Voter Registration: Nottingham North

Debate between Chris Skidmore and Lilian Greenwood

Tuesday 28th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chris Skidmore)]

Thank you for your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am grateful that you are presiding over this debate, because you too take a personal interest in electoral matters and I am sure you enjoyed the contribution from the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Alex Norris) as much as I did.

It is striking that although we sit on opposite sides of the political divide, I agree with much in the hon. Gentleman’s speech on electoral registration being a matter of social justice. I will touch on that later, but I am determined that, as a Government, we will look at the burning injustice for those people who are unable to access the ballot box for whatever reason. Next year, it will be 100 years since women got the right to vote, but now many people do not vote because they do not wish to—that is their freedom—although many people who want to vote will still be unable to do so. I will talk about what the Government have been doing and intend to do to improve access to registration and, therefore, to our elections.

The hon. Gentleman paid tribute to his predecessor Graham Allen. In July 2016, two days into my job as a Minister, I was here in Westminster Hall to respond to Mr Allen’s debate on the issue of a constitutional convention. I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is following in the proud footsteps of his predecessor by taking up the matter of voter registration. It is incredibly important for that issue to be raised in the House and I thank him for securing the debate. As is evident from his recent parliamentary question to the Cabinet Office, which he mentioned, electoral registration is of interest to him, and I commend him for that.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the issue of data. To consider what we do and do not know, at the moment we do not have the accurate data to be able to track movements of people within certain locations. I am passionate about changing the nature of the electoral registration conversation from focusing only on top-line national issues.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the “Missing Millions” report, which I commend for highlighting the number of people missing from the register, but what we do not know is who those missing millions are and whether they are all actually missing or have gone off and registered in a different location. I am absolutely determined for us in the Government to do the work on the much finer-grained detail to achieve a more accurate picture of where we need to focus our resources. I will talk about that in connection with our democratic engagement programme for the future.

We need to move away from the national conversations on voter registration and talk about democratic inclusion versus democratic exclusion and where the democratically excluded are. The hon. Gentleman mentioned certain target groups that had traditionally under-registered and were under-represented, such as home movers. He mentioned the Electoral Commission report that highlighted the number of renters who are not on the electoral register. For me, one of the most significant statistics is that only 28% of renters join the electoral register in their first year of moving into a property. We are looking at trying to tackle that churn.

I will have to disappoint the hon. Gentleman in his passion for automatic voter registration. I am equally passionate about the system of individual electoral registration, which is here to stay. More than £70 million has been invested in putting the system in place and in enabling the successful transition to individual electoral registration. At the core of that system is the conviction that individuals should own their own registration status. When it comes to our democracy, voting and registration, I am a passionate believer in voting being not only a right but a responsibility. Gone are the days of the old head-of-the-household system, in which one individual registered numerous others; now it is the right and responsibility of each and every individual to decide when and where they want to be registered.

Individual electoral registration has proved not only more responsive to the needs of electors, but a success in making the system more robust and in driving up the accuracy of the electoral registers. The Electoral Commission report on the 1 December 2016 registers provides the best and most recent full assessment of the completeness and accuracy of the electoral registers across Great Britain.

[Lilian Greenwood]

The Minister may be wedded to individual registration, but will he not accept that there are some groups he needs to work much harder with? That might be those who have poor language skills or learning disabilities. They might want to register but find the process difficult. Will he commit to put in extra measures to ensure that those people who want to vote but find the existing process difficult can access it effectively?

[Chris Skidmore]

The hon. Lady is clearly as passionate about this issue as I am—only last week, she asked a question during Cabinet Office questions. As a Government, we are absolutely determined to ensure that by the next general election in 2022 we will have made our elections the most accessible ever. Clearly, 100 years on from women getting the right to vote, there are still those who are unable to vote. We want to be able to change that. Looking at the whole process—the journey through our democracy—from registration through to turning up at the polling station, we need to do more.

