Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 24 March be approved.

Relevant document: 25th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

In many ways I deeply regret that we are coming to this very late in an empty House. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and I agree that this is a very important transition. It is in the interests of all parties that we get this transition to individual registration right. Perhaps—I raise this as a question for the new Session—it might be appropriate before the summer to have, if the Opposition care to suggest it, another debate on where we are and how confident we are that the transition is going ahead.

The Electoral Commission reported in its readiness report published at the end of March that significant progress had been made in preparing for the transition, and that there was no reason to delay the implementation of IER. Since the commission made its assessment, further progress has been made, particularly in the testing of the IT arrangements that will support the new system. Thus, all is going well. From my perspective all is going much better than I thought when I was originally briefed some 18 months ago. IER is set to start in June in England and Wales and in September in Scotland.

The draft instrument for England and Wales before the House today will enable a significant change to help the electoral registration officers—EROs—in two-tier local government areas to make their registers as accurate and complete as possible. The two instruments also make further refinements designed to get IER off to the best possible start. The significant change is that the draft regulations for England and Wales will provide for local data matching in two-tier areas. They will authorise EROs in two-tier local government areas, which are appointed by district councils, to inspect records kept by the county council and to make copies of information contained in them. This will remove the current anomaly that allows EROs in unitary authorities to inspect a wider range of locally held data such as—this is highly relevant to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—lists of school students who are approaching voting age, than their counterparts in two-tier areas.

In addition, the regulations will authorise but not require the authority by which the ERO was appointed, and in two-tier areas the relevant county council, to disclose to the ERO information contained in records held by that authority. This can happen only if an agreement is in place between the authority and the ERO as to the processing of the information. This will put all EROs on an equal footing as regards the right to inspect information. It will also permit, subject to conditions, the disclosure of data by local authorities to EROs in a form suitable for electronic matching against the electoral register. The Cabinet Office ran pilot data-matching schemes in 2013 which indicated that as many as 100,000 eligible voters might be identified through two-tier data matching. I hope that your Lordships will agree that this measure will be very helpful to EROs in getting as many of these additional eligible people as possible on to the electoral register.

I know that there has been some disappointment that this instrument does not do more. I am familiar with the initiative in Northern Ireland to raise registration levels among attainers—that is, 16 and 17 year-olds—in schools. Bite the Ballot has been active in promoting a similar scheme in Great Britain, and I wish to take this opportunity to congratulate its members most sincerely on their efforts. The Northern Ireland initiative has worked well in the Northern Ireland context. That is why we have learnt from the work of Northern Ireland colleagues when considering what to do in Great Britain—but life moves on, and what works well in one place may well not necessarily work so well in another.

There are good reasons why we cannot simply replicate exactly the same approach for Great Britain. For example, the delivery structure in Great Britain is different. There is one single registration service in Northern Ireland as against 363 in Great Britain. Regulations in Northern Ireland enable the chief electoral officer to request post-primary schools to provide him with lists of the names, addresses and dates of birth of pupils. This would be almost impossible to replicate in a place such as London, where pupils at an individual school might come from any or all of London’s 32 boroughs, each with its own ERO, or indeed from local authorities outside the London area. Further, some students may not be British or Commonwealth citizens.

Crucially, we are introducing online registration for the first time. This was not available at the time of the introduction of IER in Northern Ireland, which was therefore required to be based on paper forms that EROs took into schools. We expect online registration to be by far the easiest way for young people to register, and the paper-based approach practised in Northern Ireland would therefore be a step backwards.

I understand, too, that EROs across Great Britain already take proactive measures to encourage young people to register to vote and to promote democratic participation generally. Local authority staff have made visits to schools and colleges to give talks on voter registration and to get young people to fill in registration forms. EROs have facilitated organisations such as the UK Youth Parliament by providing advice and equipment for running youth elections and have organised events such as “political speed dating” and young mayor competitions to encourage interest in democracy and put young people in contact with their elected representatives. Much is being done already on the mainland to encourage young people on to the register.

None the less, the Northern Ireland schools initiative has played an important part in providing the evidence and the business case for developing the Rock Enrol! exercise. Rock Enrol! is a learning resource that is freely available from the Cabinet Office. It gives young people the opportunity to register to vote and allows them to discuss the importance of doing so. The Government have announced that all local authorities in Great Britain, alongside five national organisations, will share £4.2 million in funding to maximise registration. EROs have been encouraged to use this funding to support the delivery of Rock Enrol! in their area in order to ensure that we target attainers effectively as part of our maximising registration work.

Your Lordships will have observed that these regulations do not include any provision for local data sharing in Scotland. This is because the different local government structure in Scotland renders unnecessary a provision for two-tier areas data sharing as drafted for England and Wales. However, the Cabinet Office is consulting EROs and local government bodies in Scotland to establish whether there is any need to make provision for disclosure of information to an ERO by the council which appointed him or her. If there is such a need, it will be included in a suitable future instrument.

