Voter Engagement

Sam Gyimah Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane]

I will give way to the Minister if he wants to confirm that Bite the Ballot will be getting some funding. A pat on the head is fine, but it wants more than that.

[The Minister for the Constitution (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to intervene so that I can set the record straight. We acknowledge and recognise the good work of Bite the Ballot, with which we have opened discussions on the grant funding, as we have with a number of organisations. The Government operate with those organisations in a uniform way, and historically we have funded “Rock Enrol,” which Bite the Ballot has updated and is using in schools, but we have not been able to come to an agreement with Bite the Ballot—that is why Bite the Ballot is not included —although we want to involve it in this process.

[Chris Ruane]

I thank the Minister for that response. I will give him some statistics that prove how efficient and economic Bite the Ballot is. The Electoral Commission judges success on registration by the number of registration forms that are downloaded from its website. The commission is given millions of pounds by this Government to increase registration, as it was by the previous Government. For the European parliamentary elections in 2009, there were 137,000 downloads, with each download costing the Government £64. At the 2010 general election, the cost went down to £16 per download, and at the referendum it went up to £41. At the Scottish elections it was £38 and at the English local elections it was £12. Bite the Ballot can get a young person registered for 25p. Is that not a strong reason for his Department to help Bite the Ballot financially? Some might say that, because Bite the Ballot has hopefully registered 200,000 people today, it is embarrassing the Electoral Commission and the Government and must therefore be silenced. During the last election, the Electoral Commission had a target of registering 142,000 people in the two months before election day. That is 142,000 out of 7.5 million people who are not registered, which is 1.8% of the missing millions. Bite the Ballot has done that in one day. Is that not a strong reason for aiding Bite the Ballot financially and making it a partner of the Government and the Electoral Commission?

I think Bite the Ballot is being ignored out of political spite because it is embarrassing the Government and the Electoral Commission with its performance. Bite the Ballot can walk into a sixth-form college and get 100% of pupils to sign up by doing role play, by getting them involved with an emotive issue and by saying at the end, when they are all fired up, “Now we are going to have a vote, but you people aren’t registered to vote. You have no voice.” There is 100% take-up when Bite the Ballot then asks, “Would you like to fill in the registration form?”

[Mr Gyimah]

I know the hon. Gentleman is a great fan of conspiracy theories, but I make it clear that we all recognise the good work of Bite the Ballot in this area. Also, Facebook is partnering the Electoral Commission to reach pretty much everyone in this country who is online and on Facebook to help them register to vote. Bite the Ballot was not part of the announcement yesterday because it came to the Government—we have opened discussions—with its own strict legal criteria. We need to seek legal advice before we can engage, but it is Bite the Ballot’s legal criteria that are hindering any funding.

[Chris Ruane]

In times of austerity and cutbacks, when every penny counts, Bite the Ballot should be out there and recruiting those young people at 25p a shot, instead of at £44 a shot through the Electoral Commission.

Moving on, because I have only five minutes left, the other recommendations mentioned by the Chairman of the Committee include weekend voting, which is eminently sensible, and citizenship education. As I just said, Bite the Ballot does citizenship education in a fantastic way and gets a lot of traction with young people. On registration, it is a sensible suggestion to have automatic registration when a citizen interfaces with a public body, whether it is the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, the Department for Work and Pensions or housing benefit organisations. Whatever public institutions are out there, if they interact with the public, they should have a form for people to sign. There should also be block registration for pensioners living in homes, and definitely for students living in halls.

The issue is important. As I said, a decision will be taken in June—possibly by the Minister, if he is still in power—whether to drop the additional 5.5 million unregistered people from the register altogether. It will have a massive impact on the boundary freeze date of 1 December 2015, because that 5.5 million will be added to the 7.5 million to make 13 million people missing from the register. The Government-recommended 75,000 people per seat is almost the equivalent of 200 MPs missing from Parliament. That is the nature of the game. We will become a laughing stock. That is why I say it will be a constitutional coup if that decision is made.

I questioned the Minister yesterday on what his guiding principles were. I will ask him again, because when I asked him yesterday, he said:

“Whoever is the Minister, and whoever is in government, the decision they make will be taken on the independent advice of the Electoral Commission. That is pretty clear”.—[Official Report, 4 February 2015; Vol. 592, c. 365.]

Is he saying that if the Electoral Commission says, “Don’t drop these people off the register,” he will say, “We won’t”?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gyimah]

I cannot answer a hypothetical question.

