Individual Voter Registration

Jonathan Edwards Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

The reason for the carry-forward was to ensure that people who had been registered to vote but had not registered once under the new system did not suddenly discover that they were not able to vote at the general election. The carry-forward was a check. In an ideal world, one would introduce a new system and not bother having the carry-forward. It was a safety net.

As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), although postal voters provide identifiers, those do not provide any confidence or evidence that the voter is a real person. They provide confidence that the person casting the postal vote is the person who applied for the postal vote, but they do not get around the problem of people being able to create fictional identities and carry out postal vote fraud. We therefore did not think that it was sensible to extend the carry-forward to postal votes. There will still be carry-forward on the register, so people will still be able to vote, but we will not carry forward people’s absent vote. We do not think that that is likely to cause an enormous problem. The hon. Member for Caerphilly should wait for us to respond to the report of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the not-too-distant future, because I think he will be reassured by our answers.

As I made clear to the House in my statement last September, we are focused as much on completeness as accuracy. We instigated and funded the independent research by the Electoral Commission to see what state the current registration system was in. That should make us pause to reflect. When we have discussed this matter previously, there has been a complacent view that everything is fine, that there are not many problems, and that we are at risk of tampering with the system and causing a problem. The fact is that the current system is not as good as people thought it was.

I made the point that in Northern Ireland, where individual registration was introduced and where it now has a number of continuous registration mechanisms, such as putting back the carry-forward and using data matching, the system is now as complete as and more accurate than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. That demonstrates that if we do this well, learning the lessons from Northern Ireland, looking at things such as data matching and carrying out the proposal sensibly by having pre-legislative scrutiny and listening to what people have to say, we will not damage the registration system, as the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd said, but have a more accurate and complete register over time than the one we have today.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

For people such as me who are unaware of events in Northern Ireland, will the Minister inform the House how long equalisation took to take place?

[Mr Harper]

What the research has shown about the drop in the register in Northern Ireland is interesting. Some of the drop was expected because, after all, part of the point of introducing the system early in Northern Ireland was that it was understood that a number of people on the register there did not exist and we wanted to get rid of them. However, it is not clear that the drop in Northern Ireland was any larger than that in the rest of the United Kingdom. Therefore, there may well have been a drop in those who were eligible to vote because they did not go through the slightly increased bureaucracy. However, most of that seems to have been fixed by reintroducing the carry-forward, so that people who did not register the first time around are not penalised. We have learned from that. Having had Northern Ireland go first and having learned the lessons from what it has done, we can be reasonably confident that we will not run into the same problems.

I am also pleased that, as the right hon. Member for Tooting said, we have gone about this in a conciliatory way. We published a White Paper last year. We then published draft legislation, consulted on it and asked the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee to do full pre-legislative scrutiny on it. The Committee has taken evidence from a wide range of stakeholders, including me. It has raised a number of concerns, some of which the right hon. Gentleman mentioned. The Government will respond shortly to the Committee’s report. I urge all hon. Members, particularly those who are interested in this subject, to look at our response because it will address a number of the issues that were raised. Hon. Members can be confident that we will not run into those difficulties. For example, we have already mentioned the carry-forward, and we will not require people to re-register all their details every year if they do not move house. They will simply have to confirm that they have not moved. In Northern Ireland, people have to go through the whole process every year.

I have referred a few times to data matching. We have examined other public databases in a number of local authorities to see how successful we can be in finding people who are not registered to vote. We are in the process of finalising our assessment of that programme, and the Electoral Commission will also be doing so having worked closely with us. I am confident that it will demonstrate that we can use those extra data, as happens in Northern Ireland, to improve the register.

Younger people have been mentioned, and we want to ensure that we allow people to register online in a secure way, which will particularly help younger people. To pick up on a point made by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), it will potentially also help people who are disabled and find it easier to use electronic methods. I absolutely agree with her that people with learning disabilities are entitled to register to vote and to cast their vote. From my experience of working with Scope and attending its reception immediately after the election, and of talking to people with learning disabilities, particularly younger people, I know that they are just as able as anybody else to understand the issues involved and make decisions, and nobody should tell them that they should not. I wanted to put that on the record in strong support of what the hon. Lady said.

