Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

I originally planned to make a very straightforward speech in support of the amendment of my noble friend Lord Lipsey. I will not rise to the helpful and interesting trail that my noble friend Lord Maxton has dragged along the ground about ID cards, but his analysis is accurate. We would have had a much clearer database that could inform the electoral registration process and much else besides. However, I will not go down that road.

I cannot allow the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington of Ribbleton, about the north being disadvantaged because of the south. However, the point that I want to make about the amendment is that it is accepted throughout the House that there are inadequacies with the current level of electoral registration. I have not heard any noble Lord arguing that the electoral register is currently a perfect piece of data collection. It is inadequate. There are significant shortfalls. Reference has been made to the report done by the Electoral Commission in March 2010 The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain. Noble Lords can see that that is clear in terms of the number of people who should be registered but are not. But the significant point and the one that I want to make which has not been made so far in this debate is that the shortfall is variable.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Does my noble friend agree that one of the variables is the zeal of the local authority officers responsible for that?

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

It is not only a question of the zeal, but of the budgets that they are allocated and the way in which that resource is used.

If noble Lords look at the register, they will find that there is a shortfall that is variable throughout the country and in different types of area. If we accept, as no doubt the noble Lords opposite all do, that the objective of this legislation is to create fairness across the country, the Bill has to address the shortfalls in electoral registration and, in particular, the variables between different parts of the country.

In the Electoral Commission’s March 2010 study there were a number of case studies in various parts of the country. One was in London, in Lambeth. It has a population of 266,169 and a population density of 99.2 persons per hectare. There is an ethnic minority population of 50.4 per cent and worklessness of 16 per cent and so on. In particular, figures were quoted for the percentage of households that were in the private rented sector and the percentage of residents who had moved in the past 12 months.

In the London Borough of Lambeth, 17.7 per cent of those on the register had moved in the previous 12 months. That is a substantial degree of turnover and churn. In my experience of being an elected politician in London for many years, that degree of churn and turnover was a particular facet of many parts of London. It would be true of many other inner-city areas and parts of the country, but it was not uniform. It was not uniform in London and it is not uniform around the country. Therefore, without the sort of amendment moved by my noble friend—or an alternative because there are a number of other possible ways of addressing this—the Bill is in danger of institutionalising poorer representation in certain sorts of area.

I looked at the paper produced by London councils in the past few months which examined the 2001 census. This paper tries to ensure that next year’s census will be a better one. Yet even if we use the census data as the source of information about what the population and the registered electorate ought to be, there are problems. Kensington and Chelsea—not, I have to say, the typical example of a rundown inner-city area—had the lowest response rate in the country to the 2001 census. Its response rate was 64 per cent. I suspect that the good residents of Kensington and Chelsea might not be interested in filling in the form about the census, but would probably make considerable efforts to make sure that they were on the electoral register to return MPs of a particular colour to Parliament. The point is that there was that degree of poor response even to the census in that part of London.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

My credentials are that I was an elected councillor for the ward of Golborne in north Kensington. My noble friend will have to be a little careful in talking about Kensington and Chelsea as an affluent borough, when the northern part of Kensington has some of the areas of highest deprivation in the country. It was a cauldron of social movement, with fair housing and the first legal advice bureau with Peter Kandler. It was an area of multi-deprivation, so there must be considerable variations within the one London borough from the affluent south to the relatively disadvantaged north.

[Lord Harris of Haringey]

Indeed, that is the case. The interesting issue about that, since we were talking earlier today about the importance of community, is that that is one area where we now see parliamentary constituencies straddling local borough boundaries in London. I think that the MP for the area that my noble friend described is Karen Buck, who also represents part of Westminster. It is a bad idea to cross London borough boundaries; I suspect that we will return to that at a later stage in this Committee. However, my point is about the degree of underrepresentation. I picked on Kensington and Chelsea because, apart from those pockets which my noble friend knows so well, it is not regarded in most people’s minds as being an area of acute deprivation—although parts of it are.

