Electoral Conduct

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend Lord Alderdice—who, as he said, was a member of the all-party inquiry into electoral misconduct—for bringing these issues to the attention of the House as we approach the next general election, as well as local elections in much of England next May. This is therefore a very timely debate.

I was pleased to be able to provide evidence informally to the inquiry, based on my experience of involvement in election campaigns over more than 40 years, since I first became an active member of the Liberal Party as a teenager in the 1970s. I believe that the inquiry raised important issues for debate and action. I also thank John Mann and his assistant Danny Stone, who I met, for their work in initiating this, and also for the earlier report by a cross-party group of MPs concerning anti-Semitism.

The inquiry chaired by Natascha Engel helped to illuminate continuing problems with prejudicial behaviour, such as discriminatory language, in the conduct of our elections. I believe that the most blatant use of discriminatory language by candidates from the major and most established parties in this country is fortunately now very rare. However, all the major parties had severe embarrassment in the past. I remember being personally very deeply unhappy and distressed about the use of the phrase “secure family background” in the Liberal Party leaflet for the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985, in which neither of the other two major candidates were married. My late noble friend Richard Livsey had to apologise immediately for a leaflet that he had had no involvement whatever in producing.

When I took overall responsibility for parliamentary by-elections for the Liberal Democrats a few years after this incident, I helped to ensure that we took great care in those campaigns to avoid even the kind of unconscious discriminatory language that could otherwise have slipped through. However, it is not possible for a national party to monitor every leaflet produced at local level. In 1993, I was enraged when some of the literature that my party produced for a council by-election in Tower Hamlets was clearly pandering to racism. It was also clear in that campaign that Labour literature had had the effect of boosting the BNP vote, enabling a BNP councillor to be elected. This controversy led Paddy Ashdown, who was then the leader of my party, to ask my noble friend Lord Lester of Herne Hill to conduct an investigation and to produce a report. I believe that what he said in his report, Political Speech and Race Relations in a Liberal Democracy, was very pertinent to this inquiry. He wrote:

“The right to free and unfettered political speech and debate is fundamental to democracy”.

However, he added the important rider:

“Whilst essential to political speech and public debate, free speech is not an absolute right without limits. Other fundamental values must be of equal value, including the unequivocal commitment to the principles of religious and racial acceptance and cultural diversity in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect”.

This inquiry sought to address the problem of how to deal with people when they go beyond the tolerant norms of society and, often, beyond the scope of what the law can allow in a civilised society, because to do so unfairly demeans others and may incite hatred, or even violence.

One of the most shocking cases of such behaviour that I have come across in recent years was during a council by-election in the London borough of Waltham Forest. One of the sitting Liberal Democrat councillors was in an openly gay relationship, but the Labour candidate in that campaign put around false rumours that he was a paedophile. There were no leaflets, but the rumours were effectively spread by word of mouth. As a result the councillor was harassed, his property was attacked and he lost the election to the candidate who spread the vile rumours.

After the election, some of the truth came out when local residents who were aware of the real facts revealed what they had been told and identified the source of it. The new Labour councillor was prosecuted, convicted and forced to stand down. The Liberal Democrats won the by-election that followed, but by then our shattered ex-councillor had been forced to leave the area. Such legal action will always be rare, and it could not provide proper redress in this case.

I have described this particularly unpleasant incident in order to highlight my belief that the greatest responsibility must be on all the political parties to take sufficient care in their approval of candidates, so that none of them could behave as this particular Labour candidate did. All parties must make it plain to all concerned that such behaviour is not remotely acceptable, that candidates and those working for them should be governed by proper codes of conduct, and that they may also be subject to prosecution.

The point was well made in the inquiry that, while the major parties may have greatly improved their assessment, approval and training of parliamentary candidates, generally they lack the resources to do this sufficiently well at local level. The task of vetting local council candidates is generally done by volunteers. The inquiry report calls for funding from the Equality and Human Rights Commission to provide support, training and guidance to the parties about non-discriminatory campaigning. I believe that it could again undertake some of the useful work that was done by the Commission for Racial Equality, with which I have worked previously.

However, a significant problem is one of resources for the parties themselves. If we are to improve the quality and diversity of candidates standing for public office at all levels, and to ensure that they behave as they should, there is also a case for public funding to assist parties with the tasks of identifying, approving and training candidates at different levels to prevent such problems occurring.

When problems do occur, legal remedies may apply in the most serious cases. Candidates always have the protection of the law in relation to defamation, but legal routes are neither quick nor affordable for most people. Candidates and agents should in future be rather wary after the case brought by my friend Elwyn Watkins against Phil Woolas at the last general election. The election court that met in the Oldham East and Saddleworth constituency after the 2010 general election agreed that false statements had been made by Mr Woolas, who was thereby disqualified from Parliament and a parliamentary by-election took place. The court case revealed that the intention of the then Labour agent—now, I am told, a member of UKIP—had been to,

“make the white folk angry”.

The court was able to obtain and to see the chain of e-mails within the Labour campaign that revealed a blatant attempt to appeal to racism. As a result, an MP was disqualified from public office and the costs to him and the Labour Party may well have been in excess of £1 million.

Serious malpractice therefore still exists, but my own conclusion is that the major responsibility for dealing with it must lie with the political parties. They must make sure that their agents and organisers are fully aware of their responsibilities, both legally and according to appropriate codes of conduct, and that they are subject to party discipline.

As Natascha Engel concluded in the debate on the report in the other place:

“I hope we can foster an atmosphere of fairness so that we fight elections on policy, not on personality or people’s sexual orientation or religious or ethnic background”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 102WH.]

The political parties have a responsibility to promote these values. I hope that government and all appropriate independent bodies will work with all the parties and help them to do just that.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, on putting down this Question for debate and thank those Members of the House who have taken part in the inquiry and have spoken today.

As we have all agreed, the report that they have produced is an excellent document, and its recommendations give all political parties and the Government issues to reflect on. The need to address the recommendations and conclusions of the inquiry is as urgent as other noble Lords have said, as we are coming up to the general election. As my honourable friend Sharon Hodgson said in the debate in May in the Commons, we support the report’s recommendations.

As noble Lords have said, the inquiry was chaired by my honourable friend Natascha Engel. In addition to the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, it also included my noble friend Lord Beecham among its members. I was very struck, as were other noble Lords, by some of the things that are in the report. Natascha Engel said in that debate:

“Our inquiry found that people in some areas were not putting their names forward as candidates out of fear for their lives, which happened across the board. Whether the tensions were religious, ethnic or based on their sexuality or gender, we found that people who would have been good candidates for elected office at any level were not putting their names forward”.—[Official Report, Commons, 7/5/14; col. 97WH.]

I think that we would agree that this is unacceptable in a modern UK and a modern, mature democracy.

We can all cite, as did the noble Lord, Lord Rennard—although I notice that he cited only Labour cases—examples of malpractice.

[Lord Rennard]

I referred also to the Liberal campaigns in the Brecon and Radnor by-election and in Tower Hamlets. I was not being one-sided. I cited examples of bad practice by both my party and the noble Baroness’s.

[Baroness Thornton]

I accept that rebuke, although I have to say that the noble Lord went into some detail.

I remember being Harriet Harman’s “minder”—as they are called these days—during a by-election in 1982. She was pregnant with her first child, and the Liberal candidate, who is now a Member of your Lordships’ House, used the fact that she was pregnant all the way through the campaign as an argument for her not being fit to be an MP. As we all know, Simon Hughes has apologised for the campaign that was mounted against Peter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner, during the by-election in Bermondsey. We all have issues that need to be addressed. Even today, none of us can cease to be vigilant as party politicians to ensure that every single word that we utter and every single word that is printed in our name is appropriate.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, that, as far as I can tell—and it was certainly what I was taught as a Labour activist and someone who has run lots of elections—that you have the responsibility to make sure that every single word that is published and every single leaflet that is put out in the name of your party is proper and correct, and does not contravene any rules. That is difficult, and people will make mistakes, but there is no doubt where the responsibility for those things lies. It is true that we have a proud history in the UK of fair and free elections with proportionate regulation, and broad agreement that discrimination and racism have no place in society in general, and certainly not in our democratic processes. However, as we all have agreed, we know that racist, homophobic and other discrimination takes place during election campaigns.

The committee produced a series of recommendations and we give our full support to those, tackling, as they do, discrimination as it affects our democratic process. Like other noble Lords, I am puzzled as to why the Equality and Human Rights Commission has to be urged in the way it is being in this report—and by noble Lords—to produce a plan for engaging with electoral conduct, which is clearly an excellent idea. It would pick up on the work carried out by the former CRE. This should be done as a matter of course. It makes sense that the EHRC, the Electoral Commission and the police should work together to make sure that the guidance produced for our elections and election procedures is clear; makes it easy for people who are running elections, particularly in local elections where it is being done by volunteers; makes it clear what our responsibilities are; but also tells everyone how to deal with issues of redress.

Since the political parties’ annual briefing from ACPO and the Electoral Commission focusing on voter fraud takes place, the report is right in asking: why not expand that sort of event to include discrimination? I think the Electoral Commission trialling an online briefing for candidates seems an excellent idea and, where possible, should be integrated into the work political parties are undertaking with their candidates. However, as the report rightly points out, it is new parties, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, mentioned, and independent candidates, who are the ones who may not know their responsibilities and what they should or should not say. Of course, parties from a racist background are the ones we need to be particularly wary of and which need to be watched most carefully.

All police forces appoint a single point of contact for matters concerning electoral fraud. This has proved invaluable. Expanding that role and appointing a second officer may be one way to deal with these issues. One of the other issues not referred to in quite the same way in the debate is the code for parties to work within concerning non-broadcast media. While it is the case that generally parties and candidates have behaved responsibly, surely there will be those who have pushed the boundaries. What does the Minister think should happen in those cases?

I turn to new media. We face an election where social media and online campaigning will be present in a way that it never previously has been in our general elections. I remember a few years ago being targeted by the online discussion in our local newspaper in Bradford—I think it was by UKIP, to be honest—in a vile and horrible way. The problem was that the newspaper was not mediating the online discussion properly. When eventually it was pointed out to the editor that they had a responsibility not to allow people to be vilified in this fashion on the website of their newspaper, they took action. Multiply that by hundreds and hundreds of other incidents and I think all noble Lords would agree that we potentially have some very serious problems.

It will take concentrated and co-ordinated action to deal with such issues. I believe the Government have a responsibility to make sure that those things are pulled together. Every single political party has a responsibility, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, for the behaviour of its own candidates. Certainly in the Labour Party we take this extremely seriously: we have no hesitation in referring people to our disciplinary committee. We carry out the appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the party, and occasionally involve the police. We have no doubt that those are our responsibilities as a political party, but also that we all need to work together to ensure that our free and fair elections continue to be so.

