United Kingdom: Election Law

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 15th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy of Southwark, for securing this debate. He brings considerable experience to this issue from his years of working for the Labour Party and as an Electoral Commissioner.

Tonight’s short debate is very timely in different ways. As my noble friend Lord Tyler and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, said, it is of course 800 years to the day since the sealing of Magna Carta, the 14th clause of which sets out the role of the “common counsel” of the realm. Historians regard this as the initial basis for our modern Parliaments, although the emphasis then was on the role of,

“the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons”,

rather than, as it states, those,

“summoned generally, through our sheriffs and bailiffs”.

We are now in the process of reviewing what can be learned from the conduct of a parliamentary election eight centuries later.

While the text of Magna Carta can be seen on a single page, our electoral laws are now expressed in 25 Acts of Parliament, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said. I do not know how many pages in total they would cover. These laws have not been consolidated since 1983—when I was the election agent for the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, when he was elected to represent my home area of that city in the other place. Much has changed since then in the way in which elections are contested, and they are now held for many more bodies than when the Representation of the People Act 1983 had simply to cover Westminster parliamentary and local government elections. So now we wait to see how the Law Commission proposes to recommend changes, in the first major overhaul of all our election laws in the 32 years since I was a constituency agent.

The commission’s excellent consultation document of December 2014 poses a number of questions and makes clear the need to review our electoral laws, and to consolidate them. In this brief debate, I want to focus on the need to examine changes in electoral law to reduce the incidence of electoral fraud, which I believe must also be matched by efforts to improve voter registration and turnout. Measures to make it harder to commit electoral fraud should be one of the prime objectives of any review of electoral laws, even if the scale of electoral fraud under the present ones is hard to determine. I have often heard Ministers here make very complacent remarks on this subject because of the relatively low number of successful prosecutions made in relation to it. But as most crimes of any kind go unreported and undetected, this is clearly not a reliable indicator of the scale of the problem. Major problems may be confined to a few particular areas but the ease with which fraud can be committed means that we really have no idea how widespread it is.

The various judgments of Richard Mawrey QC, from different election courts, are required reading for anyone examining the need to review our electoral laws, especially his most recent, 200-page judgment in the case involving the disqualification of the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman. The court over which he presided in relation to Tower Hamlets found that,

“corrupt practices extensively prevailed at the election both of the Mayor and of the Councillors for the twenty wards of Tower Hamlets held on 22 May 2014”.

His judgment explains carefully the ease with which fraud can be committed in relation to postal votes and the difficulty of assessing the scale of it. He was satisfied that people were registered to vote who did not exist, but on whose behalf postal votes were cast. Other people, he said, had their postal votes taken away from them against their will, and their votes were actually cast by others. In his judgment, he described “bribery” by the distribution of grants and the use of “undue spiritual influence”. He referred to,

“thuggish conduct at polling stations”,

and said that the bar for legal challenge is set,

“much too high for dealing with intimidatory behaviour during the conduct of the poll”.

In presiding over other election courts, he has concluded that these sorts of problems are by no means unique to Tower Hamlets. In 2005, he barred six councillors in Birmingham from standing for election after uncovering fraud that he said would “disgrace a banana republic”. In 2008, a case in Slough involved the use of bogus postal votes and, in spite of some reforms, he observed that,

“opportunities for easy and effective electoral fraud remain”.

We may, in my view, have reached the point at which it is no longer desirable to permit postal voting on demand and without reason. With my noble friend Lord Greaves, we secured some greater measures of security for the postal voting process in the past, such as requiring a signature to accompany a postal vote that matches the signature on the application to vote by post, and requiring a reason to be provided for a postal ballot to be sent anywhere other than the address for which the voter is registered. But these measures appear to have proved inadequate. The widespread incidence of postal voting in many areas means that we have now, in my view, effectively removed much of what was achieved by the ballot Act of 1872. The postal voting process means that ballot papers are often not completed in conditions of secrecy—and probably often not by the people entitled to complete them. Their votes are therefore stolen from them. Perhaps a reason should now be given for choosing to vote by post rather than going to a polling station and voting in supervised conditions of secrecy. A reason is required for the appointment of a proxy to cast a vote on someone’s behalf, and we should now consider if this principle should be extended to postal voting.

Certainly, some greater safeguards are required to prevent the democratic process from such abuse, but the measures taken must be proportionate, and care must be taken not to reduce participation in elections unnecessarily. Changes such as these should only be considered if we also properly address other and perhaps even more significant problems with our electoral laws, in particular the way in which many people qualified to vote are not included in the electoral register, and thereby denied their chance to participate in elections. This remains the most serious issue in terms of modernising our electoral laws.

In the last Parliament, I argued successfully in favour of the principle that registering to vote should remain a requirement, with at least civil penalties to be part of the process of enforcing compliance. But I am far from convinced that every appropriate effort is being made to make people properly aware of this principle and to address the issue of under-representation.

Irrespective of possible changes to the voting franchise that I support, involving 16 and 17 year-olds, we still need to ensure the proper involvement of all schools in the registration process throughout Great Britain, in the same way as now happens in Northern Ireland. This could be part of the civic education process that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, referred to earlier. We should also look again at how students are registered and how people with two homes determine where their general election votes should most properly be cast. Above all, we need to look at how we increase participation in the democratic process.

There was an excellent article in the Guardian during the recent election campaign about the inconvenience to many schools from polling day always being on a Thursday. Thursday is generally a convenient day to vote for people not in work but it is much less convenient for many others. We therefore need to look more at polling stations perhaps being open on Saturdays and Sundays when many more people might be able to participate. All these potential changes will require careful scrutiny of the kind that was undertaken in the last Parliament in the other place by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. Therefore, further to my recent Question in the House on 4 June, can the Minister please explain to the House the Government’s justification for the abolition of this committee?