[Chris Ruane]

It is not a hypothetical question; it is the Minister’s own words from 24 hours ago. The hon. Gentleman said yesterday—I will read it again if he wants—that if the Electoral Commission says, “Don’t drop these 5.5 million missing people off the register,” he will not do so.

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Gentleman’s question involves many assumptions. Nobody has deliberately dropped anyone off the electoral register. A proper assessment must be made at the time of the state of the register: who is on it and who is not, what more can be done to maximise the register and, in view of that, what decisions need to be taken at the next boundary review. It is not a binary question of whether or not I would drop them off, so the question is inappropriate, which is why I cannot answer.

[Chris Ruane]

Obfuscation.

In conclusion, I turn to the performance of the Electoral Commission—I have mentioned it before—and its total lack of ambition to get unregistered people registered. That is one of its two main duties: securing the vote by removing people who should not be on the register, and ensuring that we have the maximum number of people possible on the register. Its ambition is virtually non-existent.

I have highlighted the Electoral Commission’s targets in each of the past five elections. It has massively overshot each target that it has set. In the 2009 European elections, it wanted 50,000 electors, but overshot and got 137,000. That is fantastic, but a target is supposed to be reviewed regularly so that more difficult targets can be set, for constant improvement. The Electoral Commission did not do so. For the general election, it set itself a target of 142,000 people. It overshot and got 466,000. Is the Electoral Commission not fantastic? No, it is not, because again it did not review the number. In the 2011 referendum, the target was 75,000, just 1% of unregistered people—that shows a lack of ambition—but it got 131,000.

The Electoral Commission has overshot every target that it has set. It needs to give itself more difficult targets so it can test itself. That is the commission’s record over the past five or six years. Its future target—to have 7.5 million people registered in five years’ time, which is exactly the same as today—is woeful. There is a complete lack of ambition, and I am pleased that the Committee raised that as a specific point.

With very little time left, I will say that there are good electoral registration officers out there. We need to work to that best practice. I particularly congratulate Gareth Evans, the electoral registration officer from my constituency, who has done a fantastic job. Of the 12,000 postal voters in my constituency, we have lost only 25. He has had a 93% transfer rate from household to individual registration; he is doing a fantastic job. We need to spread that best practice.

[Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, and particularly my hon. Friends the Members for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), on the brilliant work that they have done throughout this Parliament, including the report that we are debating. As they both said, it is timely that we should be debating the report on national voter registration day. I echo what they said about Bite the Ballot—a truly fantastic organisation, to which I will return in a moment.

As the Chairman of the Committee knows, my plans today had to change. I was going to be in Liverpool with the brilliant organisation UpRising, which, as part of national voter registration day, is at City of Liverpool further education college as we speak, talking to young people about the importance of registration. It is great to see so many of those activities happening in colleges, schools and youth organisations across the country, thanks to Bite the Ballot and similar organisations.

At the beginning of his remarks, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North had an exchange with the hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) about the context. She spoke about turnout and how it had increased since 2001, but the reality is that it has been in long-term decline. In general elections from the second world war until 1997, turnout was always above 70%. We have not come near that since the 1997 election. Not only is turnout often higher in marginal seats, as my hon. Friend reminded us, because elections there are closely fought; turnout tends to be higher in more affluent areas of the country. There is a social class dimension to the debate about voter engagement, as well as the youth dimension that we have rightly focused on yesterday and today.

I will say a little more about individual voter registration, without repeating the debate that we had on the Opposition motion yesterday. From the research that we have undertaken, which has produced the figure of about 1 million in further fall-off from the electoral register, it is clear that the areas of largest fall-off are those that have significant numbers of university students, which is unsurprising for reasons that we debated yesterday; and those that have large numbers of people in the private rented sector, which is again not surprising, as that is an inherently transient population. However, a disturbing feature, which we focused on yesterday, is the decline in the number of attainers—young people who will reach 18 during the period of the current electoral register. That is the challenge that we face.

We support the principle of individual voter registration. It was the previous Labour Government who introduced it in Northern Ireland and started the process of extending it to England, Wales and Scotland. Online registration has been a hugely welcome innovation and, as I am sure the Minister will remind us, many people have taken advantage of it. Those are welcome changes, but the concern that we have expressed—my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd in particular expressed it powerfully yesterday—involves the speed of implementation through this Parliament. I press the Minister to respond on the issue that my hon. Friend raised.