House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD Ind)]

My Lords, when future assessments are made of this Parliament, I suspect that the biggest disappointment for many—but certainly not all—Liberal Democrats will be our failure to achieve substantial reform of this House. For over 100 years, Liberals have fought to complete a reform that was begun with the Parliament Act 1911 to move this place from depending upon the hereditary principle to resting upon the popular principle.

Only in this House could 100 years be too short a period to consider properly making such a change. I suspect, however, that our failure to achieve House of Lords reform will not be such a concern to the wider electorate. The failure of the House of Lords Reform Bill came as a relief to many Members of this House. Nevertheless, among most Members there is at least widespread agreement, as this debate has shown, that the size of the House is now too large.

Failure to achieve reform means that there also remains significant concern about the powers of patronage exercised by the major party leaders to put their loyal friends and supporters into Parliament. This power of patronage may make the numerical problem even greater in the near future. We could perhaps be heading for a series of Parliaments in which power changes regularly, and each new Prime Minister will wish to add to his or her ranks in the House of Lords to reward their followers, sustain support in their party and assist the swift passage of new legislation.

In the latter part of the 20th century, the Conservative and Labour parties both won large majorities in the House of Commons, which took long periods to ebb away. In the 30 years between 1979 and 2009, we had had only three Prime Ministers. However, in the next 30 years we may have many more than three Prime Ministers, and with each new occupant of 10 Downing Street might come new waves of appointments to this place. The House of Lords could become simply incredible because of its increased size, and much less respectable in public perception than it is today.

Something therefore needs to be done, and it needs to happen soon. I do not think that a lengthy commission is required to work out what should happen; we already have too many dust-gathering reports on this subject. Most of these reports have come to some broad conclusions: that the number of Peers must be contained and eventually reduced; that elections should take place for at least some of the future places in the House of Lords; and that any elections should at any one time elect no more than a third of the Members of the House. Most recent reports have also suggested that Members should serve a single long, non-renewable term, thereby preserving the independence of the House and the primary accountability to the electorate of the House of Commons.

The Government presented Parliament with a Bill that would have done all these things two years ago while retaining a strong contingent of Cross-Bench Peers. Despite strong support in all three parties and an overwhelming majority at Second Reading in the House of Commons, that Bill could not make progress. As it became clear that the idea of more democracy was too much of a threat for some to let a Bill such as that progress, I came to the conclusion that any plan for reform must be rather more pragmatic while retaining a clear aim and purpose.

I would hope that the parties could agree in advance of 2015 that there should be no new lists of politically appointed Peers beyond the Dissolution Honours List.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

Would that include the current list that is in preparation?

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I have no knowledge of the current list. My proposal was simply that there should be an agreement that there should be no more lists of that nature beyond the Dissolution Honours List in 2015. In the mean time, we should pledge to stop the absurd practice of the hereditary by-elections. The idea of “topping up” to keep their number at 92 is simply ridiculous. The hereditary presence in the House should therefore be ended for all but some of the most active hereditary Peers.

We should let voters elect 120 Members of the House early in the next Parliament. Such an election could coincide with the devolved elections in 2016, including in Scotland if it remains a part of the United Kingdom. Such an election could be held rapidly, as indeed Members of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly were elected shortly after the 1997 general election. Each of these Members should be elected for a single, non-renewable term of 15 years. At the same time, the number of appointments made through the Appointments Commission should be limited to 30 over the course of a five-year Parliament. That is probably enough for one Parliament. Those in both Houses who prophesied that the sky would fall in if we elect a number of Members of this House, rather than have them appointed by party leaders, will see if their prophecies prove true.

If they do not, it will be after 2020 before Parliament has to think again and consider whether to elect, say, another tranche of 120 Members in that Parliament, or whether to return to a system of patronage. In the mean time, we would be joined by elected Members who would contribute to the work of the House. Such a number could not and would not fundamentally change the character of the House as a revising “think again” Chamber. If the sky has not fallen in by 2020, the parties could agree again not to make any patronage appointments, and a further set of elections for, say, 120 Members could happen soon after the 2020 general election. At this point, the number of life Peers—by a process that it is quite hard to find appropriate and polite words to describe—will have reduced significantly.

The use of proportional representation in the elections will ensure the continuation of a healthy balance of opinion in the House, in which no single party has a majority. Those of us who believe that elections to this House can happen without a fundamental upset to the balance between the two Houses will have a chance to prove our point before further stages of election are considered, and everybody will be able to examine the evidence of such an arrangement working over time.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, it may not surprise the House that I have very considerable sympathy with the arguments just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, and with the amendment tabled in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, as it is remarkably similar to the amendment that I moved in Committee. I made my points in support of it at col. 473 of Hansard for 29 October, and I shall not detain the House by rehearsing all them. However, I emphasise that we on these Benches feel very strongly that it is very important to make a success of what we are setting out to do through this Bill and that the widest possible range of data sources are used to encourage more people who are missing from the electoral register to be on it.

Of the organisations in the amendment, the Government have so far said publicly that they will move substantially on the Student Loans Company database only. There are very important issues still to be addressed, which could be addressed in further regulations, so it should not be necessary to vote at this stage. At some point, the House would like to know that the very good practice used in Northern Ireland of returning officers visiting schools as part of a civics lesson and registering 16 and 17 year-olds to make sure that they can vote when they are 18 and suggestions put forward in Committee about using things such as the tenancy deposit protection scheme and credit reference agencies’ information will be taken forward.

In particular, we would like to know from the Minister, if possible before the end of this debate, that action will be taken to try to ensure that the DVLA database is used in the same way as the DWP database, if not in exactly the same way for any legitimate reason. In the debates we have teased out the fact that very many people are missing from the electoral register because they move house. If we were simply to use the database of those people who notify the DVLA that they have moved house to then notify electoral registration officers that they should contact those individuals and invite them to be on the electoral register, that could ensure that many of the people missing from the voter registers were included.

These things could all be done relatively easily. I am hoping that it will not be necessary for us to vote at any point here, or on regulations on these issues at a later stage, but it is important that we receive some assurance from the Minister that the Government will take these points seriously if they are to assure us that they are sincere about improving the completeness of the electoral register as well as its accuracy.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have come a long way in discussing this issue since the Bill was subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny, and the character of the Bill has changed quite a lot as it has gone through both Houses. We have also learnt as the various data matching and data mining exercises have been piloted, and that continues to be the case. We had an interesting and informative debate on this subject in Committee and, as I said then, the Government are sympathetic to the spirit of the amendment, which seeks to ensure that the best possible use is made of data matching to identify people not on the register who may be entitled to be. The outcome of the second round of data pilots showed that some 70% of voters could be confirmed through the DWP database. As the noble Baroness said, this varies from local authority to local authority, but it enables us to focus on the 30% who are not confirmed.

We are all aware that it is the frequent movers and young people—above all, young men—who are the hardest to identify. In the various pilots under way, we are experimenting with using other databases. I remind noble Lords that, in last year’s data matching pilots, data were matched with organisations such as the DWP, HMRC, the Royal Mail—which was particularly useful for people who had given their changes of address—the Department for Education, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Transport, the Student Loans Company, the Ministry of Defence and, for Scotland, the Improvement Service company. In early 2013, we are currently planning to undertake pilots of data mining using databases held by the DWP, the Department for Education, HEFCE, the Welsh Government, the Royal Mail, the Student Loans Company and a small number of county councils.

Some data sets are held locally and some centrally, some are public and, as far as the credit reference agencies are concerned, some are private. The Bill enables us to remove any barriers to the usage of private sector data, and we have not ruled out the possibility of working with credit reference agencies to see what value their data sets can add to data matching for individual electoral registration.

I repeat: this is an area in which the Government are already very actively engaged. The amendment is not necessary. This schedule gives us the power to remove barriers to data sharing. Working through regulations enables us to discover new, useful data sets as we move forward. The Government are continuing to test which data sets are the most useful and effective in identifying potential electors.

Pre-empting such careful consideration of which may be the most appropriate data sets to use by specifying them in primary legislation could limit flexibility by requiring the unnecessary use of data sets that add no value to the work of EROs. The amendment would mean that the Government could not bring forward a data-matching order that did not include one of these agencies. That could potentially mean ruling out the future use of as-yet-unknown data sets or carrying out multiple data-matching exercises. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that we are in active discussion with the Department for Transport on the use of DVLA databases and others. It is likely that in 2013 we will be testing out other such databases.

The amendment is unnecessary and limits flexibility in an area where the Government are already engaged in intensive action to identify the best data sets to assist EROs in performance of their duties. I hope that I have said enough to reassure the noble Baroness and to enable her to withdraw the amendment. We all share the objective of coming out of this exercise with the maximum possible number of people on the register—and, as the noble Baroness has said, not just on the register first time around but staying on the register as they move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, the annual door-to-door household canvass is an extremely important part of the current registration system and has been shown to be very effective. Recent evidence from Northern Ireland shows that it was clearly a mistake to remove the annual canvass from the registration process there when individual electoral registration systems were introduced. However, some are arguing that for the data-mining and data-matching exercises to be successful, the Government may want to signal that at some point in the future it may be possible to remove the annual canvass. Personally, I cannot envisage it in the foreseeable future, but I accept that if all the other methods being tried to register voters prove as successful as some of us hope, there may be a case for doing so in the future. However, it would be unwise for the Government to proceed with removing the annual canvass without considerable consensus and the advice of the Electoral Commission that it was safe to do so, and without the new electoral registration systems being put forward in this Bill having been in place and embedded for a very considerable period.

I accept that we have made extensive changes and effected substantial improvements to this Bill, but I am unhappy about this power remaining in the Bill unless we know that positive parliamentary approval would be required for any Secretary of State to cancel the power for the annual canvass. However, as I say, I do not think that the power should be exercised at any point in the foreseeable future.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I start by stressing again that we all share the goal of getting as complete and accurate a register as possible and, indeed, of maintaining it over the years. I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, whom I was about to call my noble friend because I have learnt a lot from him during the consideration of this Bill, as I have on previous occasions.

Over the next 10 years we will move more towards online and digital registration by default and we will find that communication between the citizen and the state becomes much easier. That is one of the large, indeed revolutionary, changes that we expect to go through. I would also remind noble Lords of what I said in Committee, which is that in certain parts of the country new housing in particular is making it increasingly difficult to carry out a full canvass. I visited the electoral registration office for Wandsworth. The figures there show that currently some 50,000 housing units are sited in gated communities or apartment blocks with entry phones, while the proposed development of the Battersea Power Station site will add a further 16,000 such units.

