Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Gavin Shuker Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

That point has been raised with me. At the moment, I do not think that striking the balance between making sure that people who are eligible to vote can vote and preventing those who are not eligible from doing so requires voter ID at polling stations. I heard several Labour Members shout out that that was an illiberal proposition, which is rich coming from people who thought that having compulsory ID cards was a good idea. This Government legislated to get rid of ID cards, and we do not mean to bring them in via the back door.

Last June, we published a White Paper and draft legislation setting out our proposals. We proposed that in 2014, every elector on the register would be invited to make a new application providing personal information that would be verified by comparing it to data held by the Department for Work and Pensions, to ensure that the applicant was a genuine person. Every elector would have to make a new application and anyone who did not, or whose application was unsuccessful, would be removed from the register published after the 2015 annual canvass.

We held an extensive public consultation on those proposals, which had more than 900 responses. As its Chairman said, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee carried out pre-legislative scrutiny, and there have been a number of debates and questions on the matter in both Houses.

Members may have noted that earlier today, to assist the House in its consideration of the Bill, my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House announced in a written ministerial statement that the Bill will be part of a pilot for explanatory statements on amendments. I hope that all hon. Members who plan to table amendments will participate in that pilot, as will the Government.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

What percentage of the eligible UK population does the Minister believe will be registered after 2015 under his plans?

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[Mr David]

That is not much of an argument. We need an indication from the Government, which they have failed to provide, of the level at which the fixed fine will be set. There is no question of varying the fixed fine, of course; it will be a uniform fixed fine. We simply want to know what it should be. The Observer suggested that it might be £100. There have been other suggestions, too. I am simply saying that given that the Government are making a big thing of having listened to the opinions of many people outside the House and are committed to a civil penalty in principle, we need to know what they judge an effective figure to be.

[Gavin Shuker]

Is not the point that the threat of a fine is proportionate to how much money it would take off people? If it is a small fine, people will be less likely to register, but if it is a larger fine, they will be more likely to do so.

[Mr David]

My hon. Friend puts it very well.

The Minister told us that details of the civil penalty would be set out in secondary legislation, which brings me to a broader point. With this legislation, perhaps more than any other, the devil is in the detail, but the detail is tucked away in secondary legislation and we cannot see it. Last November, I asked the Deputy Prime Minister, from the Dispatch Box, whether the Government would publish their secondary legislation at the same time as the primary legislation. That was six months ago. Additional information has been forthcoming, including today, but six months later we still cannot properly assess these proposals, simply because we do not know—we have not been told—the detail.

One of the main reasons we have continuing concerns about the Bill relates to the Government’s timetable for implementation. Under the last Labour Government, the Electoral Commission was to play a key role in monitoring and assessing the progress towards a new register. Sadly, that role has been diminished and downgraded. Instead, the Government are rushing pell-mell into a new system of electoral registration that ought to provide the cornerstone of our democratic process. We understand from the Government that they are undertaking a second round of data matching. That is to be welcomed and will show how complete the new register is at the end of 2015. The pilots will indicate whether the new register will be depleted. In all reasonableness, I think that the House should be aware of the conclusion of the pilots before it decides on the Government’s implementation timetable, yet the results of the data-matching pilots will not be available until early next year.

Why are the Government hell-bent on introducing this radical change at breakneck speed? It has been suggested that they are determined to end the carry-over arrangements before 1 December 2015 for reasons of Conservative party self-interest.

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[Gavin Shuker]

The hon. Lady’s argument seems to be that young people who cannot be bothered to fill in the form should lose the right to vote, but that people who cannot get to the polling station by 10 pm should gain that opportunity—

[Mrs Laing]

No—that is completely wrong. My point is that if someone is just outside the polling station—in the school playground, perhaps, or the car park of the village hall—but there is not sufficient space for them to get in through the door, the presiding officer should have the power to designate the end of the queue, so that those people can move forward and vote.

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[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank the hon. Lady for clarifying the position, although I still think, given the comments that she made previously, that she had been prepared to support the previous timetable.

The process of pre-legislative scrutiny has been helpful, and the Government have clearly listened to the issues that were raised by the Select Committee, the Electoral Commission and others. That has been an important part of the process. It is an important part of the process for any legislation, and the Select Committee takes it very seriously. We make this comment frequently, and we made it quite vociferously when the opportunity was not given to scrutinise some of the early constitutional legislation in this Parliament. I believe that my fellow Select Committee members agree that that was detrimental to that legislation. The process has been valuable in this case. Even if some of the issues remain unresolved, we nevertheless got a response to the process. I hope that we will see much more of this kind of scrutiny for other legislation. The more debate, discussion and detailed scrutiny we have, the better. That kind of scrutiny is not always possible in Committee, whether on the Floor of the House or upstairs, as time is often limited. The Select Committee process has therefore been helpful.

