Electoral System

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 12:50 pm on 26 May 2005.

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Photo of Lord Garden Lord Garden Spokesperson in the Lords, Defence 12:50, 26 May 2005

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, for the opportunity to debate these issues. I found his opening speech totally compelling. I shall not focus on the detail of different PR systems—my noble friends are much better at that than me. But I want to draw attention to one group which has found it difficult to be represented under the current system and will continue to find difficulties under any different system unless we make some changes.

The Armed Forces represent about 200,000 voters. If we add to them the reservists that are increasingly deployed, their families, who often move with them, and civilians who are out in support of the Armed Forces overseas, we have a significant group of people who find it difficult both to vote and to feel represented. I do not wish to allocate blame in this debate, but I want to make some suggestions as to how we could improve the system, whatever electoral system we take forward.

The main areas in which I should like to see improvement are registration, the voting systems themselves, the provision of information, the role that the Ministry of Defence plays, and how we might achieve better parliamentary representation of the interests of the members of the Armed Forces and their families.

The system changed in 2001. As the Minister said in a previous debate, this was an opportunity to give more choice to the Armed Forces. But it did not work out that way—that is the trouble. The new system allowed for registration as a local civilian voter, or as a service voter who could vote by post or proxy. But, at the same time under the change, members of the forces had to re-register every year instead of being registered continuously, as had happened under the previous system. As they moved, progressively they fell off electoral registration lists because electoral registration officers did not, and could not, keep up with those moves. So we had a progressive lack of registration.

One difficulty encountered by the services is predicting where the individuals will be in any given year or what their constituency is. So Ministers advised in the other place that the best thing they could do was to register for proxy voting. That may be a more satisfactory system but it has its own difficulties. We have already heard in the debate today that the ballot should be secret, but proxy voting, by its nature, is not a secret ballot system. Some service people can register with their parents, with whom they have a reasonable relationship, and they can use their parents, or one of their parents, as a proxy. But many cannot. Their friends also tend to be in the services and they, too, are liable to movement.

Commonwealth members of the Armed Forces have a particular problem because they may have no one in the United Kingdom whom they can use as a proxy. I return to the fact that proxy voting is not a truly democratic voting system.

The postal voting system was also part of the new choice offered. But because the time between the issue of ballot papers for postal votes and the election itself is so short—and was compounded this time by a public holiday in the intervening period—the British Forces Post Office system has to be very fast in getting the votes out and back again. So far as I can see, the BFPO made no special arrangements for that, and many of the ballot papers did not arrive in time even for the election, let alone in time for them to be returned and counted. That may not have been too surprising in Iraq or Afghanistan but it also happened in Northern Ireland and Germany. Perhaps the Ministry of Defence needs to consider setting up some kind of courier arrangements if we are to have postal votes, or perhaps, as is the case in some nations, ballot stations for units that are deployed overseas.

If we are looking forward, as some are, towards the eventual introduction of Internet voting, perhaps the services are where we should start that trial. As we heard, postal votes were first introduced for the services and so, again, perhaps the services should be in the lead when we look at new systems to make voting easier.

The information and awareness strategy for the Armed Forces was not well thought out. The Electoral Commission became aware of the problem. It produced 100,000 leaflets—not enough for everyone—but, by and large, even those leaflets were distributed too late for people to register. The MoD had incorrect information on its website. The Queen's Regulations had not been updated and stated that people were not allowed to vote by post.

There was one beacon of light in all this: there was an unofficial, if somewhat irreverent, website called the "Army Rumour Service", where volunteers posted information to encourage servicemen to register to vote and to get out and vote. This was done in a totally non-partisan way, and links were made to all the electoral registration offices so that registering could be done on a voluntary basis. That is the kind of thing that the MoD should have been doing.

Indeed, it seems to me that the Ministry of Defence needs some guidance about its role in this matter. Many of the regulations appear to be directed at ensuring that the Armed Forces will not receive information about political parties. Canvassing and hustings are prohibited on units. Now that we have a wider security barrier because of the security situation, that often includes married quarters, and one cannot canvass if the married quarters are within the security barrier. Given that we expect the military to promote democracy in faraway places, it might be timely to consider how we can better educate it about its own democratic system. The Ministry of Defence is very target-driven these days. Perhaps the Government will think about recommending suitable targets for voter registration among servicemen.

We were told that it is difficult to track the registration of service voters because that would be an infringement of their personal confidences. That is nonsense. Electoral registers are published everywhere else. We used to register service voters and there is no reason why that should not be done again.

Finally, it seems to me that we need to consider how to connect the services to their parliamentary representatives. We have already talked about the effect that some voting systems have on disconnecting the representative from the constituent. There is a real problem with the current system for servicemen. Over the years, I have observed defence debates and have despaired that there is no natural constituency for the Armed Forces. MPs happily represent the defence industrial interests of their constituencies or raise the individual problems of a military constituent, but it is left to those only with some former military experience to argue the wider service interest. Over the years, a number of MPs have gained some military experience through the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme. That is a very valuable innovation but it does not give the continuous link which MPs enjoy with most of their constituents.

Therefore, perhaps as many as 300,000 citizens—the forces and their families, the reservists and maybe some of the civilian supporters as well—do not have their interests represented as do civilian residents of a particular constituency. I do not think that there is any easy answer to the problem, but we need to consider how to tackle it. Perhaps we could look at offering a number of easy registration centres for service voting, which would give clusters with a service interest. We might have a much better informed parliamentary debate of defence issues if some MPs felt that they were dependent on a military vote.

I know that the Electoral Commission intends to take up the lessons of service voting with the MoD and to make a number of recommendations. I simply ask the Minister to encourage her colleagues in the Ministry of Defence to listen for once and to be prepared to innovate. We owe it to our Armed Forces and we owe it to our democracy.