Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

David Evennett Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I am grateful to the Committee’s Chairman for what he says, and I hope that by the time I finish my remarks the House will see that I have addressed satisfactorily all the points in the reasoned amendment, at which stage I will of course urge Members on both sides of the House to support the Bill’s Second Reading.

We debated this subject on an Opposition day in January during which I welcomed the tone that the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) adopted. He said, for example, that he welcomed the process that the Government had adopted and how we were acting; he noted that we had had a draft Bill and a White Paper with pre-legislative scrutiny; and he noted that the Deputy Prime Minister and I had said that we would not just listen to concerns, but act on them and make changes accordingly.

At the time I noted that that was a shift from last autumn, when the right hon. Gentleman’s party leader said, in response to our making registration individual rather than household, that the Labour party was going to go out and fight against the change, and when the shadow Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), said that our proposals were

“a shameful assault on people’s democratic rights.”

I thought that that was nonsense when she said it. In January, the right hon. Member for Tooting appeared to think so, too, and he adopted a sensible tone that was welcomed not just by me, but by Members on both sides of the House, so I am disappointed that in tabling this reasoned amendment he appears to have reverted to the Labour party’s original approach.

One of the main points in the reasoned amendment that I will not cover later in my speech is the assertion that there was cross-party support for the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. As I said in January’s Opposition day debate, it is true that we supported the proposals in the Act for individual registration, but it is worth reminding the House that the previous Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to include them. They were not in the Bill when it was introduced in this House, and that is why we voted for a reasoned amendment. In fact, they were not in the Bill when it left the House of Commons, although by that stage the Labour Government had made a commitment to include them. They were, however, introduced in the other place. My right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), now Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, who led for us on the issue, ably assisted by my hon. Friend the Member for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing), said:

“I am glad that at the eleventh hour the Government have, at last, agreed to move ahead with individual voter registration, albeit in what still seems to be a lamentably leisurely time scale. They committed to the principle of individual voter registration many years ago, but a bit like St. Augustine, they seem to be saying, ‘Make me chaste, but not yet.’”—[Official Report, 2 March 2009; Vol. 488, c. 695.]

My right hon. Friend made it clear that we approved of the decision to proceed with individual registration, which we thought could be accomplished earlier. We said that it would be our intention to do so, and on page 47 of our 2010 manifesto we made a commitment to

“swiftly implement individual voter registration”.

It is not fair and right, or at least it leaves out something quite important, to say that there was complete cross-party consensus on that measure.

Before I set out the Bill’s provisions in detail, let me explain the rationale on how we got to this stage following the draft proposals and the significant amount of pre-legislative scrutiny that has taken place. The move to individual registration was supported by all three main parties in the previous Parliament and was in each of their manifestos. It is supported by the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators and has been called for by a wide range of international observers. We remain one of the few countries in the world to rely on a system of household registration. I believe, as I am sure many Members do, that a system that relies on the rather old-fashioned notion of the head of household, whereby just one person in the house is given the responsibility of dealing with everyone else’s registration to vote, is out of date. It does not engender any personal responsibility for being registered or promote a person’s ownership of their own vote, and it could give that one person the ability to disfranchise others. That is not the approach that we adopt in other areas where people engage with the state.

[Mr David Evennett (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Con)]

I welcome what my hon. Friend is endeavouring to do in this Bill, particularly his determination to modernise our system and to get more people registered to vote. Does he share my concern that many people are on the register who should not be, and, in particular, that people who do not have leave to remain in the country are participating in voting? Will that also change under his system?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jackson]

The Minister makes an astute point. In 2001, the year in which the hon. Member for Caerphilly entered the House, the English electorate numbered 37.3 million. By the end of Labour’s second term, in 2005, the figure was 37.1 million. So Labour did not push up registration rates in an increasing population either.

I take with a pinch of salt Labour’s protestations and faux outrage. We have argued for many years that overseas voters should also have the right to be registered, and that active steps should be taken to achieve that. That point has also been made by the hon. Member for Caerphilly’s erstwhile right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). However, that did not happen during the 13 years of the previous Government. Indeed, they more or less ignored services voters, despite many people from military constituencies saying that that was an outrageous and egregious oversight.

[Mr Evennett]

My hon. Friend is making some powerful points. Does he agree that the modernisation of our system is essential, and that it should be brought in as soon as possible?

[Mr Jackson]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, who has great experience in the House.

The Bill is absolutely right, in that its central aims are to tackle electoral fraud, improve the integrity of our electoral system, particularly the electoral register, and modernise the electoral registration system, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Mr Evennett) says, is most important. The hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) was gracious in paying tribute to the Minister and the Department for engaging in an open and wide-ranging debate during the pre-legislative scrutiny and public consultation, and for producing the White Paper and a detailed, comprehensive Government response in February 2012. It is far from the truth that this is some kind of rushed, gerrymandering Bill. It has attracted a lot of support, including from organisations such as the Electoral Commission. There is consensus around the Bill.

The proposals in the Bill featured not only in the Conservative manifesto of May 2010 but in the coalition agreement, so we certainly have a mandate for carrying out this policy. If the hon. Member for Caerphilly were more generous of spirit, he would perhaps admit that the previous Government wanted to proceed in a similar way when they were in power. Reference has been made to the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 in that regard.