Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Andrew Stephenson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate and I broadly welcome the content of the Bill. There is much to commend it, especially individual electoral registration, which is long overdue. Regardless of what official statistics say, the simple fact is that in parts of Britain electoral fraud is widespread and has led to fraudulent election results. That is a disgrace and should be tackled immediately or at least as soon as is practicably possible, not in 2014 or 2015—or even later, as the Opposition suggest.

[Frank Dobson]

The law provides for people who commit electoral fraud to be prosecuted, fined or imprisoned. If the problem is as widespread as people suggest, why are there not more prosecutions, more people paying fines and more electoral swindlers in jail?

[Andrew Stephenson]

I shall come on to that exact point. There are a range of reasons why electoral fraud is not reported, the police do not have the resources to follow it up and the culprits are not brought to justice. Dozens of MPs have majorities in two or three figures and I have real concerns about the integrity of the ballot and its impact on recent elections as well as future ones.

My Labour predecessor in this House, Gordon Prentice, was a vocal supporter of individual voter registration, particularly in April 2008 when he found out that our Lib Dem opponent for the last general election had 27 registered voters living in his house and a household of 44 people. I know that some Members will raise their eyebrows at that, and it was indeed an exceptional case, but I can assure them that in parts of my constituency it is not uncommon for seven, eight or more voters to be registered as living in a terraced house and no one makes any checks on that.

We have also seen a sharp rise in the number of eastern European names appearing on the electoral roll, including those of Polish, Lithuanian or Czech citizens, but few are correctly marked as being unable to vote in UK parliamentary elections or referendums. During my time in Parliament, the names of virtually every illegal immigrant or illegal overstayer with whom I have dealt has appeared on the electoral roll. We know from Operation Amberhill, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), that almost half of all forged or counterfeit documents were positive matches on the electoral register.

Surely all that would lead anyone to support individual electoral registration—and I do—but we need to ensure that it is properly scrutinised for fraud and that the returns are accurate. Scrutiny costs money and it will take a significant amount of time and effort to check people’s citizenship or residency status, in particular, so I welcome the Minister’s comments about extra money for the project.

The nub of the issue of electoral fraud is on-demand postal voting, on which I believe, sadly, that the Bill should go further. It was introduced by the previous Government and my concerns are widely shared by a number of Members and by many of my constituents. In a letter to the Electoral Commission’s Jenny Watson last summer, Pendle borough council’s chief executive, Stephen Barnes, described how

“allegations and perceptions of malpractice around”

postal voting

“are seriously undermining public confidence in the whole electoral process”,

and expressed his own view that those concerns were fully justified, citing examples of probable malpractice and difficulties for the council in taking action.

In a motion last year, Pendle borough council resolved that practices related to postal votes

“affected the result of the election in some wards”.

Just last week, five councillors in Pendle from the three main parties came together to form a taskforce on tackling postal vote fraud. One of those five, Conservative Councillor Linda Crossley, said:

“People used to have to be really ill, virtually bed-ridden, to get a proxy or postal vote, now anybody can get a postal vote”.

To put that into context and explain how it happens, I shall refer to one ward, Reedley, where the scale and impact of postal voting has been dramatic. I should declare an interest. Reedley was for many years a safe Conservative ward and perhaps it still is, without on-demand postal voting. Until last year all three councillors were Conservative; now there is only one. In 2010, 800 postal votes were issued in Reedley in an election in which 3,049 people voted. The Conservative candidate secured 49% of the vote and was easily elected. In 2011, Reedley saw a 25% increase in postal votes, and this year a further increase of almost 25%. In two years an extra 479 voters felt the need to vote by post. Virtually all were from the British Pakistani community and virtually all were signed up for postal votes by the Labour party. Not coincidentally, Labour was elected on both occasions. The Conservative vote did not collapse. The Labour victory was not on trend across the constituency. Nevertheless, in this ward its support rocketed.

[Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)]

In 2004 in Sheffield we had an all-postal vote election. Labour won that election against the trend. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that in such instances there is wide-scale fraud on the part of Labour voters?

[Andrew Stephenson]

Certainly not. I am suggesting that certain parties can abuse the system of on-demand postal voting, and all parties have a vested interest in signing up their voters for postal votes in order to increase the turnout of their voters. I believe that that can skew election results. A return to the old system, where voters had to have a reason to have a postal vote, is the way that we should go.

I accept that in the Reedley ward it is theoretically possible that local support for Labour did sky-rocket. However, I have no doubt that the 45% increase in the Labour vote in 2011, against the backdrop of an 18% drop in turnout, was down to the huge increase in postal votes that year, as well as individual reports of party activists walking into polling stations with piles of up to 50 postal votes at a time. It is not so much that the numbers do not add up; rather, that they do. As the new council leader of Pendle, Councillor Joe Cooney, recently said:

“If we lose an election we want to lose it fairly, we don’t want to see councillors losing seats where it is not a level playing field.”

I accept, as I said, that while the rules remain as they are, all political parties will compete to sign up as many people as possible on to postal votes. Everyone in the Chamber knows that electors with postal votes are more likely to use their vote, so all political parties have a vested interest in doing that. However, as we all know, the temptation for some political activists to create fictitious voters and sign them up for postal votes has proved irresistible in places such as Slough, Birmingham and east London.

It is also clear, yes, that there is a cultural element. That has been endorsed by independent organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Trust. Even if the electoral roll is accurate, as the Bill hopes to ensure, the current on-demand postal voting regime actively disfranchises women and young people by allowing family voting to occur. By family voting, I mean the head of a household pledging the entire family’s votes to a particular political party. He can then ensure that all those votes go to that political party by watching family members complete their postal ballots, completing the ballots himself, or indeed completing them with an activist from the said political party.

[Mr Stewart Jackson]

I entirely concur with my hon. Friend’s comments. What we have found in Peterborough from time to time is that the head of the household will fill in both the signature and the date of birth of predominantly women members of the family. It is time-consuming and resource-intensive for the local authority and the electoral registration officer to cross-reference and match those. It is only in that way that the practice is found out, but often it is not. That is uncomfortable and unpalatable, but nevertheless true.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Stephenson]

This is a particular issue in the south Asian community. I have met Asian women in my constituency who have told me they have no idea who they voted for because their husband did it. Needless to say, because of the close family ties and bonds of loyalty, this is not going to be reported to the police or investigated by anyone. I imagine Emmeline Pankhurst will be turning in her grave.

Apart from electoral fraud taking place and women and young people in some households losing their right to vote, such goings-on play into a narrative that gives impetus to groups such as the British National party and the English Defence League. As someone who played an active role in helping an excellent Conservative candidate unseat a BNP councillor in Pendle this year, I say that we cannot allow electoral fraud, or the suspicion of it, to continue to be used as a reason for undermining community cohesion.

In my view, the only sensible conclusion is to suspend postal voting by demand and revert to a system in which postal and proxy votes are available only to people who genuinely need them and can provide a compelling reason why they cannot vote on the day. That would save a significant amount of money, which could be invested in better scrutiny of individual voter registration, as outlined in the Bill, and would address the biggest area of fraud in our electoral system. We would disfranchise nobody and could restore confidence in our democracy. Alongside individual registration, an immediate end to postal voting on demand would lead to electoral fraud, and allegations of it, once again becoming exceptional.

I welcome the Bill’s Second Reading but urge the Government to go much further by ending postal voting on demand. That would end almost all electoral fraud, re-empower women and young people, remove a hobby-horse issue from the far right, bring our democracy in line with international standards and restore true confidence in our electoral system.