The Minister said rightly both yesterday and today that whoever is in government will decide the timing of full individual voter registration, based on the independent advice of the Electoral Commission. It would be interesting to hear from him whether, if he is still Minister and the advice is clear that we are not ready to move to individual voter registration, he will then simply accept that advice. Our view, based on the evidence that we already have, is that we will definitely not be ready for the implementation of full voter registration in 2015. We may not even be ready in 2016.

Our overriding concern is to have a register that is more complete than the one that we have at the moment, which is why I share the frustration of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd about the Electoral Commission’s modest ambitions for improving the completeness of the electoral register. We need to explore all available options. The Committee report that we are debating talks about automatic registration, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (Mr Spellar), who was with us earlier, talked about the experience in the Netherlands; we can also consider the experience in Australia.

However, the underlying objective must be to get a register that is far more complete—in comparison with not just where we are now, but where we were before, under the previous system of household registration. That is why we tabled our motion yesterday for legislation to implement the Northern Ireland schools initiative in England, Scotland and Wales, which is supported by the National Association of Head Teachers and the Association of School and College Leaders. It is also why we would like to see block registration allowed again for certain classifications, notably halls of residence and adult care homes.

Let me press the Minister to address two issues when he responds. First, in the debate yesterday—

[Mr Gyimah]

Can the shadow Minister explain how he expects block registration to work in the context of individual electoral registration? Is he saying that those students would not have to provide their national insurance numbers or personal details to be verified? If they had to provide them, we might as well have individual registration.

[Stephen Twigg]

We believe that there are very clear categories where an exemption can be made: where there is a residential character to people’s accommodation. Halls of residence are the most obvious example, but adult residential homes are another example.

The Minister’s intervention links directly to the question that I want to ask him, originally put by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) yesterday. Under the Cabinet Office guidance, Sheffield university has been able to achieve remarkably high levels of registration using individual voter registration but without the requirement for the national insurance number. The assurance of the university saying, “These are students who have registered to be students at Sheffield university” has proved sufficient under the new guidance. I welcome that, and I welcome the role that the Cabinet Office has played in that.

Will the Minister say whether he would be willing to write to all the other universities to ask them whether they can adopt the practice that Sheffield university has adopted? Frankly, if the Sheffield experience was typical, we could achieve even higher levels of registration of higher education students in the future than we did under the previous system.

Let me also press the Minister on the issue of Bite the Ballot and its relationship with the Cabinet Office. I welcome the extra money announced yesterday and I thank him for clarifying the position with regard to the Cabinet Office’s discussions with Bite the Ballot. However, I absolutely share the sentiments of my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd about the fantastic and efficient approach of Bite the Ballot. I urge the Minister to reopen discussions with Bite the Ballot to explore whether it could share in some of this resource; I am confident that it would do the job of increasing voter registration well.

[Chris Ruane]

I pay tribute to the Minister for his reaction to my hon. Friend’s question: he nodded his head and I think he said, “Yes.” Will he confirm what his nod suggested?

[Mr Gyimah]

The hon. Gentleman wants me to interpret my body language?

[Chris Ruane]

Yes.

[Stephen Twigg]

We are in one of these complex three-way discussions, so I will now give way to the Minister. Does he wish to intervene, so that he can respond to my hon. Friend?

[Mr Gyimah]

indicated dissent.

[Stephen Twigg]

Perhaps the Minister will respond to my hon. Friend’s point in his closing remarks. I am conscious that I have only a couple more minutes left, so I will try to be brief in addressing the other issues.

Let me address the issue of votes at 16. I welcome what the Select Committee’s report says on that. Labour’s policy is to move the voting age to 16 as an early legislative priority if we win the election in May. The research from the Electoral Commission on Scotland is absolutely fascinating, showing that 75% of 16 and 17-year-olds voted in the Scottish referendum compared with 54% of those aged between 18 and 24. That is very similar to the experience in Austria, when votes at 16 were introduced there. Austria found that 16 and 17-year-olds turned out in larger numbers than 18, 19 and 20-year-olds in its elections. It is an idea whose time has come.

Finally, I echo what my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North said in welcoming the work of the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy. We want to see a further opening up of the democratic process to ensure that as many people as possible are involved, and we support the piloting of a number of the measures referred to in the Select Committee’s report—same-day registration, for example. I know that there are concerns among electoral registration officers about some of the practical issues, but in principle my hon. Friend and his Committee are right to say that we need to look at same-day registration. In those parts of America where it has been used, there is strong evidence that it has increased turnout.

