Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I certainly agree that we should not put any obstacles in their way, but I would go further perhaps than my noble friend Lord Desai. I do not know whether it will be the noble Lord, Lord McNally, or the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who replies but I hope that they will perhaps give us some examples—I know that there are examples—of where registration efforts have had an effect. It is those efforts that I am trying to build into the system.

I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, that I was encouraged by him saying that he supports the sentiments of the amendment. If he supports the sentiments, perhaps I can persuade him that you can make a difference by what you do. If the Electoral Commission is set up to judge that everyone has done what they should, would not that, I ask rhetorically, have the effect of improving registration, which is what everyone in this House wants to achieve?

Our amendment addresses this problem. It sets a standard for the electoral register of the UK to be certified by the body in charge of such matters, the Electoral Commission, before the redrawing of the boundaries begins. The status of the electoral register matters. Correct counting of the numbers of those living in different parts of the country matters. The Christmas adjournment debate in another place on miscounting in certain London borough constituencies during the 2001 census shows the impact that can be wrought on local communities in terms of allocation of local services and resources.

We have heard throughout this debate that what this Government aim for is fair votes and fair representation. That has been the headline into which the noble Lords, Lord McNally and Lord Strathclyde, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, have resorted when seeking to justify this Bill. Basically, this amendment proposes that you have a starting point that means you have got as many people as you reasonably can on the register. It reflects the fact that these boundary reviews take time and that you should have reasonable time between the reviews so that the up-to-date process can be given effect to.

I respectfully believe that those are sensible and realistic proposals.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I wonder whether my noble and learned friend will press the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on something he said at the beginning of this debate. He referred to the informal party advisory group of which he is a member. Do we have an informal party advisory group for the Labour Party which meets with the Electoral Commission?

[Noble Lords]

Yes.

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The noble Lord talked about a group. I am presuming that all parties belong to this group and not just the Liberal Party. It was the way the noble Lord phrased it. Forgive me: I will not press my noble and learned friend.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I can possibly help. I have said on the Floor of this House that it was the case when I was Speaker that the Electoral Commission had to report. There was a weakness in the Electoral Commission in that it would not allow former party agents in its membership. As a result, although there were former chief executives of local authorities, you never got someone like Jimmy Allison—God rest his soul—who used to be the wily agent of the Labour Party in Scotland. As a result, it was agreed that there would be an informal committee to give the type of advice that was needed when there were proposals for delivering leaflets and meeting the electorate. We all know that when you meet the electorate, sometimes you have to face an Alsatian dog, and when you get by the Alsatian, you get a Rottweiler. The chief executives did not really know about that, but Labour Party agents did.

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There are two issues. First, local authorities can and should make a far greater effort than they are doing and there should be less variation in the country if we are all agreed—as I assume that we are—that registration ought to be maximised. The other point is that, as I have indicated, at some stage we need to think about whether the Electoral Commission has enough power to say to the local authority, “You are not doing well enough and we expect you to do better, or you will not get properly registered or certified”. We really need to increase that power. As I understand them, this amendment and the following amendment, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lipsey, will both have the effect of making it more likely that we will get people to register than we will at the moment with the Bill.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Given that the Electoral Commission does not have this power, was it not highly irresponsible of it to push individual registration on local authorities when it knew that it could not enforce it?

[Lord Soley]

There are two views about individual registration. I understand the argument, but this is not the time to have it. I accept my noble friend’s underlying point: if we are going to give the Electoral Commission the power to enforce in some way or to put heavy pressure on the local authority, we will need to think through some of these underlying issues, because there is a legitimate argument on both sides of the point that he has just raised—even though I have one particular view, which I suspect is the same as his.

Let me go back to my main point. If we are going to make sure that local authorities maximise registration, we really need to ensure not only that they have the time to do it but that we, as a Parliament, put the pressure on them to do it. Given that there is some acceptance that the Electoral Commission cannot enforce this as fully as one would like, the Government need to say that each local authority will be asked to demonstrate that it has maximised the registration on the voters roll in its area and that it will be asked for evidence of that, where there is a track record of its having a lower registration than other, similar authorities. That could be done in part by accepting these amendments, but there really needs to be some leadership from the Government on this issue.

