Elections Bill

Lord Hayward Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I commend the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and agree with everything he said; that is hardly surprising, of course, because I have added my name to the list of those opposing the Question that Clause 1 and, effectively, Schedule 1 should stand part of the Bill.

The noble Lord put it so well: compulsory voter ID, and in particular photo ID—this needs to be teased out a little—is a solution looking for a problem. It is a bit like compulsory ID before it but, again, as the noble Lord pointed out, there would be a greater logic—it was a position that I opposed for many years, along with many others in this Committee, in your Lordships’ House and in political life, particularly to the centre-right of politics—in the current Government’s position if, when in opposition, they had not been so opposed to the notion of compulsory identification and compulsory photo identification for their citizens. Pretty much every argument that was put against compulsory ID, particularly the more libertarian arguments about this being a country of free-born people who should not need to identify themselves before the exercise of the most fundamental rights and freedoms, applies here. I am afraid that it leaves many people in this country very concerned about the true motivation behind this policy at this time.

This is the clause stand part debate so, necessarily, it reintroduces some of the points that were made in previous sessions of this Committee in relation to various amendments to do with public cost, private cost and various aspects of the argument against.

Once more, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has pointed out, this is a solution looking for a problem, compared with other solutions that are, some would argue, quite urgently required in relation to real problems, such as voter intimidation and the oppression of some women, in particular, including within their families. That point was at least intimated by the noble Baroness, Lady Verma, when we last met. She is not in her place, but her noble friend Lady Noakes is in hers, and I think there was a consensus in the Committee that there are issues there about women, in particular, in certain families and perhaps in certain communities, and that there is work that could be done there.

It would involve some public expense to really empower some of those women, to be sure that they felt truly liberated and empowered to exercise their vote truly independently. But this is not an issue of proof of identification; it is a much more holistic problem of the way in which they live and, perhaps, their lack of support and a certain level of alienation from wider society. The problem could be addressed in many ways with some of the resources which, as we said last time, will instead be diverted towards this untested, new, radical requirement of compulsory photo ID, and all that comes with it.

We have a problem already. I think it was broadly agreed, by consensus, in Committee last time that there are nowhere near as many people registered as there could be, and should be, for them to have at least the potential to exercise the right to vote. We could be using public resources to have truly cross-party, non-party voter registration campaigns. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Woolley of Woodford, cannot join us today—he is detained in Cambridge with his students—but he spoke last time about the importance of such campaigns for voter registration. Resources could have been targeted towards that, rather than this.

Some of us have argued, and will argue on later groups, that we should really be moving towards automatic voter registration, as happens with automatic registration for taxation. Why is it that in this country we are capable of automatically registering people for taxation purposes on their 18th birthday—quite rightly, in my view, because that is not only a right but a duty, and it is an ethical duty, at the very least, to think about voting—but we cannot do that for the purposes of representation and voting? That would no doubt cost some money, at least. But we are spending the money on this, the Government’s intention, and not on that.

There are general levels of disengagement and disenchantment, in some communities more than others. There are so many things we could be doing there to engage people in civil society, political parties and voting. Some of that could be done quite creatively, and some resources would no doubt be involved. But we are not choosing to do that; we are choosing to do this instead. I would argue, as I have done all my adult life, that there is still insufficient constitutional and political literacy in our mature democracy. Yes, that is more the case among some groups than others, and it would take some resources to engage in that kind of voter and citizenship education—not just among school-age children but among new migrants, including refugees who come to our country. There is so much more we could be doing with the resources, but we are choosing—or at least, the Government are currently proposing—to employ resources on this compulsory ID instead of on that.