We also think that Government agencies should have a duty to raise the issue of voter registration whenever people come into contact with them. Some local authorities already do that, but it should be uniform across local government and central Government agencies, such as the Passport Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency.

We also welcome the Committee’s support for considering the possibilities of extended and weekend voting, or even voting on public holidays. We want to ensure that the experience of voting is as easy as possible, to increase turnout. That is why we want to consider trialling voting in advance of polling day, holding elections at weekends and online voting, about which my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North spoke.

In conclusion, I very much welcome this report and the work of the Committee. It is, of course, a new Committee that was established after the 2010 election. I will finish by once again paying tribute to my hon. Friend for his very effective leadership of this cross-party Committee. I hope that we can take forward the excellent recommendations of its report, ideally on a cross-party basis.

[The Minister for the Constitution (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

Thank you, Mr Davies, for calling me to speak. First, I offer my apologies for my slightly late arrival. I was at Chilwell barracks in Nottingham to launch the military’s voter registration day. It is very interesting that, although our armed forces fight all over the world for freedom and democracy, in the Army specifically at least a third of people are not registered to vote. I was there today to let people know about online registration and how important it is for our people in the Army to register to vote. That was why I was slightly delayed; my apologies.

That brings me on to a much wider issue. When we consider under-registration, we see that it affects young people but it also affects some ethnic minority groups and some people with disabilities. There are a whole range of people who are under-registered and not engaging with the electoral process in the way that they should, so Government policy should seek to get all of those people to engage with the political process.

I would like to draw a distinction between the process that Government can do something about and enthusing people to vote. I believe that getting people to the polling station and excited enough to vote, is the job of us politicians; making sure that the system works is the job of Government. In that context, obviously the first and most crucial step to engage people in the political process is the registration system. It is great that we have national voter registration day today, and I echo the comments made earlier to congratulate Bite the Ballot on its efforts in increasing voter registration. However, as I said in an intervention, organisations such as Facebook, which is in partnership with the Electoral Commission, can really help to make an impact across the entire country, which is what we want to do on a day such as this.

I also thank the Select Committee for its report. It has done a lot of work in this area and it contributes a lot of good ideas, some of which I am sure will find their way into the manifestos of some of the parties, come the election in just over 90 days’ time.

First, I will talk about what the Government are doing and, secondly, I will deal with some of the recommendations in the Select Committee’s report. Without rehashing the arguments from yesterday, the issue of under-registration goes back to the previous Government. Individual electoral registration, which I am glad the shadow Minister said the Opposition are not against, was introduced by Labour in government and has been taken forward by this Government.

What I counsel against is taking a snapshot within any one month of what is a two-year process, and then concluding that somehow IER, as a method of getting people to register to vote, is not working. I speak a lot to electoral registration officers on the ground. Furthermore, I was at the Association of Electoral Administrators’ conference on Monday—I spoke to a lot of people and asked them, “What do you need that you’re not getting from Government?” They all said that they were getting whatever they needed from Government in terms of resource and that they did not see the problems that some politicians stand here and say are happening with IER and the transition to it. In other words, the people on the ground accept that we are going through a transition process and to take a snapshot in any given month, and then generalise about the process, is the wrong approach.

[Chris Ruane]

The Minister said that we are at the beginning of a two-year process for the introduction of IER. Does he not think it would have been better to have started that two-year process after the general election, and after the freeze date for the boundary review, as was originally planned? Can he tell us one more time why IER was brought forward by one year, when all this impact on the general election and the Boundary Commission could have been avoided? Why did he bring it forward by one year?

[Mr Gyimah]

May I reject the hon. Gentleman’s premise that somehow the transition to IER will result in a negative impact on the general election? Nine out of 10 electors have been transferred to the new system. More people than we expected are registering online to vote, including some 900,000 18 to 25-year-olds. May I correct a second thing as well—the idea that somehow we can sort out the register, but not have online registration? Online registration is very much part of dealing with the long-standing deterioration in the register that happened under the previous Government.

[Stephen Twigg]

The Minister rightly reminded us that the position now is a snapshot, but our understanding is that that snapshot shows 1 million fewer than the snapshot a year ago. Is he confident that we will see 1 million people added to the register between now and 20 April so that overall there is no fall in numbers? Is that what he is telling the House?

