Voter Identification (Amendment of List of Specified Documents) Regulations 2024

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I follow my noble friend in welcoming the proposals that the Minister outlined in his opening comments. I have two or three points to raise. The first is that, when this SI was discussed in the Commons, the Minister identified that research was being undertaken by IFF Research on voter ID. Could this Minister clarify the terms identified for this work and why it is necessary, given that the Electoral Commission has in fact already undertaken its report, to which the Minister referred? It does not seem necessary to have two organisations doing the same thing.

In passing, I add my welcome to the Minister’s comments on Zimbabwe. As a former resident of that country, I am conscious that there are some 200,000 people of Zimbabwean nationality in this country; it would be helpful to that community.

I am concerned by a phraseology that the Minister used—that there might be further changes to ID that are not done as a group. If we are to make further changes to requirements for the opportunity to use certain forms of ID at polling stations, they must be introduced en bloc. We do not want a series of changes, one after another, and to have to sit in this Committee to consider them individually. It makes much more sense, whether they are because of the Electoral Commission’s work, IFF Research’s work or a combination, to bring them together as a single block. That reduces the workload on the Minister for a start, let alone for anybody else.

Although this is not quite within the field of the SI, it follows on from my noble friend Lord Mott’s question on the local elections taking place next May. Is the Minister in any position to indicate whether, in fact, those elections will be as those currently scheduled or are there likely to be any changes?

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, accepting the use of the veteran card as ID for voting is a welcome improvement, but to a very poor, expensive and quite unnecessary scheme. When the previous Government introduced the requirements for photo ID at polling stations their impact assessment said that it could cost £180 million over a decade, so I hope that the new Government have other spending priorities and recognise that scrapping or changing this scheme will not endanger the fundamental security of the ballot process.

As many Members on the Government’s side said in the debate in the House of Commons, this can be only the first of many steps in helping to make sure that everyone legally entitled to vote is able to. Issues with voter ID may not affect large numbers of voters, but many elections are determined by small margins. Etched in my own memory is being the election agent for a parliamentary by-election in which just 100 votes, or 0.1% of the vote share, separated my candidate from the successful Conservative candidate—now the noble Lord, Lord McLoughlin. In the recent general election, seven seats were determined by margins between 15 and 98 votes. Many council elections are also determined by very small margins—sometimes there are even ties—so changes in the election rules really matter.

We are advised by the Electoral Commission that, on 4 July, slightly less than 0.1% of people were turned away from polling stations, never to return, because of the photo ID requirements, but that could have been the margin of victory in several seats. With the lowest turnout in a general election for 23 years, it is probably more significant that 4% of the non-voters said that their decision not to vote was related to the voter ID requirement. That is perhaps 800,000 people or 2% of the electorate.

There is no need today to repeat arguments about the motivation for introducing the photo ID rules and the complete lack of evidence ever presented to justify them. However, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons at the time, made it clear what the intention was. Moving forward, the Electoral Commission has suggested that we would need a much wider review of what may be acceptable if we have any form of voter ID at polling stations—more than we are considering today. It suggests, for example, that the Jobcentre Plus travel discount card and the 18-plus student Oyster photocard should be acceptable in addition to the veteran card.

Let us look back to the commission’s consistent advice of some years ago and to the last Conservative Government’s report, conducted for them by the former chair of the Conservative Party, the noble Lord, Lord Pickles. There was no suggestion from either of a photo being required on any form of ID at polling stations. In debates during the passage of the Elections Act 2022, Ministers suggested that the process for obtaining a ballot paper should be akin to that for obtaining a parcel at a post office, but they could never explain to me why the Post Office’s ID requirements —including a bank card or a credit card—could not be acceptable at a polling station.

In the review of these regulations that the Government are now undertaking, will the Minister undertake to look at the costs of the photo ID scheme, admitted by the previous Government to be more than £100 million during those debates? Ideally, he would consider scrapping it while taking steps to ensure that voters know that their vote cannot be stolen. Even Ministers in the previous Government did not seem to know that, if you go to a polling station and someone appears to have already used your name and address to get a ballot paper, you can have a replacement issued. The fact is that hardly ever happens. In the 2019 general election, it happened in just 0.00004% of cases—an average of two cases per constituency. This was mostly down to clerical error and crossing off the wrong name rather than fraud, thereby showing that the expensive scheme is quite unnecessary.

Will the Minister undertake to review in particular the costs and the value of voter authority certificates, which can be issued on request by local authorities as a form of ID? The take-up of these certificates was minimal in the general election, with many people, particularly young people, remaining unaware of them, but the costs and time involved for election officials must have been considerable.

If the Government conclude that there must still be a form of voter ID at polling stations, can the Minister confirm that the review will look at alternatives to the current scheme using the official polling card issued to every voter by electoral registration officers? When I moved an amendment to the then Elections Bill in 2022 proposing just this, I was pleased to have the support of every Labour Peer present for the vote, with none of them voting against. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, who led for the Opposition at the time, said

“we believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said in introducing his amendment, that the Government have simply got it wrong on requiring voter ID to be presented at polling stations”.—[Official Report, 27/4/22; col. 337.]

She and her colleagues then voted for my amendment, calling for the official polling card to be acceptable as ID—as did the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, and the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lord Khan of Burnley. I am pleased to see the latter as the Minister today; I look forward to his response as to whether he and his colleagues, now in government, remain supportive of this cost-saving and effective measure if any form of ID requirement is to be maintained.