Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, as many other participants in the debate have suggested, there is, indeed, much to be welcomed in the Bill. I think that noble Lords on all sides have said that. I start by discussing under-registration, which has been an abiding problem in the UK. There are worries that we are slipping into a situation of institutionalised under-registration. Some of the measures in the Bill will genuinely help to ensure that that will not happen. Introducing performance standards for election officials will start to bring confidence that the registration process is being taken seriously and that all areas will be forced to ensure that they compare with the best. The flexibility of late registration is welcome and very helpful in that context, notwithstanding the difficulties that officials might have in dealing with it. The increase in registration is a necessity in a modern democracy. It is also high time that election offences were taken more seriously, so the new offences, in particular on fraudulent applications, are also greatly to be welcomed. I wish to concentrate my remarks on two issues in the Bill: individual registration and the pilot areas, which my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours talked about; and postal votes, which, although not directly related to the former, is related in the minds of the Electoral Commission at least. The Electoral Commission has been a very strong supporter of individual registration. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours that it has put itself in a very challenging position in terms of any future assessments of the benefits of that by declaring so wholeheartedly in advance that it is entirely committed to it. That is unfortunate. However, the commission accepts that the problems are real and—although it is not perhaps appropriate to go into the matter in detail—that they are very political. Individual registration is unlikely to have an even impact on all political parties. That inevitably makes some political parties rather more nervous and more concerned about the consequences than others. In the context of people freely admitting that the level of registration may, at least initially, fall as a result of individual registration, we ought to be very wary of going down that road. We already accept that there are something like 3 million to 4 million people not registered at the moment. To introduce something that at least in the short term might increase that number seems to be rather difficult. The proposal for pilot areas emerged largely, as far as I can see, because a compromise was sought between what the commission wanted and what the Government were prepared to accept. Now that the commission is opposing pilot areas for the range of reasons that it has set out in the very full briefing that it has sent us—not least because of the difficulties of having any kind of mass advertising campaign, which would not have a mass impact because it would be able to reflect only the small areas that were trying to introduce pilot schemes—I doubt whether there is any particular advantage in continuing with pilot schemes as they currently stand. The Electoral Commission is no longer in favour of them and it is not obvious what the benefit would be. One of the problems with both the enthusiasm for pilot schemes and the new transitional arrangements is that the Electoral Commission has been entirely thirled to the notion that the only way to deal with the perceived and real problem with postal voting is to introduce individual registration over the whole system. That is demonstrably not the case. It is perfectly possible to deal with fraud in postal voting by introducing the necessary personal identifiers for postal voting and making sure that across the whole country electoral registration officers have experience of that system of postal voting without having to extend the scheme any further at this stage. I look hopefully to individual registration. However, if the measures in the Bill for increasing registration, sorting out registration and dealing with the absolutely accepted problem that we have of under-registration had already been introduced and people had the resources and the statutory right, power and necessity to do something about the problem, we could have seen how registration had gone in the present system before we went any further. I accept that there is an absolute case for going further in relation to postal voting, because there has been definite evidence of fraud in some areas. I would be prepared to live with that, but it does not seem to me that the case for rolling out individual registration has been made. I am sure that all these areas will be gone into in great depth when we get into Grand Committee. It is extraordinary, but there are an awful lot of people around here who will take a great deal of pleasure in the Grand Committee. Perhaps denying us a vote is really a bit of a nuisance; we could get rid of all these enthusiasms in other areas if we still had the vote. Some of the issues that have come out of this debate about attitudes to individual registration and the attitudes of the Electoral Commission come back to a more general question, which the powers that be might wish to consider. Here, I am echoing some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, made on the exclusion of political parties from discussion of the political process, which is a curious phenomenon. Some of the difficulties that the commission has faced could have been handled differently if it had had more political advice. I know why this House moved amendments to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act to exclude people with political experience from the commission, and maybe it would be going too far to change that, although there is a case for doing so. Some kind of additional board, not as at present comprised of officials from the various parties but at a more senior level, with the sort of experience that abounds in this House, might be very helpful to act as a sounding board for the commissioners. I know that the Speaker’s Committee already exists, but that has a different function. It—or the commission, or the Government—might consider whether there would be some benefit in going down that road. A lot of the issues that have come out in this debate could have been dealt with at an earlier stage if that had been the case. Indeed, when the original legislation was being considered, some of us felt that the exclusion of political parties was not of great benefit. The Bill is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. I look forward to the Grand Committee, when many of these issues can be discussed in more detail. I will strongly support the Government’s moves to increase registration and access to voting, which are essential to any democracy.