Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Maxton

Wednesday 23rd January 2013 Lords Chamber

[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.