Draft Government of Wales Act 2006 (Amendment) Order 2019

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2019 General Committees

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

May I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David? This is the second such occasion in less than a week, as I attended the meeting on endometriosis that you chaired last week, and I pay tribute to your qualities as a chairman. I also pay tribute to the Minister. He is a consensual and easy-going Minister, and I do not intend to give him a hard time on this occasion, because I fully support the draft order and this transfer of functions to the Welsh Government. It is a sensible way of doing business with Wales.

I was at a meeting yesterday where, on other issues, Welsh and Scottish Ministers feel that they have been treated like children, and not in a very mature way. Today that is not the case; I think we are treating the Welsh Government and politicians in Wales in an adult way, and it is long overdue.

Giving the Welsh Government, with all the functions they have, full licence to do what they want in this area without coming back to London to seek permission for this or for that means that all the ducks are in a row now and they can pursue the initiatives that they want to pursue. That is the great thing about devolution. We have four Chambers—five, if we include London—where good practice can be looked at and experimented with. The best practice can then be spread around the whole of the United Kingdom.

The measure is eminently sensible. In fact, Lord Griffiths of Burry Port highlighted a great Welsh word, which describes what has gone on in the Lords and what will hopefully go on here today: “tidy”. This is tidy; we have tidied things up, made them presentable and allowed the Welsh Government to do what they are supposed to do.

I could bore for Britain on this subject. I have been switched on to the issue of electoral registration since 2001, when I found out that 4,000 of my constituents had disappeared—not physically, but they were off the register. I have maintained an interest in it. I think that I have tabled 1,000 questions on electoral registration and registration issues.

I question what the Government are doing nationally with individual electoral registration and photo ID. I believe that those measures have been used in America by the Republicans in their attempts at voter suppression. However, this order is not voter suppression; it extends the ability of the National Assembly to get on with its job.

The National Assembly already pursues many excellent policies on electoral registration, including extending the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds for local elections and National Assembly elections. I hope that what we are passing here today will enable the National Assembly to go on and do even bigger and better things. It should explore the ways in which young people can be registered to vote at the age of 15 and three quarters. On the day that they get their national insurance number at 15 and three quarters, hopefully the National Assembly will now have the powers to register them, perhaps even at school.

I hope that the National Assembly ensures that all EROs fulfil their statutory responsibility and knock on every door of every non-responder, and take forceful action against those who do not respond. That work has not been done across the whole of the country; many EROs and many local authorities have not done the annual canvass for years on end. The measure will allow the National Assembly to pursue those policies.

This process is not just about taking a big stick to the EROs; much more needs to be done to celebrate them. They are magnificent people. They develop the building blocks of our democracy—the electoral register. So, hopefully, the National Assembly will celebrate them, perhaps even giving civic awards or national awards every year, and celebrating a democracy day with democracy awards for those EROs who more than fulfil their responsibilities.

I hope that these comprehensive powers will be used to develop service-level agreements with people who have a track record in registering people and groups who are unregistered; I am thinking about Operation Black Vote and Bite the Ballot. Bite the Ballot can go into a sixth form, engage with young people and ensure that 100% of that sixth form is registered. The average cost of doing so is 25p per registration. We see the Electoral Commission, with its advertising campaigns. When it compares the cost of those advertising campaigns with the number of downloads of electoral registration forms that they generate, the cost can be up to £95 per registration.

I hope that the Welsh Government and the National Assembly will use the powers to the full. They fully support the changes that we are considering here today, and I also welcome them.