Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Falconer of Thoroton Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

54A: Clause 10, page 8, leave out lines 14 and 15 insert—
“(a) initially by a date to be specified by the Boundary Commission, once the Electoral Commission has certified that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible; and(b) no later than every six years after that.””

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, Amendment 54A stands in my name and in the names of my noble friends Lord Bach and Lady Thornton. It would leave out lines 14 and 15 of Clause 10 on page 8 of the Bill. Clause 10(3) states:

“For subsection (2)”—

of the Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986—

“there is substituted … ‘A Boundary Commission shall submit reports under subsection (1) above periodically … before 1st October 2013, and … before 1st October of every fifth year after that’”.

We propose that the two dates should be deleted and the following inserted:

“initially by a date to be specified by the Boundary Commission, once the Electoral Commission has certified that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible; and … no later than every six years after that”.

We propose the change because in practice—this is their timetable—it has taken Boundary Commissions six to seven years to complete the past five reviews of parliamentary constituencies. The Bill proposes that the first review be completed before 1 October 2013. If the Bill were passed tomorrow—which seems unlikely—the work would have to be completed in two years and nine months. That is less than half the time that ordinary reviews have taken so far. While everyone would want the process to be quicker than it has been before, the Bill proposes that one should do it in less than half the time that it has taken before, even when one has to redraw every single boundary in the country. I say that because the chair men and women of Boundary Commissions came before the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the House of Commons and said that it was probable that every constituency in the country would be affected by the proposals that were being made.

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[Lord Tyler]

I am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord for giving way. I am finding it difficult to follow him. I think that this is the most important part of his amendment: the trigger to start the process. I should say that I sit on an informal all-party advisory group which the Electoral Commission consults occasionally. I really do think that his amendment imposes on the Electoral Commission a responsibility that it is not ready to take and would not wish to take. How can he suggest that there are criteria by which the Electoral Commission could certify that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible? I cannot see how it can do that. The work done by his Government previously may have helped, but it certainly has not enabled the Electoral Commission to take the very subjective view that he suggests.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I do not think that it is a subjective view. The commission would not be asked to guarantee that everyone, or 95 per cent of people, was on the electoral roll; it would be asked to check that the local authorities had taken all reasonable steps. I envisage that it would set out what it would expect a reasonable local authority to do—for example, house-to-house inquiries if there were very high levels of underregistration; or getting the figure up to 95 per cent in certain sorts of area. It would not be difficult to identify the criteria that had to be satisfied before the commission could be satisfied. There are so many other areas in which public bodies certify that reasonable steps had been taken. I do not regard it as beyond the wit of man for the commission to do the same in relation to local authorities.

[Lord Tyler]

The noble Lord’s amendment says that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps, so presumably no Boundary Commission operation could start or any review be initiated until every local authority had been able to satisfy the Electoral Commission that it had taken reasonable steps. That is an impossible target. I am sure that, from his ministerial experience, he would agree.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

This new review could not start before every local authority had done that, but what would the excuses be? Why should one, two, three or four constituencies be prejudiced?

[Lord McAvoy]

I thank my noble and learned friend for giving way. Is he aware that the City of Glasgow Council recently conducted an exercise and, I am reliably informed, got an extra 30,000-odd voters on to the register? Does that not show that each council area can vary so much that it is not right or proper that we can have such variation in the country? Therefore, the measure of compulsion, if you like, on all local authorities to do what Glasgow has achieved should be in the Bill.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I am absolutely clear that the Electoral Commission would be perfectly capable of setting out what it would regard as the criteria that had to be satisfied. If you impose a provision like this, I have no doubt—and I have experience of this having been the Minister involved in ensuring good electoral practice—that that would have the effect, as far as the local authorities are concerned—they are, in practice, responsible for registration—of lifting all the votes up. I cannot envisage a local authority that would want to be one of two or three in the country that were incapable of meeting the standard. I cannot envisage that anybody in this House does not want the standard that I have described to be met. If the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, thinks I am imposing too high a standard, I am sure that he wants some standard imposed, and I would welcome his contribution about the margin of error that he would regard as acceptable as far as the Electoral Commission is concerned. I have detected no one in this House who has not supported the proposition that we should try to do all that we can to get the 3.5 million people—a broadly accepted figure—who are not on the electoral register on to it. The effect of my amendment is not that everybody has to get on; it is that the local authorities have to make a reasonable effort to get them on. If they do, and if the Electoral Commission certifies that they have done all that they can, then, and only then, can this process start.

