Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Baroness Jay of Paddington Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

That is exactly my point. I am unaware of any consultation on this issue. I have asked a number of times by correspondence what consultation there may have been with the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly or the LGA, which is responsible for local elections. It seems that these bodies are unaware that, through the Bill, there will be significant changes to the electoral arrangements for those elections in May 2016. I believe that they should be aware of them and their view should be part of our consideration of this Bill.

As I said, the principle of IER is not really in dispute between the parties. All the parties agree the principle of it, and they agree that a household-based system is insecure, inadequate and leads to inaccuracy. However, the question is how you get from that system to a more secure and more rational alternative without losing from the register lots of people who are legitimately entitled to vote.

In that objective, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and I are all agreed, but the question is: what if we have not achieved our objective by 1 December 2015? I am convinced—and the Electoral Commission warns us of this—that there is a real possibility that we will not have achieved our objectives by 1 December 2015. Furthermore, I am convinced that the possibility of failure will be lessened if we do not in this Bill sign up to full implementation by then, irrespective of what progress is actually made on implementation in the next few years. In other words, a strong signal will be sent to government if they have to make this system work before it is fully implemented. I think that it would be invidious to expect the Electoral Commission, on its own, to push the “go” button on the final parts of the transition to IER. Therefore, to help to ensure that the stated objectives are met, I would prefer to see provision made to permit Parliament effectively to extend the carryover of voters from existing registers for a further period if, in the judgment of Parliament, the register is not in a sufficiently complete state on the basis of individual registrations alone. On that basis, we do not support Amendment 59, as we believe that there is a better, alternative approach, which we will set out when we reach a later group.

Turning briefly to Amendments 1 and 36, I should like to see the Electoral Commission reporting in this way, as it would inform our future debates. However, these reports themselves would be of little value if there were no possibility of Parliament providing for carryover to continue beyond 2015. Likewise, the capacity of Ministers to give guidance to electoral registration officers is of little value if the law says that electors on existing registers in their area should be removed from future registers, even if Parliament is not satisfied that we have been able to get a proper alternative registration system in place.

In due course, I hope that all concerned will accept that Parliament should have the final say on whether we are succeeding sufficiently well in our aims of having an accurate and complete electoral register before we exclude unnecessarily from the voting rolls perhaps several million people who will still be legitimately entitled to vote. We will not be able to make that judgment until we see how the new system is working.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I regret that I was unable to take part on Second Reading, but since that debate the Constitution Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, has issued its own report on the Bill. The report very much echoes some of the points that have just been made by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. Overall, the Constitution Committee sought to impress on today’s Committee that the Government need to do everything possible to ensure that the completeness of the electoral register is matched by its accuracy. Concerns were raised—I know from reading the Second Reading debate—about the way in which the impact might fall heaviest on areas of urban population where, for example, many people in private rented accommodation—ethnic minority people, the young, and so on—might be unnecessarily excluded in the pursuit of the completeness, which might not necessarily reflect the accuracy and vice versa of the new register.

Although I take the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, that there may have been special concerns and reasons in Northern Ireland, it is worth noting that the accuracy of the register fell by nearly 10% when individual registration was first introduced. The other major point that applies to this group of amendments—again I am echoing the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and the concerns raised by the Constitution Committee—was about the necessity not to express many of these important concerns in guidance. The committee was concerned that there should be much greater parliamentary oversight of the introduction of the new register and that these matters should be put in regulations. We felt that for the Secretary of State to be able to determine requirements for exercising the right to vote without effective parliamentary oversight would indeed be constitutionally improper.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I begin by apologising to the Committee because like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, I did not speak on Second Reading. I had a specific reason for not doing so. I was on the list to speak but unfortunately I was in the Information Committee. I thought that the business would go on longer but I suddenly realised that I could not make it into the Chamber in time to hear the beginning of the Minister’s opening remarks. I was therefore asked not to speak on Second Reading. I apologise to the Committee for making that mistake. The danger is that now I will fall into the trap of making the Second Reading speech that I would have made.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in particular, roused me to my feet as I have one simple point to make. The Bill is designed to stop fraud and ought to be designed to encourage people to vote, and there is one simple way to deal with that. Unfortunately this House and the other place both voted to get rid of that simple way of dealing with this matter, which was the introduction of an identity card—a general register of all people. It would have been a compulsory identity card for everyone. It would have ensured that everyone was on the central register and we would not be in this position. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, led the campaign, as much as anybody did, against ID cards, which was a major error on his part. By the way, the technology on ID cards, or smart cards, has moved on extensively even since we abolished the proposal less than two years ago. Now we could have a smart card that would ensure that people were on a central register and the register itself would divide and set up online registers for the whole of the country. Each constituency would have a register, not completed by a registration officer or by individual registration but automatically: by pressing a series of buttons on a computer it would come up with the right answers. Each individual would be able to vote only by producing an ID card. This would stop a great deal of fraud, provide a workable system and, I hope very rapidly, we would move to voting electronically and using the ID card to register our votes.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

To be absolutely sure that I am entirely consistent with my namesake, I will write to the noble Lord when I have checked as thoroughly as I can to ensure that I am entirely accurate.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

To follow up the original question of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, which is a question of constitutional relevance, however the register is achieved—whether the attainers are dealt with from one particular date or another—is not the point the inconsistency between that referendum franchise and the one then applicable for Westminster elections and how will that be dealt with?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

In allowing 16 year-olds to vote in a Scottish referendum, we are making an exception. That is evident; that is part of what has now happened. We have a register which has various people on it with different circumstances. There are those EU citizens who are entitled to vote in local and European elections but not national elections; there are Members of this House, who are entitled to vote, similarly, in European and local but not in national elections. So there are already some variations between categories on the register. I will check as thoroughly as I can on this to ensure that I am entirely accurate on a point which, I fully understand, is important.

Perhaps I may now turn to the three important amendments. The issue at stake for all of us is how confident we are that we will manage the two-year transition and what we do when we reach the end to ensure that we have gone all the way through the transition. The reason for having a two-year transition is precisely to ensure that we are successful as we come to the outcome. The Electoral Commission will be following that very closely. We will be reporting back to the House on how the new system operates, so we are confident that by the autumn of 2015—with, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, correctly pointed out, a different Government, or certainly a new Government, in place—we will be able to make a full transition.

Amendment 1 asks for guidance to be maintained for registration officers beyond the five-year period. Again, we are into questions about central direction and local autonomy for registration officers. Having spoken to a number of electoral administrators, I have considerable sympathy for the strains under which they work and the efforts which they put in to maintain as complete and accurate a register as possible. We will come back to the issue of how electoral registration is maintained on our third day in Committee.

We will of course continue to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the system during the five-year period, but we are confident that at the end of it the transition will have been fully taken through and we will have achieved a relatively stable system. When I say “stable system”, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, that I am also confident that we will have moved to a considerable extent towards an online system. I recall telling the House some months ago that the DWP expects that the number of its customers who interact with it online will have moved from some 20% to some 80% over the next 10 to 15 years, so we are in a system in which we will be moving from paper and letters to online interaction. I am also confident that we will find that data matching and data checking will become more and more constructive and accurate as a means of checking whether someone who registers is precisely who she says she is.