Electoral Registration

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2012 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wills]

That this House takes note of Government policy on electoral registration.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to introduce this debate, which takes note of the Government’s policy on electoral registration. This is often a highly technical issue, but it is always an important one. The struggle for the right to vote defines the history of our democracy but electoral registration makes that right a reality. This debate is a timely one, as the Government have embarked on a significant change to electoral registration, with potentially profound consequences for the health of our democracy.

Many issues could be addressed under the rubric of this debate. For example, it would be possible to explore why the Government have been so dilatory in pursuing proposals put forward by the previous Government to ensure that service personnel serving in conflict areas can cast their votes themselves. It would be possible, for example, to discuss the abolition of the edited register. There is also a range of other more technical issues that could be discussed. I hope that the distinguished noble Lords who will follow me in this debate will address some or all of these issues.

I want to focus on the introduction of individual voter registration. Most people, in all political parties, believe that the Government are right to bring in individual voter registration. The previous Government legislated for it—and I declare an interest as the Minister who brought in that legislation. I did so because I believed that it was right to do so. It is right, as a matter of principle, that citizens should be responsible for their own eligibility to vote. Individual registration can help to tackle fraud, although, as I will discuss later, the extent of fraud should not be overstated nor is individual registration a cure-all for it where it does exist. However, there is widespread concern about the way that the Government are introducing this change. I am particularly worried by their abandonment of the bipartisan approach adopted by the previous Government. I am also worried about the damage that they risk doing to the efforts to secure a comprehensive register, which must be the foundation of our electoral system.

For all its merits, the introduction of individual registration carries with it the severe risk that significant numbers of people who are eligible to vote will not be registered to do so and so will be unable to vote. This was the case in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration a few years ago. The report by the independent Electoral Commission on the experience in Northern Ireland found that the new registration process disproportionately impacted on:

“Young people and students, people with learning difficulties and other forms of disability and those living in areas of high social deprivation”.

That report concluded—and this is important, because of the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland—that:

“While these findings relate directly to Northern Ireland, they are not unique and reflect the wider picture across the UK. They present a major challenge to all those concerned with widening participation in electoral and democratic processes”.

In evidence to the Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons, Jenny Watson, the chair of the Electoral Commission, said that it is possible that, under the Government’s proposed changes,

“the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around, say, a 60% completeness”.

There is already a serious problem with the electoral register in the United Kingdom. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people who are eligible to vote were not registered to do so in December 2010. The fact that so many people who should be on the register are not, despite all the measures taken by the previous Government to increase registration—measures which I am pleased to see the current Government are taking forward—shows how intractable this problem is. It damages our democracy when so many eligible citizens cannot vote because they are not on the register.

The introduction of individual registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse. That is why its introduction was delayed for so long. The improvements it is likely to bring to the accuracy of the register are balanced by the deterioration it is likely to bring in the register’s coverage. The previous Government sought to reconcile these competing objectives by tying the implementation of individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015, as far as it was practicable to do so. This timetable allowed for a phased introduction of the new system. However, that Government showed their commitment to meeting the timetable by giving the Electoral Commission the power to oversee the process independently and the obligation to report annually to Parliament, so that if Parliament wanted to make any changes as the system progressed it could do so. We also gave the Electoral Commission substantial new powers to carry out these objectives.

The previous Government spent a great deal of time and effort building cross-party agreement on this approach. In the debate in the other place on 13 July 2009, which was the major occasion when this issue was debated there, the Front-Bench spokespersons for both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrat Party supported the government approach and the timetable, and they did not vote against it. The present Government could have continued with this approach, but for reasons that they have never adequately explained they did not do so. They are rushing forward with the timetable for individual registration and removing the key safeguard of the requirement for a comprehensive and accurate register.

That is not all. The Government threaten to make the register even less complete by proposing to remove the civic and legal duty to register to vote, and to abolish the annual household canvass in 2014. I am sure the Government will say that they are taking measures to mitigate these potential risks just as the previous Government did—and I give them credit for that: they are—but nobody can be confident that such measures will solve the problem.

