– in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 13 December 1949.
Lords Amendment: In page 2, line 39, at end, insert new Clause—(Voting rights of certain persons coming of age during currency of register).
I beg to move, "That this House doth agree with the Lords in the said Amendment."
When this Bill was before the House earlier, in Committee, an Amendment was moved by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Bing) which raised the question of what was to happen to the people who would have come on the register at the half-year in which, in future, no register will be published, and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State undertook to report to me the feeling of the House in the matter. I also had the advantage of reading the report of the discussion which took place and it seemed to me that if it were possible, without imposing any serious additional expenditure on either the taxpayer or the ratepayer, then it was very desirable that some arrangement should be made whereby in practice the advantages of a six months' register should be preserved.
The Amendments which were made in another place secure that. What will happen in future will be that when the canvass is made for the annual register a space will be provided on the form which will enable the householder to enter the names of those persons who, though not 21 on the qualifying date for the annual register, will become 21 before the day on which the intermediate register would have been compiled in the old way. Those people will come into full electoral benefit, if I may use that phrase, on 2nd October in every year.
I think this meets the point that was. before the House. It does not deal with all the people who might have come on to the register. There are, for instance, people who are naturalised during the six months and who become eligible, therefore, for entry on the register, but of course those people cannot say with certainty when the annual register is compiled that they will be naturalised half-way through the year. There are also, of course, a number of British subjects who may come from abroad and who similarly will not be able to get on to the register, but I think those qualified by reason of attaining the age of 21 are the overwhelming majority of the people concerned and I think the arrangement we have made will meet the point about them.
It is astonishing how many words it takes in a Bill to achieve an apparently simple purpose. I am assured that all these words are necessary to achieve the purpose which the House had in mind and I commend the Amendment to the House in the belief that it fully carries out the point which my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State undertook to consider.
Mr. Speaker:
I should point out that this involves a question of Privilege and, if it is carried, the necessary entry will be made in the Journals.
During the discussion on the Amendment moved by the hon. Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Bing) which had a similar object in view to that which is effected by the Amendment made in another place, I intervened in support of the Amendment, which seemed to me to be quite unexceptionable in principle and highly desirable if, in fact, it could be achieved without great administrative difficulty or great additional expense. We therefore welcome what the Home Secretary has seen his way to do, the effect of which is that if an election falls at any time during the months between October and March a large number of young persons whose enfranchisement would have been postponed by the abolition of the second of the two annual registers will be enabled to cast a vote. They would otherwise have been disqualified from doing so. I must confess that I have much more sympathy with this class of young person, whose position is being safeguarded by this Amendment, than I have with those other persons who acquire British nationality by naturalisation—the persons to whom the right hon. Gentleman has referred and to whom he he been unable to extend these provisions.
I should like to ask a question as to what additional cost, if any, it is now estimated will fall upon local authorities and upon the Exchequer as a result of the addition of these names in a supplementary list. We have had very unsatisfactory experience in the past on this question of finance. Both the Prime Minister in his broadcast and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his statement in this House on the economies clearly stated that the saving to the Exchequer by the abolition of the second annual register would be £800,000. When we got to the Committee stage of the Bill we were told that that saving would be divided equally, to the amount of £400,000 each, between the Exchequer and the local authorities, but a few days later, at Question time, the Chancellor of the Exchequer made a third correction which was that the saving to the Exchequer alone would be £650,000, and no doubt a similar saving is anticipated as likely to accrue to the local authorities.
When the principle of this Amendment was debated in Committee on 29th November, the Under-Secretary of State, who was in charge, said:
If the charge suggested by my hon. Friend were to be introduced at all it should, of course, be done on a much more comprehensive basis, but I think there is no doubt that if one did so attempt it would go some distance at least to defeating the object of the Bill, which is to simplify procedure and to reduce the costs involved in compiling more than one register.
He went on to mention the figure of additional cost of this proposal forecast by the hon. Member for Hornchurch—a figure which the hon. Member for Hornchurch put at £15,000. The Under-Secretary of State said:
I do not know where my hon. Friend got the figure of £15,000 which, I think, he suggested … but I am afraid I cannot accept that the extra cost or the amount of additional labour which would be made necessary by this new Clause is as inconsiderable as the hon. Member suggests."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 29th November, 1949; Vol. 470, c. 1050–51.]
I am quite sure that before adopting these proposals the Home Office must have given some consideration to the additional cost these proposals would involve and the amount by which the amendment will reduce the latest estimate of the saving effected by the abolition of the second register—an estimate of
£650,000. I would hope that before we part with this Amendment we shall be told by how much the annual saving will be diminished as a result of accepting this proposal.
By leave of the House, I would say that my own belief is that the extra cost of this will be really negligible. It really is the extra cost of printing what may be some 350,000 names spread over the registers for over 600 constituencies. I do not think that on that basis the cost will be very considerable. We have, of course, endeavoured to secure that these names shall be picked up during the course of the ordinary registration. I suppose that if one went into the exact cost one would find that the most costly item of all would be the time taken in some households in writing in one or two additional names on the register. I propose that there shall be space for two names on the forms sent out, because that will allow for twins, and I do not think we should be expected to provide for those families in which fecundity on some occasions is rather higher than that; and if we came across triplets or quadruplets or even quintuplets I have no doubt that their names could be inserted between the lines.