Representation of the People Bill (First sitting) Debate
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Paul Holmes
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Representation of the People Bill (First sitting)
Paul Holmes ExcerptsWednesday 18th March 2026
(1 week, 2 days ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 18 March 2026 - (18 Mar 2026)
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
In the interests of transparency, I have met various witnesses in other settings in my official capacity as shadow Minister.
The Chair
We now hear oral evidence from the Association of Electoral Administrators, the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers, and the Local Government Association. As I have said, we must stick to the timings in the programme order that the Committee has agreed. For this session, we have until 10.05 am. As I have indicated, Ms Yule is on her way and will join us as soon as she is here, but we are very pleased that Councillor Bentley and Mr Stanyon have been able to join us at this point. Would you both please introduce yourselves? I will then open the meeting to questions from the Committee.
Councillor Bentley: I am Councillor Kevin Bentley. I am the senior vice-chairman of the Local Government Association.
Peter Stanyon: I am Peter Stanyon, the chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators.
Paul Holmes
Q
My first question is a very broad one for both of you. Have the Government given you enough time to prepare for the changes proposed in the legislation? Secondly, the Government propose bringing in automatic registration. Can you outline some of the challenges or problems that might result from that? Thirdly—to get my questions out of the way—there are proposals to allow, for example, bank cards and non-photographic identification as voter ID at the polling station. As the chief executive of the Association of Electoral Administrators, do you have a concern about that? Do you perceive that the secure ballot process could be harmed as a result of those changes?
Peter Stanyon: I shall take those in order. There is never enough time to introduce significant change, albeit that the very fact we are into the parliamentary process now is really important so we can look towards getting the Act in place. It is clear that, in lots of places, the Bill is setting a framework for what will come, and we are pleased that the officials who we are working with are already working on the secondary legislation to go alongside it. The devil is very much in the detail when it comes to how that will be delivered. Much depends on how we can deliver the policy intent behind the Bill, so that the polling stations and administrators can deliver it in time.
I think that the significant change will be noted. Friction is the wrong word, but there may be some clunkiness in certain areas where we are not quite clear where we are going with the overall detail at this stage. That is being worked up. We would always echo—we are pleased to hear the Government echo it as well—the Gould principle of trying to make any legislative changes six months ahead of any major poll. If we can get that to nine months or 12 months, it will make registration even easier.
We do have some concerns about the timescales around the introduction of voting for 16 and 17-year-olds. Those timescales do not mirror what happened in Scotland and Wales, where, in broadbrush terms, there was a year’s lead-in for 16 and 17-year-olds being able to vote at elections. In this Bill, it becomes almost automatic, and that could mean that the preparatory time for getting everybody on that we want to is not there in quite the same way as it was for Scotland and Wales. We hope that that can be looked at, so we get it in a more measured way and do not miss individuals out simply because of the timetable—although we fully appreciate the reasons why.
On automatic voter registration, we have looked at what happened in the pilots in Wales. There is some learning, but it is a very broad area at this stage. What are the data sources that we are looking at? What is the process to be followed? How does that interrelate with the current individual electoral registration system? A lot of communication will be needed to understand these parts of the principles.
Interestingly, one of the things that came out of the pilots in Wales was the lack of understanding of the need to be involved in the electoral process. It becomes a much wider communication process about, “These are the benefits of doing so.” We cannot solve all problems with the introduction of that sort of system; there are a lot of things needed alongside that. I do not know if Councillor Bentley wants to come in before I come on to the voter ID pilot.
Councillor Bentley: I am happy for you to continue, and then I can answer all three questions.
Paul Holmes
Q
Peter Stanyon: We have severe reservations about bank cards being added to the available lists. The simple reason is that when voter ID came in in the first place, it set the bar by being very clear that photographic ID is required in polling stations. We are unsure about what can come through, because our understanding at this stage—again, this will become clear as the secondary legislation rolls through—is that it will not be a full name on a bank card. For example, it can be an initial. How can you guarantee that it is the right person before you? If you have a photograph—regardless of whether that is the right or wrong policy—at the end of the day you have something to hang that on going forward.
The other challenge is the range of bank cards that are available. What is a bank card? We all know the major institutions, but there are lots more out there now. That adds a degree of confusion for the staff in polling stations. There could be a tension there, which we see already. Someone might bring in their passport, for example, and the staff do not deem that to be of a satisfactory level. Then they produce a bank card, and it is accepted. There is a counterintuitive nature to that side of things, so we do have significant concerns with regard to that part of the system.
We may be opening up the ID possibilities for 16 and 17-year-olds, but we would much rather see us take more of a digital ID-type approach—for example, by having a digital VAC, or voter authority certificate. Most of the time, I bank using my phone rather than my bank cards. Will it have the effect that we are looking for? We have significant concerns about adding additional confusion, despite the fact that we understand the reasons why the policy was put forward in the first place.
Paul Holmes
Q
Councillor Bentley: I do agree with that. Of course, bank cards can be cloned and other people can get hold of them. There is no photographic evidence, as we know, and I agree with everything my colleague has just said about that. Another element that we have not considered is: if someone should use a bank card fraudulently to vote, whose fault is that? Let me be clear that there should be no blame whatsoever on polling staff, should that take place. If this goes ahead, that needs to be made very clear.
Anyone can obtain a bank card. You can have “K Bentley”, “Kevin Bentley” or “Kevin Paul Bentley” on those bank cards. For all I know, there may be other Kevin Paul Bentleys—there probably are—and they could use those cards. You have heard why I think that is not a great system. With voter ID, you need photographic evidence to be able to prove someone’s identity, and people can register via their local authorities.
May I tackle some of the other questions as well? I think you have heard a very good answer about there being enough time. There is a cost element to it as well, and, being from the LGA, you would expect me to say that any extra burden put on local government should be funded properly. We require extra staff to be able to do that, and the extra responsibility for 16-year-olds adds extra pressure to staff—that is not a comment on whether 16-year-olds should vote, but staff would need to be brought in to do that above and beyond their normal duties to run elections, so it needs to be thought about.
On automatic registration, all I would say, and this is just an observation, is that in this country we have the right not to vote, and therefore we need to be very careful about people being put on there automatically. I think that needs to be tested with the public more; we need the public’s opinion on whether they want to be registered automatically. That is a comment, rather than me saying whether we are for or against it, but we need to ask the public what they think about it further.
Paul Holmes
Q
“bank cards that are issued subject to a search of a consumer’s credit file conducted in the way set out in the amendment”
could be used as voter ID, as we do with loans and the like. We understand that it is not a brilliant amendment, because we do not believe that that part of the legislation should be included at all, but do you think that having a bank card with a hard credit check would make any difference to the process, or—this is probably for you, Mr Stanyon—would it be better if that was not included in the legislation?
Peter Stanyon: I think the latter in terms of the uncertainty. The difficulty in putting that in place is that the individuals dealing with this at the polling stations are effectively volunteers. We already have a list of 23 versions of voter ID available, and it is quite a complicated process. Ultimately, if a bank card is presented and it is to the standard that the staff have been trained to receive, they will accept it, so the hard credit check thing will be more for the central control of the election than it would be for the staff at the station.
Councillor Bentley: I agree. I think that it is difficult to have that included, but I would re-emphasise that if it is, you must be very clear that it is not local government staff who will be at fault if someone commits an offence.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)
Q
Peter Stanyon: The first thing to say is that, as an association, we are pleased that the vast majority of the Bill echoes what we put in our blueprint following the last general election; there were lots of issues with the actual mechanics of the election. There are the more high-profile things such as votes at 16 or automatic registration, but if you ask an administrator, we are more concerned about the mechanics of delivering the election.
It is accepted that the timetable will not extend beyond 25 days, and there are lots of reasons for that. However, we feel that the moves to alter the deadlines for nominations to be received and to move the deadline for the receipt of postal vote applications go a long way to providing that wiggle room within the elections timetable. That will allow administrators to work with their suppliers to get postal votes out and to ensure that there are no issues on that side of the process.
There are lots of things in the Bill regarding the status of the returning officer in the local authority, and we echo the view that it should be a senior officer of the local authority. How that will be policed is another matter, but it gives the local authority the ability to assist the returning officer, because they will have that punching power within the local authority itself.
There are also lots of things about the postal vote replacements that were learned at the last general election. We are very reliant on third parties; once a postal vote leaves the control of the returning officer, Royal Mail will do all it can to deliver that, but there will be breakdowns in the system. The fact that the Bill gives the ability to put the elector back first in those situations is really important, because it is not their fault if they have not been able to receive a postal vote.
There are lots of really good bits in the Bill. The only areas where we have concerns relate to things I have mentioned already: bank cards, some things around the nominations process and the identity checks being proposed, and the lead-in time for the 16 and 17-year-olds. Those are the three big areas that we have concerns about. The rest of it makes absolute sense in terms of the mechanics of delivering the election and should address some of the issues that were quite high profile at the last general election.
Councillor Bentley: Anything that encourages people and makes voting easier has to be welcomed. That is very important.
I will pull out two things in addition to what my colleague said. One thing that we are learning about now —it has started to happen for the first time—is re-registering for a postal vote. That needs to be much better co-ordinated and to have much better communications. We are seeing already people who have not re-registered because they did not realise that they needed to. It depends on the local authority and how and when they communicate, but more of a national campaign would be helpful in all that.
The other piece is around harassment during elections. It is a specific part of the Bill, but I think it is very important. While freedom of speech is very important in our country, freedom to harass certainly is not. That needs to be emphasised to people. What is being proposed is right, but we need to emphasise that more. People should be encouraged to stand for public, elected office, but we hear anecdotally that many are put off by the harassment they receive on social media and so on. Freedom of speech is very important; freedom to harass certainly is not. I would like to really see that emphasised within the Bill. [Interruption.]
The Chair
Mr Holmes, did you want to ask Ms Yule anything? I will then come to Ms Smart.
Paul Holmes
Q
Welcome, Ms Yule. The other witnesses would argue that the Government’s intention is to make voting easier and extend the franchise. I put to you the question I asked them earlier: do you consider that local authorities and chief executives have been consulted enough at this stage—notwithstanding the fact that the Bill has to go through its passage—about the proposals in the legislation? Are there burdens that you are not quite sure you can meet yet on behalf of your members?
Emily Yule: On behalf of Solace, I have been involved in lots of conversations around the development of the strategy and the Bill. We have really appreciated that collaboration and that ability to influence the design of the provisions. I always say that the devil is in the detail, so implementation is going to be really important. Chief executives, returning officers and electoral registration officers need to have a clear understanding of the timelines for implementation and the guidance, so that we can ensure consistent application of those new provisions.
In my view, consistency is what builds credibility and trust in the democratic process. At the moment, I do not think that there is huge concern among the sector that any of the items are undeliverable, but we would, of course, always ask for resourcing to be considered and any new burdens funded to put those implementation plans in place.
Lisa Smart
Q
I have two strands of questioning; one is around timing. The Bill proposes some changes around postal votes and bringing forward the dates for postal votes. We have seen too many people miss out on their opportunity to vote because of some of the issues relating to Royal Mail that you talked about, Mr Stanyon. That is particularly acute with those living overseas for a time, whether they are serving in the armed forces or otherwise.
We all welcome the bringing forward of the dates, but can you say a little more about how many of those issues will be addressed by changing the dates for postal votes? Are there other measures—for example, allowing people to print their own ballot papers or to submit their vote at overseas embassies or consulates—that you would see as useful in enabling more people to vote?
Peter Stanyon: In terms of the practicalities of the proposed time changes, the best evidence I can give is from the last general election—the parliamentary election a couple of years ago—when you saw significant spikes in applications towards the end of the period. The date is currently 11 working days before the poll; it is proposed to move that to 14. That has meant that there is a big pinch point—not just for the electoral registration officer, who has to process the applications, but because the Elections Act has brought in additional identity checks that now need to be done for postal voters.
Currently, there is almost a perfect storm 12 and 11 days before the election with registration applications and applications for postal votes. Moving that deadline slightly further back allows the same work to be done—checking identities and physically getting the data to the printers—so that the packs can be produced and got out three days earlier than they can now. That will not go every step of the way to solving the overseas issue, because you are still talking about 12 or 11 days for ballots to go out and back; you are relying not just on Royal Mail but on overseas postal services as well. To answer the first question, this is a positive step, but it must be seen in that light—it is moving in the right direction, but it will not solve every issue that has been identified.
As far as overseas electors are concerned, this has been an age-old issue. I was thinking the other day that I have been in the industry for over 40 years—that is scary—and I have seen significant change in that time. Overseas electors have always been an issue because you are physically getting the ballot paper to them and back. It is an area that can be investigated, but we need to be careful about it. Could you have things such as printing your own ballot papers? Could you have an overseas electors constituency, which would make things slightly different? Could you have online voting, for example? I am not proposing any of those. It is an area that needs to be really thought through: what is beneficial to the elector or the voter, but also what is suitable for the system we are trying to maintain?
At the moment, the system is very paper-based and secure, but we already know it has those issues. This is not a new thing; it is just that there are far more postal voters than there used to be. The issue has been here for the whole of my career.
Councillor Bentley: All I would add to that is timetabling and making sure there is enough time for local authorities to do the printing. I am reminded that the cancellation of a whole slew of elections was proposed and then suddenly they were not, and everyone is on catch-up to make sure it all happens. They will do it, because we have brilliant staff in local government, but it is not always about them—it is about the suppliers for the printing, the paper and all the rest of it.
Provided that time is built in to make that happen, then this is a good thing. Anything that makes it easier for people to vote and participate in elections has to be a good thing. Postal voting is increasing, but we must build in the correct timetable so that authorities can get the printing done.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from the Electoral Commission. Again, we must stick to the timings in the sittings motion that the Committee has agreed. For this session, we have until 10.25 am. If anyone wants to ask our witness a question, it would be helpful if they indicated that early, because then I am more likely to be able to come to you and keep things moving. Could the witness identify himself for the Committee?
Vijay Rangarajan: Thank you, Chair. I am Vijay Rangarajan, chief executive of the Electoral Commission.
Paul Holmes
Q
What is your view, as far as you are able to give it, on the fact that the Government have gone forward with landmark and quite detailed legislation, but at the same time have asked Philip Rycroft to conduct a review of campaign finance and foreign interference, which bears no resemblance to what the Government are proposing during this legislative process? Have you made representations to the Government that this legislation should be paused until we have the conclusions of Dr Rycroft’s review?
Vijay Rangarajan: Thank you for the question. No, we do not think the legislation should be paused, partly because of the timing issues that you covered with the previous witnesses. Unless this legislation goes through fairly swiftly, there is little chance of the crucial changes it makes being in place in time for the next general election or beyond.
There are a number of really quite urgent changes, particularly in the political finance area. We have been making recommendations since, I think, 2013 to tighten up on unincorporated associations, for example, and to look at the company donation provisions and at “know your donor” checks. We really welcome the fact that they are in the Bill, and we would like to go further in some areas. However, for those provisions to be in place—this is probably the tightest of the timing issues for the Bill—there will need to be the primary legislation, then secondary legislation, then guidance and then, crucially, quite a period of training and guidance for parties themselves so that they are able to get their systems in place and implement this in the financial year of a general election. That is a lot of steps to go through, so we would like to see this done fairly soon to alleviate, quite rightly, what the AEA and others just said on timing.
We also really welcome the Rycroft review. It looks as if it is going further than just finance. It may make changes; I think the Government have said that they will take that on board in the Bill. It is very helpful to have a look at the broader issues of foreign interference—for example, through online media and many other areas than just money. We see a whole range of threats, which the Committee may want to get into further.
Paul Holmes
Q
Could you give us your thoughts, if you have any, on the idea of a digital repository and whether there would be a role for the Electoral Commission, as the regulator, in ensuring that that information is passed on and the provisions are enforced?
Vijay Rangarajan: I think that the digital imprints parts of the Bill are very helpful indeed. We would also like to add the party—saying on the digital imprint which party had actually financed that area.
The transparency of the digital imprints regime has really helped. We run an imprints portal, and we had a lot of references to it, all of which were sorted out at the time. That was mostly small parties or candidates who just had not followed the guidance and not done what was required. I know that that comes as a real annoyance for other candidates and larger parties as well, but fast action through the imprints portal was actually more effective than a longer-running investigation or using criminal sanctions.
We also think that having some kind of a repository, for both imprints and a lot of wider digital material—for example, political advertising—is a real help for voters to see what is being said across the political spectrum. We are seeing a segmentation of elements of the political debate into closed online groups, and that can be quite corrosive of trust.
Paul Holmes
You will have noticed some scepticism from the previous panel—I do not think it is ungenerous to say that—about the proposals for using bank cards as a form of identification. In your role, do you have concerns about the Government’s proposals to water down photo voter ID?
Vijay Rangarajan: We are also concerned about the bank cards proposal; that is largely for the administrative reasons the previous witnesses set out, so I will not repeat those. We do see growing public support for voter ID—73% of the British public are now in favour of it, up from 65% in 2024—and the way we have implemented it has broadly worked. About 0.1% of people in Great Britain were unable to vote, because of voter ID, and it definitely put off some voters, so there is a slight cost to this. However, in Northern Ireland, after 25 years of voter ID, it has become part of the fabric of how people vote.
Rather than continually changing the system, it would be helpful to allow a broad range of voter IDs—which should probably stay with the existing security standard to maintain public trust—and give some stability to the system. In time, people will get used to it; we are already well above 90% of people knowing that they have to bring voter ID. Again, before this May’s elections, and before every election, we will run, in areas where voter ID is needed, a campaign to remind people to bring voter ID.
Samantha Dixon
Q
Vijay Rangarajan: Thank you, Minister. Broadly, we very much welcome the Bill. If I might go into a little detail about which areas, it picks up some of the crucial changes after the 2024 general election. For example, the change from 11 days to 14 days on postal voting will make a real difference, particularly in Scotland. We saw real issues about that in our post-poll report; I will not run through all of those, but the changes in the strategic review part are very important.
As I said, we very much welcome the changes on campaign finance. We would like to see that go further in the company donations area; our proposal is to use profit, not turnover, as the metric for what a company should be able to donate, and it should be able to donate that profit only once every year.
We strongly welcome the provisions on automatic voter registration, because up to 8 million eligible British voters are not on the register. That is even more important with the other part of the Bill—votes at 16—coming in. Being able to add attainers at 14 and 15, and then letting 16 and 17-year-olds be on the register, will remove a very clear barrier. Last week, we had “Welcome to Your Vote Week”, and that issue was raised quite broadly by youth organisations as yet another barrier for 16-year-olds. We also strongly welcome the elements on candidate safety, and they should all help.
Overall, it is a very strong welcome: the Bill is necessary, and it picks up some long-standing recommendations, as I have said. We also warmly welcome the Secretary of State’s commitment to repeal the SPS—the strategy and policy statement—for exactly the reasons you have mentioned. The Bill will never completely fix everything. I think this will be the 27th Representation of the People Act, so there is a never-ending process of trying to keep this going. A lot of work needs to be done outside the Bill—for example, with the police or on social media—but it will distinctly help with many of the processes involved.
The Chair
Q
Dr Garland: Good morning. I am Jess Garland, director of policy and research at the Electoral Reform Society.
Paul Holmes
Q
Dr Garland, you identified in your evidence that you are in favour of relaxing voter ID from requiring photographic identification, and you cited a Cabinet Office report, “Securing the ballot”, which suggested including bank cards, signatures and date of birth checks. Could you elaborate on what, in your opinion, date of birth checks would look like for a person volunteering at a polling station? Could you explain to the Committee why you do not think that going from photographic ID to bank cards would relax security around someone being able to vote?
Dr Garland: Taking that first question, I think it is important that we go back to the origins of the policy. The report said clearly that we need to have something that is proportionate, which is where I think we need to start. What is the problem that we are trying to solve? I worry that we have moved very quickly to a very, very tight scheme that does not give voters other options. For instance, none of the currently accepted IDs are the sort of thing that people ordinarily carry, except for the over-60s bus pass. Most people are not carrying their passport around, so we have this problem of disenfranchising not just those who do not have access to those IDs, but also people who might have forgotten them on the day. That is why I think the suggestion of including bank cards has a lot of value, and digital ID is the same—the sort of thing you might have on your phone, as we heard earlier.
Under the scheme, we do not have any option for people in the polling station, which sets the current policy even further away from some of the strictest voter ID schemes around the world. We have a very strict scheme with very few options for voters, yet we see in the evidence that it has not really made any difference to claims of personation, which remain the same as before the scheme was introduced, and it is inconclusive as to whether it has enabled people to identify personation happening. I worry that we have walked into a position where the cure is something of a curse. We have seen many more people disenfranchised by the limitations of the scheme than have ever had their vote stolen through personation. You used the word “relaxing”, and I think it is rebalancing—it is bringing it back into proportion with the risk of personation that might exist.
Paul Holmes
Q
Dr Garland: I think we would need to know what exactly is happening. We have to be very clear on what we think the problem is in the first place, and of course we know where personation has been a problem. In Northern Ireland, for instance, many, many people were turning up to find that someone else had cast their vote. We do not have that evidence base across the whole UK.
There is no evidence in the first place of widespread personation, so we need to think about the impact of the scheme, and that impact has been at least 42,000 people losing their vote. I urge people to think about what it must feel like for a voter who has turned up to cast their vote in our democracy and been turned away, despite being eligible to vote. I think that is incredibly damaging for our democracy, and I urge the Committee to think about the wider picture on voter ID.
Paul Holmes
Q
Dr Garland: Three sets of elections have used voter ID. If we add up the voters who were turned away and failed to return with ID across the three sets of elections where we had voter ID—that includes two local and one general election—that is where the 42,000 comes from. It is Electoral Commission data on people who have got to the polling station and been registered, but then registered as not returning. Another percentage of voters just did not turn out in the first place, because of voter ID.
Paul Holmes
Q
Dr Garland: No. It was 16,000 at the general election—although I would say that even one voter is one too many.
Paul Holmes
I agree, but that is 0.1% of the total electorate. Briefly, Chair, may I ask about bank cards?
Paul Holmes
Q
Dr Garland: I go back to my point about needing something that people carry on them, which has their name on it and provides the base level of knowing who that person is, as the policy initially set out. We could achieve that in a number of ways. In the voter ID pilots poll cards were used, and those pilots with poll cards as an option saw the fewest number of people turned away, so we know that those more accessible forms of ID are going to be better for the scheme altogether.
For most people, however, bank cards have really good coverage. We also have to think about what newly enfranchised 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to access. That is part of the whole question of what we should be looking at—what will cause the least damage when it comes to people turning up to vote?
