £60. We are talking about civic engagement with something that is important for the future of our country, and people understand that they should be part of it.
An important corollary of the changes is the reduction in the potential for financial fraud. Essentially, the capacity to commit fraud is often given via a place on the electoral register. Figures produced over the last year or so in the Cabinet Office impact assessment by the Metropolitan Police Service and the National Fraud Initiative under the auspices of Operation Amberhill showed that of 29,000 information strands collated, 13,214—almost 46%—showed data matches with the electoral register that were fraudulent or counterfeit. In other words, the documents were often generated as a result of someone’s being on the electoral register, but were nevertheless fraudulent or counterfeit.
The Minister made the simple point that ours is one of the few countries in the world that still operates a household registration system. The system is backward-looking, and it disfranchises people, particularly women, in communities in which the heads of households take full responsibility for women’s registration and postal vote. We should do something about that. We have a duty to ensure that those women’s votes are not being stolen by people who should not have access to them, because we have a universal franchise based on free and fair access to democracy for every man and every woman, which is what has put us here today.
At present, only a person’s name, address and nationality need to be supplied for that person to appear on the electoral register. As the Minister made clear, this is one of the least robust systems in the world. Let me share with the House our experience in Peterborough. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh), who I know has been in the House for a long time, was very relaxed and insouciant, perhaps even complacent, about postal votes and the transfer to the individual electoral registration system. However, on 27 April the Peterborough Evening Telegraph reported that 16% of postal votes applied for in the central ward of Peterborough had been thrown out because they were fraudulent or forged.
That is happening now, and it can be extrapolated to different communities and different wards in urban areas throughout the country, including Greater London. However, Members need not rely on me for speculation, because there have already been serious cases of electoral fraud involving postal votes in Slough, Pendle, Birmingham, West Yorkshire and, in particular, Peterborough. I shall say more about that later.
Siobhain McDonagh
I certainly would not tolerate the fraudulent registration of even one postal vote, but how can it be right to reduce access to postal votes for the many because of a few examples of fraud? No investigation, including those by the Electoral Commission and the Association of Chief Police Officers, has discovered extensive fraud. We know that it happens, and we know that it happens in particular places, but surely the job of the police is to find out where it happens and make specific proposals to deal with it, not to disfranchise the many.
Mr Jackson
We are making specific proposals. I think that the hon. Lady is tarrying with the wrong person. I saw the huge resources that were devoted to investigation of postal vote fraud by the Cambridgeshire constabulary—who, as far as I know, received little if any help from the Government of whom the hon. Lady was a member—between 2004 and 2008. It took four years for Operation Hooper to complete its investigation, which resulted in the imprisonment of, I believe, five individuals—two of them Conservative and three Labour, as it happens—following the European and city council elections in the central ward of Peterborough in June 2004.
We cannot say that we should not bother about this because we have no proof that it happens. It does happen, it is costly, it undermines the very basis of democracy in this country, and we should ensure—as I believe the Bill does—that the correct procedures operate to ensure that it does not happen in the future. The hon. Lady may wish to reconsider her rather lackadaisical approach to the integrity of our electoral system.
One proposal with which I strongly agree, although I do not think that the Government have gone far enough, is the proposal in clause 19 to allow police community support officers into polling stations. I think that if there is a missed opportunity in the Bill, it is our failure to consider the serious problem of personation and intimidation at polling stations. We saw that in Tower Hamlets earlier this month, and we have seen it too often in Peterborough. I must not major on Peterborough’s central ward, but it is the one that I know best. In that ward we have four polling stations. About half a dozen members of the Cambridgeshire constabulary and mobile CCTV are required at each of them because of the issue of personation, of which there have been cases in Peterborough.
We are not going far enough in looking again at the Representation of the People Act 1983, because the power of the presiding officer inside the polling station remains extremely limited. If the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden were to go into a polling station in Mitcham and Morden and say she was Elvis Presley and that name was on the electoral register, the polling clerk would have very little power to say, “Actually, you’re not Elvis Presley. You’re our esteemed local Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden.” That is not satisfactory. The legal test for proving that the hon. Lady is her good self, rather than Elvis Presley, is very difficult. We have missed an opportunity to look again at that issue.
In closing—which is what the Whips are imploring me to do—may I make two quick points? I have concerns about the removal of the co-ordinated online record of electors—CORE—database. I have no interest in promoting national ID databases—I voted against identity cards—but the Minister must tell us how successful he has been in removing the difficulties of duplication, which have frequently arisen. CORE ameliorated that, but it is no longer in place.
On a slightly mischievous note, this morning on the ConservativeHome website my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) made a point about clause 18 and allowing a parliamentary candidate standing on behalf of two or more parties to use a registered emblem of one or more parties. Can the Minister assure me that there is no hidden agenda in that, and that it is just a helpful way to assist Labour and Co-operative party representatives to get elected in their seats?
Mr Harper
I am happy to be able to give my hon. Friend that assurance. There will not be coalition candidates at the next election; there will be separate Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates. I must say, too, that the attitude of Labour Members is a bit depressing. The only reason why we are making this change is that when the Labour party was in office it could not draft legislation properly and inadvertently “cocked it up”, to quote the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant). Because of that, and because we are fixing what is largely a problem for Labour and Co-operative Members, one would think they could be slightly less churlish.
Mr Jackson
Finally, let me say that the data-matching projects are very useful, but in Peterborough’s case they resulted in merely a 54.7% matching rate. More work needs to be done in the second tranche, and sufficient resources must be allocated, as this will be the bedrock of individual electoral registration.
I thank the Minister for his detailed and comprehensive remarks. The Bill is excellent. It restores integrity, honesty and transparency to the electoral system. That is long overdue. The previous Government should have done this, but it has been our new Government who have taken this courageous step, in order to make sure we can all have faith and trust in the system that puts us here and puts councillors in their seats. That adds to British democracy.
Andrew Stephenson
Certainly not. I am suggesting that certain parties can abuse the system of on-demand postal voting, and all parties have a vested interest in signing up their voters for postal votes in order to increase the turnout of their voters. I believe that that can skew election results. A return to the old system, where voters had to have a reason to have a postal vote, is the way that we should go.
