Elections Bill (Fifth sitting)

Patrick Grady Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith]

I am a little confused by the Minister’s intervention. That would be reported because the person would have a tendered ballot and that information would be available. The point is—we heard it during evidence—that this policy has been brought in for UK Parliament elections with large electorates and we did not hear one witness say they thought a major election had been swung by mass fraud.

On the example of referendums, I campaigned in the EU referendum for remain, but I do not question that leave won because it would be unthinkable to enact personation fraud on such a scale.

[Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)]

Is it not precisely the point that the EU referendum was not swung by a voter fraud of fake leave voters turning up and stuffing the ballot boxes, but by the voter fraud of telling people that there would be £350 million a week for the NHS, that food prices would go down and that the NHS would not be harmed—it was swung by the frauds that are now being proven as precisely that by the state this country is in?

[The Chair]

Order. Can we all calm down? It is getting very lively.

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[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because what we heard in evidence was that the financial threshold is exceptionally high for people to get over. We also heard in evidence that people did indeed risk their entire financial situation—they faced bankruptcy—to take that matter forward. There is an old phrase: criminal proceedings, or taking things to court, are free to everyone in this country just as everybody in this country is free to dine at the Ritz, but quite a lot of people are precluded when the bill arrives.

[Patrick Grady]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, because I was about to come on to him.

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[Patrick Grady]

The right hon. Gentleman was asking whether anyone could think of another crime in this country that people are just allowed to get away with. According to the House of Commons Library, the cost of tax evasion to the UK Exchequer in 2018-19 was £4.6 billion. When will this Government bring forward legislation to stop the vast amount of tax evasion going on in this country?

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[Tom Randall]

I wish Councillor Golds had had a whole evidence session to himself, but unfortunately he had to share one and we had to listen to other witnesses, which I shall not go into now, but I think that was an unfortunate timetabling measure.

There is a fundamental weakness in the system as it stands. For that reason I will support this part of the Bill.

[Patrick Grady]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I echo the welcomes to the Minister and Members who have joined the Committee.

The phrase “voter ID is a solution in search of a problem” has been heard several times since the start of the Second Reading debate. That is a quote that my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute did not want to explicitly attribute to Baroness Davidson, who was once the coming thing in the Tory party. She was going to be the leader or a Minister. She was going to save them all and save the Union. Now that those future leaders of the Conservative party, the 2019 red-wallers, are here arrayed in front of us, demonstrating to the Whips, the Minister and everyone else their value, I am sure they will not be overlooked quite as much in the next reshuffle.

The previous Minister on the Committee made the pertinent point that we must be careful about the use of the word “disenfranchisement”. To disenfranchise someone is to actively take their vote away; where once they were previously eligible to vote, they are now no longer eligible. They made the point that we must be very careful about casually suggesting that voter suppression, which I will get on to later, is the same as disenfranchisement—which is fair enough. However, that also means that we must be quite careful when we use other terms—terms such as “voter fraud”, which has been bandied about on the other side of the House in reference to a whole range of electoral malpractices, some of which we heard about in the evidence sessions. In fact, voter fraud specifically refers to personation and the casting of the ballot.

As has been quoted back several times from the Committee session with Richard Mawrey:

“In Tower Hamlets, as I said, they virtually ticked every box of electoral offence. But for my being rather kind-hearted, they would have ticked the intimidation box as well—they ticked them all. Voter fraud played a very small part, funnily enough,”.––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 14, Q13.]

That is the point about personation. It is a point that has been made repeatedly by hon. Members from Opposition parties, and that has not been challenged or proven false by Conservative Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute quoted another witness as saying that personation was an incredibly inefficient way of swinging an election and making oneself the victor. It carries with it an extremely high risk; someone only needs to do it once to be tapped on the shoulder and kicked out of the election campaign and into jail.

[Chris Clarkson]

Would the hon. Gentleman agree with me that, technical merits of personation aside, any one instance of personation is a negative input into our democratic process? Anybody stealing a vote, misusing a vote or representing themselves as somebody else should be a cause for concern.

