Representation of the People (Electoral Registration Data Schemes) Regulations 2011

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 7th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I declare that I am an electoral commissioner, having joined the commission on 1 October last year. I fully support the thrust of the commission’s views on these important statutory instruments.

I am sure that all noble Lords want completeness and accuracy of electoral registers. We want confidence in our democracy and our electoral system. We want confidence that you will be able to vote if you want to and if you are eligible. We want confidence in those who have been elected to serve at all levels of government.

It is important that clear and reliable evidence on data matching is produced and that the evidence is robustly assessed. It is particularly important that this assessment is done carefully and represents fully what can be achieved, not least because data matching is envisaged as the primary method of ensuring the continued completeness of individual registration in 2014-15. I should welcome a response from the noble Lord, Lord McNally, on that specific point and on the commission’s concern that the timing of the schemes will coincide with the annual canvass of electors. It is important that there is clarity about the design of the data-matching schemes, so that the impact and any follow-up activity can be demonstrated beyond what the annual canvass activity would normally achieve.

Can the noble Lord give any further information on the agreement to process the data? It is particularly important that personal data are handled carefully and are protected. The commission has specifically recommended that the approach to the delivery of each pilot area should also form part of any written agreement, so that the commission can fully evaluate each scheme.

Finally, the noble Lord will be aware that the commission is required to produce an evaluation report on the operation of the scheme by 1 March 2012. To achieve this, it will be important that EROs are able to provide the commission at agreed intervals during the schemes’ operation with the information needed. Clarity about the design and delivery of each scheme will ensure that the commission is able to undertake its statutory evaluation effectively and that the results can inform future policy development on electoral registration. I am of course happy for the noble Lord to write to me to clarify a number of these points.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, because I know that he shares the commitment that we have on all sides of the House to make the electoral register as comprehensive and accurate as we can.

In the debates earlier this year on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, there was a great deal of discussion about under-registration. That was not the first time that the issue was raised. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, gave a great deal of attention to this in the previous Government. I recall that on a number of occasions in Grand Committee on the Political Parties and Elections Bill we had considerable discussions about the right momentum and the right progress needed to improve the level of registration. On a number of occasions, previous Administrations—like the present Government—have looked at ways in which data matching could assist this purpose.

It is important to note that there was an improvement during the calendar year 2010; in the last few days there have been some interesting improvements, too, which I notice that colleagues on the other side of the House have also seen. The context of that was a very exciting general election at which, for the first time in some people’s political memory, it looked as though the outcome was not certain. In those circumstances, there was an increase, particularly—and this is encouraging—among the younger age group, which notoriously in the recent past has not registered. We should take encouragement from the fact that, if we can make politics more interesting and outcomes more indeterminate, we can increase registration. It is not only a mechanical operation but a political one to get as many of our fellow citizens engaged as possible.

The integrity of the register is a question of making sure that those who should be on are on and that those who should not be on, or are there in duplicate, are not on. Therefore, accuracy and integrity are the same thing.

The PPE Act, as the Bill became, set fair and square registration objectives. They are,

“to secure, so far as reasonably practicable—(a) that persons who are entitled to be registered in a register are registered in it, (b) that persons who are not entitled to be registered in a register are not registered in it, and (c) that none of the information relating to a registered person that appears in a register or other record kept by the officer is false”.

Obviously, the instruments that are before the Committee today seek to build on that responsibility, which lies not only on the Government but on all of us. I appreciate the clarity with which my noble friend introduced the instruments, which I welcome.

Those objectives are clearly uncontroversial and it is a matter of some puzzlement to our fellow citizens that sometimes the electoral register seems to be totally unrelated to the other information that has been gathered on behalf of local or central government. They find it peculiar; they think that we are all the same thing. They think that Parliament and the Government are the same thing, let alone local authorities and other parts of the state system. They think that we are all part of the same bureaucracy. For example, those who are accused of filing a housing benefit form inaccurately will often cite the presence of all members of their household on the electoral register as a necessary and understandable defence. Who can blame them? They think that that is an official document and therefore can be quoted as such.

Those kinds of situations raise the question of whether the flow of information from government departments into councils will be a two-way process. Will it work in both directions? The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions—this is in the order—might give information on the DWP’s database to the electoral registration officer in Blackpool, but will the DWP then use the comparison data to identify potential fraud on its own books? I do not expect my noble friend to answer on behalf of the other department this afternoon, but I think that this is a subject where our fellow citizens would genuinely like to know whether there is an answer.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords—

[Lord Wills]

I thought that someone would challenge me on this and I am delighted to give way to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler.

[Lord Tyler]

I do not wish to challenge that. I want to draw the noble Lord’s attention to the fact—he is a very fair man—that what he has just said about individual registration and what he said previously about the fact that his Administration failed to bring forward these instruments after the PPE Act in 2009 are in direct contradiction. If it is so vital to improve data sharing so that the register can be more effective and more accurate and so that its integrity can be improved to enable us to move further and faster on individual registration, why did his Administration not bring forward these instruments immediately after the PPE Act?

[Lord Wills]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. He is fully aware that we are talking about a matter of months. We considered all the advice that we received and we consulted widely. As the noble Lord has raised this point, it is worth reminding the Committee that, under the previous Government, the Front Benches of both the party of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, including the Minister, and the Conservative Party agreed that the timeframe that was necessary to bring in individual registration could not be rushed. Therefore, we set a date of 2015. Everyone agreed with all the expert analysis that that time was needed to achieve a comprehensive and accurate register. That is the reason for the timeframe. There is no good reason for bringing this forward in the way that the Government propose—none.