I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that this is an expensive solution looking for a problem. Worse than that, it will do more harm to our democracy than any possible good. It is not unusual, when the precautionary principle is used to justify everything from detention without charge to compulsory ID, that we end up with a policy and a law liable to do more harm than good. Whether by accident or design, what some of us fear in this case is nothing short of voter suppression, or at least voter discouragement, on a level that is not what we need at this moment, nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century, after some really difficult years in a very divided country. Whichever side people were on in the referendum campaign, with suspicions of interference in elections by foreign powers—including foreign powers now tempting people possibly into another great European war—and during the difficult times of the pandemic and the difficult times now, with yet another refugee crisis, this is not the moment even to whisper a policy, let alone to legislate for one, that will lead people to feel that we are going in for a period of voter suppression.

We do not want to go down the American road on this. There are wonderful things that come from the United States. Many of us who are constitutional lawyers have, when studying, looked in admiration to many aspects of American notions of citizenship, but we should avoid voter suppression or putting hoops in people’s way, particularly those from more vulnerable communities, whether they are more recently arrived Britons, minority groups, the disabled or poor people. Putting any hurdle in the way of registration and voting will smack of voter suppression, whatever the true intentions. Clause 1, married with Schedule 1, makes the photo aspect compulsory, and it is that which I have a principled objection to, and would have whichever party was in government and whichever party was proposing it.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

Given that the noble Baroness has a principled objection to the introduction of photo ID, why is photo ID used in Labour Party selection meetings?

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My noble friends, who have more experience of being selected to stand for elected office in the Labour Party are muttering that it is not—

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[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have been somewhat orthogonal to this whole debate for a long time. I feel that whether Clause 1 stands part or not is neither here nor there—but there is an important point here. If voting is my right, it is the Government’s duty to deliver the instruments that will make it easy for me to vote. I should not have to go out there and register; the Government ought to be at my door, knowing that I have attained the appropriate age of 18, or whatever it is nowadays, to register me and give me my identity card. I do not know what the fuss is about. Why do we put the burden on the voter all the time? We really ought to make it easy for the voter to vote.

As I have said before, at Second Reading, we should not even have to go to the voting booth to vote; people should be able to vote on their smartphones, as long as it is a valid, encrypted method.

I am not at all worried that the great unwashed and coloured people like me will not be able to handle literacy. That is not the point. The point is that the Government are not doing enough on their own to make good and allay the fears they have that lots of people are going to cheat.

It is very simple. As I have said before in your Lordships’ House, in India they have 900 million-plus voters, and everyone has an identity card. I do not know what the fuss is about. It is not expensive and it is very convenient. After all, when people go out, they have their debit card, and they can give their phone to identify themselves, and so on.

My grandchildren laugh about our system of voting, because it is a very old-fashioned system. I do not think that is anything to be proud of: it is a voting system that puts all the burden on the voter and none on the Government. Whether or not Clause 1 stands part is another matter, but if the Government want identity cards to be introduced, they should introduce them and provide them, and they should make it easy for people to vote.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that I have displayed to the Committee an independence of spirit on certain parts of this Bill, including in my comments on this clause stand part debate previously, but I am absolutely 100% behind the Government in introducing photo ID. It is for the reasons that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, touched on, and actually for the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, accidentally touched on last week—and I am pleased that he is here. He raised the question twice in relation to the last general election, about the uncertainty of our democratic institutions.

If one looks at the surveys undertaken by the Electoral Commission, there is serious doubt about the validity of the ballots that take place, persistently. The trials that were undertaken, and then followed up by research thereafter, showed that there was a marked—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am so sorry to interrupt mid-sentence; it was just due to my hesitation. In the moments which follow, will the noble Lord give some thought to, and reflect on, his comment that there has been some serious doubt about our recent polls? That is quite a serious thing for anyone to say in this House. It may just be a question of rephrasing that point. For the reasons given by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, it is quite serious to now suggest, at this moment in 2022, that there is serious doubt over recent elections. We have had some pretty seismic elections and electoral results in recent years, and it is serious for a noble Lord of any party to suggest in this Chamber that there is serious doubt about the validity of those polls. That may not have been the noble Lord’s intention, but he might want to clarify this.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I did not say those polls, I said some polls. In fact, the noble Baroness actually referred to the disagreement in society in relation to the EU referendum and the closeness of that result. It was that, and others, to which I am referring. Clearly, the noble Baroness has not actually read the Electoral Commission report and the research undertaken associated with the trial ballots which took place in a number of locations in 2018 and 2019. Had she done so, she would have seen that there was serious concern among large parts of the electorate—not a majority—about the validity of the voting process. The noble Baroness is looking at me somewhat quizzically. I suggest that she actually reads the report.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

It is just my mask which makes me look suspicious.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

In which case, I apologise for misinterpreting the noble Baroness’s expression below her mask.

