House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Taylor and Lord Grenfell on the way in which they jointly steered this Labour Peers’ working group forward. I was delighted to be an elected member of that group—elected by my fellow Labour Peers. I am bound to say that my noble friend may have been extremely persuasive in her opening remarks today but, my goodness, she is much more persuasive when she is chairing a committee, and she ensured that we got agreement.

I was happy to support the report, although I should have liked it to go a bit further and I want to develop that in a moment. However, I want to say something about the Clegg Bill, which managed to unite in opposition to it those of us who support an elected Lords and those of us who oppose it. It was quite a political achievement to get all those people on the other side.

Furthermore, in so far as some of us believe in an elected second Chamber, as I passionately do, we believe in it because of accountability to voters. A 15-year term manages to avoid such accountability because once one is elected, one is no longer answerable. So I did not like that 15-year period. There is another argument against that 15-year period that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, advocated, which is this: if people are going to give it 15 years of their lives, they will not be young people. After 15 years, what will they do? How will they get into a career? A 15-year term seems to be recipe for only older people. That is surely the last thing that we want to advocate at this stage. I am against the 15-year term, whether it comes through appointment or election.

The size of the House is getting unmanageable. Let us be clear about that. More people are coming in. When one looks at the figures—and given the number of people who are attending—one can see that it is extremely difficult for this place to function sensibly. If we are to adjust the membership of the Lords after every election, unless there is a way of getting rid of people, there are will be more and more people. The number will rise exponentially.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

There is execution.

[Lord Dubs]

I thought that we were against the death penalty, but it is an interesting suggestion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

My Lords, I, too, start by congratulating my noble friends Baroness Taylor and Lord Grenfell on their co-chairmanship of the group, and indeed all members of the group, on their work. I should inform the House that I, too, was a member of the group, although I was nominated by the leader of my party. I am not altogether confident, if I were to put my name forward for election that my colleagues would have elected me, given my views on Lords reform. None the less, it was a great privilege to serve on the group and I think we have had a very good debate indeed. It may not be the last word on Lords reform, but it seems to me to set some sensible proposals on which we could make progress. I hope the Minister will be positive in responding. In fact, I hope he might invite my noble friend Lady Royall and the Convenor of the Cross Benches for a cross-party discussion on how we might take forward some of these proposals.

A number of noble Lords have said that many decent proposals have been put forward and, essentially, the Government of the day have rejected them because they have said substantive reform is round the corner and other proposals would get in the way of it. I am guilty of that as much as anyone. Like my noble friend Lord Whitty, when I was appointed in 1997 I remember telling my wife that I would be here for only three years because by then we would have had a substantive reform Bill. Here we are, many years later. Who, hand on heart, can say that substantive reform will be with us any time soon? In view of that, the argument for incremental reform becomes much more persuasive. I was grateful for the contribution made by my noble friend Lord Richard on that particular matter.

My own party is committed to democratic reform, but we also want to see progress in dealing with the issue of the ever increasing size of the House. I have no doubt that my colleagues’ report can enable us to make a great deal of progress. The noble Lord, Lord Stephen, with some late support from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, was a lonely champion of the 2012 Bill, in his fascinating tour round Labour Party manifestos. The problem with the 2012 Bill was that it simply did not deal with the big issue of the function and powers of this House if there were to be two elected Chambers. I have consistently voted in favour of Lords reform, but I do not think it can happen without explicit agreement about the respective powers of the two Chambers and how disputes are dealt with between two elected bodies in one Parliament. Those who have argued that that can be done say that the Lords will carry on as it currently does, but we do not use all our powers because we are not elected. If we have an elected House, it is bound to use those powers up to the limit. There you reach the problem.

I do not buy the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, for that reason. He accepts it may not be possible to go all the way, so he would add 120 elected Members to what we currently have. The problem with that is, the moment elected Members are added to this House, the dynamic changes. My noble friend Lord Rooker is right: there is no getting away from the fact that those who want substantive reform—I count myself among them—have to be very explicit about powers and functions.

It is good that there is general consensus about the size of the House. Not everyone agrees we should come down to 450; in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Norton, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, made points about that. However, it seems to me that there is a general consensus that we need to reduce the size of the House over time. This is where I should like to ask the Minister whether the Government are seriously proposing to make another long list of appointments. I can hardly believe that they will do so but I ask him to confirm, with a yes or no, whether that is the Government’s intention. Also, does he accept Meg Russell’s analysis that adopting the coalition’s formula of making the membership of this House dependent on the votes cast at the previous general election will lead to an existential increase in the size of this House and to it being completely unmanageable? My noble friend Lord Lipsey pointed out some of the consequences of what we have now.

I also challenge whether this House should be a mirror image of the House of Commons. That is essentially what would happen if you had a formula basing membership on votes cast at the last election.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord may not have noticed that the House of Commons is not entirely composed on a proportional basis because of our current electoral system. Therefore, the House of Lords would not entirely duplicate the House of Commons.

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath]

None the less, both Chambers would be elected based on the votes cast at the same election. I think that that would be a pretty odd formula on which to base two separate legislatures, and the more you examine it, the less it stands up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, when I first heard that we were to have another five-hour debate on Lords reform, my heart sank. After the long series of debates that we had on Lords reform in 2011-12, I had a nightmare that I had been condemned to wind up a Lords debate once a week. The person sitting opposite me was rather fuzzy in my nightmare but I fear that it was probably the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom I was responding to on each occasion.

However, this is a constructive, useful and modest report, which makes a number of, on the whole, rather conservative proposals. I note that the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, said that it is a report to, and not from, the Labour Party. Yesterday, I looked at the speech that Stephen Twigg had made to the Electoral Reform Society last month. On Lords reform, he said:

“What I can say is this: Labour is committed to a democratic second-chamber. Ed Miliband has shown that he is a leader with a radical zeal—and this will be true for Lords reform”.

I think that this report is a little bit like Talleyrand’s remark, “Pas trop de zèle”.

Stephen Twigg also said in his interesting speech that one problem with the Lords as currently constructed is that more than 40% of the Peers who regularly attend the House are based in London or the south-east, compared with some 2% in the West Midlands and some 4% in Yorkshire. We all recognise that the Lords, as currently constituted, has a range of problems and that it does not, as the report says, reflect in very many ways the diversity of the United Kingdom. We also recognise, as the noble Lord, Lord Gordon, remarked, that that is partly because it is so much cheaper and more convenient if one is based in London. Therefore, there is an incentive to move to London once appointed.

I had the great advantage of having been offered a post in the London School of Economics three months before my party leader suggested that he might nominate me for the Lords. It was therefore possible to combine a career with membership of the House of Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Sewel, was appointed on the same day as me. He was vice-principal of the University of Aberdeen and found arranging his life to fit in with Lords business a little more difficult than I did.

The report states that,

“reform of the Lords is not an issue that can be tackled in isolation from other constitutional issues”.

I strongly agree with that, and a number of noble Lords said it in this debate. Before commenting on the specific proposals, I shall address some of the broader contexts of constitutional change within the United Kingdom. The other day, a number of us had a useful debate in the Moses Room on exactly that issue. I hope that I will not embarrass the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, if I tell him that my opinion of his expertise on constitutional issues continues to rise every time I hear him speak. That will do him no good at all with his colleagues, but never mind.

A new all-party group chaired by my noble friend Lord Purvis, and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, is looking at the implications of devolution for the overall constitution. That is exactly the sort of thing we all need to address and will have to address after the Scottish referendum when, as we hope, the Scots vote against independence but expect further devolution, as the Silk commission promises the Welsh—and indeed, there are questions on Northern Ireland.

The English question has come up a number of times in this House. I regard the English question as partly the London question and a question for the whole of the United Kingdom. How do we counterbalance the economic, political and social dominance of London? If you do your politics in Yorkshire, you are acutely aware that the north of England loses out very heavily from the extent to which the devolved Parliaments have begun to establish their independent voice. I go to meetings inside government in which I hear the Scottish dimension, the Northern Irish dimension and the Welsh dimension, but no one mentions the Yorkshire, north-western or south-western dimensions. That is a problem which we all face and which we all have to address.

I hope that all noble Lords will have noted the Government’s various proposals on city deals and the attempts being made, starting with Manchester and following on with Leeds and others, to devolve and decentralise to the major city regions within England financial powers and powers over economic growth. If that is carried through, that would begin to resolve some parts of the English question. Furthermore, it would carry further implications for the governance of the United Kingdom. If the centralisation of England is reduced, we will need fewer departments and fewer civil servants in London. We may then perhaps need fewer Ministers in Parliament. Therefore, perhaps there would be a House of Commons that sees its job less as preparing for service in government and perhaps a little more as checking and controlling the Executive.

We are now engaged on a whole set of questions. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act also has implications. There have been some rather interesting reports from parliamentary committees and from the Institute for Government on how we might use the last year of government to prepare for the next Session. It could be along the lines already adopted on national security strategy where we have agreed—the previous Labour Government set this out—that each new Government should define a national security strategy on the basis of work conducted in the last year of the previous Parliament.

The Institute for Government’s report suggests that in the last year of a Parliament, we should not rush through great masses of additional legislation, as I recall the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, demanding that we do, but that we should discuss some of the dilemmas that whoever is elected will have to face—for example, the rising costs of the National Health Service and how it is funded and some of the other huge questions that will face any Government—and look therefore at a scrutinising role.

