Electoral Administration Bill

It is a particular pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, North (Ms Johnson), as she and I were political opponents in the constituency of Brentwood and Ongar in 2001. We have all had a glimpse today of how formidable a political opponent she can be, and I am sure that she will prove an enormous success in the House. She was very brave, furthermore, to take on the Government over giving the vote to prisoners. I did not entirely follow the hon. Lady’s logic over giving the vote to 16-year-olds. She seemed to say that people at 16 pay taxes, but so do some young people at 14 or even five, insofar as people with money to spend purchase items that are subject to value added tax. It seems an entirely phoney argument to me. It does not really matter whether it is 17 or 16, but there must be an age at which all the rights accrue. There cannot be a halfway house in which people get part rights and no responsibilities. Some young people are in the Army at 16, but they cannot stand on the front line. I find the idea of child soldiers at the front line repugnant and I do not like the idea of 16-year-olds entering into credit agreements. The argument is misplaced, but it was advanced powerfully. I regret the way in which the debate has seemed to offer us two choices: individual registration or increasing the turnout. It seems somehow that if we opt for individual registration, we are sacrificing voter registration and turnout. I simply do not accept that, but I believe that we must do two important things. First, the Bill must make the electoral system entirely proof from systematic and sustained fraud. Secondly, it must reassure the public that they can trust the electoral system. Members have referred to the MORI poll, which showed for the first time that people believe that it is now easier to commit electoral fraud and are concerned about it. I have been involved in elections for nearly 40 years. In the past few years, people have become increasingly worried about the safety of our electoral system. My electoral registration officer in Brentwood is Mr. Jim Stevens, who tells me that since the general election more than 400 people have returned their postal vote registrations because they do not want to continue voting in that way. In the general election, a number of people were worried that their postal vote would somehow be taken away from them or rendered illegitimate. My hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) talked about observers from Ukraine and other democracies who had witnessed our general election. They produced a report, ““Democratic Institutions, and Human Rights Mission””, and we would do well to listen to some of their remarks. The report mentioned the introduction in 2000 of ““postal voting on demand””, and it said that the lack of an application process"““demonstrated the vulnerability of any trust-based electoral process””." Until the past few years, our electoral system was trust based. We must try to find a way to rebuild trust in our system. Much has been said about the case in Birmingham, and I shall not repeat any quotations that have been offered to the House. I do not mean my remarks in any way to be a barb for any Labour Members in the Chamber, or for their party in general, but one passage in the electoral court report into the matter is especially chilling. It states:"““Here we have two wards, some distance apart, in both of which the Labour party organisation has conducted a large and skilful campaign of electoral fraud, using precisely the same techniques in each case. This cannot be a coincidence. But did it go wider? In my view, it does.””" It is a shock to realise that our system has become so vulnerable to systematic fraud, but we must accept some of the lessons so eloquently set out by the hon. Member for Belfast, East (Mr. Robinson). The dilemma is often described as how to strike the balance between security and turnout, but I suspect that few people will be willing to turn out in an election if they do not trust the system. I believe that the balance to be struck is between sensible security, over-reaction, and security against fraud. I shall deal first with security against fraud, which involves the problem of individual registration. I see no reason not to move towards individual registration. The discussion about whether we should use national insurance numbers was utterly pointless. Sure, we could use some other method—iris recognition, DNA, blood sample, or a person’s ability to recite the ““Star Trek”” cast list.