Conduct of Elections

Debate between Simon Hoare and Wendy Chamberlain

Wednesday 20th March 2024 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (Simon Hoare)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Mundell. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) for instigating this debate. The topic set out on the Order Paper is “the conduct of elections”, which is a wide canvas. We had no reference to any specific points the hon. Lady was going to draw the House’s attention to, so I am working from manuscript notes based on my own knowledge as elections Minister.

Let me shoot stone-cold dead two foxes that the hon. Lady has tried to set running round Westminster Hall this morning. First, she said that she thought the Elections Act 2022 and subsequent guidance was—I quote directly —“a tool of the current Government to improve their own position.” It is absolutely not. I say gently to her that she cannot turn around in good faith and in all conscience and say that our electorates need to have faith and confidence in the robustness, resilience, honesty, transparency and integrity of the system, and then say, in almost the juxtaposed breath, that the Government were trying to rig the rules in their favour.

If the hon. Lady does not believe me, I ask her to look at the evidence and the facts. I suggest to the House that the results of last year’s local elections demonstrate beyond peradventure that even if they had been planned to improve the position of the Government, the plan did not work. They were not results that my party welcomed. I am afraid that the hon. Lady’s fox is not only shot but buried on that point. I take her point entirely that the public need to have faith in the system, and I politely suggest to her that it is our job as parliamentarians, along with our colleagues across the local government sector, to ensure that the public have that. Her opening remarks did not help in that important endeavour.

The second fox I want to shoot and butcher is that we are in some way undermining the independence of the Electoral Commission. The commission’s independence is sacrosanct. The chairman and the chief executive of the commission know that, and we work well and closely together. I made that point very clearly on the Floor of the House when I made my statement. We have to have faith and confidence in the robust independence of the commission, and that is a ditch I will die in to defend.

The hon. Lady raised a number of other issues. She described almost as some sort of elections equivalent of the Russian revolution our revocation of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. It was not an ancient piece of UK constitutional architecture; it was always envisaged to be a temporary piece of legislation, wisely brought in by the then coalition partners—the coalition of which the hon. Lady’s party was a key and important part—to provide stability and confidence for the markets and the electorate that there was a secure and stable Government that, having inherited an absolute horror show of a financial legacy from the Labour party, would take difficult decisions to restore the nation’s finances. The Act was always envisaged to be temporary; it is no longer required. It is for no other reason that it was revoked.

The hon. Lady spoke about the boundary reforms, which were long overdue. She will remember, although it was before her time and mine, that there was a bit of horse-trading between my party and hers and we had a referendum on changing the first-past-the-post system. My side won and her side lost, but the Liberals seem to be very poor losers and, rather like the SNP, who always try to resurrect the question of an independence referendum, they keep picking away at the scab of first past the post. I am not entirely sure that the electorate are with them on that, given the results of the referendum that was held on changing the voting system.

The Boundary Commission review of parliamentary seats was long overdue. We know full well that that will now take place every eight years, so the next review will be required to report by 2031 and will be based on the registers as at December 2028. It is about time we had that as part of an iterative process, to ensure that as populations grow and shrink, and new housing development comes on stream, our parliamentary boundaries broadly reflect an equal number of constituents to ensure that it really is one Member, one vote, and all of us are equal in this House.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

Will the Minister give way?

[Simon Hoare]

I might in a moment, but the hon. Lady covered a lot of ground and I want to give respect to her by covering the very serious and sensible points that she made.

On voter ID, the underpinning of the Act and the subsequent statutory instruments that we have brought forward is that we cannot rest on our laurels. The hon. Lady is absolutely right that in broad terms, the way our elections have been conducted in this country has been robust and fair, and everyone—both those who have won and, more importantly, those who have lost—has accepted the results, but I do not think we can rest on our laurels. She will know, as I do, that we are living in a changing world, in which western democratic principles are under acute pressure, and the rise of populism and social media brings challenges that our forefathers had not foreseen. To that purpose, we reflected on, reviewed and updated the rules that govern our electoral processes, in order to ensure that they are fit for purpose and demonstrably capable of being changed and reformed.

