Political Parties and Elections Bill

I shall speak also to Amendments 129, 131 and 132. I will not be moving Amendment 132AB, which is in this group. Although there are a few more groups of amendments, we are moving towards the end of the Committee stage and this is the last one with which I shall be dealing. These are probing amendments to further explore some of the elements involved in fraud and postal votes, much of which was dealt with in the government amendments on IVR. Amendment 128 seeks to insert a provision that personal identifiers verification must happen in 100 per cent of postal votes and not only 20 per cent as a minimum. Amendment 129 would do that for Scotland. Amendment 131 seeks to insert a provision which makes a fraudulent application for a postal vote an offence with a custodial sentence not exceeding six months. Amendment 132 seeks to impose a moratorium on all-postal ballots. As has been made clear by a number of speakers, particularly during the debate on the large number of government amendments to which we devoted two hours, we are all concerned about the fraud contained in postal ballots and are very keen to see what we can do about it. The first two amendments are designed to ensure that all postal votes are properly checked and, given the amount of fraud within that system, it seems only sensible that that should be the case. I welcome the Government’s comments on that in due course. The amendment relating to bringing in a custodial sentence is designed to probe the Government as to whether they have any intention of doing this and to discover how seriously they are taking the complaints about the amount of fraud. We could go through all the cases we discussed earlier, quote from what Judge Mawrey said in the Birmingham case and so on, but the suggestion comes from the Electoral Commission’s recommendation in its 2005 Securing the Vote report. The report stated: ""There should be a new offence designed to prevent fraudulent applications for postal votes. The maximum penalty should be a custodial sentence in line with the penalties for personation. Voting fraudulently is already an offence, but there is no specific electoral offence of fraudulently applying for a postal vote, probably because the number of applicants was relatively insignificant until postal voting was made available on demand in Great Britain. A new offence, with appropriate publicity surrounding is availability and use, would have some deterrent value, and would also help to encourage greater public confidence"." Again, I would welcome the Government’s comments on that. As I made clear, Amendment 132 is probing amendment, the basis for which again comes from the Electoral Commission’s 2005 report. It stated: ""All-postal voting should not be pursued for use at future statutory elections or referendums in the UK, and the option of sending out ballot papers automatically to every registered elector should not be pursued"." I should like assurances from the Government that they do not intend to go down this route given the current state we are in and because of the ease with which fraud can be pursued in postal votes in what I will call the pre-IVR era. After we have achieved individual voter registration it might be possible to have more postal voting. At this stage I do not think that is the case. I beg to move.