The figures are: in Hackney, there was a 72 per cent response rate; in Tower Hamlets it was 76 per cent; in Hammersmith and Fulham, 76 per cent; in Camden, 77 per cent; in Southwark, 77 per cent; in Islington, 78 per cent, and in Lambeth, 79 per cent. The point is that the work which has been done where there are concentrations of poor response, either to the census or to electoral registration, demonstrates a number of characteristics. First, the highest non-response rates come from those who rent from a housing association or a council. There are higher non-response rates: where the occupants are from black, Asian or mixed ethnic groups; where the household contains a single-parent family; where the average age of the people in the household is 70-plus; and in areas with higher income deprivation scores.

I am not making any moral judgment about people in those households. I am only reflecting the research that has been done, which demonstrates that there are certain socioeconomic characteristics suggesting, as my noble friend Lord Lipsey has identified, that there will be lower rates of registration.

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[Lord Lipsey]

I apologise for the vagaries of the Marshalled List, which mean that I am on my feet twice running. This, again, is a slightly exploratory amendment but it has a serious purpose. The intention behind it is to suggest that, if we are to equalise anything, there is quite a strong case for equalising not electorates but population of voting age. This issue has come up from time to time during our discussions. It is not necessarily a question of either/or; it would be possible to arrive at a figure for equalising which contained an element of both. I may well put down a formula to that effect on Report but I shall not try it out now because I think that it would be a little hard on the Hansard writers.

First, I should say that there are big differences between large constituencies in terms of population and large constituencies in terms of electorate. To take an obvious example, which noble Lords will be able to relate to after our earlier discussion, the Isle of Wight is by a long way the biggest constituency in terms of electorate but it is only the third largest in terms of population. In Regent’s Park and Kensington North, the population of the relevant age was 146,000, which is nearly double the number of registered voters. For Kensington and Chelsea the figure is 135,000 compared with 65,000 registered voters—that is, more than double the electorate. There are 45 seats in which the electorate is less than two-thirds of the population.

Of course, an MP represents everyone who lives in a constituency and not just those who have a vote, so it would seem fair that some allowance should be made for that in terms of workload. This is particularly the case as lower registration tends to be correlated with people with particular kinds of problems, the most obvious being black and ethnic minorities, who are about 30 per cent less likely to be registered but are likely to give rise to a great many problems, such as immigration matters relating to their families. Therefore, there really is a case for taking population into account. The second thing—

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

Does my noble friend agree that certain constituencies have a disproportionate amount of asylum seekers because they are designated by the Government as areas to which asylum seekers will go? I will give an example. I found that in my constituency surgery perhaps two-thirds of the people who came to me were not on the electoral register because they were asylum seekers. I concede that many of them were sent to me by solicitors, who no doubt hoped to obtain some form of financial assistance for them. Be that as it may, it means that certain constituencies have a far greater workload for their MP.

[Lord Lipsey]

My noble friend is right. It says a lot for his assiduity, and for that of most Members of another place, that they are prepared to work very hard for people who will never have the chance to vote for them. Those who are cynical about Members of Parliament should bear in mind that remarkable and cheering thought.

I turn to another fact that I had not realised before I prepared for this debate. The system that I propose for discussion in this amendment, whereby constituencies are equalised by virtue of population rather than electorate, is more common in other countries than the use of electorates. Britain has a jolly good constitution; we love it very much and certainly I am not knocking it. However, we should consider this. It is not a silly idea for a system that no country uses. Lewis Baston of Democratic Audit states:

“Most countries use some measure of total population to serve as the basic measure of constituency size, either total population or a modified population such as voting age population … or citizen population. Britain is a member of a minority, albeit a significant minority, of countries that use registered electorate”.

He states that the ACE Project shows that half the countries of the world use total population and one-third use registered voters as the population base. No doubt there are all sorts of ingenious combinations of the two. Countries that use population include decent democracies such as Germany, perhaps slightly less decent democracies such as Italy, and Hungary and the Czech Republic. That is a pretty good list of countries that think the population measure is right. If we are internationalists, we should consider whether we could learn from them, as my other argument suggested that we could.

