Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

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.

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[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.

Electoral Registration Data Schemes (No. 2) Order 2012

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

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.

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[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

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[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.

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[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—

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[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 ---

[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.

Parliamentary Constituency Boundaries: Review

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

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 Register

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their response to the recent Electoral Commission report on the accuracy of the electoral register.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have funded research by the Electoral Commission to discover how deep the problems with the existing system are. It shows that the register has become significantly less complete during the past 10 years. The register is around 85 per cent accurate and, as of December 2010, was 85 to 87 per cent complete, with around 6 million electors missing from the register compared to an estimated 3.5 million in 2000. The data show that the current system is not as good as many people thought it was. These findings show that now, more than ever, it is important that we take steps to improve registration rates as part of the move to individual registration. This includes looking at how we can most effectively reach those groups most likely to be missing from the register.

[Lord Rennard]

Does the Minister agree that we need talks between all the parties, the Electoral Commission and others so that we have confidence that we are handling the transition to individual voter registration in such a way as to ensure that many more people are not missing from the voter register in future? Given the consensus shown in this House in last Thursday’s debate, does he agree that the sanctions which currently apply to households and make most of them conform with the process should continue to apply to individuals?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, my noble friend asks several questions. We value the independence of the Electoral Commission as an umpire for this system. We recognise that the integrity of the system depends on the trust and confidence of all parties involved. We noted the calls from around the House, including from the noble Lord, Lord Wills, last Thursday, for a new all-party group to ensure that confidence is maintained. I have fed that in to fellow Ministers.