Electoral Registration

Wayne David Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane]

We introduced it because, although the old system had served us fairly well and quite a high number of people were registered, we thought it was patriarchal and registration should be down to the individual. We did it with cross-party support, cross-party unity.

Why did the Conservatives go to such trouble to shatter the cross-party support? They knew exactly what they were doing when they rushed the Bill through with undue haste. They hoped that even more poorer voters would drop off the register before the 2015 general election and increase their chances of winning it.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the most appalling things that this Government did was to produce a White Paper which referred to voter registration as a lifestyle choice?

[Chris Ruane]

I am coming to that right now.

What the Conservatives proposed was not simply bringing forward the date by one year. They had a few more tricks up their sleeves. They wanted to replace the civic duty to register by making it a lifestyle choice. Electors could simply opt out of registering by ticking a box that would be supplied to help them on their way to political disengagement. The Electoral Commission warned that if this happened, it would be assumed that those who did not vote would not register and we would lose 35% of the electorate.

If the Tories had succeeded, nearly half the electorate would have been missing from the register. Those left off would have been the poorest. This was a blatant, deliberate political act to drive the poorest people off the register. There is a term for it used by right wingers in America—voter suppression. No vote, no voice: those people were being silenced. The Conservatives were leaving nothing to chance. They planned a few more measures to ensure that those electors were forced off the register. They proposed that there would be no annual canvass—the Minister mentioned this. We introduced an annual canvass. The Minister did not want to introduce an annual canvass, but he was forced to do so. To complete the stitch-up the Conservatives proposed to remove any sanctions for not registering to vote. All these actions together show beyond doubt that the Tories’ direction of travel was to disfranchise as many poor voters as possible.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) who, as shadow minister at the time, summoned civic society to fight this, and we managed to get the worst aspects of the Bill removed. The Lib Dems finally realised that they were being stitched up too. I pay tribute to the work of Chris Rennard in the Lords and others in the Lib Dem party who informed their Front-Bench team of what was going on.

We were able to stop the worst aspects of the Bill, but even though the Tories were defeated by a mighty alliance of those who wanted to protect democracy, they managed to squeeze one concession from their Lib Dem partners. The Tories proposed that they be given an opportunity, should they win the election, to make a political decision to drop off the unregistered in June this year, six months before the freeze date for the next boundary review. Five million electors would not transfer from household registration to individual registration. These voters would also be removed from the Scottish parliamentary elections, the Welsh Assembly elections and the local government elections. The Minister has already admitted that he has no guiding principles when he makes this important decision to smash British democracy—no such principles are in place. He failed to answer on this when I asked him at the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee and he failed to answer today when I asked him. The press and the public are watching the Minister. Would he like to intervene on that? Where are his guiding principles?

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

I will not follow the line of argument of the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), who I suspect sees a conspiracy every time he walks past a bus queue. The reality is that this serious issue deserves rather better than the cynical treatment it has had from the Opposition today.

The integrity of the register is an integral part of our democracy, and that integrity means not only that those who should be on the register are on it, but that those who should not be are not on it. The level of complacency demonstrated by the Labour party towards that aspect of the equation is nothing less than contemptuous towards our electors.

[Wayne David]

The Electoral Commission has been quoted on many occasions, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that even it says that it is the perception of fraud, not the actuality of it, that Members are talking about?

[Robert Neill]

The report last week deals comprehensively with that, and there is another report to which I will refer the hon. Gentleman in a moment. Let me deal first with the important issue of why the Labour party really has adopted this attitude. I made an assumption about the backing away from Labour’s previous stance that we saw from the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan). I am sorry he is not in his place, because I know he is a great fan of block votes and he is probably looking for a few in the London Labour party at the moment for the nomination for Mayor—I am sure we could pass that on to him. I assumed it was the normal reaction that we get from the Labour party nowadays. IER was, of course, introduced—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) must contain himself for a moment. IER was, of course, introduced in 2009. What is that magic figure of 2009? Of course, Tony Blair was still around, so it is a legacy of the previous—[Interruption.] The Labour party is anxious to forget everything that went before and the reason the previous Government come into it is this: the Labour party had a track record of being extremely flaky on adopting IER.

