Voter Registration

Chloe Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd October 2014 Westminster Hall

[Chloe Smith (Norwich North) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Williams, and to be the second speaker after the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott), who made an extensive speech. I would invite her to Norfolk, where the climate tends to be a little drier and, occasionally, warmer, although I cannot speak for that in a week where we have all been battered by somewhat higher winds than normal.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on calling this important debate. This is an urgent and important matter for us all, and particularly for me, because, until 1 pm today, I am the secretary of the all-party group on voter registration—we have our annual general meeting at 1 pm, and I fully hope to continue being the secretary or to become another officer of the group. At our meeting, we will also have a briefing from Cabinet Office officials on individual electoral registration. I can therefore reassure hon. Members that there is great interest in this important reform programme and that it is being properly scrutinised, not only in this room, but by the all-party group. It is, indeed, also being scrutinised by many others outside this place, and I could name, among many others, Bite the Ballot or the group I met last night, who are behind the Twitter handle “It’s A Power Thing”—I am sure that you tweet every day, Mr Williams, and that when you find examples of what politics really consists of, you, too, use the hashtag ThisIsPolitics. I am confident that every one of us in the Chamber shares with such groups a passion not only for getting young people to register to vote, but for making sure that anybody and everybody can use their rightful place in the franchise.

I am sure the Minister will explain everything he is doing to ensure the greatest possible accuracy and completeness in voter registration. He will not need me to reiterate the many arguments I have made on this issue, because I have been on record many times in this Parliament as a former Minister with responsibility for the registration programme.

I am pleased to see that we have colleagues from Northern Ireland with us, and I am sure they will be able to explain further some of the lessons that have rightly been learned from a similar roll-out there.

[Chris Ruane]

I pay tribute to the non-partisan work the hon. Lady does on the all-party group—she is an excellent politician. On the lessons from Northern Ireland, the registration rate there in 2011 was 71%, which was way down. There was then a complete canvass, with door knocking, and the rate went up to 88%. Door knocking is the single most important way to improve registration, but, in 2013, 23 authorities did not door-knock. What does the hon. Lady think of that?

[Chloe Smith]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman. He and I have tussled over this many times—again, in a non-partisan way. There is no call for this to be a party political question, but there is every call for us to ensure that local authorities have the tools to do what works, and I am sure the Minister will respond fully and properly to the suggestions that the hon. Member for Sunderland Central made.

On the subject of errant local authorities, the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) will remember that I wrote to colleagues in this place when I was a Minister, and I have done so again during my time with the all-party group, to encourage Members to hold their local authorities to account for what they and their EROs do to properly engage with those who should be registered. Members of the House have a real chance to take a proper interest in this subject—again, in a non-partisan, non-party political way—because we have every interest in ensuring that we have an accurate and complete register and, indeed, that all the tools of the trade are being used to back up the state of our politics. It will not be a matter of debate among us that politics has a bad name and continues to be the subject of declining interest among voters. That is not acceptable to any of us, and all of us, in our different ways, take a passionate interest in the issue.

[Dr William McCrea (South Antrim) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on introducing this timely debate. When she talks about people who vote, she means those who are on the register, but there is a disconnect even there. After we get those people on the register, it is difficult to get them to exercise their voting rights. However, how do we get those who are totally uninterested on the register? There certainly is a problem there. In Northern Ireland, 88% of people are on the register, but there is still a long way to go to get the proper franchise.

[Chloe Smith]

The hon. Gentleman makes a sensible point, but I am certainly not going to be able to solve the problem he raises in my comments—and nor, I suspect, will the Minister be able to. In the scenario the hon. Gentleman described, there is an element of somebody not wishing to do something, and, in the final analysis, I do not think there is a way to compel somebody to do something they do not wish to do. Before we got to that point, I would put every argument to show that their place in democracy is a hard-won right and, at times, very sensitive; and I am sure the hon. Gentleman would be able to give us many more localised reasons why that is so in Northern Ireland. I would argue that, in the grand scheme of things, it is not hard to get on the electoral register in our country. We should compare that with what happens in countries around the world, where it is still hard for people in this day and age to have their democratic voice heard. The best example, which we have seen in the newspapers only in the last month, is probably Hong Kong, where people wish to play a part in democracy. We could all take a few lessons from that back to the people we represent to further the discussion of what democracy really is about.

