Absent Voting (Elections in Scotland and Wales) Bill

Debate between Patrick Hurley and Graeme Downie

2nd reading
Friday 17th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Patrick Hurley (Southport) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Tracy Gilbert) for bringing this valuable debate and Bill before the House today.

As has been made clear by many speakers, for as long as we have known it, there has been a weird hotchpotch of different regulations concerning different elections in the UK. We have different voting systems for different elections; we have parliamentary boundaries that take little account of the boundaries for local elections; and we have age differences for different elections in different parts of the country, with votes at 16 in some parts of the country for some elections. We have voter ID regulations. We have the single transferable vote, top-up systems and first past the post. That whole hotchpotch of different regulations needs to be simplified and standardised.

[Graeme Downie]

The stramash that my hon. Friend refers to around electoral systems is added to in Scotland, where initially the Scottish Parliament had a four-year term. That was extended—temporarily at first—to a five-year term to take account of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 that was enacted in this place. That has not yet been mended; it now seems to have become a five-year term, which causes additional confusion that I am not sure has been properly and adequately explained to the Scottish people. Does my hon. Friend agree that that adds a further complication to the problems he is describing?

[Patrick Hurley]

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend—the amount of complications and complexities in the voting system in this country needs addressing. This Bill will address just one of those complexities, but I fully agree with what he has said.

My hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Euan Stainbank) mentioned that we could perhaps guess his age from the elections he had taken part in. In a similar vein, perhaps Members can guess my age when I say that the first national election I voted in was the landslide Labour victory of 1997. At the time, I was living in the marginal constituency of Knowsley South—it was one of the safest seats in the country. I am sure it was not the vote of my 20-year-old self that tipped the balance in that election, but none the less I was very proud on that May morning to go down to the community centre around the corner from my house, with my voting card in hand, and cast my vote for the first time in a national election for my MP.

I am still very proud that at every election, I cast my vote in person, but just because I am a hopeless old romantic who wants to go down to the polling station, it does not mean that we must ensure that everybody does that. On the contrary, we need to make voting as easy and engaging as possible, so that the majority of people can engage with the process. For those people who cannot vote on the day, we need to ensure that proxy and postal voting, and absent voting more generally, is as easy as it can be.

I will talk briefly about an issue in my constituency and across my wider combined authority area. Over the last couple of years, since voter ID has become mandatory, there has been a localised concern. The law states that an older person’s bus pass is an acceptable form of ID, but the common bus pass in my part of the world is the Merseytravel over-60s bus pass, which the law does not allow to be used as voter ID. My council, and neighbouring councils across the local authority and combined authority area, had to write to every single Merseytravel over-60s bus pass holder in the borough to tell them that their bus pass was not valid to vote with, contrary to what they had been led to expect and believe by the national press in its reporting on the law change.

[Graeme Downie]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the move to ensure that veterans’ passes could be used as voter ID, which was one of the first things that this Labour Government did, was a welcome change?

[Patrick Hurley]

I again agree wholeheartedly. The omission of veterans’ passes from the previous legislation, which meant that they could not be used, was shameful.

We have all talked about the complexities, but the cherry on top of the 57 varieties of voting system that we have all got used to over the years was the old European Parliament elections being held under the d’Hondt system. I am mindful of time, so I will not go into detail on that—I am sure that even Mr d’Hondt could not come up with a better method of filibustering than doing so.

Much to my dismay, this Bill is not intended to correct every single peculiarity of the voting system, but it is intended to correct one. The Elections Act 2022 made it easier to apply online for absent voter arrangements, but it included Scotland and Wales only when it came to UK parliamentary elections. For some reason, Wales was included when it came to police and crime commissioner elections, but Scotland was not. Unwittingly, the weird hotchpotch of systems was made worse, rather than better.

People in Scotland and Wales who thought that they had registered for a postal or proxy vote found out when it was too late that they had registered for one set of elections but not another. Unwittingly, they were being disenfranchised, due to the nonsensical bureaucratic changes that had been brought in. Even council officers, as has been made clear, did not want this change; it heaped further administrative and cost burdens on electoral officers and local authorities. Nobody wanted it to happen, yet almost by accident, the complexity was increased.

There needs to be a raft of changes. The remits of the various boundary commissions need revisiting, and the voting system needs updating to ensure stability and good governance. In July last year, we achieved stability and good governance almost by accident, despite the voting system. Voting needs to be made more accessible, and engagement with the democratic process needs to be made easier.

In conclusion, there is a huge patchwork quilt of rules that make sense to almost nobody. The Bill seeks to rectify one small aspect of the increasingly daft situation. I hope it is allowed to make progress.