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. However, we have repeatedly heard, throughout all the evidence sessions and debates, that when personation has been identified it has been called out and punished, the perpetrators have been brought to justice and, if necessary, candidates have been disqualified and election results overturned. What would swing elections is disincentivising turnout—making it more difficult for marginalised voters to turn out, particularly in marginal constituencies, and putting up barriers to electoral participation. That is exactly what voter identification will do. There have been disputes about how many people do or do not have adequate voter ID, as required under the terms of the Bill, but even the most conservative figure—with a small c and capital C—is that there are at least 2 million people across the United Kingdom without adequate voter ID. At an average, I think that works out at around 3,000 per constituency. There are plenty of us Members sitting on majorities of considerably less than that. It is clear to see the difference that could be made if suddenly those people were unable to cast their votes.

The Minister said right at the start that everybody who wants to vote will have the opportunity to do so. That is just a simple statement of fact. That is the case now; everybody who is currently eligible and wants to vote has the opportunity to do so when an election comes around. What will happen with this Bill is that barriers will be put in their way. What if someone turns up at quarter to 10, on a wet Thursday night, and it turns out they have left their voter ID at home? What if their passport has expired—will that be valid? What if they have recently got married and their surname has changed—what happens in that situation? There are all kinds of barriers that have nothing to do with anyone’s background or minority status.

[Cat Smith]

I was about to raise the issue of women who marry and need to change their surname on IDs and other documents. However, the hon. Gentleman has triggered in my mind another thought. Kate Robson, who works for me, left the purse containing all her ID documents on the bus. If that had happened on polling day, she would not have applied for the free voter ID as she had a driving licence in her purse—but that purse had been left on the bus. As it happened, all ended well and she was reunited with that document, but it shows that it is not just those who do not have photo ID who would be disenfranchised; so too would those of us who mislay documents. I am sure that all of us in this room are very organised, but people who mislay documents do exist, and they might only remember that it is polling day on their way home from the gym at 9 o’clock, when they will not have time to go back for their ID. A greater number of people will be disenfranchised than just that percentage who do not have ID.

[Patrick Grady]

Absolutely. It will put up barriers and make that democratic participation more difficult and more challenging.

[Tom Randall]

On a small point of clarification, under proposed new paragraph (1H), “specified documents” include documents

“regardless of any expiry date”,

so the expired passport would be valid.

[Patrick Grady]

That is incredibly helpful. People across the country with expired passports will be breathing a sigh of relief, unlike the people across the country who, for whatever reason, do not have passports or who, for all kinds of reasons, find it difficult to make that approach.

We have heard about the pressure that there will be on electoral administrators to deal with the inevitable surge in applications. We have heard about some of the accessibility challenges that will be faced by people with different kinds of impairments when applying for photo documentation. There are all those kinds of barriers. Nobody is questioning the agency or ability of minority communities to apply for voter identification; the point is that many people are already disproportionately without existing forms of voter identification and so are already disincentivised from taking part in the democratic system.

[Cat Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so generous with his time. I feel moved to mention that my grandfather, who sadly is no longer with us, did not have any form of photo ID because he was illiterate. The idea of having to approach the local council and fill in a form in order to get an ID document—he just would have stopped voting. There is a group of electors that we have not talked about so far, either in evidence or in Committee this morning—those constituents that we represent who would be filled with dread by the idea of approaching the council and being asked to fill in a form. They will do that only if it is absolutely essential to their survival. The reality is that my grandad would not have applied for a voter ID card because he would have been too embarrassed to go to the council and confess that he was illiterate.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. Precisely those concerns have been raised by Age UK, which quotes the Cabinet Office’s own research as showing that

“2% of people aged over 70, equivalent to 180,000 older people in Great Britain, do not hold any of the forms of identification that the Bill proposes would be accepted when voting…Having to present photographic identification at the polling station would ‘make voting difficult’ for 6% of people over 70, or around half a million people living in Great Britain…4% of people aged over 70…less likely to vote…These figures are likely to be underestimated as the Cabinet Office’s funded research did not include a representative sample of older people in Great Britain.”

A whole range of minority and segregated groups in society will be affected by this.

[Chris Clarkson]

Just to expand on that point, would the hon. Gentleman say that having to present a vaccine passport in order to use goods and services, for example, would present a barrier to people engaging in the economy?