Public disengagement was mentioned in the report and by the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, in her opening speech, as well as by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. When I read the Hansard Society’s recent Audit of Political Engagement I was shocked that only 24% of 18 to 25 year-olds think that politics has any relevance to them.

[Lord Richard]

The noble Lord is describing a constitutional process that clearly will be lengthy. The agenda he has given to the Constitution Committee is long. It will take a lot of examination and discussion. There will be a lot of evidence and thinking. Does he really think that House of Lords reform should wait until all that is done?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have in my notes that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Richard, that further progress in Lords reform does not have to wait for the conclusions of any constitutional convention. However, I would just make the point that we are moving into a situation where various dimensions of British politics are changing, and we need to discuss how they relate to each other.

Public engagement very much concerns us. The decline in the reputation of the House of Commons should also concern us. I love listening to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. He is a romantic for the House of Commons as it should be, and he was one of the best House of Commons men that we had. I fear that the new generation does not produce as many House of Commons men who are as good as he was.

We have the decline of the two-party system and of parties as such. All political parties now are small compared with where we were some 20 years ago. It is quite possible that the outcome of this coming election, as has been suggested, will not be a two or three-party system but a four or five-party system. With the Northern Irish and Scottish parties, there are already multiple parties in the House of Commons. We could have an awkward situation after the next election in which Labour emerges with the most seats and the Conservatives emerge with the most votes, and no two parties alone would be able to form a majority. That is getting into very uncharted territory as to how we would then proceed. I read the New Statesman and listen to Labour people talking about a Labour mandate and how Labour could form a minority Government with a clear mandate. A mandate on, say, 33% of a 60% turnout is not exactly clear.

The case for a commission or convention is out there. There was an excellent report by the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee last year which suggested that the Government have no view on this issue at present. However, personally and as a Minister, this is a question that we ought to be debating in the last year of this Parliament. I welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and others are doing. It is one that we all need to consider because we need to look at how all of this runs together.

Recommendation 1 of this proposal is that we need to think about a constitutional commission or convention. There is not time within the next three months or even nine months to define exactly what we want, but it is precisely the sort of thing to which we might return in future debates between now and the election.

On Lords reform, we have been here for a long time. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, after all, chaired the Joint Committee and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, reminded us that he was on the Wakeham commission. The Government remain committed to comprehensive reform, as indeed does the Labour Party officially. The noble Lord, Lord Stephen, remarked that the 2012 Bill, criticised sharply from the Labour Benches, closely followed Jack Straw’s White Paper.

The Byles/Steel Act has now introduced some useful interim reforms, and if we accept the proposals in this report as interim and not intended to avoid more comprehensive reform, there are a number of useful and constructive proposals for the interim, some of which are familiar and some of which are relatively new. Quite a number of them can be agreed by this House without requiring further legislation through the normal procedures and usual channels. We are of course open to further discussion on that. On the proposals in the report—

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

Since the Minister has been good enough to acknowledge that these proposals could be brought forward and agreed by the House without the need for legislation, would he be prepared to say whether the Government would support such a move?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The House has a structure of committees that regularly discuss House procedures. I am not able to give any commitment. We have already discussed within this Parliament the question of the role of the Lord Speaker, for example, and the House decided at that point that it did not wish to move further. It is unlikely between now and the next election that major changes will be agreed and made, but it is certainly quite appropriate that further discussions should continue.

On the question of the size of the House, the figure of 450 Members suggested in this report was in the Government’s Bill. In the long run, we might also have a smaller House of Commons if more power is devolved to the regions and the nations. Indeed, the Conservative proposals that fell saw a House of Commons of 600 rather than 650. How to move from here to there is of course the most difficult issue. Do we go for an age limit or for a time limit—or, as the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, suggested, a post-election weeding out within each group, which would be a wonderful series of bloodlettings within each of the two groups?

A member of the Supreme Court talked to me some months ago about the statutory age of senility. It is a wonderful concept which, for judges, is slowly being reduced from 75 to 70. The suggestion is made here for the Lords’ statutory age of senility to be 80. I realised the last time we debated this that I will hit 25 years of service in this House within a couple of months of reaching the age of 80—and that, clearly, is the point at which I should do what Lord Grenfell did so gracefully and retire. We should all accept that we cannot move from where we are to where we would like to be without a number of us retiring. The suggestion that I think I got from the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that those of us who are here already should somehow be exempt from the changes, is not possible.

The reason I will not give any commitment about future lists, although I am not aware of any list at the present, is that we need to keep renewing and refreshing the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Gordon of Strathblane, said, experience and expertise go stale. When I joined the House, it had an average age of 67. It now has an average age of 70—I have just passed it. It has 139 Members over the age of 80 and only 131 under 60. That House is a little difficult to defend.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Does the Minister not accept that most people think that the major motive of Governments in having extra lists is that they will have a net increase in their number here. The idea that it is motivated by renewal of the House is not how the dark arts of 10 Downing Street operate.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not an expert on the dark arts of Downing Street—perhaps the noble Lord is. I simply stress that the question of age balance is important, and the idea of a House that stops recruiting new Members and simply grows older and older relatively gracefully is not one that we would accept or recognise.

[The Earl of Sandwich (CB)]

I am grateful to the Minister. He rather dismissed the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Norton, but does it not cope with the problem of topping up after the election? He has not addressed that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is one way of addressing the question of topping up after the election. We also have to grasp the question of retirement. It was intended, when the retirement proposals came in, that a larger number of Peers would take the option of retirement and follow the excellent example of Lord Grenfell in that respect, but that has not actually transpired so far.

There were a number of recommendations in the report about the appointments process. I note that the appointments process will remain centralised and largely agreed by party leaders, although that is itself a question. The Bill that the Government put forward proposed to make the House of Lords Appointments Commission a statutory commission and, in any comprehensive reform, that would happen. The question of political balance is one of the most difficult ones. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, that if UKIP establishes itself as a significant party in British politics, it would of course be appropriate to have a number of UKIP Members in this House. He might have wished to add that given the level of attendance of the current UKIP Members, both here and in the European Parliament, we might not notice the difference. We already have a Green Member of the Lords, which recognises that British politics is shifting. That is also part of what is appropriate to reflect the changing political balance.

The need to reflect diversity across the UK is a tremendous problem, which election on a regional basis would resolve, as of course would indirect election. I am struck by the number of Peers who raised the question of indirect election in this debate, as it has not received very much attention until recently. The noble Lords, Lord Foulkes and Lord Trimble, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby and other noble Lords mentioned it. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, talked about it having an occupational or functional basis—a sort of guild socialist approach. The Cross Benches, after all, are well organised: the academies, in particular the medics, always put forward their members. Incidentally, when it comes to lobbies, I have to say to right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby that the biggest lobby in this House is the academic lobby—I hope he has noticed that I used to be part of it myself.

As to working Peers, part of the reason that attendance has risen in recent years is because one is asked, before one comes in, whether one is prepared to work hard. However, those of us who were appointed when we still needed to earn our pensions would like to go on working until we have finished earning them, so the Government do not intend to produce a high bar of the sort that is proposed here. It is a matter of judgment the extent to which Members should be full-time or part-time but, again, if we want Members under the age of 60 who still have children to bring up and careers to finish, we have to consider how much we insist on their attending all the time.

The House can decide to end the wearing of robes. I have much sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, that it would be a little more radical to suggest that we might end the use of titles, but that would be a more deliberative step.

Do we need a referendum on Lords reform? The Government’s view is that, since each of the major parties had it in their manifesto last time, it was a clear consensual commitment and a referendum is therefore not necessary. A number of procedural reforms were proposed in the report which, as I have already said—

[Lord Cormack]

To be entirely fair, would my noble friend acknowledge that the Labour Party did have a commitment to a referendum in their manifesto?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I have to admit that I do not recall whether the party had a commitment to a referendum on Lords reform. If it did, that is fine.

I will wind this multifaceted debate up as quickly as I can. The House of Lords has changed a great deal over the past 20 years. Certainly, since I came in, in 1996, we have become a much more effective revising Chamber and a much busier Chamber. We have become the area through which the lobbies outside know that they can get things. Figures were quoted about the number of government defeats, although my figures do not entirely agree with those of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and we might perhaps exchange ideas outside the Chamber. As a Minister taking Bills through, I am conscious that we are always saying to Commons Ministers, “You won’t get that through the Lords unless …”. As we all know, a great deal of what happens in the Lords is about bargaining and about the Government bringing back proposals to meet criticisms that have been made.

Let us treat this as a final-year-of-Parliament debate. There is not time for legislation before the general election but ideas such as those produced can feed into the thinking of the next Government—whoever they may be—and perhaps even build a consensus across the parties on the way forward.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The Minister has not addressed directly the suggestion put forward by my noble friend Lord Hunt that the Leader of the House might get together with the Leader of the Opposition and the Convenor of the Cross Benches to discuss the way forward. That seems a very sensible suggestion and it would be helpful if the Minister could indicate assent to that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am sure that the Leader of the House would be very happy to meet, as he regularly does, the leaders of the other groups in the House, and that this could be part of an informal, or perhaps a more formal, conversation.

