Electoral Administration Bill

I have three amendments in this group, the first of which perhaps is not too important. My second amendment would insert, as part of the duties of electoral registration officers,"““making appropriate investigations into any information provided to him by any person concerning a person’s entitlement to be registered””." Usually, candidates or representatives of political parties get involved in these things, but not necessarily. Some people go to their local electoral registration officers and say, ““There are seven people at this address and it is a one-bedroomed flat””. On one occasion, in Nelson, Manchester, I found that no one was living above a shop, but the person in the shop said, ““Oh, So-and-so said that he would come along and collect their votes for them when they come through the post””. When that happens, it is important that electoral registration officers take it seriously and follow it up. Some do, and some do not. That is the difficulty. Equally, it may not be the elector, the head of household or a resident in a household who points out that people should be registered when they are not registered. It may be the result of political parties going around an area finding out that information. Ed Fordham, in Camden, Hampstead ward, is knocking on a lot of doors, for reasons that people will guess. He says that there are probably at least 400 people registered in that ward who should not be, because they are not entitled by nationality to be registered. It is an area with what Mr Fordham refers to as a ““large international community””, a lot of whom are people who work for multinational companies—Americans, Africans and so on—who have no right to be registered in this country. People fill in the forms without realising what they are and they send them back. There is some difficulty in reporting that and in getting these matters taken seriously—perhaps, with elections coming up, the electoral registration officer has got other things to do. But it is important that, if people make those reports, investigations are made, not least because, as far as over-registration is concerned, if there are a lot of people on the electoral register who should not be, electoral fraud is that much easier. Someone could apply for postal votes for them or could take part in old-fashioned personation. That is what used to happen in parts of Northern Ireland, where people used to spend all day driving around, changing their coats, putting wigs on and voting lots of times. I am assured by friends in Birmingham that it still happens in Birmingham, although I have no direct evidence of it. It is possible, and it seems to me that we ought to do everything that we can to stop it. Equally, if political parties report that people ought to be registered because they have canvassed them and found them not to be registered and so unable to vote, that ought to be sufficient to trigger an investigation by the electoral registration officer, if only through sending those people a letter asking them if they want to send the form back. That kind of proactive work by EROs, in my experience, happens in a minority of places only. By and large, that kind of report is not always taken very seriously. It would be helpful to insert a further duty on electoral registration officers to make investigations whenever something is reported to them and whoever has reported it. Amendment No. 44 would allow an electoral registration officer to inspect any records held for any purpose by the local authority that employs them and to inspect any records that are open to public inspection. There is a lot of confusion among electoral registration officers about what they can inspect and what they cannot inspect, and about which other databases they can use for data matching against the electoral register. Some do it quite vigorously and extensively, whereas others say, ““We do not think that we can do this because of the Data Protection Act””, or, ““It is not a specific power given to us and it is certainly not a duty, so, given our level of resources, we do not do it””. By comparing the electoral register database with other databases, you can find a lot of people who apparently ought to be on the electoral register and are not on it; equally, you can find a lot of people who ought not to be on it but are on it. A lot of local authorities have traditionally used records of tenants on council estates, but one of the problems is that a lot of authorities have pushed off their council estates to arm’s-length organisations—housing associations or whatever. Again, electoral registration officers in some places are saying, ““We cannot do that any more because it is now run by an independent organisation and we cannot use their database or they will not give it to us””. This needs to be clarified. I can see no reason whatever, for the specific purpose of electoral registration, why they should not be able to use whatever information they can get from any source that is available, either in the authority or generally to anyone.