[The Chair]

Order. We are not discussing vaccine passports. Let us remain focused on the Bill.

[Patrick Grady]

Thank you, Sir Edward. I think there is a slight difference between someone voluntarily taking part in different parts of the economy and someone exercising their fundamental right to vote. The Prime Minister himself has not ruled out vaccination certification, so we will wait to hear what those on the Government side of the House have to say about that a couple of weeks down the line.

The point that the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton touched on there is the divergence across these islands. He is perfectly entitled to make that point. It is interesting, because in the devolved areas, rather than making it more difficult for people to vote, we have been making it easier to vote and more proportionate. We will get on to more of this later in the Bill, but in Scotland the franchise has been extended to 16 and 17-year-olds, to all EU nationals with settled status and to refugees, and nobody is being asked to turn up with voter identification in the devolved areas. We will have people on increasingly different franchises—[Interruption.] I am glad this is of such interest to Government Members, because they are supposed to be defenders of the Union, and they want to keep this glorious country, as they see it, together and keep us in a United Kingdom. Actually, what they are doing is increasing divergence and showing that Scotland and Wales can adopt a far more liberal, all-encompassing and participative approach to democracy. Here it is being made more difficult and increasingly narrow. That is a challenge for people who want to protect the Union.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Scotland extended the franchise to the groups that my hon. Friend mentioned, but one that he did not mention was people in prison with 12 months or less to go on their sentence. Would I be correct in saying that, by extending the franchise, Scotland achieved its higher ever turnout at the elections in May and ensured that people have faith? It is not just about creating rules; it is about creating faith in the system. The Government do not have to go down this draconian ID card route to create faith in the system; they just need people to believe that what they elect is what they get, and Scotland is doing that.

[Patrick Grady]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Compare that to the “Oh no, here we go again” response to the sequence of snap elections and uncalled for and unprepared for ballots that have happened in the UK in recent years, because of the utter chaos and incompetence shown by the Conservatives.

My hon. Friend brings me on to my next point, which the Labour spokesperson touched on. We as elected politicians are not impassive observers, as perhaps parliamentarians can be on other aspects of legislation, where we can take an objective view. All of us have an active interest in who elects us and how we get elected. I join the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood in paying tribute to election administration staff in councils up and down the country—later in the Bill we will talk about the role of the Electoral Commission and who gets to mark our own homework. If it has been tough south of the border, it has been even more so north of the border, where there has been another referendum, local elections and the devolved Parliament elections, on top of all the UK-wide ballots and plebiscites that have had to be administered.

I also pay tribute to our party activists and volunteers, as I am sure everybody in this room will—perhaps we can get one point of consensus. They are in many ways the backbone of the electoral process and political engagement of this country. They are the people who stand outside the polling stations in the pouring rain and the blazing sun—sometimes in Scotland that can be within the same 10 or 15 minutes. We can have all four seasons in one day or even just a couple of hours—that is certainly true of the last couple of elections we have had. These people play an incredibly important role. If there was widespread personation, with people turning up in dodgy rain jackets, funny moustaches and thick eyeglasses to repeatedly impersonate other voters, it would kind of be noticed. That is the point of having the system we do.

We have polling agents, counting agents and voluntary observers. That is a hugely important part of trust in the system. It happens at counts as well, when we watch how the ballot papers come out and how they are sorted and so on. We have heard examples of electoral malpractice and intimidation outside polling stations. Exactly: we know about it because it has been witnessed and reported. It has been covered on the news, because it makes for a bit of drama if people are shouting at each other outside a polling station—the cameras like to go and see that. It should not happen, and that is why people have been punished for it.

[Cat Smith]

Another thing that has been observed outside polling stations in recent elections is really long queues of people turning up just before 10 pm. They are allowed to vote if they are in the queue before 10 pm. If people also have to show ID and have it verified by the polling card, what does the hon. Gentleman think that could do to the queues outside polling stations? How does he think that might incentivise people to actually turn out and vote?

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[Patrick Grady]

There is a bit of a challenge. People do get put off by long queues. Under social distancing in Scotland, the queues were even longer and it was taking even longer to vote. I commend people who are prepared to wait, but imagine the frustration of someone who has waited all that time in a queue and then finds out that they do not have a valid ID, or they thought it was in their pocket, but it turns out it was not, and there is no provision to even cast a provisional ballot, which we may get on to later.

