Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Mark Harper and David Wright

Monday 3rd November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I look at the performance of both providers, Atos and Capita, and he is right—where we see good practice and particular things that work with one, we want to make sure we share that information with the other. Having the two is helpful for the Department in assessing their performance.

[David Wright (Telford) (Lab)]

I support the point made by the hon. Member for Chippenham (Duncan Hames). Why are some of my constituents from Telford awaiting a PIP assessment being told that they will have to go to Stoke-on-Trent? It is an 80-mile round trip. One of the journey recommendations provided to one of my constituents involved sitting on a railway platform overnight waiting for a train. This is a disgrace. When is the Minister going to sort it out?

[Mr Harper]

Under the guidance that we give assessment providers for journey times, no one should have to travel for more than 90 minutes on public transport to go to an assessment, so if that was what the hon. Gentleman’s constituent was told, that was clearly a mistake. Ninety minutes is the maximum time people are supposed to have to travel by public transport, and for no longer.

Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Mark Harper and David Wright

Monday 18th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right in one respect. There are two objectives: one is to get everyone on the register who is entitled to be on it; and the other is to ensure that no one is on it who should not be. Both are central to, and inform, everything we are doing. That is partly why we put the carry-forward proposals in place. If anything, they do a little of what the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr suggested, which is to ensure that for the 2015 general election—the first for which the new register will be used—people do not inadvertently fall off the register and become unable to vote. I think that that is a sensible proposal.

Amendment 2, tabled by the hon. Member for Caerphilly, proposes that we should not be able to commence with these provisions if the Electoral Commission does not say that the new electoral system is operating effectively. It relates to the guidance issued by the Secretary of State. The reason we thought it appropriate to have guidance issued by the Secretary of State is that there will be important operational details that registration officers will have to think about, particularly on how the new IT service for verifying applications will operate. We therefore thought that the transitional period should effectively switch off after five years.

The hon. Member for Caerphilly tried to make a big hoo-ha about the use of the word “likely” and the choice of five years. It seemed to me to be a sensible period of time. I could have written “certain”, but then he would have criticised by arguing that I could not possibly know the future. It is a sensible set of proposals. We are working closely with the Electoral Commission on all these matters, and it is represented on the programme board. We worked closely with it during pre-legislative scrutiny and listened carefully to its advice, but I am clear that, ultimately, Ministers are responsible for the implementation of the system—they have the advantage of being accountable to Parliament—which I think is right.

Amendment 30, which the hon. Member for Edmonton spoke to earlier, would ask the Electoral Commission to pronounce on the state of the register or the proposal. My first point on that is that the chair of the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, has welcomed our move and, indeed, the timetable. She said:

“The Electoral Commission wants to see our registration system tightened up and it’s good that the Government plans to introduce new laws to do this which will apply to any of us who want to vote by post before the 2015 General Election.”

I see no great value in the commission producing a report on the basis set out in the amendment. It refers to

“an electoral register made up solely of electors who have registered individually”,

but one of the things we have learned from the experience in Northern Ireland, to which the hon. Member for Caerphilly referred, is that the register used for the 2015 general election will not entirely consist of people who have registered individually because we have a carry-forward proposal to ensure that those who are on the previous register and failed to register individually do not drop off the register and miss out on their opportunity to vote. That is an important safeguard, and one that we inserted, having learned from the experience in Northern Ireland, and it has been generally welcomed outside the House. When Northern Ireland Members have commented on that, they have also welcomed the fact that we have learned from it. I do not think that amendment 30 is justified by the evidence.

Finally, let me turn to amendment 31. It appears implicitly to support the Electoral Registration Data Schemes Order and the pilots it will set up, so I look forward to the support of the hon. Member for Caerphilly for the order tomorrow in Committee. Again, I think that the use of that order is very sensible. When we did our first set of pilots, more than 2 million records were matched against Department for Work and Pensions data. That showed us that we could check the accuracy of the information against the DWP database and, therefore, be confident that those people really existed and lived at those addresses. Therefore, that is a good way for moving two thirds of the electors on to the new register, thereby reducing the risk and enabling electoral registration officers to focus on the remaining third of electors. The Electoral Commission said that because we had drawn those conclusions from pilots where that had not been the intention of the pilots—they had been about using data matching to look at increasing the number of people on the register and at people who had not previously been registered—it felt that we should run a further set of pilots with that specific objective in order to be absolutely certain that confirmation would work.

We are very confident that confirmation will work, and we think that what the Electoral Commission said was very sensible, which is why the order we will be debating tomorrow will enable us to run that set of pilots. That will do two things: first, it will confirm to our satisfaction and that of the Electoral Commission that confirmation will work; and secondly, it will enable us to refine the process so that we make the process as efficient as possible for electoral registration officers. I think that is very sensible.

[David Wright]

When does the Minister expect the process to be complete? Will the Government assess whether the process has been effective, and what happens if it is not? Will we have to go through a further phase of piloting, or will the Government proceed anyway?

[Mr Harper]

The hon. Gentleman asks some very good questions. The pilots will run this year and then be assessed not just by the Government—we will of course assess them—but by the Electoral Commission, as the previous set of pilots was. We will then publish our assessment, and the commission will publish its assessment, so we will be very transparent about the process and Members will be able to see what has happened.

Based on the pilots that we have already run, we are pretty confident—I am not going to say “certain”, because that would be complacent—that the process will work and that confirmation will enable us to move a significant number of electors on to the new register in a way that is much less risky, increases confidence and, very importantly, enables EROs not only to focus their efforts on the electors they cannot confirm, but to do some work with electors who may not be on the register—people who perhaps move more frequently. That is important, and that is how we have set up the funding mechanism. We have been very transparent about the process, which will be published, and it will enable us to take sensible decisions.

The Bill strikes the right balance between completeness and accuracy, both of which are very important, but the amendments would tilt that balance in an unhelpful direction.