Clause 7 - Encouraging Voting
Regional Assemblies (Preparations) Bill
10:30 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 7, in
clause 7, page 3, line 38, at end add
''provided that the Electoral Commission shall certify that anything done under this section is not likely, in the Commission's judgment, disproportionately to benefit one of the possible outcomes of the referendum.''.
The clause will impose on the Electoral Commission a duty to encourage voting. There are obviously good reasons why one would want the commission to do that. Committee members will have received a briefing from the Royal National Institute of the Blind and I shall revert to that in a moment with a couple of specific questions. I am sure that the Minister has had the brief, so he will have specific answers to the RNIB's questions.
The thoughts that lay behind amendment No. 7 were formulated on reading the brief. The RNIB talks about the need for simple messages in short sentences and ordinary words to convey information about a referendum, for example, to people with learning difficulties. That is fine, but it is important that in promoting or encouraging voting, the Electoral Commission is extremely careful that what it does is impartial in relation to the outcome of a referendum. Having met the chief commissioner, I am in no doubt that the commission would intend to ensure that what it did was entirely impartial and did not have any impact on the outcome that disproportionately benefited either side. However, that could be difficult to achieve.
Let us discuss the north-east. It has been used as an example and I think it is a commonly held view in the Committee that the north-east is likely to be one of the first areas that the Minister wishes to test. We have talked about the urban-rural split and the fact that the large proportion of the population lives in urban areas. I suspect that many people would not regard it as highly contentious that there is likely to be a larger level of support for an elected regional assembly in the metropolitan areas of the north-east, than there would be in the rural areas, where the changes to local government arrangements will come into play. Therefore, it would be important that anything that the Electoral Commission did to encourage voting was not targeted in urban areas, but across the whole of the region equally, and in a way that did not discriminate.
If the commission were minded to use electronic means to communicate with potential voters, it would be important to establish that those who were electronically enabled were not disproportionately
likely to be of one persuasion or the other. Hon. Members could think of many examples of groups of people who might be more likely to be inclined to vote yes or no—polling evidence might demonstrate that. It is important that the commission takes that into account. I hope that it is not contentious that encouraging voting should be an entirely neutral exercise, and it is becoming more difficult to ensure that such exercises are neutral. Electronic media are a good example of a medium where access is clearly not evenly distributed among the population. Younger people have more access than older people, wealthier people more access than poorer people.