Elections Bill (Fifth sitting)

Tom Randall Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd September 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Cat Smith]

The Minister is right to say that there is a lot of different research done on who holds what ID, and it appears that there is no central understanding in Government about who holds what. That leaves us, as a Committee, high and dry in terms of knowing what impact this policy will have on different communities.

The Committee heard evidence from Gavin Millar QC, who pointed out that if Tower Hamlets was the reason for introducing voter ID, it would be

“an example of a hard case making very bad law, and I would counsel against that.”––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 16 September 2021; c. 108, Q165.]

[Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way on that point?

[Cat Smith]

I will give way, and I ask the hon. Gentleman whether he thinks the Government are using Tower Hamlets as justification to bring in a nationally damaging policy.

[Tom Randall]

I was going to ask the hon. Lady whether she accepts that Labour constituency associations that are in special measures should have special photo ID requirements. Would she at least support photo ID in those parts of the country that have particular problems with administering their elections?

[Cat Smith]

I look forward to the hon. Gentleman’s bringing forward an amendment to the Bill along those lines, and I am sure we would be interested in having conversations across the Committee Room about how we might be able to support him in amending his Government’s Bill in such a way. I look forward to speaking to him after the Committee to see whether I can be of any assistance to him on that matter.

It is quite clear from the evidence we heard that the voter ID requirements will make it disproportionately more difficult for some people with disabilities to vote. We heard evidence from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and we realise that anyone who is blind or registered partially sighted is very unlikely to have a driving licence, which immediately rules out one kind of ID.

Because of the poverty disabled people face, they are also less likely to have a passport, and the Committee heard evidence of concerns that the Cabinet Office had not sufficiently engaged with disabled groups, charities and campaigns in drafting this legislation. There are issues further on in the Bill—I am sure we will come to them later, so I will not go into any detail—about the changes to accessibility having a double whammy effect on disabled voters’ access to elections.

Labour will reject clause 1, and that is consistent with the position we have taken since the first day that the Conservatives mooted this policy.

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[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because, of course, Richard Mawrey said in his evidence that the threshold for proving in electoral law as it currently stands is too high to really get over the bar. By bringing in an extra set of checks and balances, we hopefully get away from the point that we would have to try to prove these cases to get over what is a very high electoral bar.

[Tom Randall]

Following up on the point about Tower Hamlets, is it not also worth noting that that election petition was brought by a small group of volunteers, working on a cross-party basis, who put up their own money and used their own time to investigate the issue in Tower Hamlets? If they had not done so, that entire piece of work would not have been done. That helps to demonstrate how difficult it is to get a petition such as that off the ground.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention, because what we heard in evidence was that the financial threshold is exceptionally high for people to get over. We also heard in evidence that people did indeed risk their entire financial situation—they faced bankruptcy—to take that matter forward. There is an old phrase: criminal proceedings, or taking things to court, are free to everyone in this country just as everybody in this country is free to dine at the Ritz, but quite a lot of people are precluded when the bill arrives.

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[Brendan O’Hara]

I absolutely will. My position is that there is no evidence whatsoever. Policy must be made on the basis of evidence. We have a limited time in this House in which to act and legislate. It is a waste of that precious time, I believe, for a Government to run around looking to create a problem to find a solution for. We should address the problems that we know exist, and those problems that have to be attacked.

Even Lord Pickles, in his evidence, said:

“I did not recommend photo ID”. ––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 16, Q13.]

He also said that fraud

“is not endemic within the system”,––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 8, Q5.]

However, somehow, Lord Pickles has now embraced this voter ID card with the zeal of a convert. It is further evidence of a Government with a solution looking for a problem.

Councillor Golds gave chapter and verse on the problems of postal voting in Tower Hamlets, and he was extremely convincing. Fair play to Peter Golds and the people who he has been working with—they have identified a serious problem—but to try to segue that into pretending that ID cards at polling stations will somehow solve what we saw at Tower Hamlets is frankly nonsense. It is not there.

[Tom Randall]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will in a moment. Ailsa Irvine, of the Electoral Commission, admitted that

“we are starting from a high base of public confidence.”––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 46, Q64.]

There is confidence in this system—that the system works and is sufficiently robust.

[Brendan O’Hara]

I will in a moment. There is nothing perfect. There is no way on earth that we can stop every sort of crime, but this Government and this Committee should concentrate on identified problems, rather than seeking to find problems and then provide a solution as they see fit. Now, there were two hon. Gentlemen bobbing.

