Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Wednesday 19th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey]

I am happy to: I have not. I was going to suggest that the Government should now embark on such consultation. The noble Lord seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. The Electoral Commission and the Boundary Commission already deal with matters of extraordinary—

[Lord Maxton]

Does the noble Lord—

[Lord Lipsey]

Please may I finish answering one question before I address another?

[Lord Maxton]

I am sorry.

[Lord Lipsey]

The commissions already deal with matters of extraordinary complexity and political controversy. On the basis of the evidence that I have seen, this would seem to be not a difficult exercise and not necessarily very controversial in its outcomes. It is more a matter for mathematicians and statisticians than for politicians, and that is how it should be.

I was going to invite the Government to consult on these proposals before Report—there may be some hitch to them that has not occurred to me—but it would be a very sad day if you were not allowed in Committee in this House to raise a proposal unless you had bottomed it out with every interest group and authority that might be involved. I think that occasionally one is allowed to play with one’s bright ideas.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, is next. I look forward to hearing several more interventions from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in a minute.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, the noble Lord opposite referred to “crude estimates” landing in the political arena. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who is not in his place, and I have had a running dialogue throughout the Bill about using other databases to put people on the register. These would provide not crude estimates but hard facts drawn from databases to which local government, the Electoral Commission and others should have access and would be able to use to give not an estimate but the real number of people not on the register.

[Lord Lipsey]

The noble Lord sustains the point I am making. This is not a completely impossible exercise and other data sources could be brought in to meet the point. Does the noble Lord wish to intervene again?

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, is splitting hairs. There is a principle behind the amendment, which my noble friend is saying is that the register is incomplete and there must be some way of adding to it those groups of people who should be on it but who are not for all sorts of reasons. In trying to identify them, socio-economic data based on the profile of any particular constituency should be taken into account. That is a perfectly reasonable argument, but the noble Lord is splitting hairs on whether the Electoral Commission is equipped to carry out that function.

This is a particularly important case. It goes to the heart of many of the amendments that we have moved and dealt with over the past few weeks and no doubt will deal with over the next few weeks as well, which is that the register is inaccurate and that population is important. Therefore we have to find a formula for establishing what the population is in any given constituency in the United Kingdom.

I have been following the debates on the question of the census. Last weekend I had the pleasure of reading a report from the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee on the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill. I suspect that Ministers have not read it. Indeed, I would ask the noble Lord whether he has actually ever read it. It is impossible to consider this legislation without reading this report because it repeatedly draws attention to all the concerns that were expressed, and in some areas it does so in greater detail than the report produced by our own Constitution Committee in the House of Lords did.

I refer to a particular section in which the Minister responsible for the Bill in the House of Commons was asked questions by Ms Catherine McKinnell on the census. At the end of the quotation, I ask the Minister to note what I am asking for because it would be helpful to have the answer set out. I will read out what is unhelpful to my case and what is helpful. On the 2011 census, Mr Harper said:

“There are two difficulties with using Census data. The first is that Census data is of population and does not look at whether people are eligible to vote, and of course many people who live in the UK are not citizens and are not eligible to vote for various reasons. The second difficulty relates to the level of detail of the information collected in the time available. Clearly, Electoral Registration Officers are able to access Census data and use it, but Census data at the individual level that could be used to track whether actual people exist, so that they could be approached, is not published at that level of detail, but it is aggregated”.

When it is aggregated, I presume that there must be some data behind the aggregation. I wonder what those data are. They may not be published, but I wonder whether they are available.

Mr Harper goes on to say in his reply:

“Therefore, with regard to electoral administrators using it as a source to identify people who exist in an area and who are not registered, they can look at overall number and make some assumptions, but it does not really give them the detail to drill down”.

That is based on the aggregated data. Again, what is the material behind those aggregated data? He then says—and this is where my noble friend Lord Maxton has become involved in the debate, unless we are talking about other matters here:

“There are other data sets that might be more helpful in that regard that we are going to pilot in 2011”,

to which the noble Lord has referred.

“There is no bar on them using the data that is published.”

Can we have a list of all those sources of data? I have seen references in various documents to bits and pieces of data, but I have not seen an aggregate list of all the additional sources of data that can be taken into account by registration officers when they carry out their functions.

I am also trying to establish whether there is some way in which those additional data can also be used by the Boundary Commission in carrying out its work, or are those additional data somehow excluded because of the fact that we seem to be confined to the use of data that were drawn up in 2010? We should have a very clear statement as to what actual data the Boundary Commission can take into account when it draws up its reports on individual constituencies.

I have always presumed that when the Barnett formula was established, the allocations for Scotland took into account the data that my noble friend is referring to, but perhaps I misunderstand how the Barnett formula is calculated. I also understand that some areas of local government finance are also influenced by socio-economic data at the local level. Is that not the data source that my noble friend Lord Lipsey is referring to? Is it the kind of source that my noble friend is referring to? I do not know. Perhaps the Minister might be able to clarify whether that could be the source of the additional information that my noble friend would seek to include in the information that is necessary to draw up the boundaries.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I hope to be brief and hope that the cameramen from the Independent are taking photographs on that side this time to note those who are closing their eyes and going to sleep.

