Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, for some of his kind remarks about me. However, in many decades of organising elections, I was always sceptical about how far many candidates actually understood the details of the process. A number of those remarks have not reduced my scepticism about how far candidates have appreciated the detail of elections. I remember the period when, I think, the noble Lord was the chairman of the Conservative Party and the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, was Prime Minister. It was during that period that the fine for not complying with the registration process was increased from £50 to £400. There was great concern that people were not following their proper duty in being on the electoral register; they were possibly seen to be avoiding the poll tax—which we all remember—and therefore the fine was £400. There is sometimes a lack of consistency in the way that some Conservatives argue about the civic duty to be on the electoral register and it being a legal requirement that is, therefore, subject to a fine.

In general, at almost every point in the recent discussions on voter registration, I have asked Ministers to confirm that the aims of making changes to the process are at least as much about improving the completeness of the register as they are about improving its accuracy. However, the impact assessment of the Bill suggests that successful implementation of the move to individual electoral registration may mean only around 85% completion, which is little better than the situation is now. In other words, successful implementation may be deemed by the Government to be based on making the register more accurate but not necessarily more complete. The Government may be aiming rather modestly to do little more than halt the significant decline in registration levels that we have seen over the past 10 years. Therefore, the aims of the Bill are not very ambitious in respect of maximising registration. I should like them to be more ambitious and I believe that we need to know how successful the implementation of a new registration scheme has been before it can be declared fit for purpose for all elections and boundary reviews after 2015.

I welcome the changes to the Government’s approach that have been made since the publication of the White Paper in June last year. However, more detail on the proposed changes is still required and more could be done to improve, rather than weaken, the health of our democracy. I particularly welcome the significant change in the approach to obligations to register from that initially outlined in the draft legislation. The initial proposals would undoubtedly, whether wittingly or unwittingly, have had the effect of depriving millions more people of their right to vote. Instead of 6 million or 7 million people being missing from the register, as there are now, under the original proposal we might well have ended up with 12 million or 15 million people who are entitled to vote missing from the register, and therefore unlikely to be able to vote. With an electorate that should be around 50 million, it should be a source of great concern that so many millions of people would potentially miss out on the opportunity to vote for the lack of a proper process of voter registration, such as is the basis of all democratic systems. Therefore, everyone should welcome the Government’s recognition that there is an obligation to register to vote, and that this gives people the opportunity to take part in an election but does not require them to do so.

There is a significant problem with the existing system, caused by the inconsistency of individual electoral registration officers designing their own forms in every case. The degree of prominence given to the legal requirement has varied and the fact that you can, under the present system, be fined as much as £1,000 for not complying with the registration process is not even mentioned on many of the forms. Best practice requires making the legal requirement and the potential level of fine explicit and prominent on the household registration forms. I am very grateful to the Minister for confirming in the debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on 12 July, that in future,

“the application form that will be designed by the Electoral Commission must include a statement about the possibility of a fine and the size of that potential fine”.—[Official Report, 12/7/12; col. 1292.]

I hope that he can also assure us that regulations will ensure that the statement will be very prominent on those forms.

It will be even more important that we adopt the best possible methodology for the individual registration forms that will follow the household inquiry ones. The Bill establishes the principle of individual forms but the crucial detail about implementation will be in the secondary legislation. Therefore, in considering the principles of the Bill, I ask the Minister to confirm some of the issues of principle behind the implementation that are not featured in the Government’s implementation plan, which was published last Friday, and which I assume are still under consideration.

It seems important that the civil penalty for non-compliance with the individual registration form must not be seen as a one-off fee for exemption from inclusion in the voting register. I agree with the Minister that the level of fixed penalty should be akin to that deemed appropriate for parking offences. However, repeatedly and wilfully refusing to comply with the process should attract repeat penalties. Subsequent compliance with the registration process should then lead to the cancellation, at least, of further penalties and possibly the reduction, or even cancellation, of the original fixed penalty.

