Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Maxton Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, I regret that I was unable to take part on Second Reading, but since that debate the Constitution Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, has issued its own report on the Bill. The report very much echoes some of the points that have just been made by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. Overall, the Constitution Committee sought to impress on today’s Committee that the Government need to do everything possible to ensure that the completeness of the electoral register is matched by its accuracy. Concerns were raised—I know from reading the Second Reading debate—about the way in which the impact might fall heaviest on areas of urban population where, for example, many people in private rented accommodation—ethnic minority people, the young, and so on—might be unnecessarily excluded in the pursuit of the completeness, which might not necessarily reflect the accuracy and vice versa of the new register.

Although I take the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, that there may have been special concerns and reasons in Northern Ireland, it is worth noting that the accuracy of the register fell by nearly 10% when individual registration was first introduced. The other major point that applies to this group of amendments—again I am echoing the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, and the concerns raised by the Constitution Committee—was about the necessity not to express many of these important concerns in guidance. The committee was concerned that there should be much greater parliamentary oversight of the introduction of the new register and that these matters should be put in regulations. We felt that for the Secretary of State to be able to determine requirements for exercising the right to vote without effective parliamentary oversight would indeed be constitutionally improper.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, I begin by apologising to the Committee because like the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, I did not speak on Second Reading. I had a specific reason for not doing so. I was on the list to speak but unfortunately I was in the Information Committee. I thought that the business would go on longer but I suddenly realised that I could not make it into the Chamber in time to hear the beginning of the Minister’s opening remarks. I was therefore asked not to speak on Second Reading. I apologise to the Committee for making that mistake. The danger is that now I will fall into the trap of making the Second Reading speech that I would have made.

The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in particular, roused me to my feet as I have one simple point to make. The Bill is designed to stop fraud and ought to be designed to encourage people to vote, and there is one simple way to deal with that. Unfortunately this House and the other place both voted to get rid of that simple way of dealing with this matter, which was the introduction of an identity card—a general register of all people. It would have been a compulsory identity card for everyone. It would have ensured that everyone was on the central register and we would not be in this position. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, led the campaign, as much as anybody did, against ID cards, which was a major error on his part. By the way, the technology on ID cards, or smart cards, has moved on extensively even since we abolished the proposal less than two years ago. Now we could have a smart card that would ensure that people were on a central register and the register itself would divide and set up online registers for the whole of the country. Each constituency would have a register, not completed by a registration officer or by individual registration but automatically: by pressing a series of buttons on a computer it would come up with the right answers. Each individual would be able to vote only by producing an ID card. This would stop a great deal of fraud, provide a workable system and, I hope very rapidly, we would move to voting electronically and using the ID card to register our votes.

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[Lord Maxton]

What the noble Lord is saying agrees with exactly what I have said. It seems that the identity card solves both the problems he is talking about. It ensures both accuracy and that the person who is registered is the person who is registered and not somebody else. It eliminates fraud.

[Lord Dobbs]

I recognise the noble Lord’s commitment to the identity card, but he is making a Second Reading speech rather than dealing with this amendment. There are many different ways to justice on this. I am sure we are all interested in having a robust electoral system at the end of the day but I am not sure that we have that at the moment. When postal votes are handed out like ice cream on a summer’s afternoon, it is not surprising that we have discovered cases where various people get their hands rather sticky.

We also seem to be tying ourselves in knots in this country in an attempt to prevent criminals from getting the vote. However, for a criminal to vote under the present system is the easiest fraud in the world. There are no checks in our electoral system as it is at the moment to see whether anybody on that electoral system should no longer have the right to vote because of a conviction. I hope that the Minister will be able to give attention to this and introduce some effective form of data-matching to make sure that that is no longer a problem.

I do not want to delay the Committee, but I want to give a couple of meaningful statistics that have been kindly provided to me from the Library. Postal votes nowadays account for a huge chunk of electoral turnout. In most constituencies the number of postal votes average around 10,000, which sometimes amounts to well over 20% of the total turnout. In some constituencies it is more than 30% of the total turnout. The 25 most marginal seats in the country are decided on majorities of around 500 votes or fewer. Quite clearly, it is more than possible for a fractured postal voting system to decide the outcomes not only of many constituencies but of an entire general election. We cannot turn a blind eye to the possibility that all the efforts we put into general elections could be turned over simply because of a very poor postal voting system.

Those who emphasise the need to get the maximum number on the register have all my sympathy. Let us by all means talk about numbers and get those numbers up. However, let us make sure that they are the right numbers.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

In allowing 16 year-olds to vote in a Scottish referendum, we are making an exception. That is evident; that is part of what has now happened. We have a register which has various people on it with different circumstances. There are those EU citizens who are entitled to vote in local and European elections but not national elections; there are Members of this House, who are entitled to vote, similarly, in European and local but not in national elections. So there are already some variations between categories on the register. I will check as thoroughly as I can on this to ensure that I am entirely accurate on a point which, I fully understand, is important.

