Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I am going to make some progress, and will perhaps take an intervention from him later. Otherwise I will not get through my speech, and many other Members wish to contribute to the debate.

It is clear that the current system of registration is unacceptably open to electoral fraud. There is widespread concern about that; indeed, a survey carried out at the end of last year found that 36% of people believe that it is a problem. If citizens do not have confidence in the integrity of our electoral register, they will not have confidence in the integrity of the outcome of elections. We need to tackle that. When we came into office, we did not think that the plans for which Labour had legislated, which involved a voluntary process initially running in parallel, were the best way to tackle the problem. We thought that it would lead to confusion and have a very significant cost. That is why we want to speed up the introduction of individual registration so that the register published after the 2015 annual canvass will consist entirely of entries that have been individually verified, with the sole exception of some of those in the armed forces.

The Electoral Commission supports that position. At the beginning of the month, Jenny Watson, chair of the commission, said, when commenting on alleged fraud in the recent London mayoral elections:

“The Electoral Commission wants to see our registration system tightened up and it’s good that the Government plans to introduce new laws to do this which will apply to any of us who want to vote by post before the 2015 General Election.”

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Did the Electoral Commission find any fraudulent activity in the London mayoral election?

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate and I broadly welcome the content of the Bill. There is much to commend it, especially individual electoral registration, which is long overdue. Regardless of what official statistics say, the simple fact is that in parts of Britain electoral fraud is widespread and has led to fraudulent election results. That is a disgrace and should be tackled immediately or at least as soon as is practicably possible, not in 2014 or 2015—or even later, as the Opposition suggest.

[Frank Dobson]

The law provides for people who commit electoral fraud to be prosecuted, fined or imprisoned. If the problem is as widespread as people suggest, why are there not more prosecutions, more people paying fines and more electoral swindlers in jail?

[Andrew Stephenson]

I shall come on to that exact point. There are a range of reasons why electoral fraud is not reported, the police do not have the resources to follow it up and the culprits are not brought to justice. Dozens of MPs have majorities in two or three figures and I have real concerns about the integrity of the ballot and its impact on recent elections as well as future ones.

My Labour predecessor in this House, Gordon Prentice, was a vocal supporter of individual voter registration, particularly in April 2008 when he found out that our Lib Dem opponent for the last general election had 27 registered voters living in his house and a household of 44 people. I know that some Members will raise their eyebrows at that, and it was indeed an exceptional case, but I can assure them that in parts of my constituency it is not uncommon for seven, eight or more voters to be registered as living in a terraced house and no one makes any checks on that.

We have also seen a sharp rise in the number of eastern European names appearing on the electoral roll, including those of Polish, Lithuanian or Czech citizens, but few are correctly marked as being unable to vote in UK parliamentary elections or referendums. During my time in Parliament, the names of virtually every illegal immigrant or illegal overstayer with whom I have dealt has appeared on the electoral roll. We know from Operation Amberhill, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson), that almost half of all forged or counterfeit documents were positive matches on the electoral register.

Surely all that would lead anyone to support individual electoral registration—and I do—but we need to ensure that it is properly scrutinised for fraud and that the returns are accurate. Scrutiny costs money and it will take a significant amount of time and effort to check people’s citizenship or residency status, in particular, so I welcome the Minister’s comments about extra money for the project.

The nub of the issue of electoral fraud is on-demand postal voting, on which I believe, sadly, that the Bill should go further. It was introduced by the previous Government and my concerns are widely shared by a number of Members and by many of my constituents. In a letter to the Electoral Commission’s Jenny Watson last summer, Pendle borough council’s chief executive, Stephen Barnes, described how

“allegations and perceptions of malpractice around”

postal voting

“are seriously undermining public confidence in the whole electoral process”,

and expressed his own view that those concerns were fully justified, citing examples of probable malpractice and difficulties for the council in taking action.

In a motion last year, Pendle borough council resolved that practices related to postal votes

“affected the result of the election in some wards”.

Just last week, five councillors in Pendle from the three main parties came together to form a taskforce on tackling postal vote fraud. One of those five, Conservative Councillor Linda Crossley, said:

“People used to have to be really ill, virtually bed-ridden, to get a proxy or postal vote, now anybody can get a postal vote”.

