Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Monday 10th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The noble Lord talked about a group. I am presuming that all parties belong to this group and not just the Liberal Party. It was the way the noble Lord phrased it. Forgive me: I will not press my noble and learned friend.

[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.

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[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, can a local authority or the Electoral Commission speak with accuracy regarding steps being taken by a local authority? The amendment says that,

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

That does not mean that it has to be so exact that, as in the days when I was in engineering, you have to be half a thou within your measurement. The amendment says “all reasonable steps”.

I know through experience that the Electoral Commission is a well resourced body. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, had this experience, but it even said that it wanted copyright for a teaching pack to teach returning officers how to carry out their duties. That is the extent to which the Electoral Commission goes into these matters.

Talking about accuracy, my thoughts go back to the days when Strathclyde region was on the go and the famous poll tax was a big worry for every Member of Parliament in the west of Scotland. Strathclyde region took in the whole of the west of Scotland. People were deliberately staying off the electoral register. It was not a case of the man or woman of the house coming to the door and forgetting to say that one of the sons was working offshore but was resident in the household and therefore the canvass could be inaccurate to one person in a family because of the wrong information. This was particularly single people making sure that they stayed off the register to avoid the poll tax. It used to be called the community charge. That was a nice phrase. We called it the poll tax because that was what it was.

Mr James Woods was put in charge of electoral registration for the whole of Strathclyde. All the Members of Parliament for Strathclyde met him and said that the voters roll would be inaccurate. When it came to appeals and the Boundary Commission, a big matter would be the number of people on the electoral roll. He told us all, “Here is what I’ve done. Come and visit my department. I do a canvass and then I do a second canvass and if we suspect that there are people who are taking their names off the electoral roll, we make inquiries”.

There was also the question of people having two homes. Sometimes a wife would register in one home and a husband in the other to avoid a double poll tax. Mr Woods assured us that he was putting a high and accurate return on to the electoral register. It would be reasonable for the Electoral Commission to interview someone such as Mr Woods and ask, “What are you doing? What facilities have you got? We want to visit your premises and see what you are doing”. That would be good enough to give a certificate.

It must be remembered that people used to speak with fondness about a local authority called Saltcoats down on the Ayrshire coast which had the cheapest rents in Scotland—the reason being that it had no direct works department and was a small local authority. The local authority was so small it would even meet if it had to hire a foreman gardener. Local authorities such as that are no longer with us. Local government has been streamlined. There is often a criticism that some chief executives in local government get paid more than the Prime Minister of the day because of their large responsibilities. I do not wish to go into that as I would stray from the amendment but all local authorities that I know of in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland would be well able to hire a highly competent electoral registration officer who could easily convince the Electoral Commission to give the local authority a certificate to say that it is working to ensure an accurate register. If the Government had a worry about the Electoral Commission, it need not be the Electoral Commission but someone else. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned certification; certification is given to shipping, factories and other bodies.

[Baroness Thornton]

This is my first intervention in the Bill. I am pleased to join my happy band of colleagues to, I hope, help with the discussions. I want to get involved in the issue of voter registration in this part of the Bill because of my work with young people, particularly excluded ones, in a variety of charities and also because I am from Bradford. My title is Baroness Thornton, of Manningham. I suspect that Manningham in Bradford probably has one of the lowest records of voter registration in the whole of our city, for reasons that we will discuss in the next series of amendments.

We know that those who are absent from the registers are likely to be drawn from the same social groups as under-registered voters in previous decades. This is not a new issue. Variations in registration levels by age, social class and ethnicity have long been recognised and it is predominately densely populated urban areas with significant concentrations of mobile young people that have the highest levels of under-registration. That is why I, along with other noble Lords, support amendments pressing our concerns for different groups of our fellow citizens.

The Electoral Commission’s March 2010 report The Completeness and Accuracy of Electoral Registers in Great Britain highlights that matter. The report states that,

“there are some grounds to suggest that geographical variations in registration levels may have widened since the late 1990s. Available data sources suggest that registration rates in London appear to have stabilised, and may even have improved slightly, since the late 1990s. By contrast, English metropolitan districts appear to have experienced a clear fall in registration levels. Canvass response rates show a similar pattern. In 1996, the average canvass response rates for metropolitan districts were 93%, significantly higher than the 87% achieved by the average London borough. However, by 2004 the average response rate among London boroughs had risen slightly to 89%, while it had fallen to 84% in the English metropolitan districts. Despite improved response rates among metropolitan districts in 2008, the 90% average remained just below the 91% figure achieved by London boroughs”.

