Parliamentary Boundary Commission: Electoral Administration

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours for securing this debate. In the speeches so far, we have already heard just how important are the issues that he has given us the opportunity to discuss. When the Government brought forward their proposals for redefining the criteria for constituency boundaries, they justified them on the grounds of high constitutional principle. For example, during Second Reading in the other place of the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Bill, the Deputy Prime Minister said:

“If we together cannot deliver these reforms, we will have to ask ourselves what we really meant when each of us promised our constituents that we would seek to reform and strengthen our politics. We promised a new politics. Today is the day we must begin to deliver on that promise. We must make the system fair”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/9/10; col. 44.]

However, we now know what this new politics actually means. We know it thanks to the interview given to the Independent last week by the recently retired director of strategy for that same Deputy Prime Minister. In that interview the recently retired director of strategy promised that these reforms, which, I remind the House, the Deputy Prime Minister promised would help deliver “a new politics”, would be sabotaged if the Liberal Democrats did not get their way on reform of the House of Lords—a reform which, if passed, would incidentally virtually guarantee the Liberal Democrats an entrenched position of power in Parliament. So we see that the Deputy Prime Minister’s much vaunted new politics in fact turns out to be nothing more than an old-fashioned backroom bartering of partisan pieces of legislation.

Today, however, I do not want to excavate any further the motivations behind that legislation. I want to look at the toxic consequences for our democracy of the interaction between the boundary reviews launched by that Bill—now Act—and the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill which is shortly to come before your Lordships’ House. I do not oppose the objectives of these pieces of legislation. Reducing the number of seats in the House of Commons and equalising the size of the constituencies that remain must be a reasonable objective. As a Minister I brought in the legislation which introduced individual electoral registration and which is the subject of the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. But the way that the Government have set about delivering these objectives has abandoned long-established constitutional proprieties in the pursuit of partisan self-interest. There has been no serious attempt to establish cross-party working on radical changes of the boundary review process or radical changes in the system of electoral registration. Perhaps the Minister could say what happened to that cross-party working group on the introduction of individual registration for which, in January, there was such cross-party support in your Lordships’ House.

The Government have explicitly abandoned the cross-party approach to the introduction of individual registration adopted by the previous Government. I was the Minister responsible in that Government. When we brought in our legislation to introduce individual electoral registration we went to great lengths to consult other political parties and we secured Front-Bench agreement from the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats to our approach, which linked individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register. After all this time and after so many questions, we still have not had an adequate explanation from the Government of why they have abandoned such a cross-party approach.

When we look at the detail we can perhaps see a clue as to the consequences of the Government’s change of approach. We have already heard—it is generally accepted—that for all its merits the introduction of individual registration carries with it the severe risk and the great probability that significant numbers of people eligible to vote will not register and so be unable to vote. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that was the case in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration. In evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons last year, Jenny Watson, the chair of the Electoral Commission, said that,

“it is possible … that the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around, say, a 60% completeness”.

As we have already heard, there is a serious problem with electoral registration in this country. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people eligible to vote were not registered to do so in December 2010. The fact that so many are not on the register who should be, despite all the measures taken by this Government and the previous Government, shows how intractable this problem is. It damages our democracy when so many eligible citizens cannot vote because they are not on the register. That is all the more so when we see that they are disproportionately concentrated in particular groups: young people, students, people with learning disabilities, people with disabilities generally, those living in areas of high unemployment and ethnic minorities.

The introduction of individual electoral registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse. That is why the previous Government delayed its introduction until a comprehensive and accurate register was achieved. We brought in a timetable and allowed for a phased introduction of the system by 2015. There was no undue delay about this. We gave the Electoral Commission power to oversee the process and Parliament the opportunity to monitor regularly what was happening. No one could say we were dragging our feet. We were trying to deal with the real problems that the introduction of individual registration was likely to bring.

This is the approach that has been junked by this Government, who want to bring in individual registration whatever the consequences on the register. I know that the Minister is going to rehearse in his reply all the measures that the Government are taking to increase registration. They are all welcome and I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, who is largely responsible for removing some of the worst features of the Government’s proposed changes and for restoring the situation to the status quo ante. He is to be congratulated on his hard work. The changes that he has brought about are welcome, but essentially the measures that the Government are bringing in to increase registration are the same ones that I brought in when I was the Minister responsible. I hoped that they would reverse the decline in registration. I looked at these issues for months, but I could not guarantee that we would be able to halt the decline in registration that individual registration is likely to lead to. That is why we took the approach that we did. I could see no justification in advancing towards one public policy objective at the expense of another when I thought that it was possible to advance towards both at the same time.

What will be the consequences of the fall-off in registration to which this Government are opening the door? Most agree that those eligible voters who will not be registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do so. The Liberal vote in the inner cities is similarly likely to suffer. The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90% complete in Labour seats and 94% complete in Conservative seats. When you look at the demographic make-up of these seats, the explanation is clear. That might be the reason why this coalition Government are junking the principle followed, for good reason, by successive Conservative and Labour Governments that fundamental constitutional change such as this should only proceed, wherever possible, on a cross-party consensual basis. That incidentally is the attitude that the Conservative Party is taking towards reform of your Lordships’ House.

The Government have taken some steps towards acknowledging this problem by allowing for a carryover from the household system of registration for the general election to be held in 2015. Significantly, they have not allowed for such a carryover for the constituency boundary reviews also due to take place in 2015. This means that those boundary reviews will be conducted on the basis of a profoundly flawed register.

What are the consequences of that likely to be? Labour constituencies are likely to see disproportionate declines in those on the register, because those less likely to register are disproportionately concentrated in such constituencies. Because of the tight numerical limits on constituency size and flexibility imposed by the Parliamentary Voting Systems and Constituencies Act, that is likely to mean fewer Labour seats. Because of the way in which Labour constituencies are often surrounded by strongly Conservative constituencies, that is likely to mean that more Labour safe seats will become more marginal and more marginal Labour seats will become marginal Conservative ones.

I heard what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said about the likely psephological implications of the boundary reviews but, with respect, that has not properly factored in the interaction between the decline in registration and those boundary reviews. It is clear that this Government are hijacking our electoral arrangements in the interests of the Conservative Party’s. They are turning these electoral arrangements into a matter for partisan dispute for the first time in over a century. This is potentially toxic for our democracy.

I have asked your Lordships to consider the situation before and I ask your Lordships to consider it today. What is the impact on the health of our democracy if it turns out, as it may do in 2020, that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so and that this was the result of a government policy deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence?

We will return to these issues on 24 July when we debate the Second Reading of the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. In the mean time, I conclude by asking the Minister two questions and should be grateful if he will reply directly and without equivocation. First, can he guarantee—I use the verb advisedly—that there will be no decline in electoral registration with the introduction of individual electoral registration? Secondly, why will the Government not allow for a carryover from household registration for the purposes of boundary reviews in 2015?

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this has been a rumbustious debate. The noble Lord, Lord Clark, referred to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, as fearless. I felt that in many ways it was a tub-thumping speech. I feel the pain coming from past and present Labour MPs at the way they have been treated by IPSA and by the threat of boundary reviews. In terms of economy, I have to say that I feel moderate pain in the current Government. I go around saying to people that this is the leanest Government we have had for many years because we have cut the government car pool in half and we walk more. With regard to economy but not humiliation, perhaps I may share with noble Lords the occasion on which I went with an official to represent the Government at an international conference. At the end of the conference, the government car collected us, delivered us to the VIP lounge at the airport and, from there, the protocol officer took us to the front of the easyJet queue for us to fly back. That is an approach to economy that Members of the other place may need to share.

With regard to spending on elections and on politics between elections, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Clark of Windermere, that over the past 25 years the amount provided to sitting MPs for assistance with casework and allowances for communications has given in-built advantages to sitting Members against challengers. That, again, is an issue that we may need to talk about in more detail.

[Lord Wills]

With great respect to the Minister, I think that I should correct him on that. There were very clear rules in the other place. The expenses given to MPs were solely for discharging their duties as Members of Parliament. They were explicitly excluded from any kind of campaigning purpose whatever. I can speak for myself and for the great majority of my former colleagues when I say that we scrupulously observed those rules. I just wanted to correct the Minister on a point of fact.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I merely referred to the advantages of incumbency and strengthening the advantages of incumbency. I think we both know what we are talking about.

As this Question refers to democracy and political representation, I thought that as an academic I should go back to the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics and look up the definition of democracy. It says that democracy is a descriptive term synonymous with majority rule. It goes on to say that the plurality rule, as opposed to the majoritarian rule, which selects the candidate with the largest single number of votes, even if that number is less than half the votes cast, may select somebody whom the majority regard as the worst candidate. It says that, nevertheless, countries using this rule for national elections, such as Britain, the United States and India, are normally described as democratic.