There is a very long list of qualifying documentation for voter ID, and 99% of all voters have at least one form of acceptable ID, and many have more. There is also the voter authority certificate, which is free and lasts for three years. That meets the needs of the 1% of the population who do not have an acceptable form of ID. We have a list, which is quite long, but it is not carved in tablets of stone. I hope the hon. Lady will welcome my saying that this is an iterative and organic process: as technologies change and new forms of ID come on board, Government will of course respond. We reviewed the situation post the local elections of 2023 and we will have to do a quick review post the coming elections in May 2024. Tweaks could easily be made, if required, in preparation for the general election later this year. I think that is the right way to go.

Turnout for the local elections in 2023 was broadly commensurate with that in previous years. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), who is no longer in his place, rightly referenced the fact that within boundaries of the United Kingdom, voter identification has been an accepted part of the electoral landscape in Northern Ireland—again, with no demonstrable negative impact on turnout.

The hon. Member for North East Fife and I share an absolute keenness—as do the Government, the Electoral Commission and local government—to maximise our attention to what all the survey work has pointed to, which is driving up registration and participation of those we might colloquially describe as hard-to-reach groups. That can be students, the very elderly, people from black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, or those with disabilities—in particular disabilities that make it a challenge to come into new spaces, or to meet and interact with new people.

We take this matter absolutely seriously and I want to put it clearly on the record that we want to make sure that anybody and everybody who is eligible to vote in any electoral event has the right to do so, and that if they wish to exercise that right they must be free to do so. We are deploying the strength and power of gov.uk, working with the commission, turbocharging the engines of local government communication, and reaching out to faith groups, disability groups and the voluntary sector. We are focused, Exocet-like, on driving up registration in those communities, as well as participation, with a greater awareness of voter ID. That is key and it is right. If the hon. Lady and I agree possibly on nothing else in this debate, I hope that she will welcome that.

On overseas votes, the hon. Lady repeated a line that is the third fox that I need to shoot in response to her remarks. A qualifying overseas voter cannot just choose willy-nilly which constituency to register in. I appreciate that sitting in the ivory tower of Marsham Street, one can sometimes seem slightly caught between theory and practice, but on Monday I visited a local authority election office, where I completed some of the applications processing—I did it all fairly and was supervised! We admitted two applications, but one was not sufficient because the applicant said they had been on the paper register but that had not been digitalised. Such applications are then put into the “pending” box and further proof of ID is required to prove where the individual, if qualifying, lived in that constituency and therefore that they have a right to vote there. I know that some feared that parties would organise themselves to motivate people to apply to vote in their most marginal seats, but one has to demonstrate without any form of a doubt that they have a link to that last constituency. That is important.

The hon. Lady asked what I thought the numbers may be. We assess that the potential quantum, in totality —including those already qualifying to be overseas voters under the old 15-year rule—to be about 3 million.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

I want to make it clear for the record that that was not a third fox. I was not suggesting in any way that there would not be robust processes in place for people to register in a particular seat. I was asking about the numbers, because I think the Minister must accept that if we are making an estimate of 3 million, we cannot say exactly where those 3 million will be, and the numbers will alter the overall electoral register in each affected constituency.

[Simon Hoare]

The hon. Lady makes a good and clear point. Clearly, when it came to the subsequent boundary review—at a time when, one would have to presume, those who had qualified would have already taken up and exercised that right—those who were reviewing our parliamentary boundaries would take those numbers into account. That is the one number that will never move, because one will not be able to change a historical link to a constituency.

The hon. Lady made an important point about devolution and different settlements. I assure her that while there are differentials between the nations of the United Kingdom, the four of us who are charged ministerially with dealing with elections, and the Northern Ireland Office, work closely together to ensure that parity can be delivered as and when it can, and when it is deemed to be desirable, and to try to maximise the points that the hon. Lady talked about—namely, simplicity and transparency across these islands.

The hon. Lady mentioned automatic voter registration. Again, that is something that any Government would keep under review. We have decided that individual registration is the best way. We all talk about rights, but sometimes we do not talk about responsibilities, and I actually think that that individual motivation to register—deciding to go on the electoral register, obviously without being forced to vote—begins a contract between the young qualifying adult and the state in all its manifestations.

This has been a fascinating debate, which we now draw to a conclusion. I am grateful to the hon. Member for North East Fife. I just hope that I have assured her on the two key charges that she levied against us: the commission’s independence is clear and without challenge; and we are in no way trying to gerrymander. The Conservative party is the oldest political party in the world. We have always extended and widened the franchise, and that is a historical tradition that we intend to continue.

Question put and agreed to.