Electoral Administration Bill

I beg to move,"That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Electoral Administration Bill because it fails to introduce necessary and sufficient measures to restore public confidence and integrity in the electoral system, owing to the absence from the Bill of the tried and tested Northern Ireland system of individual registration; because it lowers the threshold for lost Parliamentary deposits, which will assist extremists like the British National Party in spreading racist propaganda; because it perpetuates the flawed system of all-postal voting and fails to provide for the proper Parliamentary scrutiny of election pilot schemes; and because it exposes the Government’s continuing preoccupation with electoral modernisation that has undermined the UK’s reputation for free and fair elections." Nobody could present the measures proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) better than he doubtless will. We stand behind his proposals, but I shall not even attempt to explain them. Given what has happened to our electoral process, no Opposition politician could fail to point out that when Labour was elected in 1997 the promise was to restore trust in the political process and to introduce a new politics. Since then, the electoral system has been tinkered with on many occasions, often for partisan advantage. The Government have opened the door to an older form of politics, which was riven with abuse and corruption and which all of us were glad ended more than 100 years ago. Electoral law was the most unexciting and staid corner of the Home Office until the Government turned their beady eye on the subject. Since then responsibility has changed three times to three Departments, we have had six Acts of Parliament—the Bill would be the seventh—and we have ended up with a system that has led public opinion and confidence in the electoral system to collapse and compromised the perceived integrity of Britain’s once proud electoral system. There is no question that what has happened is wrong. Something substantial needs to be done, but the Bill is inadequate. We needed a strong sword to defend our democracy and what we have is a damp lettuce leaf. I shall start with the proposals for pilot schemes for collecting personal identifiers. The introduction of postal voting on demand in 2000 was a welcome step. It allows electors to apply for a postal vote without any specific reason. It has led to an upsurge in postal voting and we do not oppose that at all. However, the experience has shown that we need firm anti-fraud measures. Things have got to a point where we have had international election observers from as far away as the Ukraine and Serbia, those well-known beacons of democracy, coming to the United Kingdom to tell us how to run our system. They warned that the issue of postal voting has raised lingering doubts about this country’s ability to regulate elections securely. They went on to suggest a way to overcome the problem—individual voter registration—for which the Government’s own Electoral Commission and MPs from across the political spectrum have also called. The Government’s proposal for a few local authority pilots is wholly insufficient. There is no need for pilots—Northern Ireland, a nation in itself, has trialled the system extensively over a number of years—which are simply a delaying tactic. Conservatives want to see the Northern Ireland scheme introduced in Great Britain, with national insurance numbers used to verify registrations, which is essential to ensure an accurate register and to curtail postal vote fraud. The Government do not like the use of national insurance numbers and initially opposed their use in Northern Ireland. It is, however, worth reminding them that after pressure in the other place by Conservatives and Unionists, the late Lord Williams helped to introduce their use in Northern Ireland. The electoral registration officer for Northern Ireland, Denis Stanley, with whom I have discussed the matter, told me that he was initially concerned that the use of national insurance numbers might have an adverse effect on registration, but his fears have been allayed. In a road to Damascus conversion, even the Northern Ireland Office now admits that national insurance numbers were"““central to enhancing the accuracy of, and confidence in, the electoral register in Northern Ireland””." The dead were voting in Northern Ireland, and now they are not. Some 94 per cent. of the people in the census were registered to vote before the change, and the figure is now well ahead of the registration level in many inner-city areas, which is an issue that the Minister has discussed.