We all recognise that the annual canvass is useful and important. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Martin, that there are areas in Bradford where some houses are back to back and others are not; some houses where people use only the front entrance and others where they use only the back, so many of us are well aware of the difficulty of finding out who lives where. Nevertheless, the extent to which we find it easy to catch people when they are in and get them to answer their doors, and thus to rely primarily on the annual canvass, is itself changing. This provision has been put into the Bill to remove the necessity of coming back to the House with primary legislation for a change when we are confident that other methods—in particular, online methods—provide more efficient and cost-effective ways of ensuring that we have a complete and accurate register.

I also stress that, under the Bill as drafted, there is a statutory role for the Electoral Commission in any changes. This does not create a power that is simply in the hands of the Government. In addition to the changes requiring the approval of Parliament, the Electoral Commission must be consulted and give its approval. The commission itself considers that Clause 7 and the other clauses relating to piloting and implementing changes to the annual canvass are appropriate. It stated that,

“it is sensible to include these provisions in this Bill to allow the findings from pilots and the early years of IER to inform the future role of the canvass. The Government has already made changes to this part of the legislation to reflect comments made by the Commission during pre-legislative scrutiny”.

The commission’s report is also required for any specific changes that the Government make under the powers in Clause 7. Under Clause 8, the Minister bringing forward the order must ask the Electoral Commission to,

“prepare a report assessing … the extent to which the objective in subsection (2)”—

the registration objective—

“is met … and … the merits of alternative ways of achieving the objective”.

The Electoral Commission would be required to publish its report within three months, and the Minister would then be required to present that report to Parliament alongside the draft order—which is subject to affirmative resolution of both Houses—that would make the changes.

Our aim with this provision, and the associated provisions I have outlined, is to create a system that is flexible and able to respond to advances in technology but also one that is transparent and has the right amount of scrutiny and safeguards built into it. Having given those assurances, I hope that the noble Baroness will feel sufficiently confident to withdraw her amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I shall be very brief, except to say that sometimes I sit here, as I have today, wondering what world it is that we think that we live in. The world around us is changing a lot faster than we are prepared to change the electoral system, apparently. As I have said before and will say only briefly again, what we really need is a national register based on every individual getting benefits, et cetera, only if they are on the register, backed up with an ID card—sorry, a smartcard. I had better not use the term ID card as I know that it sometimes causes frissons down people’s backs. Smartcard technology is now very advanced. Although I am grateful to the Minister for calling my name in aid in the previous debate, the fact is that 10 years is now a very long time in technological terms. If you look only at the two years since this Government came into power, when we abolished—wrongly, in my view—ID cards, the way in which smartcard technology has moved in those two years now makes it very feasible to have one register and to divide it up into the constituencies. Everybody who is on the national register and is a holder of an ID card will then be entitled to vote.

Personally, I think that we ought to be moving to a system whereby the actual voting is done electronically as well, using that smartcard. That will come, but, at the moment, it would appear that the last place in which we will be using a pencil will be to mark a cross on a ballot paper in some school, where people have to go out in the cold and wet to do it. I think that even golfers will give up the pencil before this Government are prepared to give up the pencil for ballots under the electoral system. Please, please, will the Government take this slight delay as an opportunity to look again at how we can introduce a national register to ensure that every citizen of this country is entitled to vote in the next general election?

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Tyler and I have both signed the amendments in this group. They clearly result from the lengthy discussions we had in Committee about the right time to end the carryover for electors from the household register to the individual register. The debate then centred on how confident we can be as to how good the transition to individual electoral registration will be seen to be by 1 December 2015. Some people may be very confident that it will all work well in terms of both completeness and accuracy; as your Lordships know, I am a bit less confident about that. None of us can be certain about which is the right assessment to make until the transition is actually under way and properly tested. As we know, we are piloting various things at the moment but with software which will not even be the final software for use when we are fully into individual electoral registration. It was for that reason that I was determined in Committee that there should be a mechanism by which we could extend the carryover if, for example, the Electoral Commission reported by 1 December 2015 that many people would unjustifiably be removed from the electoral register and that the register was at that point significantly less complete than at present.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes (No. 2) Order 2012

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, The order will provide the legal basis for a further electoral registration data-matching trial, by enabling the sharing of specified data between several data-holding public authorities and some 22 local authority electoral registration officers. The work that we plan to do under this order will form a significant part of our planning for the implementation of individual electoral registration.

The Committee will be aware that this is the third draft order of its kind since the summer of last year. It may be helpful if I were briefly to recap the story so far, before I go into detail about what the present order will do.

The first order—the Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2011—allowed us to carry out a set of data-matching schemes and evaluate the results. In those schemes, we were trying to find out whether matching their registers against public authority databases would help electoral registration officers to find potential electors who were missing from the register, so that they could contact those people and invite them to register. We were also trying to find out whether data matching would help registration officers to find entries on their registers that might be inaccurate or fraudulent, so that they could investigate them and then, if necessary, take steps to remove them.

We learnt a lot from those first schemes about the challenges of data matching and about the techniques and the technology that we would need to put in place if we were to do data matching more effectively and on a larger scale. When the schemes were over, the evaluations told us that more piloting work would be needed if we were to ascertain the potential of data matching, and data mining, for finding potential electors who are missing from the register.

What last year’s schemes did reveal, however—rather unexpectedly, it is fair to say—was that data matching might give us a way of confirming the majority of existing electors on the register in the transition to individual registration. If that turned out to be correct, most of the electorate would not have to register individually as soon as individual registration is introduced. That would be more convenient for electors; and for electoral registration officers. There would be significant savings in time and money which would enable EROs to concentrate on those whose details could not be matched and those who were missing from the register altogether.

We needed to test our understanding, however, and we needed to do it quickly so that, if this was shown to work, the necessary systems could be put in place in time for the transition. The second order—the Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012—approved by the House in the summer, was sought mainly to enable that testing, and the schemes for confirming existing electors are now in progress. That order also allows us to carry out further testing of data matching for finding missing potential electors and inaccurate or fraudulent entries; but only in the areas specified in the order, and only using data held by the Department for Work and Pensions. But I told the Committee in the summer that if we decided to extend the schemes to include further areas or data sets, a separate order would be laid before your Lordships at a later date. We are now ready to do that further testing, hence the order now before the Committee.

This latest order will allow EROs in the areas listed to compare their registers against specified public authority data sets. The public authorities which have agreed to make their data available for these schemes are the Department for Work and Pensions, for areas that were not included in the previous order; the Department for Education or, for schemes in Wales, the Welsh Government; the Student Loans Company; and Royal Mail Group. The schemes will target three particular groups where there are high levels of under-registration: people who have recently moved home; young people of 16 to 18 years of age who are just going on to the register; and students. They will complement a programme of work that the Cabinet Office has in hand to maximise electoral registration among groups identified as currently under-registered and at risk of falling off the register during the transition to individual registration.

The main purpose of the schemes will be to see how far data-matching helps EROs to improve the accuracy and completeness of the register by finding people who are missing from the register and finding entries on the register that should not be there. The schemes will also help us to design, develop and test the technology that we will need if data-matching is to play a significant part in future arrangements for electoral registration.

In addition, the order will enable EROs in four lower-tier authorities in two-tier local government areas to match their registers against education data held by their county council, to see whether it helps them to find 16 to 18 year-olds who are not yet registered. Registration officers in unitary authorities already have access to such data because it is held by the same authority that appointed them, but their counterparts in two-tier areas have no right to access the same kind of data if it is held by a different council. The results of these schemes will help us to decide whether it would be worthwhile to legislate to correct this anomaly.

The order will also enable us to augment the work that is already being done on confirming existing electors, by allowing us to carry out a statistical analysis to find out how far other public authority data sets might add to the match rate obtained from DWP data. The Higher Education Funding Council for England has agreed to make its data available for this purpose alone.

As in previous instruments of this kind, the draft order requires that before any data can be transferred, a written agreement must be in place between the ERO and the data-holding public authority setting out the requirements for the processing, transfer, storage and destruction of the data. It sets 17 July 2013 as the date by which each of the schemes must have been evaluated by the Electoral Commission. I also assure the Committee that after the pilots have ended and the evaluation is complete, the data created and held for the purposes of the pilot schemes will be securely destroyed.

The Information Commissioner’s office has been consulted on this draft order. The office has welcomed the fact that the current phase of pilot schemes has identified a much narrower range of data, and that the schemes will inform the extent to which personal data to be collected from electors can be minimised. I hope that the Committee will recognise the value of this further work for improving the accuracy and the completeness of our electoral registers.

I would like to make some additional points which I hope will help the Committee. All of this feeds into the wider context of digital transformation and the development of what in the trade is called “identity assurance”. This morning, I had a useful briefing from the government digital service on exactly this matter. Further down the road, there are delicate issues about the balance between the use of public and private databases, to which we will want to return in that wider context. I reiterate that the current electoral register has deteriorated quite badly over the last 25 years —especially in its coverage of vulnerable groups. We are very conscious of that and are therefore strongly committed to this move toward individual electoral registration and to using this transformation to maximise the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register. I hope that the Committee will accordingly approve this order.

[Lord Rennard]

These orders are clearly welcome to me, as they show potential ways forward for increasing voter registration and improving the accuracy of the electoral register. It seems to me, however, that further pilots are clearly needed, because earlier pilots were certainly not considered to have been a complete success. The Electoral Commission raised serious concerns about the reliability of the earlier pilots because they had,

“an absence of a clear, common, methodological framework”.

This, it said,

“had a significant impact on our ability to draw clear conclusions about the effectiveness of data matching as a tool for maintaining the accuracy and completeness of the electoral registers”.

The Electoral Commission has raised a number of concerns about this next set of pilots, of which, I am sure, the Minister will be aware. In particular, will he tell us how closely the IT systems to be used in these pilots will match the IT systems being developed for eventual use in implementing individual electoral registration? It is clear that they are not the same systems, as the eventual IT systems to be used are not yet ready. Does he therefore accept that there is a significant element of risk in making an assessment of these pilots and drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the IT systems that will eventually be used?

The commission raised a number of concerns about the methodological framework for the pilots. I am sure that the Minister will assure us that the Cabinet Office will do its best to address them. He has told us that the commission will evaluate these pilots by 17 July 2013. It seems to me that the crucial issues of the completeness and accuracy of the electoral registers will depend on the relative success or failure of approaches being taken in these pilots and other measures which are yet to be announced. It certainly will not be before these pilots can be evaluated that we will know whether a register based exclusively on individual electoral registration will be fit for purpose. That is why the existing Bill must provide for Parliament to decide whether the process has been sufficiently successful for our elections and for future boundary reviews to rely exclusively on it; just as Parliament will also have to approve any decision to abandon the annual canvass.

When the Minister responds, I hope that he will provide some clarity to the Committee about when the Bill will come back and we can debate further the issue of when it may be considered safe to rely exclusively on an electoral register based on IER. In the mean time, we have to hope that the transition will be as successful as possible, as quickly as possible, in terms of the stated aims of improving the completeness, as well as the accuracy, of the electoral register. It seems to me that these aims are best served by testing as many potentially relevant databases as possible. Use of the DWP database will help to ensure that, for example, people who are retired will be registered. The DWP is clearly happy for its database to be used in that way.