My noble friend Lord Lipsey, who I am delighted to see in his place, made a speech before dinner in which he made the point that if we proceed with this very significant change in relation to the drawing of the constituency boundaries on the basis of the December 2010 register, which is what the Government are proposing, we are going to build in the bias. Who is the bias against? It is against young people, those in private rented accommodation and members of the black and minority ethnic groups. It might be said that that group would tend to favour Labour or even the Liberal Democrats, but that is not the point. You do not want to start with a great section of our population—the young people—being disenfranchised because they do not want to vote.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

The sentiments that the noble and learned Lord expresses are wholly admirable. One wants to get every single person on to the register, but as I apprehend it, the problem is not a technical one; it is that there is a mass of disaffected younger people in our country who simply cannot be bothered to vote. They are not galvanised to take part in the democratic process. How does he propose to overcome that?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I know from my experience as the Minister responsible that if, for example, you do door-to-door inquiries, check who lives there, hand over a form to get on to the register, rather than sticking it in an envelope, and then go back and pick it up, you dramatically increase the number registered. My noble friend Lord McAvoy referred to the effort by the city of Glasgow. In my speech, I referred to the way that Manchester and Birmingham have 95 per cent registration because they are making the effort whereas London and Nottingham have 91 per cent, which is much lower. Picking up the approach of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, work has been done to identify the practical steps that can be taken. That is why I am submitting that it is not unreasonable and does not impose an unreasonable burden on local authorities for the Electoral Commission to say that it expects good practice from everybody. Our democracy is crucial to the well-being of our society and only when all the local authorities have got to that standard, measured not by an absolute number but by doing the right thing, do we then move on to this particular approach in relation to registration. We then avoid the bias against young people, particularly in the BME communities and in the private rented sector.

[Lord Desai]

Does my noble and learned friend agree that, contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, has said, whether people want to take part in voting is a secondary issue? The first issue is that we should never put any obstacles in the way of a person’s right to vote. A judgment, such as, “Oh, these guys are never going to vote so let us not register them”, would be much more damaging to democracy than allowing as many people as possible on the register and then leaving it to them to vote or not vote.

[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?

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[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.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I sat on the committee with the Speaker in which we discussed those matters, and I remember the setting up of the informal committee. Since then a Bill has been passed which allows former politicians to sit on it. Happily, your Lordships have answered all the questions so I have not been put in the embarrassing position of doing that which I am not allowed to do, which is to press the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, because he is supposed to be pressing me in the course of this debate.

I have set out the reasons for this amendment. It is a very important amendment because it requires a justification as to why it is two and a half years, why we should not wait for an up-to-date register, and why gaps of five years are suggested. Those are the questions that this amendment raises. I beg to move.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

My noble and learned friend is absolutely right that this is a very important amendment. It is double-barrelled in that it deals with two things. It deals with the redistribution to make sure that it is based on the real number as near as possible of people eligible to vote in a constituency, and it encourages people to register and to vote. It is important from the point of view of the redistribution of boundaries, but it also has a wider and more beneficial effect.

For the first aspect of this, I have an amendment, Amendment 89C, which I hope we will come to later this evening. I hesitate to say that it is better than my noble and learned friend’s amendment, but it is simpler because it just says that,

“for the purpose of this Act”,

the electorate will be taken as the number of people eligible to vote, not registered to vote. We can always find out the number of people who are eligible to vote through the census or whatever. I hope, in anticipation of that—which is why I am giving the Minister a bit of extra notice—he will look at his briefing. It is a simpler amendment and I hope it is one that the Government might accept.

However, my noble and learned friend’s amendment has the double advantage of getting people on to the register and, as my noble friend Lord Desai said, encouraging people to vote. There are lots of ways of doing that which we have discussed previously. One of those is compulsory voting. A number of colleagues were a bit doubtful and unsure about that, and with good reason. I say that because I have just been reading about the compulsory vote in Belgium, but because that country has a daft proportional representation system, which my noble friend Lord Grocott will particularly appreciate, it has not been able to form a Government for seven months, and the guy who was appointed to mediate between the various parties in order to try to get a government has just resigned. That is the sort of thing that happens when you have daft systems of proportional representation. Someone asked me who is running the Government in Belgium, and I said that I supposed it was the civil servants. They answered, “What’s different? Doesn’t that always happen?”. I hope that is not the case, but it is worrying that you can get to that position even with proportional representation and compulsory voting. You would think that that might improve the situation.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I think that I have made it clear that I have not asked any of my colleagues not to speak. I am not quite sure that I could make it any clearer than that.

With regard to the timetable, the indication we have given is that we wish the changes in Part 2 to be in effect for the election due to take place in May 2015. One could say that that is dependent on the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, but in any event, even under our present constitutional arrangements for the timing of elections, the latest date would be May 2015. It is the wish of the Government that constituency sizes should be of an equal size in time for that election. That is why we are asking the Boundary Commissions to bring forward their reports by October 2013. That would give time between the reports—one for each constituent nation of the United Kingdom—being published and an opportunity for the parties, the importance of which I think someone mentioned, to gear up, as it were, to what will be different boundaries.

With regard to the issue that I think was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, about whether this is feasible, my noble friend Lord Phillips quoted from the Constitution Committee report where the Boundary Commission had indicated that it would be feasible. In giving evidence to the committee in another place, the secretary of the Boundary Commission for Wales said:

“I don’t think the timescales for Wales are going to be too challenging”.