The system that exists just now, pre this Bill, is the system that got us elected. There is a real danger that what is going on here is undermining the confidence in that system. If confidence in the system is undermined, people will simply not turn out at all, irrespective of whether they have a voter identification. They will sit on their hands and say, “You’re all the same—a plague on all your houses! My vote doesn’t make a difference,” and they will not turn out at all.

[Fleur Anderson]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s concern that this is a disproportionate Bill and that it will stop people turning out—they will just sit on their hands. We will not know whether they have gone or not. From the research we have on the pilots, there was an indication of a real disparity between different areas, age groups and other groups in terms of the inclination, or disinclination, even to go and vote. For example, in Woking nearly all electors said it would be easy to access ID and they would trundle down with it easily, but in Pendle only seven in 10 people said it would be easy to access. For non-voters, only 88% of people said they would find it easy; for those who vote, it is 95%. That is a real disparity. White electors were more likely than BME electors to think it would be easy to find identification for future elections, by 92% to 87%—another huge disparity. Younger electors, too, were less likely to say they would find it easy to access identification for future elections: 84% for 18 to 34-year-olds, compared with 93% for 35 to 54-year-olds. As a mum of adult children who should be allowed to vote but often cannot find their ID, I agree with the differences there are between different parts of the electorate.

[Patrick Grady]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and it is interesting that we have not heard more about the detail of those pilots from the Government. They were their own pilots—it was the Government who ran them. They seem happy to pick up evidence of electoral malpractice in any areas that cause them concern, but less interested in picking up the outcomes from the pilots that they themselves commissioned.

As the hon. Lady mentioned some of the disparities in terms of voting ID, I will pay tribute to Maurice Mcleod, who gave very impressive evidence to the Committee under the most sustained and pressured questioning of any of the witnesses we heard from. He said, and he was quoting the Government’s own data, that

“while 76% of white people hold a form of relevant photo ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, when it comes to black people, about half do: 47% do not hold one of those forms of ID.”––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 16 September 2021; c. 89, Q134.]

The statistics the hon. Lady quotes from the pilots appear to be borne out by other evidence we have heard.

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He may recall that I questioned the witness on that, and he agreed that the evidence from 8,500 respondents to the IFF review was that, in fact, 98% of the population in general have relevant ID, and that when it came to BAME respondents, it rose to 99%. He also agreed with me that on that basis he was somewhat reassured.

[Patrick Grady]

There we go: that is the benefit of having these evidence sessions, and we should thank, congratulate and treat with respect all the witnesses we heard. I echo the points of order that were made earlier on: I hope we get to have more evidence sessions when it becomes appropriate, so we can hear about the extension to the Bill’s remit that the Government have made.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Looking back at the evidence given by Maurice Mcleod, it got to the point that the Government are aiming at the wrong target with this Bill. Does my hon. Friend not agree with Maurice Mcleod and, indeed, Gavin Millar, who both said the Government should prioritise a registration drive, increasing participation and opening up? As Maurice Mcleod said:

“I do not really understand why you are not automatically registered. I remember turning 18; you get your national insurance number because going out to work and paying your…tax”.––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 16 September 2021; c. 88, Q133.]

However, people are not automatically registered. Does my hon. Friend not think this Bill should look at automatic registration rather than seeking to disenfranchise people?

[Patrick Grady]

Yes. I hope as the Committee progresses we will be able to look at precisely that issue. That brings me quite neatly on to what I hope will be my final point of concern: what is really needed is a massive voter education drive. We need a new wave of civic engagement, helping people to understand the critical role they play in democracy and decision making in this country. As the right hon. Member for Elmet and Rothwell said, irrespective of our views on a matter, we as politicians should be able to express those views, and try to convince the voters and win as many of them over to our side of the argument as possible. That is what is vastly needed, and that need for civic education and massive voter registration drives in order to encourage as many people as possible to take part came out in quite a lot of the evidence, as well. That requires us to live up to our promises, not make false promises and pretend that things are going to happen.