However, I understand that the Department for Transport has not given permission for its database at the DVLA to be used in a similar fashion. Both databases are national, government databases and both, of course, will have significant levels of inaccuracy. Surely, it would be better to use them both rather than just one of them. Perhaps the Minister will explain if the DVLA database will be used in due course. It would be very disappointing and quite unacceptable if the Government, having been asked repeatedly to use the DVLA records, were to argue in the future that the fact that there had been no pilots with the DVLA data was the reason for not using the DVLA database for the final process of transition to IER. The DVLA holds data on millions of adults, which is reasonably up to date, because it is a legal requirement to notify the agency if you move.

I very much welcome the addition to the list of databases secondary schools and academies, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Student Loans Company and the Royal Mail Group. The presence of educational institutions makes particular sense when it comes to adding so-called “attainers”; that is, young people who are coming up to voting age. I hope that the presence of those institutions in this list is an early sign that the Government will accept that the use of secondary schools’ pupil information must be integral to the IER regime, as it is in Northern Ireland.

It seems to me that in this respect we have at least had a four-year pilot in Northern Ireland. My understanding is that it has been very successful in engaging with 16 and 17 year-olds to add them to the register. We learnt today from the report of the Electoral Commission on registration in Northern Ireland that it was probably unwise to abandon the annual canvass there.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am very happy to take that back. I will report back to my colleagues on the strongly held sentiments. Perhaps I may take the questions about tenancy and deposit schemes and credit agencies at the same time. The initial assessment by the Cabinet Office of the suggestion from my noble friend Lady Berridge that tenancy deposit schemes might be used was that it was not sufficiently obvious that the processes of these databases could be adapted to support IER. However, that does not exclude renewed consideration.

Of course, the question of credit agencies takes us over the boundary between public and private. Credit agencies are part of the private sector. The issue is part of a broader discussion that we all need to have with the likes of the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, and others, about the extent to which, as we move into a new world of data transmission and availability, private and public databases can be used for identity assurance. That was the basis for the briefing I received this morning from the government digital service. It would be helpful to organise a meeting for Peers as a whole on the work that it is doing—for longer-term and wider purposes than this Bill alone—on these issues. Private databases are increasingly useful, but their use raises questions about civil liberties and public and private interests with which we need to be concerned.

[Lord Rennard]

The Minister suggested that there was a great gap between private sector credit reference agency databases and public sector databases. Would he not accept that private sector databases used by credit reference agencies are already used extensively by public local authorities? Many local authorities use data held by credit reference agencies to determine whether there may be more than one person living in a household, in particular when someone is claiming a single person’s council tax discount. Credit reference agencies may have information suggesting that more people are present in the house, and revealing who they are. Local authorities, which are public sector organisations, are already using the data from private sector credit reference agencies. Would it not be logical for electoral registration officers to do what their colleagues in finance departments are doing to identify the existence of people who are there but who are not on the electoral register, and invite them to be on the electoral register? I am not aware of any objections from civil liberties groups to any of these existing practices.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank my noble friend for that strongly worded intervention. I take that on board as one of the issues that we are edging towards. The civil liberties lobby may not have caught up yet with the point that he is making, but I expect that it will do so soon. There are some very broad issues here that we have to be concerned about. I point out, as he has done, that one of the principles of our system of electoral registration is that it is in the hands of local authorities. We do not have a central database, so what one local authority does with credit agencies may be rather different from other local authorities do.

On the question of why this particular collection of local authorities was chosen, the answer is that these are the ones that volunteered to take part. They seem to us to be relatively representative, but this is the nature of the system under our current legal arrangements. Happily, the selection of local authorities is sufficiently wide that we and the Electoral Commission are persuaded that they will provide us with sufficiently reliable information.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Rennard]

10: Schedule 2, page 17, line 15, at end insert—
“(1A) Provision under sub-paragraph (1) must authorise or require institutions providing secondary education (as defined by section 2A of the Education Act 1996), the Student Loans Company Limited, the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency, tenancy deposit schemes (as defined by section 212 of the Housing Act 2004), and credit referencing agencies (as defined by section 145(8) of the Consumer Credit Act 1974), to disclose information to another person for the purpose of assisting a registration officer in Great Britain.”

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, Amendment 10 is in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Tyler. The Government have been trailing data sharing with the DWP database since orders were passed through this House last year. We very much welcome their aspiration to data match some two-thirds of eligible voters from the old household register on to the new individual register using this process. However, we worry that this process will not prove to be as robust or successful as everyone hopes it will be. Other databases are, in our view, needed to make a success of this project. We have talked many times at the various stages of this Bill about the need for the electoral register to be complete. I believe this amendment about the use of other databases will show whether it is really the intention of the Government to walk the walk on this issue, as opposed just to talk the talk on it.

It will be a matter of judgment as to which databases may be appropriate for automatic registration, as the DWP’s will be, and which should only provoke invitations to register from electoral registration officers. What is clear is that to restrict ourselves to the DWP’s database, in either endeavour, is missing a real opportunity to improve the completeness of the registers, even from their present positions. For all the talk there will be about the dangers of the new system, we have to recognise that the old system has proved quite unsatisfactory. We now know that the electoral register is complete up to only 82% of eligible voters, as opposed to the 92% quoted by Ministers very frequently a year ago. Whether we have the old or the new system, we need better and more comprehensive data matching and data mining in order to help overcome the difficulties of registering voters.

We believe in particular that the information held by the DVLA—a comprehensive database of drivers—could provide a rich source of information better and more diverse than that of the DWP. Its database of national insurance numbers is of course notoriously unreliable: there are 80 million national insurance numbers in a population of only 51 million. We know there are many people on the DWP database who will have real trouble voting, since they died a long time ago. It would be particularly worrying if we restricted data matching to the DWP database only, as the Government could give the impression that they were keen only to see one demographic group of voters registered and not so keen on seeing other demographic groups registered.

Pensioners are not generally underrepresented on the voting registers or in the votes on election day. It is other groups where there is a more significant problem. There is a danger of unintended consequences in proceeding only with the DWP records, because they deal disproportionately of course with retired people. It is known that they vote disproportionately, although not exclusively, more in favour of the Conservative Party than perhaps other social groups. I know that our coalition partners would not want to give the impression that they are particularly keen on assisting with the registration of voters that may aid their cause and not with the registration of voters in general, in accordance with healthy democratic principles.

It therefore seems very important that the Department for Transport allows use of the DVLA’s database in the same way and with all the appropriate safeguards about personal data that the DWP applies. We are told by the Electoral Commission that the Department for Transport does not wish the DVLA database to be used in this way. However, the DWP has given permission for its database to be used in this way. My proposition is simple: that there should be consistency across government databases, using all of them to maximum effect, with the proper safeguards about personal data, in order to ensure that as many people as possible are registered.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

No.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I am not in principle against what he is suggesting but, as someone who bears the scars on my back of false accusations when in government of an intention to mine data, match data and cross-match data, can he tell us when the Liberal party came to the conclusion that it was perfectly legitimate to mine and cross-match the data from DVLA, from pensions, from national insurance, which the noble Lord mentioned, and from transport? Once you have created this precedent there will be very good reasons for using it, presumably with data from HMRC and others, right across the spectrum so it is not something that should be entered upon lightly.

[Lord Rennard]

Indeed, I understand that and we would not do so lightly. We had significant differences over the national identity card scheme, which we were told would cost something like £300 million. What I am suggesting in terms of electoral registration would obviously cost far less. The essential principle, rather than the costings, is that this is a one-way process with data whereby we are trying to make sure that everybody who is entitled to vote is able to vote. The safeguards that would be in place would ensure that the only information made available is someone’s name and address. If the database shows that they are there, they could then be invited to register if they are not on the register.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

My Lords—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are in Committee but I think I am right in saying that the procedure is that until the noble Lord has moved the amendment, no others should intervene. Could we allow the noble Lord to move the amendment? Then we can have the normal Committee stage open discussion.

[Lord Rennard]

I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister. All that I am arguing in my contribution is that there should be consistency across government use of databases. We should use the DWP database to help some people, and other databases which may help many other people, get on the voting register and have their democratic entitlement. We know that students, for example, are also very under-represented on the current register and may be even more under-represented under IER. However, there is an easy way in which this could be addressed. If the Government had the will to pursue what they say is their objective of maximising voter registration, students and former students could easily be located through the Student Loans Company, invited to register and reminded of their legal responsibilities to do so.

Attainers are a particularly important group. Sixteen and 17 year-olds could be identified through schools. There is a precedent for doing this in Regulations 41 and 42 of the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2008, under which the previous Government brought in a system whereby schools had electoral registration officers visiting pupils at the age of 16 or 17 as part of their civic lessons. At the conclusion of their lesson about voting systems and registration, forms were completed to register those 16 and 17-year-olds at school. However, so far there is no such provision to do so in Great Britain. There is also a particular difficulty with transient tenants in the private rented sector. They could be tracked down through tenancy deposit schemes and, again, invited to register and reminded of their obligations to do so.

These are all government databases and my argument is that the Government should be consistent in using them for data mining and data matching to try to make sure that we improve registration to improve the health of our democracy. There are also private databases and a huge wealth of information available through credit reference agencies—many of which are used at the moment by local authorities, including many Labour local authorities. The credit reference agencies use the electoral register as their own starting point, so some of these people are already registered. Those agencies also know of many more people with perhaps several forms of credit made available to them, more than one bank account legitimately registered and, perhaps, several credit cards used legitimately. Yet they know that those people, who exist, are not on the voting register even though they are clearly entitled to be on it. I believe that they should be invited to be on the register and told of the requirements.

At the moment, many local authorities are using exactly these data to try to check on the single person’s council tax discount. They know from their data that there is often one person on the register yet several people are resident. Local authorities are using these reference agencies to write to the people they know within this household, pointing out that they know that those people are there and should be on the electoral register and that perhaps it is not appropriate for them to claim a single person’s council tax discount. Local authorities have no difficulty in doing this. I think there is a great deal to be said for using more effectively the data of the credit reference agencies. I know that the Government have been holding discussions with them. However, there is as yet no commitment from the Government to use either these other public databases to which I have referred or the private ones.

I turn briefly to Amendments 11 and 15 to 20. I would simply say that they appear to be also on the Marshalled List for the purpose of probing these sorts of issues, so I will not comment further on them from our Benches. However, we believe that the Government must look closely at all these areas and give some commitments before Report so that we can be sure that the final regulations on data sharing are far more ambitious than they are at present and that they are seen to be fair and in the interests of promoting our democracy. I beg to move.

