Civil Society and the Democratic Process
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
I agree with the noble Baroness that we need to have another look at the exemptions that Northern Ireland has from certain parts of electoral law, in particular on declaring sources of expenditure. We have a new First Secretary of State, and I am sure he will be interested in taking this matter forward in discussions through the usual channels.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the time may now have come to make sure that transparency of income for campaigning charities is extended? It is striking that there are a number of charities, some Muslim, that the Charity Commission has been concerned about, but right-wing bodies such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Global Warming Policy Foundation do not declare their large donors. It would be useful, appropriate and an extension of democratic transparency if those rules were changed to ensure that donations were necessarily declared in their annual reports.
Lord Young of Cookham
I am grateful to the noble Lord, who piloted the relevant legislation through this House in 2014. I mentioned a moment ago the House of Lords Select Committee on Charities report, Stronger Charities for a Stronger Society. Chapter 3 is on improving governance and accountability. The Government will look at the recommendations in that chapter, to which the noble Lord referred. In due course, we will respond to the Select Committee report. There has been a slight discontinuity because of the general election.
Boundary Reviews 2018
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, the country has already fought two general elections on out-of-date boundaries for reasons that are familiar to the noble Lord. If we followed the noble Lord’s suggestion and started again with a new register, there is a risk of a third general election on boundaries which were set in place in 2000. That would be an affront to democracy.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, fair and equal representation is clearly one of the principles. The principle of a single-member constituency also refers to the importance of place and community. Are we now abandoning that, as seems to have been done in the proposals which we are developing, and following the American system, where boundaries are drawn up entirely according to which party has the advantage in each state and without reference to local communities? Will we still try to hold on to the principle that representation should be based on towns, communities and counties?
Lord Young of Cookham
We are implementing proposals put on the statute book by the then leader of the noble Lord’s party, who was Deputy Prime Minister. He put on the statute book the legislation implementing the reviews which are currently being delivered.
General Election: Voting Rights
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
My noble friend is quite right to draw the attention of the House to the progress that we have made in this Parliament by publishing the Ministerial Statement on 10 October. That Statement made it clear that our plan was to have the policy implemented before the next scheduled parliamentary election. Discussion is now taking place on how to register and who will be eligible to register. I hope that Ministers, if they are indeed returned after the next election, will be able to take this initiative forward.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Government will recall that in the referendum campaign a number of voters living abroad did not receive their postal vote in time to vote. There was much discontent over that. Can the Government make sure that on this occasion, those who wish to vote while living abroad and who are registered are provided with the opportunity to vote in good time?
Lord Young of Cookham
My Lords, I understand that I said earlier that people could vote online; I should have said that they could register online. I am happy to put the record straight.
When people tried to register before the last referendum, there were times when the system could not cope. Since then, steps have been taken not only to increase the capacity of the system but to build in extra safeguards against any attempt at sabotage.
Electoral Fraud
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Young of Cookham
Without getting involved in Sheffield politics, it is certainly inappropriate for postal votes to be handled in that way. As I said in response to an earlier question, that practice is already discouraged in guidance from the Electoral Commission. There have been recommendations that it should be banned for precisely the reason that the noble Lord explained, and the Government are deciding how best to take that forward when legislative opportunities present themselves.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, could the Government ensure that the police take sufficiently seriously examples of electoral malpractice during elections, both local and the 2015 general election? In Bradford, there were a number of allegations during the last campaign across the parties about gatherings of young men outside polling stations and about party workers going into polling stations. The police did not follow these up as fully as perhaps they should have done. Can the Government make sure that the police are aware, for local as well as general elections, that these are serious offences?
Lord Young of Cookham
The noble Lord is quite right. This was one of the problems identified by Sir Eric Pickles in his review; he recommended that there should be a sort of cordon sanitaire around polling stations to prevent the intimidation to which the noble Lord refers. My understanding is that the Electoral Commission has taken that recommendation forward in guidance to stop intimidation in polling stations for the reason that the noble Lord has given.
Northern England: Opportunity and Productivity
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, this is obviously a debate for praising the noble Lord, Lord Prescott; I thought he said it all. Brexit transfers power from Brussels to London. England is the most centralised area in the whole European Union. The devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has to some extent modified the centralisation of power within the UK, but the regions of England have continued to lose out. Cuts to local authority spending now are making that go further. It is a cultural imbalance as much as an economic one. I agree strongly with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leeds that people in London sometimes talk about Yorkshire as if it is part of Africa. When I first came into this House, I remember a Conservative Peeress saying to me, “I have just been to Yorkshire, and parts of it were quite nice”. The media, as we all know, are also heavily concentrated in north or east London and report things that happen in Islington or Tower Hamlets in ways they would never think of reporting if they happened in north Leeds or east Bradford. That is all part of the problem with which we have to deal.
