Electoral Registration

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. Gentleman’s point is not relevant to the motion, but I will deal with it directly. If he has concerns about the misuse of postal votes, I advise him to report them to the police and to the Electoral Commission. He will be aware of the numbers of prosecutions that there have been over the past few years. We have to be quite careful about using parliamentary privilege to make allegations. If he has specific examples, I ask him to refer them to the police and the Electoral Commission.

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

The constituency with the highest proportion of postal ballots is Tatton, with 96%. Is the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) aware that 93% of people transferred their postal ballots from household registration to individual registration? Postal ballots are valued by the voting public.

[Sadiq Khan]

That is a very important point. In some constituencies the number of people using postal votes is incredibly high. I am sure that the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster was not suggesting that the voters in Tatton are committing electoral fraud.

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[Sadiq Khan]

I am grateful for that clarification, and to demonstrate what a nice guy I am, I shall give way one last time.

[Chris Ruane]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way a second time. May I inform him and the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) that there has been one successful prosecution for postal ballot fraud in the past seven years?

[Sadiq Khan]

I thank my hon. Friend for confirming the point that I was seeking to make a short while ago.

There is some good news. Many people out there are not prepared to put up with this inequality. I pay tribute to all those involved in registering people to vote—it is a tough job, but critical—from local authority electoral registration officers to political party activists of all parties pounding the pavements, and from the NUS to HOPE not hate, Operation Black Vote and our trade unions, who tirelessly work to get people registered. I also pay tribute to the Daily Mirror’s No Vote No Voice campaign, getting its readers and their families and friends registered to vote.

In particular, I want to pay tribute to and thank Bite the Ballot, the architects of tomorrow’s national voter registration day. Anyone who has been involved in one of their sessions with young people cannot fail to be impressed by the infectious enthusiasm of Mike Sani and his team. It is a real pity that the Prime Minister chose to snub their leaders’ debate, although it is perhaps indicative of how some in the ruling classes view younger voters.

To complicate matters further, the whole way we go about registering to vote is undergoing a fundamental change. Yes, it was the last Government who, in 2009, legislated to introduce individual electoral registration. That legislation was shaped by the experiences in Northern Ireland—when they moved to IER, there was an 11% fall in the numbers registered, so to counter that a transition period was put in place for long enough to prevent a repeat. Safeguards were also put in place at key milestones to check against any deterioration in the completeness of the register. Colleagues on both sides of the House welcomed that careful and considerate approach to moving to IER.

The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing), now Madam Deputy Speaker, who in those days spoke for the Conservative party, said:

“I am very pleased to have the opportunity to put it on the record once and for all that we agree with the Government that the accuracy, comprehensiveness and integrity of the register and of the system is paramount. That is one of the reasons why we will not oppose the timetable the Minister has suggested this evening.”

The then Liberal Democrat spokesman said:

“I do not think that anybody was suggesting that the timetable be artificially shortened, or that any risk be taken with the comprehensiveness of the register.”—[Official Report, 13 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 108-12.]

After the last general election, the coalition, in its arrogance, decided to rip up the cross-party approach supported by all sides in the previous Parliament. The coalition agreement contained a commitment to

“speeding up the implementation of individual voter registration”,

and the Government introduced the reckless Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, which removed the voluntary phase and instead introduced compulsory individual electoral registration from July 2014.

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[Mr Gyimah]

As I said, in addition to the £161,000 of maximised registration funding, Liverpool received £288,000 to help boost its register. If that money was not enough, the city can apply to the Cabinet Office for more funding using justification-led bids. Electoral registration officers have statutory responsibility for maintaining the register, so perhaps the hon. Lady will ask her EROs what they have done with the money.

What has prompted the change of heart on the Labour Benches about IER? Is it because the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) is trying to taunt the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) and the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) in their bids to become the Labour candidate for the Mayor of London? Could it be that the Labour party, rightly scared of the next election, has retreated to the comfort zone of opposition politics and scaremongering about the Government’s policies?

[Chris Ruane]

If the Conservatives win, and if the Minister is still a Minister in June, he will take the most momentous decision of his life: whether to let 5 million people drop off the register before the freeze date for boundaries on 1 December. What principles will guide him in that decision? When I asked him that in Committee, he did not have any.

[Mr Gyimah]

I will come to the details of the electoral register—[Interruption.] May I answer the question? There is a clear process through which the decision will be made about whether to end the transition in 2015. That will be down to the independent advice of the Electoral Commission, whoever is Minister and whoever is in government.

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[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), who speaks with great expertise on this subject. He makes the case that we need to do all we can to get people to register to vote in this country, and I completely agree, but I believe we are doing that by all methods possible, as I shall come on to demonstrate. However, I completely agree with his wider point about engagement; we need to find new ways forward. I will read his report tomorrow with great interest.