[Lord Reid of Cardowan]

My Lords, I am sorry if I have breached the long-standing conventions of the House. I intervened at what I thought was the appropriate point but in terms of process, I should obviously be commenting now. I had not intended to comment when I came in to listen to the discussions but the precedent being suggested by the noble Lord has huge implications and significance. It ought to be regarded and scrutinised with some care before we proceed.

I do not for a moment doubt the noble Lord’s intention, which is to maximise the number of people on the voting register in order to enhance democracy, although perhaps I might express the wish that some of the comments made during earlier discussions had been listened to. It was predictable that we would end up with a shortfall on the electoral register and an anticipated greater shortfall. I think that lies behind the measures that the noble Lord has raised.

Let me make this point. If, however good the ends, we adopt the means of proliferating the use of data mining and data matching, that would be of considerable significance. If we are suggesting that we data mine and data match records from HMRC, the DVLA, the DWP—that has already been agreed—the Student Loans Company and credit reference agencies, that is a suggestion of huge import and ought to be scrutinised for its possible consequences.

It is, with great respect to the noble Lord who spoke, a complete red herring to compare this with identity cards. I say that for two reasons. First, they were voluntary and not all of what he suggested would be voluntary in so far as the person whose information is being mined would volunteer—although in some cases he suggested that they be contacted with a view to volunteering. Nevertheless, the ID cards were voluntary. Secondly, and more importantly, part of the reason for them was the spread of databases and the anticipation that data matching and data mining would become the norm in a cyberspace-dominated environment. Biometric protection was therefore enshrined in the ID card. In short, anticipating the use over the coming decade of greater dependence on an individual’s identity marked in a data bank and the possible loss of that identity or of that data bank by a government department, no one could have used that to gain access to any of the material in it—including bank accounts and so on—unless they had the fingerprints and the iris of the person whose bank account details were taken. In other words, it was a completely separate intention: to protect people should someone wish to use their identity if a databank was lost. It did not presuppose the Government going down this road of using records, which are exclusive to one purpose, for the purposes of data mining and data matching for another purpose, however well intentioned that might be.

I do not for a moment doubt that the intentions of the noble Lord are benevolent, benign, progressive and democratic, but the process of getting there, if it includes such widespread data matching and data mining as he has suggested, has profound implications and should therefore be subject to profound scrutiny in terms of the principle before this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I entirely take the noble Lord’s point, and add that an information campaign is clearly an important part of the transition to get to those who think that they might be on the register but may not. I would be entirely happy for noble Lords to press us further on the question of attainers, education in schools and civic education, which must be part of the transition process.

We resist the exact terminology in the amendments, and ask for more flexibility on the terms that we are looking at all these areas. We do not want to limit such schemes to the organisations named; we are experimenting with the range of datasets that can be helpful in this regard.

As we stated in our response to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee:

“The Government feels that the categories of persons should not be prescribed in primary legislation in this regard—

because—

“the Government does not intend to introduce an amendment to restrict the categories of persons that may be authorised or required to provide information, but will listen carefully to the views of the House on this issue during Parliamentary debate”.

The Government will reflect carefully on all those points and make clearer our intention on Report. So we are considering the precise detail of the alternative verification procedure beyond the immediate, primary identifiers and will consider a range of options to provide an accessible but secure approach.

Amendment 11 would require local authorities to share their data with electoral registration officers. That already takes place. Electoral administrators are part of local authorities and have for some time accessed relevant other local authority databases for the purposes of checking names and addresses together. The Bill would allow for such data sharing if it were decided that it was necessary and valuable in addition to that which already takes place. The next phase of government data-matching pilots will look at which datasets are most useful for electoral registration officers to carry out their duties. Some of the pilots will target students; some will target recent home-movers, which the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, flagged up as particularly important; others will explore how sharing data between two-tier local authorities, in those parts of the country where they exist, may assist them further.

However, on local authority data, I repeat that registration officers are already authorised to inspect records held by the authority that appointed them and are required to inspect records where they are permitted to do so both under the 1983 Act and the Representation of the People Act 2001.

On Amendment 15 and the whole question of students, we are already working with the National Union of Students, which represents students, and organisations with which students interact, such as the Student Loan Company and universities, to establish ways in which the registration process and the transition for those groups can be as simple and accessible as possible, building on the changes that we are enabling to the registration system, which will make registering to vote more convenient for all. Again, that work is under way; we are discussing and consulting with the other relevant public and private stakeholders.

Similarly, as for sheltered accommodation, which is the subject of Amendment 16, registration officers already have the power to require information from an individual to maintain their election register. That would include requiring managers of sheltered accommodation to provide the names of residents. Once registration officers are aware of that information, Clause 5 would require them to write to each individual who was not already registered at that address to invite them to register to vote. Amending the legislation is therefore unnecessary to empower registration officers to obtain information about individuals in sheltered accommodation or to require a registration officer to invite them to register.

As noble Lords will gather, the Cabinet Office is already actively engaged in a programme of work with groups which represent students, helping to provide alternative channels of registration, looking at the elderly in sheltered accommodation and how we could signpost people towards registration as they come into contact with other government agencies.

Amendment 17 addresses the question of private landlords. The real question here is whether a requirement on private landlords adds sufficiently to the toolkit of electoral registration officers to be worth the additional burden being placed on private landlords. That, again, is something that we are investigating further but our current view is that the marginal benefits of that measure over, to take just one example, the canvassable properties in the area do not justify imposing that additional burden.

Amendment 18 talks about the local authority providing additional information on council tax and other documents. Again, the Cabinet Office is testing out where it is most valuable and useful to provide additional information and, as the behavioural unit puts it, to prompt people to consider more actively ensuring that they are registered to vote. There are some questions about the complexity of the council tax document. I am not entirely sure that I read the whole of my council tax documents either in Bradford or in Wandsworth last year, but I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, read his in great detail from cover to cover. We are therefore not entirely sure that this is the best document to use for these purposes.

Amendment 19 requires local authorities to invite individuals to register to vote when they first register and begin paying council tax. This idea has a certain amount of utility and there is certainly no reason why local councils should not do that on the initial council tax form, but of course this would capture only the bill payer. There is a need for additional mechanisms to be in place to capture other people living inside the same property.

On Amendment 20, on the whole question of awareness-raising in other, wider government services and other transactions, we are looking with organisations from the public, voluntary and private sectors—I emphasise that it is not just in government agencies—to see where we can identify a potential benefit to introducing, for example, some form of prompting or signposting during the course of a transaction. We will test the different options to establish the extent to which they will assist the citizen.

On Amendment 24, to provide the explanation of the other uses of the register, opinions might differ on whether that was a plus or a minus. There have been one or two suggestions that there are those who wish not to be on the register so that they avoid jury service; it is not one of the most popular aspects of civic duty. That is another issue that we should perhaps explore further.

To sum up after this very large discussion of different ways of using and accessing databases and encouraging people to register, this is very much what we as a Government are already engaged in. We are happy to brief people further on what we are doing, how the data-matching pilots are going and how the information campaigns will be planned. We hope that on that basis the noble Baroness and the noble Lord will be willing to withdraw their amendment at this stage, and we will be happy to have further discussions on how we go forward to ensure that our shared aim, which is to maximise the number of people who register under individual electoral registration, will be achieved to the satisfaction of all.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his explanation of what the Government are doing and his confirmation that he is still willing to talk and listen about what we can do to ensure that the Government walk the walk to emphasise maximum voter registration. In his discussions with all parties who are concerned about this issue, I ask him to keep emphasising that while people talk about “data sharing”, imagining that these are a lot of data on someone, we are simply talking about name and address—nothing else. In his discussions with people on this issue, he should emphasise that it is simply a matter of names and addresses so that we contact people to ensure that they are aware of their right, and their obligation, to register to vote so that we have a healthy democracy. People are concerned about access to data, but these data are names and addresses. In this debate some people seem to be unaware that if you wish to get details of someone’s name and address in any area, you walk into a local library where a “database” called the electoral register is freely available, and you look at the names and addresses on the register. So the principle at the moment in this country is that the names—

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, may I interrupt the—

[Lord Rennard]

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I am about to say that I will not press the amendment to a vote but I ask the Minister to consider further the remarks that we have all made during this debate. I welcome his open-mindedness on these issues, particularly with regard to 16 and 17 year-old attainers, and I am sure that he could alleviate the fears raised by a number of noble Lords in this debate by emphasising that the issue is simply a one-way movement of information about name and address, which should not be a severe threat to people’s civil liberties. On that basis, with the leave of the House, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 10 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, this is perhaps the most important of the amendments that we will discuss today. This group of amendments has basically a twofold purpose. One is to maintain the annual canvass. The annual canvass is a critical tool, not only in compiling the register but as the only way of judging whether the other systems, which we welcome, and all the other work that is taking place on getting information from a variety of data sources are actually working. Without the annual canvass, there will simply be no check on the completeness of the register.

I have discussed this with a number of people who have more current experience in this area than I do, and they are adamant that the old fashioned canvass remains a crucial tool in locating citizens domiciled in Great Britain. Simply put, as has been said for other reasons, houses do not move. Ensuring that their eligible residents are on the list is best done via the canvass—really, nothing else competes.

We will press the Government hard on this, so our other proposals in this group to make it harder to abolish the canvass and to ensure that this could happen only with the super-affirmative procedure would, we hope, not actually be needed. Certainly I think it would be unacceptable to this House for an elected politician in government to take the decision to dispense with this crucial democratic tool. Our amendments, should any such proposal to abolish be considered, would ensure that the Electoral Commission’s report on this came before Parliament, not just to the Minister, and that any similar report published on piloting proposed changes to the annual canvass also came here, with time for debate on those, and that any proposals to change the canvass were made only with Electoral Commission approval. The Electoral Commission was quite rightly set up to take many of these decisions about the running of elections out of the hands of those with a vested interest in the outcome; in other words, elected politicians. It is therefore right that any proposals to change the way the register is compiled, for example, should have the Electoral Commission’s public nod of approval so that everyone can see that fair play in the interests of voters and democracy is taking place. I doubt that anyone will argue with that.

There are other proposals in this group where I doubt the Minister will raise any objection, particularly that the local registration officers should ensure that they have addressed every residential property with which they have contact, whether for council tax or anything else, as well as those in the relevant gazetteer.

There is one further word in these amendments to which I would draw the Committee’s attention: October. It is no good having a January canvass because by the time the register is complete it is almost too late for all the systems to download all that information. It perhaps sounds an easy job but, because it is done locally, the computer formats used by local authorities are not quite the same. I have looked them up. Formats include three types of Strand format, a Pickwick format, a Pickwick variant, CSV files, Xpress formats and page image formats. If all those come in, it takes a lot of time. If the annual canvass takes place too late, there is simply not time to do all that data cleansing between these different computer programs, on which I do not profess to be an expert.