It is therefore an increasing disadvantage that the north, as a whole, lacks an effective political voice within the UK system of government. Scotland has an effective voice on the Barnett formula, the geographical distribution of public funding, and in negotiating with London on the terms of international trade. Wales and Northern Ireland also have good institutionalised positions. But the north lacks anything comparable—certainly not comparable with London government itself. That matters in particular when we have a Conservative Government drawn largely from the Home Counties, with only a handful of Ministers who have any feel for, or sympathy for, the northern counties. Now that George Osborne and William Hague have gone, Greg Clark is the only one among the senior members of the Cabinet who appears to have sympathy and understanding for the industrial towns and cities that contributed so much to Britain’s prosperity over the past 200 years, but which have been left behind since the balance of Britain’s economy shifted, under Margaret Thatcher, from manufacturing to finance. There is a real danger that the north will be squeezed further between London and the devolved national governments as the Conservatives negotiate Brexit.
The State of the North report notes that the English regions, as a number of noble Lords have said, are significantly more dependent on trade with Europe than London itself. Yorkshire trades with the continent. Hull and the other Humber ports depend on handling trade with the continent. Two-thirds of Yorkshire’s food exports go to the European continent, eased by the rules of the single market and protected by the registration of regional denominations by the EU. Some of our producers are just beginning to wake up to the fear that they might lose that. The idea that food can be traded freely without international regulation is absurd. Food goes off, and dirty processes on food spread disease, so there has to be international regulation, and European regulation is some of the best. European regional funding flows into the economically weaker parts of Yorkshire, redistributing funds that a southern-dominated Conservative Government in London might be reluctant to redistribute to the north within a purely national framework.
Previous State of the North reports have detailed the low levels of investment in infrastructure in the north, in transport in particular, as noble Lords have said. I have been using the trains across the Pennines since I first taught in Manchester in 1967, and some of the rolling stock has not changed since then. The speed has hardly improved, either. The previous Labour Government, amazingly, neglected the north’s infrastructure, even cancelling tram networks in Liverpool and Leeds when plans were well advanced. It is not clear from recent announcements whether the east-west rail corridor from Oxford to Cambridge will now carry a higher priority for the Government than northern Crossrail, which is vital to realising the concept of a northern powerhouse.
The concept of a northern powerhouse, as the previous year’s report from IPPR North said, is itself difficult. The 2015 report said:
“The government has excelled in being largely unspecific as to what exactly the northern powerhouse is”.
That represents a lot of the cynicism in the north as to whether the northern powerhouse concept is merely rhetoric or is actually going to lead to money being redistributed. When George Osborne appeared with a number of Chinese investors alongside him, to suggest that perhaps the Chinese could pay for the northern powerhouse rather than the British taxpayer, our cynicism increased.
The north of England has been left behind by successive Governments. The rhetoric of a northern powerhouse was a welcome sign that things might change, but we have not seen the money yet. Canvassing for the referendum in June, I was painfully aware that in the former council estates of West Yorkshire, people planned to vote against London as much as against Brussels, and against politicians as much as against bankers. Head teachers tell me that school budgets are being squeezed. Two head teachers in Bradford told me that they fear they might go bankrupt in the next two or three years, as flat funding comes up against increasing salaries for their teachers.
Councillors tell me that local services are in danger of disappearing as cuts get deeper. Companies recruit directly from eastern Europe because, they say, they cannot find local workers with the skills or the motivation that they are looking for. Extra rounds of spending cuts and the likely downturn that will accompany a hard Brexit will worsen the situation across the north, so I strongly support the message of this IPPR document, which says that we need a more effective voice for the north to rebalance the British economy and rebalance the political system of the UK.
I stress the fiscal redistribution dimension of this because we have not talked much in British politics about the imbalance of funding for local authorities across the UK as a whole. The Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish now bargain with the Government about the balance of income and expenditure. The rest of us do not have a chance to do so. It is extremely important that we now begin to bring into the open the argument about how far rebalancing the economy allows us also to shift funds from the richer areas of the country to the north. The noble Lord, Lord Mawson, talked about a dependency culture, but in the estates of north Bradford, which I know that he knows well, the sense of hopelessness is partly because the local authority cannot do anything for you either. Children’s services, social services and so forth have been cut, so people do not see their local authority and they feel alienated from the entire political system.
