Representation of the People Bill

Lord Hayward Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, before I turn to the Bill, I thank the Minister for the action that she has taken in relation to another matter. I spoke on the duty of candour in relation to the Hillsborough Bill and I had been pursuing for three years the briefing given to the Minister by officials. At no stage was anybody willing to allow me to discuss it with either the Minister or officials. Within one week of me raising it on the Floor of this House, the Minister has taken the action and I have had a conversation with officials. I would like to put on record my appreciation to the Minister for the action that she has taken. Whether we agree in the end or not is another matter. I also take the opportunity to thank the Minister for her involvement with many Members of this House. In my case, she rang me yesterday for a discussion about aspects of the Bill and I greatly appreciate that.

There are two broad comments I will make about the Bill. One is, I am afraid, that it is far too long. I made the point previously that legislation on electoral law should have been consolidated years ago, and it should be consolidated now. This is a missed opportunity.

That leads me on to my second point about the general debate. I am not talking here about disagreements in relation to policy: ages of voting or whatever it may happen to be. There have been a number of contributions this afternoon where people have said, “We’ll need to change this urgently, next year or the year after”. They have come from all sides of the House. My criticism of this Bill is that it has come at the wrong time, because many aspects of donations or other matters have not been carefully enough considered to encompass the whole range of issues, whether it be donations, subscriptions, access through cryptocurrencies or the like. Those are two broad comments.

I will now touch on two questions of detail. There are elements in the Bill which, to be honest, are utterly unnecessary. They appear to have been drafted because returning officers and councils have come to disagreements, and I will, solely at this point, identify one classic case. I am referring to Clause 32(3)(a), which says

“for ‘an officer’ substitute ‘a senior officer’”.

Now, I ask your Lordships: is that an indication that officials in a council could not agree? You should knock their heads together—it should not be whole clauses in a Bill. There are other more substantial examples that I could give and will give in Committee.

The other aspect to which I think there has been virtually no reference today is the impact assessment. It is a very lengthy document. To be honest, it is a statement of every reason why you should support the Government’s decision. It does not consider alternatives. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and I will disagree on many things in relation to registration, but it does not address the alternatives which are available. It just says, “We have decided this, and this is how we are going to do it”.

Associated with that, many of the costings in the impact assessment are barely credible. I will draw attention to just two. One is on page 59. The noble Baroness, Lady Prashar, made reference to the need to educate people and communicate well. The Electoral Commission has put its costs at £39.8 million as a central estimate on an annual basis. The rest of the national costs are supposed to be just over £40 million. Is it credible that if the Electoral Commission reckoned its costs are going to be a figure, the cost to the whole of the rest of the nation is going to be almost exactly the same figure? The reason I have doubts about that example—but I could cite any number of them because I was sad enough to spend the Summer Recess reading the impact assessment—is paragraph 174 on page 61, which says:

“There is also an additional resource implication arising from the collaborative development of this policy, with staff time from other government departments, principally DfE ... There is also a potential impact on education staff. However, these contributions are not considered significant in cost terms and have therefore not been monetised”.


Anybody who believes that they cannot be monetised and should not be monetised is stretching credibility beyond belief.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Rooker (Lab)]

My Lords, I spoke for less than a minute on Second Reading and therefore I did not have an opportunity to congratulate my noble friend Lord Macintosh of Eastwood on his very powerful maiden speech. My purpose with this amendment is exactly the same as the one on the public accountability Bill: to strengthen the role of the elected Members of the Commons. I will make a couple of general points and then come to this Bill.

In the Commons, Second Readings are all effectively guillotined. It is called the programme Motion and it affects all Bills. The effect is that the Government always want to boast about the numbers of Bills, which is done at the expense of scrutiny of Bills, so the Bills arrive in your Lordships’ House as a result of inadequate scrutiny. We end up sending more amendments back to the Commons than would otherwise be the case. Then, in the Commons, the Government—it is only one Government in both Houses—blame the extra work for elected Members in the Commons on the upper House abusing its position, leading to calls for reform. Even when we return amendments to the elected Members, they are limited in the time they can use due to the original programme Motion. My view is that elected Members need more time for scrutiny. The Government have to return to Parliament some of the power that they have taken away with the programme Motions designed to fit in more Bills rather than better Bills. Asking for a list from the Government of what they have not allowed to be scrutinised puts the buck back where it belongs.

On this Bill, on 2 September the Commons dealt with Report and Third Reading. They had five hours during which there was debate and Divisions, on which I do not comment. Then the programme Motion from 2 March took over and the Government’s 15 new clauses and six schedules occupying 72 columns of Commons Hansard were approved on the nod—no debate, no speech, no vote. One of those new schedules—in the Commons it was called Schedule 8 and it has now turned up in the Bill as Schedule 12—is 19 pages of the Bill.

We are a revising Chamber. We need to know what we are revising, because in this case you cannot identify from the Bill any of the changes passed on the nod. They are dispersed throughout the Bill and the numbers have changed. They could, for example, be italicised. We would not need a list then. The Bill would show us that these were the bits on the programme Motion passed on the nod. The only way at the moment is via Commons Hansard, which of course is a bit unsatisfactory. We should have an official list from the Government of what the Commons did not have time to scrutinise. That is what it is all about. We cannot identify in the Bill the part that we are not revising but scrutinising for the first time because nobody else has scrutinised it.

We are being taken for Charlies, as it were, because we get the blame later on. I venture to say that there will be a lot of amendments to this Bill. In a few months, when the rows start about what has been sent down there, I want the audit trail complete. In a way, that is why I have raised this amendment.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has just said. He has identified a problem. It is not new. It has evolved over a period of decades, but it is a real problem that this Chamber is facing now. I strongly support the detail outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, which we face and which the Commons has not addressed.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, conscious of the time, I will very briefly say only that I fully agree with both noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Hayward. Were what is being proposed what we were used to having, we would think, of course, it is completely obvious that we would never abolish the provision of such straightforward information that would help us do our job better, so I very much commend the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker.