Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lexden]

My Lords, we have heard some very wise reflections from the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths. It is a privilege to follow him. This is an immensely important Bill, designed to help make democracy in Britain work considerably better than it does now, and to restore the trust in it that has become so badly impaired. The Government submitted the Bill to prolonged pre-legislative scrutiny. It has been significantly improved and strengthened as a result. There could be no better advertisement for the value of this new parliamentary procedure, and the Government deserve great credit for the open-minded way in which they have carried out consultations over the last two years. I hope that the same open-minded attitude will be displayed in Committee.

On the matter before us today, great care is singularly appropriate. Our country has never had a taste for frequent alterations of the fundamental features of its arrangements for electoral registration. Indeed, this is only the second time they have been radically changed since their first appearance in the Reform Act 1832, of which Mr Clegg is such an ardent fan. The Act created a thoroughly bad system under the supervision of incompetent officials, the overseers of the poor. Votes were awarded to the dead and to the unqualified. The 18th century practices—of which my noble friend Lord Baker reminded us with characteristic vividness—were very much alive and well throughout the 19th century. The system only worked creakingly, because the political parties exerted themselves, with the assistance of expensive lawyers, to fill the registers with as many of their firm supporters as possible. They showed no scruples. “As a class”, a parliamentary committee was told in 1835,

“attorneys obtain more fraudulent votes than any other men in the country”.

In all areas, the main function of local party organisations during the supposedly high-minded Victorian age was the manipulation of deeply flawed electoral registers. As late as 1896, the Liberal Party’s agent in Manchester reported that the registration of votes,

“involved an expenditure of about two-thirds of the entire cost”,

of his organisation.

Rectitude and competence finally arrived in 1918, when responsibility for electoral registration was placed in the hands of local government officials. From that point until this, they have sought out the names of voters by,

“house-to-house or other sufficient inquiry”,

as legislation prescribed. Now, however, the 1918 dispensation has fallen into disrepute in its turn. Our long-familiar arrangements are tainted by fraud which, though unquantifiable, has aroused widespread public concern. As my recently married noble friend Lord Bates reminded us, one highly respected international body has ticked us off for lacking “safeguards against fictitious registrations”. At the same time, an astonishing number of people who ought to be on the electoral registers are not—some 6 million to 8 million of them, according to the Electoral Commission’s latest estimate.

Across the political spectrum we all agree what should be done. Registration should cease to be undertaken on a household basis; it should become an individual responsibility, as many distinguished political thinkers have long advocated. As this debate has made abundantly clear, a consensus for change has not, however, been accompanied by a consensus on the path to change, or on the speed of change. Perhaps that was always going to be difficult to sustain. I strongly support the Government in their belief that the magnitude of the registration problem is such that we should proceed more quickly to a new system of individual registration than was proposed before the last election. That is what Part 1 of the Bill provides, and it is to Part 1 that I confine my remarks.

The Government have rightly set themselves the aims of making our country's electoral registers as accurate and as complete as possible. We must take care to ensure that this major reform is not seen as a change designed to benefit particular political parties. After the passage of this legislation, there should be careful monitoring of progress, not least in view of the widespread fear that the transition to individual registration could reduce, rather than increase, the numbers registered, as happened in Northern Ireland when individual registration was introduced there in 2002. That fear may not have been wholly assuaged by the Government's wise decision to allow those on the last register compiled under the existing system to be carried over to the first register of the new system.

In this connection I particularly welcome Clause 5, which will introduce a civil penalty for those who refuse to comply when an electoral registration officer asks them to register. As the debate has made clear, however, there are practical difficulties. This change has been included as a direct result of pre-legislative scrutiny, replacing the Government's original intention of allowing individuals to keep themselves off a register if they wish.

