Individual Electoral Registration

Gloria De Piero Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies.

I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) on bringing the extremely important matter of individual electoral registration to Westminster Hall at this crucial time for our democracy. As he says, this change represents a potential body blow to our democracy, as 1 million people might be ignored.

We should all reflect on the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), who pointed out that the boundary review is intrinsically tied up with the process of individual electoral registration, which could distort the electoral map. My hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Christina Rees) mentioned the Association of Electoral Administrators, which points out that the block registration of those in sheltered or university accommodation is crucial—so why has it not happened? My hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) pointed out that in her constituency they are trying to do all this work in just a two-week window.

My hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) made the point that we must all be democrats and should not be putting barriers in the way of democracy, and my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) asked an extremely important question, which I hope the Minister will answer, about whether an equality impact assessment has been conducted. Finally, my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) pointed out that the issue is not the principle of IER but having a reasonable time to adjust to it.

In the short time remaining to me, I have some additional questions for the Minister. Will he tell us one good reason for the change of date, other than politicking to give the Tories an electoral advantage? The Opposition have suggested a number of common-sense solutions. Why have the Government refused measures such as the block registration of students this year? We also suggested that the Government work with letting agencies to take such simple measures as reminding new tenants to register and helping them to do so, but they have not carried out any of them. In my constituency 900 people are predicted to fall off the register, but look at Hammersmith and Fulham and we are looking at the loss of 8,000 people. Does the Minister agree that that would be unacceptable?

I will finish by coming back to the words of the Electoral Commission. It has said that the proposed change to the IER implementation date poses

“a risk to the completeness of the register and to participation”.

I remind the Minister that the Electoral Commission is an independent body set up by Parliament and has no partisan axe to grind. Why do the Government believe that their party political agenda should override the advice of a body that exists to increase trust and participation in our democracy? Will the Minister reconsider and stop this rush to implement a change that poses profound risks to participation and the completeness of the register? I urge him to heed the Electoral Commission’s sound advice.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose]

I invite the hon. Gentleman to come along and hear my speech on Thursday at Policy Exchange, where we will talk about not just that but other initiatives, which I will mention briefly in a minute. Even if we were able to extend what has been done successfully the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam to many other universities, given that the people we are talking about are not on the register, either before or after individual electoral registration, the date at which we end the transition to IER would make no difference to whether they are registered. This is something worth doing, regardless of whether we are doing IER and the transition. It is worth doing at all times, in all places, in any case. The transition date will make no difference to those people.

I completely agree that it is important that we roll out some of the exciting innovations that are being tried in places such as the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam for students. There are all sorts of other things we could do with the online registration process. It is now possible to register to vote online in less than three minutes—less time than it takes to boil an egg. It is an incredibly convenient and simple process.

However, we make it more difficult for people to renew their registration after they have been registered for a year. The hon. Member for Edinburgh East said, and I am sure we all agree, that there is a natural seasonality to electoral registration: registration rates tend to dip after a major electoral event, such as a general election or the Scottish referendum, because people are less interested and registration is less relevant to them if there is no poll in which they can vote in the next 12 months. Some of those people re-register nearer the time, but we should ask ourselves why we ask all those people to re-register every single year once they have made their individual decision to register to vote. We do not ask them to re-register for their tax credits, their TV licence or their benefit claims every single year.

Everybody in this room, except perhaps the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—I am not sure whether she is in favour of this principle as a fundamental—accepts the noble cause of individual electoral registration and ensuring that people make an individual decision to register to vote. However, we need to ask ourselves whether it is necessary to ask people to renew that vow every year. Are we still being true to individual electoral registration if we relax it and make a decision on it every couple of years? That would allow us to deal with some of the natural electoral seasonality that the hon. Member for Edinburgh East mentioned.

There is a huge amount we can do, and there is a huge amount that I believe should be done. I hope, based on hon. Members’ comments today, that there can be some sort of cross-party agreement on some of these things, which could then be introduced. There may not be cross-party agreement on everything. The hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero) gave a couple of examples, and we do not necessarily agree on all the detail.

[Gloria De Piero]

Can the Minister give me examples of any measures that will be introduced in the next six weeks?

[John Penrose]

I cannot, partly because I have not given the speech yet, and partly because, as I said to the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), registering people who are not on the register needs to happen, regardless of when the transition from the old system to individual electoral registration ends, because the transition will not affect people who are not already on the register. It is a parallel process that needs to be done anyway.