Electoral Administration Bill

This debate comes round again. Some of us are serving on a Joint Committee of both Houses that is examining the conventions of the House of Lords. Whatever we discover they are, or are not, one thing that incidentally comes into our discussions is a consideration of rules that might be more sensible than those that we have at the moment. An idea that is clearly up for discussion and has a lot of support is the suggestion that once a Bill has moved up and down the corridor between the Commons and the Lords a few times, there might be wisdom in establishing a Joint Committee of both Houses so that the people who know what they are talking about can sit down and try to reach an agreement. However, we cannot yet do that, so we are involved in the annual, occasional—it is not terribly frequent—and important process of finding out whether we can reach a compromise after hearing what both Houses have said. There has been no great delay so far. The Bill was introduced into Parliament in November 2005. It came out of the Lords only on 7 June. We considered it on 13 June, it went back to the Lords for consideration on 20 June, and it is back with us today. Only two weeks have passed since this House first had the chance to consider the great volume of work done by the Lords, to which we pay tribute. As the Minister indicated, nearly all of it was consensual. All of us are clear that we are considering a significantly good Bill that will allow us to make a lot of good progress, yet we are left with one remaining disputed issue. When the time comes, which will be no more than an hour from when we started by virtue of the guillotine, my colleagues and I will vote to uphold the decision that the House of Lords took the other day. We will do so for several reasons. As you know from your constituency, Madam Deputy Speaker, and as we all do from ours, we have to get the balance right on maximising turnout and minimising fraud, both of which we want to do. I have checked the Library note to find out the turnout at the last general election. For reasons about which we could be mischievous, although I will not, the Northern Irish always have the best turnout. West Tyrone won, with over 80 per cent. of those who were registered voting—they must be congratulated. Indeed, the four constituencies in the UK with the highest turnout were all in Northern Ireland. The constituency on the mainland of the United Kingdom with the highest turnout was West Dorset, at 76 per cent. However, sadly, there was a different situation in the constituencies at the bottom end of the league table. The turnout in Liverpool, Riverside was 41 per cent. The figure in Manchester, Central was 43 per cent. and it was 43.3 per cent. in Salford. The turnout in Glasgow, Central was 44 per cent., as it was in Liverpool, Walton. Two Hull seats—Kingston upon Hull, West and Hessle, and Kingston upon Hull, East—both had a turnout of 45 per cent. The figure in Glasgow, North-East was 45.9 per cent, as it was in Manchester, Gorton, and the turnout in Leeds, Central was 46.2 per cent. I cite those figures entirely objectively without commenting on the Members for those constituencies or their parties, but people can obviously check what sort of seats they are. Those figures are not good. According to the Library note, the turnout in the recent local elections in England was 37 per cent., but there were huge variations. In my borough, turnout ranged from 25 per cent. to over 50 per cent. Since our debates began, we have also had the Power report to examine the way in which we can deal with both maximising turnout and minimising fraud. Two bits of objective advice have been given to us, the first of which was from the Electoral Commission, which is the statutory body that has been set up to advise us. The Electoral Commission is in favour of personal identifiers for not only postal votes, but votes cast in person. If a body that we set up is meant to have authority, it seems to me that we should take it seriously and presume that its proposal is the right one, unless there is a good argument against that. Secondly, we have advice from the relevant Select Committee. ““Electoral Registration””, the first joint report of Session 2004-05 of the Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mr. Beith), and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee, said:"““We agree with the Electoral Commission that it would not be necessary to include provision of a National Insurance number as a requirement of registration in Great Britain.””" It also said:"““We believe that the inclusion of a signature in the list of required identifiers is the correct approach.””" The history of our debate shows that the Conservative party started by saying that national insurance numbers should be used, which we opposed. The joint Select Committee suggested that there should be a system that was halfway between what we have now and that more extreme proposal—having a signature.