Representation of the People (Electoral Registers Publication Date) Regulations 2020

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Adonis (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I commend the Minister both for the extremely fluent manner in which he introduced this legislation and for its sensible and proportionate content. He invited the House to support it and I doubt that there will be any dissent. It is important that we give the Government credit when they do a good job, because we are always critical when they do not. The way that the consultation on these regulations was conducted, with the devolved authorities, local authorities, electoral administrators and so on, has been almost a model of its kind. The conclusion which the Government drew—to have a short delay in the permissible period for the publication of the register but not to cancel the canvass, which would have potentially led to large numbers of people being disfranchised, as the Minister said—was the right outcome and the response to a well-conducted consultation.

Since the Minister is inviting the House to agree to these arrangements for electoral registration, I will raise a wider issue. One thing that is seriously wrong with our system of electoral registration at the moment, which goes back to the introduction of individual registration, is the way that we deal with people who live in institutions. The two largest groups of those are students in higher education and people who live in care institutions—who have been much in our mind in respect of Covid. Right back to 2015, when individual registration was introduced, electoral administrators and others have been seriously worried about the underregistration of people in institutions, who often move in and out in quite short order. They are often not aware of the fact that they are not registered and there is now no system for automatic registration as there was before. The Minister has introduced these regulations in such a reasonable way. May I invite him to at least agree to look at this further? It is obviously not going to make any change for this year, because it would require legislation, but there would be widespread support for a system allowing EROs automatically to register those in institutions. This could lead to a justifiable improvement in the way that the register works.

It was notable that the report on registrations for last December’s general election by the Office for National Statistics showed a very large increase in registrations in the run-up to the election. Total registration increased by 2.8% between December 2018 and December 2019, to its highest level ever. That is a welcome reflection of engagement in the democratic process, but it is also a commentary on how inaccurate the register was at the start of that period. If it were possible to get an automatically more accurate register, not only through the improvements such as data matching that the Minister rightly noted, but also by means of automatic registration of those in institutions, this would be a welcome advance.