Electoral Registration Pilot Scheme (England) Order 2016

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I come to this order with a slightly different approach and a different range of concerns from those on which I expect my noble friend will concentrate. We are now in a situation where, whatever happens to the process as outlined by the noble Baroness, the constituency boundaries at the next general election will—contrary to the recommendation of the Electoral Commission—be based on the register as it stood in December 2015. Of course, that does not mean that anyone registering since that date will not have a vote, but it means that the constituency boundaries will not necessarily reflect the, I hope, improved system of registration. Let me give an illustration of the potential differences. In my own city of Newcastle, the number on the electoral register as of last December was 183,961, and it is now 190,770, which is an increase of 6,809 or, by my calculation, an increase of 3.7% on the figure that will be the basis on which the new constituency boundaries are drawn.

The Government have introduced other significant changes, using their majority in another place, to change the whole system. I say that because local authority boundaries will become irrelevant under the new dispensation. I am wondering whether the Minister has—I do not blame her if she has not—seen the report by Lewis Baston, who is an expert in these matters. He recently produced a report for the Constitution Society in which, among other things, he states:

“As it currently stands under IER, the electoral register is too incomplete and unstable to provide a suitable basis for allocating parliamentary representation”.

He says:

“There have been noticeable levels of under-representation, which has varied with social and demographic characteristics”.

He also says:

“The use of the December 2015 purged register has also had a regional effect. London has three seats fewer than it should. Nationally, it has mainly affected urban areas, with the big core cities in particular had poor net completeness in electorate registration”.

However much that is corrected, partly as a result of the order we are discussing, it will not affect the boundaries that will apply in the next Parliament.

Lewis Baston also says:

“If the register numbers in December 2015 are inaccurate”—

they clearly were—

“the boundary review will contaminate the entire basis of the electoral system”.

He points out in relation to the discussions and debates before the boundary review was implemented that the,

“warnings made in 2014, of damage to the representation of London and the metropolitan areas, have come true and the map drawn in the 2016-18 boundary review will under-represent these areas”.

It is of course entirely coincidental that those are the areas in which the Labour Party is currently most strongly represented.

Lewis Baston goes on:

“The dramatic variations in total electorate that have taken place … between December 2012 and December 2015 undermine the idea that at any stage the electoral register is a reasonable estimate of the total local population entitled to vote”.

He cites examples demonstrating that in some places, such as Liverpool, the estimated net completeness of the register as at December 2015 is as low as 81%. By definition, it is therefore about 20% short of what the figure should really be. I repeat that that does not stop voters being registered, but it means the boundary situation has in effect been corrupted. One of the problems, as he concludes, is that there is,

“simply nothing that can be done under the current rules to rectify the problem that student constituencies are likely to be oversized (in terms of registered electors) when the election takes place”.

That is one facet of an issue which is generally of much wider application.

I am not sure whether the Minister will be able to respond to this today, but in my submission there is a very strong case for the Government to review and, indeed, to alter their decision to require the next general election, or at least any general election taking place after 2017, to be held on the basis of the boundaries as currently drawn. There is a need for a proper review of constituency boundaries to reflect the increase in the electoral register and other changes, which, I repeat, the order will help to facilitate. If the Government do not do so, they will have taken such a decision because they perceive a political advantage for the Conservative Party. That is no way in which a democratic process should be regulated, and I hope that the Government will reconsider their position. I repeat that they will return to the recommendations made by the Electoral Commission, who should be consulted in the light of the developing circumstances as we now see them.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, before I come to the specifics of the order before us, I want to refer to two extremely important issues about the context in which we are discussing it. In the first place, both the Law Commission and the Electoral Commission have given recent advice to government and Parliament that the time is long since past when it was necessary to bring together a lot of the electoral legislation. We have an extraordinary situation now, and it is repeated again this afternoon, where we are referring right back to the 1983 Act. The good ship “RPA” has been covered with so many barnacles over the years that it is hardly recognisable as being a ship at all. The Law Commission has made it clear that it is urgently necessary, in this Parliament, to bring together the legislation that refers to electoral matters. This is for clarity for the parties, for individual electors and, frankly, for us parliamentarians.

For over 11 years, I have been in this Room when we have been amending and referring back to the 1983 Act; on one occasion, I think we even referred back to the 1883 Act. It is not acceptable for the Government to keep putting off this issue. Paragraph 4.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum that accompanies the order—and just that one paragraph, about how all these things fit together, is so complex—makes a very cogent case for a degree of co-ordination and consolidation. In paragraph 8.3, there is the added dimension of ensuring that all parts of the UK march in step. The register is something of such basic importance to our representative democracy that we cannot accept differences taking place on such a scale as has been happening in recent years between the devolved nations of the UK.

In paragraph 7.6, ironically, there is the wonderful statement:

“Consolidation does not apply to this Order”.

You can say that again; there is absolutely no consolidation in this, and it is time that there was. I know that in this particular context that is a technical term, but it makes the point very strongly. We cannot go on with these piecemeal additions, subtractions and amendments to electoral legislation. That is not acceptable, and the Law Commission and the Electoral Commission have been unanimous in making that recommendation to us in Parliament as well as to the Government.

