Electoral Registration

Siobhain McDonagh Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Can the Minister identify any case in the last 30 years of wrongful registration? Is this not a red herring?

[Mr Gyimah]

IER was the policy of your party to make the electoral process secure. The Electoral Commission has identified 16 local authorities at risk of electoral fraud. Just because you have not been able to point to it, it does not mean fraud is not happening. That is the point.

The same Labour party that introduced IER is now seeking to disown it. It is the same Labour party that said our long-term economic plan would lead to the disappearance of 1 million jobs. [Interruption.] Instead, 1,000 new jobs have been created every day of this Parliament. It said that reforming education maintenance allowance would increase the number of young people not in education, employment or training. [Interruption.] Instead, we have seen the biggest drop in the number of NEETs since records began.

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[Siobhain McDonagh (Mitcham and Morden) (Lab)]

Let me first out myself as someone who, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), was completely opposed to individual electoral registration. I accept that I have lost that argument and that we have to move on from where we are now. Where we are now was entirely predictable, but we must now get to a better level of registration.

I wish to let the House know what is happening in the London borough of Merton, which is at the halfway stage in the transfer to individual electoral registration. Merton has a very effective electoral registration organisation and high levels of registration but is still experiencing difficulties. I would like publicly to acknowledge the long-standing work of our electoral registration officer, Mike Bentley, who recently retired, and welcome Andrew Robertson, who faces his first general election in May.

As of 1 December 2014, a total of 146,567 people were registered to vote in Merton, compared with 149,615 in 2013, so there has been a drop of about 3,000 over the past year. However, that masks a much more worrying fact. Experience shows that voter turnover in Merton is usually about 23,000. In other words, about 23,000 move out of the borough and leave the register, and roughly another 23,000 move into the borough and join the register. However, in this transition year only 7,000 have joined the register and 10,000 have left. Have fewer people moved, or is the register inaccurate? I believe that about 10% of the electorate are inaccurately registered, based on past movement.

Of the 149,615 on the register at the end of 2013, only 128,000 could be verified. That left about 21,000 unmatched on any of the registers currently used. Using a variety of techniques, the electoral registration department has followed up as many of the 21,000 as it can and brought the number of unmatched voters down to about 6,500—about 5% of the electorate. As we all know, if a voter is unmatched for this year only, they would still be allowed to vote in person. The problem is that a significant number of those unmatched people were previously postal or proxy voters. Many of those people are elderly or disabled. They believe that they have a lifetime entitlement to a postal or proxy vote.

I am giving this information to the House not to help me in the election, because most of those people have historically voted Conservative. I still want them to have the same opportunity to use their postal or proxy votes to vote for somebody else, because this debate is not about party politics; it is about the essence of our democracy. If we cannot get people to register to vote, we will have an enormous and growing alienated community in our society, and that will not benefit any of us. All of us, of whatever party, whose hearts sink when we hear criticisms of politicians and politics need to do everything we can to get those people on the register, irrespective of who they are or whom they intend to vote for.

We are only halfway through the process in Merton. In 2016 we face a mayoral election in London. Our community is far more mobile and diverse than Northern Ireland could ever be. It is possible that we will lose huge numbers of people from the register. Some of the alternatives set out in the Opposition’s motion could help, but for me they do not go far enough. I might unite everyone in opposing my suggestion, but I will still continue to make it. I believe that if someone accesses a public service, they should be required to register to vote. If they want the benefits of an advanced welfare democracy, they should sign up to be on the electoral register. If they need to be on the register to get a mortgage or credit card, is it not reasonable for them to need to be on it to get a driving licence, access tax credits or join a library? All those things are about a social contract: something for something, not something for nothing. Whether people vote is up to them, but it is our job to persuade them to do so. The sheer act of citizenship needed to be on the register should be required if someone is to access the services of the state.

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[Mr Jackson]

I am not wholly convinced that the Labour party has ever taken electoral integrity as seriously as it should have done. The hon. Gentleman talks about the criminal cases over the past few years. My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) alluded to the fact that we simply do not know how much electoral registration stuffing there has been, because EROs and local authorities have not had the capacity to check that across the country. Under the Labour party, we saw electoral malpractice and criminal activity in Pendle, Derby, Birmingham, Bradford, Slough and Peterborough, to give just a few examples.

Let us be honest: this debate is a wasted opportunity for the Labour party. It is inviting us to conclude that an impact assessment of its Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, in which individual electoral registration was originally contained, would have shown no reduction in the number of people registering. Of course that is not the case. I was in the House at the time and we all knew that there would be a reduction after the first major change for many years.

The Labour party now comes back and says that this is an evil, wicked Tory plot to drive poor people off the register. The crocodile tears were not flowing when it blocked servicemen and women—people who were fighting and dying for our country—from coming back, casting their ballots and using the universal franchise. Labour Members were not worried then. Now they are full of crocodile tears and faux outrage over the patronising notion that their voters are not on the register.

The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) bemoans the situation with older people and postal votes. Does she think that people who are older are so stupid that they cannot fill out forms? Before the 2001 changes, older people and pensioners were able to fill out forms in cases of ill health, if they were working away or if they were in other circumstances. More to the point, the turnout was much higher.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jackson]

I will not give way to the hon. Lady.

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[Tom Brake]

My understanding is that the Electoral Commission provides guidance that the EROs then act on, but they do have some leeway in how they interpret it. Given that the hon. Gentleman has raised this issue four times today and clearly wants a response, I will ensure that he gets a written reply.

I have listed the organisations that are going to work very actively on promoting voter registration among the people they work with. They have direct experience of working with unregistered groups and insight into what works. The £2.5 million campaign is funded from the £10 million announced in January to increase voter registration rates. From this we will also be funding student bodies, including the National Union of Students. As I said earlier, if the Government intended to stop students registering, as some of the more overheated Opposition Members have suggested, we would hardly be funding the NUS.

[Siobhain McDonagh]

Will the Minister congratulate Sean Goulding, John Treacy, Nathan Coe and Mitchell Murdoch—from Carshalton Boys Sports college, in his constituency—who, unfunded, are running their campaign for first-time voters, which can be found on Twitter at #ftvote?

[Tom Brake]

I am of course very happy to support that initiative, as I am indeed doing.

As a number of Members have highlighted, national voter registration day, organised by Bite the Ballot, which I have worked with, takes place tomorrow. Events will be held up and down the country and I urge everyone here in the Chamber to do what they can to support this and similar initiatives. Of course, we all have at our fingertips the ability—through the many tweets Members send out, through Facebook postings, through the e-mails we send out—to encourage young people to register to vote, and we should all be participating in that.

Tomorrow, the Electoral Commission’s overseas voter registration day marks the launch of its activities over the coming months to encourage British citizens overseas to register and to vote. The Ministry of Defence will also be launching its annual information campaign for the armed forces tomorrow—the start of a range of activity to encourage service personnel and their families to ensure they are registered to vote ahead of the general election.