We had a call for evidence, and 260 people have responded so far. In the spring, we will publish a report on actions the Government intend to take forward. I have already managed to make certain changes—for example, with the certificate for visual impairment—on data held at NHS level. Last year, there was a consultation. I wrote to the Health Minister to make the case that that data should be shared with local authorities and electoral registration officers, so that when a certificate exists for those who are blind or visually impaired, it should be possible to use it to contact people in the local authority area, perhaps with forms in Braille—although it is not frequently used nowadays, and it is important to keep up with the technology when it comes to access to elections—or large print. It is about establishing who the vulnerable people are who need the extra effort and attention.

Again, it is about data and about ensuring from an early position that we can act as a Government. I agree entirely with the hon. Lady that we need extra investment in those certain groups, but we also need knowledge of those under-registered groups. We have run a knowledge and capability review to try to understand people’s needs. Since becoming a Minister, I have been touring every area and region of the country to try to understand the needs of the most vulnerable.

When it comes to individual electoral registration, the completeness of the register is stable at around 85%, but its accuracy has now increased to 91%. There is more to do. I share the hon. Gentleman’s vision of having as complete and accurate a register as possible, although I perhaps disagree about the methods to achieve that. Since 2014, 30 million people have registered to vote using the IER system, and 75% of those did so online. During this year’s general election, nearly three quarters of the 2.9 million applications were made using the register to vote website. I am sure he will join me in welcoming the fact that electors across Nottingham have engaged with this new system, mirroring the trend we have seen nationally. Since 2014, 197,042 applications to register to vote have been submitted to Nottingham City Council—79,314 of those were from 16 to 24 year- olds—and 24,978 applications were submitted to Nottingham City Council ahead of the 2017 general election, from 18 April to 22 May.

The hon. Gentleman also touched on the issue of duplicate registrations, which the Association of Electoral Administrators has raised with me. In a way, that problem is part of the success of the register to vote website—the opportunity and flexibility that it gives to individuals to register—and the side effect is duplicate applications. At the 2017 general election, we added a page to the website that said that if people were already registered with their local authority they would still be on the register, which we believe screened about 5% of applications. However, as a Government we are determined to look at the issue. I am not convinced that a centralised database is necessarily the way forward, but we are continuing our work and we want to work closely with the AEA and the Electoral Commission on those barriers.

I addressed the AEA conference in Brighton earlier this year and I committed the Cabinet Office to holding an annual electoral summit, which will take place on 11 December, with representatives from the AEA and from the Electoral Commission, so that we can plan out the registration and democratic engagement strategies for several years. We are launching a democratic engagement programme, which will be published this side of Christmas. It is the first Government electoral engagement strategy and we are determined to ensure that, rather than focus on electoral events, when money is invested suddenly in the run-up to an election, we can plan across a five-year cycle where we need to focus our attention to help the most vulnerable people and to drive up the completeness and accuracy of the register. I will be delighted to share that work with the hon. Gentleman when it is published and to have a separate meeting to talk him through the Government’s plans.

As part of my tour, I visited the British Chinese Project in Nottingham, and I attended a round table with electoral service managers in Gedling. The hon. Gentleman is fortunate to have passionate electoral service managers in his local area who do good work. I learned a lot from my conversations with them, which I hope will be reflected in the strategy.

On the annual canvass, again, we do not disagree in principle. The annual canvass is a 20th century process—an analogue system in a digital age. We have already seen the modernisation of IER and the register to vote website, but the annual canvass process is in the past and it needs to catch up. It is a significant cost for local authorities, of between £60 million and £65 million. I am determined to try to enable permanent change to reform that system, but what does permanent change look like?

I am determined that we make measured and evaluated changes to the annual canvass that do not risk upsetting the existing system, so that when it comes to preserving the completeness and accuracy of the registers, we do not move simply from one system to another. That is why we established a pilot process. We had three pilot areas in 2016 and we have 24 across the UK in 2017. All the pilots are being evaluated by the Electoral Commission and that evaluation has to be published by the end of 2018, I think. I am determined that we go forward with permanent change to the annual canvass. The pilots so far have tried to give local authorities greater flexibility over the canvassing process.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the endless number of letters that can go back and forth, the paper that is wasted in that communication process and the canvass itself, which can cost £1 for every door knocked on. Legislation may require people to return to a particular address, on occasion up to nine times. Although the canvass procedures are in primary legislation and we are looking to make changes to that, we will shortly lay a statutory instrument that will aim to make further improvements to the registration process within the existing canvass, and which will be debated early next January. The hon. Gentleman might want to speak to Labour Whips or the Committee of Selection because we would be delighted to have him on the Committee to continue these discussions.

