My Lords, I add my voice to those who have congratulated my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Moore of Etchingham, on his magisterial maiden speech, which might be a wonderful foretaste of contributions to come.
I was a member of the committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, which reported in 2020. I shall follow what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, touched on but want first to add my voice to those expressing grave concern about the independence of the Electoral Commission and the Government’s strategy and policy statement. Others have touched on this much more eloquently than I can.
I too read with interest the report of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and its savage criticism of this Bill. I also read with interest the Government’s response to PACAC, in which they stated that the provisions in relation to the strategy and policy statement
“do not give the Government the power to direct the Commission’s decision-making”,
yet, under the Bill, the commission must “have regard to” the statement. These two statements fail the common-sense test.
Following on from what the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, touched on, I shall certainly listen with interest to the arguments for and against voter ID and on whether it is the answer to some of the wider worries about electoral fraud. Yet, at the same time, the Bill has nothing to say about what seems to be a far larger problem relating to the integrity of our electoral process; namely, that many millions of eligible voters are missing from the electoral registers. Other countries with similar registration requirements, such as Canada, seem to be much more successful in achieving higher levels of both completeness and accuracy in their electoral registers.
There are many ideas on how this problem might be addressed—for example, automatic or assisted registration —and we will hear more about this on Friday when the House at long last debates the 2020 Lords committee report on electoral registration. I wonder whether the Minister might give us a foretaste of his arguments in that debate to answer today the argument that the millions missing from our electoral registers are a far greater threat to the wider integrity of our elections than personation.
I too ask why such a fundamentally important Bill affecting the very foundations of our democratic system is being taken through Parliament without the kind of careful consultation and consensus-building that it deserves. There was no White Paper; there was no pre-legislative scrutiny to build understanding and cross-party support; there is no statutory commitment to post-legislative scrutiny, yet significant government amendments have been introduced since the Bill was given a Second Reading in the other place.
This is an important Bill introduced at a time when the integrity of our politics and the observance of the conventions which regulate our constitution are under intense scrutiny. The Minister knows this better than anyone. I look forward to his reply.
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