Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey]

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, that people can be on the register in a particular constituency, but that does not mean that they are not on the register in a different constituency. That is the point that I made in the student example. We found that people registered in their place of residence at home registered again when they came up to the university area. When they had to produce a national insurance number we could tell that people were registered in two different places and they got knocked off in one place but were still on the register in another. That practice is widespread and well known.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

Does the noble Lord acknowledge that the Electoral Commission report which has been cited has taken all that into consideration? It did a very good and nuanced report that looked at the risks and benefits. It concluded, as my noble friend Lord Tyler indicated, that given the five weeks’ notice and potentially the 250,000 people affected by this in Scotland alone, it was not right to bring forward the closure of the transition period. The more targeted approach that he is asking for is best conducted over the normal timeframe which the Electoral Commission and the EROs have operated under existing processes.

[Lord Empey]

First, I do not accept that the scale of the problem is as large as the noble Lord suggests. As to the five weeks, our experience is that this process has been going on for quite some time—it is not as if it has come from nowhere. We are talking about the opportunity at least to bring it to a conclusion. However, the period after 1 December is not a period in which nothing can happen. People can continue to register. I hope the Minister has listened seriously to what the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has said. It has been done before and it works if it is targeted. If we are drawing up new boundaries in parallel, the best thing to do is get on with it, draw the line, bring it to a head and provide the resources to target the groups that are traditionally underrepresented. If the effort is made we will end up with a very accurate register. However, the Government should go further. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, made a fair point when he mentioned ID. I do not understand why people should not be asked for their identity when they go to a polling station. It is a very basic thing to do. The postal voting system is mad. There is a lot of work to do and the problem with this process is that the Government are not going far enough.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me. A lot has been said this afternoon. It has been an excellent debate, and there have been very good contributions from all sides, although I profoundly disagree with some of what has been said, as I will come on to. It is always nice to be reminded by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, that I have not read my Aristotle. He firmly puts me in my place.

I shall start by taking a step back to make two fundamental points, on which I hope we can all agree. First, we all agree that we want more people to engage in the democratic process and register to vote, but those who are not on the register today will clearly not be affected by the measure we are discussing, which is the removal of ghost entries. Secondly, as my noble friend Lord Lexden said in his excellent speech, nobody will lose their right to vote as a result of the government proposals that we are debating today.

Instead, the core of what we are debating comes down to the accuracy of the new electoral register. Do we keep on the new register ghost entries—entries of people who may have moved house or died or may never have existed in the first place? Are these ghost entries living, breathing voters, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, calls them, or hundreds of thousands of database errors which need to be removed ahead of the important elections next year? As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, rightly pointed out—let us not disguise this fact—for the sake of completeness, the Electoral Commission wants to keep those entries on the register, even if this means that the accuracy of the register is undermined. It judges the risk of fraud to be acceptable, and the Government disagree.

First, we believe that after 18 months of transition and more than a decade of waiting, as we enter a year of elections and possibly a referendum on Europe—possibly—the time has come to move fully to the new system. Secondly, we see the risk of fraud as unacceptable. Thirdly, we believe that people have been given ample opportunity to register on the new system. That said, fourthly, we entirely agree with those who want more people to register to vote and participate in the elections, but we do not make the register more complete by stuffing it with inaccurate registrations.

I shall take those points in turn. As the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, we have been waiting for the full transition to individual electoral registration for more than a decade. As the current chair of the Electoral Commission said:

“This change is something we’ve been calling for since 2003 and is an important step towards a more modern and secure electoral system”.

To give the former Labour Government their due, they legislated to introduce individual electoral registration in 2009. The coalition Government further legislated in 2013 and, finally, in the summer of 2014, the new system was introduced. I remind your Lordships that at the general election, in its manifesto, the Conservative Party committed that:

“Building on our introduction of individual voter registration, we will continue to make our arrangements fair and effective by ensuring the Electoral Commission puts greater priority on tackling fraud”.

This Government believe that it is time to finish the process, and finish it now. This decision is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said, rash.

