Representation of the People (Electoral Registration Data Schemes) Regulations 2011

Lord Kennedy of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord McNally)]

My Lords, the order and regulations will together provide the legal basis for the electoral registration data-matching trial that my honourable friend the Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform announced in another place on 15 September 2010. These instruments will enable the sharing and matching of specified data between local authority electoral registration officers and public authorities that also hold certain kinds of specified data.

It might assist the Committee if, before going into greater depth about what the instruments will do, I were to supply some context and background to the order and regulations. The view that there is a need for change in our arrangements for electoral registration is, I know, widely shared. It is important that the register is as accurate and as complete as possible. We need to make sure that the system is not vulnerable to fraud, while ensuring at the same time that people are not prevented from registering to vote because the system is too difficult to use or because they are not aware of their rights.

In 2014, the Government plan to introduce individual electoral registration in place of the outdated system of household registration. Alongside that, however, we believe that there are other tools that we may be able to use to tackle under-registration and to ensure that people have every opportunity to register. Data matching is one of them.

Data matching involves comparing the electoral register against other public databases in order to identify people who are currently missing from the register. They can then be contacted by electoral registration officials and offered the opportunity to register if they are eligible to vote. We envisage that through data matching we will also be able to take steps to identify and remove any individuals who are on the register but are not entitled to be.

We believe that data matching has the potential to reduce the incidence of under-registration among specific groups in our society, but we do not yet know enough. We also believe that data matching has the potential to tackle inaccuracy in our electoral registers, but, again, we do not yet know enough. We need to test the effectiveness of data matching in this context and see what kinds of data are most useful in improving the accuracy and completeness of the register. We therefore plan to trial data matching over the next few months in a range of electoral registration areas in England, Wales and Scotland. The instruments before the Committee today will enable that to happen. The results of the trial will be evaluated with the assistance of the Electoral Commission and will help the Government to decide whether to seek to legislate to extend data matching permanently across all local authorities.

The order will enable specified data-holding public authorities, including the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department for Education, to provide electoral registration officers with the data necessary for their planned data-matching schemes. The 22 local authorities planning to take part in the trial are listed in the schedule to the order and we are grateful to them and to the data-holding authorities that will be participating for the work that they are doing.

Members of the Committee may have noticed that there are in fact 23 local authorities in the schedule. This is because Cardiff has unfortunately had to withdraw since the order was laid. I am, however, very happy to confirm that Peterborough, which withdrew prior to the order being debated in another place, has since been able to resolve its problems and will after all be taking part. Cardiff’s withdrawal does not affect the validity of the order, because being included in the schedule does not compel an area to take part. Nor will it affect the validity of the eventual results of the pilot schemes. Even if another one or two of the pilot schemes were to run into unforeseen practical difficulties of the kind recently encountered by Peterborough and Cardiff, there will still be enough of them for the results to be useful.

The order stipulates that before any data can be transferred a written agreement must be in place between the electoral registration officer and the data-holding authority, setting out the requirements as to the processing, transfer, storage, destruction and security of the data concerned. It also sets 1 March 2012 as the date by which each of the schemes must have been evaluated.

For the information of the Committee, let me say that 1 March 2012—not the end of December 2011, as mentioned in the draft agreement attached to the Explanatory Memorandum—will now be the date by which all data created for the purposes of the pilot schemes must be destroyed, except of course where data have been added to the electoral register in the mean time. Since that version of the draft agreement was prepared, the Electoral Commission has told us that it would assist its evaluation of the pilot schemes if the data were still to be available, should the commission need to see it. We agree with the commission, so the final version of the agreement will reflect this change of date.

The regulations complement the order by enabling registration officers to supply a copy of their full register, or an extract from it, to another person for it to be compared with the information that is to be provided under a data-matching scheme. The regulations also provide that a person to whom the copy of the register is passed may not do anything with it for any other purpose or without the registration officer’s consent. This means that registration officers will not be given data relating to everyone in their area. They will receive only targeted information about particular individuals, thus ensuring that unnecessary personal data are not transferred to registration officers and that the data that they receive are provided to them for a reason.

Data-matching schemes may lead to greater accuracy and improved levels of registration in some electoral registration areas and among some groups within the next few months. If so, the schemes may be the key to greater accuracy and improved levels of registration on a much larger scale within the next few years. However, we need to know for certain and we need to be able to produce the evidence. That is why it is so important to put these trials in hand. The order and regulations will enable us to do that and I commend them to the Committee.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I declare that I am an electoral commissioner, having joined the commission on 1 October last year. I fully support the thrust of the commission’s views on these important statutory instruments.

