Elections Bill

Baroness Verma Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

We have an opportunity to reset—to use this legislation and say, “You know what? We’ve looked at the evidence, and we’ve got a lot wrong.” I heard the debate on Tuesday, when the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and others said that if we do not put things right, the blind and those with eyesight impediments may not be able to engage. I am talking about young people and people from African, Asian and Caribbean communities. The report on the 2019 review says that Asian communities in Derby were disproportionately affected by voter ID. We can do better than that. This is our opportunity to tell those communities that we are listening and caring. We must get them to the voting booth by being positive—not by being negative as this Bill shows.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

My Lords, I did not want to be here either today, because of my fractured foot. The noble Lord, Lord Woolley, and I go back a long way, fighting on the same side on many things. However, I am worried that we are pulling everybody together and thinking that wanting to clean up the system is disenfranchising people.

I have worked so hard locally engaging with people, and the thing I hear back all the time is, “What’s the point of my vote when it’s not going to count?”, because they are not engaged—not, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, because they do not want to be, but because in cities like mine, they are not encouraged to be engaged. I have talked about those who cannot speak and understand English over and again in this Chamber, and I am talking about the many women I engage with every single week in my city. I really try hard to get them engaged in what is going on in their city because their rights are constantly being set aside.

I want our voting system to reflect these women’s desires too, just as the noble Lord and I have fought battles against everything else that is discriminatory. I want to remove this inability for them to believe that they matter. They do not matter because, most of the time, the decisions they want to make are made by people who tend to speak on their behalf because they are the only people who are engaging.

It is not just about the £180 million for me—it really is not. I am passionate that we have a system where every single vote counts, whether it is from the poor, white working class in my city or the women I am engaged with. I spoke with many of them about this Bill—before I did this to my foot—and said that I would listen carefully to what was being said. Often as not, I ask for clarification from the Government Front Bench because I want to know that what I am taking back to them will actually empower them and not take power away. A lot of the time, what they said to me was that they want to be the people who matter in this process. At this moment in time, they do not feel that they matter. For me, anything that tidies that up is a great thing.

I of course want young people to be engaged, but more important than the young people coming forward are the people who are there today—the women from my communities and the noble Lord’s communities, and the poor, working class—who do not feel engaged. If that means we have to have something that helps that process, I am all for it. Do not think for one minute I will not challenge my Front Bench if I do not agree with it, but I really want a system that enables us all to feel that we are part of a process where one vote matters. At the moment, there are plenty in my city who do not believe that.

[Baroness Pinnock (LD)]

My Lords, what a wonderful, emotional, eloquent contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Woolley. I have to say I totally agree. Here we are this afternoon debating the minutiae of the costs of voter ID, when the big issue we are failing to debate and come to terms with is the huge number of people in our country who should be able to vote but are not able to because they are not on the register. It is disproportionately and discriminatively against those from black communities, Asian communities and working-class communities. That is why the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, was so powerful.

[Baroness Verma (Con)]

I am tired of this divisiveness that keeps coming up. We have been in this country for a very long time. The divisiveness that has been caused has been caused because we have refused to allow people to be fully engaged. I am going to stand here and say that over and over again. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, can shake her head, but I have heard it over and over again that minority communities do not want to engage. They do, but unfortunately the systems do not always help them.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I have found this absolutely fascinating—I genuinely have. This is not a rhetorical point. I understand that both the noble Baronesses opposite who have spoken have said they want integrity in the system. The noble Baroness has just said she feels passionate about a lack of engagement and obstacles to people’s engagement—an issue on which I suspect she finds common cause with the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, and everyone in the Committee. My question to the noble Baroness, because I really want to understand her position, is whether she feels that, at present, a significant bar to the engagement she seeks is coming from widespread voter fraud in the communities she is discussing. Is that the problem she feels is the stumbling block and is that why she is a supporter of the Government’s policy?