Education is also a tremendous problem. I have seen figures that suggest that by the time children enter reception class at school in large parts of Bradford and Leeds they are already a long way behind their counterparts in London. I am conscious that FE colleges in the north are also being cut. As a Latvian cheerfully said to me when I canvassed him during the referendum, “The one good thing about Brexit will be that you will have to go on depending on people like me because you aren’t going to find people to build houses within Britain”. The supply is not there. There are not enough places. Building companies in Yorkshire, I was told some weeks ago, want to carry on recruiting directly from eastern Europe because they do not have the confidence to set up the sort of training schemes to train people who are less well motivated. In Bradford, the one training scheme that I am aware of was oversupplied in terms of applicants for its building apprenticeships by 100% or more.
I have one final comment. Depending entirely on FDI is not the answer for the region. We need local economic leadership, which means encouraging local entrepreneurs and local companies. Allowing those local companies as they grow to be taken over by foreign multinationals does not provide us with local incentives and local leadership—everything that we need. Banks, centralised in London as they are, also need to put money into the region. We need an institutionalised presence for the north in the process of Brexit, but we also need a stronger voice for the north in the British political system as a whole.
Public Contracts: Conflicts of Interest
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
As long as the Ministerial Code is closely adhered to, along with the regulations, everything should be in order as far as appointments are concerned.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister recognise that the distrust of public service that public interest economics has left many Conservatives feeling has led to an overdependence on outside consultants and interlocking bodies, to which successive Governments have paid a great deal of money over the last few years? The worry that this Question reflects is exactly about the extent to which overdependence on outside consultants, who have their own self-interests to protect and defend, needs much greater examination than it currently gets.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
Again, with the regulations and the code of practice this should work well and all the boxes are ticked. We want to make sure that this Government are successful in public procurement and to that end the best way is to make sure that companies adhere to the regulations and the code of practice so that they can move forward. We must make sure that we are helping industries in this country get involved in public procurement.
Party Funding Reform
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have for further reform to party funding.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, party funding reform is rather like Lords reform: we come back to it every other year, or at least once every Parliament; we possibly get round to setting up a working group; the parties fail to agree; we go away and significant change is rarely made. I note that the last debate on the matter in this House came after the breakdown of cross-party talks in late 2013, and I wound up on behalf of the Government after the coalition parties had failed to come to an agreement between themselves.
The reasons for returning to the subject are very clear. The first is the funding of the referendum campaign, which had a number of troubling aspects. According to the report last month from Transparency International, more than half the total funding to both sides in the referendum campaign came from 10 sources, both individuals and corporations. Indeed, 95% of the funding came from as few as 100 donors. That is not exactly popular sovereignty or popular participation among the masses.
The absence of limits to cap individual donations is clearly becoming an acute problem in our democracy, and there have been other recent developments in the funding of politics. In the 2015 election, Conservative spending was far higher than that of any other party, and some of it was on the outside edge of current rules, as we can see from the number of Electoral Commission investigations at this time. The current situation builds in a structural advantage for the Conservative Party in access to finance and pushes other parties into chasing major donors, wherever they can find them, in order to compete. There has been a substantial increase in income from large donors. When writing about the resignation of the noble Lord, Lord Feldman, from the chairmanship of the Conservative Party, the Financial Times estimated that the Conservatives had raised £250 million under his chairmanship.
Then there is the question of more professional techniques—what the Russians call political technologies —which also cost a good deal more money: for example, computerised analyses using sophisticated search engines that allow personalised messages to be sent to assorted individual voters from central party organisations, and focus groups to refine messages. These techniques also mean that, within the parties, there is a shift in the balance of influence from local parties to the centre, which I think has caused a certain amount of discontent over the past few years in the Conservative Party, as well as in others. The competition among parties in this way means that there is a harder drive for funds. There has also been a rise in corporate donations to political parties, which the Transparency International report estimates as £125 million over the past decade.
We have also had the Trade Union Bill of 2015, on which a Lords committee reported in March. We still await the Government response to that, and perhaps the noble Baroness will be able to tell us something about that as she winds up the debate. I intend to leave further comment on that to my noble friend Lord Tyler, who was a member of the committee.
The continuing globalisation of wealth and the rise of the super-rich, living largely offshore, means there is concern in Britain and other countries about foreign donors and foreign donations—that is, from wealthy foreigners within the UK and from the British abroad, not on UK electoral register, who have been living in tax havens for a very long time. There is particular concern about the super-rich living in London from autocratic states such as Russia and the Gulf monarchies.