We will return to these issues in due course, but I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who is also a fair man, did not in his remarks pay credit to the Electoral Commission for the work that it did in improving registration rates in the run-up to the election. He may well be right that it was an interesting general election and that that motivated more people to register and, in some cases, even to vote. However, it was also the case that the Electoral Commission did first-rate work in targeting particularly hard-to-reach groups—groups that are traditionally under-registered—and achieved considerable success. This will give us all hope and the commission deserves credit for that.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, should have given the previous Government some credit for the measures that they put in place and implemented to drive up rates of registration. The encouraging figures that we have seen recently owe at least something to the work that we did in government. I hope that he is nodding in agreement with this. I am happy to give way to him so that he can put it on the record.

[Lord Tyler]

I give credit to all who can improve registration, but the noble Lord is again undermining his own case. If registration has improved over the past 12 or 24 months, the circumstances that he described of moving towards individual registration could also be accelerated.

[Lord Wills]

I am delighted that the noble Lord has made that point. We set up a process under which there would be an independent assessment of whether the register was comprehensive and accurate—not a guess by Ministers or politicians but an accurate independent assessment. As the noble Lord is aware, under the legislation the Electoral Commission has to report annually to Parliament on progress. Let us see what it says and not rush ahead before we have received such assessments, which are unlikely to show that. I do not say that they will not show it and, if they do, obviously this can be revisited. We put in the requirement for those annual reports to Parliament so that it could make that judgment on the basis of independent evidence and not on the basis of a ministerial whim. When the noble Lord’s party was in opposition, it was very much against that kind of executive whim. I hope that we will see that antagonism to arbitrary action by the state exemplified in its opposition to this legislation.

[Lord Tyler]

I am sorry, but we did not support the timescale that the noble Lord is now describing. In this very Room in Committee, my noble friend Lord Rennard and I argued that we surely could be in a position to accelerate the process in time for an expected election at some point in 2014-15.

[Lord Wills]

With all due respect to the noble Lord, we have to make that judgment on the basis of evidence, but the evidence is not there at the moment. I tried hard in government to put in further measures to improve registration, but for various reasons I was not able to get them all through. I want to know what this Government are doing to bring in new measures over and above what we brought in. That was my first question to the Minister. I have not seen any evidence that this Government are doing any more than the previous Government did, although I am happy to be proved wrong. The improvement of registration rates is vital for the health of our democracy.

The point that I was making, which the noble Lord overlooked, was that Parliament will have an opportunity annually to assess progress towards a comprehensive and accurate register. My concern is not about the speed of individual registration but that it should happen only when the register is comprehensive and accurate. The noble Lord seems to be saying that it should just be done whenever Ministers feel like it. That is the point of disagreement between us. If a comprehensive and accurate register, assessed independently by the Electoral Commission, can be achieved earlier than 2015, that is fine, but all the evidence is that it will not be. If it can be done, then I agree with the noble Lord that we can bring in individual registration sooner, but to rush ahead before the register is comprehensive and accurate will be very damaging. It will be damaging to the register and to the health of our democracy, because it is so transparently partisan to so many of us.

We do not see this as a benign oversight by the Government; we see it as another example of a Government trying to fix the system in their own electoral interest. I know that many people will just shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, that’s what politicians always do. What do you expect?”, but we and this Government really should not behave like that. That is why this matter is so important. It may sound like a technical issue to many people out there but it is not; it is about the integrity of the whole system. I hope that when we get to debate these measures we will hear the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, engage with these issues with his customary rigour, fairness and belief in the integrity of the system. He may come to the point where he is persuaded to vote against his Government on this measure because, in my view, that is what he should do.

[Lord Tyler]

The noble Lord is eloquent, but perhaps I may ask him to confirm one thing before he completely rewrites the history of the previous Administration. Am I right in thinking that the Electoral Commission recommended a staged move towards individual registration in 2003? Why did it take so long for him and his colleagues to get round to doing anything about it if it is as important as he says that it is?

[Lord Wills]

I agree. This was a particularly intractable problem, which Governments have looked at and tried to solve over a very long period. We were not in power for the whole of the past 50 years. Other Governments were in power and they, too, did nothing about moving towards individual registration. We tried to move towards it. The problem was that, every time we looked at achieving the desirable good of individual registration, we saw the problems with the register. We took necessary and important steps to improve the register, but I admit that they were not sufficient. I accept that and the noble Lord is right to criticise us for it. However, you cannot try to achieve one desirable good at the risk of creating what I would see as a greater ill, which is damaging a flawed register even more than it is already damaged.

It was not an easy process, but we found a way to do that. It took a huge amount of effort and negotiation with all sides, including the Electoral Commission, which had to be satisfied that it was proper. We found a balance by coupling the two processes. We coupled the improvement of the register so that it became comprehensive and accurate with individual registration. That, we hoped, would put pressure on everyone to drive up registration rates and move within a reasonable timeframe—and 2015 really is a reasonable timeframe; this is not long-grass territory. Therefore, we moved towards individual registration within a reasonable timeframe and, at the same time, tried to ensure that the register was not damaged, or, to be precise, damaged more than it was already.

I hope that the noble Lord will accept that that is a reasonable point of view. We have to be careful with this. I know that the Minister has not tried to do so, but it is wrong to claim—I am hearing this among the background noises—that these desirable and worthwhile measures that he has brought before us today, for which we are all grateful, on their own justify the partisan rush to individual registration. For all their merits, they do not.