To put that into context and explain how it happens, I shall refer to one ward, Reedley, where the scale and impact of postal voting has been dramatic. I should declare an interest. Reedley was for many years a safe Conservative ward and perhaps it still is, without on-demand postal voting. Until last year all three councillors were Conservative; now there is only one. In 2010, 800 postal votes were issued in Reedley in an election in which 3,049 people voted. The Conservative candidate secured 49% of the vote and was easily elected. In 2011, Reedley saw a 25% increase in postal votes, and this year a further increase of almost 25%. In two years an extra 479 voters felt the need to vote by post. Virtually all were from the British Pakistani community and virtually all were signed up for postal votes by the Labour party. Not coincidentally, Labour was elected on both occasions. The Conservative vote did not collapse. The Labour victory was not on trend across the constituency. Nevertheless, in this ward its support rocketed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

The first time I heard of the proposal for individual registration, I expressed my opposition to the idea. I remain of that opinion, like my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh).

The Bill is unique in the history of all changes to electoral law over the past 180 years. All the others added citizens to the electoral register; this one, as we all know, will do the reverse. Individual registration will reduce the number of people on the electoral roll. Those who support the Bill say that its object is to reduce the scope for electoral fraud, but whatever the intentions behind it, its main effect will be to reduce the number of people entitled to vote. That number will be reduced not by keeping swindlers off the electoral roll but because it will become more inconvenient, complicated and difficult for the law-abiding majority to get on to it.

The right to vote is the birthright of every British citizen and the most important right granted to those who become British citizens. It is a symbol of our democracy. Over the centuries, British people have struggled, fought and in some cases died for the right to vote. In the last century, women had to battle for it. This afternoon, we are being asked to vote to make it harder for many of our fellow citizens to exercise that democratic right.

[Mr Harper]

Why does the right hon. Gentleman think that our fellow United Kingdom citizens in Northern Ireland are perfectly capable of registering individually—just as many of them are on the register—but people in Great Britain are not?

[Frank Dobson]

I am rather surprised that the hon. Gentleman gives the example of Northern Ireland, because he cannot deny that there was a massive drop in registration immediately after individual registration was introduced. I see no reason to believe that the people of Northern Ireland are inferior to any other people.

No one can deny that there have been examples of electoral fraud, which are deplorable. We know that, because people have been successfully prosecuted. However, the number of fraudsters is small, otherwise there would be more prosecutions. The most glaring scandal of our electoral system is not that some have swindled their way on to the electoral roll but that as many as 9 million of our fellow citizens have been left off it. That is the scandal that we should be addressing. Instead, the Government want to add to the number of their fellow citizens who will be denied their birthright.

We are being asked to pass a law to make life more inconvenient and difficult for the law-abiding many, in response to the law-breaking of the wrongdoing few. Instead, we should be targeting more effort, and much more effective effort, at whenever and wherever electoral fraud is suspected.

[Mrs Laing]

I am thinking about the figure of 9 million that the right hon. Gentleman gave. Is it not the case that at present, those 9 million people, if there are 9 million—I think there are 3 million—have to go through their “head of household”, whatever that might mean, to register to vote? When the Bill becomes law, they will be able to register individually in their own right, which will give them a power that they do not have at the moment.

[Frank Dobson]

I do not think that is what will happen in practice. I admit that it may happen in some cases, but in a very large number of cases, particularly in inner-city areas such as my constituency where people live in houses in multiple occupation, it will be more difficult for people to get on the register. Virtually everyone in the Chamber accepts that that is likely to happen, but apparently regards that reduction as a bit of collateral damage in the headlong pursuit of individual registration.

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman is mistaken about houses in multiple occupation. At the moment, people in houses in multiple occupation get one form and depend on someone to whom they are not even related to put them on the electoral register. Under our proposals, they will all be written to and all get the chance to register individually. That is a step forward, not backwards.

[Frank Dobson]

The measures are proposed for areas where there is about a 30% to a 33% turnover of population each year. To whom will the electoral lot write if people have moved on? The proposals do not reflect the practicalities, problems and inconveniences that arise.

The Bill reminds me of when the police tried to counter football hooliganism by inconveniencing the majority of law-abiding football fans by treating all football fans as hooligans. It did not stop hooliganism. It was only when the police started to identify and target the trouble-making few that widespread hooliganism was stopped and the law-abiding many felt safe again. If we want to deal with the fraud, we need to target the potential fraudsters much better.

By all means we should ensure that no one votes who should not vote, but surely a far more important task is ensuring that everyone who is entitled to do so can cast their vote. The whole approach is simply back to front. Our first priority should be to get on the register the 6 million people who are not on it—I do not know whether by a slip of the tongue I said 9 million. Even the benighted Electoral Commission admits that the figure is about 6 million. The Bill proposes all sorts of cross-checking of official records, but largely with the object of getting people off the electoral roll. We should cross-check official records and private databases with the object of adding people to the register. The Bill’s object is wrong. Getting more people on the roll should be the main task of all involved in the electoral system: registration officers, the Electoral Commission, the Boundary Commission, civil servants, Ministers, holders of private sector data and political parties.

