Electoral Administration Bill

I speak to Amendment No. 80, to which I added my name, and to the two associated amendments. This is the crux of the Bill in many ways. I start by saying that I am not opposed to individual registration as a principle. I am concerned about how we get there and I am sceptical by nature about schemes that try to get us all the way to a perfect system immediately. We should pause before we set up too many complex systems. We will be committed to CORE. Depending on how votes go, we may well be committed to an identity card. I wonder how many things we ought to be committing ourselves to in terms of massive registration exercises. The key fraud problem, which has been properly identified, has been in postal voting. The reason I put down Amendment No. 80 was that I absolutely accept—as I think does everyone—that that needs to be dealt with. The Electoral Commission’s original proposals implied that the only way you could deal with fraud in postal voting was to have a blanket individual registration. That seemed to me not to be the case. You can deal with the problem of postal voting if you take it on straight, in the manner of this amendment. The object is to ensure that two personal identifiers are taken for people applying for postal votes. I do not know whether that is foolproof, but it is certainly a huge improvement. It would provide a massive deterrent, which is an important part of this, and it would provide a new, clearer and more transparent manner of dealing with postal votes. Having set that out, I looked to see what implications it had for other parts of the Bill. It would provide something for the whole of the United Kingdom—Northern Ireland is already dealt with, so it would deal with the rest of Great Britain. All electoral registration officers would have responsibility for collecting personal identifiers for a part of their electorate—those on postal votes. The structure would be in place to be built on. It would cover the whole country evenly. That in itself would provide a tremendous test bed to see whether that could be more generally applied. That comes very close to being the transitional arrangement as set out by the Electoral Commission, because the only thing that it would not get is the voluntary addition of identifiers on the form. There is no voluntary basis on which we should deal with postal voting. It needs to be cleaned up, it needs to be sorted. Therefore, it should not be voluntary, it needs to be across the board, which is the basis of the amendment. Indeed, if you take that change in postal voting along with all the other things required in the Bill to improve registration—there is a problem about registration and all the other impositions are placed on electoral registration officers to try to improve registration—the two things together will have a big impact on registration in the UK. I imagine that the Electoral Commission, if there was that change in postal voting and the changes in the Bill, would want to reflect and report on what that meant for registration in future. I would expect it to come back with further recommendations. It may be that it would then set out a timetable for moving further down the road of individual registration—I absolutely accept that—but it seems to me at present that to go all the way to a full process of individual registration is to impose too much of a burden to deal with what is fundamentally a relatively narrow problem of fraud with postal voting. That should be dealt with quite separately. I know that my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours has tabled amendments which would give a certain amount of discretion to different areas to check in different ways. I must say that I do not think that is wise. It should be across the whole country. Everything should be checked. No authority should be asked to say that one electoral registration area is somehow more inclined to be corrupt than another. That takes us to a whole new area of ghastly problems that we should avoid. It should be evenly done over the whole country. At the end of that, we could look at individual registration; what had happened on postal voting; what was happening in the rest of the registration process; and what the next stage might be. I certainly do not think that we should add a third identifier. I take the points made about signatures and dates of birth, but we are trying to make what would be a significant improvement, because it would create a deterrent and put a brake on the problem of fraud. I have no doubt about that. That would be a useful first step—I see this as a process. As I said, I am very nervous about deciding from a long way back that we should put in a huge, complex system that dots every ““i”” and crosses every ““t”” so that everything is thereafter perfect. I would rather take it a stage at a time and deal first and primarily with the real problem of fraud, make the other improvements in the Bill and see where that leads us towards getting a more transparent and open system in future.