Individual Voter Registration

Dan Rogerson Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD)]

I would like to cover a couple of elements connected with the prospective legislation though perhaps not the main business. The Minister makes eye contact with me, so I am sure he can imagine what one of those elements will be. First, I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and his Committee for the work that they have done, although I take issue with one aspect of that, to which I shall return as the second of my two points.

My first point relates to multiple property owners. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr Offord) referred to this issue, but it has a particular resonance in constituencies such as mine where many properties are second or holiday homes. I pay tribute to a local campaigner, Mr Angus Lamond, who stood as an independent candidate for Cornwall council in the first elections to that new authority in 2009. He stood in a coastal ward with a high number of such properties and noticed that their owners were being targeted in a particular way to get them out to vote. According to the Electoral Commission’s guidance, it seems that many of them should not have been on the local electoral register, because we are talking not about people who divide their time relatively equally between two places, but about those who spend a few weekends or a few weeks in the summer in their properties and who are, according to my definition, in no way resident in the community. Some of those people have had second homes for many years and play an active role in the community, for example by fundraising for the local lifeboat, but as a general principle it ought to be the people who live in the community who get to vote, particularly in local authority elections.

I have been told that it is perfectly legal for people to be registered in a number of places and to vote in other local elections on the same day by postal vote. I would like us to consider whether that is right, because by allowing that we are effectively saying that those who are fortunate enough to own more than one property can have more of a say in what goes on in this country than those who are not, and I find that very difficult. If we are to have a system that recognised that some people genuinely live in two parts of the country for different parts of the year, whether because of their business lives, family circumstances or studies, I do not have a problem with making them specify which home they regard as their primary address. If one is talking to our great friends in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for capital gains purposes—famously, some former Members might have juggled the property they registered with HMRC as their normal residence—one should have to specify where and in which community ones lives.

If we are to have an electoral system based on constituency mandate—I, of course, favour a more proportional system—that mandate is very important and should be the same for local and national elections. Is there really a problem otherwise? Two of the constituencies in Cornwall were decided at the last general election by small majorities: one changed hands with a majority of 66 and the other was won by fewer than 500 votes. I am in no way criticising the duly elected Members of Parliament for those constituencies, who I am sure won fair and square; I am merely making the point that we are talking about sometimes very narrow margins of victory.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I am not convinced that the current proposals will address the problem that the hon. Gentleman is talking about. I wonder what his view is of the coalition Government’s decision not to go ahead with the system proposed by the previous Government, which would have enabled such cross-checking. Under the current proposals, so long as an elector provides their local electoral registration officer with their identifier, they could still register in more than one place, which I think is what he believes to be a problem.

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Lady makes a fair point. I have discussed this with the Minister informally and in meetings, including one that involved the constituent I mentioned earlier. I am seeking to urge the Minister to do all he can to provide local electoral registration officers with the tools they need for cross-checking so that they can be confident that the people who are presented to them are resident in the community. In the best-case scenario, we have people who are on the register and who scrupulously ensure that they vote in two places only in local elections and only in one place in general elections. Of course, some of them might vote in both places in a general election, or even in three or four places. Realistically, what electoral registration officer will have the wherewithal to indentify where an elector’s other properties are and to get hold of the marked register for those places in order to perform that cross-checking? I am genuinely concerned about that and hope that the Minister will take my comments on board and look at what can be done.

There are further connected issues. If we as a Government are moving towards more consultative referendums locally on planning and local plans, I can see a slight diversion of interest in an area between those who have a second home and those who are trying desperately to secure an affordable home when it comes to what the local plan says about, for example, the provision of affordable housing and where it might be located.

The same thing might be said of a referendum under the Localism Act 2011 to vary council tax upwards in order to provide local services, with local authorities quite rightly having to make the case to the electorate on such issues. People who are not so involved in the services in an area may still have a view on having to pay for them. The flipside of that argument is no taxation without representation, but that does not apply to council tax. With business rates, people have a big stake in a local community, but they have not had the opportunity to vote in local elections for a long time, and we should see people who have the luxury of a second property as being more in line with people who operate a business in that area, rather than as a resident paying council tax. I urge the Minister to ensure that that question is addressed as we move forward.

My second point, on which I disagree slightly with the report by the Committee chaired by the hon. Member for Nottingham North, is about the edited register, which does a huge amount of good for business. We have heard already about tackling credit card fraud, and the agencies that pursue it often use the edited register. The Salvation Army and others do fantastic work in reuniting separated families, and it has told me how much it relies on the edited register to do so. Many other practitioners in the field reunite people who have been adopted with their birth parents, and other family members who have lost contact with each other.

Work is undertaken on dormant assets and matters of probate, and the people involved all make use of the edited register, so I hope that when the Minister comes to legislate he will think carefully about how that aspect of the register is treated. I accept that for reasons of safety people should be able to opt out, and we have that safeguard in place already, but when the edited register meets so many demands in society it ought to be a provision that we retain. Charity fundraisers, a category that I did not mention, also make great use of the register, so before we throw it out we should look at what it achieves.

I support my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) on the importance of a canvass in the run-up to a general election, and many have made the point that a 2014 canvass would help a great deal with preparations for the next general election. So, although I shall happily support the Government tonight, I urge the Minister to consider carefully the key issues of the edited register and second-home voters.

[Several hon. Members]

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