Parliamentary Constituencies Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Janvrin

Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Janvrin (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I, too, put my name down in support of Amendment 24, having been a member of the Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act, which reported in July, and I pay tribute to the astute chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland.

The purpose of Amendment 24 is to oblige the Government to address the accuracy and completeness of electoral registers as a matter of urgency. The Minister, to give him his due, has expressed the Government’s commitment to the importance of this issue, most recently only last week in the debate on the representation of the people regulations. This amendment seeks to inject that sense of urgency and priority into doing something about improving the present situation—there are very good reasons for doing so, as other noble Lords have said.

In the context of this Bill it must be right to improve the data on which decisions on constituency boundaries are taken. The Government—as we constantly hear—value good data, and they are right to do so. Our present level of voter registration, as we also heard, is by many accounts not good by comparable international standards. Nine million missing voters suggest that improvement is long overdue. We could and should do better.

There are a number of possible measures that would address the issue, including, but not confined to, automatic registration, as mentioned in Amendment 11. The proposals for action are out there and are well known. The most important reason to inject a sense of urgency into addressing voter registration, however, is that it is one way—not the only way—of addressing the disenchantment and mistrust with politics in our society. It is about the integrity of our democratic process, and, as I said at Second Reading, it takes us into the wider political debate about regional disparities, race and inequality. That is what this amendment is about and why a sense of urgency is required. I hope that the Government will accept it.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased that we are all paying tribute to my noble friend Lord Shutt of Greetland and the membership of his Select Committee, and their advisers, for their excellent review of the workings of the electoral administration legislation from 2013, and I shall stay awake until midnight waiting for the government response to their excellent report. In any event, I look forward to it being debated properly in the House.

The committee achieved cross-party consensus on the crucial issue of automatic voter registration. The principle of fair boundaries, with MPs representing roughly equal numbers of people entitled to vote, requires a complete electoral register, but we are far from achieving that.

Even if the principle of automatic voter registration is accepted and is implemented as far as possible, there will still be gaps and inaccuracies. However, introducing it would be a significant step towards increasing the capacity of people legally entitled to vote and to take part in elections or referendums.

It would also mean that constituency boundaries will be more likely to reflect actual populations and those legitimately entitled to vote. At present, only those people who are already included on electoral registers count for the purpose of drawing up boundaries. We know that those now on the registers are not representative of all those entitled to vote, especially young people, private sector tenants and, perhaps especially, people who rely on the widespread misconception that they are registered to vote automatically.

I am grateful to the Minister for agreeing last week that there is a legal obligation to comply with the registration process and for his undertaking to try to ensure that all registration forms make this clear, as many people do not understand the fact of these obligations. However, in a reference to automatic voter registration, he suggested that the problem was that no single dataset had been identified that could be properly used. It seems to me, however, that several different datasets could be used to contribute to the process of automatic voter registration.

Last week, the Minister highlighted the problems of checking nationality. Nationality is specifically included in passport information, so every time someone obtains a new passport, perhaps with a new address, they should be included on the relevant electoral register, without having to check whether they want to opt in to the right to vote. The right to vote is fundamental. Whether to exercise it is as matter for the individual, but they cannot do this unless they are registered.

Last week the Minister said that

“the sacrifices and battles that people made across the generations to secure the right to vote for every citizen mean that it is vital that it should be enjoyed.”—[Official Report, 3/9/20; col. 501.]

The Chartists and the suffragettes demanded the right to vote, not the right to opt in to a register if they happened to know that this was needed and how and when the relevant paperwork must be completed. These amendments are about removing unnecessary barriers to facilitating that fundamental right to vote.

The DVLA database, for example, may not contain details of nationality, but if someone is already properly included on the electoral register, then when they notify the DVLA of a change of address, their electoral registration details could and should be automatically transferred.

Some databases, perhaps including those of the DWP, universities registering students or those held by the Student Loans Company, may include details of nationality. Where it is appropriate for people on such databases to be included in electoral registers, this should be done automatically, without further ado about inviting them to apply to register and to opt in to a basic right—the right to vote.

Finally, I will put to the Minister one very clear proposal that would be a step towards automatic voter registration and could be easily implemented. It was made in the recent report sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, written by academic experts at the University of East Anglia. It was included in the “missing millions” reports produced by the APPG on Democratic Participation, for which I have been an officer, and it was supported by the House of Lords Select Committee looking at electoral registration issues.

Will the Minister undertake to promote the practice of ensuring that all 16 year-olds should be automatically registered to vote when they receive their national insurance number? This is a simple and very achievable proposal that could greatly improve registration levels of young people, enabling them to vote as soon as they reach the age at which they are entitled to vote. The Electoral Commission, the Association of Electoral Administrators and the Electoral Reform Society have all supported this. I suspect that there may be some opposition within government to improving the completeness of the register, in spite of what we are told. But this practical proposal may enable cost savings to be made in the registration process, and it should be seen as a necessary step, given the difficulties of canvassing young people, particularly in the current Covid crisis, or engaging with them in school.

Much excellent work has been done on this subject by Dr Toby James, professor of politics and public policy at the University of East Anglia. I hope that the Minister and his team will study the excellent report that he helped to produce for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, and respond positively to this idea in particular, before we have to consider further amendments on the issue of automatic voter registration on Report.