Political Parties and Elections Bill

It seems to me that the Bill is about better regulation. We are looking at whether the Electoral Commission has been an effective regulator, and the consensus in the speeches that we have heard so far is that it could do better. I share that view. If we look at the principles of good regulation—proportionality, accountability, consistency, transparency and targeting—we see that some of the measures in the Bill will help in that regard. For example, the present burdens on voluntary treasurers in local political parties are such that I would never volunteer to be one. I bless the guy who is the treasurer of Slough Labour party, and I hope that he lives for ever, because if he does not, I do not know where we would find another. I also fear that our regulation of donations has not been sufficiently proportionate. It has placed a very heavy burden on volunteers, and some of the proposals in the Bill—perhaps with some amendment—could ease some of those burdens and make them more proportionate. Some of the powers that make some of my hon. Friends anxious—my right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) was one—are the ones that we expect of most regulators. They include the powers to investigate and to call for documents, and they are held by regulatory bodies from the General Medical Council and the Charity Commission to the Financial Services Authority. I do not think that we should fear them. However, most of those bodies have a duty to keep their investigations confidential in the early stages, and not to go running to journalists to say that they are investigating this or that politician. One weakness in the Bill is that such a duty will not be placed on the Electoral Commission, even though that is one of its present failures. Another of the Electoral Commission's present failures is the fact that it knows nothing of that which it regulates. That will be helped substantially by the proposal to add some commissioners with recent electoral experience. I am depressed by the commission's lack of a sense of inquiry into the electoral process. In a way, it has followed an agenda that was, I am afraid, invented by journalists, rather than one that is determined by what is happening on the ground during elections. I am very concerned about what happens on the ground during elections. I am also very concerned that, in some constituencies, the process of electoral registration is not picking up the people who should vote. The number of people in inner-city constituencies, for example, who are eligible and registered to vote is substantially lower than the number of people who are entitled to vote. Even in the small town that I represent, which is very diverse, I have seen people turning up at the ballot box wanting to vote but being unable to do so because they find, to their horror, that they are not on the electoral register. They did not know that they needed to fill in a form, or whatever. I am depressed by the fact that the Electoral Commission has done so little to increase electoral registration. I was not really surprised that the Conservatives were concerned about registering people overseas and about individual voter registration. I believe that there are circumstances in which we should consider individual voter registration. I represent a town in which there has been substantial, sustained electoral fraud. Eight members of the Conservative party will shortly face criminal charges at Reading Crown court for roll-stuffing—that is, registering people who do not exist. Some 200 people who did not exist were registered in one ward in Slough. We discovered this, and our Labour party volunteers put huge human resources into collecting the evidence that was eventually presented in an electoral court to show that the person who had overthrown, by 120 votes, the first ever black woman mayor in Britain—she had been a long-serving councillor—had got there by cheating. A by-election followed, and Labour won the seat back. In places where there is evidence of such corruption, there might be a case for individual voter registration. I would not support its introduction universally at the moment, because when it was introduced in Northern Ireland the number of people registered to vote went down by 10 per cent. That is not a tolerable consequence.