I turn now to the provisions for the further refinements that we are making to the IER arrangements. Both sets of regulations will disapply the usual requirements for follow-up actions by the ERO where the ERO has invited a person to register to vote who he or she has reason to believe would, if registered, be registered as a special category elector such as an overseas elector, a person with a service declaration or an elector with an anonymous entry. These are small but important categories. The effect of the current regulations is that EROs are required to take specified steps to encourage applications to register in certain cases. They must send an invitation to register and, where necessary, two reminder letters and a canvasser to the elector’s residence.

There is, of course, some enthusiasm among EROs to be sent to canvass overseas electors in places such as the United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand and Florida, but noble Lords will understand the issue of the costs involved. They will appreciate that these steps can be impractical and/or expensive, and the need for greater sensitivity in the case of anonymously registered voters will often make letters or visits undesirable. I can assure your Lordships that the legislation will not prevent EROs sending invitations to register to special category electors. It will merely change the subsequent actions from a mandatory process to one that will be at the discretion of the ERO.

The Government are working with the Electoral Commission to provide guidance to be issued to EROs in the summer of this year specifically encouraging them to be proactive in carrying out their duty of inviting those whose registration has expired to register. It will reinforce the need to send follow-up reminders to special category electors where the ERO believes that this will be effective.

The Government will introduce further secondary legislation that will require EROs to encourage special category electors to reregister before their registration expires. Under existing regulations, EROs are required to send a reminder to reregister to special category electors, excluding anonymous electors, between two and three months before their registration expires. The Government will amend these regulations to compel EROs to send an additional reminder. This has two advantages over the reminders sent following an invitation to register. First, it will reduce the burden on electors by preventing the need for a completely new application. Secondly, it will reduce both the cost and time burden on EROs by allowing electronic communication of the reminder notice.

The second instrument—the draft regulations for Scotland—also confirms that the date for the introduction of IER in Scotland will be 19 September 2014. The House will have observed that in this respect the regulations amend legislation that was passed quite recently. I ought to explain why that is. We are aware that the combined effect of previous instruments could result in a lack of clarity as to whether the start date for IER in Scotland is 10 June 2014 or 19 September 2014. The Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Commencement No. 5 and Transitory Provisions) Order 2014 clearly sets out that the start date in Scotland is 19 September 2014. The draft regulations for Scotland are intended to minimise any potential for confusion on this important point.

I reassure the House again that we are continuing to work to maximise electoral registration. We are considering running further data-matching pilot schemes, building on the work done in previous years to match electoral registers against data held by public authorities. This will help us see what additional data sets might be able to add to the processes for verifying electors’ details and helping find potentially eligible electors who are not yet registered.

The draft Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014 were laid on 6 May 2014. Should Parliament approve them, the regulations will allow political parties the information they will need to promote IER among electors who are not yet individually registered. This is in response to a request from the political parties that at the end of the 2014 canvass they should be given a specific new list of those electors on the register who have been carried forward but not confirmed or registered under IER. The parties have recently told the Cabinet Office that they remain in favour of such a list and are expecting it to be made available to them. I trust that the House will have the opportunity to consider that instrument in the near future.

I return to the two statutory instruments before your Lordships. Each will, in its own way, play a part in the successful implementation of individual electoral registration in Great Britain. I commend them to the House.

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I am not a Methodist minister and shall be very brief. I support very strongly the comments made by noble Lords about the importance of action in schools. Like them, I have been greatly impressed by the results of the initiative in Northern Ireland. Speaking as a strong unionist, particularly where Northern Ireland is concerned, I would regard it as an absolute tragedy if lessons that could be usefully drawn from that part of our country went by the wayside and here in Great Britain we failed to profit as we might. I hope that my noble friend will consider very carefully that which Northern Ireland might have to teach us in this matter. He is noted for his open-mindedness and there is perhaps merit in a little further consideration of what has happened in Northern Ireland.

He will be unsurprised that I listened with great interest to the comments he made on the implications of these regulations for British subjects living overseas who are eligible to vote here. I gained the strong impression from what he said that the effect of the changes will be to assist the efforts that some of us, including my noble friend Lord Tyler, are encouraging to seek greater registration among British citizens living abroad who are currently eligible to vote. I know my noble friend supports those efforts, too.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their various contributions. I will take all the thoughts back with me. Let me start by saying that we are all concerned about the problems of low registration. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, really talked about two different problems: we are mostly concerned here about problems in getting young people on to the register. There is another problem, which is people who actually do not want to be on it. We have all been through some of the estates where a large number of people are not on the register and quite strongly tell you—as they put their bull terrier on to you—that they do not want to be on it. That is of course another part of the problem.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I must say that though I may have had various dogs set on me for all sorts of things, it was never so that people would not go on the register.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We recognise that we have a number of problems. My noble friend Lord Tyler referred to the recent audit of political engagement, which showed the level of political disengagement in the United Kingdom. I happened to be having my hair cut when Sky News ran its European poll on levels of trust in political elites. I regret to say that the United Kingdom comes alongside France and only just behind Belgium in the high levels of distrust in all our political elites. We share a common interest in reversing that and political parties have to work on it. The media have to make their own contribution and bear some responsibility for the rising levels of mistrust we have seen in recent years.

