Electoral Registration and Administration Bill
Debate between Lord Beamish and Mark Tami(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Jones
I agree with my hon. Friend, although data matching has its limitations, given the turnover in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras and in pockets of my constituency. We cannot leave it entirely to data matching, which is a useful tool but it will not get over the key problem of ensuring that the local register is as accurate as possible.
On the use of the private sector, let me provide the example of the new Durham county council. Before the formation of the unitary county council three years ago, seven district councils were responsible for electoral registration in County Durham. I have to say that their performance was patchy—some were good and some were bad. One benefit of the new county council taking responsibility for the register is a uniformity of approach. The county council put in extra effort when it was formed and contracted a company to do a full canvass to ensure that the register was as accurate as possible. That process—credit to the county council for doing it—put an extra 12,000 people on to the electoral register. I must thank the council, as that affected the size and the distributions when the parliamentary constituency boundaries and the new county council wards were redrawn. With 12,000 added through an intensive canvass, it shows what can be done in a rural county such as County Durham. I am not sure what would happen if that were not done in a constituency such as that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras, for example. As I say, this has proved to be useful for the process.
The county council went down the road of ensuring as full a canvass as possible for another reason. I and others had noticed that entire streets or parts of them were missing altogether from the register. Was it that people living there suddenly decided in sequential order that they were not going to register? I do not think so. It was the consequence of errors made in the data inputting, so the canvass helped to identify the streets affected. I was aware of the problem and so were councils, and I believe that the gaps were raised by all political parties. The annual canvass is important for areas such as mine that have elections only every four years. Political parties out canvassing can sometimes spot mistakes and draw them to the attention of the electoral returning officer. Having an annual canvass becomes more important where elections are not annual, when these problems are likely to be less visible to the various political parties that are standing.
An annual canvass is important, too, for care homes and residential homes, some of which, alas, have quite a large turnover, with residents coming in and out of respite care and, unfortunately, with people dying during the year. If we are not careful, the register will get badly out of shape in respect of people living in residential and sheltered accommodation and in care homes. It might be said that it affects only 30 or 40 people at a time in each care home, but if we add that up across County Durham, it means a lot of individuals. I am not criticising any individuals running care homes and similar organisations, but when a resident unfortunately dies it is not the top priority to write to the electoral registration officer to say that someone has passed on and that they are going to re-register the new individual living there. This is another example, therefore, of where an annual canvass helps. In my experience, the residential care manager or owner can be quite helpful in ensuring that the information provided is as accurate as possible. It is obviously not nice for any political party to send direct mail, as we all do, to homes where people are deceased, so an annual canvass could be an effective way of helping to ensure that that is prevented.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras Friend touched on the issue of students. My constituency does not contain a large student population, but the city of Durham certainly does, and any Member whose constituency contains a large number of students will know that there is quite a high turnover. I am thinking not just of the halls of residence that exist in parts of Newcastle that I know very well, and in parts of Durham, but of the fact that students move around and may not stay in the same house for two or three years. Members of that large population—who, I hasten to add, are using local services—are not reflected in any of the data, not only in terms of voting but in terms of electoral boundaries. They are nowhere to be seen. I think that the annual canvass has helped in that regard. Durham county council undertook an exercise to ensure that its register was as up to date as possible, and found that the number of voters in the city of Durham had increased by nearly 4,500. I suspect that most of them were students.
My right hon. Friend also mentioned welfare benefit changes. People with an extra bedroom are to lose their right to a proportion of their housing benefit, which I expect to increase the amount of movement, certainly in my constituency. I do not know what will happen in parts of London, where people are on a kind of merry-go-round, moving constantly from one type of social housing to another. That increase in movement will make the annual canvass more important. In parts of my constituency, such as Stanley and Chester-le-Street, there is a large concentration of private sector landlords. Once the benefit changes come into effect, people will move, because they will no longer be able to afford to live in their homes. How can we reflect that in the register?
What I am going to say now may sound strange, but it is a fact. In the north-east of England, the legacy of those infamous old days of the poll tax remains. People used not to register because they thought that that would be a way of getting out of paying the tax. In parts of my constituency that thinking remains, and people still refer to council tax as “the poll tax” . That did a lot of damage to people’s awareness of the civic duty to register, which I have always found to be very strong among older members of the population. They tend always to send in the forms and to vote, but that poll tax legacy is still there. I suspect that the only way of tackling it is to knock on people’s doors and ask them who lives in their houses.