The statutory instrument will aim to make further improvements to the registration process by streamlining the deletions process and rationalising correspondence that electors receive in the registration process. The same statutory instrument will also seek to improve the anonymous registration system to ensure that it is accessible to those escaping domestic abuse who need to register in such a way.

The hon. Lady mentioned vulnerable groups; one of the vulnerable groups that I have been determined to help, particularly in view of next year’s 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote, is those women who are survivors of domestic violence and who might be residing in refuges, who are unable to register to vote without risking their identity being revealed. They have to sign up to an anonymous registration system by going to either a director of social services or a chief constable of police. We will lower that attestation process to domestic refuge managers. There are 12,000 women in domestic violence refuges, but only about 2,300 women use the anonymous registration scheme. I hope that for the May elections we can demonstrate that change and give those women back their voice in the democratic process.

I passionately believe that voting is more than just a cross on a ballot paper. Voting is the end point: there is a process by which we need to re-engage communities, but there are some people who might not want to engage in the electoral registration process to begin with. How do we work with organisations such as the British Chinese Project, which I mentioned and which sees the low levels of literacy among first generation Chinese people, for instance? How do we engage people to make them understand that that registration process and having their say are equally important and vital for them to take part in our democracy?

I am determined to look at that, through reflecting on the democratic society. There are civil society organisations and groups that do a fantastic job helping to register vulnerable people. One of my first visits was to Birmingham, where I met Uprising—a charity that went around with tablets to help people to register to vote.

What can we do as a Government to try to engage those groups with the wider community and to try to provide them with opportunities? I have announced the first National Democracy Week, which will take place next year on the 90th anniversary of the Equal Franchise Act. When we think about our democracy, we think of Magna Carta and parliamentary sovereignty, and think of ours as being one of the oldest democracies in the world, but it is remarkable that it has been just 90 years since women got the equal right to vote.

In celebration of that moment, I want to set out a week’s programme, and the hon. Gentleman will be more than welcome to involve the people of Nottingham. I want to make sure that events take place across the country. How can we ensure that we look at the state of our democracy 90 years on from the Equal Franchise Act and what can we do over the next 10 years, to 2028, to ensure that we have as complete and accurate a register as possible?

There are other events taking place next year, including the suffrage celebrations, with £5 million set out for that. A key part of it will be investment in education and democratic participation. The week before last, I met the National Citizen Service to look at engagement models for young people.

I want to reassure the hon. Gentleman that although we differ on the point of principle, it is a point of principle. I understand that hon. Members feel passionately about automatic electoral registration. I believe that individual electoral registration is here to stay, but in that context we are determined to ensure that we register as many people as possible. This is a social justice issue and we will publish our democratic engagement plan shortly.

Question put and agreed to.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Chris Skidmore and Lilian Greenwood

Wednesday 22nd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chris Skidmore)]

The Government are currently considering the 256 responses to our call for evidence on the accessibility of voter registration and voting. I will soon lay draft legislation to improve the accessibility of the anonymous registration scheme for survivors of domestic violence, and I recently implemented the findings of an accessibility review on the “Register to vote” website.

[Lilian Greenwood]

A 2014 survey by Mencap found that 60% of people with a learning disability found the process of registering to vote too difficult. Registration forms are often complicated and not accompanied by an easy read guide. The Electoral Commission report, “Elections for everyone”, published earlier this month, agrees and calls on the Minister to act. Will he commit to improving the Government’s online registration process, and will he ensure that every local authority provides easy read information and a good helpline, so that no one with a learning disability is disenfranchised?

[Chris Skidmore]

I thank the hon. Lady for raising the report by Mencap, which has been working closely with the Cabinet Office and is a member of the “accessibility to elections” working group. I do not disagree with the premise of her question: we need to do more, in the 21st century, to make sure that our elections are accessible for everyone and that we remove barriers for those who are disabled. I am absolutely committed to doing that. It is right that we now consider all the responses and we will publish our report later next year.