I end by simply reminding the House—in particular the noble Lord, Lord Richard, whom I remember laughing as I said it—that in answer to a rather sharp question some time ago on why the Church of England had not got around to appointing women bishops, I suggested that the Church of England might well appoint its first woman bishop before we achieved the next significant stage of House of Lords reform. I think it is quite possible that we shall have half a Bench of women bishops here before we achieve the next stage of House of Lords reform, but let us keep going and hope to achieve it soon.

Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft regulations laid before the House on 6 May be approved.

Relevant document: 1st Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments. Considered in Grand Committee on Monday 16 June.

Motion agreed.

Scotland: Independence

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I metaphorically tore up my speech before I started. Time is short. This has been a helpful debate and has raised the sort of questions that we will all have to consider over the next 90 days—and well beyond.

We need to remember just how far we have moved. I say that as someone who first joined the Liberal Party machinery of government panel. I was a graduate student in 1965 and we were talking about devolution and regional government. I remember that in 1974 my wife and I, as academics, were invited into the Treasury Constitution Unit that had just been established. Several of the senior officials there could not understand how you could manage a national economy if you allowed any autonomy whatever in financial terms. My wife and I tried to say, “Yes, but in Germany they do it this way, as they do in the United States and Canada”. The officials still could not understand. We have moved a long way already. Think how far we have gone since the Maclennan-Cook discussions of 1996 and 1997; it is some considerable distance.

We are, however, left with the tremendous problem of the democratic deficit in England and its highly centralised pattern of government. We should all recognise that part of that problem is the dominance of London, economically as well as politically. We must all take that economic dominance into account in considering the future of the United Kingdom because London continues to generate an enormous amount of wealth, which needs equitably to be shared around the regions and nations. My noble friend Lord Purvis talks about fiscal federalism, which is about hard bargaining or “finance ausgleich”—who gets what share and how much shall be distributed. That is at the core of Finanzausgleich, which is much better organised than the disorganised US federalism. Incidentally, in established federal systems—as the noble Lord suggested—you can never say that we have reached the end of the journey. Federal politics is about a constant battle between state rights and federal powers. A pull and push in each direction is normal politics—just as in the European Union we have had a constant and continuing battle between those who say that we have to do things at the European level and those who say, “No, we don’t; we have to have it at the nation-state level”. That is what international, domestic and local politics necessarily provide.

The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, quoted Margo MacDonald, who said that we should all work together for the good of Scotland. I suggest that we should work for the good of the UK, not just Scotland. That is post the Scottish referendum; if, as we all hope, the result is no, we need to address this question. Between now and then, no one could cook up a proposal for a conference for a new union, or constitutional convention that could be agreed or accepted at least half-heartedly by the Mail and the Telegraph. We can raise the question—I encourage all noble Lords to do so: where do we go after September? It raises fundamental questions about the future of the kingdom, including, as the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, said, the role of the second Chamber of what in some ways then becomes the federal Parliament.

It may well be that at that stage we move towards some sort of constitutional convention. We have to recognise that, against the cynicism of much of the national media and the disengagement of much of our national public, it will be quite a job for all of us as politicians to carry the public with us when we say that a more fundamental look at the balance of our political life nationally, regionally, locally and internationally is needed. After all, the future of the United Kingdom in the European Union is part of the picture. The arguments made by English nationalists for leaving the European Union are not entirely dissimilar from the arguments that Scottish nationalists make for leaving the United Kingdom. Therefore part of what those of us who care about good governance have to do is to link all these different levels together.

As somebody who accepted a job at Manchester University rather than Edinburgh University when I was 26, and therefore have spent my adult life in the north of England rather than in Scotland, I am concerned about the marginalisation of the north of England. I am told that a number of senior officials in local authorities in England have been saying to their Scottish counterparts: “Don’t leave us; we need you. We need you to help us to counterbalance the dominance of London and the south-east.” That is a very important part of this. As one of the relatively small number of people in this Chamber who represent, in a sense, the north of England, I am constantly struck by the assumption that when something happens in London it is important, when something happens in Edinburgh or Cardiff, well we notice it a bit, and when it happens in Bradford, Leeds or Newcastle we are not quite sure what it was, but besides we certainly did not report it, even in what used to be called the Manchester Guardian.

Birmingham is a local authority with a population larger than that of Northern Ireland and roughly comparable to that of Wales. This morning I heard on the “Today” programme a former Minister say that one could not trust Birmingham to run its own schools. There is a mindset inside the Westminster bubble which has accepted that perhaps one can now allow the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish—to a certain extent—to run their own affairs, but one certainly could not allow Manchester or Leeds to do so.

The City Deals are at long last beginning to push power back to what might become the English regions. Part of the conversation we all need to have after September is what we mean by the English regions and whether they will be city regions or something different, and how far one can allow Cornwall to split off from the south-west because we all know that all good Cornishmen hate Bristol. What do we do about the south-east as a whole, which, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, remarked, is so dominant a part in population and wealth terms of our United Kingdom? How do we ensure that the south-east continues to share its wealth with the rest of the country? The whole of the country, including Scotland, would benefit from the sharing of that wealth; it has to be done. Where do we move on that? We move perhaps towards the discussion of a constitutional convention. All parties need to consider to what extent they put that in their manifestos. They will then have to define what they mean by it. Then, of course, we cannot move towards a constitutional convention unless there is some consensus on it. It has to be cross-party and beyond party if it is to be successful.

Over the centuries the British constitution has been built in a series of fits of absence of mind and occasional crises. We are discussing now something which might be a little more rational and a little more long-sighted—it is very un-English in this respect—but we should go for it. The Government have no policy on this and intend to have no policy between now and the election. However, it is precisely the sort of thing that others ought to be floating if it is felt that we need to think in the round about how the substantial changes in the structure of government in the United Kingdom over the past 20 years have taken us to a point where we need to reconsider some of these fundamentals.

I would add—I say this personally, not as a Minister—that the role of the House of Commons, as such, is also a very important part of this. I have found in 18 years in the House of Lords that the House of Commons leaves more and more legislative scrutiny to the second Chamber, while the first Chamber does, in many ways, less and less.

Therefore, there are very some large issues which we have to consider. We have to attack the public scepticism about democratic politics as a whole. That is also part of this. We have to revive a degree of respect in regional government, regional autonomy and local government. I had not realised how sharp a problem that is in Scotland as well as in England. Then we need to work together across the parties and beyond in order to reshape something.

I have learnt over the past three years that there are many, particularly on the Opposition Benches in the House, who regard compromise and consensus as almost dirty words that are linked to “coalition”. Having been in coalition for four years, I would defend the concept of compromise and consensus in coalition if we are to address these fundamental issues, something the British have been pretty bad at doing most of the time. We are going to have to build a broad coalition of interested parties from all the regions of England, from the other three nations of the United Kingdom and from civil society as well as all parties, in order to promote the good governance that we all want.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock]

The Minister has not been supported by any civil servants in the debate and yet he has done a brilliant job. However, I am a bit suspicious when Whitehall does not turn up. That is because my experience over the past few months is that Whitehall seems to be ignoring this issue. Perhaps I may ask the Minister how he is going to feed the ideas that have been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, and the questions raised by my noble friend Lord Kennedy, into the Whitehall machine. It is important not only that we have the sympathy of the Minister but that we have the Whitehall machine behind him as well.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for that barbed compliment. Of course it is purely accidental that I have made a good speech without officials being present. I can assure him that I meet the officials fairly regularly and that I meet my Conservative colleagues fairly regularly. I also talk to Labour colleagues fairly regularly. This is one of those areas where we all share an interest in raising various broad matters. It means that people like the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and others should be writing to the newspapers and appearing on radio and television programmes to discuss them. We have at last reached the point where people understand that there is going to be a Scottish referendum, and that is progress. Three months ago you hardly saw any mention of it in the London press. We can now begin to talk about what is to happen after September, and that takes us further.

Those of us who are interested in successful decentralisation within England, which is part of what the coalition Government are now trying to do with the City Deals, want to take them further and link them into the devolution-plus which follows in Scotland, the implementation of the report of the Silk commission for Wales and similar developments in Northern Ireland. That is a very large agenda, and it is not something that the British have been good at handling. The sad history of attempting to discuss House of Lords reform over the past 25 years and more shows how bad we are at considering constitutional reform in a calm way. Let us approach this in a different manner. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Purvis, that as far as I am concerned, I along with many of my Conservative colleagues recognise that after Scottish devolution we will have to move. That is what the three parties in Scotland have just committed themselves to, and that is how we will go forward. I note the point about entrenchment; it is not something that the British constitution has done before. I note the point about a changed role for the Treasury and I note the argument that we need a bigger overview in some form of the structure of the British constitution.

This is a debate that will continue and I trust that all noble Lords will be active participants in it, but this is the point at which, without my officials, I should stop and thank everyone for a very constructive debate.

Committee adjourned at 6.03 pm.

Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 16th June 2014 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the Grand Committee do consider the Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014.

Relevant document: 1st Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this is another of a long series of statutory instruments as we move from household electoral registration to individual registration. I emphasise that throughout this process our overriding aim is to make sure that as many people as possible are included on the register by as many different groups as possible.