We all go out and about, and we know just how variable registration can be. That is one of my major concerns about the Bill. When I walk down a street of bungalows and villas in my constituency, I can be sure that I will knock on every door in that street, because all the people living there are on the electoral register. Equally, in other parts of the constituency, the number of registered households can be as low as two or three of the 10 or 12 on a stair in a tenement. Edinburgh is a city of tenements. There are modern flats and also traditional tenements, and many people living in them are not registered.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but the hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) seemed to suggest that the fall in the numbers of people registered during the past year was somehow to be placed at the door of the previous Government because they wanted registration to fall. What has actually happened is a substantial change in certain types of housing tenure.

In Edinburgh, the proportion of people living in the private sector was between 6% and 7% in the late 1990s, but it is now 20%-plus and, in some areas, between 30% and 40%. That is important, because the time spent by people living in that form of tenure is shorter. Most private lets are shorter; people have to move on. In that situation, perhaps they do not form the same commitment to their community, and sometimes they have no sooner registered themselves than they are moving on. Not all the tenements have lifts, especially the old-style ones. I think that the highest such building in my constituency is five storeys high—or six, if we are using the British naming of floors. Having puffed my way up to the top, I often find that the people who were registered as living there have moved on, and that the new tenants have not yet registered. It is a particular issue in certain areas.

It is important that the additional money promised by the Government is spent on the process of ensuring that registration happens properly. Even the data matching will be quite differential. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central touched on that, explaining that in some areas the data-matching pilots had shown only a 55% match—not the two thirds that the Government have mentioned.

Why is that important for the size of the register? If the aim is to move people over as a result of data matching—that was not its original purpose, although I accept that it has considerable benefit, helping to ensure that people do not find themselves off the register—areas such as Edinburgh, which has many varied styles of description for tenement flats, help to explain why data-matching will not work. For example, the way in which flats are referred to within tenements is often quite variable. Some flats are referred to in some records as “stair 9/1, stair 9/2, stair 9/3” and so forth, whereas they are called something quite different in other registers for the same address—perhaps strange things like “1F1, 1F2, 2F2” or something rather peculiar like “PF1”, which puzzled me for a long time, as I thought it might refer to a platform, but it refers, in fact, to the ground floor.

[Gavin Shuker]

It strikes me that my hon. Friend is advancing the point that individual electoral registration officers and returning officers are well placed to understand their local communities, if given the appropriate level of resources for the challenging set of circumstances in which they have to do their job.

[Sheila Gilmore]

That is exactly my point. It is not just about the levels of population within an area, as variability is also important. Far more work will have to be done in areas with such difficulties, as the data matching will simply not happen in the circumstances I was describing. It is not because people do not exist or are in any way phantoms on the register, but simply because there are two sets of data identifying the same property in a very different way. That difficulty will be thrown up in the process. In those circumstances, certain areas will require more resources to ensure that people are registered.

The decline in registration is worrying, and it is worrying that in some parts of our communities so few people are taking even the first step towards registration to vote. Being registered to vote is, of course, no guarantee that people will vote, but if they are not registered, they certainly cannot vote.

Finally, I would like to hear more from the Minister about the extent to which the Government want to encourage somewhat more innovative ways of getting people to register—not just through the canvass and other traditional ways. Would it be possible, as happens in some countries and as some commentators have suggested, to offer people the opportunity to register when they are involved in other transactions with the state? If, for example, people were applying for a driving licence—that is particularly appropriate for young people—could they not be offered the opportunity to register? We cannot make them register, but that would provide the opportunity to do so.

Perhaps even more valuable for the future, would it not be possible, given all the systems we have, to allow people both to register and to vote at the same time? Most people are of course most interested in voting when an election campaign is going on. We have all encountered people suddenly realising that they are not able to vote at the point when they want to do so. Allowing people to register and to vote at the same time might be difficult, but it certainly happens in many states in America. I urge the Government to look at as many different ways of getting people to register as possible.

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[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am extremely grateful for being given the opportunity to speak in this debate. On Second Reading, we have the opportunity to debate the principle behind the Bill, and Opposition Front Benchers were right to point out that although we can support the underlying principle, there are areas that give cause for concern, and I am sure those will determine how we divide the House this evening.

Some of the comments made today in discussing the principle behind the Bill have concerned me. We have thrown around terms such as “the integrity of the register” as though that were a one-sided issue. The root of integrity is the absence of flaws. I completely support the efforts we made when in government to introduce individual voter registration, and which we have continued to support under the current Administration. However, my concern is that a register that excludes people who otherwise may wish to vote and who are perfectly entitled to do so, and that seeks to reduce the number of voters from certain key groups—those who are less likely to be able to register in this way—is fundamentally flawed. Many Opposition Members and, if we are being honest, Members across the House, would identify those key groups as young people, people from ethnic minority and poorer backgrounds, and those who live in inner cities.

Two issues have come to light during the debate that will govern how we will debate the Bill as it proceeds through Parliament. The first is the number of anecdotal examples of alleged voter fraud, and of convictions for such fraud. I detected an underlying tone in many Members’ contributions; it suggested that, even where convictions were not secured, the fact that questions were raised was evidence of a problem that must be solved. However, we should be better than that, especially when the underlying assumption about the background of the people involved in such activity—it is an assumption made by a number of Members during today’s debate—relates to their ethnicity, religion or faith. If we want to make assertions based on anecdotal evidence, we should be extremely careful about the type of groups we characterise in that way. The onus of proof is clearly on us, as Members.