There are also concerns related to this House: honours for donors, from all parties. This is a recurring theme. Most famously, my father once met my party leader of many years ago, Lloyd George, so I can “almost” say that Lloyd George knew my father—there were several thousand other people in the room at the time, but never mind. More recently, I recall the investigations of 2006 and 2007. The Transparency International report identified that 28 Peers created over the past 10 years were created primarily for their donations to particular political parties—I stress that that relates not just to one party.
The popular and press assumption is that donations buy influence. They certainly buy access. The Conservative offer of special access for large donors in the Conservative Leaders Group, to which one pays apparently a £50,000 entry fee, is estimated to have brought in £5 million from 100 donors since January 2013. The attractions of this access are strongest when a party is in government, and build in a structural advantage for a party in government. Mr Cameron’s resignation Honours List has increased concern still further, but I stress again that all parties take part in this competition, partly because they have to.
Recent proposals from the Government to cut support for opposition parties by imposing cuts in Short Money and Cranborne Money have also raised issues about funding for democratic activities. There was a clear perception that the Conservatives were trying to bias the political rules in their favour, including those for party funding, which feeds into popular cynicism about politics. Then this August, we had a letter from the Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, to which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Bew, will refer in his speech.
We have seen the developments in the United States, where the extraordinary influence of the very rich on politics is becoming even greater, where congressional politics is distorted by the continual search for campaign funding, and where Donald Trump has funded a great deal of his own political rise. That does not yet happen in our politics, although in Richmond Park we have someone who has very substantially funded his own political rise. We have seen the aggressive political campaigning that the use of major funds allows in the United States, and we have seen the politics of fear in similar campaigns in this country. All this drives popular mistrust of politics as such as a plaything of the rich, as inherently corrupt and as excluding the voices of ordinary people. A Transparency International survey suggests that 76% of respondents think that rich people have undue influence on politics, and 28% think that all politicians are corrupt.
That raises some major issues. The funding of the Vote Leave campaign and the role of Arron Banks and the company he founded, Better for the Country Ltd—which appears not only to have given £2 million to Grassroots Out, but to have lent £6 million at a nil rate of interest to the Vote Leave campaign in three separate transactions—raise large questions about getting around current rules about party funding.
All parties pledged further reform in their 2015 manifestos and all have particular preferences to defend. We need to reopen cross-party talks and recognise that we need a serious intent to achieve at least some limited reforms to restore public confidence in participatory politics. We all know what happens if people do not feel they have a chance to engage in parliamentary politics—politics moves on to the streets. We have seen that once or twice in the last 15 years and it could easily happen again if there is a strong sense that politics in Britain has become dominated by money, and in particular money to the advantage of a particular party.
Francis Bacon said at the beginning of one of his best essays,
“Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread”.
That is a good democratic principle. We could agree that limits on corporate donations and trade union donations should have to be considered together. We could agree a cap on donations to start at £50,000 or even £100,000, and then gradually reduce it. We should at least consider making individual donations up to a certain level open to gift aid, comparable to charitable donations contributing to public life. We need to strengthen the policing role of the Electoral Commission in local as well as central spending, and in campaigning innovations. We need to police donations from outside the UK more carefully, and possibly from ex-pats—no representation without taxation. Our overall aim must be to reduce the impact of money on politics, to widen the pool of donors, and to encourage ordinary citizens to contribute and feel that they are making their own contribution to democratic life.
Constitutional Convention Bill [HL]
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, it is very good to hear the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, reassert yet again how deeply conservative—I hesitate to use the word “reactionary”—he is on all matters constitutional. I had expected him to object to “reform” rather than “electoral system”.
Clearly, I appreciate that a Labour Party which pursued in this recent election a campaign based on the idea that it could win a majority with 35% of the vote and was then defeated by a Conservative Party which won a majority of the House of Commons on 37% of the vote should want to have a vested interest in our current electoral system. If we are talking about constitutional reform overall, we need to talk about the balance in different parts of the United Kingdom. Perhaps one might then talk about, as he says, the range of different electoral systems that we now have.
During the AV referendum a very effective no campaign was led by Matthew Elliott, who is now leading the campaign to leave the European Union—with good right-wing credentials and a lot of right-wing funding. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, is happy about that. But if we are going to talk about the rapidly changing and moving relationship between the different parts of the United Kingdom—for example, what is happening in local government in England concerns many of us on these Benches and is another dimension of this—we need to look at the overall pattern. That clearly would need to include some question of which electoral systems are appropriate for which levels of elections. That is the only point that I am making.
