Political Parties and Elections Bill

I think that the noble Lord has a case. However, if an electoral registration officer within the local authority is dissatisfied with the response of the local authority, and he or she maintains that there is a problem with corruption of the electoral system, they can go to the Electoral Commission or to a Member of Parliament. It is unlikely that the majority of members of the local authority would be so corrupt that they would be prepared to turn a blind to corruption of the electoral system in a particular area. A minority of councillors within that authority area would want to foster such corrupt activities; I would have thought that the majority would be very much opposed to them. I turn to the issue of data transfer under the proposals. I understand that there are already within local authorities arrangements for the interdepartmental transfer of data—for housing benefit, council tax information and so forth. I am told that some local authorities are tardy over the use of such facilities. However, I am also told that it is the Government’s intention to pilot the use of data transfer from national databases such as the DVLA and DWP to local authorities for use in electoral registration. That is in the Bill. Perhaps before doing so, they should read the recent Joseph Rowntree report, rather provocatively called The Database State, to which my noble friend has referred on a previous occasion at the Dispatch Box. I recall his comments with great interest. On page 32, the report sets out the scale of cross-referencing already within the system under the heading, ""Links from and to DWP"." Reading between the lines, it is obvious that the need for cross-referencing is based on some risk assessment. It is quite conceivable that the data-matching service, which has been in operation for over 10 years and which includes DWP benefits, Royal Mail redirecting, TV licences and other services, which detects fraud and error in benefits and is applied to millions of claimants, must provide for flagging-up areas of risk. I contend that many of those areas will include among them areas of social deprivation among which there will be precisely the same areas that I seek to identify in my amendments. I therefore argue that a risk assessment, which at the end inevitably targets certain areas with high ethnic minority populations, is more likely to breach discrimination considerations than an arrangement that allows those same areas themselves to voluntarily apply to central government for permission to adopt a scheme that deals with that same element of risk. I should like to read into the record some information which has come from the other place. I refer to the report produced by the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee, which dealt with the whole matter of individual registration. In paragraph 18, the committee says: ""A pattern appears to be emerging for the number of registered electors to decline at each canvass only to show a slow increase thereafter as a consequence of rolling registrations. The Electoral Commission pointed to evidence suggesting ‘an emerging downward trend in the electoral register’. Although this evidence was limited because the new system had been in operation for 18 months at the time, the Commission considered that ‘nonetheless the available ‘like-for-like’ comparisons indicate that the register is falling by about 1.5-2 per cent per annum’. This view is backed up by the 2004 canvass results, published on 1 December 2004, which show a further decline in the register to a registration level of just 83.9%.""This finding is a particular cause for concern in Northern Ireland because the adult population of Northern Ireland is increasing at a rate of 0.7% per annum. The Electoral Commission warned that: ‘…unless it is rectified, the downward trend in the register has the potential of embedding itself structurally in the registration process. If the register is in decline, then the number that can be canvassed will also tend to fall from one canvass to the next, thus reinforcing the cycle’"." The committee goes on to say at paragraph 49: ""The shift from household to individual registration is one of the key changes resulting from the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. This change was essential to eliminate some of the possible sources of ‘phantom’ names on the register. However, this is now one of the key factors contributing to the low levels of registration in certain population groups"." I repeat: one factor was the phantom vote. Paragraph 78 states: ""The second appears to be that a significant proportion of the eligible population does not register. There are several causes for this but there is little doubt that one of the most significant is the change to individual registration. The shift away from a system, where one person in each household registers the entire household to one in which each individual has the responsibility for their own registration requires individuals to be more pro-active if their names are to be included on the register"." Paragraph 80 reads: ""We are deeply concerned by signs that the system of individual registration is causing a spiral of structural decline in the electoral register. This appears to occur because every year only those people who were registered the previous year are directly canvassed. While people are able to register outside the canvass periods through rolling registration, the number registering each year through this mechanism is lower than the number of people dropping out of the register in canvass registrations from one year to the next. Consequently, the register has been shrinking progressively. We believe that the level of electoral registration in Northern Ireland has now reached the point at which it will begin to have an adverse effect on public confidence in the integrity of the process"." We will have a report like this in a matter of a few years. The question is: what would happen in those circumstances? The noble Lord, Lord Henley, appeared to be pretty frank about that. I think he was actually saying that he saw electoral advantage in individual registration, and I think he was suggesting that we might see electoral disadvantage. In other conditions, another Government might have that in mind. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, shakes his head, but I do not think that he can shake his head on behalf of his party when it comes to electoral considerations of that nature. I think that another Government might have other matters in mind in the event that they are required to make the changes which the Electoral Commission, under the legislation with which we are dealing, suggests to them concerning the further reforms that it feels are necessary prior to compulsory registration in 2014-15. Further on, under "Political Discrimination", the report says: ""Research by the Electoral Commission has shown that the highest decline in electoral registration occurred in the top 20 most deprived wards of which 69% are catholic and 27% protestant. This represents a serious adverse impact on the catholic/nationalist community in particular and exposes the highly political motivation behind the electoral legislation. Those who supported this legislation must look to the effect it is having, not just in terms of denying large numbers of people their right to vote, but in the categories of people being affected: the poorest within the nationalist community and to a lesser degree the poorest within the protestant community. It has affected the young, the old, those with disabilities and ethnic minorities. The pattern emerging across the north is that this legislation is producing a two-tier system whereby affluent areas are returning high registration uptake and the poorest areas, mostly in deprived catholic and protestant wards, are alarmingly low"." Can we see the writing on the wall? Can we see, as we proceed with this project, that there are huge dangers inherent in this whole approach? We may well effectively be disfranchising very large numbers of people in the inner cities who cannot be canvassed, who will perhaps simply be ignored in the future for political reasons. I am particularly concerned about that. I refer to a speech by Fiona Mactaggart on 20 October on this Bill. She is the Member for Slough, which has a large ethnic population. She said: ""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".—[Official Report, Commons, 20/10/08; col. 79.]" She is a former Home Office Minister in the Labour Government. She went on to deal with problems in her constituency in this area in some detail. We have a Member of Parliament who is a former Minister expressing concerns over electoral registration national rollout. She said that it should be dealt with on an individual basis. I understand that she is prepared to take my amendments, perhaps remodel them in some way and, if it is possible procedurally in the other place, to move them. She would have to do so under the somewhat truncated procedure whereby, on this huge issue, there is no Second Reading in the Commons, there is no Committee stage in the Commons, there is no Report stage in the Commons, there is no Third Reading in the Commons; but our Bill simply goes back for them to consider, if I am not mistaken, in one stage. I think that is grossly unreasonable. Unless someone can correct me, that is the case. That is completely wrong. Finally, I will turn to what happened some weeks ago on binge drinkers. I raise binge drinking because when Sir Liam Donaldson made his proposals for a tax on the basis of so much per millilitre of alcohol, he argued that we should change the tax system on alcohol nationally, across the board, to deal with binge drinkers. The Prime Minister very quickly leapt in to say, "Oh no, we are not going to do that". He said, "Let us deal with the problem in the area where it exists. Let’s deal with the problems of that particular group of people who are binge drinking. Let’s not punish the whole nation with a greater level of taxation, because that is unreasonable". I have lost the quote, but I am sure that noble Lords will remember what he said at the time. If we are prepared to isolate binge drinkers and deal with them as a group, why cannot we do that in this case? Why cannot we isolate the problem in the areas where there is a problem and deal with that in isolation and not, if I might say so once again, punish the whole nation?