The Electoral Commission published a report in 2003 and the Labour Government responded to it in 2004, saying that they were sympathetic to the principle of individual registration but they were not going to implement it—that is the reality. Ever since then, Labour has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards improving the quality of the electoral register. In the end, the experience in Northern Ireland, where IER certainly produced a reduction in the number of people on the register but also significantly reduced fraud, made it clear that Labour’s position was untenable. The people of Northern Ireland blazed the way for the rest of this country and we should salute the introduction of IER there. If it is good enough for Northern Ireland, it should be good enough for the rest of the UK as well, and it is no good the Labour party trying to row back from that now.

The Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 made provision for this phased implementation of IER. Ironically, that was not originally in the Bill and it was put in only as a result of pressure from the then Opposition parties in the House of Lords. The Labour party was reluctant even to take that step.

[Robert Neill]

I am delighted to see that the right hon. Gentleman is taking a hard-line stance, which is consistent with his political views. There is no doubt that he demonstrated that same consistency when he voted down changes to the boundaries that would have ensured that the electorate of his constituency was broadly more equal with that of mine, but we will not trouble him with that unfortunate matter.

The fact that the issue of electoral fraud has been dismissed so often by the Opposition suggests that they think it is irrelevant, but it is not. My hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) made an important point. The real difficulty that we have is proving cases, and the complacency shown by the Opposition on this matter is breathtaking. The reality is that the six-month time limit makes it particularly difficult to get the evidence required for this type of offence. I hope that, in the future, we will revisit that matter. We should extend the timeline for bringing prosecutions for election offences, and I hope that we can consider that in the new Parliament.

The very nature of the offence makes it difficult to prosecute, particularly when it involves the head of the household, as it has in the past, filling in forms on behalf of other people. It is also difficult to get people to stand up against members of their own family on whom they may be dependent. That is why there are fewer prosecutions than we would expect. That fact is borne out by the useful report, “Electoral Offences since 2010”, which has been issued by the Library of the House of Commons. Members might be interested in looking at it. It was published on 30 July 2014, and details, over a raft of pages, individual instances of allegations of electoral fraud. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon mentioned, it has been difficult to bring many of those cases to a successful prosecution, but the report is, none the less, really worth looking at.

In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, there have been repeated cases of fraud. Let me say here that I am not trespassing on the current court case. This has nothing to do with the election petition against the mayor. Historically, there have been repeated allegations of malpractice in Tower Hamlets, largely by abuse of the block registration of postal votes. In March 2012, Tower Hamlets removed 127 names from the electoral register. It was not possible to bring a prosecution in that case, but the names were removed because they should not have been on the register. Clearly, malpractice was going on. Some 550 people were registered in 64 properties in the borough. In some cases of registration, there were eight people to a bedroom. It was nonsense, but it is something that the Labour party regard as “fairly minor”. It says that it is a small price to pay. I say that it is not, because it demeans the electoral process. But that does not matter as far as Labour is concerned. Its ersatz view of quantity seems to trump the importance of quality in the elector register. At the end of the day, it is the quality of the electoral register that is most important. If it is not honest, people will lose faith.

My hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) made the point that we can drive up the number of people properly on the register through the excellent initiatives of the Electoral Commission. We do not need the specious arguments of the Opposition to do that. We can have safe and secure electoral registration and sensible campaigns to increase voter registration.

[Wayne David]

rose—

[Robert Neill]

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once. I want to make a little progress as I have little time left.

My own local authority in Bromley has made great progress with its individual canvasses and maintaining the roll-over on to the register; it can be done. Frankly, we have had nothing but crocodile tears from the Opposition. I have not seen so many crocodile tears since General Nasser built a dam across the River Nile. They should not be detaining the House in the way that they are doing. The Opposition motion is a shambles and a disgrace.