If noble Lords look at the most recent poll undertaken by the Electoral Commission, it is striking that concern about recent ballots and votes diminished quite markedly, despite the fact that there had been no change in electoral law. It is my contention that one reason for this is that we are moving further away from the Brexit vote, which generated large concerns among large numbers of people about the validity of certain votes.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

Has not the noble Lord just undermined his own argument, then? If things are moving in the right direction, with what problem is this legislation seeking to deal?

In addition, the noble Lord said that we have not read the report—I have read the report. There is a huge difference between an expression of concern and evidence of concern. If we sought to change the law of the land for everything about which people expressed concern when responding to opinion polls and surveys, this House would never stop sitting. The issue is evidence of concern. What evidence of concern—beyond that which has already been indicated to the Committee and which is extremely limited—can the noble Lord point to?

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The noble Lord is misinterpreting the data within those datasets and what the Electoral Commission and an individual research team undertook to do. They were trying to establish the level of concern. Had the noble Lord allowed me to continue for a few more sentences, I would have identified why I am concerned about that. It is not about a particular election; it is about when elections or referendums become close and contentious.

I speak here as a remainer—I was not a Brexiteer. When a referendum, or some form of ballot, becomes both close and contentious, the way in which the ballots have been conducted comes out as a matter of concern. As a result, it is precisely for those reasons that I am concerned that we should have certainty and security in the process.

I do not regard it as a process of voter suppression. President Trump—or Donald Trump, whatever you like to call him—had a basis of foundation for his arguments against the result at the last presidential election because there were uncertainties about the way in which it was conducted. As far as I am concerned, I want to see certainty in this country.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

In my Second Reading speech, I said that I recognised the sense in which we have a problem of people withholding loser’s consent. I made the point that that was one of the problems we had in America with Donald Trump withholding it. Loser’s consent is a fundamental part of democracy. For many years following the referendum result, there was a substantial number of people who wanted to withhold loser’s consent for a majoritarian vote. That is complicated and there is a political issue going on about why people no longer accept that.

My argument—and this is what I want to ask the noble Lord—is that it is not a technical matter. It has absolutely nothing to do with impersonation. Nobody accused anyone of impersonating anyone. All sorts of accusations have flown but not that one in the UK. Therefore, does this technical way of trying to tackle a problem imply that there is a big problem of impersonation when there is not and therefore fuel the very sentiments that we are trying to reassure people around? It just does not make any sense as a way of dealing with a problem that I agree exists.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for her intervention. She and I clearly recognise that there is a problem and there are different problems and you can tackle them in different ways. I happen to believe that photo ID is a way of tackling the issue.

Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, is not present. I was present on the Select Committee when he gave evidence. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was also present but, unfortunately, he clearly is not able to be here today. The noble Lord, Lord Woolley, dealt with issues way beyond the question of voter registration and voter ID when he gave evidence to the Select Committee. It was an incredibly powerful submission then and it was last week in his contribution here. He was essentially talking about alienation from society in a much broader sense, and I recognise that. I live in the ward which I think has the largest proportion of voters of west African origin of any ward in the country—Camberwell Green. In Camberwell Green, if you want to collect a package from the Post Office—and I did last week—you are required to produce one of six items of ID, four of which are photo ID, two of which are not and one of those I do not think anybody would use in this day and age. In terms of general—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for giving way. He spoke about the alienation of voters and earlier he spoke about the validity of the process. Does he agree that concern about that validity of the process surely reflects the fact that people look at the composition of the other place—or, indeed, this place—and feel like it does not represent them? They maybe even know that 44% of votes went to the Tories and they got 100% of the power in the other place. People’s deep feeling of alienation and lack of validity does not relate to voter ID; it is much more deep-seated.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I agree with the noble Baroness, but I am not sure that it is specifically or solely related to this particular Bill. There are much broader issues on paths down which I will not go at this stage. I see it on a daily basis. I see it from where I came this afternoon to be in this Chamber.