Lord Grocott
I am very sorry that the noble Lord no longer speaks in an official capacity on the Liberal Front Bench. I do not know whether he has been demoted or has voluntarily moved to the Back Benches or is moonlighting; I am not quite sure what the position is. It is a novel concept from the Lib Dems—I can understand in the light of the recent general election why they may need the odd novel concept—to say that for them it is a reactionary position to respect the views of the British people as expressed in a referendum. I regard that as a very progressive position. Although I do not mind in the slightest being accused of being a reactionary on the constitution from time to time, it might be at least reassuring if we heard occasionally from the Liberal Democrat Benches, whether officially or unofficially, that they do respect the wishes of two-thirds of the British people in a nationwide referendum.
Lord Bridges of Headley
My Lords, I do not think it will surprise noble Lords to hear, at 12.50 pm on a grey Friday, that the Government do not support a written constitution. I agree much more with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. He spoke very eloquently about the need for flexibility. Of course, as noble Lords will know, this country did once try a written constitution—in 1653, if memory serves me right. It lasted for about four years with the Instrument of Government. It was not a particularly happy time in our nation’s history and we have survived quite well without one for getting on for 400 years. As the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, says, we have flexibility borne out of various parts of our legislative past—the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement and the Great Reform Act. Parliament has been adding to that canon, and advancing and evolving the constitution for centuries. That is a fundamental part of our polity.
On the specific clause, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth made clear, this is adding even more to the work of the superhuman convention, manned by the world’s constitutional experts, who will be working frantically to get it all done. I would just point out that were this Bill to be passed, there is no detail on the scope or content of the written constitution. As this short debate has highlighted, we are not entirely clear what would be included and what would not—maybe the entire process of the convention itself. Furthermore, it is not entirely clear that the Secretary of State would be able to make any further provision or provide any guidance on this constitution when it was presented, which was a point made so eloquently by my noble friend earlier. The convention would have superhuman powers not only in the sense of its ability to come up with solutions, but in the effect that it would have. Therefore, I fear that the amendment would not enhance the Bill but make it even less feasible.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I would just reflect on how solid is our base and how flexible is our constitution. From what I have been reading and hearing about the Magna Carta this year, I understand that two clauses of it are still in force and 75 are no longer in force. If one reads the Bill of Rights carefully, there is a very substantial anti-Catholic element, some of which is actually still in force, but has been weakened. The things that we refer back to as the foundations of our constitution are in many ways deeply inappropriate and we get by by ignoring them.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I heed what the noble Lord so rightly draws out. My point would be that these are the foundation stones on parts of which we have been building over the centuries.
House of Commons: Ministers
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to reduce the number of Ministers in the House of Commons proportionately to the intended reduction in the overall number of members in order to avoid any increase in executive influence over the elected House.
The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Lord Bridges of Headley) (Con)
My Lords, we have acknowledged the link between the size of the House of Commons and the size of the Executive, both in this House and in the other place, and we will continue to keep the number of Ministers under review as the consequences of the forthcoming boundary reforms are delivered and begin to take effect.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that there is no other first Chamber in a democratic Parliament in the western world which has as high a proportion of people caught up in government as in our House of Commons? Would he also agree that that is part of the cause of tension between the two Houses, and the Commons as a result does not do its work of scrutinising and holding the Government to account as vigorously as a democratic Parliament ought to do and that, as we reduce the number of MPs, it is vital that we reduce the number of Ministers in the Commons as well?
Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
The noble Lord has quoted the Electoral Commission several times. As a matter of process, the opinion of the Electoral Commission is extremely important. As a member of the coalition Government, my clear understanding was that we had agreed that we would complete the process by December 2016 unless there was—as the Electoral Commission has confirmed there is—compelling evidence that it was not necessary to go that far. The Electoral Commission has said, very clearly, that it thinks we are mistaken in what we are doing. Is the Minister saying that the Government consider the commission not to be relevant in this crucial area, although he is using it to support his argument in other areas? Why do the Government not regard the Electoral Commission’s argument? I repeat that this is a matter of the rules of politics, which have to be seen as fair.
Lord Bridges of Headley
I completely agree with the noble Lord that the rules of politics must be seen to be fair, which is why we are taking this action today. We believe that it is wrong to have so many inaccurate ghost entries on this register and that the facts have changed, in that by December these four out of 100 voters will have been contacted at least nine times. I will go on.
