Individual Voter Registration

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Sadiq Khan]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise that point. In seats where there is a large number of students there could be a bigger slump than in areas where there is a large number of owner-occupiers. There could be a second major boundary change in five years, if there is a big slump in those on the register. Bearing in mind that the register is used to determine boundaries, the changes could lead to some of the concerns that the hon. Gentleman alluded to. If the formation of new boundaries goes ahead, with 10 million missing voters—not my figures but those of independent experts—it risks another substantial upheaval of parliamentary constituency boundaries to deal with that large loss of voters.

We should not forget that the electoral roll is not used simply for election purposes and for drawing boundaries; the register also performs an important civil function.

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

The shadow Minister was making a point about the impact of the changes on the next boundary review. Has he been able to estimate the consequences of under-registration on this side of the water? The measures will not apply to Northern Ireland, which has already taken its hit and is recovering, but they could lead to an increased number of seats being allocated to Northern Ireland under the constituency formula, in turn inflating the size of the Assembly, which is based on parliamentary constituencies.

[Sadiq Khan]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Members laughed during his intervention, but he is right to remind us indirectly of the formula by which seats are divided up. I am sure that when the Minister responds he will address the hon. Gentleman’s point, because an unintended consequence of reducing the number of voters is that the formula may lead to the changes he mentioned.

It will be more difficult for people who are absent from the roll to get credit checks, undermining their ability to apply for loans or mortgages, and it will be more difficult for those trying to prevent money laundering to check identities. The lists from which juries are drawn would be compromised. One of the fundamentals of our justice system—that defendants should be subject to trial by their peers—would be threatened. If individuals are given the right to opt out of registering to vote, by implication they could opt out of jury service, which currently is rightly deemed a civic duty.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

I want to address one or two issues that have not yet been fully addressed. Reference has been made to the use of data matching to find out where people are so that letters can be sent to get them to register. It is very important that we assess how effective that is, and I hope that the Minister is minded to bring forward the reports on that at the earliest possible opportunity and that we have access to that information when we debate the proposed Bill.

Data matching will not be easy. It is said glibly, “We will have data matching”, but the Select Committee was told that some of the exercises have proved to be a lot more difficult than people anticipated. In Southwark, for example, 25% of Department for Work and Pensions records could not be reconciled with the records held by the local authority. That does not surprise me, especially in a place with a lot of flats and tenements. Addresses in Edinburgh, for example, can be recorded in a number of weird and wonderful ways. Traditional approaches, such as numbering each flat 1, 2, 3 and so on, have been replaced by abbreviations such as PF1, PF2 and so on. Someone might apply for a benefit and put their address as 3/1, but another person might record that address as PF2. Data matching is not, therefore, a magic implement, and we must have the opportunity to assess whether it has worked.

The hon. Member for Peterborough (Mr Jackson) suggested that the issue of the boundaries is irrelevant because the register has been set for the current boundary review. Indeed it has, but the problem will arise in 2015, when the register used for the boundary review will not be the one used in the preceding general election. The Committee has suggested that it would be sensible to use the register as it stands at the general election earlier that year, because it contains the carry-over. That approach would run the least possible risk of our ending up with another set of boundary changes based on a low level of registration. While a low level of registration is not inevitable if we really work at it, the Northern Ireland experience tells us that it is likely to happen at least in the first instance. Whatever happens in the more distant future, I hope that the Government accept that particular recommendation.

[Mark Durkan]

Northern Ireland has had more frequent and relatively positive mentions in this debate than in any other debate in which no Northern Ireland Member has sought to catch the Speaker’s eye. In respect of the snakes and ladders experience that Northern Ireland had with individual electoral registration, I encourage Members to note that registration efforts post-election tended to be especially difficult. The Minister has said that he will rely on a canvass in 2015 after the general election, but registration post-election often means that people assume that because they voted at the election they do not need to register. That is one of the lessons that need to be learned.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention, which supports the point that I was trying to make.

I am also concerned about the issue of postal voters. I am not suggesting that the system is perfect because voters already have to overcome certain hurdles. The signature issue clearly causes problems, especially when signatures change, and people’s votes have been discounted for that reason, but people—especially older people—have been used to getting a postal vote regularly for some time. I am sure that coalition Members have gone door-knocking and have encountered people who say, “I think I have a postal vote, but I’m not sure.” We are usually very reassuring, saying, “Don’t worry, it will come.” During an election campaign, we might say that they are coming out next week. The problem is that many people in that situation will not appreciate that to get their postal vote they will have to go through the individual registration process. Yes, they will be left on the register, at least until May 2015, but they will lose their postal vote. If they lost their postal vote, many of them will simply not be able to register their vote, and that is a very important point.

Given that we have certain safeguards in place for postal voting, and we are allowing the general carry-over, I do not see it as such a big change to suggest that we carry over the postal voting aspect of people’s registration at that stage. As the system beds in, that will probably become less necessary, but at this initial stage there is a great risk that people will discover that they are unable to vote in the next general election—not to mention the boundary issue.

What we really need to do on registration—and no one has done it well enough, although some local authorities are better than others—is to look at imaginative ways to get more people registered. Registration differs so much across cities—even across a ward. I was out door-knocking only yesterday and in one street of terraced houses almost everybody was on the register. Just around the corner, I found a block of six flats where only two households were registered. The two places are not fantastically different sociologically, but flats tend to have higher turnover, and that is the important difference. If we crack that problem, it will make a tremendous difference, but individual voter registration alone will not do it. In fact, the opposite is true, because it will be difficult to get people in multiply occupied flats to register.

The best electoral registration is where local authorities put a lot of resources into doing it and target, not necessarily everybody—a universal door-knocking exercise is not necessary—but those places where there are known to be deficiencies. We know where they are, and that would build up registration, which should be the priority at the moment. On top of that, I hope that the Government accept the recommendations made by the Select Committee on the proposed Bill.