As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer said, if the electoral roll is to be frozen as at 2010, how much more inaccurate will it be in those areas of the greatest vulnerability by 2015? We know that more than 3 million people are not on the electoral roll. How many more voters would the coalition Government find it acceptable not to appear on the electoral roll by 2015? I think that the Minister needs to answer those questions, given that millions of people—young people, ethnic minorities and people who live in rented accommodation in areas of high density—will in effect be disfranchised by the Government’s proposals.

Our amendment suggests, quite reasonably I think, that the Electoral Commission should ensure that the local authorities that have responsibility for the canvasses that produce the electoral roll should do their job as effectively and as efficiently as possible. I cannot see what is unreasonable about that. Indeed, our suggestion seems entirely proper, so I am surprised to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has a problem with it, as I cannot think what that problem would be. We need to get those 3.5 million people back on our electoral rolls and then—although, as my noble friend said, this is a different matter—to consider voting. I support Amendment 54A and I hope that the Government will do so as well.

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[Lord Soley]

I most certainly can. What is more, I can go a bit further. At our meetings to discuss how to handle the Bill, there was a clear view that we should not filibuster. I say that categorically and give my word of honour. There was not one occasion when anybody supported the idea of filibustering. What we have seen this afternoon, sadly, is the reverse of a filibuster. A government party—or two parties—refused to take part in a serious debate about the constitutional matter of a Government taking on themselves the power to change the size of Parliament. That is a major issue. I do not want to make it directly relevant to this debate, which is becoming slightly off-side. I will simply say—and I will leave it on this point—that in a situation where a Government are allowed to change the size of a Parliament, you cannot deny that it is a major constitutional issue. The voting system is not. The voting system and even registration are not major constitutional issues. They are very important but they are not constitutional issues in the sense that changing the size of Parliament is.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

Compared to the noble Lord, I am still an apprentice in the procedures of this House, but should we not be talking about the amendment before us? That might be the best thing to do.

[Lord Soley]

My noble friend still thinks that he is in his previous role. If he was in that role here, he would have ruled me out of order, which would be quite right. However, we do not have that system.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

The noble Lord was the chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. He would never have allowed any Minister in the Labour Party to tell Members not to speak. That would have been an invitation for them to speak.

[Lord Soley]

I am not sure that I wholly agree with that. I certainly would not encourage people to speak, but let us be clear. Whips at all times have said, “If you speak on this from the other side, you will be here very late tonight. Alternatively, we won’t get the Bill passed in time”. What matters to the Government, on this Bill more than any other, is time. That is what this is about. We need to be very clear about it, which is why I say that what happened earlier was a filibuster in reverse. It was a silent filibuster, if you like. That does not alter the fact that, on this issue, my reason for arguing and the reason why we diverted is precisely that the registration of citizens is important in the voting process. In the context of a Bill that is incredibly important constitutionally because of the power to alter the size of Parliament, you cannot argue that this is irrelevant. It is an important part of it.

The Government need to show some willingness to move on these issues. If we agree that registration is not as good as it ought to be in this country and accept that at the moment the Electoral Commission does not have as much power and authority as one would like it to have to instruct local authorities, there is a duty on the Government to do more to make sure that representation on the electoral roll is as good as it can be. I would expect leadership from the Government on that. I would expect them to stand up and say, “Yes, we will do this and we will discuss with other political parties how to deliver it”. That is the sort of statement on which we need to get some cross-party agreement for a very important Bill.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, “more haste, less speed” is a maxim that every Lib Dem Minister in the coalition—and, perhaps, other Ministers—should pin up above their desks in large Day-Glo letters. We can see that the dynamic behind the Bill—and the reason why the coalition seeks to thrust it through as fast as it can—is the ambition of the Deputy Prime Minister to establish himself as an effective constitutional reformer and his anxiety that he does not have much time in which to do it. How very much more important it is to get it right than to do it hastily. That is why my noble friends were quite right to table this amendment which would place some restraint on the Boundary Commission process.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, talked about the Electoral Commission and the art of the possible. We ought also to consider what it is reasonable and realistic to expect the Boundary Commission to do. As my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer said in his opening remarks, the proposition in the Bill that the Boundary Commission will submit reports for the redrawing of effectively every constituency in the United Kingdom in a short period of some two and a half years before 1 October 2013 is not a sensible thing to undertake to do, and I do not think that it is a proper thing to undertake to do. While there are all sorts of reasons why it would be very difficult for the Boundary Commission to do that satisfactorily, not least because it would be impossible for the citizens of this country to have the opportunity to make their representations on the process in this abbreviated timescale, there is also the factor of electoral registration. This amendment, which focuses particularly on the indispensability of having a decent level of electoral registration before we draw the boundaries of the new constituencies, is absolutely right. You can reform electoral systems and constituency boundaries as much as you want but it will be a hollow process if you fail to ensure that those who should be the beneficiaries of these reforms—the citizens of this country—are in a position to benefit from them. If you merely reform without ensuring that people will be able to exercise their vote under your reformed system, it is effectively a case of “Hamlet” without the prince.