Sadly, there always are and always have been a substantial number of people who do not register to vote—whatever the system, and in every democratic country—no matter what their persuasion. Different figures are bandied about because it is an imprecise science: we can count the people on the register, but we cannot count those who do not register. As of July 2014, before the shift to individual voter registration started, at least 6 million people were not on the register.

[Chris Ruane]

Seven and a half million.

[Mr Streeter]

I am talking about 2014.

[Chris Ruane]

So am I.

[Mr Streeter]

Goodbye.

The figure the hon. Gentleman gives is the snapshot of the number of unregistered people as of 1 December. I have to say that he ruins my weekends. He tables at least 400 written questions every week, and I have to spend my weekends reading through the answers. Of course, it is great fun. My wife is convinced that I am having some kind of illicit relationship with him. [Interruption.] Not a pleasant thought.

[Chris Ruane]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Will the hon. Gentleman clarify what he has just said?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I do not think anybody needs to clarify the relationship between you and Mr Streeter.

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[Mr Streeter]

Yes, we have, and the right hon. Gentleman will be pleased to learn that the Electoral Commission hit its target in the run-up to the last general election. I am pretty confident that it will do so again.

[Chris Ruane]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Streeter]

I cannot give way again; I have only 29 seconds left.

I hope that the House will recognise that there is a great deal of activity already under way or about to happen that is likely to increase voter registration dramatically. We also have a responsibility ourselves to take our great communication skills to our constituencies and to get the message across to everyone out there: register to vote—don’t lose your voice!

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

I shall start by making the bold statement that if the Conservative proposals on electoral registration had gone ahead in their original form in 2010 and 2011, we would have seen a constitutional coup that would have kept the Tory party in power in this country for a generation. There would have been a two-pronged attack that involved bringing the date for the introduction of individual electoral registration forward by a year. That simple act would have resulted in a total of 35% of the electorate dropping off the register, in addition to the 15% who were already missing from it. Those people would have been the most economically and socially marginalised in the country, and their marginalisation would have been complete with their vote gone.

The second prong of the attack was to have been the equalisation of constituencies at 75,000 electors per seat, plus or minus 5%. That change would have been carried out while 7.5 million people were missing from the electoral register—the equivalent of 100 missing parliamentary seats.

[Meg Hillier]

I am concerned that the number of people on the electoral register is used as a proxy for local government funding allocations. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is a real concern, especially for the poorer constituencies, which are experiencing the greatest drop-off of all?

[Chris Ruane]

I agree with my hon. Friend.

I wish to probe more deeply into the machinations of that grand plan. It is only by looking at what has happened in the recent past that we can find out what would happen over the next few months if the Tories were to get back in.

[Mr Gyimah]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Ruane]

No, I will not give way.

Individual electoral registration was introduced by the Labour Government in 2009 with cross-party support. The issue was so sensitive that we sought that cross-party support. The deadline for its introduction was after the latest date for the next general election, which is of course this year. The reason for the long run-in period was that there were already 7.5 million people missing from the register, and we hoped that we could get them back on to it during that five-year period. The Electoral Commission was going to have marking points throughout the period, so that we could implement IER and assess its impact. This cross-party support, this cherished unity, was shattered, as one of the first aims of the coalition agreement, set out on page 27, was:

“We will reduce electoral fraud by speeding up the implementation of individual voter registration.”

What was this massive electoral fraud that so concerned the Conservatives? Why was it so important that a new IER Bill took precedence over virtually all other Bills at the height of the economic crisis?

Let us look at the facts and figures concerning electoral fraud. The fraud that so exercised the Conservatives was one case in 2008 and one in 2009. In the six years from 2008 to 2013 there were three cases out of 45 million electors. That was the size of the problem.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Ruane]

No. I shall make progress.

That was the size of the problem—three cases of electoral fraud in six years. The Government, backed up by the Electoral Commission, claim that it is not the numbers—

[Mr Gyimah]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. Will he explain to us why the Labour Government decided to introduce IER if not to deal with electoral fraud, which he says does not exist?

[Chris Ruane]

We introduced it because, although the old system had served us fairly well and quite a high number of people were registered, we thought it was patriarchal and registration should be down to the individual. We did it with cross-party support, cross-party unity.

Why did the Conservatives go to such trouble to shatter the cross-party support? They knew exactly what they were doing when they rushed the Bill through with undue haste. They hoped that even more poorer voters would drop off the register before the 2015 general election and increase their chances of winning it.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most appalling things that this Government did was to produce a White Paper which referred to voter registration as a lifestyle choice?