The debate before the dinner break was on the crucial issue—it is a central issue for me—of the constitutional factor. We will return to that when my amendment comes up, which I suspect will not now be tonight. I hope that it will be on Wednesday. All of this is in the context of a Bill that is doing the very thing that I have said before that the Government are doing: presenting us with the image of a Government who do not care too much about the quality of our democracy and are determined to drive through the changes. In that sense, they have become an overpowerful Government. You can see that in the Public Bodies Bill or in this Bill, where they are determining the size of the House of Commons at the same time as they are increasing the numbers in the House of Lords to a position where they almost have a majority. All these things are deeply worrying. There is a massive increase in the use of Henry VIII powers, about which all the members of the Regulatory Reform Committee, including me, expressed their acute concern in their report on the Public Bodies Bill. All these things are coming together. The Government, simply in terms of their own image, need to demonstrate that they are taking these matters more seriously than they seem to be at the moment.

It troubles me, as it troubles other Members, that, particularly in the previous debate, which was so clearly on a matter of acute constitutional importance, virtually no one took part—except one Liberal Democrat Member—from the government Back Benches. I know, and I challenge the Government to deny this, that all the Back-Benchers from the political parties in the coalition have been instructed not to speak on that issue because it would take up time. I challenge them to deny that the Back-Benchers have been whipped not to take part in debates that add to the time on this Bill. That was particularly true in the previous debate.

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[Lord Soley]

I am delighted to hear that. I am sure that Members did not receive e-mails or letters of that type. However, I challenge the Front-Benchers again to give a clear indication that they did not tell Members on their Back Benches not to take part in the debate in a way that would add to the time taken on the Bill. I want to hear that.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

They are refusing.

[Lord Soley]

All I know is what I have been told. I respect people’s privacy, and I respect individuals who say that it has not happened; I am sure that people on this side would say the same. But I also know, from all my experience in Parliament and in this House, that it happens in all parties—I am talking not just about my party but about all parties, including mine; I have seen and heard it happen in all of them—that a recommendation goes out that you do not take part because that will use up time when a Government are worried about time on their Bill. We all know that that is what this Government are worried about. I would be less concerned about that if this were a conventional Bill, but on a constitutional Bill this is profoundly serious.

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, has just quoted from a Boundary Commission document, which states that this is achievable.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I hesitate to interrupt, but the quotation was from a report not of the Boundary Commission but of our own Select Committee on the Constitution, which is rather more important in this respect.

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

It may well be achievable but on the basis of a deficient register. That is at the core of our complaint. We do not accept that the review should take place on the back of a deficient register.

I do not challenge my noble friend Lord Soley, but I do put it to him that when the Electoral Commission tells him that registration rates in London have gone up, that is at variance with the statistics that have been published by the Office for National Statistics in Wales. The director-general wrote to Chris Ruane, a Member in the other House who has led the charge on this issue over recent years. He has tabled hundreds if not thousands of Questions, and has a library of statistics that is of great interest to those of us who take an interest in these matters. In June of last year, the director-general of the Office for National Statistics in Wales wrote to him:

“I have been asked to reply to your question asking what the electorate was in each year since 1997 in the 100 parliamentary seats which have had the largest decrease in the number of electors on the register since that date … This is the latest year for which comparable data are available”.

One can look at where the London boroughs stand in this table of the bottom 100. I will start from the bottom of the table. Kensington and Chelsea, the Cities of London and Westminster, Regent’s Park and North Kensington, Holborn and St Pancras, Hampstead and Highgate, Hammersmith and Fulham, North Southwark and Bermondsey, Islington South and Finsbury, Brent East—I intervene at this stage to suggest that they are not doing well in London, despite what the Electoral Commission might say—Wimbledon, Vauxhall, Tottenham, Lewisham, Deptford, Islington, Hackney. There are more that I could reel off.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, tells us that the problem does not necessarily arise in the way that we suggest because many of these are safe seats where people do not think that it is worth voting. I argue that most of the seats in London that I referred to are highly marginal.

[Lord Soley]

The figures that my noble friend gives are very important. I will look at them and draw them to the attention of the Electoral Commission to get its response. Without being sure what we are comparing here, it is difficult to be confident. The statement about the London boroughs was, to the best of my memory, that registration had gone up and stabilised. That was in the last report of the Electoral Commission. I do not know what date the statement related to, but I am happy to take on board the figures and ask for an explanation of them.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Perhaps I may tell my noble friend exactly what the figures relate to. The percentages were calculated using the mid-2007 population estimates for parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom of those aged 18 and above and the number of people registered to vote in parliamentary elections on 1 December 2007. We have a clear description of what we are talking about. No doubt the Electoral Commission will pore over our contributions to this debate and respond to us accordingly.