There have been references to the question of personation and the quantities of that. The police have not pursued personation in some cases. I refer here to Richard Mawrey QC’s judgment in the petitions in relation to Tower Hamlets. He refers to a former Labour councillor, Mr Kabir Ahmed, and I quote from paragraph 326 in his report:

“Applying the statutory test of residence set out above, I am quite satisfied that 326a Bethnal Green Road was not such a ‘residence’ as would entitle Mr Ahmed to be registered to vote from that address”.


That is part of the judgment of an elections court. The police did not pursue it. I am not arguing that there are large numbers of cases, but there are far more cases than are being cited. The police, for a number of different reasons, do not pursue them.

Equally, as I cited in passing at Second Reading, the Electoral Commission makes it difficult to access electoral rolls. If you are going to be able to produce proof of false registration—that is, personation—you have to refer to past electoral rolls. However, the Electoral Commission has quite specifically said that EROs

“should not provide access to any register other than the current register”,

so that makes it very difficult indeed for people to prove personation.

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[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I was only giving my personal experience.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I appreciate that correction from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman.

But the concentration has been on the problems associated with certain social groups. It was said earlier that it is not necessarily the case that certain groups can or cannot participate in one form or another. The Liberal Democrats will point out that this is a failing of our first-past-the-post system, but selection meetings held by political parties in many constituencies are, in effect, choosing the Member of Parliament. For the selection of the Labour Party candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the last election, the note that Apsana Begum sent to party members said, “Bring photo ID”. That is a specific instruction. It goes on to say,

“Bring your membership card or another proof of address”—


in other words, at her selection, you had to produce two forms of ID: one photo ID and one proof of address.

You can go on the web for other examples. One of the most racially diverse constituencies in the country—the reason that the noble Lord, Lord Collins, may be aware of this is that it is right next door to his borough—is Tottenham. Again, I quote from the web: for the Haringey shortlisting and selection meetings in 2018, people were told,

“You need to bring ID”.


They were told to bring proof of address—a utility bill or council tax bill—and named photo ID. The types of accepted photo ID were identified as a passport, driver’s licence, et cetera. I willingly give way to the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way again. I understand where he is going: he is drawing analogies with a number of other situations in our country where photo ID is being required, either in law or in practice. Earlier, before everyone started intervening on him and he very graciously gave way, he gave the example of having to prove that you are the person associated with a package when you go to collect it at the Post Office. I could go further and say that if I am going to take money out of a hole in the wall, I will be required to demonstrate that it is me who is entitled to access that bank account, as otherwise someone else could steal my money. But he must surely understand the distinction between my right to specific property and millions of people’s right to go and vote. We could go back to a system where everyone just has some indelible ink put on their finger once they have voted. There is not the same degree of risk of theft and impersonation with universal suffrage as there is with people’s property—whether it is their cash property in the bank or whether it is with their pass.

On the Tower Hamlets example, I know that at one stage the Labour membership amounted to the biggest political membership in western Europe. I do not know the position at the moment, but the noble Lord would concede, would he not, that most people in the country are still not members of the Labour Party and, therefore, in a very contested and slightly toxic selection, people might get very anxious about whether people are actually members of the Labour Party. Therefore, it becomes much closer to the property example than to universal suffrage, does it not?

