Electoral Administration Bill

moved Amendment No. 46A:"Page 6, line 37, at end insert—" ““(3)   Each registration officer shall continue to maintain the register between each annual canvass by means which may include any of the steps set out in subsection (2) in addition to applications received from the system of rolling registration, with the objective of increasing its accuracy by— (a)   adding persons who are entitled to be registered; (b)   removing persons who are not entitled to be registered; (c)   identifying the elections at which persons are entitled to vote. (4)   In section 10A of the 1983 Act after subsection (7) insert— ““(7A)   Following the publication of a register the Electoral Registration Officer shall make further enquiries in relation to any entries that are retained in that register under the provisions of subsection (7) above, and any such entries that have not been verified within a period of six months following that publication shall be removed in the next published monthly amendments.”””” The noble Lord said: Amendment No. 46A is in two parts. I think that the Minister has already given me a satisfactory reply on the first part, but I will ask her to confirm that. The amendment states that all the things that electoral registration officers should be doing in relation to the annual canvass are things that they can and should do during the rest of the year, although presumably not quite so intensively. Since my noble friend Lord Rennard is sitting in front of me, I was going to say that the amendment is about their doing their work all the year round and not just at registration time, which at least he will laugh about. I think that the Minister has told me that that is already possible and should be happening. I must say that it does not happen in any sort of intensive way in a large number of places. If one of the purposes of this legislation is to provide a greater degree of uniform professionalism around the country and a uniform level of resources devoted to electoral registration, I very much welcome it. I hope that the Minister can put my mind at rest about the first part of the amendment. I am in no way suggesting that there are not brilliant, hard-working and highly professional electoral registration officers all around the country. I have certainly come across a number of them, not least in Pendle. Even when they are really good people, they are often under-resourced. This is a basic problem, which may not be for the Bill, but it is one that the Government have to tackle. I am not in favour of specific grants to local authorities for all kinds of things, not even for this, but I am in favour of electoral registration officers being properly resourced. It is up to the Government to make it clear to the registration authorities that the resources are being provided and it is up to them to spend the resources on this work. The second part of the amendment is about the system that exists in a lot of places, but not all. If you are on the electoral register when the annual canvass comes along in November and you make no application to go back on to the register, you are simply carried forward for 12 months. The guidance given to registration officers is that it should be for 12 months. I believe that in some places the period is more than 12 months. In some places, it is perhaps considerably more than 12 months, even now, because it is in the interests of local authorities to keep as many people on their registers as possible—far be it from me to say that that is for reasons of grant and things like that or that local authorities are doing it deliberately. However, I think that there is a feeling that they will not strike people off as vigorously as they should be doing. The amendment states that if an application has not been received from a person on the electoral register to continue to be on the electoral register for 12 months and the retention system comes into operation, the continuation should be only for six months and not 12 months. That is the first thing. There is a lot of complacency about this at the moment and, particularly in areas with a large turnover of population, this leads to a lot of inaccuracies. Secondly, there is a duty on the electoral registration officer to chase up these people, actively and proactively, during those six months to find out whether they are there. In other words, they should continue the canvassing for the next six months; they should continue writing to them, checking council tax records and all the other records that they have access to. They should not just say, ““Ah, we cannot find these people. We don’t know whether they are still there. Look, we’ll give them another 12 months on the register””. This is a major factor for inaccurate registers for two reasons: first, it means that a lot of people are on the register who should not be; secondly, and more important, it means that people who should be on the register at those addresses are not being put on it because the officers think, ““Oh, there is somebody there already. It is not an empty house. It is not a place with people living there who should be on the register, because they are on it already””. That results not just in people not being taken off the register but in people not being put on the register because there is a feeling that that address is already represented. This is an important question. The present system, in which people stay on the register for 12 months, may not be appropriate in a lot of places where the turnover of people is far greater than it used to be. I beg to move.