Recall of MPs Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Martin of Springburn

Monday 19th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My understanding is that the postal voter will be sent a form with the words as stated on the face of the Bill and will be invited to sign it or not to sign it. That would then go in and be submitted.

[Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)]

In all my experience of petitions, they are public documents. The other place is famous for petitions being laid before Parliament. This is a public record, but now we are discussing the introduction of an element of secrecy about it. The recall of a Member of Parliament is a very serious matter. We are working through a process to remove a democratically elected Member of Parliament and we are considering that some of the petitioners shall be secret. There is an old saying in the trade union movement: you should put your courage where your mouth is. Well, you should put your courage and signature in the one place as well. We are overturning a petition, a procedure which was in place before people had the vote—before we had suffrage. That is a very serious matter.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I recognise that, but on the other hand the secrecy of the ballot is also a very serious matter. As I said earlier, it is a question of striking the right balance between the unavoidably public nature of a petition and the principle of the secrecy of the ballot. It is a matter that we will consider further and come back on.

Lobbyists: Register

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Martin of Springburn

Thursday 6th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, discussions are under way on that question and it is likely that a Bill will be introduced in the next Session which will deal with a number of such issues to do with parliamentary behaviour and what is called parliamentary housekeeping.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, would journalists who have credentials in both Houses be entitled to be on the register for lobbyists? In other words, will they be allowed dual membership?

Lobbyists: Register

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Martin of Springburn

Wednesday 12th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Yes, and we have discussed whether I should put down everyone I meet at a party conference. There comes a point where almost the entire political process becomes lobbying. For example, the secretariats of most all-party groups are supported by outside bodies. Are those lobbyists? Is that proper? Should we do away with them? One gets into very deep water quite early on in this field.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, would journalists in the press gallery, who are therefore registered journalists, be allowed also to be registered lobbyists? In other words, could they hold two occupations?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have to admit that I do not know the answer to that question and will have to write to the noble Lord.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Martin of Springburn

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

We are all in a learning process but I am concerned about Amendment 7 and the requirement for a person to provide their date of birth and national insurance number. A register is tied in to a constituency and it would be irrelevant if someone’s date of birth and national insurance number alone could get them on to a register because that has to be tied in with their place of residence. I believe that an electricity or rates bill would provide more proof of whether a person was entitled to be on a constituency register than their age or national insurance number—although that may be in the list that was not available before now.

The Minister has touched on other evidence but I believe that there are more ways for a person to prove that they are a bona fide elector than by giving their date of birth. For example, I live in London for several days a week—many of us do; I am not the only one. But my main home is in Glasgow, and if I sought to get on the electoral roll somewhere in London just by turning up and saying, “My name is Michael Martin and my date of birth is 3/7/1945 but I cannot recite my national insurance number”—I can never remember it—that would not prove that I was entitled vote in a given constituency.

Perhaps there is something in the legislation that ties an individual into a constituency, but if I went to an electoral officer and said, “Here is an electricity bill, gas bill or community charge bill”, that proof would tie me in more than my date of birth.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are getting into some of the technical complexities of the Bill. One of the reasons for preferring national insurance numbers is that it is possible to buy off the web electricity bills that are specially designed for you. We are looking for ways of ensuring as far possible that we have accurate identifiers.

The noble Lord, like many of us in this Chamber, is one of the difficult exemptions of people who wish to be registered in two different places because they have two different homes and therefore do not entirely match with the first identifier, which is that your national insurance number is likely to have your current address attached to it; these naturally go together. I am told that some voters do not have their date of birth in their head either. There is a tendency in some of our ethnic communities to assume that your date of birth was 1 January of whatever year it was that you were born.

None of these things entirely matches everyone’s predicament and we are therefore attempting to design something which is as flexible as possible while recognising the importance of parliamentary scrutiny. The changes we have made between the draft legislation in 2011 and the Bill’s introduction into the other place in May this year and these further amendments acknowledge the concerns raised most recently by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that we need to make sure that there is some parliamentary scrutiny. However, when it comes to the alternative evidence provided, we believe that, because of the changing circumstances in which we are operating, some flexibility is needed. We do not wish to box everyone into simply the NINo and the date of birth. I can almost remember my national insurance number—there are two numbers in the middle that I cannot quite get straight—but I must learn it off by heart.

The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, as he did earlier, wants to raise some much wider questions. I have considerable sympathy with where he is coming from. In 20 years’ time it is unlikely that we will vote using pencil and paper in polling stations, but that is a larger concern for the longer term, and as we have seen in some other countries, on occasion electronic voting is not without its own problems. We are retaining the principle of local registers. When talking to electoral administrations, something I am told immediately is that they have for many years used council tax registration as a means of checking where people live and whether these are accurately placed on the register. The council tax, of course, only gives the head of the household. Indeed, perhaps I should have said in responding to the previous debate that one of the reasons given in recent research for incomplete registration is that the single person’s discount for council tax encourages some people not to put down the others living in the household because that would raise the level of council tax. We have moved on from the poll tax as a disincentive, but the single person’s discount is, we are told, is a disincentive in a number of ways. There is a whole range of different factors to look at as we go into the details of the register.

The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, and the rest of us will enjoy debating the impact of the data revolution on the way the citizen interacts with the state. I find it fascinating myself, and I think that it will revolutionise that interaction over the next 10 years. However, noble Lords in this House may be among those who are slower to take part. I am sorry that the noble Lord was unable to come to our demonstration of online registration. The Government are considering many other options in terms of how one puts various things online. For example, some experiments show that if, when someone reregisters their car online, they are also offered the choice of transferring to their local authority and checking for a parking ticket, that increases radically the number of people who apply for a ticket.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Of course I did not. I would never have thought about it while the train was in the station. I am sure that noble Lords will be as familiar with the song around that as I am.

We intend that the civil penalty should be modest and reasonable. That is why the phrase used is that it should be in the same range as parking fines. The intention is that the amount of the fine should be set out in secondary legislation so that it is flexible. We do not intend and no Government would wish to have to introduce primary legislation on the electoral registration system every two or three years.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I understand what the Minister says here, but the non-payment of a fine can lead to other court actions. Is he not worried that we will get into a wrangle if someone digs their heels in and says, “Look, I do not want to register. I do not want anything to do with registering”? Non-registration is a right that can be exercised by a person, ensuring that their name is kept off the roll—but now we are changing things. Does that then mean that if they refuse to pay the fine, there will be other penalties imposed on that person—even imprisonment?

[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.