That allows me to move to the point I wanted to make. I want to go back to principles. I disagree with the hon. Member for Sunderland Central that we are facing disfranchisement—we are not. The people we are talking about are enfranchised and legally able to vote. We are talking not about some descent into North Korean-style practices, but about the method of getting as many people as possible, in the most accurate and complete way possible, to change from one system to another. I am no fan of large bureaucratic systems, and I would—like the Minister, I am sure—place a high value on making the programme as simple and as fast as possible for the voters concerned.

I strongly agree with the hon. Lady’s point—which unfortunately she made only in passing—that the IER programme has cross-party agreement. We do not need to go back to a hyperbolic disagreement; we are looking at the best means of achieving a shared goal. It was the right thing to do in the early days of this Parliament to remove potentially wasteful and expensive duplication in the programme by bringing it forward, and I am sure the Minister will be able to give us a full update on why he continues to think that that was the right thing to do at the time.

Let me also lay out a crucial factor in the implementation programme. There is not going to be—I say it again—some forced North Korean-style loss of participation in our democracy at this crucial time, because no elector will be removed until after the general election. Again, I shall leave it to the Minister to explain fully how he envisages that working, but it is important not to blow things out of proportion. The programme has cross-party agreement and that should continue. We should all pull together to find the best ways to get the result we want.

As to the principle behind IER, it is one of the most important final pieces in the democratic journey, made over centuries, towards a right and proper adult franchise. Among those three letters the “I” has always, for me, been important; it is right and proper for individuals to be able to exercise the right to register, and that is why I believe in the programme. Neither I nor, I am sure, the hon. Member for Sunderland Central would think it acceptable for the right of a woman to register her hard-won place in democracy to be exercised by someone else in her household; so why do we seem to be quibbling over the ability of young people, renters or single adults to take care of their affairs? We need to keep in mind the basic principle that it is right for individuals to take responsibility for their own place in democracy. We have a good democracy, in which there is a place for those people, with their names on it. It is, in the end, for them to take that up, and for us to persuade them why doing so is worth their while. It takes two to tango, of course.

There are a few short months until the general election. There is much for us all to do—in this place, together and individually—to put politics across in the best light. Parliament week will shortly be upon us, so that we will collectively be able to do that little bit more. I could name many groups where people are already encouraging their peers to vote. As I have said, I am particularly interested in encouraging young people to take their place in democracy.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the problem is double barrelled? It certainly is in Northern Ireland and, I am sure, in the hon. Lady’s constituency. Young people, who tend to be more mobile than older people, are less likely to register and less likely to come out and vote even when they are registered. We have a twin approach to deepening the franchise.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chloe Smith]

I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman. He is right. We are all familiar with the statistics from the previous general election: turnout in the 18-to-24 age group was about 44%, while three quarters of those at the other end of the age scale turned out. That is the difference we are talking about; but we are also talking about an evolution that has happened in politics. The situation is not one in which young people will snap into the habit of voting when they get married and get a mortgage. If we wait for that, we will be waiting a long time, for some of the reasons that the hon. Member for Sunderland Central touched on when she spoke about housing.

However, this generation has changed the way it does politics, and actually does fantastic things through non-traditional political means—through informal politics and community politics. It is our job to make sure that formal politics meets them halfway. That is something that I will continue to speak on passionately in this place and act on outside it, and I will endeavour to open up this place to those people. I hope that today’s debate allows us to contribute a little to that process. We should all be in agreement about the value of the programme and the need to ensure that individuals’ rights to register and vote are upheld and encouraged. We should be talking merely about the best way to get people in our local authorities, and the citizens we represent, to the ballot box.

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[Chris Ruane]

We did not do our job and I admit that. However, we had a plan from 2010 to 2015 to remedy that and to put the missing millions on the register in time for IER to be introduced in 2015. That plan was wrecked for party political advantage by the Conservative wing of the coalition Government.