The question was then directed to the secretary of the Boundary Commission for England, which is obviously much larger. He said:

“Taking a potential worst case scenario, based upon what is in the Bill in front of us, the initial view of myself and the Commission is that the timetable is achievable”.

The noble and learned Lord went on to ask why not do this in two and a half years every time, and why institute five-yearly reviews after that? The reason is that a five-yearly review would mean that there would be a boundary review in each Parliament. If he thinks about it, with a two and a half year or three-year review, you could have two reviews within one Parliament and a boundary review producing constituencies for an election that would not take place. I am sure he agrees that that would be farcical. That is the reason for the five-yearly review, and later we will debate other amendments regarding seven and eight year reviews. As was noted by the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, the second part of the amendment has a six-yearly review. We believe that a review every five years would mean that in each Parliament, if the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill goes through, there is less likely to be disruption. The more frequent the reviews, the less the opportunity for wide divergence and therefore the less would be the likelihood of disruption.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I wish to intervene very briefly on the quotations used by the noble and learned Lord from the secretaries of the Boundary Commissions for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, when they gave evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee of the other place. The note I have confirms that the secretary of the Boundary Commission for England said that the timetable was “achievable but tight” and that,

“extra resources would certainly be needed”.

I do not know what date it is assumed that the process would start and what extra resources would be provided.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I am not making any presumption about the date it will start because it would depend on Royal Assent, and therefore I am not going to speculate on when that might be. I know that the noble and learned Lord has a later amendment regarding resources, tabled for the avoidance of doubt. When we come to it, he will see that it is not necessary because as the Bill stands, the resources ought to be there to be drawn on for the purposes of this review. If he thinks about it, given all the comments made by noble Lords opposite about the Government wishing to get this piece of legislation through, they are hardly likely to wish then to frustrate it through lack of resources. That is perhaps self-evident. We will have a better opportunity to discuss the level of resources when we come to that particular amendment, but I would assure him that we do not anticipate that the issue of resources will be a barrier to the timetable being delivered.

Perhaps we may move on to the other barrel of the amendment, which would have the effect of delaying the boundary reviews until such time as,

“the Electoral Commission has certified that every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible”.

That is quite a steep requirement. My noble friend Lord Tyler questioned whether it would be appropriate for the Electoral Commission to make subjective judgments in cases that could have major consequences for a boundary review, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, raised some of the practical difficulties that again were picked up in an exchange with my noble friend Lord Tyler. I would simply observe that if the Electoral Commission decided that, in its judgment, one local authority in the whole of the United Kingdom had not done this, a boundary review could be put off indefinitely. It certainly would not be in time for the 2015 election, it might not be in time for the 2020 election, and it might not even be in time for the 2025 election. That is the possible logical consequence of the amendment put forward by the noble and learned Lord.

If there was a problem with a boundary review where the baseline for the review would be 1 December 2010, if we held elections in 2020 or 2025 where the boundaries for England were based on a baseline of data from the year 2000, that really does not address the very legitimate issues he has raised with regard to people who might be eligible to vote but might not be on the electoral roll.

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[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.

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

I am grateful for the trouble that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, has taken here. As he rightly says, there are two bits to this. The first part of my amendment questions the proposition that you could effectively complete a review of every constituency in this country by October 2013, which is what the Bill proposes, when there is agreement across the House that hitherto it has taken between six and seven years to complete such a review. I was looking for the reasons why that which hitherto has taken six to seven years can be dealt with between the date upon which this Bill gets Royal Assent—a date we know not but assume is some time in the next few months—and October 2013.

The evidence that the noble and learned Lord relied on was that the secretaries of the Boundary Commissions had said to the Political and Constitutional Committee that they think it can be done but—he might have disputed this—that the timetable would be tight. How will it be done? I do not know and it strikes me, from my knowledge of the way that such bodies operate, that to manage a much more complicated and difficult review than they have ever done before—it will touch every single constituency in the country—sounds unrealistic. I do not in any way criticise the noble and learned Lord for his answer but it did not really offer an explanation to me that provided any consistency on how this marvellous process could be done so much more quickly.

The second point is that we should really make efforts to ensure that people who are not registered are registered. The noble and learned Lord made the quite valid point that surely not every single local authority has to comply. Maybe we should have some rule or process that says “substantially all” local authorities should comply, but that was his only point. I am willing to be guided by him: he might produce some proposal if he thinks mine is too draconian. Let us give more room for manoeuvre. Every single person who has spoken in the debate has said that we should do something about under-registration. If our idea was too draconian, I would have expected the noble and learned Lord to have come forward with some idea about how we would achieve that which appears to be an aim shared by all Members of the Committee.

I thank the noble and learned Lord for taking the trouble to respond in the way that he did, but I have to say that his reply was disappointing. Of course I will not ask the Committee to divide at this time of night, but I will certainly come back on Report with an amendment to deal with the unrealistic timetable for the first review and to propose how one might deal with the issue of under-registration. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 54A withdrawn.