The Government said that they currently have no plans to remove the power to abolish the annual canvass. I wondered about the word “currently”. I hope it means that the Minister will listen to us about the need for an annual canvass and remove from the Bill that ability to abolish it. Only a few minutes ago, he said that instead of addressing landlords, it was much better to have a canvass of all properties—I think I wrote down his words correctly. Amen to that. A canvass of all properties is an essential tool for making sure we have caught everybody, and the idea that it could be abolished by a Minister without Parliament having a say is one that we could not go along with. I beg to move.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, the annual canvass is an established part of our electoral arrangements and, on the face of it, there cannot be a more effective way of finding people living in their homes than to go knocking on their doors. I am therefore instinctively sceptical about the prospect of abolishing this annual exercise. Like so much of the transition to individual electoral registration, the possibility of ceasing the annual canvass is very much contingent on the success of other parts of the package.

If there is a comprehensive process of data matching and data mining, of the sort we discussed in the previous group of amendments, and electoral registration officers get a serious suite of ways to discover that someone has moved into or out of a local address, the Government’s argument that the canvass may at some time in future become redundant starts to look more realistic. However, there should always be a duty on returning officers to visit a property where they believe an elector is based and to revisit and revisit again, if necessary, to find them in. We know that just sending letters is not enough, and to that extent Amendment 14 raises a particularly important point about what returning officers have to do. We will come back to look at that again in the context of a duty to take all necessary steps to establish a complete and accurate register when we get to Amendment 39 on Wednesday.

Turning briefly to the specific provisions in some of the amendments in this group, I would make the following observations. It does not appear, on the face of it, that there is a good reason for an annual canvass always to take place in October. Indeed, in many ways, it would be easier and more sensible to undertake such work in the spring, when evenings are lighter and days are longer. The tradition of the October canvass goes back to when 10 October was the fixed date of electoral registration and therefore the canvass was timed for October to coincide with it. Once we sensibly moved to rolling registration with the ability to go on the electoral register at any time, it was no longer necessary to have an October canvass, so the annual canvass can take place at any time. It seems to me that on a cold, dark night, people would be less willing to open their doors. We all know that from our canvassing experience. It would probably be better to do this canvass earlier in the year.

Like some of the earlier Labour amendments, Amendment 37 seeks to turn the Electoral Commission from a body that reports and gives advice to Parliament to one that makes decisions. We are not therefore inclined to support this amendment, which would mean that the commission had to agree every pilot which might take place. In general, like the previous Government, I am in favour of piloting and I do not think that it should be subject to the veto of an advisory body. Pilots of this nature generally should be welcomed.

No doubt in his concluding remarks, the Minister will make reference to Clause 7, which was added on Report in the Commons specifically to make sure that the Electoral Commission had a strong role. The role given to the Electoral Commission in the Bill appears to be the one that it asked for in its briefing at the time; namely, to make clear that the Electoral Commission must be consulted and its response made available to Parliament before any order is made to reinstate the annual canvass. We do not think that it is right to alter that very logical and consistent position.

Amendments 31 and 38 perhaps provide a neat reassurance. Looking at them, they probably provide a middle way between having this provision and not having it, in that the use of a super-affirmative procedure to remove the annual canvass in future would by definition ensure that such decision underwent thorough scrutiny. We would very much welcome that.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I am very supportive of continuing the annual canvass because it is crucial. Anyone who has been involved in the front line of politics and has had dealings with people seeking to get votes at elections—whether they are for local government, national government or, in particular, by-elections—will know the importance of that canvass. It is no easy task and, in my view, some canvassers deserve a medal for going around some of the areas where they have to go. I do not like to talk about rough areas or to make the generalisations that some people make about housing estates but some places where people have to go can be very rough. There is a big difference between a canvasser going to a nice, leafy suburb or another area where, let us face it, there may be vicious dogs that are trained to attack strangers. Sometimes they mistake the canvasser for a rent-man or some other person.

It is very important that we keep that canvass. Any of us who has had a constituency as an MP often will have been surprised that, when we have walked by a factory, a sawmill, a garage or whatever, we had not realised that someone lived there. At times, it was not until you got some correspondence that you discovered that the person who owned the property as a commercial viability also was resident there. The canvasser can draw out information that would not be available when you depend on people downloading or sending information across a website. That also goes for disabled people who cannot get out. Often, at the time of the canvass, it is the canvasser who is the contact point.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. I know the reasons that the noble Baroness gave for having the canvass in October but, for the safety of canvassers, I would rather see them out on light nights. It is interesting that this week we have turned back the clocks and that we now have the dark nights, particularly in Scotland. Experienced canvassers know that that makes a big difference. When you go into a street on a light night, people are out in the gardens where you could speak to them and get the information that you want without having to go to the door. From a safety point of view, a canvasser feels safer when people are out on the street, rather than being out on a dark, miserable winter’s night. This legislation gives the Minister an opportunity to put before Parliament a power to dispense with the canvass, which would be the wrong thing to do. It would not help electoral registration.

Good luck to the Electoral Commission with the work that it has to do but I often wonder about its supervision. Perhaps the Minister can tell us what system is set up to keep in constant contact with the Electoral Commission, not on a day-to-day basis but perhaps on a regular basis, to find out exactly what it is doing and how it is approaching its work. We are leaving with it a very big responsibility, not only of seeing how the electoral register is drafted up, but we are due a referendum in Scotland, and it will be responsible for or helping with the wording of that referendum. We have a responsibility to know whether it is carrying out its job in a professional manner.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

I hope that my noble friend will give consideration to what the noble and learned Lord has suggested in looking at the role of the Electoral Commission. Perhaps my noble friend may be able to give us some reassurance as to what exactly the Government’s attitude is towards ensuring that we have a single, coherent, fair and properly co-ordinated electoral register throughout the United Kingdom for the purpose of carrying out all democratic procedures. I understand, of course, that referenda have been conducted on a different basis in the past, but this Bill, which is an attempt to try and pull this together, is somewhat remiss in not observing the elephant in the room—or, in this case, the elephant that is north of the Tweed.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, in the course of the Committee’s deliberations, it will become clear why I have considerable sympathy with what this group of amendments seeks to achieve. However, it is not right for the Electoral Commission itself to decide whether the arrangements for individual registration have been completed sufficiently well for the new system to be fully introduced and those registered only under the old system to be dropped from the voting registers.

A later amendment, Amendment 58, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Tyler proposes to put this responsibility where it belongs—with Parliament. I accept, however, that many of us would in any event be properly guided by the Electoral Commission’s view as to the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register at the time. What is most clear to me is that we simply cannot proceed with elections and boundary reviews based only on the new individual election registration processes if the voting registers resulting from these new processes are significantly less complete than they are now. I discussed this very point with the former Minister, Mr Mark Harper, who said that he understood the difficulties of trying to conduct elections in 2016 if the voting registers were essentially “not fit for purpose” at that point.

There are of course important elections in 2016 to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and many English local authorities, as well as the next review of Westminster parliamentary constituencies, that should, under the terms of this Bill, be based on voting registers exclusively compiled on the basis of individual voter registration as at 1 December 2015. We cannot be sure at present that the new registration system will be working sufficiently by then. I should therefore be grateful if, later, the Minister could tell the Committee what consultation there has been with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Local Government Association over the major changes to electoral processes that are due to have come into effect in full by May 2016.

The debates on this Bill both in the other place and at Second Reading in your Lordships’ House have shown that the timing of full implementation is a matter of intense controversy.

[Lord Wigley]

Is the noble Lord aware of any consultation that there has been with the National Assembly for Wales on the implications of these changes for the next round of elections?

[Lord Rennard]

That is exactly my point. I am unaware of any consultation on this issue. I have asked a number of times by correspondence what consultation there may have been with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly or the LGA, which is responsible for local elections. It seems that these bodies are unaware that, through the Bill, there will be significant changes to the electoral arrangements for those elections in May 2016. I believe that they should be aware of them and their view should be part of our consideration of this Bill.

As I said, the principle of IER is not really in dispute between the parties. All the parties agree the principle of it, and they agree that a household-based system is insecure, inadequate and leads to inaccuracy. However, the question is how you get from that system to a more secure and more rational alternative without losing from the register lots of people who are legitimately entitled to vote.

In that objective, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and I are all agreed, but the question is: what if we have not achieved our objective by 1 December 2015? I am convinced—and the Electoral Commission warns us of this—that there is a real possibility that we will not have achieved our objectives by 1 December 2015. Furthermore, I am convinced that the possibility of failure will be lessened if we do not in this Bill sign up to full implementation by then, irrespective of what progress is actually made on implementation in the next few years. In other words, a strong signal will be sent to government if they have to make this system work before it is fully implemented. I think that it would be invidious to expect the Electoral Commission, on its own, to push the “go” button on the final parts of the transition to IER. Therefore, to help to ensure that the stated objectives are met, I would prefer to see provision made to permit Parliament effectively to extend the carryover of voters from existing registers for a further period if, in the judgment of Parliament, the register is not in a sufficiently complete state on the basis of individual registrations alone. On that basis, we do not support Amendment 59, as we believe that there is a better, alternative approach, which we will set out when we reach a later group.

Turning briefly to Amendments 1 and 36, I should like to see the Electoral Commission reporting in this way, as it would inform our future debates. However, these reports themselves would be of little value if there were no possibility of Parliament providing for carryover to continue beyond 2015. Likewise, the capacity of Ministers to give guidance to electoral registration officers is of little value if the law says that electors on existing registers in their area should be removed from future registers, even if Parliament is not satisfied that we have been able to get a proper alternative registration system in place.

In due course, I hope that all concerned will accept that Parliament should have the final say on whether we are succeeding sufficiently well in our aims of having an accurate and complete electoral register before we exclude unnecessarily from the voting rolls perhaps several million people who will still be legitimately entitled to vote. We will not be able to make that judgment until we see how the new system is working.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I regret that I was unable to take part on Second Reading, but since that debate the Constitution Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, has issued its own report on the Bill. The report very much echoes some of the points that have just been made by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. Overall, the Constitution Committee sought to impress on today’s Committee that the Government need to do everything possible to ensure that the completeness of the electoral register is matched by its accuracy. Concerns were raised—I know from reading the Second Reading debate—about the way in which the impact might fall heaviest on areas of urban population where, for example, many people in private rented accommodation—ethnic minority people, the young, and so on—might be unnecessarily excluded in the pursuit of the completeness, which might not necessarily reflect the accuracy and vice versa of the new register.