I am happy to tell noble Lords that the implementation of individual electoral registration started successfully on 10 June in England and Wales and will start as planned in Scotland in September. For the first time ever, people can apply online to register to vote; and all 348 English and Welsh local authorities are connected to the IER digital service. Work continues and we are on track to connect Scottish authorities for the September start in Scotland. I am told that in the first five days, by last Friday, some 10,000 had registered online to vote. For the first week, that seems to be a good start. I am sure that the Committee will be pleased that this draft instrument is before it today.

During discussions with political parties to outline plans for the implementation of IER, political parties asked that at the end of the 2014 canvass they be given a specific new list of those electors on the register who have been carried forward and those who are not yet confirmed or registered under IER. I again remind noble Lords that we hope to reach some 70% to 75% confirmation through data sharing. We are now at between 80% and 85%—80% with national data sharing and 85% with local data sharing—so we are doing better than we initially thought, although we of course want to make sure that as many as we humanly can reach are included in the new list.

The full electoral register, which is available to certain people and organisations, such as political parties, will remain as it is now. It will not indicate whether an entry is as a result of a person making a new IER application, having been confirmed or being carried forward—hence the need for these regulations. They will allow registered political parties, or a person nominated by them, to request IER-related information about which entries on the electoral register are IER entries and therefore by implication which ones are not. Such applications can be made once, from 1 January to 27 February 2015 in England and Wales, and from 2 March to 10 April 2015 in Scotland. Electors who have an anonymous entry, a declaration of local connection, a service declaration or an overseas elector’s declaration will not be included in this information, as generally they do not live where they are registered. Anonymous electors are also excluded, for security reasons.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I have only a very few comments to make on these regulations. As they stand, we support them because they will allow political parties to assist in promoting IER. One general point that I make every time that I stand at the Dispatch Box in the main Chamber is my concern about the people who are not registered to vote—at least 6 million people. Nothing I see coming from the Government ever deals with that. The Minister gave a figure of 85%, up from 75%. Is that 85% of the people who are presently registered, so that even more than 6 million people will not be registered? I want to hear more from the Government about what they will do about those people, because I do not see much for them at all.

I do not share the optimism expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, about how it is all going so well. The situation has certainly improved but I am also very well aware that there were some serious problems at the start. I know that from my membership of the Electoral Commission and elsewhere, so things have improved. Whatever Government are in power after next year will have to think very carefully about how to introduce this. If it is not perfectly right, we will have to extend the period to allow people to come on to the register, because it is really important that we allow our citizens to get registered properly. If there is a risk of more people being left out, it is not good practice.

Could the Minister also tell us a little more about the thinking of the Electoral Commission on how we are getting on with this process? I am very pleased that the Government have involved political parties, as they are crucial to getting this right, but I would like to know a bit more about the attitude of the Electoral Commission to the role of political parties.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his comments, but I am not sure that I can say with confidence what the attitude of the Electoral Commission is to political parties. They play a very obvious and important part in all of this. I am informed that a minor political party is something like the rate payers’ association in a local authority, the south Somerset independents, or whatever. Anything else that is nationwide is a national political party. Political parties have a very important role to play in democracy. One thing that I deeply regret about the current state of British democracy is that the membership of all major political parties has fallen. That worries all of us, and we all wish to turn it back.

We recognise that there are a number of people who are not on the register, and the Electoral Commission’s research demonstrates that the strongest reason for that is that people want nothing to do with politics and not much to do with the state if they can avoid it—apart from receiving benefits in a number of instances. We have a severe problem of political alienation. When I saw the latest audit of political engagement produced by the Hansard Society, which has only 24% of citizens between the ages of 18 and 25 thinking that politics has any useful connection with their own lives, that is a real problem for all of us. It suggests that we have to work particularly hard at getting young people to re-engage with politics.

[Lord Maxton]

Is not one of the reasons—I emphasise only one of the reasons—is that young people in particular see politics as somehow divorced from the trends and the movement of technology in our country? That is why they have switched off from it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

That is one of the reasons why we hope that online voting will make it more attractive to them. I also think there is a case for encouraging more activity by all parties and by all Members of both Houses of Parliament, on a cross-party basis, to make sure that as we approach the next election young people are re-energised to take part in politics because they are, on the whole, switched off. We have a very large problem here, but there are a number of things that we can do about it. I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, will be going out to many schools across his patch to energise them. I am told that the pick-up among 16 year-olds in schools in Scotland has been good and that registration is much higher than expected. That is partly because something is coming up which immediately involves them.

On ID cards, I look forward to many continuing conversations with the noble Lord, Lord Maxton. We had a Question this afternoon on digital information, digital sharing and digital privacy. The Government intend to publish a White Paper before the end of this year with clauses for a draft Bill on data sharing and data privacy. There are some very large issues here which all of us who remember the ID cards debate are scarred by. The intention of the White Paper will be precisely to try to float a more informed debate about the trade-offs between privacy and data sharing and how we address that. We have to change the legislation in this area because different departments have different legal frameworks for the collection, use and sharing of information. That is therefore a question to which we will return.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, the transition timetable does allow for the decision on whether to carry on or to delay has to be taken by the incoming Government and Parliament. These are all failsafes to make sure that we have the maximum amount of confidence by all concerned in the transition to individual electoral registration. I hope I have managed to answer all the questions.

I have become more and more committed to a successful transition. It was something that the previous Government set out on. We recognise that there are bound to be a number of problems, but so far the transition has gone much better than some of us were initially confident about, but nevertheless we have some way to go. I again flag the problems of making sure that attainers—the rising 18 year-olds—are fully on the register. We will be returning with further instruments as we go forward just to make sure that we utilise every single possibility to maximise registration.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

We seem to be raising the same points again and again. One day I would like the Minister to say from the Dispatch Box that the Government are determined to have fewer people not registered under IER than were not registered before so we are going to bring in the AEA and council leaders and work with them to make sure that it happens because with all the investment and changes, if we end up with 7 million or 8 million people not registered to vote, that would be terrible. We must get to a situation where we have fewer people not registered to vote. While some people may not want to be registered, I do not believe for a moment that all of those 6 million people out there are saying that they do not want to be on the register. I think it is about how we engage with people at local authority level, at the government level and at all levels, and that includes the political parties. I hope that when the Minister brings the instruments to us over the next few weeks and months, he will be able to give us some good news on the lines that I have outlined.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I had hoped that I was bringing good news. Of course political parties have a significant contribution to make to this. We know who the vulnerable groups are. They are young people, people who move regularly, people in private rented accommodation and people who are out of a job. They are the groups who are least likely to be registered. People like me who have been living in the same house for a long time are almost always on the register. We have to concentrate on the vulnerable groups as well as we can. I am happy to say that evidence from the National Citizen Service courses—something which our Conservative colleagues in government are enormously enthusiastically about, but I must admit I was a little sceptical at the outset—appears to show that the 80,000 15, 16 and 17 year-olds who have taken part in NCS courses are much more enthused because they think they know how to participate in local communities and therefore also how to register to vote. It is a range of activities of that sort that we all have to be engaged in. I stress again that the Government cannot do it all and that civil society has to help. The Government have already provided some £4.2 million to various civil society groups for this effort. We all need to work together. I very much hope—as I know the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, does—that that the outcome is that some of those 6 million people who we are missing will register in the transition and that we will gain rather than lose as we make that transition.

Motion agreed.

Iran: Human Rights

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they have taken to co-ordinate international representations about the execution of Mr Gholamreza Khossravi Savadjani, a political prisoner in Iran’s Evin Prison, and about the use of capital punishment and the human rights situation in Iran.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we are aware of the execution of Gholamreza Khossravi on 1 June this year. The right to life is a fundamental human right and the UK opposes the use of the death penalty in all circumstances. The UK continues to call on the Iranian Government to implement a moratorium on the death penalty and to guarantee the rights and freedoms of all Iranians.

[Lord Maginnis of Drumglass (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his Answer. It is quite disappointing in so far as what seems to dominate is the relationship that his Government want to have with Mr Rouhani. Will he acknowledge that since President Rouhani was elected there have been more than 550 executions? They are running now at the rate of two a day. The influence of Rouhani across the frontier in Iraq has led to killings running at the rate of about 1,000 a month with 4,000 Iraqis being injured. All in all, since we intervened in Iraq not so many years ago, do we not have a responsibility to Iraq and Iran to make amends by standing up and publicly and internationally exposing the injustice to the people we left behind?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think the noble Lord’s last remark is a reference to the PMOI. I recognise that it is a linked issue. The UN rapporteur’s most recent report on human rights in Iran demonstrates that human rights in Iran continue to be awful and that Iran is the second most frequent executor of prisoners in the world after China and indeed, in terms of size of population, the largest. We have no illusions on the quality of prison life, the use of torture or the absence of an adequate rule of law within Iran. Nevertheless, Iran is a complex political structure. It is not as simple a dictatorship as some of the states with which we have to deal. We think it is worth while pursuing an opening with the new president, and we are cautiously and carefully negotiating to see what is possible. The noble Lord shakes his head, but I think we have learnt from our experience in Iraq that blundering into a country with a large army and overthrowing the regime does not always lead to a much better outcome. Evolution is better than revolution.