I accept that in the Reedley ward it is theoretically possible that local support for Labour did sky-rocket. However, I have no doubt that the 45% increase in the Labour vote in 2011, against the backdrop of an 18% drop in turnout, was down to the huge increase in postal votes that year, as well as individual reports of party activists walking into polling stations with piles of up to 50 postal votes at a time. It is not so much that the numbers do not add up; rather, that they do. As the new council leader of Pendle, Councillor Joe Cooney, recently said:
“If we lose an election we want to lose it fairly, we don’t want to see councillors losing seats where it is not a level playing field.”
I accept, as I said, that while the rules remain as they are, all political parties will compete to sign up as many people as possible on to postal votes. Everyone in the Chamber knows that electors with postal votes are more likely to use their vote, so all political parties have a vested interest in doing that. However, as we all know, the temptation for some political activists to create fictitious voters and sign them up for postal votes has proved irresistible in places such as Slough, Birmingham and east London.
It is also clear, yes, that there is a cultural element. That has been endorsed by independent organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Trust. Even if the electoral roll is accurate, as the Bill hopes to ensure, the current on-demand postal voting regime actively disfranchises women and young people by allowing family voting to occur. By family voting, I mean the head of a household pledging the entire family’s votes to a particular political party. He can then ensure that all those votes go to that political party by watching family members complete their postal ballots, completing the ballots himself, or indeed completing them with an activist from the said political party.
Mr Stewart Jackson
I entirely concur with my hon. Friend’s comments. What we have found in Peterborough from time to time is that the head of the household will fill in both the signature and the date of birth of predominantly women members of the family. It is time-consuming and resource-intensive for the local authority and the electoral registration officer to cross-reference and match those. It is only in that way that the practice is found out, but often it is not. That is uncomfortable and unpalatable, but nevertheless true.
Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)
If I may issue a challenge or wager to the hon. Member for Pendle (Andrew Stephenson), it is that there will be proportionately fewer young people on the electoral register in December 2015 than there are today. I support household registration because I believe that the most effective electoral registration officer in my constituency is mum. It is mum who fills in the form and includes her young sons—it is principally young sons, but also young daughters. It is not about people being excluded because of a bullying dad or other figures in the household. The young men I saw queuing up at the polling station at the last general election were there and able to vote because their mums assisted them in that. My concern about individual registration is not about party preference or who wins and loses, but about the disfranchisement of those groups who, for the good of us all and the protection of our society, must be included in the system.
Those listening to the debate would be forgiven for thinking that all sorts of fraud goes on all the time and that there is plenty of evidence for it, but actually the contrary is true. The report produced by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission in March 2012 identified remarkably low levels of offences relating to voter registration, stating that the offences usually concern financial benefit or identity fraud, which can be investigated separately, rather than electoral fraud. Surely we have all met mums in our constituency advice surgeries whose single person discount has been removed from their council tax bill because the council found that the electoral register recorded adult sons or daughters as living with them, even though they had moved out. That is the problem. It is not about people wanting to go on to the electoral register.
Mr Stewart Jackson
Is the hon. Lady really telling the intelligent and articulate Pakistani women in my constituency that they are not intelligent enough or cannot be trusted to fill in their own individual electoral registration forms and that they have to trust their mums, aunties, dads or uncles to do so, because I do not think that that is about women’s empowerment? It is patronising, backward-looking and potentially extremely fraudulent.
Siobhain McDonagh
I think that that intervention is the result of the hon. Gentleman’s embarrassment at some of his earlier contributions on people who should not be on the electoral register—that gets to the nub of it.
I accept that I am out of step and that individual registration is going to happen. Given that it is, what can we do to make sure that as many people as possible are on the register?
Our democracy depends on the fullest electoral register, and that is why I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) referred, and which suggests that anybody who receives a service from the state, gets a library ticket and a driving licence or claims a benefit should have to be on the register. It would be a social contract, whereby the state—the Government—had a connection with people, who were able to vote if they chose to do so. In that way, we would also bring about a connection that people understood—that there was not something called Government money, but an individual’s money, which they gave to the Government or the state to spend.
The police are not against a comprehensive electoral register, because it is one of the country’s most effective crime databases, so their job will be made much harder if the register becomes less complete. Banks and credit companies will find it harder to tackle fraud, and councils will also find it harder to investigate benefit fraud.
If millions drop off the register because individual registration is introduced too rapidly and with too few safeguards, there will be trouble ahead. The Government have made some concessions, but, as the Bill stands, the number of people on the electoral roll and electoral participation will decline.
Mrs Laing
Not in my constituency, it is not, where a large majority of them vote Tory. I want them on the register. This is simply not a reasonable argument. If someone is responsible enough to exercise their right to vote to decide the Government of this country, or at any level of local government, they should be responsible enough to register to vote.
Mr Stewart Jackson
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Labour party should have learnt its lesson from the Bradford West by-election result? It relied on community voting and this kind of backward-looking, pernicious and frankly slightly sleazy and corrupt approach to registration and campaigning. It bit Labour on the backside and it lost by 10,000 votes. It is over.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I think there was a question in there somewhere.
Debate on the Address
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Lammy
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about foster care and the need to support the many people across this country who give up their homes and time and offer love to the many children who pass through their homes.
May I also say, as chair of the all-party group on fatherhood, that it is important that in this House, on a cross-party basis, we make a renewed commitment to the importance of fatherhood? I also welcome the changes to care proceedings. If it is right and in the interests of a child, we must make it easier for fathers to have contact with their children. It is now well understood that the outcomes for young people without fathers are not good enough. In parts of this country and in parts of constituencies such as mine there is the phenomenon of the “baby-father”, whereby it is acceptable to have children but not be a father to them, and I welcome any moves in legislation to deal with that issue.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman’s courageous stance on many of those issues over the years. Does he echo my view that we should also pay tribute to the love, care and courage of grandparents and extended kin, and that we should remove the impediments that they have to caring for their flesh and blood, owing to various difficult circumstances involving their own children, including drug and alcohol abuse?
Mr Lammy
The hon. Gentleman has taken up those issues in his constituency, and I too underline my support for grandparents, particularly given the complexities within families of drug and alcohol addiction.
But in the end the critical issues for most people, in relation to this Queen’s Speech and over the coming years, will be the reality that we are in a double-dip recession, will be what we are doing to get to grips with growth in this country, to provide jobs and to support small businesses, and will be how we are supporting young people. I am afraid that there has just not been enough in this Queen’s Speech to address those issues.