The Electoral Commission has let us down in other ways. In the dry run for IER, the Department for Work and Pensions cross-referenced national databases with the electoral register. There was a match rate of about 82%, which it then sent to 383 local EROs. It asked them or said that if they wanted they could do local government data matching to get them from 82% to 92%. Of the 383, only 137 informed the Electoral Commission that it had done that. There may have been others, but they could not be bothered to tell the commission. It should have been firm and told those authorities that they had to take part in the dry run to iron out any difficulties ready for the live run. It did not do that.

The Electoral Commission’s plan for 2014 to 2019 covers what it hopes to achieve over the next five years. It recognised in 2014 that 7.5 million people were missing from the register in 2010. What is its aim for putting those people on the register over the next five years? The answer is zero. It has said that its aim for April 2011 was for the register to be 85.5% complete; for April 2019, the aim is that that completeness does not deteriorate. So 7.5 million names are missing now and there will be 7.5 million missing in 2019. That reminds me of a report once sent to my mum stating, “Christopher has set himself very low standards and failed to achieve them.” The Electoral Commission has failed. It set itself low standards and will fail to achieve them. It has been remiss.

When the Electoral Commission found out that the number of people missing from the register in 2010 was not 6 million but 7.5 million—that has flatlined; it is the same now—it welcomed that. It welcomed the fact that there had been no improvement in the registration rate. It had flatlined and had not increased, and the commission thought that was an achievement. It has set itself low standards. It is not only happy that 7.5 million people will be kept off the register for the next five years, but it has introduced restrictions on the handling of postal votes. It says that political parties cannot be trusted to go out and ask people whether they want a postal vote and to send it off when it has been filled in. It refers to electoral postal vote fraud, but there has been only one case of that in 10 years.

The Electoral Commission is not happy with just doing that. It is proposing that when people go to the polling station in 2019, they will have to show photo ID. That has been done in America, in right-wing Republican states—there is a perfect mirroring between Republican and Democrat states in America in terms of those that have and have not introduced photo ID. The independent Electoral Commission in this country is proposing that we copy those Republican states. It is an outrage. There has been one successful prosecution for electoral registration fraud in 10 years.

There are big issues out there. The prediction, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central outlined, is that there will be an additional 5.5 million people missing off the register as a result of IER. The hon. Member for Norwich North is right that they will be protected for the general election. There will be a carry-over from household registration to individual registration, and we thank the Government for that—I think they were forced into it by the Lib Dems and others—but the next big date is the freeze date for the Boundary Commission, for the next boundary review, which is December 1 2015. If there is no carry-over for those 5.5 million people and for the 7 million people already off the register, 13 million or perhaps 14 million people will drop off it before the boundary review freeze date of 1 December 2015.

[Chloe Smith]

I want to draw the hon. Gentleman back a little. He is correct about the December 2015 date, but does he think that those voters then go to a Siberia of democracy? Does he not think that they still have the right to register if they wish to?

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely, and those black voters in the southern states of America had the right to go and register but they did not. We know that people have not registered and that more will fall off, and we know that we can take steps to encourage more to fall off or to stop people from falling off. I think the coalition Government are quite happy with the situation. I think it is deliberate, given the time scale, the bringing things forward by one year and the lifestyle choice that they considered. It all points in the same direction: that they wanted maximum political benefit from the constitutional changes that they were introducing.

I shall finish my speech as I started it. If we have 11 million people not voting and 7.5 million people—perhaps 14 million people—not on the register, we will not be serving democracy in the mother of Parliaments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Evans (Islwyn) (Lab/Co-op)]

Thank you for calling me, Mr Williams. I think I only have four minutes, so I will throw away the magnum opus speech that I was going to give and just make a few points that I think were covered by my hon. Friends the Members for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) and for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) in two outstanding, passionate speeches.

My key point is that the introduction of voter registration, as we have seen, is so important. As my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd wrote in Progress magazine, we could return to electoral registration rates like those of Alabama in the 1950s. We saw the situation in Florida in 2000, with the famous Bush versus Gore presidential election, where there was widespread belief that people were missing out on a democratic duty.

[Chloe Smith]

On that point, I intervene extremely briefly to ask the hon. Gentleman whether he is implying that he thinks I am racist, as I think his hon. Friend, the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd, was doing?

[Chris Evans]

No, I do not think I said that. If I implied that, I apologise. I do not think the hon. Lady is racist.