Higher Education and Research Bill

Lord Lexden Excerpts

Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 16th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very important amendment. I want to make two points. First, we have already spent a great deal of time talking about the purposes of higher education and the desire to see fully educated, rather than just trained, people going into society and playing their part. Elections are occasions that provide real opportunities, so if we are serious about our earlier discussions on the Bill, logically we ought to ensure that everything possible is being done to enable students to participate.

My second point is simply that it is most important for society as a whole to ensure that we have the fullest possible participation in elections. There should be no unnatural hindrances whatever. Although we should of course have safeguards—I am the first to agree with that—we want to make sure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to participate as they should. Students have a particularly important contribution to make in the democratic process. Therefore this amendment makes absolute sense, in terms of both achieving our objectives as a democratic society with full participation and making sense of what we talked about at great length earlier in our deliberations: we want students to become fully participating and informed citizens.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, the case for the amendment has been explained clearly and persuasively by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and its other supporters; I, too, support it.

The amendment reflects a strong cross-party conviction, in both this House and the other place, that the underregistration of young people for electoral purposes is a most serious and pressing problem that needs to be tackled resolutely in a number of ways. The amendment embodies one of them.

Its objective was recommended strongly in last year’s report entitled Getting the ‘Missing Millions’ on to the Electoral Register, prepared by Bite The Ballot and others for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democratic Participation. That authoritative study makes it clear that university registration procedures could easily be adapted to incorporate provision enabling students to opt in for electoral registration, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, explained.

The Government should associate themselves firmly with the cross-party proposals to increase electoral registration of our young people. They need to demonstrate a clear commitment to working in a bipartisan spirit so that our democracy can be strengthened by bringing those missing from the register on to it. By supporting this amendment, the Government would make a significant contribution to the bipartisan progress that we need so badly.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the University of Cambridge. Before I entered your Lordships’ House, I had responsibility on Cambridge City Council for democratic services when the individual electoral registration pilots were going through. Before individual electoral registration, the university, or at least the colleges, had an extremely efficient relationship with the city council to register all undergraduate and graduate students. The shift to individual electoral registration has many benefits, but we lost that link. Colleges could no longer simply offer the data to the city council. The amendment would bring back something that worked effectively in the past but do so in line with current legislation. It would enable the Government to ensure that we really could register young people. At the time of the EU Referendum Bill, the Government repeatedly said that everything that linked back to the franchise needed to be dealt with in a representation of the people Act. I ask the Minister to consider whether on this occasion an amendment could be made that ensured that as many young people as possible could be on the electoral register.