Samantha Dixon
Q
Dr Garland: Many of the changes feel to me that they have been a long time coming: we heard from the Electoral Commission, which made a lot of these recommendations, about tightening political finance many years ago. There have been the large gaps in the completeness of our electoral register since at least 2011, and the Electoral Commission’s feasibility study was back in 2019. A lot of the changes are therefore catching up, rather than keeping pace.
One area where it is challenging to keep pace is in the digital sphere and online campaigning, but also in political finance. The Bill currently does not address cryptocurrency, which is a fast-changing area, so there are certainly areas where it is difficult to keep pace. “Keeping pace” is an important way to think about it, because of course in a democracy, unless we are moving forwards, we are necessarily sliding backwards. That is a challenge. We have to keep changing in order to protect what we have.
The one area that has changed the most in the past two years has been the electoral landscape. We are seeing things that we have never seen before—massive party system fragmentation and huge amounts of voter volatility—and that is having an effect on the operation of our electoral system. I appreciate that that is not covered in the Bill, but that does feel like one area where the Bill might find itself a bit out of step with what is happening in the wider electoral landscape.
The Chair
Before I call Mr Holmes, it would be helpful if everyone asking questions indicated whether the question is for all the witnesses or an individual witness.
Paul Holmes
Q
My second question is a general question on votes at 16. The Government made a manifesto commitment to reduce the voting age to 16. Can our Scottish colleagues give an overview of the experience of advertising that and making sure to get maximum efficiency and registration before the first crucial elections at 16? What advice would you give the UK Government to make sure we get maximum registration and participation from a section of voters that has not had the vote for many years in England? Malcolm and Robert, maybe you can divide that question between you.
Karen Jones: Thank you very much for the question. As you say, we have had four pilots of automatic voter registration in Wales. Very recently—in December—the Electoral Commission produced a report setting out the evaluation of those four pilots. The main conclusion was that automatic registration should be rolled out in Wales; it added somewhere in the region of 14,500 names to the register, so it had a significant impact on its completeness. However, the report made some recommendations to the Welsh Government to consider before wider roll-out. A lot of those relate to making sure administrators have the time and resources to put the systems in place to support the new arrangements—for example, ensuring adequate data-matching expertise in councils to meet the task. There were also lessons around the optimal timings to undertake the various duties.
In terms of the proposals in this Bill, our major concern is the implementation timetable. If we had two different timetables for rolling in the AVR arrangements, that would place a great deal of burden on electoral teams. We would need to give that careful consideration, as well as ensuring that we do not introduce voter confusion, particularly if there were any differences in the franchises.
There are a number of things around the introduction of the UK Government’s proposals on AVR, set alongside what the Welsh Government intend to do, that we need to consider from an implementation point of view. I am sure this will be a theme throughout this evidence session, but we would welcome more alignment in policy terms between the UK Government and the devolved elections, because that makes it easier for voters and simpler for administrators, and probably also reduces the cost to the public purse. You will understand that I am not commenting on the policy position, but from the perspective of what is involved in implementing these changes.
Paul Holmes
Q
Karen Jones: Just to confirm, in the evaluation report I referred to—and I will send the details to the Clerk of the Committee after this evidence session, if you do not have that to hand—the addition of names to the register did not impact accuracy. Very few people chose to take their names off the register, so there was support from the general public for the exercise.
Paul Holmes
Q
Karen Jones: That is right. It is a small number, but as I say, the evaluation report sets out a lot of the detail.
Paul Holmes
Q
Malcolm Burr: Yes, happy to do that. We have had a successful experience in Scotland over many years of implementing voting for 16 and 17-year-olds and of course that means implementing voting preparation for 14 and 15-year-olds. I will let my colleague Mr Nicol speak to the practicalities of that.
I am very pleased to see the proposal in the Bill, as an electoral administrator, that there would be automatic additions to the UK parliamentary register of those already registered to vote. Consistency is always welcome, as is alignment at an administrative level. It helps the voter, the administrator and the process.
Your question also focused on engagement with young people, and I think that has been generally very successful. Across Scotland, there is Welcome to Your Vote Week activity in schools—in early March, for obvious reasons. That is universal. It is well received. It is updated to take account of feedback as well as changes. The independence referendum in 2014 saw a high level of voting across all age groups, and such academic research as there is shows that young people who have voted at the ages of 16 and 17 are highly likely to continue their participation in the future. All those are important points for consideration. It certainly has not caused significant issues. There are practical issues that we have to look at, of course. With voter ID for UK elections, we have to make sure that there is appropriate ID for young people of that age. There are also issues of data protection, but I will let my colleague, Mr Nicol, speak about those.
Paul Holmes
Mr Nicol, do you want to say anything?
Robert Nicol: Thank you. Malcolm covered an awful lot of what I had noted down, but you say, “How do we ensure that it becomes successful?” This is not a measure that I would necessarily recommend, but having a high-profile electoral event shortly after you introduce it— as happened with the young persons register in Scotland in 2013 and ’14 coinciding with the independence referendum—certainly embeds it in the minds of the population.
In terms of the practicalities—this cross-cuts a wee bit into automatic registration as well—we need to be aware that how data is held in different parts of the country can vary. I hate calling it data, because it is about individuals—individual electors and so on. For example, education data is held by local authorities in Scotland, so we utilise education lists from local authorities and from private schools to invite electors, young people, directly to register. That is from the age of 14 upwards. I think that it is also a welcome aspect of the Bill that there is clarity about it being from age 14 onwards, rather than the quite convoluted definition that was previously in place for 18-year-olds.
Clarity of messaging is really important. Malcolm rightly said that there is Welcome to Your Vote Week. There are also various outreach things. A number of years ago, when I was a lot younger, I went into schools myself and helped to try to enthuse young electors to get registered and suchlike. Various participation activities happen. I know that some people might think that this is a prime area for automatic registration, but I wonder whether an elector’s first experience of registering to vote being something that is done “to” them is necessarily the positive way to look forward.
Hopefully that explanation has helped a wee bit, inasmuch as we do try to engage with young people. One other really important thing, which I think Malcolm touched on, is that this is not just about getting people registered; it is about ensuring that they are enabled to exercise their vote. That relates to things like voter ID at polling stations, but also the ID checks that happen for postal votes. Making sure that that is appropriate for this age group as well and how it is administered will be important parts of this as we go forward.
Samantha Dixon
Q
Karen Jones: Thank you for the question, and thank you again, Minister, for the opportunity to contribute to the early stages of this Bill. We are really pleased to see a number of the long-standing proposals from administrators to make life a lot easier for voters and also administrators reflected in the Bill. We are very much supportive of that.
In terms of alignment, the devil will be in the detail, as we look at the rules for implementing the policies that the Bill contains. As I was saying about automatic voter registration, it will come down to the franchise and the timing elements. It may well be that we have to live with some disruption in the short term while we pursue greater alignment in the medium to long term. I think it is a step in the right direction, but more work will need to be done as we look at the detail of the Bill’s implementation.
Similarly, if there is a UK-wide approach to votes at 16 and 17, it will make it easier to engage with young people. We have found with votes at 16 and 17 in Senedd elections that, because we have years in between when young people are not casting their vote, the engagement can be a bit stop-start. But a consistent policy across the UK will make it much easier for us to work collectively to make sure that young people and others are educated as to why they need to participate in the democratic process and understand how to go about exercising the franchise they have been given.
Malcolm Burr: I do not have a lot to add, but alignment should be there unless there is a good policy reason for it not being there. Policy divergence is inherent in devolution—that is what devolution is about: there can be different policy choices in different areas—but administrative divergence should be avoided wherever possible.
This is the occasion to mention the Law Commission’s welcome recommendation that there should be a consolidation of electoral law as far as possible, because it is a highly complex set of legislation and regulation, and it is more than time for a consistent legislative framework governing all elections, recognising the policy divergences across the various nations. Unnecessary divergence leads to confusion for voters, as well as inconvenience to electoral staff, so alignment should be a very clear aim, except where there is a good principle or policy reason for not aligning.
Robert Nicol: Administrators can and do make difficult things work in the background. We absolutely recognise each Parliament’s right to legislate as it sees fit. The difficulty we have is when electors are asked to do something different for what they perceive to be the same thing. If an elector wants to register to vote, for example, and we say to them, “It’s okay, I’ve automatically registered you for this register, but you need to fill in that other form,” that not only makes me look daft as an electoral registration officer but causes confusion for the elector and does not help with overall confidence in the system. We have seen that recently with the postal vote divergence that happened, which has proven difficult and probably costly to stitch back together.
The Bill will enable people to register at 14. That does not align with Wales, but it aligns with Scotland, which is very welcome. There are other areas that are very welcome, but the Bill also has the potential to create different kinds of divergence if it is not implemented carefully. Administrators will do what they need to do, but think very, very carefully when asking an elector to do something different for what they perceive to be the same thing.
Representation of the People Bill (Second sitting) Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Paul Holmes
Main Page: Paul Holmes (Conservative - Hamble Valley)Department Debates - View all Paul Holmes's debates with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
Representation of the People Bill (Second sitting)
Paul Holmes ExcerptsWednesday 18th March 2026
(1 week, 2 days ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 18 March 2026 - (18 Mar 2026)
The Chair
We will now hear evidence from the Electoral Office for Northern Ireland and the Electoral Commission Northern Ireland. We have until 2.25 pm for this panel. Will the witnesses introduce themselves for the record?
David Marshall: Thank you very much for the invitation to brief the Committee. I am Dr David Marshall, the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland. I am responsible in law for all returning officers for all elections and referendums in Northern Ireland, and I am also the registration officer for all of Northern Ireland.
Cahir Hughes: Good afternoon. My name is Cahir Hughes. I am head of the Electoral Commission in Northern Ireland, and I am responsible for ensuring the delivery of the commission’s work in Northern Ireland.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
Q
I have two general questions. You obviously have a unique set of experiences in running elections in Northern Ireland. In some ways, in Northern Ireland you have had, for a long time, some regulatory changes that the Government would say we are only just catching up with, and I think that is a fair assessment. Starting with Mr Hughes, given your experience of running elections with voter identification in Northern Ireland, what is your view of the proposal to add bank cards to the list of accepted identification in the rest of the United Kingdom? Are you concerned that it will create a divergence from the elections that you run and your current guidelines?
Cahir Hughes: It is fair to say that the system of photographic ID at polling stations in Northern Ireland is very well established. It has been running for almost 25 years, and voters are very well aware of the need to bring photographic ID with them to the polling station. Research that we have done shows that the percentage of people who know they need to do so is in the high 90s, and they also know what form of ID—most commonly driving licence and passport. It is an established part of polling day at our elections that people know to bring ID with them.
The bank card proposal has not been introduced in Northern Ireland. There is the issue that there is no date of birth on a bank card, which is what you need for photographic ID in Northern Ireland. With divergence there is always an element of risk. We experienced it in 2024 at the UK parliamentary election, when there were different forms of ID used in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Through our public awareness campaigns and partnership work, we put a lot of focus on ensuring that the right messaging gets to voters in Northern Ireland. As I say, that did not materialise as an issue in 2024. It is something that we will consider as part of our campaigns at future elections from 2029, if the Bill follows the path it is set out to do.
David Marshall: I will say at the start that I have a large enough job as returning officer and registration officer for elections in Northern Ireland before I try to comment on policy matters in Great Britain, but I will give just a wee bit of background. Northern Ireland has had official photo ID for well over 20 years. It came in after widespread public concern about the safety and challenges of running elections back in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, as Cahir has said, it has by and large worked and been accepted, and there are high levels of public support and confidence in elections here. That is not to say that our system is perfect. We could absolutely include other forms of ID that are currently available in Great Britain. I know the Government are on record as saying the UK veteran card could be included, and there may well be other forms of ID as well. All of this needs to be future-proofed into what digital ID might bring.
In conclusion, only time will tell whether the Government’s plans for bank cards in Great Britain will work. If I was asked in Northern Ireland, I would say, “Expand the list of photo ID rather than go to bank cards at this stage.”
Paul Holmes
Q
I also want to ask about your experiences. There is a contention among many parties in the UK House of Commons that photographic ID means many people turned away from polling stations and being stopped voting, and that it is, as they would say, anti-democratic. Could you give a brief outline of the experience of you guys in Northern Ireland and the speed at which people got used to having to show photo ID? I think you mentioned, Mr Hughes, that over 90% of people are aware that they need to carry photo ID, but can you briefly talk about your experience of the numbers in recent elections who are turned away from voting in Northern Ireland, and do you think it is a large-scale issue?
Cahir Hughes: At the onset of today, it is not a large-scale issue. It is not something that voters or candidates express concerns about to us. Again, I will say that it has been in for 25 years. After the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002 was introduced, photographic ID came into effect in 2003. We ran a lot of public awareness campaigns to highlight the need for photographic ID and the correct forms of ID. We did a lot of post-poll research over the years and the percentage was in those high 80s and 90s. We do not ask that question any more because it is just part and parcel of the electoral process on polling day. We know that voters are very familiar with it.
In the last research that we did, somewhere in the region of 97% or 98% of people were aware that they needed to bring an accepted form of photographic ID. In my experience of observing at polling stations on polling day, when voters do show up without a form of ID, it is just because they genuinely forgot it. There have been no statements of feeling disenfranchised or not being able to participate on polling day, and presiding officers tend to report back to us that voters do come back with a form of ID, be it by returning home or nipping out to the car.
Paul Holmes
Q
David Marshall: Nothing substantial—just that I think the younger community here in Northern Ireland get it and accept it. The older community have been through that transition and that change, as Cahir said, 20 or 25 years ago and they accept it as well. That is not to say there is not the occasional issue in polling stations, but nothing substantial.
Paul Holmes
Q
Cahir Hughes: The list of forms of ID that are available to voters in Northern Ireland is significantly shorter than the list in Great Britain. Again, it is so well established here that people are familiar with it. Nevertheless, we need to move with the times; David touched on the impact of digital ID, and the veteran card is included in the Bill. It is right that it is kept under review, but if it was continually added to over and over again in Northern Ireland, that would risk further divergence from Great Britain and the confusion that we touched on previously.
It is right that it is kept under review, but as I say, there are high levels of public awareness of the need for photographic ID. David will correct me if I am wrong, but I think most voters are very familiar with the fact that they need to bring their driving licence or passport with them, and if they cannot get that, they can get an electoral identity card from the Electoral Office.
Paul Holmes
Mr Marshall, don’t feel you need to, but if you want to add something, you are more than entitled to.
David Marshall: I have nothing further to add.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)
Q
David Marshall: I manage a relatively small team in Belfast who run elections here. It is not the equivalent of Great Britain, where there are teams in local councils. There is an Electoral Office that covers all 11 councils here in Northern Ireland. We are tasked with running two sets of elections in May 2027—both the Northern Ireland Assembly and the local council elections—so most of my work and thinking is around that.
The Bill has a commitment to review the canvass law in Northern Ireland, which is very welcome indeed. The canvass law in Northern Ireland has not kept pace with changes in Great Britain, and it really needs to. That is an important step forward. In terms of the nomination process, the requirement for candidates to show a form of ID is a really sensible step forward, given the problems in Great Britain in 2024, and it would be relatively straightforward to implement. We think that is a great idea, as well as the timelines. As I understand it, the Bill brings forward a 12 noon timeline for the last day of nominations, which will help in terms of ballot paper proofing and then getting postal votes out to voters that bit earlier, which will obviously make it easier for them to take part in the election.
There are a whole host of other changes to postal vote deadlines for Great Britain, which in this instance aligns Great Britain to Northern Ireland. I am all for alignment if it changes Great Britain to be the same as Northern Ireland. That is really helpful. Lastly, from an electoral administrator’s perspective, the new penalties for intimidatory behaviour towards staff are critical, and it is really important that those are brought in. It is a really good step forward.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from The Politics Project and the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network. We have until 2.50 pm for this panel. Can the witnesses briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Harriet Andrews: Hi, I am Harriet Andrews, and I am the director of The Politics Project, which is a democratic education and engagement organisation that specialises in working with young people on elections and democracy.
Andy Mycock: I am Dr Andy Mycock, and I am a public policy specialist. I sat on the UK Government’s Youth Citizenship Commission in 2008 and 2009, and was a witness at the House of Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement.
Paul Holmes
Q
My question is on votes at 16 and your daily experiences of engaging with young people on it. I have had some experience of this in my constituency on Fridays. Granted, I am probably not the best person to sell the argument for votes at 16, although I still like to think that I can be at one with the kids in the schools—just the fact I said that shows I am not. Without giving my view, I have asked young people at my secondary schools to put their hands up to show whether they are for or against votes at 16, and the overwhelming majority are against. I found that really interesting, and I wonder whether it is in line with the general perception or engagement feedback you have seen?
Aside from votes at 16, could you outline to the Committee what methods, if this proposal goes through, the Government, mainstream political parties and, indeed, all parties should take on board, because we all have a stake in this and need to go further to engage younger people?
Harriet Andrews: There are different polls on what young people think about votes at 16, and the results are mixed—it often depends on how you ask the question. Young people are split on whether they want votes at 16, which suggests that they are not a monolith and that we should not talk about them as a single blob, because they have different views and opinions.
When you dig down into that polling, a lot of young people are saying, “I am not sure I have the skills and confidence to be voting and engaging.” To me, that suggests they are in a really good place to be thinking about voting, because they are taking the responsibility incredibly seriously. When you ask whether they could be supported by schools or adults to learn about this, or on their first vote, they are much keener to engage and take part in democracy from 16. So we do engage with that question a lot and talk to a lot of young people about it, and when we dig down, the reason is normally that they want a bit more support.
I love the question about what parties can do, because I think it is missing a bit from the debate at the moment. A really important thing for parties to think about is the voter information space. If I ask a young person right now, “What does X party think on Y issue?”, the absolute mess they have to wade through to work out what parties think and what their views are on particular issues is really difficult. It is difficult for any voter, and we could take votes at 16 as an opportunity to do a bit better on it.
We will talk a lot about misinformation and disinformation—it is a big topic—but the other side of it is where the good sources of information are that young people can go to for up-to-date factual information about the different political parties. That is one of my pleas: what are you doing to communicate that information to young people more effectively?
Paul Holmes
I am sure many of us around the table will be looking daily at how to do that if the Bill goes through.
Andy Mycock: May I correct the record? I am not an advocate for votes at 16; I am an academic researcher who has been looking at the evidence around the debates for more than 20 years.
We have tracked public opinion, both for young people under the age of 18 and for those over 18, and Hattie is absolutely correct: it is probably about 50/50 among young people. There are those who are very enthusiastic and those who are somewhat nervous. There are lots of reasons why some are more sceptical and nervous. It is often down to family background, the culture of their family and the communities they live in in terms of political engagement.
On the broader issue of public opinion, there has been no evidence of a majority of the general public supporting the measure. That is very different to when the voting age was lowered in 1969 to 18, when you had both political and public consensus over the age of enfranchisement and the age of majority.
In terms of the way political parties might engage better with young people, the research we have done suggests there are a number of issues. First, political parties rarely design policies with or for young people that attract them to vote, so regardless of whether the voting age is 16 or 18, most young people do not vote. Often, the representatives who are selected to represent them are over the age of 50. In all the Parliaments across the United Kingdom, the average age remains over 50, so young people do not see themselves in those people.
On the issues Hattie raised about political communication and the way electoral campaigning is undertaken, those are still clearly problematic; we have a very much 20th-century approach to a 21st-century electorate. People do not feel that politicians speak their language, come to the places where they aggregate or engage with them in ways that fit their lifestyle.
The question you ask is really important, because there is a supply and demand aspect to votes at 16, whether you support or oppose it. UK democracy is in some form of crisis. If you look at the evidence, there is huge distrust of political parties and politicians. More recently we are picking up that there is a systems fatalism: a sense that the electorate, particularly young people who are growing up at this point, feel that whoever is in power—the institutions that shape their lives and govern them—is not going to have a positive effect on them.
Whether you support or oppose votes at 16, this is a once-in-a-generation moment to reflect on not just the composition of the franchise but how you, as parties and politicians, think about the health of our democracy. This is a critical question of democratic resilience. I am doing work in Australia at the moment with the Australian federal Government, and this is a common challenge across western democracies. The UK has an opportunity to take leadership and address these challenges honestly, without getting lost in debates over votes at 16.
Paul Holmes
Q
So my question to you, in connection to that point, is whether you believe there is a missed opportunity in the Bill, in that somebody can vote in elections at 16 but not participate as a candidate, or do the Government have the right balance?
Andy Mycock: Again, I would go back to 1969. There has been very little policy learning about what happened there. It is interesting that the age of enfranchisement and the age of majority were brought together, but the age of candidature was not; in fact, it was not until 2006 that the Electoral Commission finally lowered it. At this point, there is no need to say that that is a barrier to or a support for lowering the voting age; it is an issue to think about.
I do feel there is a need for this House to review the age of majority; that is not to change it, but the conditions of the 20th and 21st centuries are very different. In the law, adulthood is now shaped at the age of 18, which is the legal age of citizenship, and yet you can get a national insurance number or a passport or undertake elective surgery—you can do a huge number of things—under the age of 18. At the same time, those traditional indicators of adulthood, such as owning a house, getting married, having children and having a full-time job, are being realised much later in life.
Our research indicates strongly that young people do not see 18 as a particularly significant once-in-a-lifetime moment when they become adults. Adulthood is much more complex, as is maturity and the sense of how young people fit into society. Our research indicates strongly that young people, if they are enfranchised universally across the UK at the age of 16, want to be treated as young people in the electorate and not to be seen as adults.
Paul Holmes
Q
Harriet Andrews: The main opportunity we see from votes at 16 is that it provides an opportunity to effectively support people to vote while they are still in education, or in work or training; 18 is actually a terrible time of your life to suddenly take on this new opportunity.
It allows us to deal with things like inequalities caused by the way your parents vote and engage determining how you vote and engage. The opportunity for schools to play much more of a role, and for there to be a more systematic approach to supporting young people, is the real opportunity with votes at 16.
Our main interest is also about what we are putting around votes at 16: where is the education, engagement and support for young people so that they can engage in democracy really effectively?
Samantha Dixon
Q
Harriet Andrews: We have a really great split screen on this because we work in England and in Wales, in particular. At the moment, we are preparing loads of young people for the Senedd election. We are running 16 youth hustings for young people at the moment in Wales, so we have a lot of on-the-ground experience of this. I would say that supporting young people at 16 and supporting young people at 18 are not particularly different; it is the same process of preparing them to engage and vote.
From our experience in Wales, I can say that young people are taking it really seriously. They are thinking about the responsibility and are really excited to vote. The work that we are doing with young people is a positive experience, and they are engaging really well. If there are any worries about harm being done to young people aged 16, our on-the-ground experience suggests that that is absolutely not the case.