Perhaps I may now turn to the three important amendments. The issue at stake for all of us is how confident we are that we will manage the two-year transition and what we do when we reach the end to ensure that we have gone all the way through the transition. The reason for having a two-year transition is precisely to ensure that we are successful as we come to the outcome. The Electoral Commission will be following that very closely. We will be reporting back to the House on how the new system operates, so we are confident that by the autumn of 2015—with, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, correctly pointed out, a different Government, or certainly a new Government, in place—we will be able to make a full transition.

Amendment 1 asks for guidance to be maintained for registration officers beyond the five-year period. Again, we are into questions about central direction and local autonomy for registration officers. Having spoken to a number of electoral administrators, I have considerable sympathy for the strains under which they work and the efforts which they put in to maintain as complete and accurate a register as possible. We will come back to the issue of how electoral registration is maintained on our third day in Committee.

We will of course continue to monitor and assess the effectiveness of the system during the five-year period, but we are confident that at the end of it the transition will have been fully taken through and we will have achieved a relatively stable system. When I say “stable system”, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, that I am also confident that we will have moved to a considerable extent towards an online system. I recall telling the House some months ago that the DWP expects that the number of its customers who interact with it online will have moved from some 20% to some 80% over the next 10 to 15 years, so we are in a system in which we will be moving from paper and letters to online interaction. I am also confident that we will find that data matching and data checking will become more and more constructive and accurate as a means of checking whether someone who registers is precisely who she says she is.

[Lord Maxton]

Surely the point about data matching and so on ought to be that people go on the register rather than the other way round. Rather than checking whether or not someone is accurate, there ought to be a way of putting people on to a register and then saying to them, “Are you the person who the register says you are?”.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord is asking some very large questions that of course relate to his preference for having a central register for all citizens, which would mean an ID card. That is rather larger than the remit of the Bill, as he well knows. Over the two years we will be conducting some further data matching and data mining to confirm existing electors. There will be individual invitations to those who are not confirmed by this process—in other words, concentrated individual canvassing rather than an overall individual canvass—a full household canvass in 2015 and a carry-forward to protect those who have not been contacted by the 2015 general election. There will be a civil penalty to encourage applications and the change will take place at the time of the next election when there will be the highest amount of popular interest in politics. I think I recall correctly that in the run-up to the previous general election some 500,000 additional voters registered in the two to three months before the election. That will bring a number of people back on to the register. We are confident that the efforts that will be made during the period of transition will complement each other to a point where we have reached at least the current level and, we hope, a great deal more.

On Amendment 36, as we go through this transition, the Electoral Commission will be carrying out research to give us measures of how well we are doing and to give us an after-measure using the December 2015 measures. We are confident that we can rely on the Electoral Commission to give us the figures that we need.

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[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to this group. Because I am referring to the advice given by the Electoral Commission I should put it on record that I have served as a member of the cross-party informal advisory group for the Electoral Commission in the past.

The government amendments are very welcome and specifically take the advice of the Electoral Commission and the Constitution Committee of your Lordships’ House about the list of forms of evidence that could be used in the electoral registration process and how they should be set out. However, Amendment 7 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, would make the Bill less flexible in this respect by setting out that the national insurance numbers and dates of birth should be the primary evidence required when applying. Many of us may have some sympathy with that because it is obviously such a fundamental building block and it may be thought by Members of your Lordships’ House that at least that has the advantage of some clarity at the outset. However, there is clearly a danger that if the national insurance numbers prove more cumbersome than all of us hope, and certainly than the Government intend, the only way to alter that primary evidence would be by primary legislation, which is clearly very bureaucratic and perhaps a matter of administrative overkill.

I suppose that one’s judgment on the merits of Amendment 7 will depend on how paranoid we all are about future Governments and whether the likelihood is that the list might ever be changed to set too high a bar. For example, it might suddenly be required that not just the national insurance number but some other form of identity, such as a library card or a bus pass, in my case, should also be available. That may seem unlikely and the regulations would anyway be subject to affirmative procedure, but on the whole I prefer the Government’s rather more flexible approach. I look forward to hearing what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the Minister have to say. Inflexibility is something that your Lordships’ House is rather good at identifying in advance, so avoiding the bureaucratic nightmare that may result.

[Lord Maxton]

My Lords, first, I take the opportunity, if I may, to say to my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench that I was not suggesting that we should vote in the same way as on “Strictly Come Dancing”. I was suggesting that we are still voting in a very conservative and old-fashioned way, whereas in other forms of national life, we do it differently.

