Individual Voter Registration

Russell Brown Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)]

I apologise to the House, the Minister and my right hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State for not being in the Chamber for the opening speeches. I had made Mr Speaker aware of that.

Today’s debate goes to the heart of our democracy, because it is about people going to a polling station and casting their vote. We need to strike a balance between protecting against electoral fraud and not further disfranchising large sections of society from the formal political process. I have three concerns about the Government’s proposals: the rapid timetable for change; the erosion of the civic duty to register; and the long-term deterioration in the accuracy of the register.

We have already heard from numerous colleagues the astonishing figures for the number of people missing from registers, generally made up of the most vulnerable in our society. The Electoral Commission has raised serious concerns about the effect of the rapid timetable for the introduction of individual voter registration on the completeness of the electoral register. Its dire warning is that under voluntary individual voter registration, the electoral register could go from its current level of completeness down to as low as 60% or 65%. That would mean an astonishing 10 million plus voters falling off the register. We have seen what happened initially in Northern Ireland.

I fear that social divisions could widen, but that does not need to be the case. Individual voter registration could, without the haste with which the Government are seeking to introduce it, take away that threat. I am concerned that, despite the previous agreement of all political parties that the previous Government’s timetable was a sensible approach, the draft legislation proposes to remove the safeguards and simply to bring individual voter registration into force by 2014.

I appreciate that my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) wants to make a speech, so let me merely say that the principle of voter registration as a method of preventing electoral fraud and providing proper safeguards is what most of us are looking for, but the Government proposals are unfair and unforgiveable and need to be rethought.