The one thing that we see in Wales is that votes at 16 needs to come alongside support—particularly democratic education and engagement in schools—so that young people know how to vote. Just changing the voting age in itself will not lead to a mass change in the way young people engage with politics and democracy. The lack of support in Wales has meant that there is not loads and loads of engagement at 16, so the surrounding support is really important, regardless of the voting age.
Andy Mycock: I have been involved in the evaluations of both the Scottish and the Welsh lowering of the voting age, and I have advised both Governments on that work. The first thing is that the lessons from 1969 were not learned in either of those cases. Simply lowering the voting age on its own does not have a mercurial effect in encouraging young people to engage and vote. The big problem is that there is a need to have a significant framework of support for young people as they grow up, before they vote, whatever the voting age is.
At present, in Scotland, Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom, there is a disconnection between the different stages of school—between primary, secondary, and further and higher education. The 50% of young people who do not go to university are dropped completely in terms of their support. It is a huge issue, and I urge you to look at it. What happens in schools and outside schools is very poorly connected, and what happens online is almost unregulated. There is a huge opportunity to think about media, information and political literacy at this point.
I urge you to think about what the House of Lords called a civic journey—the ability to connect all those different interventions and policies from Governments at different levels to a set of clear policy ambitions. At the moment, votes at 16 has very little in terms of a clear agenda for success, beyond the idea that young people might vote a little more over their lifetime. In Scotland and Wales, that has not happened.
In the independence referendum of 2014, 75% of 16 and 17-year-olds voted. It was seen as a huge success, until you look at the average turnout, which was 85%. Young people aged 16 and 17 in Scotland, although they vote more than their 18 to 24-year-old peers, continue to vote at considerably lower rates than the average turnout. That is because neither Government thought at the time they lowered the voting age about significant, consistent support for every young person as they grow up. They need to be heard, listened to and engaged with, not just in their lessons but in their communities. They need to meet you and local and other elected representatives regularly so that they feel they are part of the democracy, regardless of whether they are enfranchised or not.
The other thing that did not happen in 1969 was any evidence-based approach to finding out what the effect of lowering the voting age was. Lowering the voting age to 18 in 1969 was a policy failure. In every election after that until the late 1990s, turnout among 18 to 24-year-olds fell. This is likely to be a similar situation. Votes at 16 needs to learn to adopt an evidence-informed approach. We need a longitudinal study of the effects of what is happening. It is remarkable that this country does not have a centre for research around democracy. We have one on electoral studies, but we do not aggregate what is happening out there in the democracy.
As I said at the start, we are in a moment of huge precarity in terms of the future strength of British democratic resilience. I urge this Committee to think about how Government, Parliament, academia, and wonderful organisations such as the one Hattie represents and the Electoral Commission can come together and think about how we start to build an evidence base that starts to learn from the policy interventions that we invest in. We must start to think about the future health of British democracy.
The Chair
We have until 3.15 pm for this panel. Could both professors briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Professor James: My name is Toby James. I am a professor of politics and public policy at the University of East Anglia. I am also the co-director of the Electoral Integrity Project.
Professor Bernal: Hello, I am Professor Paul Bernal. I am professor of information technology law at the UEA law school. I am a specialist in data and in privacy, and I have been working with Toby on electoral data since around 2020.
Paul Holmes
Q
You suggested that an amendment could be introduced to establish statutory requirements for electoral registration officers to publish data on parliamentary and local elections in England and Northern Ireland. I thought it was general practice and already a statutory requirement for returning officers to publish things such as the names of candidates, polling stations and the results of elections. Could you explain where you have come from on that, and what the difference is with the current system?
Professor James: This maybe reflects the different ages in which electoral laws were first designed, many of which were designed in the Victorian age. We have a very decentralised system, whereby electoral registration officers and returning officers publish data on candidates, results and so on, but not necessarily in an electronic format—to qualify that—and not in a uniform fashion. Many electoral authorities around the world, for example, would receive results and names of candidates at a local level, and therefore it would be really easy to publish all that in one central data source. That is not the case for UK parliamentary elections or for local elections. Not so much myself but other colleagues—colleagues at the University of Exeter, for example—collect this data and publish it instead. I think that it should be a central function of the state to provide electors with data on who the candidates are and what the results are.
Paul Holmes
Q
This may be slightly out of the scope of both of your expertise, but there is an amendment tabled to the Bill about a digital election leaflet repository for digital communications. It would introduce a duty for, after 72 hours, paid-for digital election campaigning materials to be stored in a central repository. It is not our amendment, but I think the argument is that people would then be able to see—and hold to account—the promises made by various parties in the United Kingdom. Do you have a view on whether that would be a good thing? Is that something that you support?
Professor James: My areas of expertise are probably elsewhere in the Bill, but I would generally be in favour of greater transparency. Collecting in a central location information about the promises that are being made to the electorate by parties only enhances transparency.
Professor Bernal: There is another side to it, which is whether such a requirement would mean that the electoral communications had to be in some kind of standardised form. For this sort of depository to be useful, it would have to be sortable, searchable and so on, and that would require some kind of standardised form. Would that be a good thing? I think it probably would, because we want as coherent a set of information as possible. Would parties like it, given that it would constrict which bits of information they gave and did not give? I am rather cynical about that possibility.
Paul Holmes
Q
Professor James: The Bill covers many of the foundations that you would need to have to enable electoral registration to be increasingly automated. As many other witnesses have said, the devil is in the detail, and the detail is due to come in secondary legislation. That is what is really important: which data sources will be used and which are the best data sources to be used?
In many ways, it makes sense to refer to secondary legislation for that, because obviously the best data sources for improving the quality and accuracy of the electoral register will change as data changes over time, so some flexibility for Ministers is relevant and important. At the same time, that is a lot of detail in secondary legislation. Obviously we are here and you are scrutinising the Bill. It will be important that the secondary legislation is scrutinised by parliamentarians, and that there is an opportunity for civil society groups, and those groups representing individuals who are less likely to be on the electoral register, to be included in those discussions.
The decisions that are being made at the moment—important decisions—by Government Departments, electoral officials and the Electoral Commission have a lot of detail in them. Making those discussions as inclusive, open and transparent as possible is something that Parliament might want to consider promoting.
Paul Holmes
Q
Professor Bernal: I have one thing to add, and it is a very simple one: I would like the open register to be abolished—straightforwardly abolished. As a privacy expert, it seems to me that it creates more risks. In the age that we are in at the moment, we need to reduce the risks as much as possible.
Samantha Dixon
Q
Professor James: You can think of two basic, broad clusters of countries that have automatic voter registration in one form or the other. In one set of countries, you have a central single record for every single citizen: what might be called a civil population register. Those are countries such as Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands or Germany. That is where automatic voter registration is simpler to implement because, in practice, what happens is that, in short, there is a copy and paste of that register ahead of election day.
In other countries, including in Canada and Australia, there is not a single record for every single individual. What those countries have done recently—I say “recently”; it has been over the course of the last 20 years—is move towards automatic voter registration by automatically enrolling groups of people using specific pieces of data at points when they know the data is accurate and reliable. In the UK context, Canada and Australia are probably the most relevant examples.
The Chair
I am sure we will be exploring the “Lord knows what” as we go along.
Richard Mawrey: My name is Richard Mawrey. I am a King’s counsel and a practising barrister, and have acted as election judge—or election commissioner, technically—in most of the serious electoral fraud cases of the last 20-plus years, so I have considerable judicial experience of electoral fraud and other malpractice in all its guises.
Paul Holmes
Q
Given that in 2015 a Tower Hamlets election court judgment found that personation was one of the interlinked types of “corrupt and illegal practices” that took place, where people’s votes were literally stolen, are the proposals within the legislation good or bad for voter security?
Councillor Golds: I think the list produced by the Electoral Commission was somewhat restrictive; it should have been expanded. We had the situation where service personnel, nurses and so on were arriving with their photocards, but could not be permitted to vote. I am not sure that a bank card is a good idea, because anybody can hand a bank card to somebody else. Voter ID is popular with the public and causes very few problems. People believe it adds security to the electoral process.
Paul Holmes
Q
Richard Mawrey: Yes. As a means of identification at polling stations, I am easy either way on bank cards. Clearly, anyone can obtain a bank card and create an account in a particular name, so fraud would be very easy. The reason why I am relaxed about it at polling stations is that personation at polling stations is a very rare bird indeed, these days.
Most personation occurs with postal voting simply because personation at polling stations is difficult and extremely labour intensive. You have to find bodies prepared to go there and do the personating, and they are personally running the risk that somebody says, “You’re not Mr Jones”—and along comes a large constable and there is big trouble; normally, with personation, you are looking at a spell inside. It is an extremely risky business and you can do it only in penny packets: half a dozen here and half a dozen there.
If you want to influence an election, even a local election, personation at a polling station is a waste of time and effort, so on that issue I am fine. However, I would counsel very strongly against using bank cards as a means of identification for registering voters or for postal votes, because the possibilities for fraud are obvious.
Paul Holmes
Q
Harry Busz: I would add that, as an organisation, we have collected data on the number of turn-aways at the polling-station level, since the policy of photographic identification came in a few years ago. We tend to find significantly higher numbers of people being turned away at the polling-station level than we see in some of the data that has been collected by the Electoral Commission, primarily because of the different stages at which people can be turned away in the process, whether that is signage, party political tellers who are overextending their role or meeters and greeters.
It is an issue because there are particular groups who struggle to either have the ID or to bring the ID with them on the day. From our perspective, looking at different ways to bring in other forms of photo identification, whether that is the digitisation of the voter authority certificate or other forms of digital ID, is welcome. I agree to a large extent with the councillor about reducing the existing level of security when bringing in non-photographic identification.
Paul Holmes
Q
There is nothing in the Bill about family voting, but do you believe it should be amended in that regard? Do you or Democracy Volunteers perceive that family voting is a serious enough issue, and such a prevalent issue, that we need legislation to strengthen the security of that element, Harry?
Harry Busz: Let me be clear about the data that we have collected. With family voting, we collect instances of somebody’s right to a secret ballot being denied to them because of oversight, direction or collusion inside polling booths. As an organisation, we have collected and published data on that for 10 years now. At the latest general election, we saw it in 116 of the 204 constituencies that we observed in. It is a widespread problem all across the country.
Family voting can take different forms. When ballot secrecy is broken, we do not know the relationships between the people who are involved, or whether there is coercive control, so we very much believe that it should not be allowed in any democracy. Everybody’s vote should be theirs and theirs alone. The data that we collected led to the Ballot Secrecy Act 2023, which is an important piece of legislation that specifies that trying to influence somebody in the polling booth is an offence. We think that there are ways in which that could go even further.
To clarify, oversight should not be allowed. A lot of the legislation is in place. One of the challenges is election administrators on the ground, with the infrastructure they have, being able to prevent that from taking place.
Paul Holmes
Q
Harry Busz: Yes. For example, the types of polling booths we use here in the UK are a sort of cross-section. The selling points of those polling booths are that they are easy to store and quick to put up, but there is no reference to ballot security, whereas lots of other countries have individual polling booths that can aid staff in preventing family voting before it has started. By the time it has started, it tends to be too late.
Paul Holmes
Q
Councillor Golds: My experience goes well beyond Tower Hamlets. I have been an election agent for parliamentary elections in five different London boroughs and in Hertfordshire, and I have been an election agent in seven different London boroughs for local elections. I have campaigned. I have seen this far too often, in far too many places. It crosses communities. Let us be absolutely clear that we are not talking of any individual community here. It is a situation we could possibly call patriarchal, in which groups of men believe they can tell women what to do. In many places, that will include aggressive, angry white men. Let us put that on the record. I have seen it, and I have tried to stop it.
When we first got involved in this campaign, Lord Hayward, who I believe is here today, steered the Ballot Secrecy Bill through the House of Lords. That strengthened the protections. When we were campaigning against family voting, some bizarre instructions were going around, including one sent by a former official of the Electoral Commission to the police. I mention this because I shall relate it to Gorton and Denton. The police said:
“We have checked with the Electoral Commission and have been informed that just because the voter process was not followed, in terms of secrecy…it might not necessarily relate…to an offence.”
Here it comes:
“The onus is on the individual who casts their vote to claim that secrecy has been breached or that they have been unduly influenced.”
We got the Bill through, and the Act sits there. It is illegal to interfere with somebody. I seriously wonder whether that email is still sitting in an inbox somewhere in a police station or council office.
The Chair
Q
Councillor Golds: I am sorry Chair, but it concerns family voting, doesn’t it? This is the secrecy of the ballot I am talking about, where somebody is interfering with it. The onus is on the individual who casts their vote. This is what it is. That is why the Ballot Secrecy Act, which Lord Hayward and former MP Paul Bristow brought through the House of Commons, was passed with support across the Floor; every party supported it. It went through, as I think colleagues would say, on the nod. It absolutely clarified the law that, if you vote, you vote in secrecy. My concern has always been that it is not being enforced. The law is the law, but where is the spirit?
Paul Holmes
I agree.
Richard Mawrey: The problem—which I have found in all the cases I have tried, and not simply those to do with family voting, but almost any electoral offence—is that there is no point in having rules or statutes, however good and however well drafted, if nobody is prepared to enforce them.
That was particularly the case in Tower Hamlets, where there were multiple breaches of almost every prohibition in the Representation of the People Act 1983. I have never seen that many different offences, most of which were proved to the hilt. What happened there was that they were drawn to the attention of the Electoral Commission, which said, “No problem there; nothing to look at”, and to the police, who said, “Oh, we’re not interfering”, knowing the type of allegations that would be made against them if they did interfere.
Exactly the same happened about 20 years before in Birmingham. The evidence of widespread postal fraud was put in the hands of West Midlands police, and they got a nice little folder, wrote on the outside “Operation Gripe”, put it in a bottom drawer and forgot about it. That was their own evidence in the matter; they were simply unwilling to act.
It is not a question of resources. In many cases, the police were presented with what might be termed an oven-ready case, and they said, “Oh, no, we’re not touching this with a bargepole.” I am afraid that is the problem. Another problem, I am sorry to say, is that the Electoral Commission’s view is that electoral fraud is not happening. Indeed, that has been its view since I delivered Birmingham, hence my comment at the time about banana republics. Therefore, there is no impetus for the people who should be enforcing it actually to enforce the law.
I would say that, on family voting, or indeed any of the matters that are proposed, the law at the moment is fine but, if you do not enforce it, you might just as well put the thing in a bottom drawer marked “Operation Gripe”.
Paul Holmes
Q
Do you think that is a good thing for democracy? Do you think it is needed, given some of the campaigning tactics we have seen? Or do you not think it would not make a difference in general to some of the problems we have seen in by-elections—but also in local and national elections—in the country?
Harry Busz: As an organisation, we do not necessarily have a viewpoint on the issue you are referring to. As well as ballot secrecy and a lot of the other issues that we look at in polling stations, we are very aware of the accessibility of elections and understanding the campaigns going on being important to increasing turnout and getting more people involved in democracy. We do not have a specific policy towards the new clause.
Councillor Golds: I have been an agent for many years. Many years ago, in Brent, I remember issuing leaflets in Gujarati. I think that this is something that needs balance. We need to understand—I sent this back to the regulators—that it is one thing to have a leaflet on both sides having, “Do come and vote for party X, my party. I am a great candidate and my party is wonderful”, if what is printed in another language that might be familiar to people also says, “Please vote for me. I am a great candidate. My party is wonderful.” However, if in English the leaflet says, “Please vote for me. I am a great candidate. My party is wonderful”, but we turn it over and the other language says, “The other people are”—lord knows what—or this, that and everything else, then that is when we get to the problem.
In my view, this has to go back to the regulators. I am sorry to say that. In a country such as ours, with a multiplicity of languages, I want people to get involved. In my current borough, the big thing is Sylheti. If people understand Sylheti and we can put stuff out in Sylheti, all well and good, as long as when something is put in Sylheti, it says the same as for an English-speaking voter. If an English-speaking voter says, “I do not understand this”, and someone can turn around to say, “It is exactly the same”, all well and good, but if it is different, we have trouble.
Richard Mawrey: It would be perfectly acceptable if there were some sort of insistence, as Peter Golds says, for the texts to be comparable, but that is unfortunately not the case—or certainly was not the case in Tower Hamlets, as I discovered. Quite anodyne stuff in English—“Vote for me. I am a good chap”—came out much longer in Sylheti, couched in really quite extreme religious terms. The two sides of the document did not match.
It would clearly be desirable for the two sides of the document to match, so that, in a sense, you could monitor it, particularly if the one that was in a non-English language contained material that ought not to be there in the first place. That can occur, not simply with Asian languages, but with all other languages. You could say something that, you hope, no one outside your language group will understand. It is essential, I think, to monitor that so there is some equality between the obverse and reverse of the same coin.
Paul Holmes
I appreciate that. We will go away to look at how that new clause can be tailored to your feedback, all three of you. The new clause came out of some of the campaigning in the Gorton by-election, so we will go away and look at it again.
The Chair
Mr Browder, can you introduce yourself? I do not know if you heard me say that there is likely to be a vote during the course of your evidence. I will suspend the Committee for 15 minutes. The MPs present will vote, but we will come back to hear the remainder of your evidence.
Alexander Browder: Good afternoon, I am Alexander Browder. I am the founder of the global cryptocurrency laundering database—the first and largest open-source database on cryptocurrency laundering. I am the author of the report, “Confronting the Illicit Finance Hydra in the Crypto Markets: Protecting Retail Investors and Disrupting Hostile Government Exploitation”. I will be pleased to answer any questions that you have regarding how the UK could see cryptocurrency interfering in our elections. I have seen a number of bad actors using cryptocurrency to influence politics elsewhere, so I am happy to provide some examples.
Paul Holmes
Q
Alexander Browder: You cannot have crypto donations without a proper regulatory framework, and there is not going to be a whole regulatory framework for all of cryptocurrency until at least late 2027. You cannot have the wild west of cryptocurrency without proper guardrails. You need to be able to establish that those guardrails are effective in stopping foreign and criminal interference in our elections. If cryptocurrency is deemed to be permissible, we need, firstly, to be able to disclose the wallet addresses of the political donations.
There should not be any limit to the reporting requirements for cryptocurrency donations; at present, it is above £500. All cryptocurrency should be stored in institutions that are registered with the UK Financial Conduct Authority. Furthermore, the Electoral Commission needs more power to be able to investigate cryptocurrency donations. At present, they cannot access cryptocurrency wallets or investigate cryptocurrency exchanges, which leaves a whole gap open to foreign interference.
Paul Holmes
Q
Alexander Browder: Bad actors are continually evolving, and within cryptocurrency there are a number of different tactics that they use to conceal their funds. One that is particularly relevant to this issue is something called smurfing. That is where donations are split across cryptocurrency wallets to stay under the £500 reporting threshold.
There is also something called a mixer, which allows a user to send funds in and receive a whole different address. That means it is impossible to trace for an investigator who wants to try and see if a criminal has donated. At present, the Electoral Commission does not have any power to investigate. Political parties are not proper investigative bodies and do not have the skills to investigate this complex situation. More power needs to be established for this.
The Chair
Excellent. We also have three witnesses in the room. There is always a bit of choreography when we are rotating between online and in-situ witnesses. Could the witnesses in the Committee Room introduce themselves too, please?
Colin Blackwell: I am Colin Blackwell, and I am deputy chairman of Conservatives Abroad.
Imogen Tyreman: I am Imogen Tyreman, and I am the chair of the Labour International constituency Labour party.
Richard Williams: My name is Richard Williams, and I am Labour International’s representative on Labour’s national policy forum.
Paul Holmes
Q
Colin Blackwell: Thank you, Paul. The simple answer is no, it does not. A survey about voter participation among overseas electors in the OECD has shown that the UK is a significant statistical outlier, with the lowest effective participation rate. Only around 1.3% of the more than 5 million people in that potential electorate are thought to have successfully cast a ballot at the last UK election. This Bill, of course, does not overtly address overseas electors, but one of its objectives is to increase voter participation.
In line with the Electoral Commission’s recommendations, Conservatives Abroad believes that technological advances now make it possible for a secure and verifiable online facility to be introduced to allow overseas electors to download and self-print their ballot paper and return envelope for one-way return posting. New Zealand and Singapore are two English-speaking Westminster democracies that have implemented downloadable ballot papers, and they use a biometric identification app to verify overseas electors downloading ballot papers against the voter registration ID credentials that were provided at the time of voter registration.
Unlike at the time of the Elections Act 2022, when Conservatives Abroad first recommended this approach, the UK now has this technology. In the last few weeks, we have seen the launch of the Government Digital Service’s One Login app for gov.uk services, and it is now available. That was previously not a technological possibility, but now it absolutely is. New Zealand and Singapore are the gold standards for downloadable ballots for their diaspora.
Paul Holmes
Q
Imogen Tyreman: In the proposal itself, there are some elements that will help overseas voters to get on the register and exercise their vote and that go further than the current situation, such as the extension of the postal vote and requiring earlier registration. There are also things such as automatic registration, looking at passports and some of the pilot projects. However, I think that more can still be done, particularly on postal votes. That is often what people use, because there is not really enough information about proxy voting, and electoral registration officers do not know how it can operate. That feels like a barrier.
To take the example of postal voting, there is a return rate of 70% or so if ballots are sent out early. But of the postal ballots that were sent out later during the last election—around 27 June—only 2% were returned. Looking at specific countries, there was only a 6% return rate for Australia. There was a higher return rate for France, at 75%. In Spain, which is also a European country, only 32% of ballots were returned. Royal Mail itself has said that it takes six to seven days for standard letters to reach the rest of the world, so if the postal vote deadline is 14 days, I do not know how we are expecting ballots to reach voters and get returned in time. For us, having downloadable ballots is one option, as well as looking at the potential for online voting, and at the use of embassies and consulates as voting hubs or places where we can return ballots. They could potentially go back by diplomatic mail, which is much quicker.
Paul Holmes
Q
Imogen Tyreman: Yes.
Paul Holmes
I was just checking—I was not trying to catch you out.
Richard Williams: Perhaps I can just add to that last point while it is top of mind. Something that came up in discussions among members of Labour International was what could be viable alternatives to the current system. Of course, we are not the first country to talk about electronic voting.
Other European nations have successfully introduced electronic voting, with Estonia probably being the best example. In its last election, over 51% of votes were cast via an electronic system. A number of measures are built into that system to avoid things like voting coercion, whereby multiple votes can be cast and only the very last one is actually counted, and physical voting always takes precedence when both electronic votes and physical votes are received.
Having said that, to come back to the original point on whether Britons abroad are adequately addressed as a voter group, I think the numbers that Colin rightly spoke about are telling. Of the 5 million Britons living abroad, only just under 200,000 are on the electoral register, which speaks for itself.