I turn to the position of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. He knows that I have huge respect for him. We have worked on many issues over the years. However, I found his intervention extraordinary. It was almost like the intervention of a government Back-Bencher in the House of Commons desperately defending the position taken by the Government when clearly there is a deficiency in that position. What he is arguing essentially is that it would be acceptable for the Boundary Commission of England and Wales to set boundaries and to change those boundaries on the basis of every local authority having not taken,

“reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible”.

That proposition is ludicrous.

I suspect that the Government will resist this amendment because they know that local authorities will not have the resources available. The issue has been raised by my noble friends, and I have discussed the Bill with a number of electoral registration officers in the past month, to which I have referred on previous occasions. They make it absolutely clear when I speak to them discreetly that they are very concerned about what might happen to their budgets in conditions of declining local authority expenditure. I cannot see how the Government can assure us that we will gain the high levels of registration that are required when they know that they are subject to these cuts. They know equally that local authority budgets are not ring-fenced, and I hold our own Labour Government responsible for that. We allowed local authorities to proceed on the basis that those budgets would not be ring-fenced. If we had decided to ring-fence them at the time, we might not be arguing as we are arguing today. We are arguing in fear of the fact that we know that electoral registration levels will not be as high as they should be.

I have another reason. I think that the Government are not prepared to secure the high levels of registration in the inner cities that are essential to make registration work. When we dealt with the Bill on electoral registration, I talked to electoral registration officers the first time the Labour Government tried to push through individual registration in the teeth of opposition from some of us. This was about 2006 when my noble friend Lord Bach was in Committee. He will remember the amendments that I moved to try to block individual registration. The fact is that parts of Britain’s inner cities are completely inaccessible to electoral registration officers. There are no-go areas in Britain’s inner cities. There are places where you cannot send canvassers. You cannot pay them to go into those areas because they are frightened of violence.

When I raised that problem on a previous occasion, people said that it did not arise. Why do they not go into the inner cities and talk to the people who have to knock on doors, ask the questions and hand over the forms? There is a real problem here. I had a number of conversations with electoral registration officers and I felt so angry that I wrote to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, when it was inquiring into the Electoral Commission a few years back, to complain that the commission had failed to consider that matter when it was pushing electoral registration on Members of Parliament in the hope that they would get Parliament to approve individual registration. It got it in the end because the Government backed the recommendation.

[Lord Tyler]

If the situation is as dire as the noble Lord suggests in a minority but nevertheless presumably in a number of local authorities, I do not understand how the requirements of his noble friend’s amendment could possibly be met.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

That is precisely the point. The amendment says that,

“all reasonable steps to ensure”,

must be taken. We might well have to invest additional resources in the inner cities for canvassing teams to go around with forms to ensure that people are being properly registered. Unless there is an enforcement regime to deal with that problem, you will not get the electoral registration levels that are required.

Furthermore, the problem is escalating. I intervened on the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, last week on when the subsequent boundary review—not the next one—will take place. It will take place on the basis of a register that he has drawn up on individual registration. I see a much larger problem arising in the long term, in perhaps seven or eight years’ time—not at the next election, but at the election after—which Parliament has not even begun to consider. When we dealt with this matter during the course of the Bill on electoral registration, we did not consider it because we did not realise that we would be faced with the nonsense that we are being faced with today.

As I said, I do not believe that the resources are there. They must be made available to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible before the Boundary Commission can complete its work.

[Lord McAvoy]

My Lords, bearing in mind the late time of the evening, I will also try to be relatively brief. First, I apologise to my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer of Thoroton for missing the first moments of his moving the amendment. I am inspired to speak by an encounter with my friend with a small ‘f’, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who earlier this evening urged me to speak in the debate because he had missed my dulcet tones, as he put it. I am always at the disposal of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for that.

The noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, referred to Strathclyde Regional Council’s electoral registration duties. I was for five years a councillor on Strathclyde Regional Council, and I can testify to the noble Lord’s account of how it took its duties seriously. We were severely affected in Scotland and—my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport has referred to this—are still affected by the poll tax. The integrity, the aura, if you like, of the electoral register has been damaged. It is no longer an article of faith to make sure that you are registered. Lasting damage has been done to democracy by the imposition of the poll tax.

