Electoral System

I hope that the hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook and Small Heath (Mr. Godsiff) will have a further opportunity to introduce his Bill, which sounded interesting. I can imagine that it would gain considerable support on both sides of the Chamber, although the Government side is rather thinly spread at the moment. Given the importance of the subject, I was disappointed by the Minister’s speech, in the course of which she said that the electoral system is as secure as it is possible to be. That is demonstrably untrue and will remain so while we have household registration, which no other country in the world has apart from Zimbabwe. We should move towards individual registration with personal identifiers. Until then, it will not be as secure as it is possible to be, and the Minister was incredibly complacent to assert that. The Minister accused the Opposition of scaremongering. My former colleague, Dame Marion Roe, investigated this issue on her own initiative and revealed, after a lot of painstaking research, that 18 per cent. of the people on the register in Brentford and Isleworth were not eligible to be on it—a huge proportion of the electorate. Was she scaremongering? Is Michael Pinto-Duschinsky a scaremonger? He is a senior lecturer in politics at Brunel university, and he recently wrote an article in The Times pointing out that according to the research that he has carried out, with no help from the Government, there have been 390 cases of alleged electoral fraud in the past seven years. There have also been eight cases of councillors and others being put in prison as a result of electoral fraud. As the Minister said, some of those cases may not involve the kind of electoral fraud that we are talking about, but some will—she simply does not know. He has been digging away independently and trying to get at the facts, as we all are. For the Minister to accuse us of scaremongering is demeaning to the debate; we are merely trying to get at the facts, and the Government have played little part in doing that. Why has electoral fraud happened? First, as my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) said in his admirable opening speech, the Government have pushed voter participation at all costs, particularly in relation to postal voting, and they have taken risks. As the Electoral Commission pointed out repeatedly, it is admirable to push up voter registration and participation—we all want that—but proper safeguards must be put in, and the Government failed to do that. We need individual voter registration or more personal identifiers. The Government always cite the fact that there was an 11 per cent. drop in voter registration when individual voter registration was implemented in Northern Ireland. However, as the Committee on Standards in Public Life pointed out, the major reason for that was the simultaneous abolition of the carry-forward provisions whereby if someone did not re-register, their registration was carried forward for 12 months. That practice was dropped. As the Committee on Standards in Public Life pointed out, the abolition of the carry forward was the major reason why there was a sudden diminution in the number of people registering in Northern Ireland. It was nothing to do with the imposition of individual registration.