There are really three main reasons for that. One, beyond looking at processes, is simply awareness: many Britons are not aware that they have the right to vote if they are not living in the country. There is no proactive communication on the side of the Government. It is very much left to the individual themselves to find out what their rights are and then to go through the process of contacting the local authority where they used to live in the UK—I did it in Ashford, Mr Joseph’s constituency. It is relatively easy, but there is then the additional process of having to register for a postal vote, which happens afterwards. Those things are all addressed in the Bill, and I think there are some improvements there, but the awareness is the first hurdle.
Then there are the processes themselves. And the third point, in some cases, is probably apathy: if you do not have an MP representing your interests as somebody living abroad, you do not care about the potholes in the local high street as much.
Paul Holmes
Q
Jenny Shorten: We don’t disagree with any of what has been said, but I will pick up on a couple of points. On the last point you made, about contact with MPs, I conducted a survey across all parties to look into exactly that. The answer to the question, “Do overseas voters think they are represented?” is no, because things like the automated replies say, “I can only help you if you live in the constituency.” It is no wonder they feel invisible, and that is a word that has regularly cropped up in our surveys with people who get in touch with us; they say, “I feel like I’m not there and not being taken notice of.”
The other thing I wanted to direct our thinking towards is whether the processes and systems set us up to fail or to succeed. As a former election agent, I would say that the election timetable is not fit for purpose; it does not make sense. It went wrong for UK electors last time round, but particularly for those overseas. As I think Imogen remarked, you cannot get it done. With the current options, you have to wait until 19 days before polling day to know who the candidates are, so that is the earliest you can prepare ballot papers. People can still register up to 11 working days before. It is not going to work, however hard and however assiduously the people who administer it actually try.
On behalf of all of us, I think, I would like to say thank you to the Electoral Commission for finally collating the figures on how many postal votes got back in time; it is the first time we have seen them. I am sure the Committee is shocked by the fact that it is less than half. We need to look at the process, but it is also a significant matter of culture.
Paul Holmes
Q
Tom McAdam: I would just like to touch on the opportunity here. When we look at France, at the last legislative elections, it had a 37% turnout of overseas citizens. We can compare that with the turnout of British citizens overseas at the last general election, which was 5%. There is a huge opportunity. It is not one measure that will help that, but a package of measures.
The apathy point is really important. Without a dedicated overseas Member of Parliament talking about the interests of overseas citizens, it is easy to feel that we do not have representation in Parliament. Given the problems with actual voting, people do not feel incentivised to attempt to vote. I do not think that any one measure will really move the needle but, if we take everything as a whole, we might be able to move towards the numbers seen in France.
Paul Holmes
If the Minister decides to make me the MP for overseas voters, I am more than happy to do surgeries across the world.
Samantha Dixon
Q
As an aside to Paul’s point, I do receive correspondence from constituents who live overseas, usually in respect of their pension arrangements. However, to tackle the point about apathy or disengagement, the Bill includes powers to pilot automatic voter registration. Do you think that that would be a valuable tool for overseas voters?
Colin Blackwell: As others have touched on, awareness is everything. Conservatives Abroad believes that what is vital above all else is raising awareness of the right to vote and encouraging overseas citizens to register, which is now done online.
Historically, the civil service has always said, “Oh, we can’t contact Brits overseas because we don’t keep a register. We don’t know where they live. We don’t know who they are.” That raises the question of how this part of the electorate would be suitable for automatic registration.
Today’s Government services are delivered digitally and electronically in a way that was not done before. Many Departments now interact digitally with millions of British citizens living overseas. The most obvious one is the Passport Office: half a million passports from overseas are renewed every year—over 10 years, that is 5 million. The international pension centre at the Department for Work and Pensions deals with more than a million overseas pensions. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office keeps registers of Brits in individual countries. Lastly, the first place people go when they move overseas is His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to change their address. Millions of British people living overseas still pay British taxes in one form or another or make voluntary NI contributions.
What I am saying is that, if all these digital interactions between Government and overseas Brits were brought together, and a link to the online voter registration page were automatically provided in those interactions, you would overnight reach potentially millions of this invisible electorate with the exact place they need to go to register to vote. That is the approach that Conservatives Abroad would suggest you look at.
Imogen Tyreman: Automatic voter registration pilots are a great thing to look into, especially for overseas voters. I agree that we should look at how registering for a passport could link to registering to vote. Yes, it might miss some Brits, but unfortunately we do not keep a record of emigration, so it is the best opportunity we have. However, there needs to be a package of other measures or that will not necessarily affect turnout.
We see lower turnout in countries that have passive registration, so there must be accompanying measures, even if it is through the Electoral Commission, to help us to contact voters abroad to inform them. That could be something like a free post or an opt-in registration. Such options need to be explored, and the timeline for renewal also needs to be considered to make sure that people stay on the register.
Richard Williams: I agree with all the points that have just been made. There is one group of people who have emigrated who might fall through the cracks if you look just at the HMRC records of people who have emigrated: those born to British parents overseas. These people may have a right to citizenship but have never lived in the country. They have specific difficulties even getting on to the electoral register. In many cases, they need to provide evidence of their parents’ birth certificate and their own birth certificate, and then there is a question of where their vote should be assigned. This topic came up in discussions with other Labour International members.
Beyond that, if we speak about the choice architecture, we certainly echo the sentiment that we are in favour of trialling automatic and automated voter registration. One topic that came up in discussion with our members, which is perhaps a way to look at doing this, was the idea of automatic reminders upon passport renewal, which is an interaction that many Brits abroad will have. If you structured that in such a way that people would then have the choice—ticking a box to say, “Yes, I want to be on the register,” or “No, I do not want to be on the register”—it would simplify and consolidate the process for many people.
There is then the question of whether there is an opt-in or opt-out approach. In the notes accompanying the Bill from the House of Commons Library, there was a reference to the Sheffield University case study in which 75% of students were enrolled on the electoral register through a process whereby they were prompted upon their annual enrolment for university. That figure compares with 13% for other universities. If that system were explored in a pilot for voters abroad, we might expect to see similar results just by structuring the choice in such a way that people have this prompt, and we could then ask whether it should be an opt-in or an opt-out choice.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Demos and Full Fact. We have until 5.20 pm for this panel in our revised timescale. Will our witnesses please briefly introduce themselves for the record?
Azzurra Moores: Hi, my name is Azzurra Moores. I am the associate director of information ecosystems at Demos, the UK’s cross-party think tank.
Chris Morris: Hello, I am Chris Morris, the chief executive of Full Fact. We are a charity and we do fact-checking. We also have a technology team and a policy team to try to tackle issues of misinformation.
Paul Holmes
Q
Clearly, in the election strategy announced before Christmas, the Government said that our
“democracy is being threatened by misinformation”.
Both your organisations have come up with fairly similar recommendations, including, in the Demos report on electoral online harms, the recommendation for a political digital repository. I think that is quite a good idea. Can you outline to the Committee, on behalf of your organisations, where you think that the Bill is deficient in tackling such threats, particularly those from digital communications?
Azzurra Moores: I should clarify that our recommendations are so similar because Demos, Full Fact and other civil society partners have been working together.
Paul Holmes
I would never have guessed.
Azzurra Moores: We are working together partly because there is a real feeling among civil society that the Bill is much too narrow in scope and does not go far enough to tackle some of the major threats to elections that we are seeing. Part of the reason we came together is the quote that you referenced, Paul: the Prime Minister himself said that misinformation is a huge problem, and actually we are seeing such threats to elections.
We have come together to think about some of the recommendations. We have come up with a number of recommendations on a range of issues, including online harassment of candidates, given that the Bill focuses a lot on in-person harassment of candidates. We have also looked at deepfakes, and at how digital advertising needs to be modernised. We really feel that the Bill is, at the moment, a bit of a missed opportunity to tackle something that is—this is the consensus among civil society—a huge threat to democracy.
If we do not tackle some of these issues now, we do not know when we are going to tackle them to prepare ourselves for the next election. We were quite lucky in the last election that we did not see major threats to democracy or huge amounts of interference. But we have seen examples globally, including across Europe and in Canada, and we have seen examples outside election periods. We feel that that is why the Bill needs to be amended to provide for some of the bigger threats that elections face.
Chris Morris: To back that up, part of our fear is that a lot of what is in the Bill has been locked in for so long that these really important aspects of misinformation and disinformation are missing. As you suggested, we are in a situation where technology is moving at warp speed.
We recognise that legislating at a fixed point when the technology is moving so quickly is not easy, yet the Bill falls significantly short of its original aims, which included restoring trust and strengthening the integrity of our democracy. If you are going to hold an election, the information environment in which it is held is absolutely central to the public perception—I think I am going to use the word “transparency” a lot during this session—that the system is working in their favour and can be trusted.
People are sceptical—we like scepticism; scepticism is good. The danger is that it tips over into outright cynicism. The more transparent the measures in the Bill can be, and the clearer it is that people understand they can trust the system—and that they can trust that political parties and candidates, when standing for office, are held to high standards—the better it will be. The concern is that the technology is outweighing the ability of Committees like this one and legislation like this Bill to do the job they set out to do.
Paul Holmes
Q
These quotes are from your briefing, Chris, if I may plagiarise and read them out. A former Minister said that more needs to be done to deal with hostile actors. My boss, James Cleverly, has said that the Conservatives would support
“sensible, proportionate measures to ensure that AI-generated political material is clearly labelled and subject to transparency as a requirement”.—[Official Report, 2 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 635.]
Zöe Franklin, who serves on this Committee, said that section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 needs to be updated to
“explicitly criminalise the use of AI and deepfakes”.—[Official Report, 2 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 651.]
Your briefing also mentions what Martin Wrigley and Alex Barros-Curtis said. Emily Darlington, with her two excellent amendments, has tried to tackle this issue.
What interactions have you both had with officials in the Department to see how far you can get in probing and trying to get these issues included in the Bill in the first place? What would you say to the Committee about Emily Darlington’s new clauses 22 and 24?
Chris Morris: Overall, both our organisations are talking to officials all the time, so the doors are open, which is good. Part of the problem with the debate about deepfakes is that, in my opinion, some people want to go too far. It is worth exploring the idea of criminalising deepfakes as essentially identity theft, but I would have a lot of caution around that.
It is good to explore those policy options, but we are much more in favour of transparency of labelling. We have suggested an amendment that is very specific about the way that political deepfakes can be labelled. If you go down the road of criminalisation, you come to a very difficult line about where satire suddenly becomes criminal. Nobody wants to factcheck satire, and nobody wants to make satire illegal.
Again, we have to start looking at some of these things in a slightly different way to take account of the way that technology has made it incredibly easy for anyone to create new information just like that. That is the world in which we are living. Trying to criminalise some of those things would be a dangerous path to go down, but clear labelling—transparency of source—is absolutely key.
Azzurra Moores: I would echo Chris’s point. We are incredibly grateful to the officials we have spent many months talking to. They have been incredibly constructive and open to hearing these recommendations. We are sitting in front of you because all those recommendations have not made it into the Bill.
Part of the reason Emily has put forward so many amendments is because these issues deserve to be debated by parliamentarians, but they also deserve to be debated by the people they are impacting. A lot of the things we are looking at here will impact every Member around this table, and it is for you to decide how you tackle them.
You have mentioned a couple of Emily Darlington’s amendments, and I want to turn to new clause 10. You mentioned section 106 of the Representation of the People Act 1983, and I thought it might be worth clarifying that, while this measure is something she has put forward, with Demos and Full Fact support, it is actually a recommendation that came long before. It came out of the Speaker’s Conference, which I know many members of the Committee were part of, and it is something to which the Government have now responded by saying, “We understand that this is important.”
New clause 10, if anything, is just a vehicle for the Government to action something they have already said could be really valuable. It would not create new law or new bounds to discuss free speech; all it would do is say that deepfakes exist as a medium through which you must not make false statements about another candidate. It is a very simple amendment that asks the Government to publish legal guidance, so that there is no uncertainty among officials, regulators or the police. It is quite a simple approach, and that is what we have felt is the most important way forward. These things have been discussed for a long time, and the amendments are allowing them to be discussed within the scope of the Bill.
Paul Holmes
Q
Very quickly, as I know other people want to ask questions, I can see why people would want to support new clause 24’s repository of digital political advertising. One of the drawbacks that I think we can see in the new clause, which I want to strengthen, is that the Electoral Commission obviously will have responsibility for establishing a repository of paid-for digital political advertising within the 72-hour window. Where do you both think is the ideal location for that repository? Where would it sit? Would it sit with a Government Department or in a Government agency? Who would be the regulator, and who would be the manager and data controller of that repository? Do you have a preference for how that might be legislated for, such as in a new amendment?
Azzurra Moores: Our original preference was for this to sit with Ofcom. To be frank with the Committee, when this amendment was tabled, there was pushback on including any new powers for Ofcom in the Bill. At the moment, new clause 24 puts those powers on the Electoral Commission, and I personally do not mind who holds that power. I do not think it particularly matters, and it is really for Members to decide themselves.
What matters are the principles that we are trying to discuss here. We want to give voters the ability to verify whether a political ad is real, and we want to allow them to do that in real time. We have given scope for 72 hours, but we would obviously hope that it would be sooner. We also want those adverts to be transferred to the National Archives so that, in years to come, we understand how elections were fought.
Who holds or pays for that? I think that is really a matter for the Committee. We can discuss in detail whether it should be Ofcom or the Electoral Commission, but I think we need to make sure that we agree on the principle that elections are no longer fought just in person; they are fought online, and we therefore need really stringent measures to understand how elections were fought in years to come.
Chris Morris: But I would argue that it should not be a Government Department, which you suggested as a possibility. I think it should be Ofcom or the Electoral Commission, and I think the Electoral Commission would be happy to take on that responsibility. Again, it comes back to the issue of transparency, as people deserve to be able to see what is there. It is important not only for researchers but for ordinary voters, because they are bombarded from so many angles with advertising of various kinds. Creating a repository would be a big democratic step forward.
Paul Holmes
I would be one of the people sad enough to go to the National Archives to look at them, so I am fully in favour of it.
Azzurra Moores: Me too.
Chris Morris: See you there.
Samantha Dixon
Q
Chris Morris: It is not all doom and gloom. If we take the example of digital imprints, measures have been taken to extend the digital imprint regime. Our argument is simply that it does not go far enough, and it should go further. For example, it should cover things like fake newspapers or websites, which can be set up in seconds, that do not include their political party affiliation. The digital imprint regime is being slightly improved by the Bill, but it is simply not ambitious enough.
We also have to think not just of 2026, but of 2029. If you look at how technology has changed since the last general election in 2024, it is almost in a different league. I regularly ask my head of AI, “Where are we going to be in three years’ time?”, and he usually says, “I’m not sure where we are going to be in three months’ time.” We need to have the flexibility to make sure that the measures are as wide as possible, because even if we broaden them in the way that we suggest to include a wider variety of things, by 2029 we may be looking back and saying that it probably was not enough.
Azzurra Moores: It is very hard to disagree with Chris. The imprints work is huge progress. Obviously, it could go further, but I appreciate that a lot of the things we are asking for were not in scope when the Bill was being drafted. Does it cover the issues we are talking about? No, because it never intended to. That is where we are saying there is a real opportunity for the Bill to go further and be wider.
While it may have started with a narrow scope, perhaps once you hear what Philip Rycroft says through his review—and read our amendments slightly further—it will be appreciated that there is an opportunity to say, “How else can we make the Bill safeguard elections for the future?”
Chris Morris: To add to that, on a slightly different part of the legislation, it is good that the Electoral Commission will have greater powers on information sharing and enforcement, but we would like to see it have greater powers on information gathering.
There is a bit of a gap on who is responsible for regulating in that area. We would have liked to see that covered in the Online Safety Act 2023 and given to Ofcom. That did not happen, but one thing that could and should happen in this legislation is giving the Electoral Commission the power to compel people to hand over information or documents really quickly, such as in the heat of an election campaign, without having to turn it into a formal investigation, which as you probably know is laborious and takes time. A lot of this is about agility as well as transparency.
Paul Holmes
Q
I have taken great pleasure in reading all the evidence that has come in today. There are some bits I agree with—particularly from Dr Hawley and Dr Power—but there are some recommendations that I would be concerned about if we started to implement. Sorry, Mr Hames, but I am going to focus on the other two witnesses first. First, where do you see the balance between the freedom to practise democracy and overburdensome restrictions that could harm transparency and restrict voter interaction with the party political process?
We have heard this morning that there is a perception that overseas voters are finding it incredibly hard to engage with voting and have many obstacles to voting. You have a proposal that any overseas voter wishing to be considered a permissible donor should also be a UK-registered taxpayer and have submitted at least one non-zero tax return in the two years prior to making the donation. Does that not risk creating two tiers of voter—well, we already have that, but exacerbating it? For example, someone in receipt of benefits or who falls underneath the tax threshold in this country is allowed to vote. Why should they be allowed to vote, if an overseas voter who does not pay tax should not be allowed to vote? That is to Dr Power, then I will come back with another question.
Dr Power: There is a two-tier system, effectively, if you have overseas voters and overseas taxpayers, and UK-based taxpayers. It is pretty easy to draw a distinction between where the level of threat is and where the level of overburdensome regulation is, if you will.
I sometimes get concerned when I hear about how this approach can be overly burdensome. It is often used as a crutch to prevent genuine weaknesses in the system being dealt with. I do not think it is too much to ask of people who live overseas, who might well be slightly more politically exposed, to show that they are also engaging with the British system and paying tax in that respect. I do not necessarily have concerns that that creates a two-tier system—people are allowed to donate in the UK, of course, and people are allowed to donate overseas. Of course, if they lived overseas and did not pay tax, they could donate under the £500 limit.
Paul Holmes
Q
“Parties are increasingly building up their war chests well before the run-up to elections and engaging in permanent campaigning. This can have an impact on subsequent elections; as the Committee for Standards on Public Life…noted in its 2021 report”.
It is always going to be the case that political parties have to fundraise to communicate with the electorate. Where is the balance? What I could not quite work out from that submission is where you see the balance between restricting fundraising and keeping communications with the electorate going over that 18 months, rather than seeing it as campaigning? I might not be clear, but I am trying to see where you see that balance coming through.
Dr Susan Hawley: This is not about stopping it; it is about having limits apply across the annual period. An amendment that relates to the digital campaigning side has already been tabled. That is a recognition that we are in an age of permanent campaigning and to make sure that the public know what is being spent to influence them. It is about transparency and fairness, because if some parties are able to keep a lot of money in those pre-regulated periods and others are not, an imbalance is created when it comes to the election. It is about transparency and fairness.
Paul Holmes
Q
“Prohibit crypto donations until/unless…crypto currency becomes much more widely used by a greater cross-section of the population”.
That is something that needs to be seriously explored, because of evidence given to us earlier in Committee about the lack of regulation that has caught up with something that is to me completely not understandable. You support that proposal, Dr Hawley, because it is your proposal, but do the other two witnesses support an interim ban on cryptocurrency donations until the regulatory framework has caught up? Also, if we get a suitable regulatory framework, do you think such donations should be re-established or do you think that they should just be banned permanently?
Duncan Hames: We do support a moratorium for the purposes you describe. How temporary it should be depends on whether it is possible to address the risks. At such point as Parliament is confident that other forms of payment carry no additional risk to sterling or even cash, then the case for the moratorium would not be as strong. Right now, it is an absolute minefield to try to work out exactly where this money originates, which drives a coach and horses through the existing rules we have on political finance.
Paul Holmes
Thank you. Dr Power?
Dr Power: We are short on time, so I will say yes, and you can refer to my evidence. The only thing I would add is that one of the concerns we have about crypto-currency generally is its ability to supercharge donations below £500, which is underneath the check for permissibility. If that is a particular concern with cryptocurrency, there is a case for not only banning it, but bringing down the level of the permissibility requirement. In my submission, I suggest £50, which aligns with the candidate regime, because that would create a further barrier to that particular concern.
Samantha Dixon
Q
Dr Susan Hawley: We welcome the introduction of the “know your donor” regime, and the clarifications that it will have robust penalties for parties and candidates who do not undertake proper risk assessments. I am afraid that it currently needs some tweaks to be strengthened.
Obviously, we do not want to impose too much of a burden on parties but, if we are addressing foreign interference, it is very odd that the current “know your donor” policy does not say anything about addressing the potential source of wealth from high-risk jurisdictions or politically exposed persons. That is our first point. Any other regulated sector would and does need to address those risks.
Secondly, as the policy is currently framed, we think there is far too much discretion for political parties to decide what the risks are. That is unhelpful, because there will be inconsistent application of risk assessments across parties. That discretion should be reduced.
Finally, we have concerns that the fact that the Electoral Commission’s guidance can essentially be changed by the Secretary of State could lead to it being completely overridden, and that would be really problematic. We would like to see safeguards to ensure that cannot happen if there is to be a power for the Secretary of State to amend the Electoral Commission’s guidance.
Paul Holmes
Q
Part of my concern about this Government’s approach to legislation is that we very often see a jumping to legislate before the evidence is there, and then a backtracking on a number of things. For example, we had a planning and infrastructure Bill being implemented before a devolution Bill, and that devolution Bill cancelled elections to enable things to be delivered, but the elections were then forced back on. It seems that this Government do not think through public policy properly, and I think the Bill is no exception.
It seems odd to me that the Government asked Philip Rycroft to conduct a review into election interference, but they have then introduced a Bill that is bringing forward a number of measures in the same field. As a result, the Bill may go through the vast majority of its parliamentary stages and then rely on secondary legislation, which is a concern that many professors outlined earlier.
Have you made any representations to other Ministers in the Department or to No. 10 for a delay in this legislation, so that the Rycroft review can report and develop recommendations? You could then come back to the House and form a cross-party Committee to see whether those recommendations can be implemented, rather than following this hotchpotch approach that will see the Bill passed, only for a review to then make a number of recommendations on the same subject matter. Does that not seem odd to you?
Samantha Dixon: Last July, the statement of policy was set out in Parliament, so there was quite a considerable amount of time before the introduction of the Bill. You have seen policy developing over that time.
The conviction of Nathan Gill, which is why the Secretary of State asked Philip Rycroft to undertake the review, was a pivotal moment that highlighted and brought together a number of the issues that the witnesses have talked about today. The Secretary of State set the terms of reference for that review very carefully, but I think that Philip Rycroft indicated that he would act with speed. While I have not met him to date, I know that many people have, including members of this Committee, because his door has been very open to those who want to talk to him. I anticipate that his recommendations will come forward soon, and it is the Government’s intention to listen closely and carefully to what he brings forward.