I do not have to tell the Prime Minister what happened in my constituency, as we have spoken on many occasions, but I say to him that currently in Tottenham 6,500 people are unemployed and 28,000 are on out-of-work benefits. The figures have actually got worse since the riots, and, although I have heard him at the Dispatch Box speaking about the Work programme, the youth contract and apprenticeships, I find that in all three policies there are weaknesses and flaws.
The Work programme is straining at the edges, particularly with the third sector attempting without funds to provide placements, and in Tottenham 90% of those who are unemployed are not eligible for it. How can it be the biggest programme since the 1930s, when most people who are unemployed in Britain are not eligible to participate in it? While the right hon. Gentleman lauds the youth contract, I warn him of a previous era, when we saw the failed youth training scheme and, as a consequence, many young people who graduated with certificates but no jobs. People in my constituency have a long memory, and what they want are genuine jobs.
As a former skills Minister, I am pleased to see the growth in apprenticeships, but the right hon. Gentleman will know that the scheme, to reach the figure of 450,000, includes many that people would not recognise as an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship should surely be a programme that lasts for at least one year. Currently, apprenticeships last for a maximum of 16 weeks, and many young people do not want something that is, in fact, a very short opportunity in customer services dressed up as a genuine apprenticeship, so I ask the Prime Minister to look at what is behind such apprenticeships if we are genuinely to retain the trust of young people.
I and other Opposition Members will of course scrutinise the enterprise Bill in its entirety, but, when I think of those shopkeepers on Tottenham high road who saw their businesses destroyed, I recall, as will the Prime Minister, that they faced hardships even before the riots. There were hardships with business rates and with footfall on the high road, and they were concerned about issues such as regulation—2,900 of them in the Tottenham constituency, paying their VAT and employing 30,000 people.
The number of self-employed people in my constituency has fallen from 14% to 7% in the past year. It is going in the wrong direction. I warn him that his absolute dedication to slashing public services is having a major effect in adding to the dole queues in constituencies such as mine.
We are not seeing more businesses flourishing or coming in and taking up the slack from the public sector; we are seeing something much worse. Look underneath the figures. The whole House should have serious concerns about anyone—young people, particularly—who faces unemployment. However, when the unemployment rate is three times higher among young black men, we should be gravely concerned.
We should also be particularly concerned that many women—older women, often black—are now joining their sons on the unemployment queues, having been employed in the health service, local government or other areas. I say to the Prime Minister that some communities depend on those mothers being employed and I am worried about the emergence of a picture worse than some of the scenes that hon. Members will recognise from the United States of America.
That is why we needed a Queen’s Speech that would seriously address those issues—stimulate the economy in the way required; wrestle with the issue of growth; and move our economy from over-dependence on financial services and retail. When I heard the Business Secretary arguing the case for the Sunday trading Bill, it was again apparent that the Government would rely once more on retail, consumerism, shopping and spending to get us out of this mess. We will need far more than that in this economy if we are to respond to the problems in constituencies such as mine.
What about the gaps in the Queen’s Speech? Given the importance of higher education to the UK economy and all we have invested to support young people making their way to university, why have the Government decided that a higher education Bill is not appropriate? The issue has been kicked into the long grass. Vice-chancellors and young people face uncertainty because we have not seen any Bill in that area of policy at all. Why are we going to spend hours, in this House and the other place, debating House of Lords reform when every Member knows that no one raised that issue with any political party on the doorstep during the campaign of the past few weeks? Is House of Lords reform really where our priorities should be?
Trade Union Funding
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Alec Shelbrooke
I would not say that my hon. Friends are on a different planet from me; their arguments just have a different emphasis. Many Government Members believe in trade unions, and find it demeaning to be compared to the Third Reich. It demeans the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr Anderson), who said that we were going the same way as Hitler by trying to remove the trade unions. That devalues the debate today, which is about where the funding comes from.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend aware of the Warwick I and Warwick II agreements? To get the policies that they wanted from a Labour Government, the trade unions dictated the policies to be enacted by a Labour Government in return for union funding.
Alec Shelbrooke
There are indeed many stories, but I want to return to the specific—
Individual Voter Registration
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Sadiq Khan
My hon. Friend is right to raise the issue of electoral fraud, which we must all do our best to fight. I think there were five or six prosecutions in the recent period, which is not at the same level as Northern Ireland, for example, before the changes made there.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
In view of the moderate and measured tone of the right hon. Gentleman’s comments thus far, does he regret telling The Guardian on 13 October 2010 that
“10 million people could lose the right to vote”,
an assertion that has been specifically rejected by the Electoral Commission’s chair, Jenny Watson?
Sadiq Khan
I am grateful for the tenor of that intervention. I stand by that figure, not because it is mine, but because it is the figure given by independent experts. I will come to that estimate and who gives it shortly, if the hon. Gentleman will indulge me.
Sadiq Khan
My hon. Friend makes her point far better than I would have made it. She will be aware of the representations made by Scope and others. There could be confusion at an early stage when somebody completing the household form assumes, as in the past, that they are automatically on the register, without realising that the individual form they receive also needs to be completed. If we take into account the fact that many people have learning difficulties, that for others English is not their first language and that that these changes are being contemplated at a time when the register arguably needs to be at its most accurate, the position becomes very worrying—even more so if we reflect on the diminution of resources to which my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) referred.
Mr Speaker
Order. Before the hon. Gentleman intervenes, let me make the point that 19 hon. Members are seeking to speak in the debate. If I am to have any chance of accommodating that level of interest, self-restraint—in respect of Front-Bench speeches and the length of interventions—will be essential.
Mr Jackson
I am mindful of your admonition, Mr Speaker.
I am puzzled by the right hon. Gentleman’s views on household registration, given that the Electoral Commission has said that
“The ‘household’ registration system means there is no personal ownership by citizens of a fundamental aspect of their participation in our democracy—their right to vote”.
Is he saying that he is in favour of household registration, whose removal is at the centre of these reforms, or not?
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
This is probably the first Opposition day debate that I have attended in which the Opposition substantially agree with the Government. That is quite strange, but I am not responsible for the Opposition’s debate selection.