I see that the noble Lord, Lord McNally, will reply to this debate. I should be astonished if he did not stand up and say that estimates of population are to a degree inaccurate, which of course is right, and are to a degree out of date. That is also true, although it does not mean that if we decided to go down the population route, it would be beyond the wit of the Office for National Statistics and others to produce more up-to-date estimates of population for this purpose than they do at the moment.

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[Lord Corbett of Castle Vale]

My understanding on this matter is that prisoners will be able to vote either by proxy or by post. Where they do not have permanent home addresses, and many will not, they can use the address of the prison.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

I yield to no one in my admiration for the right honourable Jack Straw as both a former Foreign Secretary and a former Lord Chancellor, but can my noble friend say whether Mr Straw has attempted to make any calculation of the aggregate of fines that this country would incur if all the relevant prisoners were to take us to the European Court of Human Rights?

[Lord Corbett of Castle Vale]

My noble friend has reminded me of a point that I meant to make. At the moment there are 2,500 outstanding claims of compensation by prisoners being denied the vote, which, if they were proceeded with and accepted, would cost the taxpayer £100 million to meet.

This is not the time or place to debate at length the merits of votes for prisoners, but surely it is time that this outdated sentence of civic death upon prisoners was removed. It was imposed under the Forfeiture Act 1870, although in my opinion it should never have been, and it has lingered for far too long. As I said earlier, the European Court decided in 2004 that the blanket ban on the ability of convicted prisoners to vote was unlawful and should be removed. I much regret that the previous Government did not obey that judgment, and welcome the fact that this Government plan to do so.

It is all about enabling prisoners to take civic responsibility, which chimes in well with the extra emphasis by the Secretary of State for Justice on better attempts at rehabilitation to reduce the expensive and alarming rates of reconviction. Up to 70 per cent of prisoners are reconvicted within two years of release, surely the most enormous waste of taxpayers’ money going.

It is time for change and time to ensure that the number of prisoners anticipated under the proposed government legislation be entitled to vote, and those prisoners on remand from wherever they are on the electoral roll should not be overlooked when the maths is being done by the Electoral Commission to determine the new constituency boundaries.

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[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, I should perhaps say that I am president of the Citizenship Foundation, although I do not speak for it. Surely we could deal with the point raised in this amendment by an amendment to the Bill that says simply that prisoners serving a term of four years or less shall be entitled to vote. That would take care of the point that the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, seeks to address in this amendment. I should be interested to know whether the Minister would be amenable to that being brought forward at the next stage of the Bill.

This is a very important issue. For years we have put off grappling with the question of the prisoner vote. I think we would all say that one of the main badges of citizenship is the right to vote. We in this House all agree that rehabilitation is essential and that we do it rather badly in this country. To that extent—I shall finish on this point—we talk about punishing prisoners by denying them the vote, but I think that we punish ourselves much more by, in effect, outlawing prisoners from normal citizenship and thus, in my view, destroying any real prospect of any effective rehabilitation. Therefore, I hope that something can be done about this and that it can be done in time for it to be part of the Bill.

[Lord Anderson of Swansea]

I hope the Minister will concede that this is an important point, and perhaps he can truncate this debate by offering to have a cup of tea with his officials and my noble friend. I see that there are problems, but it is clear that the Government will have to respond in some way to the determination of the European Court of Human Rights, which has said, in terms, that the matter cannot be delayed for much longer. Indeed, the Government have said that they will respond. We know that there could be substantial expenditure implications if they do not respond and a multitude of applications. However, I see some problems in practice.

Once upon a time I was a barrister and I did a fair amount of work on the criminal side. All too often one’s clients were of no fixed abode, so how is one going to determine the constituency in which the prisoner votes? That is one obvious problem. Equally, prisoners are more likely to come from socioeconomic groups that might be determined among the population but are not on the electoral register because they are alienated and do not bother to put themselves on the register. Therefore, there are problems in deciding which will be the relevant constituency in this matter.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, from the information that the noble Lord, Lord Corbett, has given the Committee this evening, it sounds as though my noble friend is going to have to have a cup of tea with Mr Jack Straw if any advance is to be made on this matter.