Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, this has been a highly informative debate into the very basis of our democracy. As my noble friend Lady Hanham mentioned, we welcome measures to tackle electoral fraud. But although the Bill creates new offences to prosecute fraud, that is not the same as acting to stop the scope for fraud in the first place, and fraud has emerged as a major talking point of public concern in the past eight years. It is a cause of great sadness to me and, I am sure, to many others that constant messing around and tinkering with the voting system has undermined public confidence in what was the most respected and honest democracy in the world. Time and again, we hear Ministers pontificating about modernising Britain and parroting the cry of constitutional reform, but this is one area where, so far from modernising, we seem to have gone backwards. Not for more than a century has the credibility of the electoral system taken such a severe knock among a large section of the electorate. Where once we had simple voting procedures, the Government have complicated them, sometimes running three different voting systems together at the same election to the bafflement of voters. They have failed to maintain barriers to fraud, ploughing on with experiments here and pilots there, many of which have crashed ignominiously to the ground. As my noble friend Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville reminded us, no one in this House will ever forget the stand that your Lordships made on the question of all-postal ballots and the banning of voting in secret in a ballot box at a traditional polling station. Five times your Lordships tried to defend the secret ballot and five times the Government overrode this House to impose an experiment that ended in predictable chaos and confusion. Events proved this House right and the Deputy Prime Minister wrong. How disappointing it is then to find in the Bill no retreat from that foolish and misguided position. In winding up, can the Minister give an assurance that all-postal ballots will not be used again this country? Can she give an assurance that there will be no fiddling with election dates? Will she fully and finally rule out any idea that local elections in 2007 or 2008 might be delayed, or even dropped, as was recently reported? If not, we will certainly need to table amendments to address that question in Committee. It is paramount in any democracy that people should believe that the electoral system is fair, acceptable and not subject to fraud. The Bill makes a number of proposals to prevent such things from happening again. While we welcome measures to tackle fraud, this Bill could have gone a little further in allaying fears. Perhaps it would be useful if I summed up our principle objections: the lack of tried and tested individual registration with national insurance numbers, as used so effectively to cut fraud in Northern Ireland; the continuing use of all-postal voting, despite many calls to scrap it; the ongoing lack of parliamentary scrutiny of pilot schemes, allowing the Government to fiddle with the electoral system at whim; the reduction in the threshold for forfeiting deposits in parliamentary elections to 2 per cent, which will boost extremist parties like the BNP in obtaining freepost mailings and broadcasts; the lack of provision to boost service and overseas voting; allowing independent candidates the freedom to decide any ballot paper description, but limiting registered political parties to just five permitted descriptions. However, notwithstanding, we support a number of provisions: anonymous registration, for those whose personal safety is genuinely at risk, such as those fleeing domestic violence; requiring voters to sign before receiving a ballot paper at a polling station; providing marked registers for postal votes; lowering the candidacy age to 18, to be consistent with the voting age; allowing candidates to pay their deposits by credit or debit card. The Government have already introduced two major changes to the electoral system, and this Bill will bring a third. The first was the introduction of rolling registration which, as far as we can tell, has gone reasonably well—although people have said that it may enable bogus voters to stay on the register indefinitely. The second was the relaxation of access to postal voting, which this House, led by my noble friend Lady Hanham, repeatedly warned against and which subsequently turned into a disaster. The third major change is registration, a major part of the Bill, with the switch from household to individual registration. It is important that the Government clearly want one thing—a halfway house—while the Electoral Commission wants another: it wants the Bill to go the whole hog right from the start. I have the impression that the Government are dragging their feet on the Electoral Commission’s original proposals. I am sceptical that the integrity of the electoral system will be seen to improve much with the Government’s halfway house. The Electoral Commission wants a truly individual registration system. It believes that such a system is now a vital part of restoring credibility in the system, after the postal voting farrago. The Electoral Commission makes that clear in its briefing letter:"““Without individual registration, it is hard to see how the very real concerns . . . about the security of the postal voting system can be properly addressed””." Clause 14 makes provision for the Government to introduce pilots for personal identifiers to be collected during electoral registration; namely, a person’s signature and date of birth. The Government have ruled out introducing the tried and tested system of individual registration used in Northern Ireland. We share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, on Clauses 15 to 17, but maybe for different reasons. The Government’s proposals for the adoption of a few local authority pilot schemes is wholly insufficient. There is no need for pilots, given that Northern Ireland has trialled the systems extensively over a number of years. We want the Northern Ireland scheme to be introduced in Great Britain. We believe that that is essential to ensure an accurate electoral register and curtail postal vote fraud. As Conservatives, we also believe that individual registration should be backed up by requiring proof of citizenship for non-UK voters, such as their passport, if they do not have a national insurance number. That reflects the fact that the electoral franchise is restricted for overseas citizens living in the UK. We have had an experiment with postal voting. It went wrong and, to patch it up, we are about to embark on another experiment, with the Electoral Commission pulling one way and the Government another. Why do we need to take such risks with something as important as the credibility of the electoral system, which was working reasonably well before the reforms began? We tend to hear quite a lot about how voter participation is in sharp decline; fears of voter apathy; and, as a consequence, of great dangers to democracy, and the like. Of course our system may have its imperfections but, as I have already intimated, the greater risk may lie with half-baked changes that further erode the electorate’s confidence in the system. We must accept that no amount of meddling with the electoral system will dramatically increase turnout. That will come about only when the electorate goes into an election very uncertain of the result. When the outcome was unclear and two parties were arguing vigorously with very different policy stances, we had one of the highest turnouts ever seen in this country. That was as recently as 1992. I do not think that the country has suddenly gone into a paroxysm of apathy since then. The case is greatly overstated that voter apathy and problems of participation have increased massively. Wherever the Government have introduced such proposals—whenever they have travelled down the road of electoral reform—we seem to be given further evidence of the law of unintended consequences. I fear that the Bill will be more of the same. The Electoral Commission and the Government are full of grand schemes and noble projects, many of them costly, to improve voter registration and participation. I wonder whether we would not now do better just to stick to basics. For example, let us take fewer risks with postal voting. We have made quite a mess of it in the past few years; we now need to avoid further mistakes that could further erode the credibility of our electoral system. As many noble Lords have shown, there is much to discuss in Committee and on Report but, as always, we on these Benches will attempt to improve the Bill as it passes through your Lordships’ House.