My Lords, during the passage of the Bill, I raised the likely impact of the photo identification requirement on people living in poverty. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the word “photo” was not in the manifesto.
While I welcome the Government’s focus on those with protected characteristics, the Bill is not sufficient to assess adequately the impact on all marginalised groups, given the Government’s refusal to enact the socioeconomic duty in the Equality Act. I will not repeat the arguments I made previously, but my fears, far from being allayed, are all the greater given how little time there is between the laying of the regulations and the May local elections, the inadequacy of which has been underlined by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, the Electoral Commission, the Local Government Association and others.
I will raise just two main issues, the first of which concerns consultation. The Explanatory Memorandum states:
“Significant consultation has been carried out with … stakeholders”,
including “civil society organisations”. Both in Committee and on Report, I asked specifically about consultation with organisations working with people in poverty and with those who can bring the expertise of their experience of poverty to bear on the matter.
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The private office of the then Minister, the noble Lord, Lord True, wrote to me subsequently, which I appreciate. The list of civil society organisations it
gave me included some which had poverty within their remit but no anti-poverty organisations as such and no groups with direct experience of poverty. The email said that Ministers had asked officials to consider opportunities for such engagement. I therefore ask whether such engagement has taken place or is due to take place, with reference to the introduction of the voter authority certificate. I mentioned Poverty2Solutions in the debate, but I would also suggest the APLE—that is, the Addressing Poverty with Lived Experience—Collective, which recently met the APPG on Poverty, which I co-chair and, at its request, focused on digital exclusion.
This brings me to the second issue I want to raise. The impact assessment explains that it is anticipated that most electors will apply for the VAC online. In doing so, it totally ignores the extent of digital exclusion in various forms among people living in poverty and the damaging impact that digital-by-default approaches often have on them. Of course, I accept that it will be possible to apply in person or by post, but as the impact assessment acknowledges,
“there may be a cost associated with completing an application”
and there will be a “time cost” for those completing the application online or in person. There may also be a “travel cost” for those applying in person. It does not attempt to quantify those costs, but in any case, not all of them can be quantified. There may also be psychological costs in engaging with officialdom whom voters who need a VAC may not trust to treat them with dignity and respect. For those who are time-poor as well as financially poor, applying for a VAC, even if they are aware of the need to do so, may be just too much. This is especially so over the coming months, as people in poverty struggle on inadequate incomes in the face of the cost of living crisis, which is hitting them particularly hard.
I ask the Minister to put herself in the shoes of, let us say, a lone mother in low-paid, part-time work, claiming universal credit, whose energy is already depleted by the struggle to get by as food and fuel bills rocket and she attempts to combine paid work with the care of her children. Research by social psychologists indicates that poverty taxes the mind, reducing the bandwidth available for decision-making and action. It may simply be unrealistic to expect that people with too little money and no photo identification will claim a VAC, however good the publicity campaign. It is therefore all the more important that officials engage with people who have experience of poverty in drawing up plans for implementing the regulations and their evaluation.
On the evaluation, the impact assessment talks about the collection of public opinion data. Will that include the most marginalised groups—those in poverty and others—who, if the data collection is online, may be excluded? The Minister mentioned the staff in polling offices, but what about those who do not even go to the polling office because they realise too late that there is no point in doing so because they do not have the requisite identification? That could be a real issue, because those who are hard-pressed are, I suspect, among those most likely to miss the deadline for applications, which I understand has been brought forward from one to six working days before polling
day. The Electoral Commission points out that the effect of this crucial accessibility provision will be reduced, whereas allowing applications to be made up to the day before polling day would help to maximise access and minimise the risk that voters will be turned away from polling stations. Could the Minister explain this decision to go from one day to six days and ensure that its impact is properly monitored?
According to openDemocracy, Ministers told the Electoral Commission that introducing photo ID in next year’s local elections has the advantage of providing a learning exercise. Certainly, it is to be hoped that the Government will be open to learning from the exercise. In that context, I welcome what the Minister said about independent review of the exercise in May, as far as it goes, and I hope that she can answer my noble friend’s questions adequately. However, the implication seems to be that, because only some authorities have elections next year—including my own authority of Nottingham—it is okay if some electors, particularly the most marginalised in those authorities, lose the right to vote because of the rushed implementation of voter photo ID. It is not okay, and I hope that, even at this late stage, the Government will think again.