We have been talking about the 3.5 million who are not registered. I think in a modern democracy everybody has a right to be on the register and therefore a right to vote. It is not just a matter of taking the 3.5 million people into account in dividing up the various constituencies. It should be their right. Whether they vote or not is a matter for them; that is their right. But in my view—and as I listen to these debates it has increasingly become my view—that it should be the responsibility of Government to make sure that people are on the register, not the right of the individual to take that decision. It should be the Government’s decision.

In the modern world that is now possible. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, and I have been having this ongoing debate—it has been a very friendly debate—about the use of other databases to find people who are not on the register. When somebody is found through another data source—social security records, medical records, local government records, housing records, school records, or whatever else—it seems to me that the Government’s view is that it is useful to check the register that exists. It is not to be used to ensure that people go on the register. If you find an 18 year-old who has left school and has not registered not on the register when he is clearly living at that address—because that was where he was at school, and as far as you know he has not moved—do you put him on the register? In my view, that is exactly what should happen. He should be put on the register so that we have a register that is much more accurate than the one that we have at present, and we are also fulfilling our democratic duty of giving people the right to vote if they wish to use it. That should be key to what we are doing.

The argument in the past would be that of course you had to send people round to houses and check the register. It was the argument in the past—and listening to these debates, I sometimes wonder what world people in this House live in. It was a physical act, but it is now electronic. You do a search for a particular name on your computer, in the electoral register that you have there, and up will come the name and address. You can then cross-reference that without moving from your desk on your computer with another data source that you have, and you can see whether the names and addresses marry up. That takes a few seconds, not the hours and hours that many noble Lords seem to think it would take to carry out that task. Yes, the records exist and, yes, we should be using all the databases not just to check the register but to put people on the register when we get the opportunity to do so.

Lastly, as I know noble Lords will expect me to say, this whole process would have been so much easier if we had had compulsory ID cards from the beginning. If we had everybody with an ID card who was a British citizen, that would have become the easy, straight source of an electoral register.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, would my noble friend agree with me? My title is Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton. A very strong resistance to being on the electoral register developed as a result of the preceding tax to the council tax, the poll tax, which led to many people refusing to put their name to the electoral register. We still have a remnant of that about, in that people fear that, given a Conservative Government with Lib Dem support, it could come back.

[Lord Maxton]

I entirely agree with my noble friend. In a previous existence, I was the Scottish Office spokesman for the Labour Party on the poll tax in Scotland. Nowadays there is no fine at all and no compulsion on anyone to register in terms of the law, but the Conservative Government of the day increased very considerably the fines that were available to the courts to fine people if they did not fill in the registration forms. Why? Because they knew that the register was the best way of trying to ensure that they got the poll tax paid. Some people were advised not to go on the electoral register. I think that was wrong, but large numbers of young people did exactly that.

I think that we should have had compulsory ID cards. This whole question of who was or was not registered would have been solved, and it would have been to the benefit of our society. Yes, it would have cost money, but the registration process would have been much cheaper and the health service might well have been considerably better and cheaper, and there would have been a whole range of other benefits that would have accrued from having it.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

Does my noble friend agree that were all these people to be registered, support for local authorities that is grossly weighted towards the south of England might have better reflected the needs of the north?

[Lord Maxton]

I cannot disagree with my noble friend. I think I have made my point.

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[Lord Strathclyde]

My Lords, I have never heard of that, but perhaps it should be a matter for the committee of my noble friend Lord Goodlad.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, asked about the Boundary Commission’s use of databases when drawing up these constituencies. He will know this, because we have had this debate several times during Committee and I am not planning to give a hugely different answer from the one that he has already heard. This year, we plan trials—

[Lord Maxton]

The problem is not whether there is a database—we have had that debate—but what use will be made of the database once the Electoral Commission and local authorities have that information. Will it be to add people to the electoral register, or is it just to check the electoral register?

[Lord Strathclyde]

First of all, it will be up to them to decide what they want to use the databases for.

[Lord Maxton]

Does that mean that the Electoral Commission can add people to the electoral register in any particular area and then use those people to calculate where the boundary division should be?

[Lord Strathclyde]

No, the commission will be using a register of electors. It may well wish to use a database to see where potential electors are, who can then register. What are these databases? Let me just—

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[Lord McNally]

Noble Lords on all sides of the Committee will take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Reid, that everyone who has ever stood for Parliament and has been lucky enough to win has said in their victory speech that, although they were grateful to the people who had voted for them, it was their determination to serve everyone in the constituency. That is certainly the case.

[Lord Maxton]

What my noble friend Lord Reid quite rightly said was that it was not just the complete electorate that we represented in the House of Commons, but the total population. That means babes in arms right through to the person lying in hospital about to expire. It means everybody.

[Lord McNally]

What makes this an absolutely Alice in Wonderland debate is that, when the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, reads Hansard, he will see that that is just what I said. I thank him for his support.

