Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Monday 18th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr David]

Earlier, I made a point of saying that I congratulated the Government and commended them, as the Minister acknowledged, on their pre-legislative consultation and on their rethink on a number of key issues. However, with all due respect to the Government, that is not enough. There are still real concerns and I hope that the Government have listened not so much to the Opposition but to the legitimate concerns expressed by people outside this place, with whom they have been engaged for some weeks and months. Those people still have concerns, which I have expressed. Let me quote specifically what they said in one of their circulars:

“The need to ensure that the requirement for absent voters to be registered under the new system does not inadvertently disenfranchise disabled voters who rely on postal voting to mitigate the inaccessibility of polling stations”.

That is from the response from Mencap, the RNIB, Scope and Sense to the publication of the draft Bill in May 2012.

Objective comments on the proposals have been made by such organisations and by outside academics, but a Select Committee of this House also gave a trenchant criticism of the Government’s proposals. The Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform’s report on IER states:

“We recommend that the Government look closely at applying the same carry-forward arrangements for the 2015 General Election to postal and proxy registrations as to other registrations, to avoid inadvertently disenfranchising vulnerable electors.”

That is a succinct and apt way of putting that very important point.

The Government made legitimate changes to their position—I do not like to use the word “concessions”—before the final draft Bill was published and I hope that they will listen to the cacophony of reasonable opinion expressed beyond the confines of the Palace of Westminster and change the Bill.

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the problem is that many people will be on the register as it carries forward and they will have become accustomed in recent years to postal votes being sent to them every time, which they might not have been in the past? They will therefore assume that the same will happen the first time this provision comes into effect, which will presumably be at the next general election, only to discover that they are unable to vote.

[Mr David]

Yes, that is the concern, in essence. The Minister has confidently predicted that the carry-over will be 66%, but I have yet to hear on what he bases that figure. The Electoral Commission is bemused, too. I mentioned that earlier and I will be interested to hear whether he reiterates the totally unsubstantiated figure of 66% for postal and proxy votes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Harper]

It is worth pointing out that, after the general election in 2015, there will be another full canvass of households to ensure that we get people on the register. The danger with just carrying everybody forward for ever and a day is that we just perpetuate inaccuracy; we might get completeness but it would be at the expense of ensuring that the data were accurate.

[Sheila Gilmore]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Harper]

Let me make some progress, because otherwise I will not be able to deal with the amendments that the hon. Member for Caerphilly tabled. I will see how things have moved on at the end.

We have announced that about two thirds of voters will be confirmed automatically, but the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who is no longer in her place, said that the figure will not be uniform throughout the country, and that is quite right—I confirmed it on Second Reading. She also referred to funding, and we propose to deal with the issue by ensuring that better support for funding is available to areas with bigger challenges. In the summer, I will publish our proposals on how we allocate funding in order to receive feedback from electoral registration officers throughout the country so that they feel that the funding mechanism is sufficiently robust.

Amendment 18 and 19 are about the carry-forward of absent votes. If we were undertaking this process is a purist way, we would not bother having the carry-forward at all; we would just have individual registration and then test it out. But we have learned from Northern Ireland, so we are introducing the carry-forward to stop people dropping off the register.

We do not propose to extend the canvass to those who have an absent vote, because there is a risk in the system with absent voters: if registrations are fictitious in the first place, the checks and balances on identifiers for absent votes will not really add any security to the system. If someone can make up an identity, they can make up the identifiers, so we think that there is more risk involved in that process.

To deal with risk, however, we propose, first, to use data matching to undertake confirmation, meaning that two thirds of voters will be moved over automatically on the register, including two thirds on average of those who have an absent vote.