[Tom Randall]

Just briefly, on Councillor Golds’ evidence, he did make reference to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who had been marked as having voted on the register in the polling station when, of course, they would not have done. I appreciate that it was anecdotal evidence, but does that not go to the heart of how difficult it for someone to realise that they are a victim of electoral fraud? If a non-voter was a victim of personation, they would not go to look for it.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Nobody on this side of the room is saying that electoral fraud should not be punished. It absolutely should be punished. It should not be tolerated and should never be tolerated. Any victim of it deserves justice. However, that must be evidence-led and proportionate. This is neither.

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For all those reasons, I support the whole Bill, but particularly this clause because it addresses a real problem. That problem has been minimised by the Opposition simply because it is a covert activity on which we do not necessarily have the data in terms of cases, but we know that there are so many; we heard that quite clearly in the evidence given.

[Tom Randall]

May I also welcome the Minister to her place. Given that time is short, I shall be brief and make four further points, two of which relate to the evidence.

I would like to recommend some additional reading to the Committee, if they have not read it, which is a report prepared for the Electoral Commission in January 2015 entitled “Understanding electoral fraud vulnerability in Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin communities in England: A view of local political activists”. The report was prepared by Maria Sobolewska, Eleanor Hill and Magda Borkowska of the University of Manchester and Stuart Wilks-Heeg of the University of Liverpool. Neither of those universities nor the Electoral Commission could be accused of being Tory shills.

The authors make some interesting points going into the detail of this problem, including on the question of personation that has been raised a number of times today. They spoke to witnesses and acknowledge that the risk of personation was thought to be significant, with vulnerabilities identified, given the habit that people have of asking others to cast a vote on their behalf and the complex naming systems used in those communities.

The report acknowledges that there must be a trade-off between accessibility to the electoral system and electoral integrity. That notwithstanding, one of a series of recommendations in the report is that some form of voter identification should be introduced. I do recommend that as additional reading.

To return to the point raised at the beginning by the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood, I agree with her when she talks about being proud of our electoral system and its integrity. The Victorians gave us the secret ballot. While the idea that as a Briton I can walk into a polling station, simply proclaim who I am and then be given my vote—which is my right—is something that I approve of, it perhaps speaks to the system that the hon. Lady would like to exist rather than the system that actually exists.

[Cat Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way, because he is talking about rights and I think we both agree that there is something fundamental about that. We are both proud of our British democracy and we are both proud of that right that citizens have to cast a secret ballot, brought to us by the Victorians. On the issue of rights, the Government ran pilots on the voter ID trials, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that if voters became disenfranchised as a result of particularly restrictive requirements, it could violate article 1 of protocol No. 1 to the European convention on human rights, which was incorporated into domestic law in the Human Rights Act 1998.

Given the representations to the Committee, particularly the evidence from Gavin Millar, who said that there would inevitably be challenges to voter ID as incompatible with the European convention on human rights if the Bill was introduced as it currently stands, does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that, proud as we are of our British democracy and human rights, there is a potential threat here that the Government should be taking more seriously, so they should be looking into expanding the list of relevant ID?

[Tom Randall]

That relates to the fourth point that I had planned to make. The hon. Lady also made remarks about these measures being Trumpian in nature, looking to voter suppression in the United States. However, she voted remain, and I know that our colleagues in the Scottish National party want Scotland to be an independent country at the heart of Europe. There are countries like Germany, the Netherlands, France and Italy that do require voter ID at polling stations. I am uncertain—

[Cat Smith]

rose—

[Tom Randall]

If I might just finish this point. I am uncertain as to how a measure that is commonplace on the continent will be a violation of the European convention on human rights. I suggest that, as good Europeans, we should support this measure.

[Cat Smith]

I am glad that the hon. Gentleman has moved on to the point about European comparisons because the countries that he referred to have national ID cards that are given out free by the state, and people are used to presenting them to access all kinds of things. In this country we do not have ID cards, we are not asked to produce ID cards, and I am pleased that that is the case. That is part of what makes us British. Does he not agree with me that the voter ID law threatens that proud British tradition? On the examples that he gives of states with ID cards, is that a potential back-door way of bringing in ID cards, and would he support that?

[Tom Randall]

An electoral card will be issued free of charge. I am sure that between the passage of this legislation and the introduction of that scheme there will be a lot of publicity surrounding it, to make sure that the new system that is to be introduced will be well understood. The Government are used to widespread publicity schemes. I see the point that the hon. Lady makes, but I am sure that can be addressed in the fullness of time.