[Lord Eden of Winton (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend recollect that when the present president was elected, there was widespread expectation that he would introduce a more humane and moderate regime in Iran? In the light of the disappointments—to put it mildly—which have since been evidenced in that country, what recent discussions have Her Majesty’s Government had with the Government of the United States of America who share jointly with us some responsibility for what is going on?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have close and continuing discussions with the United States on Iran, as on other Middle Eastern questions. I am conscious that one of my colleagues was talking to his American opposite number yesterday. We deal with many states across the world whose record on human rights is imperfect, if not awful. Nevertheless, we have to deal with them and try our best to improve their record.

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, will my noble friend bring some pressure to bear on the Iranian regime to ensure that the UN special rapporteur, Mr Ahmed Shaheed, is admitted and granted a visa so that he can examine precisely what is going on in some of the penal establishments in Iran?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are doing so and recognise that that is an enormous problem. That issue was flagged in his most recent report.

[Baroness Afshar (CB)]

My Lords, it is important to emphasise that Islam has accepted all preceding religions and has absolutely denounced killing. Therefore, what they are doing in Iran is un-Islamic and abhorrent, as is the case in Saudi Arabia and many other countries. For a country that is ruling in the name of a religion, it is crucial to point out in the discussions that what they are doing does not adhere to the faith that they claim to support.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely agree with that. We have to remember that there is something of a civil society in Iran, in spite of the current regime. Iran has an ancient civilisation and much pride in that ancient civilisation. The persecution of minorities—both religious minorities such as the Baha’i and ethnic minorities such as the Ahwazi Arabs—is also a stain on the current Iranian regime. We know that there are many people in Tehran and elsewhere who likewise disapprove of that. We continue to make our case.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, has the Minister had a chance to look at the letter sent to him at the Foreign Office by his noble friend Lord Carlile of Berriew last weekend? It concerns not just the death of Mr Savadjani, but a number of members of the Iranian resistance who are currently scheduled for execution. In the light of what the Minister has just said about the plight of the Baha’is, would he like to make some further comment about the execution of Baha’i believers in Iran?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we have condemned extremely strongly the persecution of the Baha’i. There are still, as the noble Lord knows, a large number in prison. I have not seen my noble friend Lord Carlile’s letter; I will look at it and will write to the noble Lord.

European Union: Reform

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what are their specific objectives for the reform of the European Union.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the UK’s chief objective is to reform the European Union so that it is more competitive, flexible and democratically accountable, and works fairly for those both within and without the eurozone. As Her Majesty said at the State Opening of Parliament, the Government are working to promote these reforms together with other Governments, including strengthening the roles of the national parliaments of member states in the functioning of the EU.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, that is a very nebulous and unspecific response. Will the Government be guided in these negotiations by an honest and evidence-based assessment of the national interest? If so, is it not the case that such an assessment might well throw up opportunities for repatriating powers but equally well throw up areas where it would be better in the national interest for more powers to be concentrated or given to the Union at the Union level? Will the Government remain entirely pragmatic and open-minded about that or will they reject out of hand, or shy away from, conclusions of that kind?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for his complimentary response, as usual. I merely emphasise that reform is a process. We are negotiating with other like-minded Governments. I am sure that the noble Lord has seen the reports from the Dutch and Danish Governments on EU reform. As you know, the Prime Minister is in Sweden talking with his Dutch, Swedish and German counterparts today about a reform agenda. We are therefore working with others to change the EU so that it faces in the sort of direction that we need. Of course we are not spelling out exactly what we would want and what we will say no to unless we are given everything we want, because that would lock us into the sort of negotiation that would be one against 27 rather than a collective multilateral negotiation, which is what we need.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (LD)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the danger that the noble Lord, Lord Davies, is tempting us into with regard to specifics is the drawing up of wish lists and red lines that would automatically lead to Brexit should they be unfulfilled, and that the more pragmatic approach that my noble friend talks about is to see what the composition of the institutions looks like, to see what happens after May 2015 in this country and then to devise a negotiating strategy in pursuit of those practicalities?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, if one looks back to the Prime Minister’s Bloomberg speech, now over a year ago, it is clear that we have already been making progress on reform. We have seen the quite remarkable reform of the common fisheries policy, for which we have been working for years, and a budgetary agreement that for the first time reduces the EU budget in real terms. Reform, I repeat, is a process in which we work with other like-minded Governments, and on which we are already making progress.

[Lord Kinnock (Lab)]

The Minister is absolutely right to try, as he said, to avoid locking in Britain’s position in the EU because of the way in which that would compromise the possibilities of negotiation and influence. That being the case, and I entirely agree with him, why was the Prime Minister foolish enough to declare his position regarding Mr Juncker way before there was any possibility of a context, thus surrendering the kind of influence that is essential on the top Commission job?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, this question was addressed yesterday in the House, and I am very happy to say that the Labour Party has expressed its agreement with the British Government’s position on it.

[Lord Garel-Jones (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the principle of subsidiarity, which is already enshrined in the treaty and is supposed to ensure that the Union shall not act in areas where the member states can do so, whether at government or regional level, has in many ways been neutered by the bureaucratic procedures built around it—for example, the green card system? Will he give assurances that Her Majesty’s Government will try to convert the green card system into a red card system?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, green cards, yellow cards and red cards are all floating around at the moment. The only one that is in the Lisbon treaty is the yellow card; the green and red card proposals are on the table and I think that they are mentioned in the House of Lords EU Committee report. With regard to subsidiarity, this is acquis—it is agreed. It is what the Dutch Government were talking about; the phrase in their report, as I recall, is, “European where necessary, national where possible”. That is something that the Danes, Swedes and a number of others agree on. The new Italian Prime Minister talked in terms that my own party leader, the Deputy Prime Minister, used many years ago when he was an MEP: “Better Europe, not more Europe”.

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords, we all agree that the European Union needs reform. However, the Prime Minister seems reluctant, maybe for internal party reasons—of course I exclude the Minister from those internal party reasons—to set out any specific reforms that Her Majesty’s Government want to see, in marked contrast, if I may say so, to my party, which has set out specific proposals. Will the Minister assure the House that the Prime Minister will set out specific proposals in time for discussion at the next EU Council meeting on 26 June?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am very sorry that I have missed the specific Labour proposals; I look forward to receiving them from the noble Lord. The Prime Minister has made it quite clear that in terms of a stronger role for national parliaments, a much clearer definition of the areas that the Commission should be leading on and those where it should be much more cautious, a number of other Governments have already agreed that those are the directions in which we should now travel. However, every week Ministers from Britain are going to different European Councils of Ministers in which negotiations of this sort are under way. Actually spelling out a checklist, all of which had to be achieved or we would leave, would be absolutely the wrong way forward. In this respect I am absolutely at one with the Prime Minister.

Coalition Government: Constitution Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a serious and worthwhile debate. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, both for this report and for her chairmanship of the committee. I have had the nervous privilege of appearing before it on one or two occasions, and I have always been asked extremely sharp questions.

I must apologise to the House that the noble Baroness has not yet received a governmental response. We had hoped that it would be ready before this debate. I will take back to the Cabinet Office the strong views expressed in this debate, and I will do my utmost to ensure that we have it available for the next chance that the House will have to debate constitutional issues, which I think will be the last day of the Queen’s Speech debate. I may not be able to deliver on that—I am conscious that in government at present the number of people who have to agree something of this significance is rather larger than it would be in a single-party Government; that is of course part of the problem of coalition government—but I will do my best.

Since the committee published its report in February, the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place and the Institute for Government have both published reports on the final year of a fixed-term Parliament, which I have also read, as no doubt have many others who have contributed to this debate. The reports also provide some very useful information—in the Institute for Government’s case, resting on extensive interviews with civil servants—about what we may need to think about over the next 12 months, and indeed over the next few months, in order to prepare for the final months of this fixed-term Parliament.

There have been some elements of knockabout politics in this debate and certainly some elements of nostalgia for a firm two-party system; I also felt that there was such nostalgia in a great deal of evidence given to the committee. The rose-tinted spectacles that the noble Lord, Lord Donoughue, has for that classic golden age of British government of 1974-79 are fascinating. Some of us have seen that interesting play, “This House”, about the experience of the 1974-79 Government, and that is not quite the quality of government that I remember. Some of us will have our doubts on minority government reinforced by that experience and our commitment to stable coalition strengthened.

Much of the evidence to the committee—which I read with fascination on Sunday—suggested that coalition will prove to have been exceptional; that single-party government is purer and clearer than coalition; that voters can give only one Government a mandate; and that if no party gets a majority of seats, it will be cleaner and somehow more democratic for the largest party on its own to form a minority Government. The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, got a little close to saying that in describing his attitude to mandate. Perhaps off the Floor of the House he and I might discuss the difference between the Burkean view of parliamentary democracy and the populist view of popular democracy in which a general election is in effect a referendum to choose among the manifestos of the parties. I am for a parliamentary democracy; and in the British constitution as conventionally understood, it is Parliament that chooses the Government, and the Government rest on maintaining a majority in Parliament.

