Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Gale. Although only half of my blood is Welsh, it enables me to say that I hope she derived as much satisfaction from yesterday’s rugby international as I did. Our normal patois would tempt one to describe today’s Bill as a curate’s egg. Because it has inevitably a regulatory flavour, I shall call it an archdeacon’s egg. There is a whole series of provisions that the Electoral Commission welcomes. I approve so strongly of the Electoral Commission as an instrument for the greater good—I remark parenthetically that I only wish that the Government had not held it back from their original legislative programme until they had conducted a series of referendums under varying rules of their own choosing—that I, too, welcome those provisions. On the central issues of postal voting on demand and fraud, I have been much more sceptical of the Government’s modus operandi. Therefore, I would be hypocritical if I did not welcome the questioning nature of the Electoral Commission’s response to Clauses 15 to 17 in its briefing to your Lordships’ House, including its expression of an alternative option to which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor referred. Of course I recognise the Government’s concern about falling polls. In 1983, after boundary changes, the percentage poll in my former constituency of the City of London and Westminster, South was the lowest in the country at 52 per cent. I told my agent, who is still the agent for the constituency and therefore has seven parliaments’ worth of experience of this very inner-city seat, that we must at the next election lift ourselves off the bottom, if only by a single constituency. But in the event, in the next three elections we moved ourselves almost 25 per cent up in the polling, and two dozen places off the bottom, generally passing other inner-city seats, mainly in London, and over several Northern Ireland seats. So I am familiar with transient and undiscoverable electorates. Anyone who has canvassed in central London is necessarily admiring of London’s postmen. The Government, mainly through the Deputy Prime Minister’s obsession with all-postal voting pilots in areas where he wished to hold regional referendums, may have raised the level of polling—although I would not have gone as far as the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, once did in saying during one of the subsequent rows in your Lordships’ House that the Government had made it possible for more people to vote who could not vote before; it had always been my impression that they had the ability to vote before—but they also raised the level of fraud. That said, I felt genuine sympathy for the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, who had to defend the outcome of their initiatives in the form they took, as expressed in levels of fraud, especially when the Queen’s Counsel who conducted the vote-rigging trial in Birmingham, commenting on a government statement to the effect that the current system was ““working””, opined in reply:"““Short of writing ‘STEAL ME’ on the envelopes, it is hard to see what more could be done to ensure their coming into the wrong hands””." It was in the aftermath of that episode that Peers on the government Benches in your Lordships’ House—no names, no pack drill, but Hansard identifies them—said that the events in Birmingham had nothing to do with the Government, despite the defendants in the case being Labour Party councillors. Of course I recognise that the Labour Party is subject to the law of the land, just like any other party, but unless members of the government party are candidates for sainthood, they do have an interest and an influence in what the legislation says. I recognise the traditional problems in these matters of Chinese walls, but saying that what happened in Birmingham had nothing to do with the Government implies that what separated the Government from the Labour Party in that instance was as monumental as the Great Wall of China itself. In 2002, your Lordships’ House examined the Northern Ireland electoral practices Bill. The Government had not found themselves ready to amend the Bill in the Commons, although I am genuinely delighted that the Parliamentary Secretary in charge of the Bill when in the Commons is now in the Cabinet as Chief Secretary. We had a spirited debate in your Lordships’ House at Second Reading, a debate into which I introduced Winston Churchill’s post-First World War quotation about,"““the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone””—" the very counties where, in the 2001 general election, there had been the loudest accusations of electoral fraud. To the immense credit of the late Lord Williams of Mostyn, then Leader of your Lordships’ House, in whose charge the Bill was here, the Government rewrote the Bill in your Lordships’ House, making massive improvements in fraud prevention to the extent that such accusations of fraud are far rarer now in the Province. We shall attend to the wider aspects of that achievement in Committee. It is because the Government are not prepared to do anything remotely similar in this Bill after the Electoral Commission in 2004 revised its views about all-postal voting, following the experiences of that summer, that we must regard this Bill as an archdeacon’s egg. I gather that it is going into Grand Committee, which seems odd given the criterion of controversy and the fact that there is time for the National Lottery Bill to be taken in the Chamber. But there will be a great deal to discuss. If it is true that the Birmingham saga may run to a third election, we are back to the serial elections which, if not for the same reasons, are reminiscent of John Wilkes in Middlesex in the 18th century. To echo one of the greater effusions of that ubiquitous poet Anon:"““As I was going up the stair ""I met a man who wasn’t there.""He wasn’t there again today""I wish to God he’d go away””." In Committee and at Report, we must seek to ensure that he does. It is important for the Minister to say whether, under the Government’s proposals, there would be sufficient margin of time to introduce full individual registration within this Parliament if all went well. Incidentally, although the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that election staff would have the resources necessary to do the work needed, I would feel easier if the Electoral Commission decided what resources were needed rather than Her Majesty’s Government. Birmingham City Council has been eloquent about the strain that its staff have been under. Are the amounts that the Lord Chancellor quoted incremental or absolute? Whichever the case, how does the new total compare with present provision? My final point is smaller, but events may make it larger. At a moment when the Government seem to forget golden rules about not fighting on two fronts at once—in this instance, a fortiori, they are golden-plated golden rules because one of the fronts is Afghanistan—we shall also need to give attention to the Government’s case for the present system of service voter registration, to which reference has already been made. All in all, there is much to look forward to. I hope that the Minister in charge of the Bill, whoever in the end he or she is, is luckier than the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, was.