[Mr Gyimah]

The Electoral Commission has a target of 1 million people being registered to vote in the final weeks running up to 26 April. It met its target last year, so I expect it to meet the target this year as well.

I have only 10 minutes left, so I will race through the rest of my speech. Yesterday we announced a further £10 million towards continuing to maximise the register. We have to recognise that the very act of getting people to register to vote is a bottom-up process. Politicians in Westminster, dressed in our suits and ties, do not get people to register to vote. What is needed is electoral registration officers writing to people, knocking on doors and speaking to people to get them to register. That is why the bulk of the funding is going to local authorities and why it has been weighted to local authorities where there are higher rates of registration.

[Chris Ruane]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Gyimah]

I am sorry; I can take no further interventions.

We also recognise that a number of national organisations do great work in getting people to register to vote. Bite the Ballot has been mentioned, but the British Youth Council also does good work, as do UK Youth, Mencap, Operation Black Vote, Homeless Link, Citizens UK and Citizens Advice.

The work of those organisations and of the local authorities will help us to reach the very groups that the Opposition have identified as being at risk of falling off the register. If some grand conspiracy were going on, we would not be investing money with those groups and with the National Union of Students to get people on the register. There is nothing cynical going on and no conspiracy. Whenever we introduced IER, at some point we would need a cut-off date and an effort to maximise the register. We cannot get away from that fact.

Of the points made in the report, the first I will deal with is the one about electronic voting, which comes up over and over again. I am sure that some time in my lifetime we will have electronic voting, but it took us long enough to deal with registration. We have to recognise some of the practical difficulties, however. Furthermore, the introduction of increasing process into the electoral system, whether electronic and weekend voting or same-day registration, does not address why people are disillusioned with politics.

Scotland had a huge turnout in the referendum without electronic voting. The reason was that people were motivated, excited and engaged with the issues. Introducing more electoral innovation might make voters’ lives easier, but it is not a substitute for us politicians doing our work to connect properly with people, to engage with them and, after all, to get them to turn out to vote for us.

Countries where electronic voting has been introduced—France has it for overseas voting, for example—do not necessarily achieve an increase in turnout, but, rather, an increase in turnout among certain groups of people. Overall, electronic voting does not drive an increase in turnout. That is not to say that it is not a good thing to explore—it is—but, practically speaking, in the UK we would need a system of authentication. When people turned up to vote, we would have to be able to identify them and instantly verify that so that they could vote. We do not have identity cards in this country. Some countries that have introduced electronic voting have ID cards, which is why they have been able to implement it. There are big practical challenges.

Votes at 16 also came up over and over again. There is significant scope for debate about that, especially given what happened in Scotland. Among the reasons why there is scope for debate is that 16-year-olds can join the armed forces. However, they cannot fight without parental support, and nor can they get married—there is a lot that they cannot do. If we were to give 16-year-olds the right to vote, we would have to ensure that, for example, they did not have to ask their parents which way to vote; only with parental permission can a 16-year-old serve in the forces.

I made this point in the debate yesterday, but it is striking that the very party that wants to give 16-year-olds the vote is the one that does not trust them to navigate the vagaries of individual electoral registration and says that somehow they would not have their national insurance numbers or—[Interruption.] It is a serious point. If the Labour party believes that 16-year-olds are old enough to vote, it has to believe that they are old enough to register themselves to vote in the first place.

[Mr Charles Walker in the Chair]

That brings me on to some of the registration techniques suggested in the report, such as block registration. The Government’s guidance to universities strikes the right balance between giving EROs the information that they need—that is, enrolment data, so that they can go after students, because they know who they are and can chase them, write to them, knock on doors and get them on to the register—and preserving the fundamental tenet of individual electoral registration, which is that individuals have to register themselves.

If we cross the line where people end up on the register, but they have not been engaged in the process—that is, they do not even know that they are on the register, because the warden of the college put them on it—we breach the principle of individual registration. If we breach it for first-year students, what about ethnic minorities, or—

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Order. I am sorry to interrupt, but will the Minister finish in about a minute, to allow Mr Allen to wind up the debate?

[Mr Gyimah]

Thank you for prompting me to sum up, Mr Walker.

What about ethnic minorities—those who do not speak English or those who have not worked and so do not have a national insurance number? We could make so many exceptions. That is why, whatever we do, we should not breach the fundamental principle.

The work of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee is excellent and welcome. I also welcome the fact that the Committee continues to look forward to ways in which we can renew our democracy.