The Bill, as you will know from Second Reading, is a carry-over Bill, which gives us an opportunity, as we go forward, to consider the recommendations. It is likely that our Committee will finish around the time that we are prorogued, and that Report will come in the second Session of this Parliament. That pause is being provided to us by parliamentary time.
Paul Holmes
Q
I have one more question, which is about digital ID. Since this Government were elected, fairly and resoundingly, it has been clear that they have a problem with the previous Government’s measures on digital ID. Almost every witness today has outlined that the Government’s proposals on bank cards as a potential form of ID are not a good idea; they said that that would not increase security at polling stations or people’s security over their vote, but actually reduce it.
Will you listen to those witnesses and give a commitment to the Committee to go back to the Department and remove bank cards as an acceptable form of ID? Can you outline to the Committee how showing a card with a name on guarantees that the person who is turning up at the polling station is the named person, and how that is fundamentally different to the old system, where a polling card could be taken to a polling station and a vote be given out?
Samantha Dixon: I think that the integrity of the UK banking system is such that the possession of a bank card requires a degree of ID that is necessary and appropriate. We have to remember that prior to the 2022 Act, there was no ID requirement at all. We have also heard evidence that instances of fraud were extremely low. The introduction of the bank card ID is important because it is widely held by the population, in particular by under-represented groups including 16 and 17-year-olds. I have heard the evidence that the Committee has heard; none the less, I think the inclusion of UK-issued bank cards is an important addition to voter ID, and one that we should continue.
Paul Holmes
Q
One of the witnesses today suggested that you could have automatic enrolment to voter identification paperwork or digital ID; that is something we would support. What problem are you trying to solve in trying to bring in a bank card as a possible type of identification, when that does not prove your identity? A very minor number of people are affected by this. How much do you anticipate that a bank card will make a difference to the numbers we have heard about today?
Samantha Dixon: We are talking about people who have the right to vote, but are excluded from voting because they do not have the appropriate ID. Although I accept that many people have passports and driving licences, not all do, and many more people have bank cards. The legitimacy of the banking system in the UK means that those cards should be used by younger people in particular, but could be used by any person who wants to vote in person at a polling station.
Paul Holmes
I find it interesting that most of the people who we consider to be academics, and have made their life’s profession the integrity of the election system, are not in favour of it, but the Government are choosing to go ahead with it anyway. We will look at that further in line-by-line scrutiny. Thank you very much for your time this afternoon.
Lisa Smart
Q
It is clear from all the evidence we have heard today that all the witnesses welcome a number of the steps in the Bill, but a number of them expressed disappointment that the scope had been written so narrowly and that it does not stand up to the moment of crisis and peril that our democracy faces. If the Government think that first past the post is the right system, why not have a national commission on the voting system to test that thesis?
Samantha Dixon: The Government believe that the voting systems that we use to elect our representatives are really at the heart of our democracy; they are of fundamental importance. We welcome views and feedback on how democracy can be improved. I am grateful for the interest that you have shown in this particular area, but I can confirm that we are content with the voting system that we currently use in general elections, and we have no plans to establish such a commission.
For UK parliamentary elections, we believe that the first-past-the-post system establishes a really strong link between the constituency and the representative. Although it may not be perfect, we believe it is well understood by the electorate and the communities that we represent. When a seat needs to be filled in Parliament or a council, for example, that link between the representative and those they represent is important. First past the post is appropriate for that system.
There are occasions for other voting systems for wider electorates, and this Bill will make provision for them. For example, for a mayoral election, we are in the process of bringing forward legislation to revert that system back to supplementary voting. When it is a broader constituency—a mayoral area that may cover many constituencies—we accept that that voting system is more appropriate. But at this stage, for council wards and parliamentary constituencies, we remain of the view that first past the post is the best system.
Representation of the People Bill (Third sitting) Debate
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Paul Holmes
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Representation of the People Bill (Third sitting)
Paul Holmes ExcerptsTuesday 24th March 2026
(3 days, 10 hours ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 March 2026 - (24 Mar 2026)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. I look forward to discussing the finer details of this important Bill with members of the Committee.
Clause 1 extends the right to vote to 16 and 17-year-olds for UK parliamentary elections, Northern Ireland Assembly elections, local elections in England and Northern Ireland, local referenda in England, and police and crime commissioner elections, as well as ward elections in the City of London. The Government committed in their manifesto to increasing young people’s engagement in our vibrant democracy by giving 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all UK elections. That will enable young people in England and Northern Ireland to join their peers in Scotland and Wales, who can already vote in local and devolved elections. The change is aligned with the aim that the Government set out in the national youth strategy to ensure that young people are “seen and heard”, and will build the foundations for people’s lifelong participation in our electoral processes.
Furthermore, the Government’s view is that once 16 and 17-year-olds are enfranchised, they should have the same rights and responsibilities as all other electors. For that reason, the clause also ensures that 16 and 17-year-olds are able to sign recall petitions, as all other electors are permitted to do. The clause will support the Government in our work to deliver on our commitments to young people, meaning that approximately 1.7 million eligible 16 and 17-year-olds will have a say in all UK elections for the very first time.
Amendment 33, which was tabled by the Opposition, would oblige the Secretary of State to publish a report on why the voting age for UK parliamentary elections should differ from the age of majority set out in the Family Law Reform Act 1969, which provided that
“a person shall attain full age on attaining the age of eighteen”.
Under the amendment, the report would also be required to include comparisons with other age limits that the Secretary of State deems appropriate, and would have to be published before voting rights could be extended to 16 and 17-year-olds.
The important question is not about what else a person can or cannot do at age 16, but whether 16 is the right age at which to be able to vote. This Government are clear that the answer is yes: 16 is the right age for a person to be able to exercise their democratic right. Extending the right to vote to 16 and 17-year-olds will allow them to have a say in the Government who shape their future, and will set them up for lifelong engagement in our democracy. Sixteen and 17-year-olds have views, which deserve to be represented, and engaging voters at a younger age will build the foundations for a lifetime of participation in our electoral processes.
Making decisions about the electoral franchise on the basis of comparisons to legislation made nearly 70 years ago is not, in the Government’s view, the way to build a democratic system fit for 2026 and beyond. The amendment would simply delay the delivery of a manifesto commitment that, given the response to the Opposition’s reasoned amendment on Second Reading, has already been shown to have the overwhelming support of the House. Accordingly, I ask the Opposition to withdraw their amendment.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. Good morning to you and to members of the Committee. I am pleased to see the Minister in her place, although I am slightly surprised that she has asked me to withdraw my amendment; I have not yet talked about why it is so brilliant. I hope that she will reconsider and look at the amendment again, although I doubt it.
Amendment 33 is in my name. At the heart of the issue lies a simple question about clause 1: when do we consider somebody to be an adult? In the United Kingdom, the answer has long been clear—at 18. That is the age at which full citizenship rights and responsibilities are granted. Voting—one of the most significant civic duties in a democracy—should remain tied to that threshold. Those who argue for lowering the voting age to 16 often claim that the issue is about fairness and inclusion, but that quickly unravels when we examine how 16 and 17-year-olds are treated under the law.
At 16, individuals cannot marry or join the armed forces without parental consent, and they are not permitted to buy alcohol, gamble, purchase cigarettes or even obtain certain financial services independently. Those are not arbitrary restrictions; they reflect a consistent legal and societal judgment that individuals under 18 are not yet fully mature adults. If we do not trust a 16-year-old to make decisions about alcohol, finance or personal safety, why should we trust them with decisions about the future of the nation?
Since the adoption of universal suffrage, taxation has never been the basis for enfranchisement in the United Kingdom, but the Prime Minister has stated that those who pay tax should be able to vote. Those aged 16 and 17 are explicitly exempted in law from paying council tax. Do advocates who say that 16-year-olds should be able to vote in local elections believe that that legal exemption should be removed, so that those aged 16 and 17 become liable for council tax? I suspect the answer is no.
Taxation already exists without direct representation for children. Everyone pays indirect taxes, such as VAT. For example, for children, VAT is levied on toys and sweets. Only a tiny number of those aged 16 and 17 actually pay income tax, especially given the Conservative Government’s increases to the income tax threshold. Those under 18 cannot obtain consumer credit, nor can they open a full bank account without a parent’s signature; that indicates how their financial rights are qualified.
There is also a striking inconsistency in the Government’s arguments for this change. On the one hand, they argue that 16-year-olds are mature enough to vote. On the other, they support policies that explicitly treat under-18s as children in need of protection: raising the legal age for buying knives, fireworks, cigarettes and even undergoing cosmetic procedures. Those contradictions suggest that the push to lower the voting age is not grounded in principle but in convenience.
Consider also the issue of responsibility. Voting is not just a right; it is part of a broader framework of civic duty, yet 16 and 17-year-olds are exempt from key responsibilities such as paying council tax, and only a small proportion pay income tax at all, as I have outlined. Historically, the right to vote in the UK has never been based on taxation alone, and it would be wrong to start now. We should also look internationally. The overwhelming majority of democracies, including the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, set the voting age at 18. That is not a coincidence; it reflects a widely accepted understanding of adulthood.
Furthermore, the argument that lowering the voting age will increase long-term political engagement is not supported by strong evidence. Studies show that any increase in participation among younger voters tends to be short-lived, with no lasting impact on political involvement. In other words, the reform risks being a symbolic gesture rather than a meaningful improvement to democracy. A study looking at the effect of a lower voting age in Scotland, which was also cited by the Minister’s Department, advised:
“For engagement with politics beyond voting in elections, however, we find no lasting difference between young people who were eligible to vote at 16 versus 18. The experience of voting at age 16/17 did not make a difference in young people’s non-electoral engagement in early adulthood.”
It warned that any change in turnout might actually have been due to the polarising effect of the Scottish independence debate, rather than the voting age. It went on:
“Our results may reflect this to some extent as cohorts included in our sample of young people enfranchised at 16 came of age in the highly salient and polarised time around the 2014 independence referendum.”
Finally, we must consider where the logic leads. If we detach voting from the age of adulthood, then why stop at 16? Why not 15 or 14?
Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
I smile at the idea that it is convenient for us to pass the law; it is never convenient to pass a law.
The hon. Gentleman has set out a number of ages at which people can do different things. Most people would agree that adulthood is not the flick of switch but a continuum. We do things at different stages; many would argue that voting is at the lower end and is one of the earliest things that we should do. That was the position of the Conservative party when it came to choosing three of our recent Prime Ministers; 15-year-old Conservative party members had more say over who was the Prime Minister of this land than the rest of us. Will the hon. Gentleman comment on that?
Paul Holmes
The difference between me and the hon. Gentleman is that I do not want to legislate for when people can become engaged in politics. Younger people can absolutely become engaged in politics and join a political party. As I think I have said previously, I love elections and I love politics. I joined the Conservative party at 15, and I have not regretted my decision—sometimes.
Engaging with a political party is absolutely acceptable. If the hon. Gentleman has a complaint about the system of younger people electing a party leader, then we can have a debate about that. But we cannot pick and choose different ages for when a person becomes an adult just because it is convenient. I contend that the reason why the Labour party brought this matter forward in its last manifesto is that it wanted to extend the coalition of voter that it thinks favours it politically. That is why the Bill has been presented and brought before the Committee today. I suspect that every Labour Member secretly knows that that is true.
Let us not pretend that this is a divine intervention of principle. It is being done because the Labour party wants to extend the coalition of voters that it suspects is more likely to vote for it in the election.
Sam Rushworth
Every political party has equal opportunity to appeal to every voter. Why does the hon. Gentleman feel that Labour party politics is more attractive to younger voters?
Paul Holmes
If the hon. Gentleman only dares to look at the polls from recent weeks, I suspect that he will find that his style of politics and his party’s politics are not attractive to 16-year-olds—they are voting for other parties because of the record of the current Government. But I do not want this to be a debate about how popular or unpopular the Government are.
Political parties can select the age of their memberships, but the Conservative party fundamentally believes that the age of majority should be made more consistent. When it comes to deciding the future of the country, 18—the age at which a person becomes a statutory adult and has the rights of citizenship—is the age at which people should engage as a citizen in the democratic process.
I understand if the hon. Gentleman disagrees with that, but many countries around the world disagree with him. I do not expect him to agree with my speech at all, but if we look at some of the reports that I have outlined and the statistics that have come out, we see that there is no evidence that voting at 16 increases participation rates in elections. My party will be in a minority of one in the vote on this issue because Members across the House have different views.
Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West) (Lab)
Is the hon. Member aware that the evidence submitted by the Electoral Reform Society says that research has shown that the younger people are engaged in voting, the more likely they are to carry on voting later in their lives? What he has said about there being no evidence is not correct.
Paul Holmes
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but look at the evidence that the Electoral Reform Society gave the Committee. It believes in a change of voting system and in reducing the age of the franchise to 16. However I have just cited evidence from a report from his Minister’s own Department; it states that there was no significant change in participation rates when the voting age was reduced in Scotland for the independence referendum—it was the polarising effect of the independence referendum that increased participation rates.
The hon. Gentleman has cited one source. Although the Electoral Reform Society is a very good organisation, I have a number of disagreements with what it said in Committee when we were cross-examining. It believes in changing the electoral system, in greater limits on political parties being able to maintain their business and in votes for 16-year-olds. That is not the Conservative party’s policy, and I hope I am setting out reasons why I do not think it should be the Government’s policy. There is evidence showing that there is not an overall increase in participation rates in general elections, or national elections, when the voting age is 16.
The Cambridge professor of politics, David Runciman, has argued for a voting age of six. He has said:
“we don’t apply a test of competence before granting the right to vote to anyone other than children. So why start with them? Setting imaginary tests before allowing enfranchisement is essentially a 19th-century idea.”
He goes on:
“I do believe in a very basic competence threshold, which is the ability to express a preference in the first place. Being in full-time education seems a reasonable way of establishing that”.
The Government have said that they do not intend to drop the candidacy age below 18. If they think somebody can vote, why do they not think that person should be able to stand in those elections? I will give way to any Labour Committee member who can explain to me why the Government have advocated for a drop in the voting age to 16 but do not want those people to stand in elections. Is it because of competency? Is it because, dare I suggest, the Government do not believe they are mature enough to stand in those elections?
Sam Rushworth
I am happy to share my personal view on that point with the hon. Member. As was mentioned a moment ago, growing up is not a moment that happens between one night and the next. It is a continuum, and different ages apply to different things; people have to wait until they are 21 to do some things. One vote is one grain of sand on the beach. It allows people to meaningfully participate in democracy. That is, of course, entirely different from actually being an elected representative themselves. To me, that is a fairly obvious point.
Paul Holmes
What I think is fairly obvious is that if there was consistency from the Government, someone’s being allowed to vote for their representatives would enable them to stand as a representative themselves.
I am a big fan of the hon. Gentleman’s and I want this Committee to be good tempered—as his colleagues will know from previous Bill Committees, I am a very good tempered individual. However, I politely suggest that the hon. Gentleman wants to have his cake and eat it. He is again saying that there are variations of participation. He is proposing to open up the franchise to 16-year-olds in the election of Members to this place and the Government of the United Kingdom, but he does not want them to stand in those elections and have that participation in democracy. In his intervention, I heard no solid reason why the Government do not believe younger people should be able to stand in those elections.
David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. I was elected as a councillor for the first time at the age of 22; at that time, someone had to be 21 to stand in local elections, although they could vote at 18. Inevitably, I think, the Government accepted the argument that there was a serious inconsistency if someone could vote in an election but was unable to stand in it. That goes to the point that my hon. Friend is making.
There is an old saying: “If you are not a socialist in your youth, you have no heart; if you are not a Conservative when you grow up, you have no brain.” Does my hon. Friend agree that this issue is solely about trying to garner the vote of 16-year-olds, not about a change based on principle?
Paul Holmes
I agree with my hon. Friend. I was a Conservative at 15—maybe that means I have just been completely stupid all through my life. [Interruption.] I said it—there is no need for an intervention on that! We know the reason why the Labour Government have brought this forward.
I was elected as a councillor at 19, and the voting age was 18. I was older than the voting age at the time. The Government are criticising my party on why we do not believe there should be voting at 16, but I ask the Minister again—perhaps she will respond in her winding up—why the Government do not believe that 16-year-olds should be able to stand in an election for the Government of the United Kingdom if they are enfranchised to vote in such an election. I contend it is because they want the votes, but they do not want them to be able to stand, because they do not believe they are mature enough and—dare I say—adult enough to do so.
The contention that the Minister has brought to the Committee is flawed. We cannot pick and choose when we believe a child becomes an adult to participate in part of the democratic process, and not include in the legislation the ability for them to stand in those elections.
Amendment 33 simply tries to urge the Government to review the mess of the age of majority in this country. If we legislate to have votes at 16, that is fine. I think I am pretty down with the kids when I go on school visits—I see there is no comment on that—and my party and I will absolutely make sure that we become presentable and popular and start talking about young people and the issues that they face—
Paul Holmes
Which is the point, the Minister says from a sedentary position, but it is our contention that we then need to look at the age of majority across the whole of the United Kingdom.
David Simmonds
Does my hon. Friend recall the last Labour Government’s measures to raise the participation age? They took a very clear view that people at 16 were not mature enough to be trusted to leave school and start working life, and there was legislation compelling them to remain in education or employment-based training until the age of 18. Does that not give a very clear indication that this is a marked inconsistency—a departure?
If we were to have MPs and councillors at 16, they would be compelled to still be in education at the same time. That would require, for example, under the laws passed by the Labour party, Parliament to implement its own college system so that those 16-year-old MPs were able to continue their education while serving their constituencies.
Paul Holmes
What an interesting idea from my hon. Friend. It is one of his more radical suggestions, but he raises a serious point. The inconsistency of this Government’s approach to the age of majority is about to be made worse by this Bill.
If the Minister had come to the Committee this morning and said, “We are going to open a proper consultation and review on the age of majority”, that could be a starting basis for a genuine conversation in this country. At the moment, as my hon. Friend outlined, the Government are proposing to allow a 16-year-old to vote, but they have mandated them to stay in full-time education, meaning that they do not pay tax. They do not have that stake in the Government, because they do not pay those taxes. As I have outlined, the Prime Minister said himself that people who vote should be paying taxes. That would not be the case under this proposal.
My hon. Friend raises an interesting point on other aspects. The Government believe in 16-year-olds not being able to join the armed forces or secure a bank account without parental support, but they want them to be able to elect the Government of the United Kingdom, because it is convenient to them. It is a perfectly reasonable proposition to bring in votes at 16; it is perfectly reasonable, and I know many Labour Members genuinely believe that. I have no problem with them, but if they are going to do that, they should at least bring what a 16-year-old can do in society on to a level playing field.
The way this proposal has been brought forward, on the basis of the reasons given, with 16-year-olds not able to participate fully in the democratic process because they are not able to stand in the elections, suggests that this is more a cynical attempt than a pragmatic one.
Sam Rushworth
I feel that, particularly in the previous intervention, the Opposition are still tying themselves up in knots around the idea that the transition from childhood to adulthood has to happen within a millisecond of someone turning a particular age, rather than under-standing that there is a process of becoming an adult and we allow people different rights and responsibilities that are appropriate for those stages.
The hon. Gentleman asked why I feel that there is a difference between voting and standing to be elected. It is the difference between someone being able to choose a person to represent them and having to listen to and represent others. They are two different jobs. The Conservatives know that. I do not think the hon. Gentleman would tell me that he believes a 15-year-old should be Prime Minister, but they allowed 15-year-olds to elect who is our Prime Minister.
Paul Holmes
I do not think a 15-year-old should be allowed to be Prime Minister. The hon. Gentleman is advocating for a 16-year-old to be able to elect a Prime Minister and their Member of Parliament, but does not want them to have the equal right to stand as a candidate for Parliament. I understand his intervention, but he still has not told me why he thinks that the purposeful variance in this legislation is a good thing.
I have been very clear that I think the age to able to vote and become a Member of Parliament should be 18, because that is when somebody becomes an adult. Forgive me if I am wrong—I do not intend to put words in his mouth—but the hon. Gentleman said in his intervention that some bits of becoming an adult happen when we are younger and some when we are older. In legislation in this country, someone becomes an adult when they get citizenship rights at 18. This Government are changing that and making it slightly more blurred than it needs to be. That is why we oppose this clause.
David Simmonds
I am sympathetic to the case put by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland. I understand where he is going with it, but there is a distinction between the internal rules of political parties and the law of the land on electoral participation. Conservative party policy is that all members can vote to elect the leader of the party, but only those who have attained the age of majority can participate in elections to public office, whereas the Labour party recently changed its rules so that that only people over the age of 18 can participate in its internal processes for the same purpose. Does my hon. Friend think it is inconsistent for a political party to say internally that people have to be 18 to participate in leadership elections, but seek to allow 16-year-olds to vote in national public elections?
Paul Holmes
That goes to show the picking and choosing attitude of the Labour party when it comes to enfranchising younger people. They want to allow them to elect Members, but believe that 18 is the right age to vote their candidate selections and internal processes, so why are we suddenly discussing legislation proposing that 16-year-olds should have the right to vote? I am sure Labour Members will present a petition to the National Executive Committee, or whatever organisation represents them, to change the internal voting age. If they so believe in 16-year-olds electing national politicians in this country, perhaps they should believe in being selected by 16-year-olds too, although I do not see them jumping to take up that proposition.
I will wrap up shortly. The Government have said that they do not intend to drop the candidacy age below 18. We have had a vibrant discussion about that. Why do they think that those aged 16 or 17 are old enough to vote, but not old enough to stand for an elected body? Even if the Government do not think they can be MPs, why can they not represent smaller communities? Are they not capable of being local, parish or town councillors, or police and crime commissioners? The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland has advocated this clause. Does he therefore think a 16-year-old could represent their local parish or local town ward? Is there a variance in their ability to represent constituents in their local areas?
Warinder Juss
It is misguided to compare the ability to vote with being a representative. There is a huge step between someone having the right to decide who should represent them and being that representative themselves. Many people well beyond the age of 18 would be able to vote for their representative, but would not necessarily be in a position to be a representative themselves.
Paul Holmes
The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his view, but I do not think, if he looks inside himself, that he genuinely believes that 16-year-olds should not be allowed to stand in an election but should be able to vote in them. In his intervention, like many on the Government Benches, he arbitrarily decided in his head what a 16-year-old can do and what they are not quite ready for. I suggest that is intellectually at variance with what the Government are saying about a 16-year-old. I take his intervention with a pinch of salt because he himself is saying they are not ready.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland also said they are not ready to stand in the election. It is a big difference for someone to be able to represent the community they live in—but they can vote in it and elect someone to represent their community on their behalf. To put it mildly, that is intellectually at variance with the Government’s position, and I suggest that Labour Members do not really believe it is the case. Labour Ministers have not yet justified that variance—though that is understandable as the Minister has not yet spoken on this—other than to say that a lower voting age is about building long-lasting engagement.