Lord Bridges of Headley
No—I am absolutely clear. We need to make sure that we take every step possible to cut down on electoral fraud. Therefore, after such an effort to contact the ghost entries, which puts pestering PPI calls in the shade, and given these facts, the Government believe that the time has come to remove these entries from the register.
I will repeat a crucial point which I made at the start. Even if someone is removed inadvertently from the register, he or she has not lost the right to vote, as some would have it. Indeed, as I have said before, we want more people to register. A number of noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, have highlighted the number of those who are not on the register already. I agree—they are right—there are too many of them, and we need to encourage them to register, as I said at the start. Individual electoral registration will help them do that. It is now easier to register than ever before and takes minutes to do online: 460,000 applications were made on the registration deadline for the general election alone—that is five applications a second.
As the Minister for Constitutional Reform said in his speech last week, the approach to registration needs to be updated and modernised, building on the success of online registration. This will help to meet the challenges of finding and registering those currently missing from the register and build on the excellent work that was done under the coalition.
The key point is this: the need to encourage voter registration has nothing to do with removing the inaccurate carry-forward entries on the register. As I just said, if a person is not on the register already, they obviously cannot be affected when these ghost entries are removed from the register. As I said at the start, the answer to underregistered groups, such as young people or expatriates, is not to stuff the electoral roll, and potentially the ballot boxes, with the names of people who do not exist but, instead, to encourage more people to vote.
A number of your Lordships referred to the boundary review, which, as your Lordships will know, begins its work early in the new year, fulfilling the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to cut the number of MPs and make votes of more equal value. If we are to create constituencies of equal size, the electoral registers used for the boundary review must be accurate across the UK. Otherwise, areas with large numbers of carry-forwards will get more MPs than those with small numbers.
This should not be a partisan point, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said. Areas with high carry-forwards include Conservative authorities such as Windsor and Maidenhead, and Kensington and Chelsea. It is right that overregistration be tackled in these areas. Equally, Labour councils such as Barrow, Cardiff and Hartlepool have below average numbers of carry-forwards. Surely it cannot be right that we leave 17,000 carry-forwards on the register in Kensington and Chelsea, according to May’s figures, while there are just 558 in Hartlepool. If we allow this to happen, it will distort the distribution of seats, hitting, in particular, Wales and Northern Ireland, where there are no carry-forwards as they already have individual electoral registration. A full transition to the new system will ensure fairness—something we all should want.
As we enter a year of elections, the Government believe that we should not retain these ghost entries on the register, making it inaccurate and perhaps making elections open to fraud. As has been said, we are not alone in thinking this. As my noble friends Lord Lexden and Lord Hayward said, the Association of Electoral Administrators supports ending the transition this year for primarily this reason, saying that:
“It is crucial to have the most accurate register possible”.
All democracies depend on a weighing up of interests and a careful consideration of the facts. This is no less true of our electoral system. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, we must take an approach that strikes the right balance between safeguarding the integrity of the register and ensuring that the electors registered to vote for the elections next May are accurate. The Government believe that we are past the tipping point. Remember, 96 out of every 100 electors have successfully registered on the new system. By December, at least nine attempts will have been made to contact those entries that were carried forward. The chance of a large number of the remaining carry-forward entries being eligible to register to vote is vanishingly small. No one is losing the right to vote and registering is easier than ever before. This is why the Government oppose the Motions today.
Although I heed the words of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I would like to echo the words of my noble friend Lord Cormack. Having broken a convention yesterday by failing to respect the primacy of the other place, the House supporting these Motions would defeat a statutory instrument, not on the grounds that it has been improperly made but because the noble Lords who tabled them disagree with it. It is up to your Lordships to make your decision clear, but it would be killing a statutory instrument—something this House has done only five times since World War II. With a further fatal Motion on the Order Paper for later today, the House is being invited to withhold its approval to three statutory instruments in two days; doing in two days what this House did in the 13 years between 1997 and 2010.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The House will be doing so partly because the Electoral Commission has advised us to do so. That is the question the noble Lord has not answered.
Lord Bridges of Headley
As the noble Lord, Lord Empey, said, the Electoral Commission is an independent body but we are not bound to observe it. As I have set out very, very clearly, we believe that we have a strong case for proceeding as we have.
Although this House is unelected, I believe that we should be doing our utmost to protect the integrity and accuracy of our electoral system. That is the duty we have to voters. We believe that it is time to finish the transition to individual electoral registration in December 2015 so that we can all be confident in our electoral register.