New Clause 1
Political Parties and Elections Bill
4:30 pm
Eleanor Laing (Shadow Minister, Justice; Epping Forest, Conservative)
What the hon. Gentleman is saying is all over the place. No one is talking about feckless citizens failing to register. I do not understand what he is talking about. He referred to 103 per cent. but 103 per cent. of what? Did he mean 103 per cent. of the estimate based on the census? That is interesting but fairly meaningless, and it is not what we are discussing. We should get on with debating new clause 1. We are discussing what should be the most important part of the Bill and, quite honestly, Labour Members are wasting time.
The fact that electoral registration in Northern Ireland fell by 10 per cent. on the introduction of individual voter registration is evidence that the problem of fraudulent over-registration was tackled directly. That is the whole point. Individual voter registration and the accompanying personal identifier system worked in Northern Ireland. It is a good system. It is better and much tighter, and we ought to have it in the rest of the United Kingdom. It is important that we tackle over-registration in Great Britain, and that we restore the trust and integrity that we should observe in the ballot.
We should also note that, in its report, the Northern Ireland Select Committee stated that the
“Electoral Commission has concluded that the removal of the carry-forward mechanism is likely to be the most important factor by far in the decline in the level of voter registration following the introduction of the 2002 Act.”
All that shows that the lessons from Northern Ireland are there to be learnt, not to be copied, and that we should not dwell too much on what is happening in Northern Ireland. What matters is that the integrity of the electoral system is the very basis of our freedom under democracy. That is precious. We are here as elected representatives of the people to defend the process, and we should value it but it is under threat because of how registration is carried out. It is not more difficult to borrow a library book than it is to register to vote. In fact, we have to prove more to take a book out of a library than we do to cast our vote and influence who governs the country. Integrity could so easily be restored by introducing individual voter registration coupled with personal identifiers.
The Government have said on more than one occasion that they intend to introduce a scheme of individual voter registration. The Minister has said that he accepts the principle, as have his colleagues. If the principle had not been accepted, it would not have been suitable for Northern Ireland. The Government promised to put the principle into action, but what puzzles me is that they have failed to take the opportunity to do so under the Political Parties and Elections Bill, the perfect vehicle for such a measure. That is why we put high store by the proposal and why the new clause, tabled immediately after Second Reading, is about individual voter registration.
In a report published just last week, the Committee on Standards in Public Life stated that, although levels of confidence in the electoral system are reasonably high,
“people are attracted to the greater security and accuracy of individual voter registration.”
It goes on to explain that it undertook a survey that showed that about two thirds of respondents—65 per cent.—in the United Kingdom thought that the electoral registration system in their own country was very or fairly safe from further abuse, but that only 15 per cent. of respondents felt that the system was very safe while 18 per cent. considered the system unsafe.
Should we not in the UK in the 21st century have a system that is very safe and utterly watertight? Of course, we should. Mediocre is simply not good enough. Nearly two thirds of respondents to the survey expressed an overall preference for the individual registration system in Northern Ireland, compared with 30 per cent. who preferred the household system in Great Britain. There is a 2:1 plebiscite in favour of an individual rather than a household system of registration.
I ask the Committee to imagine it. If we were giving advice to a newly emerging democracy on how to set up an electoral system in order to produce the best democratic results possible, we might say, “Here you are; get on with it. You set up your Parliament—it may have one House, it may have two—and you set up a system of voting.” The hon. Gentleman on my left would say that the single transferable vote or some other proportionate system was best, while I would say that first past the post was best. It would be decided one way or the other. Each system has its merits. But suppose that we then said, “How about copying the British system? You have a country full of free, individual people, and in order to be allowed to vote, each one of them has to go to the head of their household, who has the duty to fill in a form that gives them the right to vote or doesn’t.” How utterly ridiculous when it is looked at like that.
We have that system because it is left over from the Victorian age, when the paterfamilias did everything. It is left over from an age when only the men in the household voted. It is left over from an age when we did not have the technical or practical ability to carry out a canvass of individuals. It is an affront to the freedom of the individual and it is totally ridiculous to take away personal power and responsibility. No wonder lots of young people do not bother to vote or take their duties seriously. They have to get their mothers or fathers to fill in the form for them, as though they were children.
In thinking about it, I realised that it happened to me when I was living under my father’s roof and was a parliamentary candidate. I was the person on the ballot paper. I was the person for whom people could vote. All right, it was in Paisley, North and only 5,252 of them did vote for me, but I thought that that was quite a lot at the time. I was the name on the ballot paper, but before I could cast my vote for myself, my father had to fill in my name and sign the form as head of the household. How utterly ridiculous. That is the system that Ministers are defending. It is simply not right.
I speak jocularly about my situation because my father, being an honourable and responsible district councillor, filled in the form properly, but if I had tried to be a Labour candidate and not a Conservative one, you can bet your bottom dollar that my father would not have let me vote. Whether that is right or wrong— [Hon. Members: “It is wrong.”] Of course it is wrong.
I had better be careful about using my late and very honourable father as an example, because he did not do things that were wrong—well, not that sort of thing, anyway—and he would not have done that, but under the current system, we give the person who fills in the form the ability, if not the right, to disfranchise other people who live in that household. That is indubitably the case. It is not a right—it would be wrong for a person to fill in the form wrongly—but we give them the opportunity and ability to disfranchise other people. It might not happen often in families, but it might happen in other households in multiple occupation, such as student or bedsit accommodation or homeless hostels. It is wrong that one person should have the ability to prevent another from registering to vote. If we are talking about individual responsibility and individual duty, each individual must have the ability to register themselves individually to vote. By not adopting new clause 1, the Government are saying that they are content with the law of 100 years ago, under which the head of the household is the person who holds the power and individuals do not count. That is a disgrace in the 21st century.