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[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

I want to raise two specific concerns, the first of which is that although some of the changes are welcome, they are characteristic of a Government who are too frequently looking through the wrong end of the microscope and thus finding the wrong solutions to the wrong problems. The second concern is about making major changes to electoral registration while substantial changes are to take place as a result of boundary reorganisation. No part of the UK will be hit worse by this than my country, Wales.

There is surely consensus that the preferred outcome is that all adults who are entitled to vote should be registered. Everyone should be on the electoral roll and have the opportunity to cast their vote at elections. The principle of individual electoral registration is positive—that electors should take upon themselves the responsibility to register to vote in their own right rather than under the aegis of a household. All relevant people should be willing and able to register and should have the same opportunity to do so. However, there might be a disconnect between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome in that although relevant people may register, they might not all actually do so. The Minister said that the Government hoped to learn lessons from Northern Ireland, and I look forward to seeing some of the resulting changes in the Bill. However, I believe that when the changes were introduced in Northern Ireland in 2002—the hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) might wish to correct me—there was a fall of 11% in registered electors, and it has taken more than 10 years to rebuild the figures.

According to the White Paper, an estimated 3.5 million people of voting age across England and Wales were not on the electoral roll at the most recent estimate. The Electoral Commission reported in December 2010 that 6 million people were not registered across the UK. It is unclear to me how IER, which creates a greater barrier to registration, will achieve a closer parity to ensure that as many people as possible are on the electoral roll.

If the White Paper is to be believed, then fear of electoral fraud is the major reason for a change to individual electoral registration and for this happening before the next Westminster election. The White Paper refers to the findings of an Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe report regarding the recommendation of an identification requirement to safeguard against fraudulent registration. However, the OSCE was informed of that problem by representatives of political parties when they gave evidence, so this is a circular argument. We tell the OSCE there is a problem, it writes a report saying that we have identified a problem and then we use its report to justify action. That is not evidence-based decision making.

From the testimony provided in the White Paper, it seems that fear of fraud rather than actual fraud is the problem. The attitudinal survey quoted in the White Paper is evidence not that the current system is not working but merely that media stories have raised awareness of the possibility of fraud. Those are two very different things. Perhaps for my party more than anything else I am concerned that the proposals, which aim to tackle what appears to be limited electoral fraud, might lead to unintended consequences.

Electoral registration has greater relevance than ever following the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011, which the Minister drove through last year. The Act will create constituencies designed to have voter numbers within 5% of a UK constituency mean that is predicated upon the number of electors on the electoral roll rather than in the actual adult population. That is the key point. As we have consistently said in our criticisms, the formation of these new constituencies ignores community, historical and geographical links. We saw that last week in Wales, where some of the proposed constituencies are not very practical.

We are also worried by the size of some of the proposed mega-constituencies in Wales of more than 1,500 square miles, which is an incredible size. Apart from that, to be fair, the Boundary Commission for Wales has done a good job, especially in Carmarthenshire. My point, though, is that non-registration becomes crucial because not only are non-registered people disfranchised and unable to vote but their non-registration increases the actual population of the constituency. Full registration must therefore be the principal aim of any change in registration, and it is very unclear from the Government’s proposals to date how the changes will bring that about.

The same is true of suggestions that a voluntary registration scheme should be introduced. The Electoral Commission estimates that a voluntary registration scheme, as suggested in paragraph 74 of the White Paper, may see a significant drop in the number of relevant adults on the electoral register, from around 90% to as low as 65%. That would clearly not assist in full registration, and given the introduction of the new population link for constituency boundaries, the impact of the change would be significant and would require the electoral map to be wholly redrawn once again to reflect the changes and ignore those we might describe as the non-people, as well as potentially disfranchising more than a third of our adult population. As we already know, electoral participation is skewed towards particular parts of society and to lose the participation of those who are more transitory or migratory, and less interested in politics, would have a strong impact on our society and our politics.

I have been very good by butchering my speech to keep it within eight minutes. I conclude by noting that I hold deep reservations that the measures proposed in the White Paper will not assist in increasing the number of adults on the electoral register, and may have negative unintended consequences on voter registration and constituencies. Electoral registration is an issue that must have cross-party consensus and I hope that that can be achieved before any changes are introduced.