The commitment to represent everybody in the constituency does not necessarily mean, as has been made clear a number of times, that we should look to population rather than registration for basing the electorate. The electoral register has been the basis for boundary reviews since the 1940s. Current constituencies in the other place are drawn up on the basis of electorate, not population. It was made clear earlier this evening that there are reasons and principles for this practice and approach. The principle behind the Government’s proposal is to ensure that one elector means one vote of equal weight, wherever that vote is cast in the United Kingdom. In order for this to be the case, constituencies must have a broadly equal number of electors. Simply to substitute population for electors would exacerbate the present inequalities in the weight of vote because there would be variations in the number of individuals in an area who are not entitled to vote. The best way to achieve fair and equal votes and to address concerns about underregistration is to have an equal number of registered electors while ensuring that the register is as accurate as possible.

A further argument has been put that the constituency boundaries should be drawn on the basis of population rather than the register of electors because a Member of Parliament is elected to represent all his constituents and a significant part of an MP’s work can be on behalf of those who are not registered to vote. That argument has been made several times. However—this point has been made several times, but I shall say it again loudly—no Member of Parliament has a free ride. MPs have different kinds of pressures and different areas of responsibility, so it would be invidious to start deciding that constituency X rather than constituency Y had more problems. Most MPs will give a full description of the kind of problems that their particular constituency brings. That is why the Government believe that it is the right of electors to have a vote that is of equal weight between, as well as within, constituencies throughout the United Kingdom.

There have been ideas that we could use population. The difficulty is, as the Office for National Statistics has pointed out, that there are limitations with population estimates. Although I have heard in previous debates the suggestion that we could use the census, the data from the forthcoming census will not be available until far too late for the Boundary Commission to complete the task of reviewing the boundaries by 2015, which would mean that, up to the 2020 general election, the pattern of representation in the House of Commons would reflect the electoral register as it was in the year 2000. I cannot believe that we should do such a disservice to every elector in that way.

Nor, as I noted in the earlier debate on a similar amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, can we accept the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Boateng, that the total population of a constituency could not exceed a number that is 130 per cent of the electoral quota. I recognise the intention behind that amendment, but the data are not available that could make that work in practice. The Boundary Commission would need population data at a very low level of geography in order to ensure that the tests in the amendment were met. Those data are not available. It would be far better to use the electoral register, as has always been the case for boundary reviews, and concentrate our efforts on improving the registration rates. The census may provide valuable information that can support that work. The provisions in this Bill for a review once a Parliament, rather than once every eight to 12 years, will mean that the work will be reflected in a review very much sooner than would be the case under the existing provisions.

I note what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who made a valid point. I know that boundary reviews cause problems in terms of sitting MPs, but this proposal is for the benefit of the electors. Amendment 74C proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, would allow the Boundary Commission to take into account likely rapid changes in population when making recommendations for boundary changes. Amendment 78A, which has not been moved by my noble friend Lord Maples, would require the commissions to take into account projected increases in the electorate.

My concern is that, however calculations were made on the projected electorate, there would, by definition, be an element of interpretation that would be subject to repeated challenge. Furthermore, the amendments would abolish the fixed figure and replace it with a moving target. I am concerned that interested parties would be likely to use this for arguing for a more advantageous calculation method for the projections. In order to maintain the high levels of trust in our system, we must base boundary reviews on the availability of actual data.

That said, I hope that we can reassure noble Lords on this issue. The Fifth Periodical Report of the Boundary Commission for England notes that the commission takes into account projected electorate changes where it believes that the projection is likely to become a reality. We are confident that the Bill does nothing to stop the commissions continuing that practice, and we would expect them to apply this practice where they judge that the specific circumstances warrant it. I would advocate continuing to rely on the professional and expert judgment of the commissions.

We agree that constituencies should be as up to date as reasonably possible in order that boundaries reflect where electors live and in order that votes have equal weight. The answer to this is the Bill's provision for redistributions to take place every five years.

At this point, in the tradition that has been established in the last hour in this House, I would offer the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, a meeting on this, but I think that his diary is probably already full. I therefore invite the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

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[Lord McNally]

I am trying to make an intelligent response. The noble Lord talks about glib responses. Would he like to suggest a term other than home constituency? The point has already been made in this debate that of course there are going to be difficulties about prisoners with no fixed abode. One of the other problems that we are looking at on rehabilitation is that too many of our prisoners leave prison with no fixed abode, which is almost an invitation to further offences.

[Lord Maxton]

Could I raise almost the opposite point of view? Many people who are in prison are already registered to vote at their home address. What is to stop them using the postal vote system to cast their vote, even though they are in prison? All it requires is for them to apply for it from that home address. The postal vote arrives at their home. Some relative takes it in to them, they cast their vote, the relative takes it back, puts it in the post and they have voted. Or are we going to use prison records as part of the access data?

[Lord McNally]

The noble Lord is right. That may already be going on. I must say that smuggling ballot papers in and out of prison is the least of the problems that we have at the moment.