The right to vote is one of the most important responsibilities in a society. It should be granted when an individual reaches full legal adulthood—when they are entrusted with the full range of rights and the responsibilities that come with them. We in the Conservative party contend that that age is 18. Lowering the voting age to 16 undermines that principle, introduces inconsistency and fails to deliver the benefits that its supporters promise.
Amendment 33 would prevent part 1 of the Bill coming into force until the Secretary of State has undertaken a review of the consistency of the age of majority with the age of voting set out in the Bill. It is not a troublesome amendment; this will have such profound impacts on other Government Departments and public services, and I genuinely do not believe the Government have thought of them. For example, each of us are privileged to represent a constituency in this place. We all go and visit our schools and younger people and we advocate, hopefully impartially—I am the biggest recruiter for the Hamble Valley Labour party that there could possibly be, and they all go and join once I have spoken to them.
When we go and speak to our younger people, we do so because we want to get them interested in politics, but nothing that this Government are proposing in this legislation would improve the education system to make sure that people have proper citizenship lessons and get that proper education through the national curriculum. Our teachers are doing their best, but many young people I talk to in schools are not getting that full, rounded citizenship education from the very early age that they should be if the Government are to implement these provisions.
That is an inconsistency in the Government’s approach, so we think there should be a review on a cross-departmental basis to see what that age of majority should be and what resources, from any Government Department, should be working towards if this legislation is passed and the voting age is reduced. That is the aim of amendment 33. We have set out our position, perhaps not as clearly as I would have hoped, but we have had a good debate on it. We will oppose clause 1 because we do not believe that the voting age should be 16; we believe the age of majority is 18, and that that is where it should stay.
Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Allin-Khan. The Liberal Democrats support the general direction of the Bill and want to help the Government to get it right and, where we feel it falls short, be more ambitious. We remain particularly disappointed that the Bill contains no steps towards electoral reform and feel that it fails to take the opportunity that the moment presents. However, we will conduct ourselves in a constructive manner throughout this Committee.
The Liberal Democrats strongly support extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds. Young people can work and care for family members and are profoundly affected by policy decisions. In every single manifesto since 2001, the Liberal Democrats have supported votes at 16. In the 2010 policy paper “Free to be Young”, which was voted on by the party conference, we decided that
“when you are old enough to get married or join the armed forces, you are old enough to vote”.
We also affirmed that the Liberal Democrats,
“would empower young people with full political rights at 16”,
and we reaffirmed this most recently in our 2024 manifesto.
We will not support amendment 33, tabled by the official Opposition. We feel that it is an attempt to delay and obstruct votes at 16, which is a long-standing Lib Dem policy. We believe it is a delaying mechanism and not a genuine policy question. We feel that the age of majority argument is a red herring, as 16 and 17-year-olds already exercise significant legal rights and responsibilities. Inconsistency in voting ages is not a new problem requiring a review, as the voting age already differs across different types of elections, whether local, devolved or national. Voting at 16 applies already in Scotland and Wales for devolved elections; I have not spotted a particular constitutional crisis brought about by that. The amendment implies a problem that does not exist, and the Liberal Democrats will not support it.
Samantha Dixon
I now move on to clause 2, which extends to 16 and 17-year-olds the existing legal incapacity to vote that applies to convicted prisoners—with the exception of those imprisoned for contempt of court or in default of paying a court-imposed fine. It is right that those convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody cannot vote. The provisions in this Bill simply reflect that well-established position and ensure that 16 and 17-year-olds are treated the same as all other electors. That is in keeping with the core principle of the policy that 16 and 17-year-olds must have the same rights and responsibilities as all other electors. That must include being accountable for their actions, including their disenfranchisement upon being convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody.
To give effect to this intention, this clause ensures that the relevant definitions of youth detention accommodation account for all of the institutions in which convicted prisoners aged 16 and 17 may be held. I would like to draw hon. and right hon. Members’ attention to the part of the clause relating to secure children’s homes. It is important to note that this does not have the effect of disenfranchising a young person who is not a convicted prisoner but who is resident in a secure children’s home.
The application of this clause ensures that young convicted prisoners may not vote in UK parliamentary elections, police and crime commissioner elections, elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, and all local elections in England or Northern Ireland. However, these provisions do not apply to elections for which responsibility is devolved, that is, elections to the Senedd Cymru, Scottish Parliament or local elections in Wales or Scotland.
I will also speak to new clause 9, tabled by the Green party. This new clause is intended to allow convicted prisoners serving a sentence of up to four years to vote. The Government have a clear view on this issue: those convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody should not be able to vote. We have no plans to extend the franchise to prisoners. I understand that the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion, who tabled this amendment, and her party advocate for a restorative approach to justice, and the Government agree that rehabilitation is an important part of the justice system. Prisoners must be prepared to return to society.
As the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), said during the passage of the recent Sentencing Act 2026, the Government wish to ensure the justice system rehabilitates and turns offenders away from crime. It is important to note in this context that that Act introduced a presumption to suspend short custodial sentences of 12 months or fewer, unless an offender has breached a court order, there is a significant risk of harm to an individual, or there are exceptional circumstances.
Rehabilitation is not the only part of our justice system. Justice is also about delivering appropriate and proportionate punishment for individuals who have committed crimes where the crime committed is grave enough to warrant imprisonment. The Government are clear that part of that punishment should include the loss of the right to vote.
The new clause aims to grant voting rights to those serving sentences of up to four years, and would allow individuals who had committed serious offences to cast ballots. Such a change would be disproportionate and would water down the important principle that prison sentences are there to punish behaviour that we as a nation have decided is not welcome in our society. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion to withdraw the new clause, and I commend clause 2 to the Committee.
Paul Holmes
We welcome the Minister’s speech on this clause, and we agree entirely with her remarks.
Clause 2, as the Minister has outlined, extends the disenfranchisement of convicted prisoners to include 16 and 17-year-olds detained in youth custody. It is consistent with the long-established principle in UK law that individuals serving custodial sentences have temporarily limited civic rights. The extension to youth detention simply aligns 16 and 17-year-olds with the framework that already applies to adults, ensuring that the law treats those in secure detention in a consistent manner, regardless of age. While 16 and 17-year-olds are generally recognised as sufficiently mature to vote under the legislation, that recognition does not automatically override the legal consequences of being placed in detention, where participation in normal civic life is restricted for reasons of accountability, public protection and rehabilitation.
We believe the Government have made the right decision. If the Bill goes through and the voting age is reduced, it is absolutely right to align it with the legislation that extends to such people. When someone commits a crime and faces a custodial sentence, I believe that there should be rehabilitation and education, which are crucial parts of the prison system. However, the fundamental right to participate in civic life is taken away when someone receives a custodial sentence in this country, which includes the right to vote and participate in electing a Government. That punishment has been sacrosanct within the criminal justice system for hundreds of years, and the Opposition believe that it should continue, so we wholly welcome the alignment of the Bill with current legislation.
I turn to new clause 9, which was tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion (Siân Berry). The Minister rightly outlined that it would extend the franchise to those serving a custodial sentence not exceeding four years, and who would ordinarily be eligible, and I think her response was absolutely spot on. No member of this Committee, or any Member in the main Chamber, would ever say, “Once you go to prison, you do not have the right to restorative justice, or the right to make something of your life again.” There is a fundamental principle in UK society when we make a mistake: you do the crime, and you do the time. We pay our debt back to society, and we then have the right to rehabilitate ourselves and make the most of our lives.
There is a fundamental difference if someone is put in prison for a custodial sentence, particularly one of up to four years, as the person has likely committed quite a serious crime to deserve that. It seems right to me that a punishment for that is the person being removed as an active participant in society, including having the right to vote for an elected Government or locally elected representatives.
This issue has been contentious for many years. When I worked for the last Conservative Government, before I was elected as the MP for Eastleigh, the European Union made an overt attempt to punish the United Kingdom for not aligning our custodial laws and voting laws with its mainstream recommendations; that was vehemently resisted by the Government at the time. Correct me if I am wrong—I am looking to the Liberal Democrat spokesperson to help me out—but I think that happened during the coalition Government.
We resisted that attempt to punish the United Kingdom, because we believe a dividing line is that, if someone goes away and is put in prison for a crime, they should not be able to participate. The Opposition wholly stand by clause 2, and we do not support new clause 9. If the new clause is pushed to a Division—I know the procedures mean that votes on new clauses will happen another time—we will vote against it.
Lisa Smart
The Liberal Democrats believe that voting is a fundamental democratic right, not a privilege to be earned on release. We champion the right to vote, and we are opposed to this disenfranchisement. We also believe that every unnecessary restriction on the franchise weakens democratic legitimacy.
Prisoners serving short sentences will, in most cases, be released within the lifetime of a Parliament, so they have a direct stake in the laws passed by the MPs they help to elect. Denying that stake feels arbitrary. We are also committed to the Human Rights Act and the European convention on human rights, and we believe that other laws we pass here should sit comfortably alongside them.
On new clause 9, we feel that the proposed threshold is arbitrary, and we are unclear why four years has been chosen as the cut-off. If the hon. Member for North Herefordshire could explain that, it would be extremely helpful. As things stand, without understanding why four years has been chosen, we will not support new clause 9.
We believe that the rules that apply to the franchise should impact 16 and 17-year-olds in exactly the same way that they impact those who are 18 and above, so we will support clause 2.
Dr Chowns
I confess that I am a little puzzled at the questions that are being raised about specific types of crime. I am not sure whether hon. Members are suggesting that particular types of crime, for example those motivated by racial hatred, should be treated in a particular way in relation to voting, or whether they are simply objecting to the idea of any prisoner being allowed to vote. By raising one particular type of crime in making arguments against the new clause hon. Members are not, sadly, engaging with the substance of the argument that I am making.
By way of background—as has been mentioned—in 2005 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK’s blanket ban on voting rights was unlawful. In 2017 the UK therefore extended the right to vote to prisoners on remand, civil prisoners—normally those in prison for failure to pay fines on time—and offenders on home detention curfew or released on temporary licence. However, that did not go far enough. The strength of our democracy is determined by how many of us participate in it. Against a backdrop of declining trust in our institutions and in democracy, that is more vital than ever. Not only are more than 21,000 people missing out on a key democratic right, they are having their chances of rehabilitation and resettlement harmed. Studies have shown the positive impact that democratic participation by people in prison has on rehabilitation and resettlement. Prisoners who keep the right to vote have an enhanced sense of civic responsibility and are more likely to be successfully reintegrated following release.
Let us consider other countries. In Guernsey all prisoners have had the right to vote since 1996. In Jersey, all prisoners serving a sentence of less than four years keep their right to vote, and in 2025 plans were announced to extend the right to vote to all prisoners. All prisoners in Ireland can vote by post. Across Europe, all prisoners have the right to vote—in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine. In France, disenfranchisement is considered as an additional penalty in some sentences, however the vast majority of prisoners retain the right to vote. In Germany, all prisoners retain the right to vote unless they have been convicted of an offence targeting the state or democracy. It is clear that the UK’s ban on prisoners voting makes us a real outlier among comparable countries.
Clause 2 provides for the disenfranchisement of detained 16 and 17-year-olds. I am profoundly opposed to that and would like to see the clause removed, because fostering civic responsibility, civic pride and involvement is particularly important for young people aged 16 and 17 who are in custody—that is, about 420 young people at any one time. Any young person in that position is likely to have been badly let down. That point was made last year by the Children’s Commissioner, who in 2025 published an important report, “The educational journeys of children in secure settings”. She found that children in youth custody are “failed before they arrive” and trapped
“in a cycle of disadvantage”.
The Commissioner made it clear that such young people faced
“disrupted education, low English and maths skills, unmet additional needs and high levels of exclusion, compounded by poverty”.
She also found that
“children in prison have been failed by multiple services long before they arrive in custody, and their time in the justice system worsens their disadvantages and limits future opportunities.”
I believe that it is wrong to cut those children—those young people—out of the voting process. They will know more about the failings of the state than many over-18s and their voices should be heard. The Bill is an opportunity to include them and to commit to supporting them to exercise their right to vote, which is a healthy habit that we should support and encourage all members of our society to engage in. As well as being right and fair, such inclusion, coupled with the right support and training for those who look after and educate them, could be a very positive part of their rehabilitation. I sincerely hope that the Minister will closely consider that in the context of clause 2.
It is clear that the current voting system for prisoners in the UK needs urgent reform. New clause 9 provides us with an opportunity to talk about how to fix that broken system by normalising democratic participation in our prisons, as so many other comparable countries do; strengthening civic society; restoring faith in our democracy; and supporting rehabilitation among some of the marginalised people in the UK, including some of our most disadvantaged young people.
Paul Holmes
I will speak briefly, because I spoke to new clause 9 before the speech made by the hon. Member for North Herefordshire. During the course of the debate, I heard a couple of things that I wanted to come back on. I thank the Committee for indulging me; I will be very quick.
There is absolutely no difference between my party and that of the hon. Member for North Herefordshire in advocating for the rehabilitation of the individual who is in the prison and criminal justice system. That is also the stated position of the Government. I was pleased to hear the passionate intervention from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton West, which was filled with conviction. I was disappointed, however, with the tone that the hon. Member for North Herefordshire took in responding to the hon. Members for Wolverhampton West and for Welwyn Hatfield. The former, having been through horrific prejudice growing up, and the latter, as an advocate, asked the hon. Lady about a crime that falls within the arbitrary four-year sentence proposed in new clause 9, tabled by the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion.
There are many crimes for which someone can be issued a custodial sentence of four years that—I hope that the hon. Member for Wolverhampton West takes this in the right way—could be perceived as worse than the racially aggravated assault case that the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield mentioned, such as sexual assault. Many people are put away for less than four years for sexual assault. They would be able to vote under the proposals in new clause 9. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire said that those Members mentioned that crime to make a political point, but their point directly addresses the proposal from the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion to set the sentence threshold at four years. If the threshold were six months, or anything less than four years, we could openly discuss that, but the crimes encompassed within a custodial sentence of four years can be some of the most serious perpetrated against victims.
I believe that everything the hon. Member for North Herefordshire does is well intentioned and principled. There is no doubt about that, and it should never be intimated that I take a different view. Members feel, however, that they have to challenge the Green party’s position because of that arbitrary figure for a custodial sentence in their proposal. The hon. Lady should therefore expect to be questioned on some of the terrible Pandora’s boxes that will be opened by the people serving those custodial sentences.
Dr Chowns
As I outlined in my speech, in many comparable countries, all prisoners are permitted to vote. The proposal in new clause 9, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Brighton Pavilion, sets an arguably arbitrary cut-off date, but that is intended to offer balance.
As we have to some extent previously covered, if someone is sentenced to four years they still become eligible for early release. That does not lessen the terrible nature of their crime. If somebody is sentenced to four years, they are still eligible to participate in educational programmes, rehabilitation, and a whole range of things that are not in themselves punishments but are designed to assist that person to reintegrate into society. Surely we all, victims included, want to ensure that perpetrators of crime are reintegrated and rehabilitated and do not offend again? That is the driving force behind this new clause: to reduce crime by reconnecting to society people who have been convicted and imprisoned.
Paul Holmes
As I said at the beginning of my remarks, I do not doubt the hon. Lady’s intentions—or those of the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion—in tabling the new clause. However, I put it to her again that the four-year figure is arbitrary. The core reason why so many people are concerned about this proposal is the plethora of cases that would be included under the four-year provision. She is absolutely right that many of those people who are sentenced to four years will be released after two. I disagree with that, but it is something that happens in the current justice system. The fact that they might be released early does not mean that they should be given the vote.
The hon. Lady mentioned something that I agree with: that people are entitled to use libraries, to learn, to undertake qualifications and to do other parts of rehabilitation. That is absolutely right; they should always be allowed to do that, because of the core belief in British society that they should be able to make their lives better. But they are doing that while locked away and playing no role in civic society. They are improving themselves and learning so that they can play a part in civic society once they have served their custodial term. That is the real difference between my party and hers. We believe that when someone receives a custodial sentence, they should be removed from civic society. They should be able to go through rehabilitation and make their life better, but that element of being removed from civic society and locked up is sacrosanct.
I think that new clause 9 comes from a good place, and we could have a wider discussion on greater involvement by somebody who receives a custodial sentence, but unfortunately, the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut attitude adopted by the hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion—we must consider the seriousness of the crimes that might fall under the threshold of a four-year custodial sentence—means that the victim is hugely let down and forgotten about. I apologise to the Committee, but I feel so passionate about the way in which the argument was made that I had to stand up and speak again. We will be opposing the new clause with, all right, only three Members, but if it comes back on Report, I urge Members from all parties, including that of the hon. Lady, to vote against it. It would represent a slow erosion of the punitive system that is meant to support victims. I do not believe this new clause supports victims.
Samantha Dixon
The Government have a clear view on this issue: those convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody cannot vote. We have no plans to extend the franchise to prisoners.
The hon. Members for Hazel Grove and for North Herefordshire mentioned the European Court of Human Rights. The UK’s prisoner rights voting policy was very recently the subject of a judgment by that Court, and no violation was found. I am quite happy to share that judgment with Members should they wish to see it.
The provisions of the Bill simply reflect that policy, by accounting for all of the institutions in which convicted prisoners aged 16 and 17 may be held.
Samantha Dixon
Clause 3 will give young people the ability to register from the age of 14, before they have the right to vote at 16, ensuring that they are able to exercise their right to vote as soon as they reach voting age. I am sure that Members will agree that no young person should be unable to vote for the first time because there was insufficient time for them to be correctly registered to vote. The clause will ensure that all young people have the opportunity to vote, even if an election falls on or shortly after their 16th birthday, removing the chance that time to register is a barrier to participation.
The clause’s approach is consistent with the current rules, which allow some 16-year-olds, and all 17-year-olds, to register to vote. Importantly, it simplifies the current rule considerably by removing the complex December calculation, which is hard to explain and understand, in favour of a clear right to register from an individual’s 14th birthday. The December calculation will remain in place for devolved Welsh elections in accordance with existing devolved legislation. The clause enables the slightly different rules to work side by side.
I underline that the two-year window for registration ahead of someone’s turning 16 established by the clause also allows for enhanced links between the classroom and active engagement in our democracy, with the option for that to begin with the act of registering to vote.
Paul Holmes
It would be churlish of me to criticise these proposals. We have had a detailed debate on the principle about votes at 16, with which we vehemently disagree, but there is no reason why we should be difficult about the implementation of the system if the Government get their way. If the legislation passes and people are allowed to vote at 16, there is a vital need for them to be able to register in plenty of time and for it to be as easy as possible for them to do so. Therefore, we will not oppose the clause.
I ask this question of the Minister not to be tricky but for clarification: why should the registration age be 14 and not 15? I was going to say, “What’s the difference?” Obviously, the difference is 12 months, but why does it need to be permitted two years in advance, rather than just one, when someone is 15 and, I would argue, there is a bit more stability for them in the education system, given some of the things that come with being a 15-year-old in school?
The Minister is correct that the December calculation is hard to explain and understand, and fairly outdated, so we do not think that is an issue. We will not oppose the clause, and we see that it is perfectly reasonable, notwithstanding—I do not know whether Members have recognised this yet—that I absolutely oppose votes at 16.
Paul Holmes
It has been a while since I have done one of these Committees, Dr Allin-Khan, so forgive me if I do not say what I am talking to or anything like that. We are learning on the job, or I certainly am anyway.
The Minister emphasised that the Government amendments are technical, which is correct, and I will not challenge on or question her much about them. However, I want to ask a couple of questions about the clause’s aims in facilitating the inclusion of younger voters. We would argue or challenge that some of the provisions appear to be slightly inconsistent or insufficiently justified.
Allowing individuals aged 16 to act as companions to disabled voters and as proxy voters or to enter polling stations for certain purposes reflects an expansion of civic responsibility, which is another result of the principled argument about whether 16-year-olds should have the vote. I am not arguing against that principle, but about the physical manifestations of the change in direction. I would like to challenge the Minister by asking her to clarify why there is no guidance, training or clear rationale for those extra responsibilities for the volunteers working in elections departments across the country or for electoral registration officers and local authorities.
The provision raises a few concerns not only about the readiness of the person subject to the law change—the younger voter—but about whether our staff, EROs and the volunteers who sit in and do the various jobs at polling stations will be trained and given guidance in time to fully bring in the proposed changes. Will the Minister give us some clarification or reassurance that these changes will result in the people involved in the physical voting on the day at polling stations being given proper guidance, and that plenty of notice will be given to the volunteers who will have to implement the changes around the country?
Samantha Dixon
The short answer is yes. This is an extension of the arrangements with which EROs are most familiar, and the guidance that will be provided to them in advance of the proposals coming into effect will reflect the extension of the franchise. I suggest that EROs and our electoral administrators are very familiar with these issues, and it will simply be a matter of extending those arrangements to the newly enfranchised age group.
Representation of the People Bill (Fourth sitting) Debate
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Paul Holmes
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Representation of the People Bill (Fourth sitting)
Paul Holmes ExcerptsTuesday 24th March 2026
(3 days, 10 hours ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 March 2026 - (24 Mar 2026)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I have covered clause 7, so if Members will indulge me, I will turn to clause 8.
Clause 8 sets out five specific circumstances in which the prohibitions put in place by clause 7 do not apply. The first circumstance in which the registration information of an individual under the age of 16 may be shared is if that disclosure is necessary for registration or the conduct of an election, referendum, recall petition or other poll. That simply allows electoral administrators to carry out their work.
An example in action would be an electoral registration officer using the data of a 14 or 15-year-old to conduct the annual canvass. The canvass would help ensure that the young person in question is still accurately registered at the address electoral administrators have on file. Another illustration of the purpose of this provision would relate to the preparation of a poll. For example, clerks at polling stations must have an extract of the electoral register for electors who will vote at that polling station. There may be circumstances in which that extract is prepared in advance of polling day, and this provision allows it to include individuals who will turn 16 on polling day, but who at the moment of the preparation of the extract are still 15.
The second circumstance provides that the registration information of an individual under the age of 16 may be shared in accordance with one of a limited number of supply enactments—specifically, those listed in clause 11. A supply enactment is a provision to allow either the entire register or the relevant part of the register to be supplied to a certain individual or organisation. The specific supply enactments where the disclosure of the registration information of under-16s is permitted are listed in clause 11, and as such I will discuss them in detail during the debate on clause 11.