The point was made that no significant election has been swung or affected by electoral fraud. I gently suggest that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, a London authority only 18 minutes from here on the tube, which has a directly elected Mayor and a multi- million-pound budget, is not insignificant when it comes to elections—it is very significant.

For my final point, I declare an interest as a former chairman of Poplar and Limehouse Conservative Association. I know Councillor Golds personally. I speak to him as a friend as well as a witness to this Committee, and he made a point to me in writing afterwards. I will read the email from him, which stated:

“When we were preparing the grounds for the petition we investigated personation. We were a small, cross party group acting voluntarily and at our own expense. I was doing most of the legal digging and the amount of time required to prove personation would have been enormous. We had evidence via marked registers but quickly found canvassing and potentially obtaining statements would have been incredibly time consuming. People who are disengaged from politics and voting are unlikely to wish to make statements for submission to a court of law. We did refer to some of the worst cases in various statements but personation…was not one of the nine grounds that we concentrated on.”

Tower Hamlets has come up a lot in this debate so far. The absence of personation as the main ground in that case should not be interpreted as meaning that there was no personation in that election. The point is that investigating it is incredibly difficult. The fact that it was volunteers working on it, who stumped up their own money, which they have not got back, is perhaps one reason why that ground in that claim was not gone into in such detail.

[Brendan O’Hara]

Does not the hon. Gentleman think that it would have been helpful in his lengthy evidence session if Peter Golds had actually said that to the Committee, rather than saying it as an afterthought in a private letter? That is surely the whole point of holding an evidence session.

[Tom Randall]

I wish Councillor Golds had had a whole evidence session to himself, but unfortunately he had to share one and we had to listen to other witnesses, which I shall not go into now, but I think that was an unfortunate timetabling measure.

There is a fundamental weakness in the system as it stands. For that reason I will support this part of the Bill.

[Patrick Grady]

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I echo the welcomes to the Minister and Members who have joined the Committee.

The phrase “voter ID is a solution in search of a problem” has been heard several times since the start of the Second Reading debate. That is a quote that my hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute did not want to explicitly attribute to Baroness Davidson, who was once the coming thing in the Tory party. She was going to be the leader or a Minister. She was going to save them all and save the Union. Now that those future leaders of the Conservative party, the 2019 red-wallers, are here arrayed in front of us, demonstrating to the Whips, the Minister and everyone else their value, I am sure they will not be overlooked quite as much in the next reshuffle.

The previous Minister on the Committee made the pertinent point that we must be careful about the use of the word “disenfranchisement”. To disenfranchise someone is to actively take their vote away; where once they were previously eligible to vote, they are now no longer eligible. They made the point that we must be very careful about casually suggesting that voter suppression, which I will get on to later, is the same as disenfranchisement—which is fair enough. However, that also means that we must be quite careful when we use other terms—terms such as “voter fraud”, which has been bandied about on the other side of the House in reference to a whole range of electoral malpractices, some of which we heard about in the evidence sessions. In fact, voter fraud specifically refers to personation and the casting of the ballot.

As has been quoted back several times from the Committee session with Richard Mawrey:

“In Tower Hamlets, as I said, they virtually ticked every box of electoral offence. But for my being rather kind-hearted, they would have ticked the intimidation box as well—they ticked them all. Voter fraud played a very small part, funnily enough,”.––[Official Report, Elections Public Bill Committee, 15 September 2021; c. 14, Q13.]

That is the point about personation. It is a point that has been made repeatedly by hon. Members from Opposition parties, and that has not been challenged or proven false by Conservative Members. My hon. Friend the Member for Argyll and Bute quoted another witness as saying that personation was an incredibly inefficient way of swinging an election and making oneself the victor. It carries with it an extremely high risk; someone only needs to do it once to be tapped on the shoulder and kicked out of the election campaign and into jail.

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[Tom Randall]

On a small point of clarification, under proposed new paragraph (1H), “specified documents” include documents

“regardless of any expiry date”,

so the expired passport would be valid.

[Patrick Grady]

That is incredibly helpful. People across the country with expired passports will be breathing a sigh of relief, unlike the people across the country who, for whatever reason, do not have passports or who, for all kinds of reasons, find it difficult to make that approach.

We have heard about the pressure that there will be on electoral administrators to deal with the inevitable surge in applications. We have heard about some of the accessibility challenges that will be faced by people with different kinds of impairments when applying for photo documentation. There are all those kinds of barriers. Nobody is questioning the agency or ability of minority communities to apply for voter identification; the point is that many people are already disproportionately without existing forms of voter identification and so are already disincentivised from taking part in the democratic system.