Political Donations: Cap
Lord Rennard Excerpts(2 weeks, 5 days ago)
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Lord Rennard
To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to cap donations to political parties.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Khan of Burnley) (Lab)
My Lords, the Government have committed to reforming political finance rules. We are considering changes that will help protect our system from foreign interference, such as tighter controls on donations. For example, the Electoral Commission has pointed to a need to consider the rules on company donations. Details of these proposals will be brought forward in due course.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, people are absolutely astonished when they discover that there is absolutely no limit whatsoever to how much money can be given by one individual to a political party. This week, Transparency International has produced analysis showing how dark money from dodgy sources can infect British politics, and Unlock Democracy has produced an excellent Democratic Integrity white paper. Will the Minister undertake to ensure that his department properly considers these reports? Is it not high time that the Government accepted the recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life that there should be a £10,000 maximum cap on the sum any individual can give to a party?
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, let me first address the noble Lord’s question about reports, in particular that of Transparency International. The Government are committed to safeguarding the integrity of our democratic processes and, as I am making clear today, we will be taking steps to strengthen protections against foreign interference in our elections. We are seeking and remain open to evidence from stakeholders, particularly on threats to our democracy. Our primary concern is reducing the threat of foreign interference.
Political parties play a vital role in our democracy, and it is important that they be able to fundraise effectively and communicate with the electorate. My department is currently developing proposals to give effect to these commitments. We are engaging with key stakeholders such as the Electoral Commission and the Committee on Standards, and we will update the House in due course.
Voter Identification (Amendment of List of Specified Documents) Regulations 2024
Lord Rennard Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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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.
Voter Registration and Participation
Lord Rennard Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for making the point about the addition of the Armed Forces veteran card to the list of accepted documents for voter ID. On her very direct question, yes—it is in our manifesto.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, only 65% of 18 to 25 year-olds are registered to vote, compared with more than 95% of the over-65s. Will the Government now act urgently on the unanimous cross-party recommendation of this House’s Select Committee on electoral administration in 2013, and begin the process of automatically registering young people to vote when they are issued with their national insurance numbers and the DWP has checked on their nationality?
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord makes an interesting point and I have had the great pleasure of working with him on various SIs and, in particular, on the Elections Act 2022. The Government will explore all options to ensure that we increase voter participation. We believe that, by building a strong foundation of democratic participation among young people, we will establish voting habits that continue as they grow older. It is about delivering long-lasting, positive consequences for our democracy and building an informed and engaged electorate for the future. In the meantime, we are working on these issues and will bring proposals to the House.
King’s Speech
Lord Rennard Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, a key test of this Government in five years’ time will be whether we are a more civilised country, a more tolerant society and a healthier democracy, with greater public confidence and engagement in it and less divisive rhetoric. In the previous Parliament, we saw many measures introduced by a Conservative Government who were constantly seeking to change in their favour the rules by which elections are conducted to try and assist their return to office—to which I might say, “A fat lot of good it did them”.
The Conservatives introduced the most restrictive form of photo ID without any evidence that it was necessary, despite overwhelming evidence that it was not and with a scheme that went far beyond what either the Electoral Commission or the election review conducted by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, had suggested. We need to scrap or replace the photo ID rules. If ID is deemed necessary, the official polling card should suffice. Using it would save £180 million over the next decade.
The photo ID did not save the Government but there were many close results where these very restrictive ID rules may have made a difference. They include the Basildon and Billericay constituency, where the former chairman of the Conservative Party, Richard Holden, scraped in by just 20 votes, having been parachuted into a seat that was supposed to have had a 20,000-plus majority.
A post-election survey by More in Common suggested that 400,000 voters were turned away at polling stations never to return, because they did not have the requisite ID. For each one of them, there were probably several people on the registers who did not go in the first place, because of the new rules. This must have been a factor in the lowest turnout for 20 years.
An even bigger scandal is that, according to the Electoral Commission, as many as 8 million people were incorrectly not included on the voting registers. Almost all of them would have been unable to vote, even though they were legally entitled to do so. Most people think that the process of voter registration is automatic. It is not, but it should be, so I welcome the announcement that we will move to automatic voter registration.
To help make changes fairly, we need to restore and strengthen the independence of the Electoral Commission. The strategy and policy statement foisted on it by the last Government should be withdrawn, never to be replaced.
As for the voting system, it is a scandal that, in so many constituencies, people did not really have a choice of MP, as the real choice lay with a party machine that can foist MPs upon them. Only 30% of those who voted on 4 July got the MP that they voted for, and many of the 30% were voting tactically against another party.
While I welcome the Ministers to the Front Bench opposite, I ask them to consider that the single biggest mistake of the Blair Government in 1997 was to think that they would never lose another election. This meant that those around Tony Blair saw no need to move to a fairer voting system providing real choices for voters. After two full terms in office, they considered that winning again in 2005 with 35% of the vote was good enough, but it was not and they lost. This Government start with having received just 34% of the vote.
The failure of those Labour Governments from 1997 to make progress on voting reform led directly to what was frequently referred to in the campaign, by the then Labour Opposition, as a “decade of chaos.” With the now noble Lord, Lord Cameron, the soon to be Baroness May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, it could not possibly be said that we had the stable government that was supposed to be the main justification for the first past the post system. We need to do everything we can to make sure that every vote counts.