The reasons for declining turnout at successive elections over a considerable period of our modern history are mysterious and it is a very difficult phenomenon to understand. There are a number of proximate causes that we can see. The noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, drew the House’s attention to the decision by a significant number of people to drop off the electoral register when they saw the poll tax heading towards the statute book. Certainly, more of them did so after it had become law. That is one reason why, since the late 1980s, the electoral register has not had the respect and integrity that it had before then. There are other factors. We will see some new factors that will cause imperfections in the electoral register in our own time. One of them will, I fear, be the effect of housing benefit changes because more and more people, particularly tenants of private rented accommodation, will be on the move because they cannot afford to continue to live in the same place in which they were living. That will impair the electoral register; so will rising unemployment, particularly among people who have been employees in the public sector. They will also be on their bikes and on the road, trying to find work in new places. All that makes it more difficult to ensure that we will have an adequately up- to-date and comprehensive electoral register. Therefore, the pressure that this amendment would introduce into the system is extremely valuable.

I refer to another reason why we should be worried about what may happen to registration. Here I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Martin of Springburn, as I am not confident that, as he said, local authorities will necessarily have the resources to employ more electoral registration officers. We are going to see very draconian reductions in local authority budgets and they will find it very difficult to do anything that is not mandatory. Anything that is discretionary expenditure will be difficult for them to take on board.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

Given the size of local authorities, it is not a question of having more electoral officers but of having a specific official to look after electoral registration. That person in turn would give an account of his or her stewardship to the Electoral Commission. That is different from employing more people, and it is not the point. It will be a sad day, given the size of local authorities in the United Kingdom, when there is no official in charge of electoral registration.

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

I certainly share the noble Lord’s hope that that will indeed be the case, and it is important that it should be, because it will be more difficult for the regime which this amendment envisages to operate if local authorities do not have registration officers in place doing their work energetically and with adequate resources. It is something on which we will need to keep a careful eye. I do not have quite the confidence that he does that that will necessarily be the case.

I should like to make just one observation on paragraph (b) in Amendment 54A, in which my noble friends have proposed that the Boundary Commission should submit reports every sixth year, rather than every fifth year, after 2013. That is wise for a number of reasons, but at this time of the evening I shall mention only one of the reasons. If constituencies are to be redrawn—and perhaps quite radically redrawn—at pretty frequent intervals, it creates problems for political parties. If political parties have to be re-formed election by election—and we know that they will all have to be re-formed in the period between 2013 and 2015, if the election is postponed for that long, and at quite frequent intervals thereafter—that creates a lot of difficulties for political parties.

We know the problem—I suspect that all political parties share this problem—of securing an adequate membership. We need a degree of stability to ensure that political parties can perform their role. Healthy, thriving political parties are a precondition for healthy, thriving local government and for healthy, thriving parliamentary democracy. So I do not think that we want to cause upheaval in political parties any more frequently than is really necessary. Of course the Boundary Commission reviews need to be of sufficient frequency and of a regularity to ensure that they adequately reflect the changing composition of the population of this country. That is essential and we all acknowledge that. It is a question of judgment and of striking a balance between that imperative and what I think is also very desirable, which is not to keep on throwing the system up in the air and destabilising political parties. For that reason, the modest change that my noble friends have proposed—having reviews every six years rather than every five years—makes good, practical sense.