Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Lord Wills Excerpts

Monday 29th October 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

That is for a later part of the Committee stage, but I have sympathy with the point made by the noble Lord. Indeed, I pointed out at Second Reading that the London Borough of Hounslow has done incredibly well over recent years, despite the difficulties that most local authorities have been facing. Hounslow has used a whole number of positive and negative ways to encourage people to register. It is not just where these things happen; it is the degree of attention that the local authority is able and willing to give to these matters.

As my noble friend Lord Rennard has indicated, we have a later amendment which we think would bring back to Parliament the last word in pressing the go button, particularly for 2016. I think that that is more appropriate than asking the Electoral Commission to be, as it were, judge and jury in its own case.

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, as always it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and particularly so on his birthday. I should like to take this opportunity to wish him many happy returns. I am surprised, though, that in his interesting history of the previous Government’s legislation in this area he omitted to mention that the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, to which my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer referred, was agreed as being the best way forward by the Conservative Front Bench in opposition and by the Liberal Democrat Benches in opposition. We have still not had any explanation of why that agreement has been ditched and we have to spend the time of this House and the other place on this new legislation. Perhaps he will return to that in due course and explain to those of us who are still mystified by it exactly why that was the case.

I support these amendments, which have been so ably spoken to by my noble and learned friend Lord Falconer. They all go to mitigate what many of us think are the risks of a decline in levels of registration as a result of this legislation. There is no certainty that the levels will decline, but we feel that there is a risk of that. We do not know whether the Government agree because so far they have studiously avoided saying whether they think there is any risk, but what we do know is that they are commendably committed to a comprehensive register. They have said that many times and I think we all agree on that. We also know that, again commendably, they are bringing forward a number of measures to that end, and they have the support of almost everyone in the House for those measures. But what we have also learnt is that they seem to feel that a level of registration of 85% to 87%—in other words where there would be 6 million people who would be eligible to vote but who would not be on the register—is a level of completeness that, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in an email to me, is, “as complete as is reasonably possible”. That at least indicates that they think there is some considerable difficulty in achieving a truly comprehensive register. We do not know exactly why the Government will not say whether they think there is any risk of a decline in levels of registration as a result of this legislation. It may be because they actually think that there is no such risk but that it would be imprudent for a Government to commit themselves in that way. It may be that they have done some work which shows that there are considerable risks inherent in the legislation, but again they do not want to tell us.

Governments are not infallible. Amendment 36, which I particularly support, offers Parliament the opportunity to assess the Government’s record in this area. This amendment would commit not only this Government but subsequent Governments. This Government may not be in power after 2015 so this amendment would commit a future Labour Government to bring before Parliament the opportunity to scrutinise levels of registration and, if necessary, to produce remedial measures. I think Parliament should have that opportunity.

This is not a minor technical matter, although some of the details are technical; it is about the very wiring of our democracy. The outcome of general elections depends on electoral registration. There are worries on this side of the House that this legislation, coupled with the PVSC Act, will lead to partisan outcomes in levels of electoral registration. These are important issues and Parliament ought to have the opportunity to scrutinise them regularly.

The Minister may say that the Electoral Commission will do its usual good job in bringing forward annual reports on the state of electoral registration and then it may be for Parliament to discuss the matter if it so wishes, but I hope that the Minister will not rely on such an argument. That would be to downplay the importance of this issue and the risks inherent in this legislation. I hope that the Government can agree with what is actually a modest amendment and allow Parliament the opportunity to scrutinise levels of registration on an annual basis.

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wills. I always listen very carefully to what he says but on this occasion I must take a rather different view of him. The cat was rather let out of the bag this morning by the BBC, which said that many Members of this House, and indeed the other place, regard this Bill as being a partisan, party-political Bill—a conspiracy on the part of the Conservative Party to extract maximum electoral advantage. This Government have been accused of many things but being part of a Conservative Party conspiracy to extract maximum electoral advantage is not a characteristic that they display daily.

Clearly the Bill is of considerable importance. It gives more effective meaning to the principle of “one voter, one vote”. It is just too important to be played for party-political advantage. Indeed, from my point of view, it stands alongside redistribution of boundaries in ensuring that elections are fair and balanced. Surely it is no fault of this side of the House—at least this party—that at the next election the principle of “one voter, one equal vote” may not apply, although I live in hope that my colleagues in the coalition may yet see the way to a liberal dose of common sense and just a smidgen of consistency even on that issue.

Of course, the important question is: how do we measure the success of this Bill? I share the concern expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, and other noble Lords that numbers are falling as a result of the current system of electoral registration. Figures of 3 million or 6 million missing voters have been mentioned. Indeed, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, mentioned 7 million, which is a figure that I had not seen before, but I suspect that voters are rather like those pesky badgers: every time you turn around there are more of them than you thought.