Although I take the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, that there may have been special concerns and reasons in Northern Ireland, it is worth noting that the accuracy of the register fell by nearly 10% when individual registration was first introduced. The other major point that applies to this group of amendments—again I am echoing the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and the concerns raised by the Constitution Committee—was about the necessity not to express many of these important concerns in guidance. The committee was concerned that there should be much greater parliamentary oversight of the introduction of the new register and that these matters should be put in regulations. We felt that for the Secretary of State to be able to determine requirements for exercising the right to vote without effective parliamentary oversight would indeed be constitutionally improper.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rennard]

There is a precise and important point that relates to this amendment. Will the Minister confirm that there is no provision in the Bill if we come to that conclusion that the system is less satisfactory than the present system? We know that the present system is far from satisfactory at about 82% complete. If under the new system IER is only 65% complete and there is no provision in the Bill to deal with that problem then, would it not be better to have some provision so that Parliament could look at the issue rather than just the Government deciding whether to start again with a new Act?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I think I need to take that away as well. If we were to go back to the old system, we would face the risk that we were retaining a much larger number of inaccurate and fraudulent entries in the system. Part of the reason for this Bill is to remove those fraudulent entries.

[Lord Rennard]

I do not wish to sound pedantic in relation to this issue, but it is not a question of going back to the old system rather than using the new one. The amendment that I have tabled for discussion later on is about whether the carryover from the old register needs to be continued for longer. It may be that if we have not succeeded with IER in the way that we hope, we might continue with the carryover for rather longer. That is a decision that Parliament should take at the appropriate time. It cannot take it during the passage of this Bill because we will not see how the data matching and data mining pilots have succeeded. We will not have that information, but we should have that information, and decide on it, before full implementation, by which I mean ending the carryover.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I recognise that we shall come back to some of the issues that have been raised when we come to debate the noble Lord’s Amendment 58, which we have almost been debating. The question of a further carryover at that point will unavoidably involve carrying over a large number of names about which we will all have less and less confidence because they will be people with whom electoral administrators have had no contact for the previous two years, in spite of considerable efforts—letters and attempts to canvass—to check their data. The Government would be very reluctant to carry over further than that, but I take the degree of concern that we hear around the Chamber seriously, and we will consider that further. Having offered these responses to a very wide-ranging debate, which has touched on almost everything from Scottish devolution to central registration and the authoritarian system of identity cards that the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, loves so much and a little on the computer revolution, I ask the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment. We will continue to discuss many of these very important issues as we go through Committee and into Report.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Rennard]

4: Clause 2, page 2, line 32, after “description)” insert “, and must require a registration to an officer to impose a civil penalty (under section 9E of the Representation of the People Act 1983) where a person refuses to give information prescribed in regulations under this section”

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I wish to speak also to Amendments 5, 21 and 22 tabled in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Tyler. These amendments concern the detail of potential civil penalties. From the outset of the consultation on the draft Bill, I argued strongly that the existing legal requirement to fill in a registration form when invited to do so must continue under individual registration.

At the moment, electoral registration forms have something like an 80% response rate. Although that is not as high as we would like, it is a clear indication of the value of the statement on the form that there is a legal requirement to complete it and to return it. The civil penalty is a distinct arrangement for individual registration as opposed to the household inquiry form. In my view, the present criminal offence for failing to fill in a household form is proportionate in that failing to do so can prevent others from having the right to vote. That criminal offence will remain for the household inquiry forms under IER. The civil penalty associated with the follow-up individual registration process should be welcomed by electoral registration officers since it retains a serious sanction for them to use as a last resort when someone fails to fill in an individual registration form, but one that would be less cumbersome than having to initiate a full criminal prosecution.

I am very pleased that the Government have given us the benefit of seeing in draft form the regulations that will govern the operation of the civil penalty. Like all our amendments, Amendments 21 and 22 are there simply to encourage the Minister to look at whether the civil offence of not filling in the form when requested to do so by an electoral registration officer should be one of strict liability; in other words, can not knowing or not understanding that you were supposed to fill it in and return it be a proper defence? I am sceptical that anyone, after a registration officer has gone through all the steps set out in the draft regulations, could not know or understand that there is a legal requirement for them to register. A great deal of time and money could be wasted with people claiming that in fact they did not know or understand.

Ministers have talked about the level of the civil penalty being akin to a parking fine. I see that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, wishes to address that in his Amendments 23 and 29. I suggest that if it is to be like a parking fine, the idea that you can escape it by simply saying that you did not know you were responsible or you did not understand the rules is misplaced. As anyone who has received a parking fine—as I suspect many of us will have done at some point—will know, not understanding or not knowing that you have to pay it is not a defence. If we could all claim ignorance, many more of us would park illegally with impunity. I would be most grateful for the Minister’s comments on that point in his response to Amendments 21 and 22.

Amendment 5 deals with trying to ensure that people are indeed fully aware of the potential fine. If it is made a strict liability matter, as it probably should be, it is clearly even more important that people are informed at every opportunity of the risk of a fine if they do not register. To that end, we believe that this fact must be spelled out on the individual registration form itself. The draft regulations before the House suggest that the prospect of a penalty will be mentioned only in the “invitation to register”, which is effectively a covering letter to the form. Clearly, there is a risk that any covering letter could be set aside in haste and that an elector would not know of the legal requirement to register if it is not printed clearly on the form as well.

Finally, Amendment 4 seeks to equip electoral registration officers with a civil penalty as a means of obtaining necessary information from people when they request it. The Government’s present plans, as I understand them, are for the civil penalty to be imposed only if someone fails after several times of asking to return a form. However, there is a risk that someone may not provide enough information to permit the electoral registration officer to proceed with a registration. The Government’s position is that someone who has not provided enough information should not be subject to criminal prosecution under the present offence of failing to provide information when requested, yet the Bill and the draft regulations do not provide any way for the established alternative to criminal prosecution—the civil penalty—to be used instead. We believe that this needs to be addressed. In tabling all these amendments, we are seeking some reassurances for the record—to see in Hansard—that these issues will be dealt with and remedied in the final version of orders which come before this House.

Commenting briefly on Amendments 23 and 29, I do not personally think that it would be right to put the level of the penalty in the Bill. Clearly, it will need to change from time to time, just as the previous criminal penalty changed many times, from £20, I think, when it was first introduced in 1991 to £50, £400 and then to £1,000 over the years. Since this will change from time to time, I am not sure we should fix it now for ever at £100. However, if the process does work, people will ultimately find that it is simply easier to register than it is to pay any fine. All I would hope in this part of our deliberations is that the Committee will be told the latest government thinking on the level of penalty.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I will address the two amendments in this group in my name and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. They concern the new civil penalty in the Bill, separate from the criminal offence, with, as we have heard, a possible penalty of £1,000. The civil penalty is for failure to co-operate with the electoral registration officer.

It remains a serious civic matter for people to be on the register, not least of course for jury service, for which nearly all are eligible, although not myself and my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer. Having been on the judicial bench—in a small way in my case, as a magistrate—we are I think are excluded from jury service. However, for the vast majority, of course this is the important source for identifying those who will serve on juries. Also, as democrats, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, it is an important right that everyone who has the vote—for which many have fought in the past—is able to exercise that right. They need to be on the register because they need to be able to vote at the moment at which the mood so takes them. Often, that may be only days before an election, when they suddenly want to kick out whoever is there or, on the contrary, maintain the incumbent; or in some way influence the Government or the local authority. However, it is only if they have registered at the appropriate point, rather than a day or so before the election, that their right can be exercised. It is for this reason that it is so important for us to get this registration accurate and complete as early as possible.

We will hear—and already have heard—a lot about the importance of the register being complete, but it behoves all of us to play our part in that by responding to the request for information from an electoral registration officer, so that we can, if eligible, be correctly entered on to the register. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, suggested it could perhaps be done by statutory instrument but the significance of Parliament writing it into law in the Bill and deciding the penalty for failure to comply with this part of our civic responsibility should not be underemphasised. For that reason, Amendment 29 would remove from Schedule 3 the power to determine the amount of the civil penalty by regulation and Amendment 23 would write into the Bill that it should be £100.

The exact amount perhaps need not detain us this afternoon, although it surely should be at the very least the same as a parking ticket, which some in the Committee may find themselves frequently having to pay. We can perhaps discuss the exact amount some other time but surely the principle is that Parliament, with this new system of registration, should fix the amount clearly in the Bill as an indication of the seriousness with which it views registration. That is the point that we want to make.

I shall speak to the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and his birthday compatriot the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. I also wish him a happy birthday, and I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, is not here to pass her wishes on; if she is watching, we can wish her a happy 80th birthday today. I will add emphasis to what has been said about those civil penalties and their use by registration officers. Particularly for the initial use of this brand-new system of registration, it will be important to impress on registration officers the significance and importance of the task that they are undertaking on our behalf, in part so that they communicate this effectively to all those with whom they will have dealings in obtaining and then registering relevant information. If individual electoral registration is to be the success that we all hope for, everyone must play their part. With the penalties being the only real weapon in the hands of those on whom we will depend to produce the register, we must give the EROs the backing to employ civil penalties if need be, and particularly the ability to have the threat of using them to the full.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord has been testing the difference between the Government’s approach and that of my noble friend Lord Rennard—who I think wants to be much fiercer on imposing civil penalties. The Government’s position is that the civil penalty is there as a backstop but should not be used to enforce compulsory registration. It should be very much a means of ensuring that forms are returned, not of insisting that everyone registers. That then takes us over into a different situation which, again, would be a change in the traditional, established relationship between the citizen and the state.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, as I said, the amendments are probing. We seek to continue a dialogue with the Government about the regulations to try to ensure that the system works as well as it should. As we said at the beginning of Committee, we are concerned about what we do if it does not work. Our major concern in considering the Bill is to try to ensure that it does, so the register is accurate and complete.

It is particularly valuable in the new process that the Electoral Commission will be designing the forms for registration, rather than individual registration officers. However, I would still like to press further with the Minister at some point that if those forms are in future to be centrally designed and the Government are laying out in regulations what is required to be on the form, it is important to state on the form the legal requirement that if you do not return this form you could be subject to civil penalty. Thinking in particular about the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Martin, it is clear to me that legislatures at either end of the building are unaware of the existing rules. For example, at the moment, a young man of 20 in, say, Glasgow, is subject to a fine of up to £1,000 if he does not return the form, because if he lives on his own, he is the householder responsible.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I agree, but a young person of 20 acquiring accommodation and, in effect, creating a household, realises that he or she is taking on the responsibility of a householder. That is different from the carefree attitude that a young person of 18 would have in a house where there is mum and dad and the only worry they have is the price of getting out to the disco and making sure that they have a good time. I accept that once a person becomes a householder, they take on a different type of responsibility.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, as someone who became a householder at the age of 17 through my family circumstances, I understand the point about responsibility at a young age, but I do not accept that 18, 19 or 20 year-olds will necessarily be worse off under these arrangements. The fact is that they will no longer necessarily be subject to the £1,000 fine if they are on their own in a household; it will be a civil penalty of much lower value. We have talked about that being akin to a parking fine. The obvious point for the 18, 19 or 20 year-old is that all they have to do is to register to vote and then they will not be subject to the fine. That will be a simple and easy process. In future, they can do it online as well as by returning the form. That should not be difficult, and then they avoid the penalty.