Democracy frequently needs the help of the law to stiffen the incentive to take the right course of action. This is a case in point. In this connection, I remind the House of one of the conclusions reached by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the Commons in its report last November on the proposed new system:

“There appears to be no reason why failure to complete and return a registration form should be a criminal offence in Northern Ireland but not in Great Britain. The Government should take steps to remedy this inconsistency”.

I also welcome the Government’s plans to ensure that a wide range of public data, at both national and local government level, are used to verify the identities of those already on the register and to help pinpoint those who should be on it but are not. As we have heard, a number of pilot schemes have been completed and more are on the way. As the Government have made clear, depending on the outcome of the latest round of pilot schemes, the process of data matching will be used by electoral registration officers throughout Great Britain to ease the transition to individual electoral registration in 2014. The Electoral Commission has said that an,

“elector whose entries match will be confirmed on the register and need take no further action”.

This is extremely important. Electoral registration officers will then be free to direct their resources and efforts towards the minority of existing registered electors who cannot be verified by data matching, and the missing 6 million.

I turn now to Northern Ireland, on which noble Lords from the Province have already commented, drawing on their own direct experience. Northern Ireland tends to be regarded solely as a cautionary tale—a warning that individual registration tends to cut the size of the electorate. However, perhaps it has not been sufficiently noticed that since 2002 several measures have been taken under primary and secondary legislation to rectify the main problems. Annual canvasses have ceased; a system of continuous registration now operates; each elector has responsibility for updating his or her entry on the register; and data matching and targeted canvassing have been introduced in the most effective manner. Since 2008, secondary schools have been among the specified authorities from which the chief electoral officer, who has responsibility for electoral registration throughout Northern Ireland, can request information for registration purposes. This has been an effective and successful innovation, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, vividly described.

There are in Northern Ireland today some 12,000 more registered electors than there were before the introduction of individual registration. The Electoral Commission announced in May that it would undertake a new assessment of the state of the electoral register in Northern Ireland, which in 2007 it had already found was 96% accurate and 84% complete, compared with 85% and 82% respectively in Britain, as shown by a survey last year. Since 2003, there have been no allegations of electoral fraud although, as my noble friends from Northern Ireland will know better than me, that does not mean that the age-old Northern Ireland customs have ceased completely. Overall, the lessons from Northern Ireland are sources not of universal anxiety but of considerable encouragement.

Electoral law in Northern Ireland remains the responsibility of this Parliament. In their White Paper on individual electoral registration last year, the Government referred in paragraph 29 to their intention to align Northern Ireland legislation on individual registration with the rest of the country. In paragraph 32 they stated that they would include appropriate provision in this Bill. That does not seem to have happened. Perhaps the Minister will be able to provide a word of explanation.

Finally, I urge strongly that the scope of the Bill be extended, as my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth argued, by adding to it provision to enable all our fellow subjects of Her Majesty who live abroad to vote in our parliamentary elections. This would end the existing 15-year limit, for which no clear rationale has ever been offered. There are some, such as Mr Clegg, who are inclined to say that our fellow country men and women abroad should take the nationality of the country in which they reside, even though I understand that Mrs Clegg, who retains Spanish nationality, has a lifetime’s right to vote in Spain’s elections. There are others who say that because they pay no taxes here they should not vote here, but many do pay taxes. In any case, other countries do not admit taxation as a principle for access to their franchises. Others say that our fellow citizens abroad cannot feel a strong attachment to the United Kingdom after some years away from it. However, in the age of the internet, they can follow closely what is happening in their native land and, as online participants, contribute powerfully to developments taking place here whether they live in Perugia, Portugal or Pennsylvania.

I set out the case for change more fully in a debate initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, in January and I propose to return to it in Committee. The Government have this great issue under active consideration, as the Minister confirmed in a Written Answer to me on 25 June. There could be no better time for action than in this Diamond Jubilee year. Some 5.6 million subjects of Her Majesty live abroad. Many of them today stand hopefully at the bar of British democracy. Let all those who wish to join us be allowed to enter.