However, this clause applies two crucial limits on disclosure of the registration information of 14 and 15-year-olds as part of a relevant supply enactment, as I will now explain. First, disclosure under a relevant supply enactment may be made only for purposes relating to an election at which a given person will be entitled to vote. That will allow the information of individuals under the age of 16 to be protected, while also allowing individuals who will be old enough to vote in specific polls to be included in campaigning activities relating to that poll. For example, it will allow 15-year-olds who will be 16 in time for a given poll to be sent campaigning materials relating to that poll.
Secondly, there is a limit on disclosure under relevant supply enactments that requires that such disclosures must not contain information that would allow the date of birth of the young person in question to be learned. That provides an extra safeguard against the disclosure of any information about young people that is not absolutely necessary for the legitimate activities in question. For example, candidates have no need to know the exact age of a young person beyond the fact that they will be 16 on the date of a poll, so they will not receive such information.
The third circumstance in which the registration information of under-16s may be disclosed under clause 8 is where such information is necessary for the purpose of a criminal investigation relating to an electoral offence. The provisions in the Bill prevent under-16s from being fined for failing to register to vote, but there are other electoral offences that rightly apply regardless of age group. Those include offences such as a fraudulent application to register to vote, or the offence of personation, where someone attempts to steal another’s vote. Such serious offences should be investigated no matter who commits them, and this clause allows for those criminal investigations to take place unimpeded.
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
The Minister outlined the criminal charge of personation. Does she think that watering down photographic ID and using bank cards for identification will make it easier or harder for someone to be convicted of electoral personation?
Samantha Dixon
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his question, but I will return to that point when we debate the relevant clauses.
Samantha Dixon
Yes, I am confident that the Electoral Commission will be able to perform that task, and I am sure that we will come back to those issues during line-by-line scrutiny.
As with the other clauses in this part of the Bill, the provisions maintain close protection on the data of 14 and 15-year-olds, allowing disclosure of that information only when absolutely necessary and appropriate.
Let me turn now to clause 12. In my explanation of clause 8, which provides for five circumstances in which the disclosure of under-16s’ information is permitted, I noted that clause 12 places further restrictions on three of those circumstances. Those restrictions apply to the following circumstances where clause 8 allows disclosure of information. The first is where information is sent to someone for the purposes of electoral registration or conduct duties. The second is where information is sent to someone for the purposes of criminal investigation into an electoral offence. The third is where information is sent to a person who has been nominated as that elector’s proxy.
Where information has been shared in one of those three circumstances, the clause prevents the person who receives it from passing it on to anyone else. The clause also provides that someone who passes the information on to another person in one of those circumstances is guilty of a criminal offence punishable by a fine. As with the five clauses that precede it, clause 12 serves to ensure that the personal information of 14 and 15-year-olds is accessed and shared only when doing so is necessary and justified.
Clause 13 is the penultimate clause in the group, which I am sure Members are glad to hear. The purpose of the clause is to provide flexibility in the regime that provides these protections, by making it possible for regulations to be made to adjust the protections. That might become necessary, for example, if new types of election or referenda are created in future, which might necessitate new groups having access to the data. Given the number and variety of changes the Bill proposes to our electoral system, such flexibility is simply good planning and avoids the risk of needing an emergency Bill to be rushed through Parliament should changes be needed. I immediately reassure hon. Members, however, that the scope of the power created by the clause is carefully limited and subject to important scrutiny requirements, as one would expect.
The regulations that may be made using the power in the clause can be divided into five types. First, the power may be used to permit the disclosure of the electoral registration information of under-16s to additional recipients beyond those provided for in clauses 8, 9 and 11. Secondly, it may be used to set out the purposes for which such information, once shared, may be used, and to attach further restrictions. Such restrictions may include whether that information can be shared with further parties.
Thirdly, the power may be used to amend clauses 7, 8, 9, 11, 12 and 14. However, the amendments that may be made are subject to restrictions, which I will come to shortly. Fourthly, it may be used to create new offences relating to the disclosure of 14 and 15-year-olds’ electoral registration information, which are punishable by a fine, but not imprisonment. Fifthly, it may be used to apply the same restrictions that apply to disclosure by registration officers and those who currently assist them to any new categories of person who might be involved with the preparation of electoral registers and lists.
Three important restrictions are placed on that power, ensuring that the flexibility it provides to ensure our electoral system remains fit for purpose as times change does not come at the cost of appropriate scrutiny. The first and most important restriction is that although the types of information protected by clause 7 may be added to using this power, the categories of protected information cannot be reduced from what is in the Bill at the point it becomes law. That ensures that the type of data protected by this clause cannot be chipped away.
Secondly, before this power is used, the Secretary of State must consult the Electoral Commission and anyone else that the Secretary of State feels is appropriate. Finally, regulations exercising this power are subject to the affirmative parliamentary procedure. I hope hon. Members will agree that the regulation-making power that this clause will create strikes the appropriate balance between appropriate legislative scrutiny and crucial flexibility to allow our electoral system to respond to external changes.
Clause 14 is an interpretation clause. It simply serves to define terms used in clauses 7 to 13. None of the definitions presented in this clause is unusual or controversial. They include terms such as “voters register”, “local government election” and “recall petition” and are included simply to provide clarity and precision to the previous seven clauses of this Bill. I commend the clauses to the Committee.
Paul Holmes
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. I thank the Minister for giving us an extensive and very in-depth description of what those technical clauses—7 to 14—outline. I cannot claim to do those clauses credit in the way the Minister has. I will just briefly ask a number of questions on those technical clauses and then resume my seat—which I am sure many Members will be pleased to hear.
The Minister has outlined these various technical clauses, and the Opposition are not concerned that they might be controversial. As I said earlier, the issue of principle rather than pragmatism in re-engineering a system to where we basically currently are to cover the people that are being enfranchised is not controversial. However, there is a slight complication that could come out of some of these changes relating to overseas voters. We know that they are not really catered for in the Bill.
We heard a lot of evidence in the Bill Committee that a number of overseas voters are essentially disenfranchised. Looking at younger overseas voters and the precepts of these clauses applying to 14 and 15-year-olds, in some countries there may be a social media ban, for example. Similarly, in some countries it would not be easy for a candidate to access the information of people who will be eligible to vote at 16, but who are not covered by these clauses for the preparation at 14 and 15. Opposition Members would argue that this could have unintended consequences for a candidate’s ability to secure that data and approach those people as if they were living within the United Kingdom. I ask the Minister to reflect on that and whether it would be, not dangerous, but an added disincentive for an overseas voter to engage and vote within the British or UK political process.
On clause 13, as with various other Bills that the Government have put forward, I am concerned by the House’s affirmative procedure giving the Minister or the Secretary of State a huge amount of power to unilaterally bring in changes. I do not think that it makes for good democracy or scrutiny of legislation. We discussed this countless times during the Committee of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, where the Secretary of State will be given the power to make a decision through the affirmative procedure via secondary legislation, and individual Members of this House across all parties—but especially minor parties—cannot scrutinise that legislation in the way in which they should be able to. We all know how statutory instruments work in this place. Those Committees are probably among the briefer meetings that Members in this House have.
The Minister needs to reflect on the fact that the scrutiny and delivery of many of this Government’s pieces of legislation has not always achieved the right balance or tipped the scales in the right way. Members should have the opportunity to scrutinise properly and make changes to secondary legislation that the Secretary of State is empowered to bring. I ask her to look at that again and consider whether there is a better way. I understand the need to consult the Electoral Commission, but it is this place that makes the legislation and it is this place that should approve that legislation in a proper and thorough manner. I do not think that making the secondary legislation subject to the affirmative procedure is the right way to go.
However, we will not oppose any of the clauses, which, as Members can tell by my varied and wide-ranging speech, are very technical. I hope that the Minister will address my questions.
Samantha Dixon
The Government are committed to ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote should be able, encouraged and supported to do so. Different authorities will have different approaches that will arise in different circumstances. Our provisions allow local authorities to take the most suitable approach when assisting people to get on the register. To address the concerns raised by the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, while the guidance will be national, the application will be appropriate to local circumstances.
Paul Holmes
As we have heard, the clause establishes a duty for local authorities in Great Britain to raise awareness and provide assistance to certain young people— particularly those who are looked after by the local authority, and those who are eligible for continuing care—in registering to vote. While the intention to support young voters is commendable, we believe that the clause has several limitations. Not only is its scope narrowly defined, but it is also vaguely defined by the words “raise awareness” and “provide assistance”. Notwithstanding what has been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, I want to expand on that ever so slightly.
As the clause is narrowly defined, it excludes other groups that may face barriers to registration, such as the homeless youth, young carers or those in unstable housing. The clause places significant responsibility on local authorities to determine and implement the steps necessary to fulfil the duty. While this should not be a requirement in legislation, there has also not been any signal or indication from Ministers of any Department that additional funding, staffing or guidance has been considered, which risks creating an inconsistent application process across different areas.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner mentioned earlier, we have both been lead members for children and young people’s services. It is not insulting to hard-working local authorities, lead members and officers across the country to say that there can be varying interpretations of the legal duties placed on them—whether they relate to vulnerable people in care or local authority children’s homes. Can the Minister provide reassurance that she will ensure that local authorities across the country will follow a universal interpretation? Due to the narrow scope of the people that the clause identifies, as well as the quite vague language of “provide assistance” and “raise awareness”, it risks creating a patchwork quilt across the UK and a variation in interpretation, which needs to be tightened up.
The Opposition are not opposed to the clause; it is admirable and does what is necessary. However, it needs to be tighter so that people responsible for implementing this legislation can do so in the best way possible, notwithstanding the fact that council and local authority officers dealing with young people do so every day throughout the country.
The limited resources may struggle to reach all eligible young people, particularly those who move between authority areas, or who are placed outside their home authority for extended periods. Additionally, the clause does not include measurable targets or deadlines, making it difficult to assess the effectiveness of awareness-raising and assistance efforts. Finally, the type of support provided is narrowly focused on registration itself, and does not address broader barriers, such as literacy, digital access or understanding of the electoral process. The geographical limitation of the clause to Great Britain also creates inconsistencies across the UK.
Overall, while clause 15 represents a positive step towards increasing voter registration—I hope the Minister will speak later about raising awareness and enabling younger people through the education system—it focuses only on registration of vulnerable young people. Its narrow scope, reliance on local authority capacity and clear lack of performance measures may limit its practical impact. I am looking for some reassurance from the Minister that those issues have been looked at, and I hope she can alleviate some of the Opposition’s concerns.
Samantha Dixon
This endeavour is an ongoing task; it is not a single point in time, which is what a report would reflect upon. The Government will move forward in partnership across the wide sector in public life, to continue to improve the education of young people. For that reason, we do not feel that the new clause is necessary.
Paul Holmes
I am pretty agnostic about new clause 44 because I think it is quite vague, but I understand the reason it has been tabled. Earlier I outlined a concern that I do not believe the education system is quite yet able to make sure that our younger people get the education that they should have before they vote in a national election, notwithstanding the fact that the education system needs to be impartial.
The Minister will know that some types of schools, such as academies, are not necessarily subject to the national curriculum. The legislation in these clauses is quite vague, as I mentioned. I am not sure that there is concrete action from the Minister’s Department and from the Department for Education on a cross-ministerial committee or something, to make sure that the two sides are being matched up to implement this legislation.
Will the Minister try to allay some of my concerns, and those of other hon. Members—perhaps the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove, and the hon. Member for Guildford, who tabled the new clause—about whether the education system will be well equipped, and whether all schools are going to be required to prepare young people for the new duty that they are going to be given?
Samantha Dixon
Yes, I can offer hon. Members that reassurance. I have worked with DFE colleagues to consider the independent curriculum and assessment review. That review will take onboard democracy, government and law being part of the curriculum going forward. As I mentioned, citizenship will also be introduced in primary schools. As we go forward, the wide collaboration of not just this Government but devolved Governments, local authorities and others will support schools, colleges and youth groups to roll out practical civic education. I mentioned that this is not a singular act but an ongoing task. A report of a proposed activity offered a year after the Bill becomes law will be little more than a snapshot of a much longer-term programme of work. For that reason, the Government do not support the new clause.
Samantha Dixon
I do not think that I would because it would be a bureaucratic exercise, whereas the work needs to focus outwards. The scrutiny will come from within Parliament, and from within devolved Governments, so I will not accept the new clause as it stands.
Samantha Dixon
I was going to come to the points the hon. Gentleman had raised.
Paul Holmes
I want to add another one, if that is possible. The Minister is being most generous, and she has shown utter determination not to accept new clause 44. Does she think there is merit in reviewing how this new enfranchisement will work, perhaps through existing mechanisms when there is a review of how a general election has been conducted? I know that is not every year, but when organisations look at voting and participation rates and attitude surveys at or after a general election, is there an opportunity to legislate for a review, at the end of each Parliament or the start of a new one, into the attitudes and voting habits of those new electors, as part of a wider review of behaviour in the last general election?
Samantha Dixon
With respect to hon. Members who are clearly thinking on their feet as we debate this issue, I point out that a review of every general election is done by the Electoral Commission. The Electoral Commission is accountable to Parliament. As it has been involved in this Bill and the legislation that falls from it, I am sure that it will be particularly interested in this approach to the extension of enfranchisement.
Finally, I turn to the hon. Member for Hamble Valley’s point regarding children in care and care leavers. I am pleased to join Opposition Members in declaring I was as a former council leader with corporate responsibility for young people in local authority care. I am acutely aware of their needs and the additional support they require. I have worked with council officers who routinely assist young people, particularly care leavers, in registering to vote and supporting them in the appropriate way as they do vote. I feel that electoral registration officers, with their unique roles within local authorities, will amply be able to support looked-after children and care leavers to exercise their right to vote. With that, I commend the clause to the Committee.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 15 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 16 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 17
Registration without an application
Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)
I beg to move amendment 26, in clause 17, page 23, line 23, at end insert—
“(f) if the person’s existence has been properly verified using three separate datasets used for national and local data matching.”
This amendment requires the registration officer to register certain electors only when their existence has been verified through three different datasets.
The Chair
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Clause stand part.
Clauses 18 and 19 stand part.
Schedule 2.
Amendment 27, in clause 80, page 100, line 15, at end insert—
“(1A) Sections 17, 18 and 19 of this Act do not come into force until the Secretary of State has published an independent review into the steps necessary to avoid non-qualifying EU or Commonwealth voters incorrectly being automatically added to the electoral roll.”
This amendment would prevent the provisions on automatic voter registration coming into force until the Secretary of State had published an independent review of the steps necessary to avoid non-qualifying EU or Commonwealth voters being incorrectly automatically added to the electoral roll.
Paul Holmes
I put on record my thanks to the officials in the Box for making that last set of amendments discussable, because they were so technical. We had an interesting debate, none the less.
We come to the crucial clauses that relate to automatic voter registration. I will speak on behalf of the official Opposition to amendments 26 and 27, which stand in my name. Automatic registration, which has been a clear aim of this Government from the beginning, would contradict the whole approach behind individual electoral registration—that individuals are responsible for registering and that there should be proper checks to ensure that the right people are eligible to be on the electoral roll. Automatic registration will result in more inaccurate entries and opens the door to electoral fraud, undoing the improvements delivered by individual registration.
Individual registration was implemented to stop fraudulent electoral registration, to ensure a more accurate register with fewer errors, and to remove the outdated concept that heads of household, often men, could decide who should be on the electoral roll. We argue that automatic registration would undermine those reforms. Automatic voter registration would lead to less accurate electoral registers, especially of people who have moved recently. Registration by algorithm may add people to electoral rolls who do not live in the area because of out-of-date entries on other databases; it might also add people who have a residence but are not eligible to vote, such as certain second home owners, unqualified Commonwealth voters and so on.
Samantha Dixon
The point that I am attempting to make is that this piloting and the move towards auto-enrolment will enable EROs to test, based on a variety of different datasets, that the application is accurate, legitimate and not spurious or in any way fraudulent. While I note the hon. Gentleman’s point, these things are being done to avoid the scenario he has just described.
EROs will continue to exercise their knowledge and judgment to assess eligibility before they send someone a notice that they will be registered to vote. Before a person is automatically enrolled, they will be written to, but the ERO will have tested, through a variety of different datasets, whether that application is legitimate. We will test that robustly and fairly and with the guidance of partners such as the Electoral Commission.
Paul Holmes
I hope the Minister will forgive me—it is quite possible, indeed likely, that this is my ignorance—but she outlined the datasets the EROs will analyse. Will she clarify whether those will be the same datasets in each geographical area? If not, does that not risk creating a different set of parameters and methods for who would and would not be added to the register, which cannot be analysed at the end of the pilot? Does that make sense?
Samantha Dixon
Regrettably, the hon. Member may have to explain that to me again in a different way.
Paul Holmes
That is no reflection on the Minister; I do not think I explained it particularly well. The Minister outlined that the ERO will assess datasets to ascertain whether to add somebody to the electoral roll automatically. In the context of the pilots, would those datasets be the same types—the same original information sources—or could they vary, depending on who the ERO is and which geographical location they are in when adding someone to the electoral roll?
Samantha Dixon
The legislation takes forward the principle of piloting. The detail of those pilots will come through in secondary legislation. I will provide more clarity, if I can, for the hon. Member, but the principle of piloting is what we are talking about.
Paul Holmes
I am genuinely not trying to be difficult, because the concern I have is genuine; otherwise, I would be intentionally misleading the House, which I am not, I would not and I do not. The reason I asked the question is that we are about to take a significant step towards automatic registration. We have a disagreement, but that is what the Government are going to end up doing. It is therefore important that the data presents a secure and reliable way of putting people on the register. The reason I ask whether there will be different datasets or sources is that we cannot properly analyse the pilots if people are using different datasets.
How can the Minister be satisfied by saying that the principle of pilots must go ahead, but that the Government will unveil the detail in secondary legislation? We have seen this with this Government before, so it is not personal to the Minister, but that is a terrible way to draft legislation. The Minister and the Government are asking the Committee to make a significant change to the electoral registration system in this country, but they cannot tell us—we are straying into the next group, so I will reserve my comments for that—what the basic parameters will look like. How is that good public policymaking?
Samantha Dixon
To offer some comfort to the hon. Gentleman, as set out in the Government’s policy paper, “A blueprint for modern digital government”, “technology presents us with” the opportunity to
“improve the way that government delivers for the public”.
Our ambition is to transform our electoral registration system, harnessing existing data from across Government to move to an automated system. We are working closely with the Information Commissioner’s Office to ensure that appropriate safeguards are put in place. We are working with the Department for Work and Pensions and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to assess whether the combined dataset that is already used to check registration applications and support the annual review of electoral registers could also help identify people who may not be registered. We are also working with the Home Office to explore whether its data could help to indicate whether people who are identified as eligible, but who are unregistered, appear to meet the nationality and immigration status requirements to vote. I hope that provides some comfort and clarity to the hon. Member. I respectfully ask him to withdraw his amendment and commend clauses 17 to 19 and schedule 2 to the Committee.
Paul Holmes
After the Minister’s winding up, I think it is even more necessary to push amendments 26 and 27 to a vote—particularly amendment 26, which concerns data checks. The Government are proposing a major change without the detail necessary to inform our decision on whether it should happen and with a lack of detail on the system to be proposed. They also cannot comment on what the datasets are or whether they could be different in different geographical locations. For all those reasons, I feel that I have to push both amendments to a vote.
David Simmonds
Does my hon. Friend agree that ensuring full transparency and integrity following any changes is even more important at the moment, given that the integrity of our electoral system is being called into question, including by some parties represented in the House of Commons that say that we cannot rely on the fairness and integrity of elections under the existing rules? Does he agree that the avoidance of future challenge and dissonance relies on this Committee’s being clear what the changes we are being asked to vote on mean in practice? If we cannot be clear with the voters about what this means for them, we should not be doing it. We should be coming back later when we can be clear.
Paul Holmes
I do not think it will be a surprise to the Committee that I wholeheartedly agree. This is alien to me. Asking the Committee to vote on the principle of something without the detail and with absolutely no reassurance that the transparency and integrity of the system will be fundamentally better than it is now is bad law making and bad government.
Samantha Dixon
I have to challenge the hon. Gentleman’s assertion that the integrity of the process will be challenged; that is not the Government’s intention in any way. The principle is that we will use the same Government datasets in each location, but also allow local EROs to use the local datasets that they have access to in addition to Government datasets. The principle of piloting is to test robustness and integrity—that is precisely why the pilots are so important.
Paul Holmes
The Minister said that the intention is not for these things to be challenged on the basis of integrity, but that does not provide clarity or certainty at all—it does not mean that there will not be a challenge or that it will not be successful. That is because of the lack of detail and transparency. The Committee is expected to decide on a new system without the parameters being laid out clearly and to rely on the Secretary of State to determine what automatic registration should look like through secondary legislation after a pilot. The details and the systems have not been outlined clearly to the Committee. That is why we tabled amendment 26, which would ensure that an electoral returning officer has three individual forms of check.
The Minister just outlined that EROs in different locations can access different datasets to reassure themselves that they should be putting someone on the roll. That sounds very similar to an ERO being able to check the register for three datasets, which is outlined in amendment 26. It seems to me that she has accepted the principle that EROs might need to determine the security of automatically enrolling someone through a number of datasets. Why are the Government so scared to ask for three? That would ensure the integrity and security that the Minister claims she wants and that I believe she wants. However, she is resisting amendment 26, which does exactly what she claims she wants to and adds a bit more detail on how the pilots will go forward.
I am afraid that for those reasons—a complete lack of clarity and transparency, and an expectation that the Opposition should trust the Government to come forward with the right decision in secondary legislation—we will have to press both amendments to a vote.
Samantha Dixon
I note the hon. Gentleman’s concerns, and I hope to address them as we go forward.
Clause 21 makes clear that piloting regulations may be used to explore this ambition further, including by testing new and innovative ways of using Government data to identify individuals and support them to register, as well as testing potential improvements to administrative processes. Our ambition is to support a modern, efficient registration system that makes participation straightforward for citizens and strengthens the foundations of our democracy. The clause plays an important role in providing the framework through which that ambition can be pursued.
Clause 22 builds on clause 21 by providing further clarity on the scope of the piloting powers set out in clause 20. It makes clear that pilots will take place in one or more areas, and that they may assess the impact of new registration methods on specific demographic groups. The clause also confirms that, in most circumstances, pilots will proceed only with the consent of the relevant electoral registration officer. It is right that those directly responsible for administering the pilot are engaged, informed and supportive of the approach being taken.
Furthermore, clause 22 allows pilot regulations, on a temporary basis, to create, suspend or disapply an offence or financial penalty where that is necessary for the effective conduct of a pilot. However, they cannot increase penalties beyond existing legal limits, nor introduce penalties or offences for individuals who fail to register or update their details. That ensures that the legal framework operates sensibly during the testing period while maintaining appropriate protections and proportionality.
