Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Monday 6th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

The hon. Lady will recognise that we introduced agreed legislation on the phasing-in of individual registration. She will also know—and she is on the record as recognising—that although there were potential benefits from individual registration, there were dangers too, which were clear from the Northern Ireland experience. It had to be phased in carefully, with a large amount of resources—not rushed, as the Deputy Prime Minister now proposes.

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Andrew Love (Edmonton) (Lab/Co-op)]

rose—

[Mr Straw]

I am coming to the close of my remarks.

The right hon. Gentleman has repeatedly acknowledged that some 3.5 million people are missing from the register; the figure is from the Electoral Commission. Yet as he told the House today, and did in July, the boundary review will be based on the register published in the beginning of December. Millions will be missing from that register and, as he admitted, they will not be randomly spread. Instead, they will be concentrated among the young, private sector tenants and black and ethnic minority British residents and will be most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities and coastal areas with significant population turnover.

Given those facts, which are accepted by all, why is the right hon. Gentleman rushing to redraw all the boundaries according to an entirely new set of rules whose effect cannot be challenged in public inquiries before these missing voters are put on the electoral roll?

I should have said to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) that I accept his point that there are likely to be many more judicial reviews, including successful judicial reviews, of the Boundary Commission proposals. The Boundary Commission will have to wade through a large number of written representations; there is no way in the world that it can give them the proper concern that would be given if there were an independent, legally qualified chair for each of the boundary inquiries.

Yes, boundaries have been reviewed in recent times on the existing registers, but that did not happen according to a rigid new electoral quota involving an arbitrary cut of 50 seats. Furthermore, those reviews were always balanced by the ability to hold public inquiries, so that account could be taken of issues such as population movement, natural boundaries and, yes, voter registration.

When this issue was debated before the election, Liberal Democrats took a very different view from the one that they now take; no surprise there. Their then spokesman, David Howarth, then the hon. Member for Cambridge, said:

“The idea that fiddling with boundaries based on out-of-date information can make the first-past-the-post system fairer is absurd.”—[Official Report, 8 April 2010; Vol. 508, c. 1217.]

Is that no longer the view of the Liberal Democrats and their leader? Are they now willing to concede a “fiddling of boundaries”—Liberal Democrat words, not mine—provided that they get a referendum on electoral reform in return?

The Liberal Democrats hawk their democratic consciences around, yet they are happy to ignore the democratic rights of millions of eligible voters who will not be part of this boundary review process. Every day in opposition they were speaking as loudly as we are about the problems of under-registration.

[Chris Ruane]

Will my right hon. Friend give way on that point?

[Mr Straw]

I am about to close.

In his excellent blog on the ConservativeHome website, the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster wrote today:

“Reform to our constitution should never be made as a short term, tactical gambit.”

This is a deeply flawed and partisan Bill. It will do much harm and sow a great deal of division. I urge the Deputy Prime Minister to return to the democratic principles that his party’s Front Benchers articulated before the election and to remove the unfair boundary clauses from the Bill. If he splits the Bill, he will have our support. In the meantime, I commend our amendment to the House and urge the House to give that amendment its full support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

There is much wrong with the Bill, or Bills—I think there are two separate Bills, which have been woven into one for political expediency—that have been presented today. As highlighted in the Opposition amendment, the Bills are top-down, hasty and undemocratic, and by their very nature they have lost their bipartisan appeal across the House. However, my main complaint is not what is in the Bills, but what is left out. There is no reference to any action on under-registration.

I have been interested in that issue since 2001, when my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (Mr Brown) informed me of the massive drop in my electorate and the electorates of many MPs across the UK. Since then, I have tabled hundreds of parliamentary questions, spoken dozens of times in Parliament, and met people at the Electoral Commission and various Ministers, but the position remains the same—3.5 million people are missing off the register. Poll tax is one of the reasons for that.

The Government say that the Labour Government did nothing to get those 3.5 million people back on to the register, but we did take steps, and they were not partisan. In 2001, we introduced a measure that said, “If you, or the head of the household, do not personally sign the register for two years on the trot to keep your name on it, you will be taken off.” That was detrimental to the Labour party and the Labour Government, but we took that step because it led to clarification and to improved quality. Many of us complained at the time, although we were not listened to, but it was done for the best purposes.

When I asked the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), what type of person was missing off the register, he said that no national estimates had recently been made. However, the Electoral Commission found in its 2005 report, “Understanding electoral registration”, that based on data from 2000, 17% of ethnic minority individuals, 22% of students, 10% of those renting from a local authority, 11% of those renting from a housing association and 18% of unemployed people were missing off the register, and that areas with the highest levels of unemployment and income deprivation had the highest levels of non-registration. It has been shown that under-registration and inaccuracy are closely associated with the social groups most likely to move home across all seven areas in phase 2 of the study. Under-registration is notably higher than average among 17 to 24-year-olds, with 56% not registered. In addition, 49% of private sector tenants and 31% of British resident black and ethnic minority groups are not registered.

[Mrs Laing]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Ruane]

No, I will not. I had enough of the hon. Lady’s nonsense in a previous intervention, which I will come to in a minute.

In the Electoral Administration Act 2006, we tried to put pressure on electoral registration officers to ensure that they did their job properly, and progress has been made. Best practice is out there, but it takes time. I have managed to improve the situation in my constituency. Working closely with the electoral registration officer, we have put an extra 6,000 people on to the electoral register, 1,000 of whom were in a ward with houses in multiple occupation. I pay tribute to the work of Gareth Evans, the electoral registration officer in my constituency who has brought that about.

Individual registration is opposed by many Labour Members because we know that when it is introduced the electoral register goes down by 10%, as it has in Northern Ireland, and that the people who come off the register are the poorest in society. We were prepared to accept that because the previous Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), said that individual registration would go hand in hand with increasing the register.

I predict that the Government parties will blow a hole in the consensus and go for rushed individual registration, taking another 4.5 million people off the register in addition to the 3.5 million who are already off it. That bipartisanship will be lost for a long time unless they get those 3.5 million people back on to the register. The Deputy Prime Minister can talk in high-falutin’ language about the Reform Act of 1832, but if they are going to take 8 million of the poorest people off the register, and keep them off, they know that they are doing wrong. The British people deserve better than this.