So why have the Government abandoned the previous Government’s careful, non-partisan approach to this important issue? They have suggested threats to the integrity of the register as a possible reason for this haste. In the words of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, a few months ago in this place:

“for the first time certainly in my lifetime, the integrity of the voting system was starting to be called into question”.—[Official Report, 31/10/11; col. 974.]

So, by implication, the Government appear to be arguing that the need is so urgent that there can be no delay in bringing in a measure that can help tackle electoral malpractice. But independent bodies tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system do not share this assessment. The analysis carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission, for example, into the 2010 elections stated that,

“no evidence of widespread systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with the May 2010 elections through electoral fraud”,

was found. They said:

“we are not aware of any case reported to the police that affected the outcome of the election to which it related nor of any election that has had to be re-run as a result of electoral malpractice”.

There is never any justification for complacency about even a single incident of malpractice, but the evidence does not suggest that the level of electoral malpractice justifies the risk that the Government are running with the electoral register.

A report in 2008 from an independent body, the Rowntree Reform Trust, concluded:

“It is unlikely that there has been a significant increase in electoral malpractice since the introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000”.

It added that any malpractice that had taken place,

“related to a tiny proportion of all elections contested”.

Nor will individual registration, for all its merits, address all the cases of malpractice. The Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission have concluded that the very nature of recorded electoral malpractice changes; as measures are introduced to tackle one form of malpractice, the problem shifts to other forms of it.

Indeed, I would say that the Government themselves do not see the problem as disproportionately pressing, because they scrapped ID cards. Whatever the justification for scrapping ID cards, they did scrap them. Whatever problems noble Lords may see with them, ID cards would have helped tackle the single largest category of alleged malpractice, which is voting offences, which includes personation at a polling station. The Government scrapped ID cards despite a recommendation by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission that to strengthen the security of the electoral process, the Government should review the case for requiring proof of identity of voters at the polling station.

The weakness of the Government’s case for their approach is matched by the damage they risk doing. They risk excluding millions from their democratic right to vote. Their approach junks the principle, followed for good reasons by successive Conservative and Labour Governments, that fundamental constitutional change, particularly when it relates to the electoral system—the very wiring of our democracy—should only proceed, wherever possible, on a bipartisan basis. Their approach means that the boundary reviews in 2015 will be conducted on the basis of a profoundly flawed register, and therefore will subvert all the high-minded principles that the Government have advanced for these boundary reviews.

The increasingly unrepresentative register that is likely to result from the Government’s approach will restrict the pool of those available for jury service, and so it will threaten the quality of justice in our country. Scope has warned that,

“the transition process must be handled carefully so that it doesn’t inadvertently exclude disabled people”.

Finally, the Government’s approach risks turning our electoral arrangements in this country into a matter for partisan dispute for the first time in over a century, and this is potentially toxic for our democracy. Most agree that those eligible voters not registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do vote. It is true that the Liberal vote in the inner cities is also likely to suffer. The Electoral Commission has found that,

“under-registration is notably higher than average among 17-24 year olds … private sector tenants … and black and minority ethnic (BME) British residents”.

It also found that the,

“highest concentrations of under-registration [are] most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation”.

The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, from a fall-off in registration is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90 per cent complete in Labour seats, but 94 per cent complete in Conservative seats.

Politicians and Parliament have been falling into disrepute in recent years—it is a matter of grave concern, I know, to everyone in this House and in the other place. I ask your Lordships to consider the impact on the health of our democracy if it turns out, as it might, that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so, and that this was the result of a government policy deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence. Whatever the motivation behind the Government’s precipitous abandonment of a bipartisan approach to individual registration, they still have a chance to return to the approach adopted by the previous Labour and Conservative Administrations.

Independent bodies have now reported on the Government’s approach and expressed concerns about it. The House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee, on which the Government have a majority, has noted,

“serious concerns that the Government's current proposals will miss an unacceptably large number of potential electors”.

The Electoral Commission has argued that the UK Government and UK Parliament should make a number of changes, including requiring electoral registration officers to run a full household canvass in 2014, abandoning the government proposal to allow voters to opt out from registration, publishing a detailed implementation plan, considering how to ensure the change is delivered consistently and ensuring that sufficient funding is available for the activities involved in implementing the change from household to individual electoral registration.

