Electoral Administration Bill

I get the impression that the Government came to power full of great ideas for reforming and improving the electoral system, but so far there has not been much progress—or at least only in limited areas. The Government have already introduced two major changes to the electoral system and the Bill will bring a third. The first change was the introduction of rolling registration, which as far as we can tell has gone reasonably well, although people have said that it may enable bogus voters to stay on the register indefinitely. The second change was the relaxation of access to postal voting, which was a disaster. The details of the Birmingham case and everything that accompanied it—the so-called warehousing problems—need not detain us. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) read part of the judgment and it was absolutely right, as was the judge. The Government and the Electoral Commission between them really mucked it up. They failed the first and overriding test of any reform in this field—to maintain confidence in the system. The credibility of the electoral system has taken a severe knock among a large section of the electorate. It is paramount in any democracy that people should believe that the electoral system is fair and acceptable and not subject to fraud. The Government make a number of proposals in the Bill to try to prevent such things from happening again. One proposal is to create a new offence of falsely applying for a postal vote. I am no lawyer, but I am not yet convinced of the need for that offence. The people who engaged in the so-called warehousing in Birmingham knew very well that they were committing an offence. The new offence seems to have the smell of ““display purpose only”” legislation, of which we have had so much in the past few years, adding to the statute book but perhaps not to the effectiveness of the law. Of course the third major change to registration, which is a major part of the Bill, is the switch from household to individual registration. Frankly, I cannot tell whether the Government intend to introduce personal identifiers and keep the household system going, or whether they really intend to move to a truly individual registration system eventually. I was still not clear on that, even after the Minister had introduced the Bill. What is worse is that the Government clearly want one thing, a halfway house, while the Electoral Commission wants another—it wants the Bill to go the whole hog right at the start. I certainly have the impression that the Government are dragging their feet on the Electoral Commission’s original proposals. I am sceptical that the integrity of the electoral system will be seen to improve much with the Government’s halfway house. I would not have rushed to adopt individual registration, but I am beginning to warm to it now that I have heard the argument tonight. The Electoral Commission, of course, wants a truly individual registration system. It believes that such a system is now a vital part of restoring credibility in the system after the postal voting farrago. Sam Younger makes that clear in the briefing letter that, I think, was sent to all MPs, when he says, ““Without individual registration””, by which he means the fully fledged system,"““it is hard to see how the very real concerns . . . about the security of the postal voting system can be properly addressed.””" We have had an experiment with postal voting. It has gone wrong, and to patch it up we are about to embark on another experiment, with the Electoral Commission pulling one way and the Government another. The fact they are already arguing about that pretty much in public does not make me very optimistic about success. Why do we need to take such risks with something as important as the credibility of the electoral system, which was already working reasonably well before the reforms began? We have heard some of the answers from those on the Front Bench. Of course, the main answer given is that a good number of people—in particular, the Government—convinced themselves that the old system was not working. Whenever we have these debates we tend to hear quite a lot about how voter participation is in sharp decline, about fears of voter apathy and, as a consequence, of great dangers to democracy and the like. Of course our system is imperfect, but as I have already intimated, the greater risk may lie with half-baked changes that can further erode the electorate’s confidence in the system. In any case, I am not convinced that the electoral system is in such a terrible mess. I think that the doomsters have largely got it wrong. No amount of meddling with the electoral system will dramatically increase turnout. That will come when the electorate go into an election very uncertain of the result. I do not think that they did so at the last election, and they certainly did not in the 2001 election when the turnout was very low. When the outcome was uncertain and two parties were arguing vigorously, with very different policy stances, we had one of the highest turnouts ever seen in this country, as recently as 1992. I do not think that the country has suddenly gone into a paroxysm of apathy since then, and the case is greatly overstated that voter apathy and problems of participation have increased massively—but perhaps we should debate that wider issue more deeply another day. Wherever the Government have introduced such proposals, whenever they have travelled down the road of electoral reform, we seem to be given further evidence of the law of unintended consequences, and I fear that the Bill will be more of the same.—[Interruption.] The Minister is saying something from a sedentary position that I cannot hear, I am afraid. She is welcome to intervene if she wants to.