Voter Identification Regulations 2022

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up on a number of points in relation to comments made during this debate, particularly by our two Northern Ireland colleagues. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and I have sat on virtually every committee, if not every committee, related to voting and voting legislation since I have been a Member of this House. At no point in any debate has any contribution we have received from any person from Northern Ireland said, “Do not go for photo ID”. There has been no such representation, nor any to say that we should revert to a position without photo ID, as was indicated previously. If there were problems in Northern Ireland, clearly we would have had representation from students, some civil community groups or whatever, saying, “Revert to the position we were at before”. But in the seven years I have served in this House—and I believe I have served on every single review of electoral law—we have never had such a submission from Northern Ireland.

I move on to the observation by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, in relation to students. Oh, I feel so sorry for them. After all is said and done, we will have elections in May and there is the Easter holiday between now and then. In my former life I was chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association. Noble Lords may wonder what on earth that has to do with this debate. My members operated late-night licensed locations. All people who attended were required to produce proof of ID. Ask any pub company how many managers are holding passports, driving licences and other forms of photo ID every Monday morning because clientele in pubs and bars have left them there. The reality is that students carry their ID with them on a regular basis, because they are used to producing them in very regular circumstances.

Both the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, and the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said that the introduction was being rushed. In recent years we have moved from a rigid electoral roll system whereby the new election rolls were registered sometime between August and October to a system in which people can now register on a very rapid basis. I think the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, will agree that I have been a regular supporter of reducing the workloads of returning officers. As an event at elections, we now get a surge in registration by people who think they are not registered. Actually, two-thirds of them are registered and that workload could be removed with read-only access. That surge is because people are suddenly conscious of the upcoming election.

If you ask the relevant organisations—the AEA, the Electoral Commission—when they are going to launch their advertising campaigns in relation to the May elections, no sane marketer would say, “We are going to launch the advertising campaign in November or December”, because people’s minds are on Christmas and other similar arrangements. You launch an advertising campaign to make people aware that they need some form of ID—whatever it may happen to be—in January or February, which is what is actually going to happen. You do not spend millions in November or December. Therefore, it is not rushed to say that you are going to launch that campaign in a few weeks’ time.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, quoted from the Electoral Commission’s comments. I would take a quote from the second paragraph rather than the first. Referring to the statutory instrument, it says:

“This detail has enabled us to start developing the guidance that electoral administrators will need.”


Start? We have had the example in Northern Ireland for 20 years, and there is barely a difference between the two in England and in Northern Ireland. Start? Even the difference of interpretation of the Tory party manifesto—whether it is an ID or a photo ID—indicates that it has been a policy of this Government for the last three years. Start? We passed the Elections Act some seven months ago, so in fact there is no reason why the vast majority of the paperwork—in preparation for distribution to everybody—to be used in the marketing campaigns that will be launched in January or February next year should not already be prepared.

This statutory instrument gives effect to something that was debated at length months ago. Many of the contributions that I have listened to this afternoon have repeated some of the arguments that were made then. In conclusion, I am going to cause embarrassment to the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, by saying that I found many of her comments as constructive as some of my colleagues did. As far as I am concerned, for the reasons I have identified, on this occasion I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. There is no reason for a fatal amendment at this stage; it is not justified—as my noble friend Lord Strathclyde identified—and we should be supporting the statutory instrument and vote for it this evening.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with what my noble friend just said. Almost every word that has been uttered during this interesting debate underlines the feeling that I have had for a long time that it would be a really sensible thing for us to go back and re-examine the case for an identity card. It would have many other uses. We are bedevilled by immigration problems. An identity card would be one document that everyone could carry, and I commend it most warmly to the House.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, may well have done his side a disservice, in view of the fact that those of us who are opposed to voter ID warned that it was a slippery slope to the bringing in of national ID cards. I personally will oppose that. I actually did oppose, throughout the whole of Committee and Report stages, the introduction of voter ID. That side lost, and the policy is as such.

The one thing that I want to pick up on is that, after I argued and spoke many times on that issue, I was castigated by a lot of people outside of the House who told me that speaking on behalf of ordinary voters who might well be excluded from the franchise by having to show voter ID was patronising and that it treated those people as hapless and hopeless. Some of the comments about poor marginalised communities not being able to get access to photo IDs and the way that we have discussed the members of the BAME communities being unable to access or being unfairly discriminated against by photo IDs is in danger of being patronising.

But the most important thing at this stage, it seems to me, is that I do not think the Government have done enough—and this is what I would like—to reassure us that there will be huge publicity so that this is known about. That seems reasonable. I liked the anecdotes from Northern Ireland of vans going round. We know that this Government are not shy when it comes to nudging, nannying and telling everybody what to do on other issues, so I would not mind them doing it on this one to mitigate any possibility that anyone anywhere in the country would not know that they need ID. Helping them get it would be a great help.