As the noble Lords, Lord Lang and Lord Norton, said in the evidence, ours is an adversarial constitution based on the assumption that politics has to be based on the alternation in power of two mass parties contesting for power. As a number of noble Lords have also said, our constitution now has to adjust to the disappearance of mass parties and the splintering of popular loyalties. The latest public opinion polls, which your Lordships have all read in the past two or three days, show that the largest party is at 33.6% of the electorate. The second largest is at 31%, with two other parties at over 10%. There are some eight to nine different parties now represented in the House of Commons, depending on how one counts the Northern Ireland MPs. I note that the Prime Minister had a reception last week for the unionist MPs for Northern Ireland, which suggests that the potential for future government is being thought about in all sorts of ways. It is more likely that the diversity of parties will increase in the next Parliament, rather than decrease.

I note, from a discussion within the Labour Party and in the Guardian, the 35% strategy, and that Labour might perhaps hope to win a majority of seats on a third of the vote, or possibly even to form a minority Government on its own on the basis of 32% or 33% of the vote. There is a question of legitimacy here. I noted with great amusement in the 9 April evidence that the Deputy Prime Minister gave to the Constitution Committee that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Irvine of Lairg, asked him what he thought was wrong with an appointed second Chamber. He said that there was a question of legitimacy, to which the noble and learned Lord said, “Only legitimacy?”. Legitimacy is a problem for government.

With this coalition Government we have had four years of remarkably stable government. I recall all the predictions from the Labour Benches in this House and the other place, to start with, that it would not last a year. It is highly likely at the next election that the people will fail or refuse to elect a majoritarian House of Commons for a single party. That will face us with the choice of changing the people, as the Leninists would like to say, or agreeing to adapt the constitution. I think that it is quite clear that we will have to adapt the constitution, and this report helpfully suggests a number of ways in which we should adapt.

From my experience of coalition Government, however, there are a number of coalition practices that ought to be practices of good government for any Government. We have returned to collective responsibility. We have had more formal meetings. Sometimes I feel that one of the problems with coalition Government is that it takes infinitely more time. There have to be more meetings—of our side and their side as well as of the two of us together. However, it means that government decisions are in most cases rather better considered. As the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said, coalition strengthens the careful consideration of policies and limits unconsidered ministerial initiatives.

I also read in some of the evidence given to the committee a suggestion that coalition weakens the Prime Minister and that what we want is a really strong, effective, executive Prime Minister. After the experience of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, I think that there is quite a strong case for saying that having an Executive who are more effectively constrained by Parliament and collective discussion among different parties are good things for good government.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, made some odd remarks about inexperienced Ministers. My recollection is that after 13 years of a Labour Government, virtually no incoming Ministers in the current Government—Conservative or Liberal Democrat—had prior ministerial experience. The question of whether there should have been more training—the sort of work the Institute for Government is now offering—is one that we will all have to consider further.

The rose-tinted spectacles also touched on what the final years of single-party government were like. I remember the Major Government in 1996-97, with all the remarks about the “bastards” doing their best to stab the Prime Minister in the back. We all have memories of the last year of the Brown Government in 2009-10 and of the last year of the minority Labour Government in 1978-79. All demonstrated that each of our established major parties is itself a coalition—and sometimes an unstable and ill-tempered coalition at that.

A range of issues was raised in this excellent report. First, on the formation of a Government, I think we can all strongly agree that it may well need more than five days, that we would not wish to follow continental practice by allowing it to extend too far and that an agreement that it would be 12 days before Parliament meets probably sends the right signal for government formation. I think we also agree that we have moved some way towards the concept of a caretaker Government. That is also a good thing in the circumstances. The question was raised of how much information and advice would be given by civil servants. I can assure noble Lords that Civil Service support for government formation negotiations will again be offered.

I strongly agree—and I trust that my colleagues in government in the response will also strongly agree—that the Queen’s Speech offers the occasion for a vote to accept a coalition agreement, although the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, was quite correct to say that it is a good thing if both parties are seen to accept it. My party had a special conference, and I have heard a number of Conservatives quietly say that they wish they had done something like that to tie their party into what they were doing. That would also perhaps be good practice.

A lot of time in this debate and in the report was spent on the issue of collective responsibility. I have to say that I was surprised to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, refer to “frequent” breaches of the doctrine of collective responsibility in this Government. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell—if I heard him correctly—referred to the “abandonment” of collective responsibility. The Cabinet Manual says that collective responsibility should rest upon collective decision-making:

“Before a decision is made, ministers are given the opportunity to debate the issue, with a view to reaching an agreed position”.

That is quite clear: collective responsibility comes from collective decision-making.

There have been occasions in previous Governments when Prime Ministers have taken decisions without consulting their colleagues—occasionally even the Chancellor of the Exchequer—and I would argue that, with a limited number of exceptions, collective responsibility in this Government works extremely well. The write-round has become much more the ritual procedure, partly because one has to make sure that Liberal Democrat and Conservative Ministers agree on things. It even reaches down to my lowly level. My stress level rose considerably last week when I received four 100-page reports with requests for my views on them by the close of play the following day because they had to go up to separate Secretaries of State. However, that is collective decision-making which ties us all in.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and others remarked that a lot of this is to do with trust and a willingness to compromise, and we all know that in any Government there will be some with whom it is easy to work on a trustful basis and others with whom it will be difficult. I remember being told by officials that in the 1974 to 1979 Government there were papers marked, “Do not show to Tony Benn”. There was a lack of trust within the coalition that was the Labour Party. On the whole, in any Government one can write down the rules but one needs to have a degree of give and take and a willingness to make it work that keeps the Government together. From my own limited experience within this Government, I have to say that it works pretty well. There are, of course, exceptions from time to time—trust does break down—but we are still here, and we will be here until May next year.

I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Jay, said that breaches of collective responsibility demonstrate the unsuitability of coalitions to the British system of government—although perhaps I misheard her on that. It seems to me that collective responsibility has had to adapt to coalition, and has adapted fairly well.

[Baroness Jay of Paddington]

What I said was that it lent some credibility to those who argue that the system of coalition Government was not as suited as others to our system of government.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As it happens, I visited Hughenden two weeks ago and bought and have since read the biography of Disraeli by the noble Lord, Lord Hurd. I have now discovered the very odd conditions under which he made the great statement that coalitions are not suitable to the British constitution. I think that we all now agree that the British constitution can adapt to a stable coalition Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, and others raised the question of the Lords. Much of the question of what we do with the Salisbury/Addison convention was discussed in the Joint Committee on Conventions in 2007. I agree strongly with what the noble Lord said in his evidence, and has said again tonight, that the conventions have adapted since then. The Lords conventionally does not vote against the Second Reading of any Bill, but we are willing to amend it. The idea of the mandate and the manifesto Bill was much easier in the 1940s and 1950s, when parties got 48% or 50% of the vote. When giving evidence to that Joint Committee, I went back to that 1945 Labour manifesto, which has a page that lists a series of Bills that the Labour Party wished to take through. I compared that with the 1997 Labour manifesto, in which I could find no single firm commitment of that sort. We have all changed our manifestos in that way.

I have some sympathy with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, on the numbers of Ministers in the Lords and their degree of seniority—and I have, of course, intense sympathy with his remarks on those who are not paid, but perhaps we will save that for another time.

The question of fixed-term Parliaments has also been raised. The question of how we handle the final year of such a Parliament is clearly one that we all need to address fairly rapidly. Some interesting comments have been made about the opportunity that the final year provides to think longer term and to prepare. One area in which I have some responsibility is the national security strategy, which should be prepared in the fifth year of a Government for publication early in the new term of the new Government. That is something that we should think actively about for some other areas as well. For example, we could all consider long-term spending trends within government and how far we cope with the inexorable rise in health costs and pensions, which we all know are coming down to us. There is a great deal there to discuss further.

On access to civil servants, I confirm that there will be no change in the long-standing principles set out in the Cabinet Manual and that guidance on pre-election contacts will be issued to civil servants nearer the time when contacts are due to commence, at the beginning of October.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, raised the question of whether we have to have a wash-up. As we have just discovered at the end of this Session, one can never predict until the end of the Session whether we will have agreed all Bills by the time the Session comes to an end. We may hope that we will agree everything by then, but we will have to see what happens when it comes to it.

Lastly, we have not talked very much about the role of the Civil Service. The role of the Civil Service in holding a coalition together is vital. I hope that the Constitution Committee will return to the role of the Civil Service in further inquiries. From my own experience of the high quality of officials and their remarkable tact and patience in managing the coalition Government, I have to say that we have been extremely well served. I have found the work of the special advisers for both parties absolutely invaluable. The distinction between their role and that of officials is also something to which the Constitution Committee might return.

I again apologise to noble Lords that they have not yet had the Government’s response to the report. I thank the committee very much for this invaluable report. It is a subject which we all need to think about as we approach the next election. The opinion polls will no doubt go up and down in various directions, but after the election we will have to face the question of how we form the next Government, whatever shape that may be.

Representation of the People (England and Wales) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 24 March be approved.

Relevant document: 25th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

In many ways I deeply regret that we are coming to this very late in an empty House. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and I agree that this is a very important transition. It is in the interests of all parties that we get this transition to individual registration right. Perhaps—I raise this as a question for the new Session—it might be appropriate before the summer to have, if the Opposition care to suggest it, another debate on where we are and how confident we are that the transition is going ahead.

