Helen Goodman
Main Page: Helen Goodman (Labour - Bishop Auckland)Department Debates - View all Helen Goodman's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Streeter
As I said, Mr Deputy Speaker, it is not a pleasant thought from my point of view.
The truth is that a vast amount of work is being done around the United Kingdom to get people to register before the general election, but it is important to remember that anyone who is already on the household register and is residing at that address has not been removed as a result of the shift to IER. The Electoral Commission is running a national campaign across the UK to encourage people to register to vote ahead of the 20 April deadline. It will reach all adults, with a focus on groups—already mentioned in this debate—that research has identified are less likely to be registered to vote, such as people who have recently moved home, those who rent their home, young people, and people from black and minority ethnic communities.
Some of this work is being undertaken with the support of organisations and private companies that represent these communities or have a special reach into them. For example—this is very good news—the Electoral Commission and Facebook have today announced that on national voter registration day, which is tomorrow, every person on Facebook in the UK who is eligible to vote will see a voter registration reminder message in their newsfeed. Some 35 million people use Facebook in the UK every month, which is more than the number who voted at the last general election. This is using innovative methods to reach people and encourage them to vote. We must keep returning to the point that people can now register to vote online. It takes 30 seconds, and the only thing they need is their name—[Interruption.] Yes, I have seen it done. [Interruption.] I was already registered; I was data-matched. People need their name, address, date of birth—most of us know those things—and national insurance number; ring your mum and find out what it is. If people have those four things, they can register; it takes 30 seconds. This is good news.
Mr Streeter
I do that every week. I don’t know what the hon. Lady is on about.
This builds on the important work the Electoral Commission is doing to get the message across that everyone should register to vote. I am also pleased that the commission is strongly supporting national voter registration day—an excellent initiative launched by Bite the Ballot last year—in a number of ways, including by re-launching the “Ballot Box Man” YouTube advert aimed at encouraging young people to register to vote. If you have not seen it, Mr Deputy Speaker, it is very entertaining and makes the point extremely well. A wide range of social media activity is being undertaken, including on Twitter and Facebook. A range of resources is being sent out to electoral administrators and the commission’s partners from across the voluntary, public and private sectors to help them get people registered. The commission is also supporting the launch of Operation Black Vote’s bus tour across Great Britain—that also begins on national voter registration day—to get more BME people on the electoral register.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield). I want to pick up where he left off—on young people.
One of the worst things about the big fall in the number of people on the register is the massive reduction in the number of young people. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) said, if young people do not get the habit of voting when they first can, they are highly unlikely to take it up later in life. In a written parliamentary question, I asked the Minister, who is not quite in his place,
“how many people have been informed that their application for inclusion on the…register was not valid because their national insurance number was not provided”.
He replied:
“Failure to provide a National Insurance number does not result in an application being declared invalid.”
He does not know what is going on. I have a letter from an ERO in response to a young person’s application to register to vote. It read, “Thank you for your recent application to register. Unfortunately, I am unable to process your application because it was incomplete. The following information is required and was incorrect or missing: national insurance number.”
There are 440,000 young people still at school who turned 18 between 1 September and 1 May. The person that letter was sent to could not register because she did not have her national insurance number. I do not know how many hon. Members spend a lot of time with teenagers, but a letter with a young person’s national insurance number arrives before they are 16, and we are suggesting that two years later teenagers will know where that letter is and have kept it in a safe place. I cannot think of anything more naïve. How many young people will have lost it?
Helen Goodman
Yes, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the “ring mum” solution before. How outrageous. What about young people in care? What about young people estranged from their families? What a disgraceful attitude to large numbers of young people.
We rang the council to find out what to do. It suggested that the person bring their passport, which costs £72. It suggested a driving licence, which costs £34. These are all things that young people do not have.
Helen Goodman
I tabled a PQ to the man who is commenting from a sedentary position now asking how young people were supposed to know what their national insurance number was. His answer was: payslips and correspondence with HMRC and the Department for Work and Pensions. The truth is that 18-year-olds who are still at school do not have payslips or correspondence with HMRC or DWP. The Government have not thought this through.
The other thing the council asked for was a council tax bill. No 18-year-old gets a council tax bill. This is completely incompetent. Ministers have not thought this through. I went to the website to find out what to do. Nobody can get their national insurance number on the website. That is not how it works. They can, however, ring a very nice man on: 0300 200 3500. They will get a very nice man with a lovely Lancashire accident, and he will put their national insurance number in the post.