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

On the noble Baroness’s first intervention, I knew that people would raise objections. I was citing the Camberwell Post Office example as an indication of the fact that people now live with producing ID, including photo ID. She cannot get away from the fact that a series of selection meetings within the Labour Party, which will be choosing the councillors and the Members of Parliament, actually require not one but two forms of ID, one of which is photo ID. If it is so impossible to produce a photo ID to vote at a polling station, how come it is acceptable to require people to produce photo ID at a selection meeting of the Labour Party, which, in the case of Poplar and Limehouse, was almost certain to produce the new Member of Parliament for that constituency? Haringey Labour Party uses the phrase

“each of the wards at the selection which required photo ID will take place.”

I am quite willing to give the noble Baroness a copy of this, although she can go on the web, search “Haringey Labour Party” and she will find it.

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

What I am struggling to understand is this. There is a fundamental difference between belonging to an organisation—be it any political party—to which you opt to belong and for which you might be expected to provide ID, and being able to vote as a citizen of the country. Those are totally different things.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The right reverend Prelate identifies the difference, but I have drawn the parallel, and it is a parallel, between selecting an MP at a constituency meeting and selecting them at a polling station.

As far as the process is concerned, I conclude with a final question, which I put to the Labour Front Bench. I have quoted from documents regarding the requirement to produce photo ID to select an MP. I ask whichever of the noble Lord, Lord Collins, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, replies to the debate to address this question. I have cited cases where people have been required to produce two forms of ID. Can the Labour Party please say whether, on occasion, at selection meetings they have actually required three forms of ID, two of which were photo and one was the address?

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Has the noble Lord finished? I am sure my noble friend will deal with his query, which has been dealt with thoroughly already. The Labour Party is a voluntary organisation which you can choose to be in or not, and if you choose to, you abide by the rules thereof—rules that are democratically determined within the party itself. It is totally different, as the right reverend Prelate pointed out, from a clear right to vote, which should apply to everyone, irrespective of the degree to which they wish to become involved in daily politics, which is of course a matter of choice.

I wanted to speak now because I did not quite understand what it was that the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, did not understand about my previous intervention on this subject. I shall not discuss any individual details, because we have sundry debates on those coming up. The silence of the Government Front Bench on two or three issues in the whole of this discussion seems to have permeated the Back Benches as well. One of the crucial questions for me is whether the Tory party, which is investing an awful lot of time and effort in the Bill—and money; £180 million at least and rising—is doing so on the basis that somehow, we should be disturbed by the result of the last general election, which, I sadly remind everyone, it won with an 80-seat majority.

The Government are saying—by their actions, if not by their words—that the election is a bit dubious, a bit dodgy. Every contribution from that side is more or less implying just that. If it is not dodgy at a global level—the 80-seat majority—it must surely be dodgy in respect of a number of individual constituencies. So, I would like to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, who is an expert on these things, which of the 650 constituencies he thinks should probably be declared invalid on the basis of serious doubts and misgivings about the authenticity of the voters in those constituencies?

Having fought numerous elections and, on one occasion, having won by 360-odd votes in an electorate of 90,000, I can only say to the noble Lord and to all those who say that people do not accept our election results because the system is first past the post, that no one in the ballots in individual constituencies argues for a moment with the idea that the person who was first past the post was the winner and should be declared the winner, even if it was by a short head. But the point I am making now is that no one contested that result. My opponent, to his credit, although he called for a couple of recounts, did not doubt the validity of the result any more than I did when, prior to that, I lost by rather more, it must be said—by 1,500. Likewise, I did not contest the result.

I really do want to know the answer to this, because we are in a very odd situation. You would think we would be on different sides of the argument. You would expect the Opposition to be saying that they were really worried about the last election result and that it looked very dodgy that the Tories got an 80-seat majority, with the Government saying that it was the finest election they have ever been privileged to take part in. But in this Alice in Wonderland world, it is the Government who are raising serious questions about the validity of the election result. So, I repeat that point, which is hanging in the air, and if the Minister would share with the House his deep anxieties about the last general election, I would like to hear them.