The Electoral Commission reported in its readiness report published at the end of March that significant progress had been made in preparing for the transition, and that there was no reason to delay the implementation of IER. Since the commission made its assessment, further progress has been made, particularly in the testing of the IT arrangements that will support the new system. Thus, all is going well. From my perspective all is going much better than I thought when I was originally briefed some 18 months ago. IER is set to start in June in England and Wales and in September in Scotland.

The draft instrument for England and Wales before the House today will enable a significant change to help the electoral registration officers—EROs—in two-tier local government areas to make their registers as accurate and complete as possible. The two instruments also make further refinements designed to get IER off to the best possible start. The significant change is that the draft regulations for England and Wales will provide for local data matching in two-tier areas. They will authorise EROs in two-tier local government areas, which are appointed by district councils, to inspect records kept by the county council and to make copies of information contained in them. This will remove the current anomaly that allows EROs in unitary authorities to inspect a wider range of locally held data such as—this is highly relevant to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy—lists of school students who are approaching voting age, than their counterparts in two-tier areas.

In addition, the regulations will authorise but not require the authority by which the ERO was appointed, and in two-tier areas the relevant county council, to disclose to the ERO information contained in records held by that authority. This can happen only if an agreement is in place between the authority and the ERO as to the processing of the information. This will put all EROs on an equal footing as regards the right to inspect information. It will also permit, subject to conditions, the disclosure of data by local authorities to EROs in a form suitable for electronic matching against the electoral register. The Cabinet Office ran pilot data-matching schemes in 2013 which indicated that as many as 100,000 eligible voters might be identified through two-tier data matching. I hope that your Lordships will agree that this measure will be very helpful to EROs in getting as many of these additional eligible people as possible on to the electoral register.

I know that there has been some disappointment that this instrument does not do more. I am familiar with the initiative in Northern Ireland to raise registration levels among attainers—that is, 16 and 17 year-olds—in schools. Bite the Ballot has been active in promoting a similar scheme in Great Britain, and I wish to take this opportunity to congratulate its members most sincerely on their efforts. The Northern Ireland initiative has worked well in the Northern Ireland context. That is why we have learnt from the work of Northern Ireland colleagues when considering what to do in Great Britain—but life moves on, and what works well in one place may well not necessarily work so well in another.

There are good reasons why we cannot simply replicate exactly the same approach for Great Britain. For example, the delivery structure in Great Britain is different. There is one single registration service in Northern Ireland as against 363 in Great Britain. Regulations in Northern Ireland enable the chief electoral officer to request post-primary schools to provide him with lists of the names, addresses and dates of birth of pupils. This would be almost impossible to replicate in a place such as London, where pupils at an individual school might come from any or all of London’s 32 boroughs, each with its own ERO, or indeed from local authorities outside the London area. Further, some students may not be British or Commonwealth citizens.

Crucially, we are introducing online registration for the first time. This was not available at the time of the introduction of IER in Northern Ireland, which was therefore required to be based on paper forms that EROs took into schools. We expect online registration to be by far the easiest way for young people to register, and the paper-based approach practised in Northern Ireland would therefore be a step backwards.

I understand, too, that EROs across Great Britain already take proactive measures to encourage young people to register to vote and to promote democratic participation generally. Local authority staff have made visits to schools and colleges to give talks on voter registration and to get young people to fill in registration forms. EROs have facilitated organisations such as the UK Youth Parliament by providing advice and equipment for running youth elections and have organised events such as “political speed dating” and young mayor competitions to encourage interest in democracy and put young people in contact with their elected representatives. Much is being done already on the mainland to encourage young people on to the register.

None the less, the Northern Ireland schools initiative has played an important part in providing the evidence and the business case for developing the Rock Enrol! exercise. Rock Enrol! is a learning resource that is freely available from the Cabinet Office. It gives young people the opportunity to register to vote and allows them to discuss the importance of doing so. The Government have announced that all local authorities in Great Britain, alongside five national organisations, will share £4.2 million in funding to maximise registration. EROs have been encouraged to use this funding to support the delivery of Rock Enrol! in their area in order to ensure that we target attainers effectively as part of our maximising registration work.

Your Lordships will have observed that these regulations do not include any provision for local data sharing in Scotland. This is because the different local government structure in Scotland renders unnecessary a provision for two-tier areas data sharing as drafted for England and Wales. However, the Cabinet Office is consulting EROs and local government bodies in Scotland to establish whether there is any need to make provision for disclosure of information to an ERO by the council which appointed him or her. If there is such a need, it will be included in a suitable future instrument.

I turn now to the provisions for the further refinements that we are making to the IER arrangements. Both sets of regulations will disapply the usual requirements for follow-up actions by the ERO where the ERO has invited a person to register to vote who he or she has reason to believe would, if registered, be registered as a special category elector such as an overseas elector, a person with a service declaration or an elector with an anonymous entry. These are small but important categories. The effect of the current regulations is that EROs are required to take specified steps to encourage applications to register in certain cases. They must send an invitation to register and, where necessary, two reminder letters and a canvasser to the elector’s residence.

There is, of course, some enthusiasm among EROs to be sent to canvass overseas electors in places such as the United Arab Emirates, Australia, New Zealand and Florida, but noble Lords will understand the issue of the costs involved. They will appreciate that these steps can be impractical and/or expensive, and the need for greater sensitivity in the case of anonymously registered voters will often make letters or visits undesirable. I can assure your Lordships that the legislation will not prevent EROs sending invitations to register to special category electors. It will merely change the subsequent actions from a mandatory process to one that will be at the discretion of the ERO.

The Government are working with the Electoral Commission to provide guidance to be issued to EROs in the summer of this year specifically encouraging them to be proactive in carrying out their duty of inviting those whose registration has expired to register. It will reinforce the need to send follow-up reminders to special category electors where the ERO believes that this will be effective.

The Government will introduce further secondary legislation that will require EROs to encourage special category electors to reregister before their registration expires. Under existing regulations, EROs are required to send a reminder to reregister to special category electors, excluding anonymous electors, between two and three months before their registration expires. The Government will amend these regulations to compel EROs to send an additional reminder. This has two advantages over the reminders sent following an invitation to register. First, it will reduce the burden on electors by preventing the need for a completely new application. Secondly, it will reduce both the cost and time burden on EROs by allowing electronic communication of the reminder notice.

The second instrument—the draft regulations for Scotland—also confirms that the date for the introduction of IER in Scotland will be 19 September 2014. The House will have observed that in this respect the regulations amend legislation that was passed quite recently. I ought to explain why that is. We are aware that the combined effect of previous instruments could result in a lack of clarity as to whether the start date for IER in Scotland is 10 June 2014 or 19 September 2014. The Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Commencement No. 5 and Transitory Provisions) Order 2014 clearly sets out that the start date in Scotland is 19 September 2014. The draft regulations for Scotland are intended to minimise any potential for confusion on this important point.

I reassure the House again that we are continuing to work to maximise electoral registration. We are considering running further data-matching pilot schemes, building on the work done in previous years to match electoral registers against data held by public authorities. This will help us see what additional data sets might be able to add to the processes for verifying electors’ details and helping find potentially eligible electors who are not yet registered.

The draft Representation of the People (Supply of Information) Regulations 2014 were laid on 6 May 2014. Should Parliament approve them, the regulations will allow political parties the information they will need to promote IER among electors who are not yet individually registered. This is in response to a request from the political parties that at the end of the 2014 canvass they should be given a specific new list of those electors on the register who have been carried forward but not confirmed or registered under IER. The parties have recently told the Cabinet Office that they remain in favour of such a list and are expecting it to be made available to them. I trust that the House will have the opportunity to consider that instrument in the near future.

I return to the two statutory instruments before your Lordships. Each will, in its own way, play a part in the successful implementation of individual electoral registration in Great Britain. I commend them to the House.

Amendment to the Motion

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I am not a Methodist minister and shall be very brief. I support very strongly the comments made by noble Lords about the importance of action in schools. Like them, I have been greatly impressed by the results of the initiative in Northern Ireland. Speaking as a strong unionist, particularly where Northern Ireland is concerned, I would regard it as an absolute tragedy if lessons that could be usefully drawn from that part of our country went by the wayside and here in Great Britain we failed to profit as we might. I hope that my noble friend will consider very carefully that which Northern Ireland might have to teach us in this matter. He is noted for his open-mindedness and there is perhaps merit in a little further consideration of what has happened in Northern Ireland.

He will be unsurprised that I listened with great interest to the comments he made on the implications of these regulations for British subjects living overseas who are eligible to vote here. I gained the strong impression from what he said that the effect of the changes will be to assist the efforts that some of us, including my noble friend Lord Tyler, are encouraging to seek greater registration among British citizens living abroad who are currently eligible to vote. I know my noble friend supports those efforts, too.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their various contributions. I will take all the thoughts back with me. Let me start by saying that we are all concerned about the problems of low registration. The noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, really talked about two different problems: we are mostly concerned here about problems in getting young people on to the register. There is another problem, which is people who actually do not want to be on it. We have all been through some of the estates where a large number of people are not on the register and quite strongly tell you—as they put their bull terrier on to you—that they do not want to be on it. That is of course another part of the problem.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I must say that though I may have had various dogs set on me for all sorts of things, it was never so that people would not go on the register.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

We recognise that we have a number of problems. My noble friend Lord Tyler referred to the recent audit of political engagement, which showed the level of political disengagement in the United Kingdom. I happened to be having my hair cut when Sky News ran its European poll on levels of trust in political elites. I regret to say that the United Kingdom comes alongside France and only just behind Belgium in the high levels of distrust in all our political elites. We share a common interest in reversing that and political parties have to work on it. The media have to make their own contribution and bear some responsibility for the rising levels of mistrust we have seen in recent years.