In discussing the Bill, I keep thinking that something is ajar or unbalanced. This is a constitutional Bill. One combination of votes in a House of Parliament can force through constitutional change, especially in a House where, previously, no single combination had the majority to deliver such legislation. I know that some people will jump up and say, “We are a coalition; we are still Conservatives and Liberals”. In this place, the Government are a combined operation and have a majority. That is unhealthy. This is a constitutional Bill, so that is entirely wrong. The rush to get it through is causing problems. It is causing problems for the Government, because I can read people's faces to a certain extent, and although the noble Lords on the Front Bench try very hard, they are not convincing all their Members. At this stage, most of them are voting for it—I think that the occasional Peer may vanish—but they are not winning the intellectual argument, because those on our Front Bench are putting the case.

The rush through this House is causing strains. It is causing noble Lords on the government Front Bench to act in a manner which, with two exceptions, is foreign to their character. I do not know about the third one, but certainly for two of them it is foreign to their character. Surely the electoral register has to be right before we start drawing boundaries on the basis of it.

The amendment would ensure that the Boundary Commission had to do everything “reasonable”—that is the key word—to ensure that people were registered to vote. Earlier, a noble Lord mentioned that we cannot make folk vote. As a noble friend of mine said, that is a different argument. It is our job as parliamentarians—Government and loyal Opposition—to ensure that people want to register and have that choice. It would be outrageous if they did not have that choice. If they do not vote, that is a condemnation of us all. We all have a duty to try to get there, but no one party or combination of parties should have the power to legislate, especially when it is changing the constitution of the country.

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Does the Minister really think that it is fair to draw boundaries in the inner cities on the basis of electoral registration figures that have been damaged by the fact that a whole canvass was not possible? Surely that full canvass has to be completed and maximum registration achieved before we can even begin to consider redrawing the boundaries. By not agreeing with me, the Minister is conceding, in the case of the argument about violence, that violence in many ways pays.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I am only indicating that it could be a circumstance in which the Electoral Commission may take that view. All the problems that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, identified may well have been addressed, but there may be a recalcitrant council somewhere in the country which, for one reason or another, has not done that.

I remind the Committee that electoral registration officers are under a statutory duty to compile and maintain comprehensive and accurate electoral registers. It is not as if it is a voluntary activity; there is an obligation on local authorities to compile as best they can comprehensive and accurate electoral registers. As was commented on earlier, the Electoral Commission’s report on performance standards for electoral registration officers in Great Britain, published in March, showed that just under 96 per cent of electoral registration officers met the completeness and accuracy of electoral registration records standard this year.

I salute what Glasgow has done—the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, mentioned this—and that should be the model. It is important that we have as accurate and comprehensive registers as possible. It is worth reminding the Committee that another report of the Electoral Commission, The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain, also published in March, stated that the UK’s registration rate of 91 to 92 per cent compared well with other countries. I am sure that that touches on the question of notional registration, which I am sure we will debate further when we come to Amendment 89C—I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, for advance notice of it. The 91 to 92 per cent figure for completeness is derived from the 2000 census, but it is an approximate measure. It could not form the basis of a boundary review as it does not provide sufficiently robust data to give confidence for something such as a boundary review. However, I take the noble Lord’s point and I shall carefully look at his amendment before we come to debate it.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

There are two points there. The first is that the figure that we have been using of 96 per cent comes from a report published by the Electoral Commission. It was not published by the Government. That is a matter that will need to be taken up with the Electoral Commission. The point that the noble Baroness has made will be drawn to the Electoral Commission’s attention. The second point underlines that it is not necessarily the wisest move to say that the Electoral Commission then has to make a subjective judgment as to whether the terms and conditions of the certification that is inherent in this amendment are met.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Following what my noble friend said, why can there not be a random selection, a pilot project, to check whether the statistics to which my noble friend referred are accurate? It might well be that local authorities are not submitting particularly accurate returns. I presume that these figures from local authorities come from electoral registration departments. They could maybe take a dozen local authorities in various parts of this country and check whether that is the case. Secondly, when the Minister referred to the pilot projects before, is it true that the pilots, and the registration levels that arise as a result, will not influence the statistics that are to be used by the Boundary Commission in its review?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The first point is, as I have indicated, a matter for the Electoral Commission. At least two noble Lords in this debate—the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend Lord Tyler—have identified themselves as advisers to the Electoral Commission. These points will have been noted.

As I confirmed in a debate before the Christmas Recess, the base for this boundary review was this 1 December past and the next one will be 1 December 2015, if this Bill goes through in full. That is more likely to be able to take account of the information from these pilots, and, I hope, broaden that out. I understand that there are issues on the Benches opposite about individual registration. It is more likely that these will be taken into account quicker than were we to wait for the day when certification comes from the Electoral Commission, as is proposed in the noble and learned Lord’s amendment. I therefore invite the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.