The majority of comments have been about how we get young people on to the register and, in the case of Lord Lexden, about overseas voters. I remind noble Lords that the Northern Ireland Schools Initiative does not automatically register pupils. The registration rate for attainers in Northern Ireland currently stands at 66%, not 100%. Students must still remember to bring in their national insurance number on the day the registration officers visit the school and then choose to register by signing the form.

As electoral registration officers and others go round secondary schools in England, Wales and Scotland, they will encourage pupils to register online in the borough in which they live. The two schools closest to Saltaire, Titus Salt and Guiseley, have a mixture of pupils from Leeds and Bradford. That is duplicated across West Yorkshire and, even more so, in London. This is part of the problem, but it will become easier with online registration.

I stress to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, that we are not in the business of permitting electoral registration officers to go into schools. A lot of registration officers have already been going into schools for a long time and we encourage them to do so. The Government are a little more reluctant to make this compulsory. The Rock Enrol! initiative was founded on the basis of the experience of Northern Ireland. The business case for its development and ensuring that we were targeting attainers effectively came out of that as part of our work to maximise registration. EROs have been encouraged to use the funding provided by government for maximising registration to support the delivery of Rock Enrol! in their area.

We all understand that there is a great deal more to do to reverse the level of disengagement among young people and older people. We have failed over many years to produce effective citizenship education in our schools; that is another area to which we need to return. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked whether votes at 16 would help in this regard. Perhaps we need to have that debate. I feel that it would also help if local government were stronger and more local so that people actually knew some of their elected representatives.

At the moment I do not have the recommendations of the Electoral Commission on this; I will write to the noble Lord as soon as I discover what they are. However, we are encouraging EROs to work on this and we are providing funding. Two of the five organisations to which we have provided specific funding—UK Youth and the Scottish Youth Parliament—specifically focus on this area. That will help us as we go forward. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, suggested, making sure that young people know something about the political process is part of a wider problem on which successive Governments have not done enough over the past 25 years.

I turn to the issue, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, of overseas voters and how to encourage them. I have learnt, over the past few months, that the number of overseas voters follows a cyclical pattern. It rises in the run-up to a general election and falls off again immediately afterwards. This is completely understandable. Perhaps we may hope that the fixed date of next year’s general election will encourage a larger rise. It was more than 32,000 at the 2010 election. We are working on this by putting advertisements on a number of websites to encourage those living abroad to think about registering. We have made it easier for them to register by reducing the number of documents they have to provide, and we support the efforts that others are making in this respect.

The Government do not think that we can do this on our own. We are working with Bite the Ballot and other voluntary organisations. We are encouraging political parties to do their bit. The other regulation I mentioned takes us further down the road. I assure noble Lords that although we have not entirely duplicated the Northern Ireland Schools Initiative, the Rock Enrol! initiative draws on it. Electoral registration officers on the mainland are already doing the work that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, would like them to do. The Government will follow that, and we hope that the outcome will be registration at least as high as in Northern Ireland. I repeat that there, sadly, it is only two-thirds. We will do our best to hit that target.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Tyler, Lord Roberts and Lord Lexden, who made excellent points. I agree almost entirely with what they said. I found some of the Minister’s response a bit unconvincing, and I think we will be returning to this many more times.

The point I found most unconvincing was about the one electoral registration officer in Northern Ireland, where, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, it works fine. The idea that the more than 300 EROs in England and Wales and the Electoral Management Board in Scotland will not know their local college and school and so could not possibly do it right is just nonsense. We hear lots from the Government about localism and all sorts of things.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is not the point. Of course, we all know our local college and school. The problem is that you cannot go into a school with a set of forms and encourage young people to fill them in because they do not all live in the same authority. Particularly in London boroughs, you are very often dealing with pupils from a number of different authorities, so if one were to do it on paper, that would be extremely complicated. That is why I stressed that the move to online registration gives us a much easier way of coping with this diversity of electoral authorities.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I am still not very convinced. Luckily the Electoral Commission now produces standard forms. I think the Minister may need to go back and reflect on that a bit more in government. That is not a credible argument.

I am very tempted to test the opinion of the House on this, but at this time it is probably not worth me doing so. I assure the Minister that I will come back and test it on a future date. I hope he will come back with a few more convincing arguments than those tonight. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.