Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister will understand that there is not a tissue paper’s thickness between me and the noble Lord, Lord Garden on this issue. Indeed, we jostled to be first on the Marshalled List to move the amendments. He won this time, but may not do so on another occasion. I joke only about that, because this is a very important issue to which we return. I acknowledge the discussions that the noble Lord, Lord Garden, has had and the work that he has done, but I remind the House that when the Bill started in the House of Commons it was Members of my party who started the attack on the fact that service voting was a shambles. We received assurances from the then Solicitor General, Harriet Harman, that this matter would be looked at. She accepted that there was a problem and hoped that things could be put right in the House of Lords. That was the situation as the Bill left the House of Commons. We are now on Report and we are still without anything from the Government that suggests that we are likely to achieve what I know the Minister is now utterly convinced that we will achieve one way or another before this Bill leaves this House; that is, the measures which we are putting forward today in both these amendments. The two amendments are companionable and fit together to ensure, first, the proper registration of service voters and, consequently and secondly, a proper system to enable service voters to vote. It is the fault of the Representation of the People Act 2000 that what was a perfectly well tried and tested system of service voting came unstuck. The amendment would have that Act overturned to enable us to return to the Representation of the People Act 1983, which placed a duty on the appropriate government department to ensure that members of the Armed Forces were given an effective opportunity to exercise their right to vote. You cannot exercise your right to vote if you are not registered. If you are being moved around the world, from one place to another, and you do not know from one year to the next where you are going to be, it is exceedingly difficult, unless somebody helps you, to have an effective opportunity to exercise your vote because you are not registered. So, we are far down the line now. Amendment No. 15 is tabled in conjunction with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Garden, who rightly stated in Committee that these are not either/or amendments. They work entirely in tandem, as I have said, which is why there is not a tissue paper between us. We should notice that the number of service personnel registered has fallen by 120,000 since the 2000 Act. There were 140,000 service voters registered, but at the 2005 election—as far as anyone knew, given the way that registrations are now spattered around the place—only 25,000 members of the Armed Forces were in a position to vote. As the noble Lord, Lord Garden, has stated, the explanation of how they should have been able to vote arrived, together with the leaflets and their postal votes, within 10 days of voting taking place. That was far too late for anybody to do anything about it, so there was complete disenfranchisement of our service personnel. If we can get such personnel to Iraq and Afghanistan to defend democracy in those countries, then there must surely be a way to enable them to take part in the democratic process. There is a mismatch between the Department for Constitutional Affairs, which was responsible for the Representation of the People Act 2000, and the Ministry of Defence, which has decided that it is just an ordinary employer—and, as such, has no responsibility to ensure that its personnel are registered. Since members of the Armed Forces relinquish a proportion of their civil liberties in order to establish democratic rights overseas and defend liberties at home, it is ironic that they should be the single most disenfranchised group at the last election. I know that the Minister has made efforts to persuade the Ministry of Defence to achieve the proposals put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Garden, and myself. Like the noble Lord, Lord Garden, I am extremely disappointed that today we have only a wimpish amendment from the Government to extend the registration of service voters from one year to five on an ordinary register. We need more than that; a proper amendment, to bring us back to where we all know we ought to be. Service voters ought to be guaranteed the right to vote by their employer, which is the country.