I hope that the Government will now take the concerns of these independent bodies more seriously than they have done up until now. I suggest to the Minister that one way of addressing all the problems that the Government’s approach risks creating would be to set up a working group, consisting of representatives of all the political parties represented at Westminster, to agree how best to tackle the problems that have been so widely identified and by independent bodies. There are many distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House, many of whom will speak in the debate today, who I am sure could make a major contribution to such a working group. I recognise that the Minister may not be in a position to respond substantively to this suggestion today, but I would be grateful if he could agree to write to me with a considered response if he is not able to do so today. If he rejects this proposal, could he set out in detail whether he accepts that the introduction of individual registration will lead to increased numbers of eligible voters falling off the electoral register? If he does not, can he guarantee that this will not happen?

This is a technical issue but, as I hope I have indicated in these remarks, it is one with potentially profound consequences for our democracy. I hope the Minister will not brush these concerns aside, but respond to them constructively and in a way that can re-establish the bipartisan approach that should always characterise public policy on such constitutional issues.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take that point on board and we will feed it back into our considerations, as and when the issue of electronic voting comes up.

I was commenting on whether the physical act of voting in a particular place, within a particular community, or—for those who are deeply committed to single-Member constituencies—within a particular constituency, ought not to be part of the way in which the citizen relates to his community and thereby to his state. We should not entirely rule out the importance of that.

A number of noble Lords asked about pilots. The Government, in their response, will discuss some of what has been learnt through the attempts at data-matching—comparing different databases, not integrating them. A certain amount has been learnt and this is part of the way forward for picking up those who would otherwise have been missed. Again, we have been looking at international comparisons of electoral systems and the Electoral Commission has produced a useful paper on them.

Other uses of the register were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, and others, ranging from the letter I received from a number of charities, which talked about the importance of access to the register in order to send out fundraising letters, to commercial use and credit checks, as well as jury service, which is also part of the citizen’s obligation to the state.

The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, asked about members of the armed services. The new employment model for the armed services will enable many more armed services members to have a longer-term home base. We already know that a number of service members are registered from their home base, and the number of those who are voting from abroad by postal votes may therefore indicate that the system is underestimating those who are able to vote. A number of us have family members serving abroad. My wife currently has a proxy vote for our son, who is on postdoctoral study in the United States. That issue also extends to the armed services. The new employment model will therefore help considerably with the levels of service registration.

The question of fraud has been raised. That is part of the issue of integrity. There is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, remarked, some not insignificant fraud in particular constituencies, and I am well aware that it takes place. Therefore, we have to maintain an effective system of checks, and that is part of the reason why we have to close down late registration and late applications for postal votes some days ahead of each election in order to provide sufficient time for adequate checks.

The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, raised the question of—

[Lord Wills]

Before the Minister leaves the question of fraud, does he accept the repeated judgments and findings of independent bodies such as the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Electoral Commission and the Rowntree Reform Trust about the very limited extent of systemic fraud in our elections?

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: Instances of fraud are very much localised in particular communities and constituencies; they are not systemic throughout the country. That is not to say, however, that they may not be significant in particular constituencies and in particular instances. To say that this is not widespread is not to say that it may not be significant.

[Lord Wills]

Perhaps I may press the noble Lord on this point, because it is fundamental to this debate. Does he accept the findings of those independent bodies? Just a yes-or-no answer will do.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am not familiar with those particular reports. We wish as far as possible to prevent fraud in the system. That is an important part of any approach to the electoral system. We have to have the maximum degree of trust in its integrity.

On the question of the full household canvass in 2014 and ensuring that for 2015 we have as complete a register as possible, the Electoral Commission has suggested carrying out a canvass in early 2014, rather than in late 2013. These subjects are still under full discussion, but the Government are of course well aware of the importance of having as complete a register as possible, both through the transitional period between 2013 and 2015 and after the election, as a basis for the new boundaries.