I am sure that all noble Lords want completeness and accuracy of electoral registers. We want confidence in our democracy and our electoral system. We want confidence that you will be able to vote if you want to and if you are eligible. We want confidence in those who have been elected to serve at all levels of government.

It is important that clear and reliable evidence on data matching is produced and that the evidence is robustly assessed. It is particularly important that this assessment is done carefully and represents fully what can be achieved, not least because data matching is envisaged as the primary method of ensuring the continued completeness of individual registration in 2014-15. I should welcome a response from the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on that specific point and on the commission’s concern that the timing of the schemes will coincide with the annual canvass of electors. It is important that there is clarity about the design of the data-matching schemes, so that the impact and any follow-up activity can be demonstrated beyond what the annual canvass activity would normally achieve.

Can the noble Lord give any further information on the agreement to process the data? It is particularly important that personal data are handled carefully and are protected. The commission has specifically recommended that the approach to the delivery of each pilot area should also form part of any written agreement, so that the commission can fully evaluate each scheme.

Finally, the noble Lord will be aware that the commission is required to produce an evaluation report on the operation of the scheme by 1 March 2012. To achieve this, it will be important that EROs are able to provide the commission at agreed intervals during the schemes’ operation with the information needed. Clarity about the design and delivery of each scheme will ensure that the commission is able to undertake its statutory evaluation effectively and that the results can inform future policy development on electoral registration. I am of course happy for the noble Lord to write to me to clarify a number of these points.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, because I know that he shares the commitment that we have on all sides of the House to make the electoral register as comprehensive and accurate as we can.

In the debates earlier this year on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, there was a great deal of discussion about under-registration. That was not the first time that the issue was raised. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, gave a great deal of attention to this in the previous Government. I recall that on a number of occasions in Grand Committee on the Political Parties and Elections Bill we had considerable discussions about the right momentum and the right progress needed to improve the level of registration. On a number of occasions, previous Administrations—like the present Government—have looked at ways in which data matching could assist this purpose.

It is important to note that there was an improvement during the calendar year 2010; in the last few days there have been some interesting improvements, too, which I notice that colleagues on the other side of the House have also seen. The context of that was a very exciting general election at which, for the first time in some people’s political memory, it looked as though the outcome was not certain. In those circumstances, there was an increase, particularly—and this is encouraging—among the younger age group, which notoriously in the recent past has not registered. We should take encouragement from the fact that, if we can make politics more interesting and outcomes more indeterminate, we can increase registration. It is not only a mechanical operation but a political one to get as many of our fellow citizens engaged as possible.

The integrity of the register is a question of making sure that those who should be on are on and that those who should not be on, or are there in duplicate, are not on. Therefore, accuracy and integrity are the same thing.

The PPE Act, as the Bill became, set fair and square registration objectives. They are,

“to secure, so far as reasonably practicable—(a) that persons who are entitled to be registered in a register are registered in it, (b) that persons who are not entitled to be registered in a register are not registered in it, and (c) that none of the information relating to a registered person that appears in a register or other record kept by the officer is false”.

Obviously, the instruments that are before the Committee today seek to build on that responsibility, which lies not only on the Government but on all of us. I appreciate the clarity with which my noble friend introduced the instruments, which I welcome.

Those objectives are clearly uncontroversial and it is a matter of some puzzlement to our fellow citizens that sometimes the electoral register seems to be totally unrelated to the other information that has been gathered on behalf of local or central government. They find it peculiar; they think that we are all the same thing. They think that Parliament and the Government are the same thing, let alone local authorities and other parts of the state system. They think that we are all part of the same bureaucracy. For example, those who are accused of filing a housing benefit form inaccurately will often cite the presence of all members of their household on the electoral register as a necessary and understandable defence. Who can blame them? They think that that is an official document and therefore can be quoted as such.

Those kinds of situations raise the question of whether the flow of information from government departments into councils will be a two-way process. Will it work in both directions? The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—this is in the order—might give information on the DWP’s database to the electoral registration officer in Blackpool, but will the DWP then use the comparison data to identify potential fraud on its own books? I do not expect my noble friend to answer on behalf of the other department this afternoon, but I think that this is a subject where our fellow citizens would genuinely like to know whether there is an answer.