[Chris Ruane]

I am coming to that right now.

What the Conservatives proposed was not simply bringing forward the date by one year. They had a few more tricks up their sleeves. They wanted to replace the civic duty to register by making it a lifestyle choice. Electors could simply opt out of registering by ticking a box that would be supplied to help them on their way to political disengagement. The Electoral Commission warned that if this happened, it would be assumed that those who did not vote would not register and we would lose 35% of the electorate.

If the Tories had succeeded, nearly half the electorate would have been missing from the register. Those left off would have been the poorest. This was a blatant, deliberate political act to drive the poorest people off the register. There is a term for it used by right wingers in America—voter suppression. No vote, no voice: those people were being silenced. The Conservatives were leaving nothing to chance. They planned a few more measures to ensure that those electors were forced off the register. They proposed that there would be no annual canvass—the Minister mentioned this. We introduced an annual canvass. The Minister did not want to introduce an annual canvass, but he was forced to do so. To complete the stitch-up the Conservatives proposed to remove any sanctions for not registering to vote. All these actions together show beyond doubt that the Tories’ direction of travel was to disfranchise as many poor voters as possible.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) who, as shadow minister at the time, summoned civic society to fight this, and we managed to get the worst aspects of the Bill removed. The Lib Dems finally realised that they were being stitched up too. I pay tribute to the work of Chris Rennard in the Lords and others in the Lib Dem party who informed their Front-Bench team of what was going on.

We were able to stop the worst aspects of the Bill, but even though the Tories were defeated by a mighty alliance of those who wanted to protect democracy, they managed to squeeze one concession from their Lib Dem partners. The Tories proposed that they be given an opportunity, should they win the election, to make a political decision to drop off the unregistered in June this year, six months before the freeze date for the next boundary review. Five million electors would not transfer from household registration to individual registration. These voters would also be removed from the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Welsh Assembly elections and the local government elections. The Minister has already admitted that he has no guiding principles when he makes this important decision to smash British democracy—no such principles are in place. He failed to answer on this when I asked him at the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee and he failed to answer today when I asked him. The press and the public are watching the Minister. Would he like to intervene on that? Where are his guiding principles?

[Mr Gyimah]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that invitation to intervene. Whoever is the Minister, and whoever is in government, the decision they make will be taken on the independent advice of the Electoral Commission. That is pretty clear as far as guiding principles are concerned.

[Chris Ruane]

The Minister wants to have a word with his boss because I do not think he is thinking like that. The Minister was unable to answer this question about guiding principles, so I will tell him what the answer on the guiding principles will be. They will be what they were at the beginning of this Parliament: party political gain for the Conservative party.

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[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

Let me make it quite clear that the Labour Government introduced the notion of individual electoral registration and the motion before us in no way backtracks from that, no matter how much bluster we hear from the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) and the Minister for the Constitution, who should look at the detail of how his Department is working. By falling back on the Electoral Commission, the Minister is making a big mistake.

I accept the argument put forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane). The original idea behind the process was to drive down the register, and we do not need to look too far to see where the Conservative party got it from. In the United States, the Republican party is doing exactly the same thing.

The hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) rightly emphasised what is being done to try to get people, particularly young people, on the register. I commend all those efforts, but it is not about working harder, to use the old BT phrase, but about working smarter. The Government are not doing that and I am afraid that the Electoral Commission is not doing it either.

The Minister asked why the focus was on young people, and I can give him the answer. According to the House of Commons Library, only 56% of 19 to 24-year-olds are registered to vote, whereas 94% of those aged over 65 are. I want to refer to one issue, which is the responsibility of the Minister and the Electoral Commission—he cannot get away from it—and that is the drop in the number of 18-year-olds who have been registered, particularly attainers.

In my constituency in 2012, there were 619 attainers on the register. In 2013 there were 701, in 2014 there were 632, and this year there are 114.

[Chris Ruane]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend, who was the MP who discovered the drop in the number of attainers. Is he aware that 87% of attainers were registered nationally last year whereas this year the figure has gone down to 52%?

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[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who is an agreeable chap. I can only assume that his conspiracy theory arises from his upbringing in the murky world of Labour and trade union politics in the north-east. Like his friend the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), he sees a conspiracy round every corner.

I have been in politics for 30 years, but for Labour Members it is always about politics, not about what is in the national interest or what is right. Even when they start off by doing what is right, proper and decent to address an issue, they turn around a few years later and say, “We don’t agree with it any more, because it does not suit our narrow partisan interests.” How do they have the gall?

The hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd trooped through the Lobby to vote against fair and equal boundaries. Along the coast from his constituency, Arfon has an electorate of 49,000, while my next-door constituency of Cambridgeshire North West has almost 100,000 electors. He considers that to be democratic, but it is not.

[Chris Ruane]

When making seats equal was being railroaded through, 7.5 million people were missing from the register, which would be the equivalent of 100 extra parliamentary seats.

[Mr Jackson]

I am not wholly convinced that the Labour party has ever taken electoral integrity as seriously as it should have done. The hon. Gentleman talks about the criminal cases over the past few years. My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) alluded to the fact that we simply do not know how much electoral registration stuffing there has been, because EROs and local authorities have not had the capacity to check that across the country. Under the Labour party, we saw electoral malpractice and criminal activity in Pendle, Derby, Birmingham, Bradford, Slough and Peterborough, to give just a few examples.

Let us be honest: this debate is a wasted opportunity for the Labour party. It is inviting us to conclude that an impact assessment of its Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, in which individual electoral registration was originally contained, would have shown no reduction in the number of people registering. Of course that is not the case. I was in the House at the time and we all knew that there would be a reduction after the first major change for many years.

The Labour party now comes back and says that this is an evil, wicked Tory plot to drive poor people off the register. The crocodile tears were not flowing when it blocked servicemen and women—people who were fighting and dying for our country—from coming back, casting their ballots and using the universal franchise. Labour Members were not worried then. Now they are full of crocodile tears and faux outrage over the patronising notion that their voters are not on the register.

The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) bemoans the situation with older people and postal votes. Does she think that people who are older are so stupid that they cannot fill out forms? Before the 2001 changes, older people and pensioners were able to fill out forms in cases of ill health, if they were working away or if they were in other circumstances. More to the point, the turnout was much higher.

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[Mr Jackson]

I named her, but I have named a lot of people in this debate.

The Labour party’s problem is simple: it is useless Labour councils. Those useless Labour councils are being given a lot of taxpayers’ money to do the job properly. They should be canvassing, registering people, ensuring that the right people are on the register and ensuring that there is electoral integrity in the register. If Labour Members have problems in Bristol, County Durham and the London borough of Merton, all of which are controlled by the Labour party, they should take them up with local people.

[Chris Ruane]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way on that point?

[Mr Jackson]

I cannot give way, I am afraid, because I have little time.

If this were a plot, we would not be putting so many public resources into the process. There has been £500,000 to boost confidence in the electoral system, £2.5 million has been spent on students and overseas voters, £6.8 million has been given to local authorities by the Department for Communities and Local Government for physical canvassing for registration, and there has been work on universities and housing associations as part of the Cabinet Office’s £9.8 million funding.

We accept that some people will be missed in the DWP data-matching. In the central ward in my constituency, about 40% of people were missed. We understand that, but it is ultimately the responsibility of local authorities to find the missing voters by physical door-to-door canvassing. In that way, we will have a full register with integrity.

For most of the time, the previous Labour Government were content to see the potential for electoral register stuffing.

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[The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Tom Brake)]

The debate has been important and wide ranging. We have heard many analyses of the issues we face and a number of possible solutions. The problem of under-registration did not happen overnight, and it will not be fixed overnight. Its causes are complex and are linked to increased population mobility and disengagement from traditional party politics. It is nonsense to suggest, as I am afraid many Opposition Members did, that this Government do not take the issue of under-registration seriously. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As the Minister for the Constitution made clear, the Government are committed to enhancing both the accuracy and the completeness of the electoral register. That is why I cannot support the idea of block registration. The whole purpose of individual electoral registration is that it is individual; it is not block registration. It is not people being put on a register who do not know that that has happened.

The decline in the completeness of the registers between 2000 and 2010—in other words, under the last Government—has been arrested. The most recent research by the Electoral Commission shows that levels of electoral registration have stabilised since 2011. I hope we can all welcome that, but it is of course not enough.

[Chris Ruane]

The right hon. Gentleman is entirely correct. The figure was 7.5 million under Labour and it is 7.5 million now. Is he aware that the EC’s aim is still to have 7.5 million people on the register by 2019? Does that not show a lack of ambition by the EC?

[Tom Brake]

I think that Members on both sides of the House would like the Electoral Commission to achieve much more than that, and of course that is why the Government have set out £14 million of spending, which I am going to come to, to boost registration.

We have taken a number of vital and novel steps to transform electoral registration in this country. Online registration, which has been welcomed by everyone, was introduced for the first time last year and makes registering to vote easier than ever. Of course young people in particular, who spend a significant percentage of their time online and are very familiar with using systems online, will be able to use that very easily. It is easier, too, for people to encourage others to register, simply by sharing a link to the gov.uk website.