Lastly, the noble Lord, Lord Bach, asked when Peers would be allowed to vote in general elections. I rush to assure him that that is of course an issue that will be caught up with the House of Lords Reform Bill, which I know he is much looking forward to—as are so many other Members of the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

Both the Government and the Electoral Commission are looking at how we manage to ensure that an adequate canvass is maintained throughout the transition period and after. There are regular consultations between electoral registration officers, the Electoral Commission and the Government, and they will of course continue.

This has been a useful debate and I just wish to end where I began. The Government are still in listening mode. We are all committed to a transition from a household system of registration to a system of individual registration, and we all have a strong interest in ensuring that the new system which emerges is accurate, complete and widely trusted. That is our aim; we shall continue to consult and will then take the Bill through both Houses while continuing to listen as the Bill goes through both Houses. I trust that when the new system emerges we will find that we have achieved those aims as far as is possible in a highly mobile society. We live in a country where a substantial proportion of those who have contact with the state are not necessarily British nationals, and some of those who have contact with the state and fill in forms are functionally illiterate or do not fully understand English. Nevertheless we aim to overcome those problems as far as we can and achieve, we hope, as complete and accurate a register as we can, both for the next election and as a basis for the next boundary review.

[Lord Wills]

We have had a very wide-ranging and useful debate. I am grateful to all those noble Lords who have contributed their experience and wisdom, and in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, some valuable historical insights as well.

There is a consensus across the House that this is an important issue, and I think there is also agreement on the diagnosis of the problem. My noble friend Lady Kennedy placed this in the wider context of the state of our democracy. There is widespread agreement, which I am glad to see the Minister has noted, about the importance of the 2014 canvass. We heard some very powerful speeches in favour of the legal requirements and graphic illustrations from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, as well as powerful speeches from my noble friends Lord Borrie, Lord Beecham and Lord Bach. There has been a widespread feeling that it is very important that this subject is approached on a bipartisan basis. We heard that from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

On an all-party basis.

[Lord Wills]

The noble Lord is quite right to correct me on that. When I say bipartisan, I actually mean a cross-party, all-party basis. We heard a very important speech from my noble friend Lord Lipsey illustrating the dangers of the Government’s approach. I very much hope that the Government and all Members of this House will study his speech in Hansard because he illustrated with great precision the dangers of the approach that the Government are taking on this. My noble friends Lord Kennedy and Lord Bach also placed great emphasis on this.

The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, quite rightly raised the question of overseas voters, and although there are issues about expatriates and those who do or do not pay tax, there is a very real issue about those who are on international service working for international organisations or studying abroad but particularly those who are working for organisations such as the United Nations. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, who is not in this place today, raised this with me when I was a Minister. We were looking into how we could address this problem. I am not sure where the Government have got to on this, but maybe the Minister will take that away and look at it.

The noble Viscount, Lord Astor, very importantly raised the question of service voting. There were plans to deal with this issue under the previous Government but they seem to have been put on the shelf by this one. I hope the Minister will take them off and get on with it. It is a very important issue, as I think all sides of this House recognise.

I am grateful to all those who came forward with positive solutions—the important issue of ring-fencing mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, and the useful and helpful contribution from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, on trying to get electoral registration tied into the way that citizens interact with the state. These were both measures that I tried to introduce as a Minister and I regret to say that I failed. I failed to get ring-fencing and to secure the sort of measures that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, was advocating. I hope that this Government will be much more successful than I am in taking these measures forward. They are very important. We heard some far-sighted contributions from my noble friends Lord Maxton and Lord Reid about the importance of electronics and information and communication technology. This has to be part of the future.

Finally I am grateful to the Minister for his constructive and reasoned response. I am slightly surprised about how insouciant he appears to be about the risks of the register being damaged significantly by the approach the Government are taking. There is no evidence to support such insouciance, but I welcome his undertaking to explore further this question of a cross-party group. I particularly welcome the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, for a more independent component as well as the cross-party complexion of it. I hope he will set this up quickly so we can deal with all these issues.

I am not sure how I am meant to conclude this new form of debate, but I have said all I should so I am now going to sit down.

Motion agreed.