Individual Electoral Registration

Nick Thomas-Symonds Excerpts

Tuesday 20th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of individual electoral registration.

For Parliament, 2015 has been a year for celebrating our democracy. Across the country, in schools, festivals and in the media, people have joined us in celebrating a journey that started 800 years ago with the signing of Magna Carta and led to our sitting here today. However, this year could end with a body blow to our democracy that could have repercussions for years to come.

The transition to individual electoral registration should reach its end in December 2016; instead, it has been brought forward by the Government to December 2015. The effects could be disastrous. According to the latest projections from the Electoral Commission, 1.9 million people are at risk of being removed from the electoral register. That number will drop as canvassers go door to door this autumn. Nevertheless, reasonable estimates produced by the Labour party suggest that close to a million people will be dropped from the register. That is a million people whose voices will no longer be recognised and who will be ignored when the Government begin to redraw the political landscape with the new boundaries.

That move goes against the advice of the independent Electoral Commission. It will not be subject to a vote in Parliament nor, apart from now, will MPs be given a certain chance to debate the important issues at stake. That is why today’s debate is so important. We need a Parliament that represents all its constituents in all its constituencies, but instead my borough of Blaenau Gwent had lost 1,736 people from the register by the time of the general election. It is projected that Wales will lose 68,000 people from the register in December, and that is unacceptable.

When the Labour Government legislated for the move to IER we put in a transition period with strong safeguards, but we can see from the numbers squeezed off the register by the current rushed transition that the Conservative Government’s haste will soon leave many people repenting at their leisure. There might be a view that this was a safe time to finalise the transition, as we have just completed a general election.

[Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate on an issue that is absolutely key to our democracy. Does he agree with me that if there is to be the change to IER, together with the forthcoming change to the constituency boundaries, the Government’s responsibility to increase the safeguards, rather than bring forward the date by a year—as has happened—will be reinforced?

[Nick Smith]

The MP for my neighbouring constituency makes an important point, which gets to the crux of our discussion. May 2016 will feature big elections for the Welsh Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Mayor of London. People’s votes, across the UK, will be vital in shaping the country once more, and the boundary review of 2016, on which my hon. Friend touched, will shape it on a much more fundamental level.

Those people who are removed from the register in December 2015 will not be counted for the purposes of determining their representation in Parliament. If the shape of a constituency is drawn based on its reduced number of voters, we will soon be faced with a distorted electoral map. Large urban areas with multiple-occupancy housing and regular home movers are the areas that are set to be hit and, on a party political level, the urban areas affected coincide with traditional Labour representation. I would like to think that the Government would not rush in the IER process to tip the scales in their favour for future elections. However, how can we have confidence in the boundaries, even in London, when Hackney faces a nearly 23% drop-off in the number of registered voters? The average loss in Britain is calculated at almost 4%. The 10 poorest areas in Britain face an average projected loss of 6.2%.

We are in danger of shrinking the voice of our poorer communities. For people in those communities, falling from the register has consequences beyond that of losing the vote. It means, for example, losing the chance of obtaining safe, affordable credit in areas where loan sharks may ply their trade. It means public service provision dipping even lower, affecting everything from school places to GPs. My major concern is that it is already too late to fix that problem before the December deadline.

The student population is a good example of my last point.