I would also like to hear from the Minister precisely what the Government’s estimate is of the effect on voter participation of the proposals in Part 1 of the Bill, which introduce a substantial new requirement for people to exercise their right to vote. This is the biggest change in the electoral requirements in my lifetime. I suppose the voting age has changed and there have been other changes of that sort, but this is a substantial one that says to electors that what they have done in the past is not good enough and there are too many risks associated with it, so they must jump over these additional hurdles.

Our contention—I say ours, but I think it is a pretty broad contention—is that the one thing you can be sure of is that introducing a brand-new requirement such as this will have a completely neutral effect on election turnout, which, I remind the House, has been going down rather badly, certainly since I first started fighting elections. I looked up the figures for a few—1970 was the first one I fought. In February 1974, the turnout was 79% and for the last five or six elections, it has been down in the 60s. That is bad news for anyone who cares about democracy. I was proud of the fact that we used to beat lots of other countries substantially on turnout at major elections. That is no longer the case. It is not credible to say that this big change in voting requirements for voters will have no impact whatsoever on turnout. I will give the Minister three options: is he saying it will have no impact whatsoever; that it risks reducing turnout; or that it is going to increase turnout? That would be an interesting intellectual case to develop.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I disagree with the noble Lord, in the sense that I am talking about the rhetoric, and the context and reason for this, whether it is happening on a state-by-state basis or nationally. What is behind it is in my second quote, from Max Feldman at the Brennan Center for Justice, who says that

“claims of widespread fraud are nothing more than old wine in new bottles. President Trump and his allies have long claimed, without evidence, that different aspects of our elections are infected with voter fraud. Before mail voting, they pushed similar false narratives about noncitizen voting, voter impersonation, and double voting”.

To pick up the noble Lord’s point about people’s concerns about the voting system, these days we see a great deal of sharing and cross-fertilisation of concerns on social media. Rhetoric spread by powerful, well-funded forces will have an impact on people’s views, as we have seen in other contexts.

The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, suggested that people were coming perilously close to suggesting that the purpose behind voter ID was voter suppression. I am not going to come “perilously close” to it; I believe that that is the case.

The second point I want to make concerns history. I do not believe that we are guaranteed to gradually progress positively into the future, but look at the trends. In 1832 and 1867, the Great Reform Acts spread the right to vote among men. In 1918 and 1928, women got the right to vote. In 1969, and implemented in 1970, the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18. That is all heading in the direction of greater engagement. In Oral Questions earlier we saw some fairly severe attacks on democracy and devolution in the UK, but Scotland and Wales have gone further down this road, with votes at 16. Democracy has been on a long-term trend of engaging more people. We have to ask why we are suddenly heading in the opposite direction with voter ID.

My final point is a practical one. Most of this discussion has focused on the estimated 2 million people who do not have any ID. I do not think we have talked enough about the people who do not have ID on them at the point where they go to vote. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, pointed out, none of the pilots was in a large urban area.

I was in a large urban area—Sheffield—telling on a polling station in one of the years when the pilots were being conducted. I saw a large number of people who had seen the reports and thought that they had to have ID.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

The noble Baroness is citing where the pilots took place. Earlier on, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, did not seem to be aware that pilots had taken place. Was it not the case that a number of local councils refused to participate in the pilots? It is not that those places were chosen by the Government; it is that those were the places which were allowed to participate by the local authorities.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I respectfully respond to the noble Lord that, whether it was the choice of the local authorities or not, it harms the quality of the evidence before us.

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[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

That should be a matter of huge concern. In an extraordinarily un-Conservative statement earlier, the noble Baroness said that voting in the way that we used to vote 50 years ago is somehow bad and means that we are not keeping up with modern times. If we applied that principle to every other aspect of life that works well we would be seeking to change everything for the sake of it—something I imagined she thought this side of the House was seeking to do.

