Electoral Registration Data Schemes (No. 2) Order 2012

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, perhaps I may surprise the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, by saying that I agree with at least two points that he made. First, it would be useful to know when the Bill, to which the order is relevant to some extent, will return to the House for debate. It is important that we take decisions on this matter, but the Bill seems to have disappeared into the mists somewhere—not even of time. Secondly, why is the DVLA not involved in this? It works with other bodies in matching data. As an elderly person, I have to renew my driving licence every three or four years. I can just put my passport number on my application form. The photograph for my driving licence is taken from the Passport Service. Two different organisations are already using matching techniques. Why can they not be used for electoral purposes as well?

I largely welcome the order because it is the right approach to use other databases to add people to the register. If I had my way, I would have people added to the register and then invited to take their names off it, rather than the other way around. It is more important that people are able to vote than it is to check whether they are committing an act of fraud. Too often, this Government seem to be more concerned about fraudulent elections than about ensuring that people can vote.

Lastly, I make my usual case that none of this would be necessary—I will not mention ID cards because for some reason they are not considered politically correct—if we had smart-card technology with a central register. Everybody with a smart card would have enormous benefits, not just in terms of electoral registration but with a whole range of matters such as social security, old age pensions or whatever. We could also involve the private sector with banking. If we did that, we would not have this problem and would not be going through this process. We would have a central register and every British citizen would be registered to vote. When they voted, they would produce their ID card and that would be that.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing the order. It is very difficult to disagree with one word said either by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, or my noble friend Lord Maxton. I have no shame in using the expression “ID card”, and the Minister is no doubt ruing the day when the Government decided that they did not want to continue with that scheme.

We warmly welcome the measure in broad terms; it is necessary, whether or not the ERA finally goes through. We hope that the process will happen in any case, because it is about finding those who have a right to be on the electoral register but are not there at the moment. It may be that it should have started earlier, but we welcome it all the same.

We have just a few questions. First, as I asked on the previous occasion, has there been any discussion with the political parties about the pilots? As I have said before, and as the evidence we have heard today from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, shows, political parties understand these issues really well and it would have been good if they had been involved in discussions on the pilots to make them as good as possible.

Secondly, like the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, we have a slight lack of confidence in whether the methodology is sufficiently robust. It looks slightly hit-and-miss, with various areas choosing which bits they would like to do. I hope that it is a little more scientific than that, which it needs to be if the conclusions are to be robust. Perhaps the Minister could assure us that the methodology is sufficiently robust to enable lessons to be learnt and that a sufficient number of authorities are participating for any general conclusions to be drawn. I had not thought of the issue of computer-matching which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, raised, but, even without that added dimension, we need to be sure that the range is broad enough for us to be able gain good evidence.

Thirdly—this is again related in part to what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said—to whom will the Electoral Commission report on its evaluation? Is it only to be to Ministers or will it be to the House? What happens if the pilots prove either too expensive per new elector identified or if, as has been suggested, database problems seem insurmountable? What happens if unforeseen data-confidentiality issues arise, or if some other weakness is identified? Is there a plan B to locate unregistered voters?

Fourthly, it is essential, as the Government’s own Explanatory Notes suggest, that the 22 areas have sufficient expertise and staffing to make the pilots meaningful. What assurance can the Minister give us that they will be sufficiently resourced?

Fifthly, what lessons have the Government learnt from the pitiful turnout for the recent police and crime commissioner elections? Can the Minister assure us that these pilots are not displacement therapy for the embarrassment caused by those unnecessary elections? In case he needs reminding, the elections cost £100 million, which would have paid for 3,000 police officers. It would be interesting to hear whether he thinks that at least some good has come out of those elections in terms of lessons for systems of electoral registration.

The Minister might also like to take the opportunity to say a little more about the Electoral Commission’s report on continuous electoral registration in Northern Ireland—to which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred—which was published today. According to the commission, the report,

“provides clear lessons for Great Britain as we move to individual electoral registration”.

Electors in Northern Ireland are now only registered once and only have to re-register if their personal details change.

This new report assesses the effectiveness of such continuous registration in Northern Ireland. It shows that the electoral register is now only 71% complete and 78% accurate, whereas the previous assessment in 2008 estimated the register to be 83% complete and 94% accurate. It appears that this significant and worrying decline is because the processes used to manage the register are unable to keep pace with people moving home or people becoming newly eligible to join the register.

