Electoral Administration Bill

The Bill is good and wide ranging. I have also found out the true identity of Michael Caine, which is given in the explanatory notes. I am not sure whether that affects the right of the celebrity known as Maurice Joseph Micklewhite to anonymous registration. I was disappointed that the Opposition have decided to divide the House, as their opposition to the Bill seems manufactured. Although several Members have discussed their differences with the Bill, they could by and large be resolved in Committee, as can my concerns about it. The Bill is a three-legged stool and the Opposition have concentrated on one leg, which they think should be made four or five times as fat as the other two legs. The principle of the three-legged stool—as many people as possible should be able to vote, as many people as possible should actually vote and as few people as possible should abuse the vote—is central to getting electoral registration and participation in elections right. Equal attention to all three criteria is important. It is right to look at electoral administration, because there are questions about all three legs. It is undoubtedly true that the state of registration is a cause for concern. In some parts of the country, as Members have said, a slow train crash seems to be in progress; in many urban areas, registration is dipping below even the incomplete census figures. Of course, we can only discharge the second leg—electoral balance—if people are registered to vote in the first place and in some of those areas turnout is also low, which means that only a low percentage of a low percentage of people are voting. Unless we proceed carefully we shall undermine confidence in the whole system, as we attempt to deal with the problems by shepherding in abuses along with proper measures to make registration easier and more straightforward. It is important that we understand the interlinked nature of all three elements in dealing with electoral registration and turnout. As the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Mr. Pickles) said, in the past our system was based on a high degree of trust. We do not face problems of trust only in postal voting but also in the whole system—that a person is who they say they are when they vote and that they vote only once. A personal identifier for individual voting would not solve the problem of people registering for insurance or credit purposes; they would simply sign on the dotted line. In many spheres, we still trust people to say who they are. Perhaps, in our society, trust is dipping and people feel less inhibited about attempting to obtain electoral advantage by means that would have been seen as venal sins in the past but to some people nowadays are seen merely as venial, if indeed they are considered sins at all. That trust was earned by a system of checks and balances in the ballot, which have mostly stood the test of time. There has not been much abuse of the system over recent years. The public nature of registration and presenting oneself at the polling station have helped. However, modern views about privacy and modern methods of communication present challenges to those checks and balances. In the past, there has been serious abuse of the UK system. It took successive Acts of Parliament in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s to deal with that, as the history of the frequent and quite startling election petitions of those days testifies. The problem with election petitions was that a retinue of judges, clerks, scribes and assistants descended on a town to investigate when a petition had been lodged by the unsuccessful candidate. The expense of the entire revenue was borne by the unfortunate ratepayers of the borough, with the perverse result that local people became so fed up with the bills that they incurred that they invariably voted for the candidate of the party that had been unseated by the petition. They blamed the losing candidate for bringing misfortune down on their town. That was perhaps an example of getting an element of those three legs wrong. We might reflect today on whether vesting the costs of registration entirely in the hands of local authorities is similarly a problem. As hon. Members have pointed out, the application of registration activity varies greatly between authorities and on the basis of how local councils allocate funds from their budgets. In that context, I was pleased that the Bill states that the budget for publicity and other activities will be ring-fenced at £17 million. It says that the Government may repay electoral registration officers the cost of activities, such as producing publicity, that are intended to increase participation. Perhaps we need to consider in Committee whether that wording will produce essentially a challenge fund or a peel-off-on-demand fund. I would not like to think that the electoral registration officers who undertake such activity risk using the money that they receive from local authorities. We still ask some registration officers, by the very nature of the areas for which they are responsible, to undertake enormously greater activity, at far greater public expense, than others who must simply check whether people are still in the same place as they were last year to produce an electoral register that is 98 per cent. or so complete. So we need to have a number of thoughts about the nature of how we fund electoral registration and about the basis of its distribution in the country. I hope incidentally that increased publicity will include local measures to explain how to vote. The Bill makes provision for children to go into polling booths with parents. That will ensure that a number of us no longer experience having to sit with children while the parent goes into the polling booth as in previous years. It is a good idea to expose children to the very mechanism of voting, which would happen if they went into the polling booths with their parents. Perhaps, in times past, as families tended to eat together, they tended to go to vote together, and parents showed their families how to vote. With less geographical cohesion in our society, first-time voters may receive information on something about which they are about as familiar as travelling to the moon when they first vote. I certainly have experience of talking to young voters who live in flats—perhaps young mums—who start off the exchange by expressing familiar nostrums about not voting because we are all the same or because it makes no difference, but it becomes apparent pretty early in the conversation that they simply do not know how to vote. No one has told them about it. They do not know how to vote or where to vote. They are afraid that they might be embarrassed or make a mess of it or that the process requires much more knowledge about the system than is the case. Measures to familiarise people with voting are therefore important. Postal votes are pretty secure once dispatched to a returning officer, but public perception is important. So it is right that we look again at signifiers for both registration and postal votes to ensure that they are more robust but in a way that does not result in the over-complication of registration or in signing for postal votes, so that people simply do not register or, if they are registered, do not cast a vote. Signing on when voting—another provision of the Bill—seems to make an important psychological difference in ensuring that there is a public record and acknowledgement that people are who they claim to be which will stand regardless of how people vote in the privacy of the polling booth. Frankly, part of the debate has turned in the past on the perceived advantage of different measures for parties. High turnout is alleged to favour Labour and therefore concern has been expressed about measures to improve it. By the same token, proper concerns about securing the integrity of the ballot have been downplayed sometimes because of the view that the imperative was to improve turnout using new means of voting when their integrity was still questioned. In fact, such issues affect all parties equally. I have some concerns about the Bill, as I have said. I am not sure whether reducing the percentage of the vote necessary to preserve one’s deposit is wise. There are discussions on both sides of the argument; but on balance, the preservation of a 5 per cent. limit would be wise. As was mentioned by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), action should be taken in respect of the activity involving national election expense when such things are truly local election expenses. There are several issues that we should examine properly in Committee. I am sorry that when we are considering such an important matter as the legitimacy of all parties through the electoral process, the message may not go out from the House that all parties are behind change. If everyone agreed with the reasoned amendment, we would have no Bill at all to consider, which would be a most perverse outcome. I hope that the Opposition will even now decide not to divide the House and allow the Bill to go to Committee. We could then discuss the Bill together and send the message on electoral registration and voting that we mean business by ensuring that the electoral system is accessible, usable and secure.