The question of how we choose representatives and the place and size of the electorate is something that we have tried very hard to balance over the past 100 years and more. The issue at stake, after all, is the balance struck by the Boundary Commission between the sense of place and the number of electors. The position taken by the coalition Government is that too great an emphasis had been placed on ensuring a sense of place at the expense of ensuring fairness and equality in the size of constituencies. In terms of numbers, noble Lords may know that in 1922, when the Irish left, Parliament consisted of 615 Members and in 1950 of 625 Members, and it has grown slowly to the current number of 650. Of course, all these numbers are arbitrary.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Some do, some do not. However, we have a larger problem which we should also address. More and more constituents—including those who used to vote Labour, according to my experience in Bradford—do not identify with the constituency, any political party or politics as such and, indeed, do not wish to register. We will return to that wider issue in 10 days time, when we discuss the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Wills, asked me to guarantee that there would be no further decline in registrations in the move to individual electoral registration, but of course the Government cannot guarantee that. We know that between 2000 and 2010, the number of people not on the register is estimated to have doubled from 3 million to 6 million. I am sure the Labour Government that were in office at that point had no intention of allowing that to happen—it happened, as we know, for a range of reasons to do with political attitudes and social change. We will be doing everything we can to maximise the completeness of the individual register, but the accuracy and completeness of the household registration system has been going down, which is very much part of the reason for the change.

[Lord Wills]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. Does he recognise that there is a big difference between a Government who are, on the one hand, doing everything they can to improve the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the register and a Government who are doing their best on that but are none the less proceeding with legislation that is undoubtedly going to damage that register even further—and in the interests of one particular political party? That is the difference. Does the noble Lord accept that?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I do not accept that and I do not accept that we have not been consulting the Labour Party. The noble Lord and I have discussed this at great length, Mark Harper has discussed this with a number of people on the Labour Front Bench and we are continuing to discuss this as we go on. I have so far dealt with several statutory instruments about the data-matching exercise, which is part of the way in which we are testing the completeness of the register. We know that this will get a great deal more difficult and will be talking with others in the Department for Education and elsewhere about how far we can use school registers and student loan registers to get at some of the mobile young people who are among the most difficult to catch for the register. We will return to this area at some length at Second Reading and in Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. We will come back to that, and to the question of carrying over the registration from May 2015 to December 2015, in that context rather than in this one.

[Lord Wills]

This will be my last intervention for today. The Minister has made a very important point and I want to be sure that I have understood it, because it will obviously inform the approach of many noble Lords to the Second Reading of that Bill. Is the noble Lord saying that the Government remain open to a carryover for the purposes of the boundary review in 2015? Are the Government now prepared to consider that?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I was not saying that, I was simply saying that we would need to discuss it further in that context, because we will be spending a good deal of time on the Bill. However, I was saying that a number of continuing experiments are under way with the government statistics authority and with the Electoral Commission about how best to ensure that, as we move to a new register, we maximise the number of people on it. He will know, as we have rehearsed it before, that the argument in respect of the December 2015 register is that maintaining a carryover from a register made over two years before risks carrying over a large number of additional names, particularly in the inner cities, of highly mobile people and those from multiple-occupation residences. There will be a post-May 2015 canvass of all of those who are in doubt on this. We think that the occurrence of a general election in May 2015 should produce the maximum registration available then, but that the question of accuracy and completeness is not best served by maintaining, even after the election, names that have not responded to several attempts personally to canvass them.

The joy and passion that members of the Opposition have for the single-Member constituency is striking. I remind them that the single-Member constituency and the electoral system that the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, went for are not necessarily part of the ancient British constitution. The official with whom I travelled to a conference last weekend admitted to me that his grandfather had been one of the two Labour MPs for Blackburn between 1945 and 1950. That was one of the last two-Member constituencies. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is perhaps not quite old enough to remember the three-Member combined Scottish university seat, which was there until 1950. However, I am sure he remembers the electoral system used for that, which was of course the single transferable vote. We now regard the single-Member constituency as the only possible thing for Britain, but other things have been tried before and might be tried again in the future. This Government’s commitment to decentralisation and the revival of local democracy means that we see casework in future more often going to the local councillor, and not always, perhaps, all the way up to the MP.

There have been suggestions of gerrymandering. Looking through my preparatory notes on this, I see that in 1978-79, the then Labour Government postponed the introduction of boundary changes. There were accusations in the right-wing press that this was “jimmymandering” by the then Prime Minister, as a means of ensuring that Labour should not lose those relevant seats. I am conscious, as we all are, that the integrity, accuracy and completeness of the register, for the next election and beyond it, matters to all of us. We are also concerned that some of the underlying causes for the decline in the completeness of the register—political disillusionment and disengagement—need to be addressed, and on an all-party basis.