Electoral Administration Bill

I want to talk about registration and personal identifiers. On Second Reading, I said that I wholeheartedly agreed with the Minister’s caution in not making a change to individual registration. That caution is the key thing. Today, as we did on Second Reading, we have debated the crisis in registration—that about 3 million to 4 million citizens are not included on our electoral registers. That is a serious matter. The Electoral Commission has pointed out that under-registration is high among certain groups. The figures from the commission’s research are borne out when we check out such groups. One of the groups most under-represented on the register were people who had moved during the past two to three months. When I checked with the Salford ERO, I was told that the areas with the most problems were those where there are six-month tenancies. The problem is serious. A large number of people—between 30 and 35 per cent.—in inner-city wards and polling districts are not registered. As I said earlier, we should not be raising additional barriers to electoral registration when a third of people in a polling district or an area may not be registered. We should be doing the opposite. As Members have already said, we should be encouraging people to register and targeting the groups most subject to under-registration. When prompted, people who had not registered said that it was a chore or time-consuming, or that they did not understand the process. Another important point, which relates to the amendments, is that people said that they were nervous of bureaucracy. All the proposals in the amendments would make that situation worse. We know that the change to personal identifiers in Northern Ireland, including national insurance numbers, caused a 10 per cent. drop in registration, so it is astonishing that the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald) talked about success and said that registration was high in Northern Ireland. I do not regard 91 or even 92 per cent. as high. When 89 per cent. of people in a community are disfranchised after an exercise to develop a better register, that is not acceptable.