Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Graham Allen and Mark Williams

Monday 25th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Williams]

I concur with the hon. Gentleman. I think we have nothing to be scared about in the Government’s legislation or in respect of the good practice that some local authorities are exhibiting. I am concerned that we spread good practice, and I believe clause 5 provides us with the mechanism to do that by requiring returning officers in the first instance to send the invitations to register and then by providing a secondary power to make regulations about the substance of the initial applications. Further to that, the regulations

“may confer functions on the Electoral Commission”.

I hope that the Minister can flesh out the role he believes the Electoral Commission should play in these matters.

[Mr Graham Allen (Nottingham North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Weir.

Before I deal with this important clause and set of amendments, let me say a few words about the role of those who have served on my Select Committee, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. I believe that it did an exemplary job in examining not just clause 5 but all the other clauses, and I fear that had it not done so, and had the Government not engaged with it as they did, this Committee stage would have been much more fraught. It is because the Select Committee managed to clear away a lot of the undergrowth—a lot of the detail—during its close discussions with the Government that the real, strong political issues that should be debated on the Floor of the House are being so debated. Not only the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner), who is present, but other members of the Select Committee have participated in the first two days of this Committee stage, and will probably participate in the third.

I was surprised to see how many amendments the Government had accepted. I had thought that we had done a reasonable job, but that co-operation has taken the Select Committee to a better place in the way in which we should, responsibly, seek to amend Bills. There can be nothing more important than what we have tried to do in respect of the right to vote, the registration of the vote, and the invitation to vote. It may sound very dry and technical, but the truth is that those issues are fundamental to our democracy. If we get this wrong, all the high-falutin’ phraseology about our freedoms and liberties, and our right to create our own Governments and dispose of them, will be rendered useless.

We need only read the history books, such as those that deal with the Jim Crow laws in the United States, to know that, even when there is a nominal right to vote, if registration is not got right—if, indeed, it is deliberately twisted so that it is difficult for people to vote—everyone is denied their right to democracy. As Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying in a famous book by Robert Caro, which I would recommend to anyone, if people are given the right to vote they are given access to the whole panoply of the power of Government, and can then exercise their ability to change law by whatever means they wish to employ: through their political parties, and through other organisations. We have seen how vital it is for registration to be exercised in a responsible and comprehensive way in countries such as South Africa, which, in recent years, has done a tremendous job in fulfilling that requirement.

However, we also need to look a little closer to home. When we talk about registration, I always think of the old Shire hall in the middle of my city of Nottingham. Three blocks can be pulled out of the steps of the hall, and that is where the old tripod gallows used to be. It was used at the time of the Pentrich rebellion, only six generations ago, to execute people who were demanding the right to vote—demanding the right, in our own country, to exercise the mandate that would decide who should be the Government.

I go to those stratospheric lengths only to demonstrate that we are debating an extremely serious matter. We are not merely discussing the dry technicalities that electoral registration officers, who are almost always extremely capable and conscientious public servants, put into law and into our democratic process. We are discussing a fundamental issue.

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[Mr Mark Williams]

I, too, welcome the Government’s direction of travel on the penalty. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that rather than becoming too hung up about the figure, we should consider how to communicate the fact that there is a penalty at all? It is about the size of the font and the prominence given to the wording in the documentation that is sent out as much as the scale of the fine.

[Mr Allen]

At the risk of summoning the ghost of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), the hon. Gentleman makes that point far more articulately, and perhaps more often, than I do. If we can persuade people to vote because they have got this message clearly from the panoply of paperwork that we send out to get them to register, then that in itself is a good thing, and it will mean that the threat of deploying a fine is not acted on.

As the Minister said, members of the Select Committee are trying to be as good as we can in giving the Committee an explanatory statement of the amendments so that Members can wander into the debate and know exactly what we are talking. The statement is straightforward. We hope that the deterrent would be used only very sparingly and rarely, if ever, but it says, in effect, that the concept of registering to vote is not about marketisation or convenience but about values—the values of which we in this place must be the guardians at every conceivable opportunity. The amendment is about the right of every qualified individual in this country to vote for the governance of their choice, and we believe that it would safeguard and extend the possibility of all of us enjoying that right.