Voter Engagement

Paul Blomfield Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2015 Westminster Hall

[Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

Thank you very much indeed, Mr Turner, for calling me to speak; it is a pleasure to contribute to this debate with you in the Chair.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) on securing such an important debate so early in this Parliament. She has covered, very ably and in great detail, the wide range of issues involved in voter registration and the prospective boundary review, and she struck an important note by saying that we should be able to discuss these issues on a non-partisan basis. That is certainly what I hope to do as I focus on student registration. I raise the issue as I represent more students than any other Member of this House—some 36,000, according to the last census —and because I chaired the all-party group on students in the last Parliament. I point out to anybody who is interested that we are relaunching the group on 13 July, so they can put that date in their diary.

Many students live in two homes, but the place where they study is effectively their primary residence. They spend more time there, and many of us who represent areas with large numbers of students make enormous efforts to integrate them into the local community and make them feel that the area is their primary home. That is as important in electoral registration as in anything else.

Members and the Minister, whom I welcome to his post, will know that prior to the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 many universities, though not all, block-registered students living in university accommodation, effectively acting in their role as head of household. I remain disappointed that the Government rejected amendments to that Act that would have allowed that block registration of students to continue, because it was an established and secure method of ensuring that students got on to the register, and that their identity was validated.

I wonder whether, in retrospect, the Government regret their decision to reject those amendments, given that in the run-up to the last election they spent an awful lot of money through the Cabinet Office pushing student registration, which I welcome. However, they were playing catch-up because they were behind the game. I welcome the fact that £380,000 was allocated to the National Union of Students, which shared it out among student unions across the country, to promote voter registration. That was a good spend; the money was used effectively, and it had a real impact on the number of students registered. We will need to look at that sort of spend in the run-up to key elections in the coming year. There will be many of them. Indeed, that applies to referendums, too; clearly, one referendum is not far away. Will the Minister say whether there are plans to continue that funding in the run-up to the elections and referendums in the immediate period ahead? I ask because that money was used effectively; it could be used again effectively, and it is certainly needed.

The Cabinet Office has worked very effectively on this issue, but I ask the Minister to consider the development of better approaches. When the 2013 Act was passed, it struck me, as someone who represents many students, that there would be an opportunity under individual electoral registration to reach beyond the number of students who registered under the old system of block registration if we could successfully integrate student enrolment and electoral registration.

Many universities have been quite willing—even enthusiastic—to promote the idea of registration, but I thought that we could take a step further than that. I talked to both the universities in my constituency—Sheffield University and Sheffield Hallam University—about the ways in which that might be achieved. We agreed between us that, for the 2014 entry of students, Sheffield University would pilot an integrated system, and that we would have as a benchmark alongside it Sheffield Hallam University, which would simply point students to the Government’s portal. We did all that with a view to introducing the Sheffield University system, if it proved worth while. The project was very successful indeed, thanks to the commitment of the staff at the universities and our local electoral registration officer, John Tomlinson, to whom I pay tribute. We developed a system that went live, as planned, last September. I also thank the Cabinet Office for its support and limited funding for that process.

The system requires students, when registering and enrolling with the university, actively to decide whether they want to register to vote. It was hugely successful, with 64% of eligible students indicating their wish to register to vote in Sheffield. The system then took people to another step, requiring them to give their national insurance number. At that point, two thirds of those enthusiastic, willing voters dropped out of the system because they did not have immediate access to their NI number and did not want to delay their university registration. The situation was looking a little bit bleak, with only 24% of students registered, despite more than double that number wanting to do so.

Again, I pay tribute to the Cabinet Office, which stepped in with new guidance issued in December, which allowed electoral registration officers to use their discretion to verify an application using any data source that satisfactorily established the identity of the applicant, including student enrolment data. That is sensible, because those data are a good verifier of identity. That meant that all those students who did not have their NI number and were not on the register—some 7,000—were added during December and January. It would be far simpler if, rather than having to seek national insurance numbers at all, we had a simple system, such as that put in place by the Cabinet Office, enabling EROs to register students on the basis of their indication that they wished to register, with their identities verified by their student status. Could not we dispense with the requirement for universities to collect NI numbers? That would make it simpler for everybody, and we would still have the verifiable data.

Whatever the Minister’s answer is, it is important that we press ahead with trying to get integrated systems. I have been working, as the Cabinet Office has, with Universities UK and the National Union of Students to encourage universities to make that decision. The Minister will know that many universities are grouped together by the fact that the same system provider writes their student enrolment programmes. The largest provider covers 82 universities, Sheffield Hallam being one of them. This happens across the country. There is an opportunity to get those system providers—I think there are three in all—to rewrite their software with a simple fix, before the September 2015 entry, so that there is an integrated system of electoral registration in the student enrolment procedures. I think active consideration has been given to this, but will the Minister positively consider the Cabinet Office funding these changes, including the rewrite of the software for many universities? Apart from anything else, if that happened the Government would save a lot of money, because we would not need the kind of retrospective funding that was needed when we were playing catch-up in the run-up to the 2015 general election.