Secondly, as colleagues on both sides of the House will know, people with postal votes have postal identifiers, their date of birth and their signature, which they have to refresh every five years because signatures can change and deteriorate over time. We are therefore going to delay the postal vote identifier refresh in 2014 and bring forward the refresh from 2015, so all electors using postal voting methods whose identifiers are due to be refreshed in those two years will be asked to provide them as well as to register. Those whose entries on the register have automatically been confirmed will be asked to provide their refreshed identifiers when they get their letter. EROs will be communicating to anyone with an absent vote who is invited to register under the new system, to make it quite clear what happens if they do not register. If they do not register, they will be written to again and informed that they have lost their absent vote but given another opportunity. All the steps that we propose will make things very clear and it will be difficult for someone inadvertently to lose their absent vote.

The final point is about disabled voters. As I said on Second Reading, we are also going to look at having an online registration system; moving away from a paper-based system to one in which people can register electronically is a way of getting more disabled people registered.

[Sheila Gilmore]

rose—

[Mr Harper]

I give way to the hon. Lady, who is on the Select Committee.

[Sheila Gilmore]

The Minister stated that concern about carrying forward the postal vote is to do with fictitious people. However, he appears to be happy to carry over other people, who might equally be fictitious. If a fictitious person is on the roll at the moment and carried over, come the general election someone using that identity could go to the polling station and vote; we do not check identity as people vote. If large numbers of people using fictitious identities are trying to vote, they can do that. Why is it thought that there is a greater problem with postal voting, for which at least some additional safeguards are in place?

[Mr Harper]

Those safeguards work only if the person with the postal vote is legitimate in the first place. The postal vote identifiers are very good for checking that the postal vote cast is the one for the person who has registered; there is a good check in that part of the system. That is not helpful, however, if the person who has registered has created a fictitious identity. We know that it is easier for somebody to set up a fictitious identity and cast a postal vote than vote in person using that identity. The hon. Lady seems to be arguing in favour of having ID cards before one votes, but the Government do not plan to introduce those.

I urge the Opposition to withdraw amendment 3 on appeals and not to press their remaining three amendments. The steps that I set out are robust. We are providing proper funding in the system for electoral registration officers to be able to communicate with voters and make sure that the system is sufficiently flexible. In parts of the country where there is a bigger challenge, for whatever reason, EROs will have access to more funding.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Blomfield]

I, too, consider students to be responsible, intelligent and able individuals—all 31,800 in my constituency and indeed the rest in our universities and in higher education across the country. But for those students there are so many different things to register for, such as the health service and course modules, and there are all sorts of choices to be made in their lives, and many of them are also uncertain about where they stand in relation to electoral registration. They assume that their place of registration is their family home, as indeed it is, not what is in effect their primary place of residence, where they study at university, so that additional effort is needed to ensure that they are fully aware of their opportunity to register in their place of study.

For those students in private accommodation in Sheffield, the student unions of both universities run vigorous electoral registration campaigns, and the unions’ experience is pertinent to the issue, because their students, like many people, leave electoral registration until the point when they need it. The unions’ registration campaigns do not work in November or December; they work in February, March and April—just before elections. So the Bill will effectively, when taken alongside the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011 exclude them not only from the electoral roll for upcoming elections, but from the redrawing of boundaries and the reshaping of our constituencies, thereby depriving them of their voice in general.

In that context, the annual canvass in October will provide students with a focus to register at the point when they join—and if it is complemented by face-to-face contact so much the better—and with an opportunity to join the electoral register at the point when it can make a difference not only in their entitlement to vote but, crucially, when it comes to redrawing parliamentary boundaries.

The students whom I met from the university of Sheffield told me that they have tried very hard to meet their other constituency MP, the Deputy Prime Minister, to talk about voter registration. In fact they have been trying since October, but unsuccessfully, so I hope that the Minister will take the opportunity to reaffirm their desire to meet the Deputy Prime Minister to discuss the issue both in his leading role on the matter and in his role as their constituency representative.

Although amendment 6 and, indeed, 9, which was considered earlier, would not go as far as I should wish and restore the right to block registration, they would work entirely with the grain of the Bill, so the Government should not have any difficulty accepting them and recognising that they are a modest attempt, among their other objectives, to address the potential drop in electoral registration and to ensure that electoral registration officers contact students in the first term of each year.

