Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said in his opening speech that service voting, which has just been addressed again, is absent from the Bill. Both Front Benches have also drawn attention to the need to do something on that important issue. We are talking about a quarter of a million of our citizens whose voting rights have been adversely affected in recent years. When the Bill was debated in the other place, the Minister, Harriet Harman, after thanking Members of the House for highlighting the issue of service voters and their under-registration, said:"““I look forward to further debate on that in another place””.—[Official Report, Commons; 11/1/06; col. 387.]" Looking at the list of speakers, I think that I am probably that ““further debate”” for today. I have been involved in this issue on a cross-party basis since I arrived in your Lordships’ House in 2004. Despite warnings of the cumulative effects of the change caused to service voter registration by the Representation of the People Act 2000, the Government at that stage were reluctant to acknowledge that there was a problem, and too little was done too late for the May 2005 election. I shall try to bring your Lordships up to date with what has happened after the election and the work that has been done between the Minister’s department, the Ministry of Defence, interested parliamentarians, electoral registration officers and unofficial representatives of the services. It is important to remember that when absent voting—both postal and proxy—was first introduced in 1918, it was primarily for servicemen serving overseas. Similar arrangements were made at the end of World War 2. Postal voting was not extended to civilians until 1948. Until 2001, all service personnel had to register as service voters. Once a person had registered, that registration remained effective until he or she changed to a different address or left the Armed Forces. Their dependants could also use the scheme if they so wished. Following the 2000 Act, service personnel and their families have had to register annually. The central register that looked after who was on the electoral register from the services was then closed. As a result, no one knows how many service people and their dependants fell off voting registers as the years passed and they moved from posting to posting. Electoral registration officers have reported how difficult it is to obtain access at some units despite the Ministry of Defence’s view that they should have such access. They are not able to check even whether they are getting registration information at unit level. I shall not repeat to your Lordships the sorry tale of the lack of urgency by the Ministry of Defence in the run-up to the May 2005 general election. I spoke in detail about that on 26 May 2005 during the debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, on the workings of the 2005 election. Since then we seem to have had a welcome recognition by the Government that there is a real problem to be solved. I have attended two meetings with Ministers, for which I thank the noble Baroness and her department. The first meeting was chaired by Harriet Harman, the Minister of State at the DCA on 2 November 2005. The Ministry of Defence was represented by Don Touhig, the Defence Minister. Sam Younger, the chief executive of the Electoral Commission, was also there. On 11 January 2006 we had a second meeting, chaired on that occasion by the Electoral Commission. Again the DCA Minister was present along with officials from the Ministry of Defence, but not the Minister. We also had representatives from electoral registration officers. I should particularly like to commend Douglas Young, who also attended. He is the author of an excellent piece of research into the problem entitled Silence in the Ranks. From all these meetings, I am convinced that the DCA wishes to achieve a solution to the problem that has arisen as a result of the 2000 legislation. Harriet Harman has spoken of ““zero tolerance”” in the area of voter registration. Yet there does not appear to be a clear consensus on how best to tackle the issue. Some have argued the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, in her contribution—that we could return to the pre-2000 position. We could go back to the previous system where service voter registration lasted for someone’s service life. It is the ““better than nothing”” option which some have described as at least a move forward, although in fact it is a move backward. It may be that it is the best we can do, but it would be unfortunate if that were the case. We need to seize the opportunity to make both registration and voting easy for service personnel and their dependants. The Ministry of Defence must have a role in this. But when we talk to MoD officials at these meetings, it is clear that there is a great reluctance to take on specific responsibilities, particularly if they have resource implications. Nevertheless the department has undertaken some initiatives which I warmly welcome. The Secretary of State for Defence, Dr John Reid, wrote to me on 15 September 2005 outlining a number of moves. It has been made a requirement for each unit to have an officer responsible for voting issues. Payslips are now being used to convey messages about registration, something which might have been done before the May 2005 election. A survey has been put in hand to try to discover the scale of the problem. I was interested to hear the detailed statistics from the Lord Chancellor covering every possible decimal point on who voted, who is registered and so forth—and yet no one knows about service voters. That is very odd. The survey now being conducted by the Ministry of Defence is a postal survey which requires those selected to return their forms voluntarily. Cynics have suggested that this may distort the outcome of the survey a little towards those inclined to fill in forms and return them, and they may well be the people who tend to register to vote. In any case, the results will not be available until next month. All these measures are helpful, but the reluctance of the MoD to take on a more proactive role is unfortunate. It deploys and posts troops, thus making it difficult for them to register and vote, yet it wants to act as though it is a normal employer. The department could take on the administration of the registration, and it must take on the mechanics of the voting process. For the mechanics of voting are just as important as the registration process. Whatever registration improvement we manage to get by amendment when the Bill is considered in Committee, we will still have the problem of how to make it possible for all deployed service personnel and their dependants when deployed to be sure that they will receive ballot papers in time for them to be returned. During the May 2005 general election it was not just distant postings in Iraq and Afghanistan that proved impossible, there were reports of problems in Germany and Northern Ireland caused by mail delays over the bank holiday weekend. Nor should we accept the argument that it is the servicemen’s fault because they can always opt for a proxy vote. Not only is a proxy vote sometimes difficult to organise, in my view it is not democratic. We have a duty to make it possible for all service people to cast a secret personal vote. That means that the Ministry of Defence will have to provide the necessary logistics. There are other issues which we shall address in Committee. The banning of canvassing on military units is out of date and is now much more restricting given that many barrack blocks and married quarters are within the widened defined secure area. Electoral registration officers need to think more about the needs of the service voter, and they need to establish a much closer relationship with their own military units. We need also to look at how the service voter can decide what their address is for registration purposes. The advice currently available is confusing and often contradictory. The main issue remains that, nearly a year after the general election, we are still searching for ways to repair the damage of the 2000 Act. I am not at this stage attempting to detail the amendment that we will need to make to the Bill. We considered a number of options at our last meeting with the Electoral Commission. A participant suggested an amendment giving delegated powers to amend service voting arrangements later when we have seen how the MoD’s new measures work. I hope that we will be able to come up with something more concrete than that. As a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Select Committee, I should say that we are never very enthusiastic about lack of policy thinking being an excuse for delegated legislation. I agree with those who have said that the best must not be the enemy of the good. We need to produce a workable scheme and I look forward to hearing what the Minister proposes we should do to meet her department’s undertaking to right this wrong. I hope we can all work together, on a cross-party basis, to rectify this important problem.