Political Parties and Elections Bill

This is exactly what happens at the moment. If someone dies and the local electoral registration staff do not pick it up, their names are rolled over to the next year at least and in some places possibly to years beyond, although that is not supposed to happen now. This is why I say that the basic system ought to be the rolling register, which people go on to when they go to live somewhere and come off when they move somewhere else. One of the problems—not a death problem—is that people go on the register in the place they move to, but do not come off the register in the place they move from. However, if they inform the people in charge of the register that they are going on to where they come from, the people in charge will send that information back to the local authority registration officers in the other place. That system should be tidied up as well. If you go on to the electoral register because you have moved to somewhere, you ought to have to say where you have come from and what registers you have been on previously. This will enable you to be taken off those registers. As to deaths, many electoral registration officers scrutinise the local papers and receive council house information, council tax information and so on, and they manage to take many people off the register. It will always be hit and miss to an extent, but we have to get it as accurate as we possibly can. Basically, a rolling register with a system of annual checks and balances would be the best way to do it. I would also extend the canvassing operation throughout the whole year. Electoral registration officers have to employ all the staff who are willing to do this—and they are not always easy to find—at the same time of the year. It may well be that electoral registration officers could find people who are quite happy to do electoral registration work for, say, one evening a week throughout the year. In that way, the canvass could take place throughout the year rather than annually. The third major point I want to make is that the system should be piloted, as I said at Second Reading. I share some of the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. It is so important to get this right that it should be piloted not only in areas where postal voting fraud or other fraud has been seriously reported or alleged but in a range of areas so that we can see how it works and what the effects are. I do not understand why this proposal has not been put forward. Pilots could be brought in much earlier than 2014. Rather than having a voluntary system, which seems much ado over nothing—it will create a lot of bureaucracy and will not result in anything positive in the next five years—perhaps 40 or 50 local authority areas should be piloted in a range of areas across the country. We could then iron out the problems and see how to make the system work. My fourth point is that political parties will have to get much more involved again in electoral registration. At the moment, if you asked the Electoral Commission it would probably say, "We do not want to do this because it is all part of political parties getting involved in the electoral process and potential fraud". But local constituency associations started off in the 19th century as registration associations to make sure that everyone who voted Conservative or Liberal, as it was in those days, was on the electoral register. The register covered only a relatively small proportion of the adult population and it was crucial to get all your people on it. That was how they started off. When out campaigning, local parties should take much more responsibility on the ground for getting people registered. They should do that on the basis of individual registration, with the safeguards which have been put forward and which I am talking about, built in.