The Minister is a talented, urbane and civilised chap, if I may say so, and he is far too polite to point out the confusion on the Labour Benches. Members will remember that not long ago we heard the comments of the deputy leader of the Labour party at the party conference. With her customary exaggeration and hyperbole, she said that the Government’s proposals would
“push people off the electoral register—deny them their vote, deny them their voice. The numbers are going to be huge”.
That was palpably nonsense, because that was never the point of the change.
The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) got to the nub of the issue by showing the Labour party’s proprietorial approach towards certain groups of voters—“We know what’s best for you. You’re our voters, and we think the proposals will unnecessarily affect your exercise of the franchise.” That is simply not the case. Today, from some speakers we are hearing politics over principle. It ill behoves them to take that approach, given that when their party was in government it absolutely refused to do anything about the under-registration of military personnel or overseas voters, for example, despite months and years of protestations from Conservative Members. Those are both groups of people who are legitimately entitled to vote in elections. Let us not, in our rush to a consensus, ignore the reality of the 13 years of the Labour Government and their record of under-registration. Hon. Members will know that in 2008 one national newspaper managed to register the name Gus Troobev, an anagram of “bogus voter”, on 31 different electoral rolls in one day.
In Peterborough, for reasons that Members may know, we have had a close acquaintance with electoral fraud, and I draw the Minister’s attention to the issue of personation. In one ward in Peterborough, we now have four separate CCTV cameras in four polling districts because of the threat of personation. In particular, I draw his attention to the Representation of the People Act 1983 and subsequent legislation, which prescribe the actions that presiding officers can take in polling stations if they fear a case of personation. That does not touch directly on the current change, but it is nevertheless a very important issue, and we have had serious problems with it.
The Minister will know that Operation Hooper, the investigation that took place into postal vote fraud at the June 2004 local elections, took four years to be resolved and resulted in the imprisonment of six individuals, three Labour and three Conservative. It cost Cambridgeshire constabulary a huge amount of money, and the cost to an ordinary voter of electoral fraud is another issue to consider.
If the proposals are some sort of wicked Tory plot, which they are to the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd, who is rather excitable but passionate, it is a strange plot, because it involves substantial consensus among the academic community, including Dr Toby James of Swansea university, Stuart Wilks-Heeg of Liverpool university, who has been mentioned, and others. The proposals have involved much consultation; flexibility and pragmatism; the data-matching pilots, of which Peterborough city council is one example; transitional arrangements; an exhaustive and detailed Select Committee investigation; and the promise of funding. In addition, the Government have admitted that certain proposals needed to be nuanced, such as the opt-in, opt-out proposals.
Let us remember that in 2008 the Council of Europe stated:
“It does not take an experienced election observer, or election fraudster, to see that the combination of the household registration system without personal identifiers and the postal vote on demand arrangements make the election system in Great Britain very vulnerable to electoral fraud.”
At the time of the 2009 legislation, even Peter Facey, of Unlock Democracy, said:
“We still have 19th-century regulations for a 21st-century situation.”
It is vital that we have eventually reached a consensus, despite references in the debate to the boundary changes. Those references were erroneous because effectively all that matters in respect of the boundary changes is the electorate on the enumeration date of 1 December 2010. Those changes are irrelevant to the substance of this debate.
There is a consensus on voter registration. It should have been brought about many months if not years ago, but I am glad that Labour Front Benchers have had a damascene conversion and understand that the Government’s proposals are about clarity and integrity and, to be fair, the fact that people can choose not to vote, which we must respect. The Government have listened and are going in the right direction, and I look forward to the details of the legislation.
G20
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
On the current plan for the recapitalisation of European banks, British banks would not require any additional capital because they are quite well capitalised already. There is a concern that needs to be expressed that as the Europeans move to recapitalise their banks, it is quite important that they do not do that purely by shrinking bank balance sheets, and that they encourage banks to find fresh sources of capital so that lending does not decrease in the European Union.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
Are we not in danger of ignoring the political reality of the current situation, which is that saving the euro at almost any cost is in the long-term interests of Germany, but not necessarily that of the taxpayers of the United Kingdom? That being so, surely the ECB and not the IMF must be the lender of last resort.
The Prime Minister
I certainly agree with my hon. Friend’s last point. The point about the future of the euro is that we should take a very hard-headed, national-interest view. All the evidence is that a disorderly break-up of the euro would have very bad effects on all the economies within Europe, and bad effects on Britain. One can make longer-term arguments about what it might mean and how things might change but, in the short-term, there is no doubt that when we are trying to secure growth and jobs in this country a disorderly break-up of the eurozone would not be good for Britain.
Public Disorder
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(13 years, 10 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
It is an hour and 20 minutes before I have said it, but I have to say it: there is a reason why we are having to reduce these budgets, and that is because we inherited a complete fiscal car crash. There is a connection between this statement and the statement that we are about to have, which is that if countries do not get control of their fiscal situations, we can see what happens, with even the largest countries in the world getting their debt downgraded.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
The Prime Minister is quite right to look at the events of this week in the context of social malaise and family breakdown. May I press him on the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)? The policy to which he referred—support for marriage in the tax system—was in the coalition agreement and the Conservative party manifesto on which we were both elected. Surely, this week of all weeks, it is time to look at the holistic context, support marriage and the family, review the policy, and bring forward proposals to support marriage and the family in our country?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that that was in the manifesto, and it is indeed in the coalition agreement. The coalition agreement, where the two parties take a different view, makes allowance for that, and I remain a strong supporter of that proposal.
Oral Answers to Questions
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Streeter
The Electoral Commission is not responsible for the comments of any politician in this country, I am delighted to say. The report on electoral fraud showed that there were 232 cases of alleged electoral malpractice in 2010, 137 of which required no further action. Sixty-eight cases remain under investigation; in 23 cases police advice was given; two cases resulted in a caution; and court proceedings were brought in two cases, resulting in one conviction.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
The House will know that, regrettably, six individuals have been found guilty of election malpractice arising from personation and postal vote fraud in Peterborough in the past four years. What specific strategies are the Electoral Commission pursuing to concentrate on postal vote fraud?
Mr Streeter
The Electoral Commission has made recommendations to the Government about tightening up voter identification, and the Government are considering that report. Naturally, the Electoral Commission takes all allegations of fraud seriously, but it is a matter for the police to investigate each and every incident.
Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Harper
No, I think that the decision should ultimately be made by the elected House, which is why I will ask hon. Members on both sides of the House to disagree with the Lords amendment. I hope, following the logic of my hon. Friend’s argument, that he will support the Government in the Lobby.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
Does the Minister acknowledge, as we are facing a considerable and potentially irreversible constitutional change, that a precedent has been set by the Scotland Act 1978, which made provision for a turnout threshold? That was among the reasons why the then Labour Government subsequently foundered, following the withdrawal of support by the Scottish National party. So a precedent has already been set for a turnout threshold.
Legislation (Territorial Extent) Bill
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Sir Malcolm Rifkind
Such proposals are under deliberation and likely to go forward. That could mean a reduction in the block grant to Scotland, if it were to raise a proportionate sum through its own decisions. This is an evolving situation, a dynamic constitutional process. I cannot predict, any more than anyone else, where that process might lead, but for the foreseeable future the UK Government will retain responsibility for virtually all tax responsibilities, as well as for the social security budget, all foreign affairs, all defence policy, all European Union issues, all trade policy, all electoral matters such as those we discussed yesterday, and a whole host of other issues. So we must not imply that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Members have a diminished interest in the affairs of this Parliament.
It is sometimes suggested that it is quite improper, in this post-devolution situation, for a Member from Scotland, Wales or wherever to be appointed as a Minister in a Department whose responsibilities cover only England. Criticisms were made of John Reid when he became Health Secretary in the previous Government because he represented a Scottish constituency. We should not think of that as a constitutional issue, but it might be politically stupid to make such an appointment because of the controversy that it will give rise to, enabling criticism to be made. There is no lack of precedent for such decisions being made in other contexts, however. During the Conservative Governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, every Secretary of State for Wales represented an English constituency. There has never been a Northern Ireland Secretary who comes from Northern Ireland, for obvious reasons with which we are all familiar. Let us not suggest that that is a constitutional problem. It is a political problem, and Prime Ministers have to decide whether it is sensible to appoint Ministers from constituencies that are not affected by the decisions of the Department of which they will be in charge. It is against that background that we are considering the question of voting in this Parliament.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
Does my right hon. and learned Friend agree that we have institutionalised a sense of resentment and unfairness by not giving greater fiscal autonomy and tax-raising powers to the devolved Governments? That sense of unfairness does not exist in other devolved systems, such as the federal system in the United States, in which each state can raise its own taxes, and there is no feeling of resentment towards the central Government.
Sir Malcolm Rifkind
I return to my point that this should be seen as an evolving situation. We speak of devolution to the three other parts of the United Kingdom, but the devolution is different in each case. We have a power-sharing institutionalised system in Northern Ireland, which does not exist anywhere else. We have a Scottish Parliament that is an Executive with full legislative powers over devolved matters. Wales does not have a Parliament; it has an Assembly that does not yet have legislative powers. In each case, the arrangements will change, but they will change in response to experience and to what are perceived to be the political wishes of the people in the territories concerned. That is the history of the United Kingdom. We are blessed with an unwritten constitution that we can evolve and adapt over the generations in a way that goes no further than necessary but that responds to the aspirations of the peoples in the various parts of the kingdom in a sensible and coherent way.
I shall turn now to the consequences of those arrangements for voting in this Parliament. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire so eloquently said, a range of options has been proposed to deal with what has become known as the West Lothian question. Some of them are completely understandable, including the proposal that, if there is a Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish Parliament, there should be an English one. That sounds completely logical, but I was once warned that logic was the art of going wrong with confidence. It is, in fact, absurd to contemplate the co-existence of an English Parliament with this Palace of Westminster, for several reasons.
First of all, to state an emotional and political fact—I say this with some caution—the vast majority of people in England think that there is already an English Parliament and that it is called the House of Commons, largely because of the history of this place and its origins many centuries ago. When such an option is occasionally raised, we are not talking only about two Parliaments. In practice, there would have to be two Governments; there would have to be an English Government just as there is a Scottish Government. The idea that that is a sensible way of dealing with these matters is foolish. It would be a sledgehammer to crack an important but nevertheless modest nut—foolish, as I say.
The second option—one of the bad options—was attractive to many of my hon. Friends during the previous Parliament. It is the idea that Scottish Members—and, one assumes, Welsh and Northern Ireland Members either now or in due course—would be vetoed or prevented from voting on issues that applied only to England. I have always thought that that is a very dangerous and unwise approach. It would manifestly create two classes of Member of Parliament for the very first time since the Act of Union in 1707, and therefore I can only describe it as a nationalist solution to a Unionist problem. I have no doubt that it would be welcomed by the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales, because it would provide a constant opportunity for them to emphasise the increasing irrelevance of the Union, as they would see it, and to go much further than the vast majority of people throughout the United Kingdom would currently want. It is not sensible to contemplate having two classes of Member, although not because it could not work. Here I disagree with the hon. Member for Rhondda: it is not a matter of the technical problems, although I can come on to those in moment if he wants me to; rather, I believe that it would be hugely dangerous and, in any event, it is unnecessary.
If those options are unattractive, is there an alternative route to resolve these matters and to deal with the issue of fairness? We do not need a solution that is absolutely perfect in every constitutional respect that fits seamlessly into some web of other issues; we need something that resolves the problem and removes a sense of unfairness.
At one stage, I argued for having an English Grand Committee, to which English-only Bills would be sent. It could be a Committee of all English Members sitting in this Chamber, but only those on such a Committee would be able to vote, just as members of Select Committees are the only people able to vote on them. That would not, in itself, be constitutionally improper. I acknowledge, however, that that would be quite a complicated innovation, which would take a complex series of thoughts to resolve and could take years in practice to implement.
In any event, there is a much simpler alternative—one that has not thus far been mentioned—and I shall put it forward. I would strongly argue that the most simple and straightforward solution relates to when a Bill is certified by the Speaker, as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire indicates, as applying only to England. Doing that, incidentally, is not difficult. Many Bills currently affect England and Scotland or England, Scotland and Wales, because there is no reason at the moment for the draftsmen not to draft them in that way, if it suits their drafting objectives. If the rules change and the draftsmen are required to restrict any Bill to that part of the kingdom to which it overwhelmingly applies, they can draft accordingly if instructed to do so.
