Representation of the People (Annual Canvass) (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2019 Lords Chamber

On the issue of principle, will the Minister confirm that the right to vote is not something that should require an opt-in principle but is a right that should be afforded automatically? The change in methodology for the annual canvass is said to result in a saving of £20 million per year. Can the Minister confirm that this sum will in future be reinvested in helping to ensure that as many as possible of the 9 million people who are unregistered, or incorrectly registered, will be included and enabled to vote in future?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as someone who was involved with the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013. I remember the discussions with the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and others within the Government about the change from household to individual electoral registration; and the frustrating discussions we had then about data matching and a wider modelling of individual data held in the Government’s hands, which would have made this all a great deal easier. When the Minister says—six years later—that we are bringing electoral registration into the 21st century, that is a bit generous. We are bringing a little more modernisation to electoral registration but it is not that modern yet, compared to a number of other Governments who are now beginning to bring data together.

I entirely agree with paragraph 7.2 of this dense document, which says:

“In its current form, the annual canvass … is heavily paper based, inefficient and outdated, leaving little scope for digital innovation”.


This modest change does not take us very far down the road towards digital innovation.

I strongly agree with my noble friend Lord Rennard that we have to move towards an automatic system for voter registration for all citizens. I recognise, and the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, would probably agree, that in changing the system the Conservatives are more concerned with ensuring accuracy and the Liberal Democrats are—as I suspect the Labour Party also is—more concerned with ensuring that we also get completeness. The gap between those we know are eligible to vote and those on the register is a real problem and a scandal. We all know of the problems in the United States between a right-wing Republican Party which does its best to limit the number of people on the register and the Democrats, who are much more concerned with completeness. We do not want to go further down that road in this country.

I am impressed by the way that in a number of other countries—for example, Estonia—digitisation and the use of government digital data has taken them a good deal further towards providing a unique identifying number for individual citizens. It is a means of access to the data which government hold on you; we in this country have so far failed on that. The verification proposals have not been very successful, after bringing in Experian and a number of other private companies. This is something that we should look at in the next Parliament. Indeed, some of us ought to propose an ad hoc Lords committee, precisely on this. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, and I might then return to the subject on which we battled with a number of people some years ago.

We have seen with the Windrush scandal, and may see again on the question of settled status for EU citizens, that people for whom various government agencies must have held data were unable to demonstrate that they had certain rights and had lived here for a number of years. There are various obstacles as to why the Government do not put that data together: they are legal and administrative, and there is sometimes rivalry between government departments. The move towards a unique identifying number, which is far from the old debate that we used to have on ID cards, would then feed back into making sure that every citizen is automatically on the electoral register. That would take us, at last, into the 21st century—25 years too late by then, probably.

This also links into the question of voting age. I have been converted to supporting a voting age of 16, partly because it would bring young people into the system when they are still at school. The noble Baroness, Lady Finn, will remember the remark that people would make as we debated this. We were told that young people in their 20s did not register for anything: they forgot to register for their doctor and did not register for a whole range of things. That left them, particularly young men, outside the system in which government knew who and where they were. That is unfortunate. If we move to a voting age of 16, young people will go on the register, and will have to be taught about citizenship while they are still at school—another scandal which we need to resolve. The idea that all British citizens have certain automatic rights and obligations will be strengthened.

I therefore give a lukewarm welcome to this mild move. It takes us a little further forward, but it does not take us forward far enough. When some of us suggest in the next Parliament that we should look at the broader question of the collection and maintenance of government data, and individual access to it for each citizen, I hope that it will have a warm welcome in this House.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I should first declare an interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association, as it is local authorities which do lots of the work here. I support a review of the current model of the annual canvass of electors and the aim of making it easier and cheaper to administer. That is important at a time when local authority budgets are squeezed but, like the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, I am a little concerned that this provision has come here very quickly at the end of a Parliament. I would have liked a much longer debate and the time to have looked at this more carefully. That said, I would maybe give it a very lukewarm welcome; that is the best you will get out of me today.

My concern is that if we make changes, we should not damage the primary purpose of the canvass, which is of course to get more people on the register and ensure that it is accurate and complete. That is very important. Whatever changes we are making here today, we know that there are maybe seven million, eight million or nine million people who are eligible to vote in our country but who are not registered. We are doing very little about that, but it is an issue. Yes, we want to be streamlined and cost-effective, but we also want to ensure that we are doing the job properly and getting those people registered to vote. My concern is that we risk not getting that right.

The Government’s new model is a hybrid of the models that they have been trying over a number of years. That in itself is a little strange. Can the Minister confirm that the model proposed has been properly tested and that it is not just a case of, “We’ve tested bits of other models and put them all together”? I fear that that is what the Government have done, without actually testing the model.

I am concerned that the pilots have not been enough. We have talked about the 24 local authorities, but are we confident that the number of authorities involved, and their breadth and scale, has been right? What will the impact be on underrepresented groups? The Electoral Commission did a study of the accuracy and completeness of the register. We all know which groups are more likely not to be registered: 71% of people aged 18 to 34 are registered compared with 93% of people over the age of 55; 58% of private renters are registered to vote compared with 91% of homeowners, and 75% of people from black and ethnic-minority backgrounds are registered, whereas the figure is 84% for white ethnic backgrounds. Various key groups are not registered. Will the Minister set out how the new model will ensure that those groups are registered? If it does not do that, it is a complete failure. We know the people who are not registered. What are we going to do to get them on the register? That will be the test of whether the new model works.

I am all in favour of using technology and other methods and moving on from paper-based systems, but the new model has to work. That is what worries me. I agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in this respect.

The regulations get at best a very lukewarm welcome from me. I am concerned generally about where we are. When we get back in the new Parliament—whoever is in government—we need to look at what we do about the millions of people who have the right to exercise their vote but who are not on the register.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I thank the three noble Lords who have taken part in this debate today. I am grateful for their generous, warm—albeit slightly lukewarm—welcome and for not attacking me too much; it is much appreciated.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, asked whether the regulations had been debated in the House of Commons. They were debated at 11.30 am today in the Delegated Legislation Committee; the Minister for the Constitution answered questions on them, and they were approved.

The noble Lords, Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace of Saltaire, asked about automatic registration, which has come up quite often in debates in this House. They probably know what my answer is going to be. We feel that automatic registration is not consistent with the principle of individual responsibility and ownership of registering to vote. There are technical obstacles; for example, no one dataset is currently identified which would allow a registration officer to establish all aspects of eligibility to register to vote, in particular nationality. Moreover, the accuracy of other datasets would also be vital. If the data underpinning any system of automatic registration were not robust, it could lead to multiple or duplicate register entries for the same individual, increasing the risk of electoral fraud.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, to reinforce that point, government actually has all this data, which demonstrates who people are and where they live, but it has not yet been pulled together. The question that we have to discuss as part of the broader issue of government data management is precisely how, with guarantees on privacy et cetera, that can and should be done. We all know that Google now knows much more about us than do the Government—it probably knows how often I breathe per minute. It is important that, on a cross-party basis in the next Parliament, we discuss how we might take government towards a system which would allow conveniently for automatic registration.