I turn to the issue of the accuracy and completeness of the register, and its integrity. As the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, has quite rightly said, this is a matter of wide concern. The Minister herself said in her introduction that the integrity of the register was the solid basis for our confidence in the way in which our elections happen. As was so clear from the brief exchanges that she and I had last Thursday, the Government simply have not taken on board the fact that we lost some 2 million people off the register last December, and some 2 million people—not necessarily the same people, of course—reappeared to vote on 23 June. In the closing months of last year, we were constantly told by Ministers—I absolve the Minister herself from this; it was not her line of argument—that those who were coming off the register were “ghost voters”. The fact that many of them had voted in the general election some months before was ignored. We now know that there are 2 million-plus more people who voted on 23 June, who were accepted at the polling stations as being eligible to vote and did so, than there were in December. The people who turned up in those many polling stations throughout the country 10 days ago were not ghosts; I hope that the Government will now accept that they were perfectly valid people who were undertaking their democratic right. It is completely ridiculous that we should now be going back to the 1 December 2015 basis for any acceptance of the register as a complete and accurate reflection of those who are eligible to vote in elections in this country.

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[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

My Lords, that was certainly an interesting debate. Indeed I feel I am in the presence of great experts, with the noble Lords, Lord Kennedy and Lord Tyler, so I start from a position of great humility. However, I certainly intend to answer most of their questions.

The noble Lords, Lord Beecham, Lord Tyler and Lord Kennedy of Southwark, all mentioned the boundary reviews and the change in the register following the take-up during the referendum. I covered this pretty well last Thursday, but unless we have a defined date and a set of registers to assess, it is impossible to run a review. The registers used for a boundary review are necessarily a snapshot, and registers always continue to change while a review is taking place. As all noble Lords know, without the implementation of the boundary reviews, MPs will continue to represent constituencies drawn up on the basis of data that will be over 20 years old at the next election. That would be to disregard significant changes in the population in relation to the principle of equal-sized constituencies, which were endorsed by the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The reforms have already been delayed once, and it is vital that we do not delay them any further so that the 2020 general election is not fought on boundaries that will by then be nearly—

[Lord Tyler]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, but I have not yet heard any explanation—I fear none is coming—of why we should not use the absolutely solid evidence of the electoral register that was, as it were, tested to destruction on 23 June 2016. What is the objection to using that register for the basis of this discussion? I cannot understand that.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

May I, too, come back to that point, rather than interrupt again later? I agree entirely with the Minister’s point about the need to have a defined date. It is absolutely right that we have to fix the date—I have no problem about that—and draw the boundaries on the basis of the figures at that date. It is absolutely spot on to say that we cannot move the date around. The problem the Government have to contend with is that we had a fixed, defined date, which was 1 December 2016, but they chose to scrap it and bring it forward by a year. The problem is that that was going to be the date, so all these people would have been on the register and would have been counted. I do not think the Minister was involved, but somebody in government sat around the table and decided to bring this forward by a year. We have never had an explanation of that. We have talked about ghost voters and other problems and this and that, but it was the Government’s decision. The December 2016 date clearly guaranteed the commission plenty of time over the next couple of years to have a review. The review would have come to both Houses some time in 2018, been approved by both Houses and been in place for the election in 2020. However, somebody in government took a decision to bring it forward by a year, and I suspect that decision was made purely for party political advantage. If that is the case, it is absolutely disgraceful.

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[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

The problem is that the boundary review has already commenced and the Boundary Commission is expected to report later this year, so that would all go down the drain. There would definitely have to be primary legislation, and there is quite a lot going on at the moment, so would there be time for it? We would need to get it through so that we could do the boundary reviews by 2018, ready for the general election in 2020, so there really is not the time. The review has already started—I ought to move on, otherwise we will move round and round in circles—but that is the reason.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, wanted to know how the pilots were chosen. They have been chosen through the EROs, who came forward with ideas and proposals and expressed the wish to participate. He also talked about the Law Commission. The Government are currently considering the commission’s recent interim report on electoral law. This comprehensive and wide-ranging report makes a number of recommendations, including in relation to electoral registration, and it is important that the Government give the report due consideration before making a formal response. I hope he will understand that I cannot pre-empt the Government’s response at this stage. I look forward to continuing the work to improve electoral registration.

The noble Lord asked why the Government do not change the registration on which the boundary review is concluded. I think I have already covered that. As I said, it would need primary legislation, which is not possible at this time. The noble Lord also mentioned the extent of application. I think he was talking about England, Wales and Scotland, and how that worked. The legal jurisdiction is England and Wales, and that is its extent. The order applies only to England because the authorities concerned are all in England.

The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, talked about looking at postal databases to boost registration levels. The use of data to improve electoral registration is an important tool, and indeed Birmingham and South Lakeland will look to harness the information from multiple local data sources to help target their activity at households. As the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, mentioned, there is indeed a terrible problem with take-up from certain representations in the country, particularly BMEs. We are looking at that, and it really has to be sorted out. It is a problem that seems to keep going on and on. The Cabinet Office is putting this at the top of its list.

Students are a difficult problem as they tend to move house every year. Part of the problem is that the actual academic year starts in September and October but the registration is done in the December the year before. Again, that is being looked into. We are hoping that civil organisations such as Bite The Ballot are having some impact in getting students to register. It was interesting that it seems that a lot of students registered to vote in the EU referendum but did not actually vote when the day came. We are looking into why that was the case. It cannot be that they all slept in from 7 am until 10 pm.

[Lord Tyler]

I think the answer is that not all of them were given the opportunity, or saw that there was an opportunity, to register for a postal vote. When the period for registration was extended—when, as the Minister will recall, the system collapsed—we did not extend the deadline for postal votes. There was a whole 24 or 36 hours when they could register but could not then get a postal vote. Obviously, many of them would have found that they would not be in the place where they had anticipated registering because it was the end of the academic year.

[Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen]

I take the noble Lord’s point. Interestingly, all chancellors at universities were written to at the start of the referendum to say, “Please encourage students to register”. At that time the students would have been able to get a postal vote, but I certainly take the noble Lord’s point. I have probably covered all the questions. Is there anything I have left out?