A combination of those two great Gladstonian reforms, the Ballot Act 1872 and the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act 1883, has maintained a level of integrity in the conduct of elections in this country that most of the rest of the world finds awe-inspiring. The idea that people look at the United Kingdom and say that, among all the democracies—let alone other regimes—there is great doubt about the integrity of our election outcomes and people are constantly concerned that ballots might be being stuffed and all that, is so far removed from reality that it is obviously a farcical proposition.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

I am sorry to intervene again but is the noble Lord aware of the report of foreign observers who watched the elections in Tower Hamlets? He seems to display complete ignorance of what overseas observers said about what they saw going on in Tower Hamlets.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

The big issue in Tower Hamlets, which the noble Lord referred to earlier, was electoral registration. What happened there was clearly improper registration. If the issue of registration had been dealt with, these further issues would not have arisen. This is not just an issue of principle, though many issues of principle have been raised. Rather like the Blair Government’s move to introduce ID cards, I suspect this will become a matter between the two Houses. The fact that photo ID was not in the Conservative Party manifesto will be significant; I do not think the Salisbury convention will cover the reform as proposed in this Bill. On matters of deep constitutional import such as this, how far we can press our concerns is always a fine judgment for this House. We have these debates and send amendments to the other place, and then they come back.

If this Bill gets through in this Session, the issue of compulsory photo ID might be one where we insist on our amendments, particularly in the context which the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, referred to, about how at constituency level and on a substantial scale there have been no pilots.

I have two other points, since I want to add to the debate rather than to repeat other points. This Bill is one of the most substantial that I have addressed in my entire time in Parliament, with 171 pages, 22 of which are Schedule 1, which governs the arrangements for the introduction of photo ID. Most of the legislation that this House passes is shorter than Schedule 1 of this Bill, which introduces some element of these requirements. There are 22 pages of very dense and complicated legal reforms, and I pity the electoral registration officers who will be implementing them—there will be a host of problems over the implementation. Yet despite it being 22 pages long, huge issues are not even properly addressed in Schedule 1. We are being asked to give Henry VIII powers to the Government to produce further changes in due course. Paragraph (2)(4)(a) of Schedule 1, on page 66, says that regulations may make provision about

“the timing of an application for an electoral identity document”

and

“about the issuing or collection of an electoral identity document.”

These are fundamental issues, and they are not even on the face of the Bill. They will all be subject to regulations in due course which this House, in practice, does not have the capacity to influence or to reject.

On a fundamental and crucial issue which I hope that the Minister can help me with, is there now effectively to be one point of electoral registration or two—the first when you apply to go on the electoral register and the second when you apply for your photo ID? I see that my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock has tabled amendments on this precise point, which is of huge importance and has not been addressed in the debate at all so far, of whether there should be provision for you to apply for the photo ID when you complete your electoral registration form. The Minister may have addressed this point in earlier debates, but I could not see it in Hansard. This fundamental issue may be worse than just ambiguous. I look forward to the Minister explaining this, but my reading of paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 is that you cannot apply for the two at the same time.

New Section 13BD in Schedule 1, which amends the Representation of the People Act 1983 by inserting these new provisions, says:

“An application for an electoral identity document may be made by (a) a person who is or has applied to be registered in a register of parliamentary electors”,


It does not say “is applying”. There is a fundamental difference between the two. Can the Minister help the Committee on this, since we are discussing the clause at large and it will pave the way for my noble friend Lady Hayman’s amendment in due course?

Is it the case from my reading of the schedule—I am a non-lawyer—that you cannot apply for both at the same time and therefore that it would not be legal for electoral registration officers to send one form enabling you to fill in your name and details on the register of electors and to make your application for a photographic identity document, but you must do them separately? I may be wrong, in which case I am very happy for the Minister to intervene, but if I am correct, it is a fundamental massive additional issue with this Bill. It effectively doubles the electoral registration requirements. Whereas until now it has been the accepted practice that you register once, you will now have to register twice. My noble friend Lady Lister said that in continental countries, ID cards are the norm, but, of course, there you have them by the time you register to be a voter, and do not have to go through any separate process, nor must you turn up with a separate identity card in due course.