Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015 — House of Lords, 2015-10-27
Topic: Civil Rights
James Bridges (Conservative, Centre-right): No—I am absolutely clear. We need to make sure that we take every step possible to cut down on electoral fraud. Therefore, after such an effort to contact the ghost entries, which puts pestering PPI calls in the shade, and given these facts, the Government believe that the time has come to remove these entries from the register I will repeat a crucial point which I made at the start. Even if someone is removed inadvertently from the register, he or she has not lost the right to vote, as some would have it. Indeed, as I have said before, we want more people to register. A number of noble Lords, such as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, have highlighted the number of those who are not on the register already. I agree—they are right—there are too many of them, and we need to encourage them to register, as I said at the start. Individual electoral registration will help them do that. It is now easier to register than ever before and takes minutes to do online: 460,000 applications were made on the registration deadline for the general election alone—that is five applications a second As the Minister for Constitutional Reform said in his speech last week, the approach to registration needs to be updated and modernised, building on the success of online registration. This will help to meet the challenges of finding and registering those currently missing from the register and build on the excellent work that was done under the coalition The key point is this: the need to encourage voter registration has nothing to do with removing the inaccurate carry-forward entries on the register. As I just said, if a person is not on the register already, they obviously cannot be affected when these ghost entries are removed from the register. As I said at the start, the answer to underregistered groups, such as young people or expatriates, is not to stuff the electoral roll, and potentially the ballot boxes, with the names of people who do not exist but, instead, to encourage more people to vote A number of your Lordships referred to the boundary review, which, as your Lordships will know, begins its work early in the new year, fulfilling the Conservative Party’s manifesto commitment to cut the number of MPs and make votes of more equal value. If we are to create constituencies of equal size, the electoral registers used for the boundary review must be accurate across the UK. Otherwise, areas with large numbers of carry-forwards will get more MPs than those with small numbers This should not be a partisan point, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said. Areas with high carry-forwards include Conservative authorities such as Windsor and Maidenhead, and Kensington and Chelsea. It is right that overregistration be tackled in these areas. Equally, Labour councils such as Barrow, Cardiff and Hartlepool have below average numbers of carry-forwards. Surely it cannot be right that we leave 17,000 carry-forwards on the register in Kensington and Chelsea, according to May’s figures, while there are just 558 in Hartlepool. If we allow this to happen, it will distort the distribution of seats, hitting, in particular, Wales and Northern Ireland, where there are no carry-forwards as they already have individual electoral registration. A full transition to the new system will ensure fairness—something we all should want As we enter a year of elections, the Government believe that we should not retain these ghost entries on the register, making it inaccurate and perhaps making elections open to fraud. As has been said, we are not alone in thinking this. As my noble friends Lord Lexden and Lord Hayward said, the Association of Electoral Administrators supports ending the transition this year for primarily this reason, saying that: "It is crucial to have the most accurate register possible" All democracies depend on a weighing up of interests and a careful consideration of the facts. This is no less true of our electoral system. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, said, we must take an approach that strikes the right balance between safeguarding the integrity of the register and ensuring that the electors registered to vote for the elections next May are accurate. The Government believe that we are past the tipping point. Remember, 96 out of every 100 electors have successfully registered on the new system. By December, at least nine attempts will have been made to contact those entries that were carried forward. The chance of a large number of the remaining carry-forward entries being eligible to register to vote is vanishingly small. No one is losing the right to vote and registering is easier than ever before. This is why the Government oppose the Motions today Although I heed the words of the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I would like to echo the words of my noble friend Lord Cormack. Having broken a convention yesterday by failing to respect the primacy of the other place, the House supporting these Motions would defeat a statutory instrument, not on the grounds that it has been improperly made but because the noble Lords who tabled them disagree with it. It is up to your Lordships to make your decision clear, but it would be killing a statutory instrument—something this House has done only five times since World War II. With a further fatal Motion on the Order Paper for later today, the House is being invited to withhold its approval to three statutory instruments in two days; doing in two days what this House did in the 13 years between 1997 and 2010.