Elections (Fresh Signatures for Absent Voters) Regulations 2013

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Tuesday 4th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Jones]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction. His speech provided dignity, if not poetry, to the bureaucratic vocabulary and procedure. Refreshing signatures means that we wish to avoid fraud. I would say to the Minister that if we put Wales into a statutory instrument, would we not expect, for the sake of accountability, to be given the full details concerning Wales in the debate in this Committee? The Minister attempted to gain an alibi of the best kind in what he said. I picked that up and I make my protest as gently, honourably and courteously as I can, knowing that he always brings nobility and dignity to our procedures.

I want to raise a point of detail concerning the refreshment and checking of signatures. What is the process here? Does an employee of a local authority literally match the signatures, or is it done by mechanical means? Is it possible for us to be given an explanation of how the signatures are handled? After all, that is the basis of what the Minister has brought before the Committee. I am sure that his department will have spotted such a question coming from noble Lords, and I think it is a reasonable request. In order to make progress, I shall sit down.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

My Lords, perhaps I may ask the indulgence of the Committee in order to congratulate the Minister not only on having sung at the Queen’s Coronation 60 years ago, but on his role in the Abbey today to commemorate that occasion. I am sorry that we are not seeing him in all his glory this afternoon. When I was a student, we used to move that the minister “do now sing”; maybe I should not do that.

On the two statutory instruments, including the one for Wales, one of the questions is quite similar to one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves: how many absent votes does the Minister estimate are covered by each of these two SIs? In other words, how many that would normally be written out in Wales and England are covered by this?

Related to that, what is the Government’s assessment of the number of likely renewals, particularly given that these are going out in the August holiday period? That has been a worry for the Electoral Commission, and is a worry as, not only is your Lordships’ House on holiday during the first two weeks of August, but so are many other people.

Although the word “stakeholders” was used by the Minister, what is the view of the political parties of this proposal? As I mentioned before in Committee, they are rather expert on all of this, as has been evidenced by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, this afternoon.

In the form that will go out on the mere matter of the refreshment of the signatures, will there be any advance notice about the move to individual electoral registration? In other words, is it part of the preparation that is being made? I know that the Electoral Commission still has some concerns over the October 2013 annual canvass date and what impact it might have on absent voters. We would be interested to know what the Government’s response to the issue raised by the Electoral Commission has been. In general, however, we support the regulations and the order.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for her compliment, although the compliment I have really liked over the past two or three weeks has been from those who have said that they find it difficult to believe that I could have sung at the coronation because I look far too young. I am sorry that she missed that one.

These regulations are important because we are all concerned to get the transition to individual electoral registration right. We will in time bring some further regulations back to the Committee. While many of them seem incredibly technical and complex, it is important that we manage to end up with a new register that is as complete and as accurate as possible. The integrity of the electoral register is also an important matter.

I remember many years ago my noble friend Lord Greaves raising in the House the question of postal vote fraud in open elections and getting a very dusty response from almost all Benches on the grounds that this was not considered a serious problem. It is now a good deal better understood that this has, in a number of highly localised areas, been quite a serious problem that was not fully picked up and has not attracted the level of prosecution that one really ought to have seen. However, it is one that these identifiers are intended to pick up.

I will try to answer some of these difficult questions. On dates, and when one does the write-around and the canvass, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, will recall that we had a discussion as to when it was most useful to do the house-to-house canvass, and I wrote to her in the spring to point out that I had in some ways misled the Committee by suggesting that March was a good time to go around house by house, because there was deep snow in Saltaire past Easter Day. Whatever we do, there is never a perfect answer, but we are trying to do our best on all of this.

I will try to answer some of my noble friend Lord Greaves’s questions, and then promise that I will write to him on others. He will of course know that many of these statistics are not collected centrally. Electoral registration officers are local appointees and the administration of voting is still a local authority matter.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I hope that it does. I will do my best to investigate and come back to the noble Lord on that.

I am told that approximately 150,000 postal votes have been rejected at each recent national poll across Great Britain—I hope that does mean across Great Britain—because one or more of the personal identifiers on the postal voting statement did not match those originally submitted or because one or more of the identifier fields had been left blank. Statistics on rejection rates are recorded by returning officers and are submitted, perhaps on Form K, to the Electoral Commission for collation. Although figures for the May 2013 local elections are not yet available, I understand that the Electoral Commission plans to publish information on turnout once all these data have been received and collated.

On the question of getting fresh signatures after five years, we do not hold this information centrally. I hope it will be considered helpful that, according to my team, one ERO spoken to has told us that in his or her area in 2012, out of nearly 22,000 electors sent a postal vote refresh notification, some 1,800 did not respond and 565 said that they no longer wanted one. That gives noble Lords a level of the turnover in 2012, for which there are many reasons. In 2013, of 21,000 electors sent a postal vote refresh notification, some 4,355 did not respond and 934 said that they no longer wanted one.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town]

That was very useful. However, the Minister said the first figure, 22,000, was from one ERO. He may not be able to tell us now, but is that from one whole constituency? I am trying to work out the percentage each January who would be likely to come up for signatures. The response rate is very useful but it would also be useful, if not now then later, to know what the 22,000 figure is as a proportion of the voters.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I understand that. The noble Baroness will know that the proportion of postal voters varies quite radically from one area to another. It is not a uniform pattern across the country. We will see what we can do to provide some more comparative statistics.

On the third of the questions put by the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, it is for individual returning officers to judge whether a mismatched date of birth or signature gives them grounds to report the matter to the police. The Electoral Commission and the Association of Chief Police Officers produce joint guidance for electoral administrators on electoral integrity, which includes such matters. Electoral administrators and the Electoral Commission have noted in recent years that the majority of mismatches appear to arise from inadvertent errors such as a deteriorated signature or the accidental completion of the date of birth field with today’s date.

The Government intend introduce a system to inform electors if ballot papers have not been counted. We introduced a provision in the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, which will allow regulations to be made setting out the circumstances in which electoral registration officers must inform electors, after a poll, where their postal vote identifiers failed to match. EROs will have discretion not to write to individual electors where malpractice is suspected. This will not include situations where ballot paper numbers do not match those on the postal voting statement as electoral administrators already have the facility to unite ballot papers with the proper postal voting statements for them to be checked and counted where these are returned separately, for example where two people in a household inadvertently swap their ballot papers. We intend to introduce this provision for the polls in 2014.