Perhaps the Minister will tell us more about exactly how this process will work, and how and when we will know how it will work. He will understand that many of us will want to understand these details properly before we approve the Bill. He should be aware that it will simply not be good enough for someone to pay a fine and then avoid registration completely until the following year. A one-off fine must not become an annual fee for avoiding registration.

We would also like to hear more detail about how we will avoid the fundamental problem that different local authorities tend to have quite different levels of diligence when it comes to the registration process. While we often argue that government processes are too centralised in this country in many respects, the basis for the electoral administration systems that underpin our democracy across the country should be the same across the country. This is necessary both to ensure a democratic outcome in the elections for those local authorities overseeing the process, and also for every set of elections based on using that electoral register.

The electoral register is also important for jury service, for credit referencing and for the purchase of goods and services, the supply of which may be linked to presence on the electoral register. It should not be up to individual local authorities or electoral registration officers to decide how assiduous to be in trying to make the register complete and accurate. The best practice of repeatedly writing to and visiting people who are known to be eligible to be on the register but who have not registered should involve explaining carefully to people four different principles.

First, they are not automatically registered. Many people believe, quite wrongly, that they are automatically put on the voting register. Secondly, there are important reasons for registering, including access to credit and to buying goods and services, often over the internet. Thirdly, it is a legal requirement, subject to fines and penalties, to comply with the process, as now. Fourthly, registration is a very simple process. Explaining these principles in writing and through doorstep canvassing must be not just the best practice but should be a universal requirement if our electoral register is to be in good order.

The Minister has accepted in other debates that the success of the data-matching pilots will be crucial to the successful implementation of individual electoral registration. There are certainly doubts about the effectiveness of the first round of data-matching pilots. I hope that the Minister will confirm that all possible national government or local authority databases will be used to identify individuals eligible to be on the register and that follow-up procedures will then try to ensure that they are registered. These should include, for example, databases such as those of the DWP, the DVLA and the Student Loans Company. Such data-mining exercises should go no further than providing names and addresses of people believed to be eligible for the electoral register. But to make a sufficient success of the changes to the system to enable the register to be fit for purpose, I believe that the Government will have to go further. They will have to show that they are really sincere about their stated aims of making the electoral register accurate and complete.

I believe that they could do so by applying the same principles of data mining that they will use for publicly held records to those held by the credit reference agencies. No more information should be obtained from these sources than names and addresses of potentially eligible voters who can then be invited to apply for the registration process. If they do not exist, or they are not eligible, there will be no further consequences. But if they do exist and they are eligible, they should be subject to the same registration processes as everyone else.

The Bill team has advised me that nothing in the Bill prevents the use of private data in this way. I believe that it could make a substantial difference to the success of implementation. But I would like to know from the Minister whether the Government are engaging with the credit reference agencies to see how, with proper safeguards, we can ensure that people entitled to be on the electoral register, but absent from it, are invited to register without compromising any private or personal information. Quickly confirming existing registration details might be more effective for this database or these databases than simply using things such as the DWP database alone. For example, queries about duplicate registration might be more quickly and easily dealt with by the returning officers with access to these data.

Much of the work to improve electoral registration should have been done decades ago. The fact that it was not done is not a reason for not doing it now. Our existing processes are now known to be rather more flawed than we thought only a few years ago. Above all, we cannot be complacent about the outcome of the process. We cannot let the Government simply say that they have done their best by the time of the next election and reluctantly accept that many fewer people will be able to vote in future.

The changes that will result from the shift to individual electoral registration may not affect any elections until after May 2015. But the local elections in England in 2016, and those to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, should all be based on the new voting system. I am not sure how far the local authorities, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly are aware of these changes or have been consulted about them.

After 2016, all elections should be based on this new system. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, said earlier, the next parliamentary boundary review, as I am sure he well remembers from very lengthy debates, will be based on the register as it is on 1 December 2015, using the new system with no carryover from the old one. The Government accept that there are risks in making changes to this process. We must therefore be satisfied that the processes have been substantially successful before we can say that it would be safe to proceed to use the new system for elections or for boundary reviews.