If the amendments are not accepted, I will conclude only that the Government do not want students to vote in the next election or to have a voice in the reshaped parliamentary constituencies.

[Sheila Gilmore]

I shall address primarily the issues around undertaking a good door-to-door canvass, because the experience of various electoral registration officers throughout the country is that, when that happens, they end up with a much more complete register than when any number of letters are simply sent out to drop on people’s doorsteps.

That is true of various other bureaucratic interventions that a local authority or, indeed, any other authority might want to make. I remember having much the same discussion about how to collect rent arrears effectively from tenants when I was the convenor of housing on Edinburgh city council. The habitual process was to send out letter one, letter two, letter three, but people who for whatever reason were not minded to pay much attention to that tended to disregard them and did not take them seriously—however well or clearly they were framed. That is a lesson in the fact that dropping lots of letters through people’s doors is not necessarily particularly effective.

When the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee was considering the Bill, we had evidence from some electoral registration officers who had achieved a much higher level of registration than others—largely through such things as regular door-to-door work. They put in that additional effort so they were gaining, even in areas, comparable with areas with much lower levels of registration, where it was otherwise difficult to register people. It was not that the EROs were in leafy suburbs where it is easy to get people registered; there was a return on the work put into some quite difficult areas.

In the inner-city areas of Edinburgh, there is the problem of a lot of multi-occupation—not just students, although there are student flats, but a large number of other shared accommodation. The Government want far more shared accommodation for young people, certainly in respect of the benefit system, so the issue will become even bigger.

We know what happens when letters come through the door of such households; they get stacked up somewhere. We also have issues, which I hope will be resolved, with how the addresses are labelled. Anybody who has done door-knocking and leafleting in some of our traditional tenements in Scotland invariably finds a little pile of undelivered mail sitting on the stairs; it has not been accurately addressed or people may have moved on. Trying to find out whether they are still there can be very confusing, partly because of the bizarre numbering system for our tenement buildings.

We call the first flat on the third floor, for example, 3F1. We also have PF1, PF2 and so on, which is the ground floor, although I still do not know what “P” stands for, while in other flats the ground floor is referred to as “G”. Traditionally, people called them something completely different. In shared accommodation, where people might well not pass on letters, the knock on the door—a personal approach—may yield results. It is important that we do not just say that it can be done, but that it should be done. A further issue is how we put the resources into doing that; it is resource-intensive, which some local authorities might find difficult.

However, I am reassured that the Minister has told us that he will look at the allocation of resources for electoral registration this summer; I hope that he will take the issue that I have mentioned into account when he divides up the resources to be made available for that purpose. If we do not take the resources into account, even saying “must” rather than “may” will lead us into problems.

[Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

Mr Amess, I apologise for not having been present for the other part of the debate; I was detained elsewhere. I also apologise for my tie, a father’s day gift from my six-year-old son. I promised him I would wear it in the Chamber at some point. [Interruption.] He is not watching me from home, I hope; I expect him to be in bed, but you never know.

I want to speak briefly to amendment 7 because I genuinely believe that it goes to the heart of our long debate about the importance of electoral registration and of voting itself. When I was first elected, one of the first failed campaigns on which I embarked was to try to persuade the then Government to make registering to vote compulsory. That will sound odd in the current context, but, as was the case 10 years ago, most people today are under the impression that it is against the law not to register to vote. Of course, it was always compulsory to return a completed electoral registration form, but it was never compulsory, and still is not, to register to vote and have one’s name on the list. That is wrong. I am absolutely opposed to compulsory voting, but it would send an important and powerful message to the country if the Government were to say, “It is entirely up to you whether you wish to vote, but we must use all our powers to make sure that when polling day comes you have an opportunity to vote even if you do not wish to take it up.” That commitment should have the force of law and perhaps a financial penalty attached for someone who does not vote.