The noble Lord, Lord Wills, is right that everyone who has a right to vote should have a vote. It is that simple, yet surely it is not just a matter of numbers, which he concentrated on; it is also a matter of accuracy—that those numbers should be the right numbers. So many of the amendments that have been put down to this Bill emphasise completeness rather than accuracy; for instance, Amendment 36 talks about the Electoral Commission producing,

“a report on the accuracy and completeness of the electoral register”,

but it goes on to emphasise that what it is really interested in are “variations in registration rates”.

The current system is wide open to abuse. There has been a huge recent increase in postal votes on demand, which has opened up much scope for fraud. The problem is going to grow with the increasing growth in the private rented sector. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, and the Constitution Committee have implied that fraud is rare. However, I go back to stating that proven cases of electoral fraud are rare but of course it is incredibly difficult to prove that electoral fraud has taken place. Whether such abuse happens is not entirely the point. Our electoral system should be made as secure as possible. My concerns are not entirely hypothetical, as we can all quote cases of politicians of all political colours who have been convicted recently—

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord is asking some very large questions that of course relate to his preference for having a central register for all citizens, which would mean an ID card. That is rather larger than the remit of the Bill, as he well knows. Over the two years we will be conducting some further data matching and data mining to confirm existing electors. There will be individual invitations to those who are not confirmed by this process—in other words, concentrated individual canvassing rather than an overall individual canvass—a full household canvass in 2015 and a carry-forward to protect those who have not been contacted by the 2015 general election. There will be a civil penalty to encourage applications and the change will take place at the time of the next election when there will be the highest amount of popular interest in politics. I think I recall correctly that in the run-up to the previous general election some 500,000 additional voters registered in the two to three months before the election. That will bring a number of people back on to the register. We are confident that the efforts that will be made during the period of transition will complement each other to a point where we have reached at least the current level and, we hope, a great deal more.

On Amendment 36, as we go through this transition, the Electoral Commission will be carrying out research to give us measures of how well we are doing and to give us an after-measure using the December 2015 measures. We are confident that we can rely on the Electoral Commission to give us the figures that we need.

[Lord Wills]

Before the Minister leaves that amendment, will he say why, as I gather he is resisting it, he wants to deprive Parliament of the opportunity to debate what the Electoral Commission finds and propose remedial measures if necessary? Is he so confident in what he is producing, or is there some other reason why he does not want to give Parliament the right to scrutinise that report?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I envisage that Parliament will continue to scrutinise this as it goes through. I recognise that this is a concern for the whole House, and it may well be one of the things that we need to discuss off the Floor between Committee and Report. The Government are not convinced that we need to have an absolute point at which Parliament says yes or no to the entire transition, partly because, if we have gone through the two-year to three-year transition, there is the question of what the alternative should be if you have not gone far enough. That would mean a much more out-of-date register, which we would know would be extremely inaccurate by then if we failed to carry through. For myself and for the Government, we prefer a process in which a dialogue will be continuing as we go through the transition. A number of experiments will be taking place at that time to ensure that we achieve the aim that we all need. We are confident—

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[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I want to contribute briefly to the discussion of this amendment on the appeals process but, before I do so, perhaps I should put the record straight in relation to the 2009 Act. There was not unanimity, despite what was said earlier, about the previous Government’s timetable for the introduction of IER. Both my noble friend Lord Rennard and I, during the Second Reading of the Bill on 18 March 2009, made it clear that we hoped there would be an acceleration of the programme, which is of course what the present Government are doing. Since then we have found that the previous register was so incomplete that there was a greater case for accelerating the process.

[Lord Wills]

I am sure that the noble Lord would not want to distort the historical record on his birthday. I do not know whether he and his noble friend were speaking on behalf of the Front Benches in that case but, certainly in the House of Commons, what actually happened was that the Front Benches agreed on the Political Parties and Elections Act and the timetable for that legislation. That is a matter of record in Hansard.

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, as may often be the case, your Lordships’ House was wiser than the other place on this issue, and I invite the noble Lord to look at Hansard for 18 March 2009, cols. 257 and 284.

Returning to the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, I too have some concerns. It is important to make sure that there is some form of transparent judicial appeal process in which everyone has confidence, not least because removals can be serious, not just to the individual concerns but more generally. I draw attention to the fact that the implications, not least in terms of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, could mean that a donor is found to be illegitimate because he or she has been removed from the register. There could be considerable consequences from any form of removal. Therefore, although I do not have a strong view about whether the tribunal process would be the right one—doubtless, the Minister’s officials may already be providing reams of advice on the cumbersome problems that could be caused by a new tribunal—will my noble friend consider extending the existing tribunal process that relates to the civil liability issue under the Bill?

I do not have a magic answer to this but surely if there is already a tribunal process under the Bill, perhaps it might be extended to deal with appeals of this sort. That would seem to be a neat way to deal with this issue, and I look forward to hearing whether my noble friend would find that a helpful way forward.