The Bill is back to front, dealing with a minor problem compared with the glaring scandal that 6 million of our fellow citizens are not on the electoral roll. Even if there are 10,000 fraudsters—I do not accept that there are—we are paying far more attention to them than to the absence of 6 million people who should be on the electoral register. The whole damn thing is back to front and it is about time we took our duties seriously and discharged our obligations in the way in which my hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) and for Mitcham and Morden suggest. We should go out there, day in, day out, using every possible method we can devise to get on the register people who could legitimately be on the electoral register. The Bill has a cock-eyed priority.

Ministerial Code (Culture Secretary)

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As ever, Mrs Bone is spot on, and I am sure that there are many like her, round the country, saying to us, “This is important—don’t belittle the issue—but there are many more important issues about jobs, living standards, and dealing with the debt that you should be getting on with.”

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Does the Prime Minister not accept that all his problems spring from his original misjudgment? Having taken responsibility for the News Corp bid for BSkyB away from the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills because he had expressed antipathy towards News Corporation, it was stupid of the Prime Minister to hand that responsibility over to the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, who was already on record as being in favour of the bid.

[The Prime Minister]

I am afraid that I do not accept that at all. To be fair to my right hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable), it was not just antipathy; he was recorded saying that he wanted to destroy the business. He could not carry on running that part of his Department. I sought advice from the Cabinet Secretary, and the Cabinet Secretary sought legal advice from the Cabinet Office. The view came back that it was appropriate to ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport to fulfil that role.

Individual Voter Registration

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Mr Mark Harper)]

It is good to be having this debate at, I think, the third time of asking. Before I explain the rationale for our proposals and deal with the motion, I want to thank the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) for the tone in which he has engaged with the debate. I have certainly engaged with it in such a way, and I do not think that he will mind if I point out that his party did not adopt that approach from the beginning. Last autumn, the right hon. Gentleman’s party leader said that we were making registration individual rather than household, and that the Labour party was going to go out and fight against that change, stating:

“One of the most basic decent human rights…is the right to vote.”

I absolutely agree, but I do not know why he wanted to campaign against our proposals.

The shadow Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), said at the Labour conference that our proposals were

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

and that Labour would expose and campaign against them. I thought that that was nonsense at the time. Clearly, the right hon. Member for Tooting thought so, although he could not say so, and he has adopted a much more sensible tone.

Finally in that vein, in an article on the Labour Uncut website, the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David), said that the Conservative-led Government had taken the Labour Government’s proposals—these are his words, not mine—and

“infused them with its own distinctive venom.”

I have been accused of many things, but never that.

People got carried away with those remarks, which were rather absurd, and I am glad that the right hon. Gentleman has returned to a more sensible tone whereby we can debate these sensible proposals. There is a lot of agreement on the move to individual registration, which will improve our system, and we can consider our specific proposals and the response that we make to the Select Committee report. I am happy to conduct the debate in that spirit.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

In view of the fact that the Electoral Commission is saying that there may already be as many as 8 million people who are entitled to be on the register but are not on it, is it not, shall we say, counter-intuitive for any of us to discuss proposals that are likely to reduce the number of people on the register? Surely the objective of the Electoral Commission and the rest of us should be to maximise the number of people who are entitled to take part in our democracy legitimately. Individual registration is not likely to achieve that, particularly as it is in response, apparently, to just six prosecutions for electoral fraud.

EU Council

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s support. The point I made in my statement about Europe being a network, not a bloc, is completely consistent with that. We should not be shy about its developing as a network, with some networks we want to be in and others we do not.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister confirm that British banks and finance houses hold about £75 billion of bonds issued by eurozone Governments and that in the event of a default, with nobody representing Britain, he will still be expected to get the British taxpayer to bail some of them out?

[The Prime Minister]

The exposure of the British banks to European countries is published by the Bank of England—quite right, too—and obviously we want to avoid a collapse of the eurozone and to ensure that it takes the necessary steps to prevent that from happening. This Government will obviously always do whatever is necessary to safeguard our financial system and the economy.

