Electoral Malpractice (Northern Ireland)

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 2:46 pm on 29 March 2001.

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Photo of Mr Harry Barnes Mr Harry Barnes Labour, North East Derbyshire 2:46, 29 March 2001

We may have discussed the history of the situation although I do not recollect what was said at that particular time, but, for our mutual benefit, I shall check our records to discover what occurred.

Multiple registration would be easy to control and contain in Britain. We have a rolling register; it may not roll fast enough for me, but supplementary lists are produced each month and people who move about the country can get on to those lists. If registration arrangements were speeded up, it would be possible for students, for example, to be taken quickly off one register and put on another, according to where they were living at a particular time. The problem in Northern Ireland is that that might be open to fraud. There is a three-month residency requirement for electoral registration in Northern Ireland so that people are not encouraged to move into an area just to be able to vote, thereby committing an electoral fraud. The residency qualification applies to by-elections as well as to general elections to prevent people taking up temporary residence and flooding an area in order to affect an election result.

If there were no residency requirement, problems would be presented in a general election; citizens of the Irish Republic might move into Northern Ireland on a temporary basis in order to vote. One way round the problem might be to retain the three-month residency requirement for citizens of the Republic of Ireland but not for citizens of the United Kingdom. I grant that difficulties might still remain, but I am looking for a way round these problems.

The Northern Ireland door-to-door electoral registration arrangements are excellent; they are a lesson to the rest of us. They have to be done in a way that avoids people getting hold of the forms fraudulently and filling them in with fictitious names, and so on. To overcome such problems, and to get the forms completed, canvassers will visit people at home and be face to face with them when they hand the forms over. That practice was probably widespread in Britain at one time, and I should like to see it extended beyond Northern Ireland. It is not only a matter of putting things in order and preventing fraud in Northern Ireland; it is sensible to ensure that as many people as possible who are entitled to be registered actually appear on the register. Something that developed in Northern Ireland because of different circumstances is, nevertheless, a good example for the rest of us.

Government responses to Select Committee reports are never ideal; they will never contain everything one might wish. However, the White Paper contains several valuable provisions that build on the recommendations in the Select Committee's report. It is a move down the road that the Committee wished to follow. Electoral investigation teams, the monitoring of multiple registrations and personal identifiers would all be helpful in ensuring that electoral registration is not subject to fraud, as it has been in the past.

The great shame is that legislation has not been introduced. We shall have to wait until after the coming election--the right hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster said 2001 or 2002--before legislation in on the cards again. I thought that we would move much more quickly.

The White Paper contains a provision for voluntary voter identity cards. The Government see that as a temporary measure; they may be expecting future developments that will lead to the introduction of better technology. The logic is that identity cards should have photographs on them. Driving licences with photographs and passports will be satisfactory for the purpose but, because not everyone is able to obtain a passport or vehicle driving licence, there should be some mechanism by which people can get identity cards. The White Paper mentions that the poor and the elderly might need to resort to such a facility.

The problem is that the poor and the elderly are probably less likely to exercise their rights than other groups. In contrast, others will readily have appropriate documents with a photograph, or will have no great difficulty in obtaining a photo ID card. There might be some resistance or lack of understanding about people's rights. If it is a temporary measure, I hope that we can quickly move on. A situation in which people who are lower on the social scales find it more difficult than others to get on electoral registers is unacceptable, both socially and politically. In the interests of democracy, as well as of our respective parties, we should not accept that. I have some difficulty arguing for my party's interests in Northern Ireland, because the Labour party has not yet come round to organising in Northern Ireland. Everyone should have the right to vote or not for the party that aspires to govern. By their nature, the Northern Ireland parties will always be small parties within the United Kingdom system. I hope that we move beyond a voluntary system and introduce a system that is fairly automatic and easy to use.

The key to everything going right is the development of the peace process. Those groups that are associated with paramilitaries must make a commitment to give up such activity, not as a tactic but to absorb themselves in the political process genuinely. The hope is that the operations of the Assembly and the Executive are such that people from paramilitary groups will be educated to take that approach. If they do so, it will be inconsistent for them to have any association with fraudulent activities. That is probably our greatest hope for putting things right.

However, there will still be problems in respect of the extension of some of the paramilitaries' activities. The Royal Ulster Constabulary has just produced a report showing that there are 78 gangs, 42 of which emerged from paramilitary activity, either current or historical, which are now the equivalent of what I call IRA plc. There might be an equivalent on the loyalist side. That residual problem from the past needs to be tackled and overcome, but it cannot be removed by good hopes. Tough measures must be taken to control the problem. Likewise, electoral malpractice may be reduced by the development of the peace process, but we cannot expect that it will just disappear. When we remove a cause, we do not necessarily remove its effect. Therefore, action needs to be taken in line with the White Paper and quickly.