Where a Bill applies only to England, the right way to resolve matters would be to say that before it can be approved on Second and Third Reading, it must achieve not only the majority of votes of the whole House but, subsumed within that, a majority of Members representing English constituencies. In other words, a double majority is required: a majority of the House as a whole and a majority of those representing English constituencies. If it does not meet that target, it cannot be deemed to have been approved on Second Reading. The attraction is that no hon. Member is prevented from speaking in the debate or from voting in the Division Lobby for or against the measure, but the question of whether an England-only Bill goes forward and is given a Second Reading will have been determined by the House to be dependent on a majority of Members from English constituencies voting for it.
Chris Bryant
Was it Socrates—I cannot remember—who said that a small book was always a bad book? Sometimes a simple and innocuous-looking piece of legislation can do the most pernicious damage. I will come on to whether I think it is innocuous later.
It is always great to hear the right hon. and learned—and gallant, and doubtless many other things besides—[Laughter.] Other words, which he might not like so much, are coming to mind now. It is always difficult not to think of the right hon. and learned Member for East Lothian—sorry, for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind)—as a Scottish MP, and I suppose that in many regards he still is, but he is a Scottish MP for an English seat. Several hon. Members think that I am an English Member for a Welsh seat, but I am thoroughly Welsh, and Jeremy Paxman had to apologise when he maintained, in his latest book, that I was not.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman is right to maintain that Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish Members of Parliament have no diminished role just because of devolution. In many debates, they bring a specific interest and point of view that adds to the whole equation. The hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), who has departed the scene, said that Wales and Scotland MPs must, by definition, have less casework, which is certainly not my experience. If anything, many constituents, in the process of trying to achieve redress for their individual concern, try to play the Assembly Member off against the Member of Parliament. As the Welsh Assembly also has regional Members, my experience is that those from other political parties who failed to be elected in constituencies end up trying to play a semi-constituency role. Often, that leads to a considerable enhancement of the amount of work done. I make no complaint about that, but I think that those who assume, from their English seat, that a Welsh Assembly and a Scottish Parliament result in Welsh and Scottish MPs having less casework, are wrong.
There are many different kinds of casework. There is casework such as a miners compensation scheme, with which thousands of people want help going through the legal process. Then there is casework such as, “I think it’s an absolute outrage that you ever thought of voting for this piece of legislation.” I get very little of the latter and a lot of the former. In different constituencies around the land, some Members have a lot of immigration cases. I have had only about three immigration cases during my time as a Member of Parliament. Casework varies between constituencies, and it is not appropriate to legislate directly in relation to that.
Mr Stewart Jackson
Is the hon. Gentleman seriously suggesting that, with constituencies in Scotland and Wales having significantly smaller electorates than those in England, list system Members, devolved Parliament Members and MPs, such MPs have the same work loads as English constituency Members? If so, does he have any academic evidence to support that, because I am quite sceptical?
Chris Bryant
I think “Sceptical” might be the hon. Gentleman’s middle name. I see he is smiling—I have managed to get a smile out of him; that must be a first. He is now trying not to smile. Now he is laughing.
The only point I would make to the hon. Gentleman is that there is no academic evidence, and probably never will be. All that we have is anecdotal evidence. I merely offer my own evidence—I have not seen my work load diminish compared with that of my predecessor, who did not have a Welsh Assembly to contend with. The hon. Gentleman is right that a constituency with a smaller number of people might mean that the Member concerned has fewer people contacting them, but it might also mean that access to the Member for constituents is more difficult and that it involves considerable travelling around the constituency. Anyway, that is a matter for a different debate.
The right hon. and learned Member for Kensington referred to the issue of whether there should be an English Parliament. He is right to argue that there is a danger that we would end up with two Governments. Who would take possession of Downing street? Presumably, we would have a set of English Ministers, in addition to British Ministers, and so on. I am not sure that is the direction in which British voters want to go. The hon. Member for West Worcestershire referred to the fact that on the one occasion when we had a referendum on whether there should be devolved responsibilities within the English regions, people decided, largely because they did not want more politicians, not to go down that route.
In parenthesis, let me say briefly that I hear regularly, not from the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington but from others, that this is the mother of Parliaments. I again say that John Bright meant that England was the mother of Parliaments and that it was a very difficult and complicated birth. The effortless English superiority that sometimes arises in these debates is unfortunate.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman referred to Wales, and I was reminded of a story, which may not be apocryphal, of Charlotte Church singing before George W. Bush when he was President—a meeting of two great minds, obviously.
When Charlotte Church was introduced to the President, he asked, “Where are you from?” She said, “Wales.” He asked, “What state is that in?” , and she said “Terrible.” Discussions about issues such as this are not always informed by great intelligence.
The right hon. and learned Gentleman mentioned the possibility of an English Grand Committee. It has been suggested in the past that such a Committee should sit in the Chamber, because it would obviously have a significant number of members. During the last Parliament we discussed the possibility of regional Grand Committees and arguments were presented both for and against the idea, but it has fallen by the wayside.
I am not convinced by the right hon. and learned Gentleman’s argument in favour of a requirement for a double majority. Neither House has ever operated a system of secondary mandates.
Prisoners (Voting Rights)
Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Hollobone
My hon. Friend makes a telling intervention, and he has done the country a national service by winning his seat in the general election. He ably represents his constituents on these and other matters. He is right. The manifesto on which he and I stood clearly states:
“we will replace the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights.”
I am sure that my hon. Friend was asked about human rights issues during the general election campaign—I certainly was in Kettering. Whenever such issues were raised, constituents were adamant that it was time for us to take sensible action on the Human Rights Act, which the previous Government introduced. The coalition agreement has kicked the replacement of the Human Rights Act by a Bill Of Rights into the long grass; it may happen, but there is no timetable, which is a great shame. Nevertheless, there is huge public demand for us to take action on these human rights issues. We would be doing our constituents a disservice if we did not raise their concerns in this place. My hon. Friend’s majority in Hendon, my majority in Kettering and the majorities of many of our hon. Friends in Westminster Hall this morning demonstrate that human rights are an important issue for our constituents.