Another positive initiative from the Cabinet Office was the establishment of projects trying to co-ordinate voter registration work for the Student Forum, which brought together the NUS, Universities UK, GuildHE, the Association of Colleges, the Academic Registrars Council and electoral registration officers, nationally and regionally. That organisation did some productive work. I hope that the Minister will commit to continuing those projects and forums.

I hope that the Minister recognises that there is a wider lesson to be learned from the experience of student registration, which shows that, with commitment, creativity and resources, IER can be introduced successfully. We can transfer the lessons of Sheffield’s system, which is aimed at students, beyond higher education to schools, colleges, housing providers, residential homes and other organisations that collect the data that the Government need to verify identity. We need to make it as simple as possible to get people straight on to the electoral roll. Much more needs to be done before we have a register that is fit for purpose, as my hon. Friend mentioned. Without that, we cannot proceed to a credible boundary review or the elections that are to take place, or to the crucial decision we will be making about our membership of the European Union.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose]

I was about to come to examples of where that has been achieved already with some success. In the case of IER, about 87% of those who were already enrolled were seamlessly moved across, without their having to do anything. They were automatically verified, and their registration was moved across straightforwardly and simply.

There is a great deal that can be done, which brings me on seamlessly to the points made by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central about other opportunities to prompt people. He used the example of students, but there are many other examples. The shadow Minister mentioned private letting agents, which provide an obvious gateway or portal. There is a prompting moment when people move house. The hon. Member for Sheffield Central talked about universities, and the example of Northern Ireland was mentioned, where work has also been done in schools and colleges.

[Paul Blomfield]

My point was that it is not simply about the opportunity to prompt—that is what we had at Sheffield Hallam, where it produced a 15% student uptake—but the opportunity to integrate systems in which data are already being collected to verify voters. There should be a seamless process of automatic registration. That is what we did in the other university, where we got 64% registration. That applies more widely than to institutions of higher education.

[John Penrose]

I agree with most, but not all, of what the hon. Gentleman says. There are huge opportunities to make it easier to verify people’s identity, to prompt them and to confirm them as legitimate voters. There are many opportunities, at points at which people intersect with other parts of Government data, when we can do that very effectively indeed.

The hon. Gentleman said that if students were asked to provide their national insurance number and did not happen to have it to hand, they would be discouraged, but there are alternatives, which were exploited in Sheffield. There are other trusted data sources, such as university enrolment data, which the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Providing the university has the right information—he said that there was an opportunity for software improvement—it could be used to provide the automatic confirmation of people’s eligibility to vote.

Where I gently but fundamentally part company with the hon. Gentleman—although I stay in contact with the shadow Minister—is on the notion of IER being part of a conscious choice for people to enrol. Moving away from the old system of household enrolment is a major step forward. I am sure that I am preaching to the choir when I say that the old system of household enrolment was a little patriarchal, if I can put it that way. Expecting people who want to vote to register is not a great thing to ask.

[Paul Blomfield]

Will the Minister give way?

[Emily Thornberry]

Will the Minister give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose]

I find that I am unexpectedly more sensitive to patriarchy than the hon. Lady. That is a phrase I never thought I would utter.

[Paul Blomfield]

I do not think we are really at odds. What we are saying is that the system we developed at Sheffield requires people to make a decision, but it does not direct them to what that decision is; that is the critical thing. It is about more active engagement.

[John Penrose]

We are as one on the idea that there is a great deal more that can be done. With any luck, the Electoral Commission’s report will equip us with more facts that show us which avenues it will be most profitable for us to pursue first. It will allow us to prioritise them and make progress.

The hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury was extremely organised and asked a series of questions. I do not have time to get through them all, but I will endeavour to. Before I move on, I want to mention the comments of the hon. Members for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry) and for Lanark and Hamilton East (Angela Crawley). I am probably misquoting the hon. Member for Glasgow East, but she said—this was a vital comment—that there should be no division between representatives of the people and the people themselves. I am sure that everybody here would echo and agree with that statement.

On the issue of whether the bands around boundaries should be 5%, 8% or 10%, the point is that constituency size must be based on registration to ensure we have genuinely equal representation in this place. The wider the bands, the less fairness there is, in terms of the power of an individual’s vote. If there was a 10% band, there could be a 20% difference between the number of people it takes to elect me and the number of people it takes to elect the shadow Minister. That would be getting too wide for comfort.