The suggestion that we have heard from Ministers that this information is readily available is totally naïve. The DWP Ministers who are responsible for giving people their national insurance numbers and informing them cannot even be bothered to turn up and sit on the Bench for this debate. They have a central role. The truth is that it displays all the attitudes of DWP Ministers to young people: they want to take the housing benefit off 18 to 21-year-olds; now they want to take the vote from those very same young people. It is a total disgrace. [Interruption.]
Tom Brake
First, as the hon. Gentleman may know, EROs can advise on alternative sources of that information, and I am sure that best practice in helping young people in that respect will be disseminated. I should also say that given that the Labour party supports, as I do, the idea of young people being able to vote at 16, I am a little worried that Labour Members seem to think that young people are completely incapable of keeping any records themselves.
Last month the Government announced a further package of funding of up to £10 million to support activities to maximise registration.
Tom Brake
I will make a little more progress.
That was on top of the £4.2 million invested last year. The Labour party has rightly wanted to know some of the detail of that, and I will come on to that. Most of this money has already been distributed to EROs, to support their work. Earlier today we announced how the rest of the funding will be used to encourage traditionally under-registered groups to register. If this was part of a Government conspiracy to stop either young people or poorer people registering, as has been suggested by some Opposition Members, then I do not understand why we would have spent £14 million over the last two years on trying to boost registration.
The funding will be provided to a number of national organisations, including the British Youth Council, Citizens Advice, Citizens UK, Homeless Link, the National Housing Federation, Mencap, Operation Black Vote and UK Youth. Many of these organisations work directly with the groups of people the Labour party has suggested the Government are trying to deny the right to vote.
Tom Brake
I am of course very happy to support that initiative, as I am indeed doing.
As a number of Members have highlighted, national voter registration day, organised by Bite the Ballot, which I have worked with, takes place tomorrow. Events will be held up and down the country and I urge everyone here in the Chamber to do what they can to support this and similar initiatives. Of course, we all have at our fingertips the ability—through the many tweets Members send out, through Facebook postings, through the e-mails we send out—to encourage young people to register to vote, and we should all be participating in that.
Tomorrow, the Electoral Commission’s overseas voter registration day marks the launch of its activities over the coming months to encourage British citizens overseas to register and to vote. The Ministry of Defence will also be launching its annual information campaign for the armed forces tomorrow—the start of a range of activity to encourage service personnel and their families to ensure they are registered to vote ahead of the general election.
Helen Goodman
As well as having a publicity campaign with the telephone number for national insurance numbers, why does the Minister not change the letter so that when people get it, they know that they will need it when they register to vote? No mention is made of that at the moment.
Tom Brake
I am very happy to take that point on board and see whether it can be acted on.
The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee will be publishing its report on voter engagement, and it will no doubt include a range of thoughtful recommendations for the future. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) suggested that the use of photo ID might be appropriate, but the PCRC has recommended that the Government do not adopt the Electoral Commission’s suggestion that people take photo ID to the polling station.
There will be things the next Government can do further to modernise electoral registration in this country.
In the time left I will try to respond to some of the specific points that were made. This is all about ensuring that the electoral register is accurate. That is what the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan) wants, and that is what we are trying to do.
On attainers in Liverpool, I have concerns that the best practice that exists in some local authorities is clearly not being picked up by others. My own local authority has successfully exchanged census information from schools with the ERO to ensure that a very significant percentage of young people at school are now on the register. The small number who are not are being individually chased by local authorities to ensure that that happens. So it can be done, and in fact an EROs conference is taking place today at which I am sure some of these issues will be debated.
Yes, we should give special focus to young people, but it is worth pointing out that we will not support the proposed legal requirement for EROs to go into schools. Of course, there are local authorities such as mine where the issue is not registering young people to vote but ensuring that older people in care homes are registered. Forcing EROs to go into schools, where there is not a problem, would tie down resources, which could result in there being insufficient resources to enable them to focus on the areas that they need to focus on. Clearly they have the ability to go into schools now; there is no need for the law to be changed to enable them to do it. We would of course encourage all schools to be participating in this regard. As I have said, there are things that the next Government—