Mr John Hirst, who is serving a life sentence for an axe killing, brought his case and subsequent appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. He celebrated with glee on the television when the appeal judgment was announced—how wonderful it was that the European Court was going to force Britain to give prisoners the right to vote. Many of our constituents will have seen that and have been disgusted by Mr Hirst’s joyous celebration of the Court’s decision.
The Court decision is interesting in several respects, because its main gripe is that there is a blanket ban on prisoners being given the right to vote. There are ways to tackle that issue, other than just caving in and getting rid of the blanket ban. It may interest hon. Members to know that 13 other countries that are signatories to the European convention on human rights also have blanket bans. Why is this country being singled out for the treatment it is getting from the European Court, when blanket bans continue in other countries, such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Moldova and Slovakia, among others? Our constituents will be outraged that the UK is being singled out for special treatment.
One of the issues that the European Court raised was that there has not been proper parliamentary debate about the issue. The judgment states that
“there was no evidence that Parliament had ever sought to weigh the competing interests or to assess the proportionality of a blanket ban on the right of a convicted prisoner to vote. It could not be said that there was any substantive debate by members of the legislature on the continued justification…for maintaining such a general restriction on the right of prisoners to vote.”
I am sorry, but those matters were discussed in this Parliament in 1870, 80 years before the European Court was even established. The judgment goes on to say that perhaps courts could be given the discretion to award disfranchisement to convicted prisoners on an individual basis. It says:
“It was also evident that the nature of the restrictions, if any, to be imposed on the right of a convicted prisoner to vote was in general seen as a matter for Parliament and not for the national courts. The domestic courts did not therefore undertake any assessment of the proportionality of the measure itself.”
It also states that
“in sentencing, the criminal courts in England and Wales made no reference to disenfranchisement and it was not apparent that there was any direct link between the facts of any individual case and the removal of the right to vote.”
There is therefore a way to address the Court’s concerns by making sure that judges can award disfranchisement specifically in individual cases and encouraging them to do so.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. For the avoidance of doubt, if the Government do not change their policy enunciated in the statement of 20 December, I shall not vote with them, but in the Opposition Lobby. My hon. Friend touches on some interesting points. Is not it true that the recent case of Greens and M.T. v. the United Kingdom specifically allows the Government to proceed with a range of policy options, which, like the consultation in 2009, could be put out for public discussion? Instead the Government have gone for an arbitrary four-year limit, without any further debate or discussion in the House or with the public.
Mr Hollobone
My hon. Friend makes an interesting and brave point, and I commend his courage on the issue. He will be joined in the Lobby by many of our colleagues. The Government should be left in no doubt this morning that they have made the wrong decision on the issue and that they will not get the proposals through Parliament.
My hon. Friend is right: the Government can tackle the issue in far more imaginative ways. It was wrong for my hon. Friend the Minister to say in his statement of 20 December, which was sneaked out just before the Christmas recess, that
“we should implement the Hirst judgment in a way that meets our legal obligations, but does not go further than that.”—[Official Report, 20 December 2010; Vol. 520, c. 151WS.]
The Government have gone further than that by saying that the limit should apply to those sentenced to four years or less in prison, because there are many countries that are signatories to the European convention that apply the ban to prisoners serving far less time in prison. For example, Austria, Malta and San Marino ban all prisoners serving a sentence of more than one year. In France only prisoners convicted of certain crimes lose their right to vote.
I should therefore like to know why the Government have settled on the apparently arbitrary figure of four years. They say that it is the difference between serious and non-serious offences, but frankly I do not accept that definition. There are other ways to cut the cake. For example, the ban could be applied to those who have their sentence issued by the Crown court, rather than the magistrates court.
Kate Green
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for raising that issue, which I want to explore in my remarks. The hon. Member for Kettering was right to say that there is more than one way to skin a cat. I am not suggesting that a blanket rule that applies before or after a four-year custodial sentence is the most appropriate way to go, but it is a step in the right direction and one on which I would like to see us build.
I would like to say a little more about how we might see restoration of the right to vote as a positive by enabling prisoners to fulfil their responsibilities as citizens, and how that might in a small way—I see scepticism on faces opposite me—contribute to reducing reoffending, which is surely the prime purpose of the criminal justice system. If we fail to give prisoners any stake in our society, it is difficult to see why they should wish to reintegrate into that society—why they should feel any sense of obligation to mutual rights, dignity and respect when we do not afford that to them. I see an opportunity alongside this new legislation to improve education and rehabilitation in our prisons.
When I raised the matter with the Secretary of State at Justice Question Time before Christmas, he expressed scepticism as to whether prisoners would take advantage of the right to vote. However, before last year’s general election the Prison Reform Trust participated in a debate with prisoners in a local prison. It reported that prisoners were intensely engaged in debating the political matters of the day: not just criminal justice but a wide range of issues that would affect them, their families, communities and society as a whole—a society, of which, like it or not, they remain a part.
Prisoners are rightly recognised as being among the most disadvantaged in terms of social inclusion prior to receiving custodial sentence. We should be looking to take steps to improve their social inclusion. What happens to them while they are in prison undoubtedly has a role to play.
Kate Green
No; I am just coming to my conclusion.
I conclude with two questions which I hope the Minister will address. First, what plans does he have for a programme of prisoner education and engagement that takes advantage of the reintroduction of the right to vote, within the context of prison education—educating prisoners in their civic responsibilities—and how that will support their planned reintegration into the community? Secondly, I would like to follow the points raised by the hon. Member for Kettering in questioning the rationale for introducing a cut-off point at four years. That seems to suggest degrees of citizenship: one is more or less of a citizen, depending on the nature of one’s sentence. I would be interested to hear the hon. Gentleman’s view on whether discretion for judges might be applied more realistically if a blanket right to vote were put in place that gave judges the opportunity in certain cases to say that such a right was not appropriate and should be removed.
I am pleased that, after many years, we are seeing some modest steps to reintroduce a right to vote for prisoners. I support the direction of travel the Government are taking. As other Members have said, I very much hope we will move to an informed and rational debate about the effect of the measures now being brought forward.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing this extremely important debate. I am pleased to have this opportunity to speak because I believe that it is fundamentally wrong for prisoners to be able to vote. If someone has decided to step outside the law to the point where they have to be incarcerated, they should have no say on how the law is made. Part of the deprivation of liberty that comes with imprisonment is a loss of entitlements, and that should include the right to vote.
