European Union Referendum: Young Voters

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 26th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, associate myself with all those noble Lords who congratulated my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno on securing this very important debate. He really is my noble friend. I spent a great deal of time in the 1990s trying to help him get elected to the other place. I think the closest we came was in 1992, when he missed by just 995 votes. I have always illustrated talks about elections with that to show how important a handful of votes can be in determining the outcome. I failed in my endeavours to get him into the other place, but this debate today highlights how important his contributions to this House can be in raising issues such as this one about the rights of citizens to participate in a democratic decision.

Early in the last Parliament, Ministers stood at the Dispatch Box opposite and spoke confidently about how the level of voter registration in this country was approximately 92%. The last Government published a White Paper on voter registration saying that the level was about 90% and that that compared favourably with levels in many comparable countries. But then the Cabinet Office commissioned some work in advance of the introduction of individual voter registration and it was shown that the real levels of voter registration in this country are in the low 80s, rather than in the low 90s.

I acknowledge that some good action was taken to try to alleviate the problem, including the promotion of online registration. However, much more could and should have been done, but it was not. We know now that two out of three polling stations in the last general election turned away people who wanted to vote—people who were almost certainly entitled to vote but who were not registered to do so and therefore could not. We know that 186,000 people who did register to vote during the course of the last general election campaign did so but did it too late to exercise their votes in that election. So there is a serious problem with perhaps 7.5 million people missing from the electoral registers, and up to 4 million of those are thought to be young people. They will all be unable to vote in the European referendum unless they register to vote by the 7 June deadline.

The problem was made worse by the Government’s sudden decision last summer to bring forward full implementation of the individual electoral registration system and exclude up to 1.9 million people from the voting registers, specifically against the advice of the independent Electoral Commission. The Government appeared to be so keen to remove entries from the electoral register that even noble Lords such as noble Lord, Lloyd-Webber, were apparently flown in from all over the world in a great endeavour to attend the House of Lords and vote specifically to prevent many people who would probably have been entitled to be on the electoral registers remaining on them until the end of this year. We still do not know how many people were really affected by that change, but if the result of the referendum is close, the Prime Minister might regret making it in order to unfairly influence the outcome of the Boundary Commission’s processes in his party’s favour.

Much good work is being done on this issue by the voluntary organisations Bite the Ballot and HOPE not hate. I hope the Minister will not just agree that their work is commendable but actively support all their efforts. They are organising a national voter registration drive in the week before the 7 June deadline. The Government have the capacity, for example, to try to make sure that many more people, including all public sector workers, are reminded that if they are not registered, they need to do so by 7 June if they are to be able to vote on 23 June, or earlier if they vote by post.

As this debate has shown, however, there are many problems with trying to identify and register people in the immediate run-up to any election or vote, so we need to look at solutions such as those put forward in the Missing Millions report, co-produced by Bite the Ballot. I hope the Minister will meet with representatives of the organisations involved in producing that report and with members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Democratic Participation to discuss taking forward some of their 25 different proposals to address the problem of under-representation.

It should be made easy to check online to see if you are registered to vote. All students should be registered as part of the enrolment process for their courses, as already happens in some institutions. Moreover, as the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, said, all schools in Great Britain should follow the example of schools in Northern Ireland, where students register to vote as part of citizenship education classes. Young people being notified of their national insurance number should be told at the same time that they should use this information to register to vote, and possibly also in order to assist with their credit rating. Above all, the forms for registration need to be standardised according to best practice, the penalties for non-compliance explained explicitly and the benefits of registration made clear.

We should do all that we can to ensure that everyone entitled to vote in the referendum can do so. We must also work to make sure that everyone entitled to vote is registered to do so in the future.