Political Parties and Elections Bill

I heard what the noble Lord said and I hear what he says now, and I understand the point, although I disagree with it. The point that I was making is that there are things that involve binge drinking called personation parties, which are reported to me, whereby people who would not normally vote, who are from what might be called the lower echelons of society, are invited to come along to a particular location, are given a polling card and told to go and vote in that name and then, when they return having done so successfully, they take part in the personation party, which involves the provision of large amounts of alcohol. That is clearly not happening particularly in the Asian community—not in the Muslim community anyway. There is no getting away from the fact, however, that electoral fraud, as it has mushroomed in this country, has unrepresentatively involved Asian communities. There is no point in beating about the bush in that regard. I am told that there has been personation in some West Indian communities as well. That is just a fact and, unless people grasp that fact and do something about it, it will continue to happen, and the people whose reputation suffers most are those people in those communities. However, I do not want to pursue that further at the moment, although I may do so later this afternoon. However, there are other forces around in British politics, on the far right, which I would not trust to operate our electoral system fairly and reasonably. They are not involved as far as one knows in false registrations and postal vote fraud, but the BNP is, judging by reports, prone particularly to fraudulent filling-in of nomination papers. There have been a number of instances where BNP nomination papers have been found to contain names which have been filled in by people who were not the electors who were purported to have filled them in. I do not trust that particular section of the British party spectrum to continue to operate the system fairly. It is not just community practices from south Asia that we have to worry about; it is the fact that, as my noble friend Lord Rennard said, as people discover just how prone the British electoral system is to being fiddled, more of them will do it. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said that the main issue was in Asian/ethnic minority communities. I do not think that it is. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, that the main problem is the accuracy of the register. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this proposal for individual registration will make it worse, but the real issue is the accuracy of the register. As far as Northern Ireland is concerned, I have never really seen a proper assessment of how much of the reduction in the number of people on the electoral register was due to the removal from it of people who should not have been there—the ghost voters, for example, to whom the noble Baroness referred. There is no doubt that there was considerable over-registration in Northern Ireland, which appears to have been significantly eliminated. If so, that is a good thing. Individual registration will help us to clean up elections in practice, but the most important thing is that it is right in principle. People’s votes belong to them. It is surely their individual responsibility to make sure that the entry in the electoral register in their name is accurate, is in the right place and is not being manipulated by somebody else. However, it is not a panacea for postal voting problems. It is clear that in postal voting, where individual identifiers now exist, people fiddling the system are getting cleverer and more organised. They are taking notice of the information that people now have to provide and have changed as a result. However, individual registration will help considerably with problems of personation at polling stations, the level of which, as the noble Lord, Lord Henley, said, we do not know. All that we have is anecdotal evidence from some areas. To some extent, there are two separate issues. One is individual registration and the other is compulsory personal identifiers. Each could be brought in without the other. The two are being brought in together, which overcomplicates the issue. I would have preferred to see a system of individual registration, and all the problems associated with it, brought in first before compulsory identifiers, but other people will take a different view. Some people are in a very difficult situation as far as registration is concerned. Homes in multiple occupation and other communal residencies are the classic example. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said that the people in them would be disadvantaged by individual registration; I take the opposite view. At the moment, who fills in the form in an HMO? Who fills in the form in any sort of communal residency? The answer is that, in some cases—for example, university colleges and halls of residence—it works properly. It is done by the college and by the hall of residence officially. But there are some who refuse to do it. They say, "It is nothing to do with us. We are not here to register our students". So in some areas it works and in others it does not. One of my reservations about individual registration is that, in that kind of communal setting, there must be an onus on the people running it to ensure that the system is working, to get the individuals to sign their forms and send them in. That must be added to these proposals if they are going to work, or these people will just be missed off altogether. I hesitate to use the phrase "doss house"—many HMOs are perfectly reputable and well run institutions—but who is responsible in that kind of institution? Who is responsible in a large family? The idea of the head of the household has gone, so it is no longer them. It is whoever gets the form and decides to bother filling it in. In a normal family it is probably a responsible person who might be the head of the household—or their wife, in a traditional way, because they are probably more efficient at doing it—but it works. However, in many places it does not. If you are placing that responsibility on somebody at random, or on a landlord to whom people might not want to give certain information, then it is a difficult situation. In areas like HMOs, if the council or electoral registration staff are efficient and do it properly then the system will be more efficient and better in every way for the electors concerned. Special efforts must be made in such places, as well as safeguards for genuine institutions, such as colleges, hospitals, nurses’ homes, boarding schools or whatever. Some things will be necessary in order for the fears put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, to be overcome. One is the question of resources, which has already been mentioned. There is no point in trying to do this unless the registration and returning officers have the resources to do so. I made the point before that there is already a separation of powers between the people who run elections and the council, but the council is responsible for providing them with the resources. That separation of powers needs to be strengthened to prevent political interference for whatever reason—perhaps just to safeguard the council’s budget, not nasty political reasons.