My hon. Friend quoted the Prime Minister as saying that even contemplating giving the vote to those incarcerated as convicted prisoners makes him feel physically ill, and he said that in response to a question that I asked him. It is nauseating to think of some of the worst offenders having a say over how this place, or any town hall or parish council, is run. What aggravates us is that this issue was ignored by the previous Government and kicked into the long grass. It is yet another mess that we have inherited and have been left to deal with.
Mr Stewart Jackson
Mindful of the comments of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), is it not hypocritical of the Labour party to take a similar view, given that in 13 years, it made very little impact on rehabilitation in the penal estate in terms of putting prisoners to work and improving literacy and numeracy? To now say that preventing prisoners from having the vote is somehow attacking their human and civil rights is hypocritical and gets the priorities completely wrong.
Gareth Johnson
My hon. Friend makes an important point. During the 13 years of the previous Government, I worked in the criminal justice system and I saw their lamentable record. We are still waiting to hear what the Opposition would do about the issue of prisoner votes. We have heard the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston give her opinion, but we have yet to hear the official position of Her Majesty’s Opposition. We also want to know why nothing was implemented in the last four or five years since this particular judgment was passed by the European Court of Human Rights.
We all want to see prisoners obey the law. That is why they have been put into prison in the first place. We all have to obey the law. The United Kingdom is a member of the European Court of Human Rights and is, therefore, subject to its decisions. As members, we cannot pick and choose the decisions we want to comply with. We have two options: either we accept this judgment, hook, line and sinker, or we pull out of the European Court of Human Rights. Perhaps we need to review our membership, because it should be for Britain and not the European Court to decide whether or not British prisoners vote.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Benton. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) on securing the debate, particularly on getting it as a kind of reserve option, and thank him for his generous remarks at the beginning of his contribution. As ever, of course, he and I will not fall out, even if we end up disagreeing. I would like to take the opportunity, as everyone else has, to wish all hon. Members a happy new year, although that does seem rather a long time ago.
I shall set out what the Government have announced and then try to deal with as many of the questions as I can. I will respond to questions which I believe are of interest to as many people as possible, and write to hon. Members about those that remain which I can not answer at this point. I will place a copy of the letter in the Library so that Members can see the Government’s responses.
It is worth starting with a bit of background because hon. Members have mentioned it—I will get through this quickly. We have already mentioned that some prisoners—those on remand, for example—have been able to vote for some time. The bar on prisoners who are serving a sentence dates back to 1870, and successive Governments have maintained the position that those who have broken their contract with society by committing an offence and are imprisoned should lose their right to vote.
My hon. Friend the Member for Kettering opened the debate in a perfectly helpful way by quoting my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who made it clear that he does not want to make this change. To be frank, it is not something that I want to do, and I believe that many Government Members would rather not do it, but we do not have a choice. We have a legal obligation. To answer my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), the proposals are not a sop to anyone. The European Court of Human Rights made a ruling in the Hirst case, and we are legally obliged to comply with it.
It is worth reminding ourselves what the Court actually said in the Hirst case. It said that the existing bar on convicted prisoners—the blanket ban—was contrary to article 3 of Protocol No. 1 of the European convention on human rights. I believe that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Mr Offord) referred to Mr Hirst. Although the ruling was given in his case, under the proposals that we will put before the House, he would not have been entitled to vote when he was in prison because he committed a serious crime and was sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment.
We in this country seem blessed—that is not really the right word. The most odious criminals appear to be the ones who run off to the European Court of Human Rights. Another odious criminal who took the Government to court—the judgment was announced before Christmas—also had been convicted of serious crimes.
The Government are following three principles in their approach. The first goes to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis). We have to meet our legal obligations, but we want to go no further than that. Secondly, we want to ensure that the most serious offenders are not given the right to vote. That is why we did not say that there would be no line, that the limit would be entirely up to judges. We want to ensure that there is a line, so that anyone above that length of sentence would not be able to vote. We recognise that the most serious offenders should not be able to vote.
Mr Harper
Let me make a little more progress. I am conscious that Members have raised many questions, and I want to try to deal with some of them rather than stack up new ones.
The third principle is to prevent the taxpayer from having to pay successful claims for compensation. One of the problems we have is that even if the compensation in an individual case is not significant, we in this country are blessed—again, that is probably not the right word—with lawyers who are assiduous, if there is money on the table, in running around and getting lots of people to sign up for cases under no win, no fee rules. Various Members have mentioned that there are already 2,500 cases pending. One can be certain that if there were a successful case for compensation, lawyers would quickly go around prisons to sign up prisoners for legal actions on the basis that there might be £1,000 compensation on the table. The Government would be faced with thousands and thousands of cases. We estimate that compensation in an individual case might be around £750 to £1,000, but multiply that by the thousands and thousands of prisoners who would bring cases if there were money on the table, and we would be looking at significant sums for the taxpayer. The one thing that would be worse than making these changes in the law would be giving hard-earned taxpayers’ money to some of those criminals. I shall take my hon. Friend’s question.
Mr Jackson
I thank the Minister for that explanation, but his argument would carry much more weight if Frodl v. Austria had been the last substantive case in the European Court of Human Rights on this issue. The ruling was very prescriptive and said, in effect, that the majority of prisoners had to have the vote. However, it was not the last case. As I made clear earlier, the last case was Greens and M.T. v. the United Kingdom, and paragraphs 112 to 114 of its ruling specifically made it clear that the Government had a range of options on which they could consult. It is not a question of the Government having to comply with the arbitrary limit of four years; that simply is not true.
Mr Harper
My hon. Friend makes a helpful point by referring to the Greens and M.T. judgment. This comes down to what several Members have said about whether we have the option of doing what the previous Government did, which was nothing. I am afraid that we do not. In that judgment, the Court gave the UK Government six months from the date that the judgment becomes final to introduce proposals. I can say to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) that there are various ways of dealing with it, but the Government will introduce primary legislation in the House. That should deal with questions raised by several Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), who is a member of the Backbench Business Committee. Proposals for primary legislation will be put before the House, and Members will have an opportunity to debate them fully. We will not try to think of a different way to implement the judgment, but we want to ensure that we have a debate in the House.