Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Baroness O'Loan Excerpts

Tuesday 24th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Loan]

My Lords, I wish to bring three brief points to the attention of your Lordships’ House. I welcome the attempts in the Bill to reduce electoral fraud by speeding up the implementation of individual voter registration, which has clearly been very effective in Northern Ireland. The noble Lord, Lord Trimble, has referred extensively to the figures. When individual voter registration was introduced in Northern Ireland in 2006, there was a 20% reduction in the number of those registered to vote. That is a significant number in anyone’s terms.

The first matter I wish to consider in detail is the power contained in Clause 2(2) of the Bill, which would insert a new paragraph into Schedule 2 to the Representation of the People Act 1983. This relates to Section 53 of that Act. Those provisions are unexceptional. They permit the Secretary of State or the Lord President of the Council to make regulations, subject to the affirmative procedure, about the registration of voters and arrangements for postal and proxy voting. However, the new provisions pursuant to Clause 2(2) will give power to the Secretary of State by determination, not by affirmative resolution or regulation as is the pattern elsewhere in the Bill, to require that a person seeking registration as a voter must provide specific evidence of identity to prove that he or she is the person named in the application and to enable the registration officer to determine whether that person is entitled to be registered. There is a new sub-paragraph, to which some reference has been made, which states the kind of evidence required, including a person’s date of birth and national insurance number. On the face of it, that sounds quite normal and what one might expect of legislation. However, this provision goes to the heart of the exercise of the right to vote. It removes from any formal parliamentary oversight or challenge the nature of the evidence ultimately required to be permitted to vote. It is left to the Secretary of State to decide by determination. The question here must be: why not by regulation?

There is already confusion about which documents permit one to be able to register as a voter. Searching the web does not always reveal a clear and coherent statement in answer to the question. Moreover, there are many in our society who do not have access to the web and thus to the information that may be available. I think of the elderly, those with a disability, those from the ethnic minorities with language difficulties, and even the very young voter. The explanation given to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, of which I am a member, of why the Secretary of State should be allowed to decide by determination what evidence should be required was that:

“The question of what information or documents have sufficient evidential value to be relied upon is a technical one, and one which changes over time as the technology used by various entities changes ... this information may need to be changed at short notice”.

That is the justification for removing from any form of parliamentary scrutiny that part of the process which will enable intending voters to become registered. We all know that it is possible for primary legislation to be made in the course of a day, let alone amending regulations. In its sixth report, the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee stated that the arrangements set out in the Bill are inappropriate.

The reality is that the range of documents which may be used to confer eligibility to register is limited, but there will undoubtedly be circumstances in which people who should be entitled to register will not have the normal documents. Not everybody has a passport or a driving licence; not everybody even has a birth certificate. You can get birth certificates from Somerset House, but that does not actually prove that someone is the person named on the birth certificate. Questions have already been asked as to whether the Government are satisfied that the current data collections in relation to material held about people’s identity are accurate. What of the validity of information which may be supplied pursuant to the Bill by a person of any kind from whom the electoral registration officer may seek information?

The matter is complicated by the fact that if you are a citizen of one of some 105 European Union or Commonwealth countries, British Overseas Territories or British Crown dependencies and you are resident in the United Kingdom, you are eligible to register to vote. That means that the nature of the documentation could in some circumstances be very different from that which might be required of a UK citizen. This is of fundamental importance to our democracy and I would suggest that, like all the other provisions in the Bill, there should be a proper arrangement for this process.

There has been considerable discussion of the issue of proxy and postal votes and the carry-forward arrangements in the Bill. I endorse much of what has been said about the importance of cleaning up proxy and postal votes, but I want to emphasise the fact that, for those with disabilities and for the vulnerable, it will be necessary to make further carry-forward arrangements. Otherwise, they will be deprived of their right to vote.

There is another issue that I would like to raise. A survey undertaken at the last general election by the organisation Scope called “Polls Apart” found that there are approximately 15,000 potential disabled voters per constituency, with 67% of polling stations representing one or more access barriers for disabled people. Five charities, Mencap, the RNIB, Age UK, Scope and Sense, have suggested that the Bill presents a real opportunity to improve the electoral process for disabled people, particularly by recording information about electoral access needs at the point of registration. Recording disabled and older voters’ access needs at the point of registration could be used to improve the accessibility of the current system during the transition to IER and over the longer term. I am also informed that this recommendation is supported by the Electoral Commission. Such information could inform plans for the creation and renovation of polling stations.

A provision to include a pilot scheme for recording access needs was presented in another place during the passage of the Bill. At that point, the Government did not commit to ensuring that a pilot would take place. This Bill undoubtedly represents an opportunity which should not be missed to make provision for a pilot that would provide the information at the time of registration about the access needs of the applicant. It would be a simple amendment that would make a significant contribution towards giving the disabled and the vulnerable the access necessary to exercise their democratic right to vote.

Finally, I will speak briefly about the imposition of civil sanctions by electoral registration officers. I can see no purpose in the imposition of civil sanctions for failure to provide information to register. They do not go to the purpose of the Bill, which is to prevent electoral fraud. There is a risk that, like so many other provisions where a low penalty is introduced by the Government, it will simply be regarded as a further money-raising exercise. I do not mean to be offensive, but we have had an enormous number of additional fines and penalties recently. They will be costly to administer. There is no provision for a scrutiny process—there is a review process but not a scrutiny process. I think the fact that discretion is given to the electoral registration officers as to whether to fine or not may well lead to unfairness. There being no legal duty to vote, why should there be a legal duty rather than a moral compulsion to register and to provide the information to vote? Why should that legal duty be accompanied by a penalty if one does not comply? What is required is further education about democracy itself and about the level of prosecutions for failure to provide information. In Northern Ireland, since 2006, there has been one prosecution for failure to provide information, and the penalty imposed by the magistrate in the court was a fine of one penny.