Public Disorder

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Thursday 11th August 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I certainly pay tribute to the Kent police force, which does such a good job. My hon. Friend referred to a speech I made about the importance of addressing the problems of family breakdown and irresponsibility. These are not easy things for politicians to talk about, because our families can also break down and we fail on many occasions, but it is too important a subject to ignore.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

We all welcome the Prime Minister’s praise for the individual police officers, firefighters and ambulance and emergency staff. Will he now follow up his warm words with warm action and abandon his proposals to undermine the pension arrangements of those self same firefighters, ambulance staff and policemen?

House of Lords Reform (Draft Bill)

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I strongly agree with my right hon. Friend in the basic principle that people should be able to hold to account those who make the laws of the land by which the people of this country have to abide. That is a simple democratic principle: it is not new; it is shared by Members of all parties; it is widely recognised as a simple democratic principle across the democratic world. It is interesting to note that there are still people even in this democratically elected Chamber who seem to resist that very principle.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Does the Deputy Prime Minister not agree that a sounder approach would be to decide what we want the House of Lords to do and what its functions should be before we decide how it is made up? Otherwise, we are in the situation of picking the team before we have decided what game it is going to play. Surely if it is to be elected, any self-respecting elected Members of the upper House will not feel themselves bound by the customs and practice that have applied to an unelected Chamber—and we will thus get conflict between this Chamber and the upper Chamber.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

We already know the role of the House of Lords—scrutiny and revision. Every time this issue has been examined by a range of cross-party groups—the Wakeham commission was just one of many examples—the same conclusion has been reached: namely, those powers should remain the same and as long as the mandate, the electoral system and the terms of those elected in the other place are different, the basic relationship between the two Houses can remain constant.

Libya and the Middle East

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. We are trying to establish better contact with the opposition in Libya and to learn more about them and their intentions. What we want—I would argue it is in our interest and in that of the whole world, including the Libyan people—is the swift removal of Colonel Gaddafi from his position. If helping the opposition in Libya would help to bring that about, it is certainly something we should consider.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister confirm that there is nothing new or peculiarly Labour about dodgy relations between the British Government and the murderous Libyan regime? Will he confirm that when Metropolitan Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead from the Libyan embassy in April 1984, the Thatcher Government humiliated the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police by requiring him to provide policemen to escort the murderer to the airport so that he could get back safely to Libya?

[The Prime Minister]

That is a somewhat tortured way of making a political point, and I would make one in return. [Interruption.] We have to comply with international rules, but let me make one simple point. During the last Parliament there was a choice about whether to support the release of al-Megrahi: one party decided that it was the right thing to do, and I am proud to say that my party did not.

Prisoners’ Right to Vote

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

I did not detect a question in there, Mr Speaker, so I shall merely say to my hon. Friend that I do not think anybody on the Government Benches is particularly happy about having to deal with this issue, but we do have to implement the law.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

Whatever the priorities of the European Court, it is the British Government who decide what the priorities are for this House of Commons. Most people will think it rather bizarre that they are giving priority to a Bill that might give the right to vote to Harry Roberts, who shot three Metropolitan policemen in cold blood, but are paying no attention to and putting no effort whatever into getting the 3.5 million decent citizens who are not on the electoral register on to that register.

[Mr Harper]

The right hon. Gentleman would know, if he followed proceedings in this House, that that is simply not true. I made a statement at this Dispatch Box in September, when I set out clearly that the Government were as committed to the completeness of the electoral register as to its accuracy. If there are, as there are, citizens missing from the electoral register, some of the responsibility for that falls on the Labour party, which was in power for 13 years and did nothing effective about it.

Political and Constitutional Reform

Frank Dobson Excerpts

Monday 5th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

Yes, I agree with my hon. Friend. It cannot be right that we can have a situation whereby, as I cited earlier, there are 20,000 more voters in one constituency than in a constituency just 10 miles down the road. That means, quite simply, that the weight of the vote where there are 20,000 more electors is worth less than that in a constituency just 10 miles down the road. It seems to me that it is obvious to most people that that is unfair and needs to be changed.

[Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)]

As the Member with, I believe, the sixth largest electorate in the country, I am acutely aware, despite having 86,000 electors, that in the most deprived parts of my constituency very large numbers of people are not on the electoral register. There is a huge bias in our system against the most deprived people living in the most deprived areas, and unless the Government do something to get them on the register, this really will be a fix.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

But what did the previous Government do for 13 years? Of course we can all agree with the right hon. Gentleman that it is bad and wrong that 3.5 million people are not on the register—he is absolutely right about that—but we will take measures to increase and accelerate individual electoral registration. [Interruption.]