Let us consider the progress that has been made. Back in May, 96% of the electorate was successfully registered under the new system. It is the remaining 4%—the so-called “carry forwards”—that the Government believe should be removed from the register at the end of December. It is not the entire register that we are questioning, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, seems to suggest; it is the 4%. Then we have to ask ourselves: what do these entries represent; who are they; do they exist? The reality is that neither we nor the Electoral Commission know who they are. They may be people who have moved or have died, or they may never have existed in the first place. However, we have gone the extra mile to find out whether these entries actually are people living at the registered address. Electoral registration officers have been working tirelessly to confirm whether the remaining entries are real people or whether they are merely ghosts.

These people will have first been sent three invitations to register. If they had not done so by last autumn, an electoral registration officer would have visited the address linked to the entry. If this failed to elicit a response, a further letter would have gone to the address earlier this year. Where carry-forward still exists, these addresses will receive three further letters and another visit from an electoral registration officer this autumn. That is the second fact that I would ask noble Lords to remember. These people, if they are people, will have been contacted at least nine times by December. I ask noble Lords to compare that with the number of times people are contacted about renewing their TV licence—four times. These people, if these entries do indeed represent people, have been contacted nine times. On top of this, as the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, the Government made available to councils up to £3 million of additional funding to support extra efforts targeted specifically at carry-forward entries, and £1.2 million of that was drawn down.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. He has always been very courteous when we have been debating issues of the constitution. He will be aware that the Electoral Commission has taken everything that he has said into consideration, yet, as the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has said, it has still given a very clear recommendation that the transition period should not come to an end early. One reason is the significant polls scheduled for May 2016. The Minister knows that I was a Member of the Scottish Parliament. On an issue of principle such as this, it is inconceivable to me that the Government would not have consulted the Scottish Parliament in bringing forward the transitional period, given the significance of the polls in May 2016. Can he confirm formally, at the Dispatch Box, whether the Government did or did not consult the Scottish Parliament? If they did, what was the view of the Parliament?

[Lord Bridges of Headley]

My Lords, the timetable for the start of IER was agreed with the Scottish Government and allowed the referendum to take place before IER got under way. There is no legal requirement to consult on this order, and electoral registration is at present within the competence of the UK Government. I will come back in a moment to the other points raised by the noble Lord.

I refer those who argue that we should wait for another year to the Electoral Commission itself. It said that such efforts are likely to see:

“Diminishing returns because a greater proportion of these electors are no longer resident at that address”.

On the point that the current canvass will address this issue, I agree entirely. The canvass going on at the moment means that we can be even more sure that the vast majority of these entries are ghost entries.

I come to the next point. Where are these ghost entries? Six of the local authorities with levels of carry-forwards above the national average have been identified as among the authorities more at risk of electoral fraud. As my noble friend Lord Hayward said, one of these boroughs is Tower Hamlets. There, the election judge slammed the “extremely lax” registration rules of the previous system as opening the door to electoral corruption. It is worth noting that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets was awarded top marks in the Electoral Commission’s performance standards for electoral integrity.

In Hackney, which is not even one of those six authorities, there were in May 43,000 carry-forwards. That is 23% of its electorate—I repeat: 23%. It is worth noting that in Hackney the register has increased by 10% since the introduction of individual electoral registration. The Electoral Commission states that the increment in the number of entries,

“may have therefore been inflated by a high volume of inaccurate entries”.

What might be the cause of those inaccuracies?

Hackney, and many other areas where there are large numbers of ghost entries, share a common characteristic: their population is, as has been mentioned, mobile—and in mobile populations many people rent their homes. Again, the Electoral Commission itself has suggested that those who rent private sector accommodation are more likely to have been carried forward. Why is that? One in three households in the private rented sector moves every year. It is therefore hardly surprising that we see a high percentage of carry-forwards in these areas given that the entries to the register are over a year old, dating from February 2014, which was before the introduction of the new system. As my noble friend Lord Hayward pointed out, these numbers are not just in Labour areas; the last time I looked, Kensington and Chelsea, Wandsworth and Windsor were blue.