My second concern is the underlying assumption, which we heard from Government Members, that if people cannot complete a more complex and demanding process in order to register and are unable to return the form—the issue that is at the heart of the Bill—they should, quite rightly, lose their right to vote. No one should lose their right to vote. There are questions to be asked about what the most efficient process is to ensure the integrity of the register. As I said at the start of my speech, if we truly want a register with integrity, we need to consider not just those who should not be on the register, but those who are not on it. There is this idea that we have an undeserving group of people. The example was rightly given—perhaps in jest, but there is some truth in it—of younger voters, such as students. It may surprise Members to hear that, not so long ago, I was a student. Even though I am a disciplined, efficient and “together” Member of Parliament now—[Interruption.] Thank you. I think Hansard may record that as “interruption”. However, there were perhaps times when a form or essay sat on my desk that I fully intended to hand in, but my approach was not as efficient as the one I would adopt now that I am in my fourth decade. It is important not to put hurdles in the way before we have seen the evidence on the effects; only then should we undergo the transition to a whole new process.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a passionate speech, as well as a self-congratulatory one. He is congratulatory about himself, but he is dismissive of the qualities of our young people. One of the transitions that they have to make is from childhood to adulthood. Students in this country are perfectly capable of recognising their duty and the requirements to register to vote. The suggestion that they or people in ethnic minorities somehow have a likelihood of being incapable of doing that is one that I find offensive to them, and I ask him to retract any such suggestion.

[Gavin Shuker]

I think that the hon. Gentleman has entirely misread my comments, and I wonder whether he has chosen to do so. About one in four young people under 24 vote, whereas about three quarters of people over 60 do so, and that should not be dismissed.

[Mrs Laing]

We have debated this matter for the past five hours, but does the hon. Gentleman not accept that if a person cannot exercise the personal responsibility of filling in a simple form online in order to register to vote, it is upon their own head that they lose their right to vote?

[Gavin Shuker]

The hon. Lady has moderated her language since she made her speech earlier, in which she clearly said that those people did not “deserve” to vote. She can look at Hansard to see that. I appreciate that she has moved her position, but her substantive point remains that there are those people who deserve to vote and those who do not. I, for one, do not want to see a system where we start talking about the electorate in that way.

[Mr Stuart]

They won’t be the electorate.

[Gavin Shuker]

The hon. Gentleman rightly points out that they will not be the electorate then, but in this place we should be better than that.

When we consider foreign policy, for example, we often examine how we set a timetable. There are two ways of setting a timetable for change. The first is by way of a conditions-based response, where we say that there are certain milestones to be hit—certain points at which we consider that the integrity of the process has been governed and understood by all, and the progress that has been made has been secured. The other route is by way of a purely date-led timetable. In the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, the previous Government set out a position where two parallel processes would happen at the same time: the existing register would continue in the way that it had, while we looked at and tried to understand how individual electoral registration affected the details of those people on the register. That strikes me as a wholly appropriate approach, and many Government Members, as they are now, supported those moves. Why for the sake of a year’s change or difference are we now going to cause ourselves trouble and store it up for the future?

We have heard a lot from the Minister about the data-matching trials, which are obviously important in order for us to see whether this shift has a measurable and discernible effect on how the register is produced. He has placed details in the Library today, and I am looking forward to seeing them. However, he said that he anticipates that only two thirds of the people currently on the register will be moved across.

[Sadiq Khan (Tooting) (Lab)]

At best.

[Gavin Shuker]

At best. The key issue is that we will not know, even from the pilots, whether that is an appropriate level until early 2013, by which point this legislation will have gone from this place. We will not be able to pull back from the brink if demonstrably lower levels of data matching are shown. The Minister was clear about the onus put on those trials in the first place; it was a key reason why this was an appropriate route to go down. In answer to my intervention, he said that he hoped the number on the electoral register will not decrease, and will instead increase, as a result of these changes. What safeguards are in place if the data-matching trials come back not with a figure of 66% or 55%, which is the sort of figure others have spoken about, but a significantly lower one? Answer comes there none.

Secondly, on the 2015 review of boundaries for the 2020 elections, to which this process is integral, we have very little in the way of answers about how the register will change constituency boundaries, which have already been changed to a great extent. I draw the House’s attention to the quotes from the Electoral Reform Society, which said:

“A substantial fall off in registered voters, weighted towards urban areas, would require the Boundary Commission to reduce the number of inner city seats. This will create thousands of “invisible” citizens who will not be accounted for or considered in many key decisions that affect their lives”.

I believe that that is the situation we are in now, and it might well extend further. That does a disservice to many of the groups that I mentioned.

Finally, I want to draw attention to the issue of young people. Students who are registered in their halls of residence are empowered to vote at a time of significant change and transition in their lives. I hope that they will not be disfranchised, because their voices must be heard if we are to maintain the credibility of the process and draw in new voters, too.