I am a little concerned that there has been great opposition to my idea of a national register of some sort, but we are now talking about national insurance numbers. Who holds them? Where are they registered? Who keeps them? Who says, “That is your national insurance number”? Is that not a form of national register?

[Lord Falconer of Thoroton]

My Lords, this is an interesting and important debate. The original draft of the Bill in effect allowed the Minister to determine, without parliamentary scrutiny, what the identifier should be. The amendment advanced now by the Government in effect says that Parliament has to approve the Minister’s choice, as it must be approved by the affirmative procedure. Our Amendment 7 would provide that Parliament has to decide in primary legislation what the individual identifiers must be.

Everybody agrees, including the Government, that the first proposal is not acceptable and that it would be wrong for the Minister to be able to determine it. People would be worried about the extent to which it might be used for political advantage. The second option has the problem that statutory instruments are rarely rejected by Parliament, so it gives pretty big power to the Minister. The third option has precisely the problem identified by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler—it is very inflexible. I recognise completely that the identifiers chosen might turn out not to be sensible at the end of the day, depending on how the system operates.

This is such an important issue that we on this side are loath to give the Minister the power that comes from being able to determine it him or herself or by statutory instrument. Subject to the Minister’s no doubt persuasive arguments, I currently favour our amendment, but I wait to hear what the noble Lord has to say.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are getting into some of the technical complexities of the Bill. One of the reasons for preferring national insurance numbers is that it is possible to buy off the web electricity bills that are specially designed for you. We are looking for ways of ensuring as far possible that we have accurate identifiers.

The noble Lord, like many of us in this Chamber, is one of the difficult exemptions of people who wish to be registered in two different places because they have two different homes and therefore do not entirely match with the first identifier, which is that your national insurance number is likely to have your current address attached to it; these naturally go together. I am told that some voters do not have their date of birth in their head either. There is a tendency in some of our ethnic communities to assume that your date of birth was 1 January of whatever year it was that you were born.

None of these things entirely matches everyone’s predicament and we are therefore attempting to design something which is as flexible as possible while recognising the importance of parliamentary scrutiny. The changes we have made between the draft legislation in 2011 and the Bill’s introduction into the other place in May this year and these further amendments acknowledge the concerns raised most recently by the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee that we need to make sure that there is some parliamentary scrutiny. However, when it comes to the alternative evidence provided, we believe that, because of the changing circumstances in which we are operating, some flexibility is needed. We do not wish to box everyone into simply the NINo and the date of birth. I can almost remember my national insurance number—there are two numbers in the middle that I cannot quite get straight—but I must learn it off by heart.

The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, as he did earlier, wants to raise some much wider questions. I have considerable sympathy with where he is coming from. In 20 years’ time it is unlikely that we will vote using pencil and paper in polling stations, but that is a larger concern for the longer term, and as we have seen in some other countries, on occasion electronic voting is not without its own problems. We are retaining the principle of local registers. When talking to electoral administrations, something I am told immediately is that they have for many years used council tax registration as a means of checking where people live and whether these are accurately placed on the register. The council tax, of course, only gives the head of the household. Indeed, perhaps I should have said in responding to the previous debate that one of the reasons given in recent research for incomplete registration is that the single person’s discount for council tax encourages some people not to put down the others living in the household because that would raise the level of council tax. We have moved on from the poll tax as a disincentive, but the single person’s discount is, we are told, is a disincentive in a number of ways. There is a whole range of different factors to look at as we go into the details of the register.

The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, and the rest of us will enjoy debating the impact of the data revolution on the way the citizen interacts with the state. I find it fascinating myself, and I think that it will revolutionise that interaction over the next 10 years. However, noble Lords in this House may be among those who are slower to take part. I am sorry that the noble Lord was unable to come to our demonstration of online registration. The Government are considering many other options in terms of how one puts various things online. For example, some experiments show that if, when someone reregisters their car online, they are also offered the choice of transferring to their local authority and checking for a parking ticket, that increases radically the number of people who apply for a ticket.

[Lord Maxton]

As someone who is of the age where they have to renew their driving licence every three years, I can inform the noble Lord that when I do so, all I have to give is my passport number. The photograph that is used on my passport is then automatically used on my driving licence as well.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord makes a useful point. That is precisely the sort of direction in which we wish to go. The noble Lord will also know, of course, that a large proportion of our population does not hold a passport.

I hope that the Committee will be happy to accept these government amendments. We think that they strike the right balance between flexibility and scrutiny. I hope that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, will also accept that while we understand the direction in which his amendment is going, it threatens to make us a little too inflexible. It is important to retain a degree of flexibility in terms of the alternative forms of evidence because the most appropriate alternatives may well change over time.