Individual Voter Registration

Bill Esterson Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Allen]

My hon. Friend makes her case eloquently, and she is a great champion of ensuring that members of the public in her constituency and elsewhere are on the register. We need to support that sentiment, and only we in the Chamber can do so.

We do that partly through the activities of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which I am fortunate to chair. It is an active Committee, and some of its members are in the Chamber: my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore) and the hon. Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths). I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing), who spoke on behalf of the Committee when I was absent due to ill health when this matter was last debated.

We have worked together, and we have worked with the Government, to try to make the proposal better. Given the exchanges that have taken place, the House is in severe danger of doing the job that members of the public elected it to do. The Government have submitted a pre-legislative proposal to the Select Committee, which is how things should happen. The Select Committee responded with non-partisan efforts to determine a better Bill and to make better proposals, some of which have already been heard by the Government. Today, we are having a measured debate. There may not be a great drama if we tend to agree on a number of the issues, but that is what the House should do when proposed legislation is introduced, so that we end up with better legislation.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a good speech and an important contribution to the debate. Will he comment on the concerns, particularly in urban areas, about the change to individual registration without safeguards? Those of us who represent such areas will have far more people to represent, often with far greater problems.

[Mr Allen]

My hon. Friend, as always, is well ahead of me, and I shall come on to those points.

Something that unites everyone in the House is the feeling that individual voter registration is right. We have heard concern from Members from all parts of the House that unless the measure is implemented effectively we could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. I do not think that anyone wants that to happen. Listening to us in the House and making sure that this is done properly will ensure that the measure—what the Electoral Commission called the “biggest change” in the franchise since the introduction of universal suffrage—is implemented effectively so that everyone can benefit, rather than partially or going off at half-cock and getting it all wrong.

Our anxiety in the Select Committee fell into several parts. The blockbuster came when we heard from the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators about the fact that if we did not do this right, not only might 10,000 people on average in every constituency not appear on the register, as only 90% of people would register, but that that figure could drop by a third, making the situation even worse, perhaps going down to 60%. That was a shock to the Select Committee and to members of all parties represented on it. I know that that is not the Minister’s intention, and that he will keep listening to ensure that as many people as possible are on the register.

Our anxieties—I shall put them to the Minister again—covered a number of areas. First, I pay tribute to him and to his colleagues for listening to what we had to say on the opt-out: the tick box saying “Don’t bother me any more. I don’t want to be registered. Leave me alone.” The fact that the Government listened to those representations very early bodes well for future amendments.

Secondly, on the issue of registration and whether non-registration should be an offence, I ask the Government to think again. We heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) said about the evidence from Rhyl. He made a compelling case that there may well be a better way to deal with the matter. Perhaps it is not by means of a £1,000 fine or by taking up half the space of the form with bold red capitals, but maybe it is. I ask the Government to take the matter away and think again. There are people who need a little encouragement, a little nudge to register, and across the House we should consider the best way to do that.

My third point concerns the full household canvass. I do not know whether the Minister said anything about that, but I hope he is keeping an open mind as the process develops. One of the particular concerns of the Committee were the areas that already have high rates of under-registration. We need to consider whether there is something we can do across the board or in those specific circumstances to ensure that something is done in areas that are brought to our attention as having a large unregistered population. I hope the Minister will look at that.

Another point that came up repeatedly was the funding of electoral registration officers. I will not get into the subject of local government expenditure and reductions, but we cannot put a price on democracy. If additional resources are needed or existing resources ought to be ring-fenced, we would all commend the Government for thinking further about that. I say no more than that. I do not offer a magic solution. I do not propose any more than was suggested in Committee, but I hope that electoral registration and returning officers locally are given the sort of support that will enable thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of people to participate in our democracy, as is their right.

I guess colleagues have very much in mind yet another redistribution of parliamentary seats and boundary changes. If there is a catastrophic fall in the numbers of people on the registers, all of us, regardless of party, nation or region within the United Kingdom, will again face the merry-go-round of boundary redistribution. All I will say to the Minister is that if this debate is an exemplar of the way we can conduct our business in the House and reach as close to consensus as we can, perhaps the way in which previous Bills have been dealt with is an example of how not to do it. Let us not inadvertently have a rerun of the boundary changes under which we are all labouring now, with the accidental reduction of a register causing yet another boundary change. I hope that lesson can be learned, otherwise Members in the House will be representing numbers rather than places and people.

Finally, I commend the Government and my Front-Bench team for the way we have managed through the parliamentary process—of course there have been the ding-dongs, the public exchange of insults and so on—to make a better proposal than we started with. I hope very much that the Government, who have listened, will continue to listen and that we will have a piece of legislation that we can be proud of and that introduces individual voter registration in a way that we would all want.