We will obviously return to this in due course, with suitable amendments to the Electoral Registration and Administration Bill. Again, as has already been mentioned, the Minister will recall that we spoke of our deep concern about the provision in the ERA Bill for the annual canvass to be abolished. We trust the Government will reassess this provision in the light of the Northern Ireland example. Hitherto, the Minister has called Northern Ireland in aid as a defence for the Bill, but I think today’s findings are a little worrying—particularly about people moving, because within certain parts of Great Britain, our population mobility is even higher than in Northern Ireland. Therefore, this continuous updating would be particularly important. However, none of this undermines the general support for these plans to take place.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank noble Lords for their comments. We are a small group, but it is very good to have an expert and interested group in this extremely important and difficult transition from a very elderly system of household registration to a necessary, but not entirely easy, system of individual electoral registration.

I will try to answer some of the questions that have been raised. The government digital service is working actively on IT systems and the compatibility between one system and another. I was amused this morning to have a government digital service team arrive with a Mac presentation that they wanted to put on the House of Lords Microsoft-based video system. They are well aware of these problems; there will be full end-to-end testing of the IER digital service before the introduction of IER. This is not necessary for the purpose of the data pilots, but from the briefing that I have so far had from the government digital service, this is very much one of the things that they are actively working on and are confident that they are making progress in resolving. As I commented to the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, earlier, I was struck by the different cultures of the government digital service and the House of Lords; we had forced two members of the government digital service to put on ties and suits to come to the House of Lords this morning and they felt extremely uncomfortable in this unusual clothing. We intend to be able to integrate IT systems at the local level and a considerable amount of work is under way.

I have been asked by several noble Lords to provide more clarity on when the Bill will come back. I can, with great assurance, tell them that the answer is “soon” and that I look forward to a more precise explanation of when soon will be, since that will also assist my diary.

I was asked about the role of the Electoral Commission and whether its report would be published. The report will be made to the Secretary of State, but in the nature of the relationship between the independent body, Parliament and government, it will of course also be published.

On the question of the Department for Transport and the DVLA, the latter’s database was used for the original data-matching pilots but is not currently available to us. Discussions are vigorously under way between the Cabinet Office and the Department for Transport, and we hope that we will regain access to the database at a later date. I am well aware that the DVLA database, as the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, commented, is accessed by other agencies including private insurance companies. It is not an entirely closed system and we very much hope that we will be able to resolve the issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank my noble friend for that strongly worded intervention. I take that on board as one of the issues that we are edging towards. The civil liberties lobby may not have caught up yet with the point that he is making, but I expect that it will do so soon. There are some very broad issues here that we have to be concerned about. I point out, as he has done, that one of the principles of our system of electoral registration is that it is in the hands of local authorities. We do not have a central database, so what one local authority does with credit agencies may be rather different from other local authorities do.

On the question of why this particular collection of local authorities was chosen, the answer is that these are the ones that volunteered to take part. They seem to us to be relatively representative, but this is the nature of the system under our current legal arrangements. Happily, the selection of local authorities is sufficiently wide that we and the Electoral Commission are persuaded that they will provide us with sufficiently reliable information.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

Is the Minister concerned that they are, in a sense, good local authorities? The fact is that if they volunteer to do this they are probably doing quite a lot in any event, and therefore probably not the ones that are of concern to us. I was very glad that they volunteered, by the way.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As I have discovered, the world of electoral registration officers and their staff is a wonderful subculture of its own. They interrelate across the board, and they know which are the good local authorities and which are not. I am less worried than I was when I started in this process after having discovered this wonderful population of people, for whom I have a great deal of respect, having been briefed by a number of them.

My noble friend Lord Rennard asked me for an assurance that the databases chosen are properly representative of the UK population. We are pursuing the greatest diversity possible in databases, which is why I take on board what has been said about the DVLA; the wider the collection of databases that we use, the more likely it is that we will catch students, attainers, rapid house-movers and others. That is precisely what we are trying to do.

The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, made an interesting comment that he might perhaps wish to pursue further: he would like an opt-out electoral registration system rather than an opt-in one. That is a point of some significance that would bear some consideration and further thinking. There are some large issues there on voluntary registration and the balance between voluntary and compulsory, which are not currently within our remit in the Bill.