The majority of comments have been about how we get young people on to the register and, in the case of Lord Lexden, about overseas voters. I remind noble Lords that the Northern Ireland Schools Initiative does not automatically register pupils. The registration rate for attainers in Northern Ireland currently stands at 66%, not 100%. Students must still remember to bring in their national insurance number on the day the registration officers visit the school and then choose to register by signing the form.

As electoral registration officers and others go round secondary schools in England, Wales and Scotland, they will encourage pupils to register online in the borough in which they live. The two schools closest to Saltaire, Titus Salt and Guiseley, have a mixture of pupils from Leeds and Bradford. That is duplicated across West Yorkshire and, even more so, in London. This is part of the problem, but it will become easier with online registration.

I stress to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, that we are not in the business of permitting electoral registration officers to go into schools. A lot of registration officers have already been going into schools for a long time and we encourage them to do so. The Government are a little more reluctant to make this compulsory. The Rock Enrol! initiative was founded on the basis of the experience of Northern Ireland. The business case for its development and ensuring that we were targeting attainers effectively came out of that as part of our work to maximise registration. EROs have been encouraged to use the funding provided by government for maximising registration to support the delivery of Rock Enrol! in their area.

We all understand that there is a great deal more to do to reverse the level of disengagement among young people and older people. We have failed over many years to produce effective citizenship education in our schools; that is another area to which we need to return. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked whether votes at 16 would help in this regard. Perhaps we need to have that debate. I feel that it would also help if local government were stronger and more local so that people actually knew some of their elected representatives.

At the moment I do not have the recommendations of the Electoral Commission on this; I will write to the noble Lord as soon as I discover what they are. However, we are encouraging EROs to work on this and we are providing funding. Two of the five organisations to which we have provided specific funding—UK Youth and the Scottish Youth Parliament—specifically focus on this area. That will help us as we go forward. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Roberts, suggested, making sure that young people know something about the political process is part of a wider problem on which successive Governments have not done enough over the past 25 years.

I turn to the issue, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, of overseas voters and how to encourage them. I have learnt, over the past few months, that the number of overseas voters follows a cyclical pattern. It rises in the run-up to a general election and falls off again immediately afterwards. This is completely understandable. Perhaps we may hope that the fixed date of next year’s general election will encourage a larger rise. It was more than 32,000 at the 2010 election. We are working on this by putting advertisements on a number of websites to encourage those living abroad to think about registering. We have made it easier for them to register by reducing the number of documents they have to provide, and we support the efforts that others are making in this respect.

The Government do not think that we can do this on our own. We are working with Bite the Ballot and other voluntary organisations. We are encouraging political parties to do their bit. The other regulation I mentioned takes us further down the road. I assure noble Lords that although we have not entirely duplicated the Northern Ireland Schools Initiative, the Rock Enrol! initiative draws on it. Electoral registration officers on the mainland are already doing the work that the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, would like them to do. The Government will follow that, and we hope that the outcome will be registration at least as high as in Northern Ireland. I repeat that there, sadly, it is only two-thirds. We will do our best to hit that target.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Tyler, Lord Roberts and Lord Lexden, who made excellent points. I agree almost entirely with what they said. I found some of the Minister’s response a bit unconvincing, and I think we will be returning to this many more times.

The point I found most unconvincing was about the one electoral registration officer in Northern Ireland, where, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said, it works fine. The idea that the more than 300 EROs in England and Wales and the Electoral Management Board in Scotland will not know their local college and school and so could not possibly do it right is just nonsense. We hear lots from the Government about localism and all sorts of things.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That is not the point. Of course, we all know our local college and school. The problem is that you cannot go into a school with a set of forms and encourage young people to fill them in because they do not all live in the same authority. Particularly in London boroughs, you are very often dealing with pupils from a number of different authorities, so if one were to do it on paper, that would be extremely complicated. That is why I stressed that the move to online registration gives us a much easier way of coping with this diversity of electoral authorities.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

I am still not very convinced. Luckily the Electoral Commission now produces standard forms. I think the Minister may need to go back and reflect on that a bit more in government. That is not a credible argument.

I am very tempted to test the opinion of the House on this, but at this time it is probably not worth me doing so. I assure the Minister that I will come back and test it on a future date. I hope he will come back with a few more convincing arguments than those tonight. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Representation of the People (Scotland) (Amendment) Regulations 2014

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 12th May 2014 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

That the draft regulations laid before the House on 24 March be approved.

Relevant document: 25th Report from the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments

Motion agreed.

Voting: Young People

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Tomlinson, and at his request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the Government have announced that five national organisations and every local authority in Great Britain are sharing £4.2 million in funding to promote voter registration, including among young people. The Cabinet Office has written to electoral registration officers encouraging them to use this funding to support the delivery of Rock Enrol, a learning resource which provides an opportunity for young people to register to vote and enables them to discuss the importance of doing so in schools or colleges.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark]

My Lords, only 44% of young people aged 18 to 24 actually voted in the 2010 general election, citizen training is virtually non-existent in our schools and we have the threat of IER, which risks wiping thousands of young people off the register. When are the Government finally going to do something to engage young people and get them on to the register?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are conscious that this is a long-term problem. The number of young people voting in elections has been going down for the past 25 years. When I was drafting my party’s manifesto for the 1997 election, I remember being told by a number of people in my party that we had to recognise that fewer young people voted than older people. That problem has been growing and it is still growing. With schools, students forums, funding a number of organisations, and working with Bite the Ballot and others, we are doing our utmost to mitigate that. From June this year we are also introducing online registration, which we hope will help young people find it easier to register.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Bearing in mind the Electoral Commission’s recent report on voter registration fraud, what safeguards are there to ensure that only those students at university who are eligible to vote in our national elections are the ones who register? In particular, what care is being taken to ensure that postgraduates on a one-year course, who may be eligible to register, do so but are taken off the register when they leave?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I suspect that a number of us in this Chamber are registered in two different places and have been for many years. Many students are registered in two different places, at their home and at their university. In all matters of electoral registration we have a balance to consider between keeping fraud to a minimum and doing everything that we can to encourage all British citizens to register.

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, while I welcome everything that the Government are doing to encourage increases in registration among young people, does the Minister accept that these efforts are very limited and that there is a lot more that they could be doing at relatively little cost? This could include, for example, sending out registration forms to young people when they get their national insurance numbers, when they get their driving licences or when they are applying for student loans. What consideration are the Government giving to those sorts of measures?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in the most recent visit by representatives of Bite the Ballot to the Cabinet Office they presented it with a draft voter mobilisation Bill that would indeed mean that when young people interacted with the state they would be reminded on each occasion to register. There are a number of quite tricky questions about government and the citizen, and how many things that you pull together in each interaction between government and the citizen, and we may be producing a Green Paper on this next year. We are conscious that the ICT revolution makes all this much easier, but the privacy lobby is not entirely keen on us making it as easy as we would like.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My noble friend will be aware that the schools initiative in Northern Ireland saw a 50% increase of the entire young people’s population. Why are we not running such a scheme in the rest of the UK?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are looking at the Northern Ireland Schools initiative that took electoral registration officers and others into schools, with forms, and that is one of the things that we will need to consider. We are also talking with teachers from the Association for Citizenship Teaching and others about how to energise students in schools and in further education colleges, to make sure that they are reminded that they have the opportunity and the duty to register to vote.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, is not underregistration among young people only a symptom of the disconnect between the politicians and the people? Does not the sight of a Cabinet Minister hanging on when she should go only aggravate that condition and that disconnect?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right. We all know that there is a broader and long-term problem, which did not arise simply with this Government, of popular alienation from politics, and a sense that national politics and Westminster have little to do with the lives of young people in particular. All of us here and in the other place have a shared interest in combating that, rebuilding trust in politics, and regaining a sense of shared citizenship and political values. The Government cannot do that on their own.

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, bearing in mind that these are all citizens and subjects of this country, have the Government considered compulsory registration?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The Government have considered it, and have not accepted it.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Does the Minister agree that one of the factors that may lead to young people not registering—or, if they do register, not voting—would be if, prior to an election, a major political party were to promise to fight to reduce tuition fees but immediately after the election join with others to treble them?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord thinks he makes a very fair point. I might also point out that one of the reasons for people not being interested in elections is that so many seats are safe seats and they know who is going to be elected anyway so there is no point in voting. The noble Lord will remember that he actively opposed the alternative vote.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)]

My Lords, have we applauded the work of Bite the Ballot on its National Voter Registration Day—5 February—when it enrolled 40,000 new voters at a cost of 15p a head, which is far less than the government cost? Will we give our support next year to a countrywide National Voter Registration Day?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government are actively interested in working with as many voluntary organisations as we can in maximising registration. We congratulate Bite the Ballot on its success this year and we very much hope that it has greater success next year.