Clause 22 provides breadth, flexibility and practicality to the proposed piloting framework, giving clarity to officials without imposing an overly rigid or exhaustive set of rules. In doing so, the provisions ensure that pilot schemes can be designed in a measured, proportionate and genuinely useful way, supporting the Government to realise their ambition to modernise electoral registration and make it simpler for citizens to engage with the democratic process.
I now turn to clause 23, which provides that any pilot regulations made under the new power conferred on the Secretary of State in clause 20 must be made by statutory instrument. Parliament is the proper forum for the scrutiny and oversight of such powers. Electoral registration is a matter of significant importance and sensitivity, and it is therefore right that parliamentarians have the opportunity to examine in full any proposed regulations establishing a new pilot.
Clause 23 provides that all regulations made under this piloting power will be subject to the affirmative procedure, except where the regulations do no more than extend an existing pilot for no longer than 12 months, or amend the deadline by which the Electoral Commission must publish its evaluation report—in which case the SI will be subject to the negative procedure. Requiring the affirmative procedure for the vast majority of cases reflects the long-standing convention that changes to electoral law should receive the highest level of parliamentary scrutiny. Safeguarding the security and inclusivity of our electoral registration system must remain paramount.
Clause 24 provides that the Electoral Commission will evaluate any pilots and produce a report. The Electoral Commission serves as an essential independent guardian of the integrity and transparency of our democratic processes. By upholding rigorous standards and providing impartial oversight, it helps ensure that electoral matters across the United Kingdom are conducted properly, securely and with public confidence.
By placing the Electoral Commission’s independent assessment at the heart of the evaluation of any electoral registration pilot, we ensure that Parliament, stakeholders and the public receive a clear, objective and authoritative appraisal of any pilot’s effectiveness. The clause reinforces our commitment to rigorous independent scrutiny by requiring the report to address specific issues. That includes an assessment of the extent to which a pilot has met its objectives and an evaluation of whether the changes made by the regulations represent a cost-effective means of achieving them.
Although we are ambitious about delivering a modern, more automated electoral registration system fit for the 21st century, we are equally mindful that robust processes and independent evaluation must remain integral to the testing of any new registration method. Clause 25 provides definitions for the four key terms used throughout clauses 20 to 24. This is an interpretive provision that defines key terms and is necessary for the operation of those clauses. I commend the clauses to the Committee.
Paul Holmes
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair again, Dame Siobhain. I do not know why I said that—it is a habit. But it is always lovely to see you; it is reminiscent of the 2015 general election.
Paul Holmes
Thank you very much.
These amendments relate to the pilot schemes. I do believe that the Government have been slightly naughty in how they are trying to promote these pilots. Not once have they consulted the Political Parties Panel or reached out on a cross-party basis to consult on changes to the franchise or to electoral systems, or on the cancellation of local elections.
The Government are completely entitled to set out a scope for pilots, but the clauses lack any detail on what we should expect the pilots to look like and what they are supposed to be delivering. Where is the detail about the datasets they will use? The transparency and sense of integrity are not there. The Minister said she wanted to reassure us—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Order. I apologise for terminating the hon. Member’s contribution, but there is a Division. I suspend the Committee for 15 minutes. We will resume at 4.16 pm.
Paul Holmes
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair again, Dame Siobhain. It was a wonderful election campaign—oh, I’ve done that bit.
The clauses deal with voter pilot schemes. As I had started to outline, we are concerned that when it comes to electoral changes, voting age changes or anything to do with the electoral system, the Government have not really been transparent. They have not worked, as previous Governments did, on a cross-party basis through interaction and meetings with the parliamentary parties panel. As with the last few clauses, they have not outlined the detail necessary to satisfy us to support the clause and rely on secondary legislation.
Although I know that the Minister is a Minister of the utmost integrity—I have always believed that, so she should take that as read—she said that we should be reassured that voter pilot schemes would not be used to amend the franchise, which is the aim of my amendment 28, but the Secretary of State said in the House, two days before he cancelled local elections, that he would not cancel local elections. He was then taken to court, and it was found that the decision was not lawful. The Minister will forgive us if we are not entirely confident in the reassurances given, when Government Ministers have given reassurances on the Floor of the House and then done something else.
David Simmonds
My hon. Friend refers to the recent judicial review. My understanding is that, rather than losing the judicial review, the Government actually offered no defence. They conceded because they did not wish to be transparent about the decision-making process that the Secretary of State had followed. Subsequent freedom of information requests sought to get under exactly what was happening, but clearly there was correspondence that the Government did not wish to place in the public domain. They preferred to abandon their devolution plans rather than concede on that point.
Does my hon. Friend agree that that is not a great starting point for a Government who are asking us to take them on trust about pilot schemes with a complete absence of detail and no indication of who would be prioritised for auto-enrolment, what the geographical basis would be or what the decision-making process would be? It is not a good basis for asking us to take them on trust when the Government have not been willing to be transparent about elections that they were determined would go ahead, only to cancel them within literally 24 hours.
Paul Holmes
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. As I say, this Minister is a Minister of integrity, but I find this out in opposition. I work for a shadow Secretary of State; the Minister works for the Secretary of State. On a number of occasions, the Secretary of State has been found to have said things in the Chamber that have turned out not to be the case. It is therefore not right for the Opposition to have confidence that we can rely on a reassurance from the Minister that the pilots will not be used to amend the franchise.
The wording of amendment 28 is so clear that there is no room for manoeuvre. Why does the Minister not accept the amendment and show us that her reassurance is worth the paper it is written on? The amendment would not fundamentally change the passage of the Bill or the parameters of the pilot, but it would provide reassurance that the Government will not use the pilots and whatever comes out of them for a reassessment through the Electoral Commission. We do not know the parameters of the pilots; their geography, as my hon. Friend says; who will be included in them; or the datasets that will be used. The Minister should accept the amendment and give us reassurance that the pilots will not be used to change the franchise.
The Opposition have repeatedly asked and challenged Ministers, particularly the Secretary of State when he took office, about whether local elections would go ahead. The Secretary of State then tried to stop those elections. We know why the Government did not want anybody to see the evidence or the correspondence. It was a pattern that this Government have shown before: putting their own political interests before the interests of the electoral system and before having a credible plan or a credible defence. That is why they were found out. That is why when I looked the Secretary of State in the eye and asked whether he would cancel the local elections, he said he would not—and then he did, on a Thursday morning when he would not get the scrutiny that he deserved from a full House of Commons.
David Simmonds
On the pattern of behaviour, the Minister has set out very clearly that the Government wish to rely on the independent Electoral Commission to appraise the outcome of the pilot schemes. But what we do not know—because the Government are not willing to set it out to this Committee, which it is asking to approve the principle of the pilots—is what it will appraise those pilot projects against. We do not know at this stage what the Government seek to achieve through the pilot projects. We therefore cannot assume that the Electoral Commission is in a position to give us the genuinely independent perspective that we expect of it.
Historically, there has been much debate about whether the Electoral Commission should be given a mandate by Parliament. One useful thing about such a mandate is that it would be able to say, for example, that a criterion for appraising pilots is the use of equality impact assessments to determine the impact of the pilots on people with learning disabilities or physical disabilities, on younger voters specifically, and on younger voters with learning disabilities, who may be a subset of such voters. Without any clear sense from the Government of what the pilots will seek to achieve and how that will be implemented consistently, it is difficult for the Committee to be confident that the pilots will genuinely contribute to the integrity of the poll.
Paul Holmes
My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Let us not forget that in very recent history the Government have completely ignored the view of the Electoral Commission anyway. When the Government said that they would not cancel local elections, and then did, and then got found out in court and did not defend the case, the Electoral Commission said repeatedly that it disagreed with the Government’s stance on the local elections because the Government had not consulted and had breached the general rule that EROs and local authorities should be given at least six months’ notice of a change of poll.
The Electoral Commission was very clear, and I think it went as far as condemning the Government’s decision, but the Government ignored it. The Minister can outline how the Electoral Commission will be consulted, but they have ignored it before and it is very likely—in fact, given the pattern of behaviour of the Secretary of State, it is almost certain—that the Government will find the answer that they want to find, regardless of what the Electoral Commission review says.
We remain sceptical. This is not personal against the Minister. I like the Minister intensely—[Hon. Members: “Ooh!”] I couldn’t think of another word. I like the Minister a lot, and I think she is a woman of integrity, but the pattern of behaviour from this Government is astounding, on consultation, on transparency and, actually, in Parliament. Ministers, who are governed by the ministerial code, have said that they will not do something and then gone ahead and done it anyway, in the cynical way that we have come to see from every Department in this Government. It is rotten from the top down.
On the pilots, the Minister has been clear that the parameters are not well established in the Bill and that she will want to come back with secondary legislation. Clause 20, “Power to pilot changes to the voter registration process”, states that the
“Secretary of State may by regulations make voter registration provision…in connection with…a register of parliamentary electors maintained under section 9 of RPA 1983”
and
“a register of local government electors”.
However, where it says that “regulations must specify”, there are certainly no parameters, and she is asking us to give the Government a blank cheque.
The Minister is asking us to approve pilots without any detail on what they may look like. She is also not saying how she will test whether those pilots are successful. When she winds up, will she outline to the Committee exactly what the parameters are for the pilots and the tests for what looks like success when they are finished?
Lewis Cocking
I wholeheartedly support my hon. Friend’s impassioned speech. Does he share my concern that the pilots may be done on the basis of council areas, but that everyone should be auto-enrolled at the same time, rather than creating two lists of electors for a general election? Does he agree that that, in itself, will undermine the next general election and undermine democracy as a whole? Does he also agree that the Government must provide more detail about these demos, rather than giving Ministers carte blanche to pick and choose who they do and do not want to enrol, with this Committee and the House having no say in the matter?
Paul Holmes
I agree entirely. As I have attempted to outline, and as I think my hon. Friend is saying, without such detail why should people trust a word that the Government say? It has been the same with other legislation, as I know from being a shadow Housing, Communities and Local Government Minister, and it is pretty clear that it comes from the top of Government.
Let us look at the detail of clauses 21 and 22. Subsections (3) and (5) of clause 21 state that it
“includes provision relating to…the identification of individuals who are not registered”—
that goes without saying—and
“the identification of changes relevant to entries in the register, and…the maintenance of registers”,
as well as
“the form of the register…the procedure to be followed in the preparation of the register…the publication of the register”,
but there is no detail. If this Government are so clear about what they want to do with automatic registration, they should set out clearly the parameters for its implementation and should have an idea of what they want from it, but I must say that everything in the Bill about what they want from the pilots is fairly generic guff.
Lewis Cocking
Does my hon. Friend therefore agree that this measure could be reintroduced during the next parliamentary Session, when we can give a lot more thought to where the demos will take place and to the detail of who will be auto-enrolled first, and we can properly scrutinise the Government? As he rightly points out, this Government have made a number of U-turns. It is very difficult to trust a word that Ministers say or to know whether they will keep their word about the Bills they bring in. Does he agree that, rather than rushing the Bill through in this Session, the Government need to go away, think again and come back with fresh ideas when they put the legislation before Parliament in the next Session?
Paul Holmes
The Government have the luxury of being able to carry over this Bill. Its Report stage will be not in this Session, but in the next. Ministers have plenty of time to do this properly and not only give it proper scrutiny and listen to this Committee, but go away and think about it. Instead of bringing in amendments in secondary legislation, they could tell us what the pilots should look like and what they want to achieve from them. So far, the Bill does not do so.
My hon. Friend is correct that we do not have to finish the Bill by the end of this Session. The Committee has to finish in this Session, but Report can be held whenever the Government want after we come back for the next Session, because there is a carry-over order. There is no need to rush to Report and get the Bill through as quickly as possible. That mechanism is in place, so the Minister has time to strengthen this part of the Bill.
It is alien to me, but unfortunately it is a testament to the attitudes of this Government—and particularly this Department, when it comes to changing key indicators in terms of voting age, but also in terms of the way that people vote—that they want us to give them a blank cheque without giving us the details that any reasonable Member of this House would require.
David Simmonds
My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne made the constructive suggestion that we proceed on the basis of local authority areas for the use of the electoral roll in the local poll so that everybody who is standing or voting in the election can have confidence that they will be treated equally. Earlier in our debates, the hon. Member for Hazel Grove set out her sympathy with the proposal for the pilots, but I am sure that no Member of this House would be content to lose narrowly in an election, only to discover that in their constituency—perhaps alone in the country—there had been a programme to auto-enrol a specific cohort of voters who had not been auto-enrolled in the same way in neighbouring constituencies or in the rest of the country. That would fundamentally call into question the integrity of the poll.
I know that the Government have had serious concerns and reflections internally following the allegations made at the Gorton and Denton by-election. I do not think that most of us accept that those allegations are correct. None the less, the level of doubt that has been cast on elements of the process is of concern to Members across the House. The Government should be in listening mode. They should listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne and should seek to do this properly, so that all voters and candidates in elections can have confidence that they will be treated equally and consistently across the country.
Paul Holmes
I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne for not responding to his very reasonable suggestion. If the Minister were to say that she wanted to base pilots across the country on a local authority area, I am sure that many local authorities would jump at the chance to be at the front of delivering it and would work with her to do so. However, it potentially calls into question the integrity of the polls when that is based on a certain characteristic, or on an area that does not necessarily cover the whole area in which people are entitled to vote.
There is a cross-boundary issue with general elections and local elections; my constituency has three local areas with three different EROs within its boundaries. The way in which the automatic registration pilots will go ahead is just not universal. I will therefore insist on pressing amendment 28 to a Division. We will also divide the Committee on clauses 20 to 25.
Zöe Franklin (Guildford) (LD)
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Siobhain. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove set out clearly, we Liberal Democrats support the Government on automatic voter registration. I have just one question for the Minister: can she confirm which datasets the Government plan to use when piloting AVR?
Samantha Dixon
The existing canvass regime in Northern Ireland is unfit for purpose. The current system requires the register to be recreated from scratch every 10 years and specifies that electors must re-register as part of the canvass to remain on the register. Electors who do not respond to canvass are removed from the register even if the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland holds data to confirm that they are eligible. That means there is a risk that a significant number of eligible electors are lost from the register, impacting its integrity and accuracy. The Government are legislating to address those challenges and to reform and modernise the Northern Ireland canvass.
The aim of this reform is to move towards a more regular and lighter-touch canvass system. Crucially, it will also avoid the arbitrary removal of eligible voters and improve the accuracy of the Northern Ireland register. Reform of the Northern Ireland canvass is supported by the Electoral Commission and the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland, with whom we are working closely on the new system.
Paul Holmes
Can the Minister outline what political engagement she has had with the Northern Ireland Executive on what they make of these proposals, and whether she has had written communications from them on that?
Samantha Dixon
I will write to the hon. Gentleman on those points at a later date, if I may. However, the First Minister and officers attended one of our evidence sessions, and I have engaged with colleagues who attended drop-ins as a result of this legislation coming forward.
Samantha Dixon
I will hopefully come to that point, but it will not.
The details of the new canvass system will be set out in regulations following consultation with the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland and the Electoral Commission, and will be subject to piloting. This change will support increased participation in elections in Northern Ireland and bring the Northern Ireland canvass system into closer alignment with Great Britain.
Clause 27 is a consequence of clause 26. Before making any regulations under clause 26, the Secretary of State is required to consult the Electoral Commission. Where the commission has been consulted, clause 27 places a duty on it to prepare a report about a proposal to make regulations under clause 26, which is the new power to amend the canvass.
Reform of the Northern Ireland canvass is supported by the Electoral Commission, and officials will work closely with the commission on it. It is important that the commission has an opportunity to consider the details of the new canvass system to ensure that the proposed changes are effective and robust before they are implemented. The provision mirrors the role that the Electoral Commission had when the canvass system was reformed in Great Britain.
Clause 28 is also a consequence of clause 26. The Government are legislating to address current challenges and to reform and modernise the Northern Ireland canvass. The aim of this reform is to move toward a more regular and lighter-touch canvass system. However, these are technical and complex changes, and it is important that we get them right, so it is proper that the new canvass system will be subject to successful piloting. We will work closely with the chief electoral officer for Northern Ireland on the design of any pilots. I commend clause 28 to the Committee.
Paul Holmes
I thank the Minister for outlining clauses 26 to 29. I believe that all parties represented on the Committee agree with devolution. The Minister outlined that there has been consultation with the chief electoral officer and officials in Northern Ireland, but given that we are entering a period of devolution, and of Governments, Cabinets, First Ministers and Members of Parliament across this great United Kingdom, I am slightly concerned that we have not had any detail about which relevant Cabinet Minister in Northern Ireland has been consulted on these proposals—not only in relation to the reports from the Electoral Commission that will be required, but on the Government’s proposed pilot in Northern Ireland. We have not heard what the democratically elected Executive, local Members of Parliament or local authorities in Northern Ireland think of that, and that concerns me.
I hope that the Minister might outline, perhaps with the help of her excellent officials, whether the political leads in Northern Ireland have come back with their views on the proposals. It is okay for officials to do so, but officials advise and Ministers decide—that is my old mantra. It is one thing for the chief electoral officer, with whom I have no issue whatsoever—he is doing an admirable job—to say that he is okay with the proposals, but I would have thought that the UK Government should have the consent of the Executive. It concerns me that we have not had such an assurance from the Minister today.
David Simmonds
Although we do not have a representative from Northern Ireland on the Committee, we have had a number of debates in which a variety of these issues have been raised, and we took evidence on them specifically. The electoral system, registration system and arrangements for elections have been different in Northern Ireland for some time anyway, and that reflects part of the fairly complex political history of that part of our United Kingdom. One of the commonalities that we have with Ireland is the ability of people there to cast their vote in general elections in the United Kingdom and vice versa.
Will the Minister set out—perhaps my hon. Friend agrees with me that we need a bit more detail on this—what conversations have happened not just with the Northern Ireland Executive but with the Government of Ireland? A number of provisions mean that the Province, in which people will have the ability to vote as a United Kingdom voter and also, potentially, in Ireland, especially if they are dual electors, will have different electoral rules. It is particularly important that that is fully considered, especially before pilots, which might make further changes, are implemented without the element of local consent.
Paul Holmes
My hon. Friend raises a good point that I had not thought of, as is normally the case. I am concerned that the political leadership have not given their sign-off or their thoughts, and that this Committee should be given the views of the Northern Ireland Administration. Having briefly served as a shadow Northern Ireland Minister, I understand the differences and the unique nature of the politics of Northern Ireland, and he is right to say that people who live in Northern Ireland could be eligible to vote in a number of elections in different countries. When it comes to the Province, it is therefore important that we get clarity on how the pilot, and the lack of information about it, might affect the different rules in different countries.
We remain concerned. As with the last group of amendments and clauses, there is no detail on what the pilots might look like, particularly under clause 28. In her last winding-up speech, the Minister stated that the Government are designing the pilots and are looking at how to make them the best they can be, but a Government propose things, and they should know what they want a pilot to look like in order to get the policy outcome before they come to this House and expect us to approve legislation. I say gently to the Minister that if the Government have a policy they want to achieve, they should have some idea about how they will get there and what a pilot might look like.
Clause 28, on the power to pilot proposals under clause 26, does not really contain any detail as to what such pilots might look like. Under clause 29,
“If pilot regulations are made, the Electoral Commission must…prepare a report on the pilot regulations, and…before the date specified under section 28(4), give a copy of the report to the Secretary of State and to the Chief Electoral Officer for Northern Ireland.”
In none of the proposals in the Bill is the First Minister of Northern Ireland, or the relevant Cabinet Minister in the Executive, included in any reporting mechanisms; it is only the Secretary of State and the chief electoral officer. If we want to harness great cross-border relations, it is very important that the democratically elected devolved Government have some kind of say, even if it is after the fact and about whether they think it was a success.
We have a number of concerns about the holes in these clauses, and we look to see what reassurances the Minister can give us before we decide whether to press them to a Division.
Samantha Dixon
To reassure Members, we have worked very closely with the Northern Ireland Office, as well as other devolved Governments, in the development of the Bill. Elections in Northern Ireland are an entirely reserved matter for the UK Government. Notwithstanding that, colleagues from all parties across Parliament were invited to come to drop-in sessions. A number of Northern Ireland colleagues did, and I also met the leadership of those parties that wished to meet me as we developed the legislation.
I beg your indulgence, Dame Siobhain, and that of the Committee: I should have spoken to clause 29 at the same time that I addressed the other clauses in the group. Clause 29 is a consequence of clause 28, which provides for the piloting power in relation to amending the Northern Ireland canvass by regulations. As I noted earlier, it is proper that the new canvass system is subject to successful piloting. It is also important that the Electoral Commission has an opportunity to consider any canvass pilots and report on their effectiveness and robustness before they are implemented. The hon. Member for Hamble Valley and I will have to agree to disagree about the role of piloting. In my view, it is the way that we iteratively and robustly test ways in which a policy can be delivered. When we get to secondary legislation, the specifics of the piloting powers will be set out, and Parliament will have the opportunity to scrutinise those powers.
Paul Holmes
How can a policy be tested robustly if the Government have not outlined the policy position or what they want to get out of a pilot, and we do not know how robustly that is going to be tested, because the details of the pilots are not outlined in primary legislation and would come only through secondary legislation?
Samantha Dixon
We could go over and over this point. The Government have set out, in some detail, their objectives for the electoral system. In the case of the Northern Ireland canvass, we have set out the principles, we want to test them, we are taking the powers to test them, and we will come back to Parliament with specifics of those pilots so that they can be scrutinised as profoundly and deeply as Members choose to scrutinise them.
Question put, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
The Chair
As Chair, I am completely in the hands of the Committee. Amendments and clauses are grouped to reduce the time taken—it is an administrative thing—but if anybody on the Committee wishes a vote to be taken separately, they are perfectly entitled to request that. I can give no better reason than that.
Paul Holmes
Further to that point of order, Dame Siobhain. I think it should be entirely out of order for an hon. Member to make a point of order and say that I am time-wasting. I am taking my responsibilities as shadow Minister very seriously by calling for Divisions, as is the democratic right of any Member of this House, in order to allow our constituents to see how we voted on the clauses in this very important Bill. Can you advise me whether saying that someone is time-wasting is in order in this Committee?
The Chair
I do not think the hon. Lady meant it in that way. She wanted clarification of the procedure, and I have given it. Everybody on the Committee completely accepts that you are entitled to request separate decisions.
Paul Holmes
Further to that point of order, Dame Siobhain. The hon. Member for North Herefordshire said the words, from a sedentary position, “It is time-wasting.”