There is another issue, which does not affect my constituency. I was very saddened by the way in which the last Government reacted to the Daily Mail agenda. Mine was one of the few constituencies that experimented with all-postal ballots, which were very successful. According to the Electoral Commission’s report, there was, overall, a very small amount of fraud, and the fraud that did occur was concentrated mainly in certain types of community in such places as Birmingham and Bradford. In one county council by-election in my constituency there was a 67% turnout under the postal ballot system. Sadly, however, the last Government and the Electoral Commission took fright following headlines that focused—rightly—on fraud that had taken place in some inner-city, mainly Asian, communities.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. The key is finding a way of increasing turnout. If turnout increases, fraud becomes far more difficult, because it is not so easy to influence the result. Low turnouts, and low registration, make fraud easier.
Local Government Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Beamish and Mark Tami(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Jones
It is not at all. If the hon. Gentleman comes to my constituency and says that to the 21% of young people who are unemployed, I am sure they will find it very amusing. It is quite clear that given the economies of regions such as the north-east, if local authorities do not know what their compensation will be, they will not be able to make plans.
It is interesting that Government Members seem quite quiet this afternoon, including the Liberal Democrats, who claim to be the party of local government.
Mr Jones
No, and that is possibly because they will have to explain to northern councils why they are supporting measures that will have a terrible effect on their budgets. They sidestep that issue and say that it is all because the matter is covered by the coalition agreement, and then we have the usual deathly silence from them. We need to remind all our constituents on every possible occasion that such draconian cuts could not be got through the House without the support of the Liberal Democrats.
Mr Jones
I am sorry, but when the hon. Gentleman gets his briefing notes from Conservative central office or wherever, he should perhaps examine how the figures are presented. The Secretary of State is very good at presenting figures. They are actually the figures for the past five years, when we had a growing employment base in County Durham.
Mr Jones
Indeed. Now, we see that the latest unemployment figure is nearly 7.8% for my constituency and nearly 12% for the north-east in general, and businesses are closing. Is the hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) saying that those businesses are somehow going to grow over the next few years as a result of this measure? In fact, councils will lack certainty about how much they will get. The local authority is one of the biggest employers in County Durham, but there has been a reduction in the numbers of people. I think the policy is that by cutting back in local government and public services, all these new jobs will rush forward from the private sector, but today’s figures show that 67,000 people have left the public service in the last quarter, while only 5,000 jobs have been created in the private sector.
As I said on Second Reading about my constituents in the north-east, the Bill will actually help the affluent south. Clearly, it is a damn sight easier to attract business to the likes of Westminster and other economic hotspots in the south-east of England than to parts of County Durham. That is no criticism of the work that local councils do to attract jobs—for instance, with the council’s full support, the area has succeeded in attracting Hitachi trains to Newton Aycliffe in County Durham. I know of the tremendous work that my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Phil Wilson) did on that campaign.
The Bill is being rushed through with undue haste. We are expecting councils and local people to walk blindly into the future. The parties in government sometimes try to portray this as a simplified system, but it is not; it will be a centralised and bureaucratic system. We cannot allow a situation to develop in which local people or local government do not know how much money they will get or how the system will work in practice.
Mr Jones
But Portsmouth council received a year-on-year increase in its grant. It is interesting to hear a Liberal Democrat argue that deprivation should not be important to how local government money is spent. I would not be surprised to hear that from the Secretary of State because, frankly, I do not think that he cares—for instance, his support for his own Conservative areas at the expense of areas such as the north-east is highly political.
Mr Jones
Exactly. Not for the first time, some of those chickens are coming home to roost. Hopefully, we will have fewer Liberal Democrat “Focus” leaflets claiming credit for everything that goes right and criticising everything else that the previous Government did. Some of those northern councils had Liberal Democrats, but thankfully, in places such as Newcastle and Sheffield, the electorate have seen through them.
In conclusion, the timetable for the Bill needs to be rethought. As suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), if we can take witnesses at this stage, we should consider doing so, because otherwise the same will happen as has happened with a lot of Bills this Session: the Bill will be rushed through here only to be held up in the other place, where the ladies and gentlemen will give it the proper scrutiny that it deserves.
Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Beamish and Mark Tami(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Jones
I am not trivialising the subject, but I will say to the hon. Gentleman that the real difference in North Durham was made by provisions opposed by him and his party, such as tax credits, which raised hundreds of families out of poverty, and the Sure Start initiatives, which were important in poor communities such as Stanley in my constituency and gave real life chances to youngsters from poor backgrounds. I will not take any lectures from a Conservative on alleviating child poverty. I hasten to add that since this coalition Government came to power, many families, including many individuals whom I met the other day at a school in my constituency, will lose the education maintenance allowance. That was not a luxury but a vital part of supporting those children in education and giving them the access to higher education that generations before them had never had.
Mr Jones
I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I remember the debates on the minimum wage as a trade union official, as he will too, and we were told that it would wreck the economy, but in the north-east alone 110,000 people got a pay rise thanks to that change. It is interesting that we are now hearing proposals from Conservative Back-Benchers to change the system and that people who are disabled and others should perhaps be offered a lower rate of minimum wage.
Business of the House
Debate between Lord Beamish and Mark Tami(14 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Jones
I am sorry that the hon. Lady wants to disfranchise up to a third of this House, who were not here in the previous Parliament. It is important that those Members be allowed to look at the proposed reforms and have their say on them. I know that, along with her colleagues, she has signed up to the Conservative party. I thought that the Liberals were not in favour of an authoritarian approach. We see the two sides of the Liberal party.
It is important that we have debates. I served for seven and a half years on a Select Committee and am a keen supporter of the scrutiny role that Select Committees play. There are issues about, for example, the size of such Committees and the representation of the minor parties. If this is steamrollered through on a Conservative-Liberal Democrat guillotine, many people in both Scotland and Wales will rightly be annoyed.
The Parliamentary Secretary and the Leader of the House have made a very quick conversion on a short road to Damascus. In the previous Parliament, when we talked about modernisation, the Parliamentary Secretary said:
“At the moment, there is a nod and a wink between the usual channels, and then a programme motion is plonked before the House, which can take it or leave it—the answer is that we take it, because there is a Government majority in favour of the programme motion. That is not a good enough way of doing business, and it does not do justice to hon. Members.”—[Official Report, 1 November 2006; Vol. 451, c. 335.]
In the new coalition Government and in the new spirit of co-operation, or conversion, that has taken place in the past few weeks, the Parliamentary Secretary has clearly changed his mind on programme motions. It is bad enough to have programme motions, which he used to argue vociferously against in the previous Parliament, for legislation that is being introduced, but to have them for something that affects individual Members of the House is wrong.
Mr Jones
That is not surprising, because the Parliamentary Secretary is a Liberal Democrat and they say one thing in one place and another in another. We are increasingly seeing—we certainly saw it at Justice questions—the push me-pull me coalition, where some Members think that they can say anything in one sphere and say something else in another.
The Leader of the House, who has been in the House a lot longer than I have, clearly was against programme motions and spoke vigorously about them. I looked up his speech to the last Conservative party conference, which took place on 5 October 2009. It was revealing. He needs to explain to the House why tonight he is a great convert to guillotine motions. He said that
“one of Labour’s worst reforms has been to introduce a guillotine motion before a bill gets a second reading, automatically cutting short the time available, before we even know how complex or contentious the issues are or by how much the government will amend them. Harriet is always there, with her knitting needles.”
No doubt he will be getting the knitting out later. I can visualise the Parliamentary Secretary knitting. I find it hard to visualise the Leader of the House doing so.
I am sorry to say that there is more. The Leader of the House went on to say in his speech:
“As a result, we send huge amounts of poor quality legislation through to the Lords. We don’t have time to do what we tell you to do—read the small print.”
I agree with the Leader of the House in that we need to read the small print of the measures we will be deciding on tonight.
Mr Jones
I will do so, Mr Deputy Speaker, but the important point is whether or not we have a debate and vote in Government time on the Floor of the House, and what the constraints on that will be. Will we be able to propose alternative September dates, because no doubt some new Members and others will have fixed holidays? What will the motion actually mean, therefore?
Mr Deputy Speaker
Order. That is way outside what we are talking about now. I ask hon. Members to restrict themselves to discussing the motion before the House.