My point is that the form should spell that out so that someone of any age or with any language as their first choice can easily see what are their obligations. Some direction is required on that. Looking further on at Amendment 24, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, I am not sure that they have appreciated that those forms will in future be centrally designed by the Electoral Commission and that it will no longer be the job of the individual 400 or so electoral registration officers to design their own form. That is why I am so keen to ensure that this form follows the best possible practice and to continue discussion with government. We have seen how in Denbighshire, Hounslow and a number of other authorities, that the paperwork has been of great effect in persuading people that they should register, of greater effect than in some other places.

On that note, I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 4 withdrawn.

Parliamentary Constituency Boundaries: Review

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 9th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are a coalition. We have our open disagreements. I recall well the official who said to me last year that it was really rather easier working with this coalition than with the Blair/Brown coalition because we have our disagreements in the open whereas they plotted against each other. When it comes to the vote next year, we will consider our views.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, would the Minister agree that perhaps any further public spending would be better aimed at making sure that some of the millions of people in this country who are entitled to vote but are unable to do so because they are not on the voting register are included in those registers, so they can participate in the democracy of our country, rather than on the Boundary Commission review process, which is now clearly, simply, an academic exercise?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we will be returning to the question of why people resist registering to vote during the Committee stage of the individual electoral registration Bill, and I commend to Members of the House the Electoral Commission study on it, which was published in June.

On how much has been spent, the previous boundaries review cost £13 million. This review was estimated to cost £11.5 million and it is now expected to cost £9 million. Much of the remaining £3.8 million has already been committed, so even if we said “stop” now, the possibility of saving very much money would be small.

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.

Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, the longest debates in which I have taken part in the House since I have been a Member were over what was then called the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I do not intend this afternoon to go over again all the arguments made during those very lengthy debates. However, I recognise that in this short debate we are dealing with some very serious issues. Some of the processes used by the Boundary Commissions are based on the electoral register. It is that issue of the work of Boundary Commissions that I wish to address. Many issues about the completeness and accuracy of the electoral register will be relevant to future parliamentary boundary reviews. This is an opportune time to concentrate on these issues, in advance of our serious consideration of the legislation to implement individual electoral registration.

Looking back to those debates 18 months ago, it is significant that at the time, we were assured by Ministers that the electoral register was estimated to be about 92% complete. However, the recent research referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain—research conducted by the Electoral Commission and paid for by the Cabinet Office—suggests that it may only be 85% complete. That is an average figure, suggesting that there may be many parts of the country where the electoral register is significantly less than 85% complete.

We recently debated in Grand Committee another round of orders for data-matching pilots. During that debate, my noble friend Lord Wallace, who I am pleased to see in his place today, assured us that the aim of the implementation of individual electoral registration was at least as much the completeness of the electoral register as its accuracy. The success of those data-matching pilots will be crucial to the successful implementation of individual electoral registration, on which boundary reviews will be based in future. There has been successful progress on the implementation of individual electoral registration since the publication of the original White Paper.

In particular, it is now accepted that we must retain the principle that it is a legal requirement to comply with the electoral registration process. The legal requirement for the household registration form will be retained and compliance will remain, as now, subject to a fine of up to £1,000. In the debate on 12 January initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, I outlined at col. 238 the wide variety of wording on existing electoral registration forms, but what they all had in common was wording about returning the form being a legal requirement. What was inconsistent in those forms and must, I believe, be made common to all forms in future is a statement that not complying with the process could make you liable to a fine of up to £1,000. That statement must be very clear on all such forms in future. Can the Minister confirm, during this debate if possible, that when the household registration forms are standardised in future and under the direction of the Electoral Commission, they will all clearly state that returning them is a legal requirement and that not complying with the process is subject to a fine of up to £1,000?

We simply cannot allow different local authorities to adopt a pick and mix approach to the fundamentals of electoral registration processes, as these provide the database for our national elections, not only for electing Members of the House of Commons—and, perhaps one day, Members of your Lordships’ House—but for the European Parliament elections, police and crime commissioner elections, the Scottish Parliament elections, the London Assembly elections, the Welsh Assembly elections, et cetera. The process is not just for elections to that particular council, so uniformly high standards must be applied to the process in each local authority area. We need above all to avoid the situation in the United States, where those who are deliberately campaigning to reduce the level of electoral registration are able to adopt different measures in different states, aimed at denying certain groups the opportunity to vote in order to manipulate the outcome unfairly. I would call that cheating in the electoral process.

The principle of consistent best practice must also apply to the new form for individual registration. There will in future be a civil penalty applicable for those who do not return the individual forms to complete the registration process, but the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee in the House of Commons was not right to suggest that this fixed penalty should be £500. For a fixed penalty that would apply irrespective of whether failure to respond is simply a matter of forgetfulness or one of deliberately trying to avoid being registered to vote, £500 is in my opinion too high a fixed penalty. Registering to vote, and in the same process registering for jury service, is a significant civic duty and I am glad that it will remain a legal obligation. However, the penalty should be more in line with the level of fixed penalties for parking offences. I know how much it annoys me when I occasionally get a parking ticket.

Repeated failures to register should also be subject to repeat penalties. It would not be right if the fixed penalty could be used as a sort of one-off fee to avoid registration. I hope that anyone subject to the fixed penalty would subsequently register and thereby avoid further penalties. Perhaps the Minister can explain how it is envisaged that this process will work. If someone pays a fixed penalty and still fails to register, I assume that they would be subject to further penalties, just as a car parked illegally may acquire further parking tickets. However, would someone be able to avoid further penalties or even receive a discount on the penalty if they subsequently registered?

We will soon be considering the details of electoral registration in this House. In our consideration, we must look carefully not only at how the process will improve the register’s accuracy but at the fundamental issue of completeness, which is so relevant to the Boundary Commission processes. In Northern Ireland, the introduction of individual electoral registration has, by and large, been deemed a success. It has required national insurance numbers but I remain to be convinced that a signature should not be acceptable if national insurance numbers cannot be found. There are of course a small number of eligible voters to whom national insurance numbers have not been issued, as well as the difficulty some people have in finding their national insurance number. I hope, therefore, that the Minister, in consideration with his colleagues, might consider the use of signatures as an alternative to national insurance numbers, as we are bound to return to this issue. We should all want to ensure that everyone entitled to be on the electoral register is included on it, while respecting the fact that only those people entitled to be on that register should be on it.

I have no doubt that, during this debate, other noble Lords will want to talk about particular recommendations of the Boundary Commissions, about the number of MPs in the context of whether or not your Lordships’ House is reformed, and about how the Boundary Commissions are conducting their work. However, on the general issue I understand the long-standing case—originally put forward by the Chartists—that MPs should represent constituencies of roughly equal size. I hope that noble Lords will, by and large, respect that, as an important principle, MPs should have roughly the same number of electors.

We need to see the final recommendations of the commissions before we can say with certainty that the margin of variation allowed is too small for the creation of sensible constituencies, but the evidence of the initial proposals is that that may well be the case. We do not yet know exactly what the final boundary shapes will be, but we can tell, from some psephological analysis, that Conservative hopes and Labour fears about the current review may have been greatly exaggerated. Some estimates suggest that the advantage to the Conservatives may be to the tune of only 10 or so seats, if they receive the same level of support as in 2010. It seems that, for the Conservatives, the boundary changes could deliver a relatively small haul for a big upheaval in the nature of our constituencies.

Those who are concerned about the number of MPs—in particular the balance between the number of Ministers and Back-Benchers—will remember that during those debates 18 months ago, we agreed, following an amendment, that there must be a review of the number of MPs after the next general election. That amendment, which became Section 14 of the Act, provides for a review of the reduction in the number of constituencies. That review must take place before November 2015. It will be an important review and all these issues, neglected in many previous parliamentary Sessions, should be kept under constant review.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order 2012

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 25th June 2012 Grand Committee

With regard to the order before us today, I hope that Committee Members see the merits of this second trial and the benefits that it will have for strengthening our electoral registration system and ensuring that it is complete as well as accurate. I hope that the Committee will approve the order.

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I wonder at the outset whether the Minister might be prepared to make a short statement of principle about the purpose behind the orders. What I want to hear particularly is that the underlying purpose is at least as much about the completeness of the electoral register as it is its accuracy. That will be crucial in approving the direction in which the Government are travelling.

Perhaps I may ask him specifically about the decision not to provide a full regulatory impact assessment of the orders. The Government state that there should be no impact on the private sector, but potentially reducing significantly the completeness of the electoral register could have a big impact there. I know that the credit reference agencies have made a number of representations to the Government on this issue. We think nowadays about the way in which many businesses do business. They do it online over the internet; they provide goods and services to people to addresses that people fill in online. If they are unable to check the accuracy of those addresses, as they generally do on the electoral register, there could be a detrimental impact on business if we fail on the key issue of completeness of the electoral register.

It seems to me that the success of the transition to individual electoral registration will be hugely important for elections post the general election due in May 2015. It will be less important for the election of May 2015 because of the carry-forward provisions, but will be hugely important for elections in future. It will be hugely important to the boundary review process for future boundary reviews—not the present one, based on the current registration process—but for those due to begin on 1 December 2015. Will the Minister confirm that it is crucial to have independent verification of the success of the move towards independent electoral registration, of which these instruments are a part, before it is considered safe to proceed either with elections under the new system or with future boundary reviews?

I have a question on a detail that emerged from the previous pilots which the Minister now suggests will be addressed in future pilots. It was discovered in the initial pilots that quite a few people were eligible to be on the electoral register. The DWP database showed clearly beyond any reasonable doubt that these people were entitled to be on the electoral register, but they were not on it. I understand from the order that in future pilots, if people are entitled to be on the electoral register and it is clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that they should be on it, they will be chased to get them on to it. That would seem to be commendable, but if we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone should be on the register, why should we chase them to get them on to it?

I can see that if we followed models that I have advocated in the past that require a signature as part of the registration process, you could chase these people for a signature. However, if the DWP database has their national insurance number, name and address, and all satisfactory methods show that they should be on the electoral register, why chase them? If they are to be chased, how do we know that they will be chased effectively and consistently? It would be a great shame if, in chasing these people, some individual electoral registration officers sent a very cursory letter and left it at that, while others used best practice and perhaps sent a series of repeat letters or e-mails pointing out the likely future sanctions if people failed to comply with what will be a legal requirement. In making sure that this works effectively, there will probably be a requirement for ring-fenced funding for local authorities to make sure that they do their job in relation to this. I very much look forward to the Government’s and the Electoral Commission’s evaluation of these pilots.