Political Parties and Elections Bill

I know that noble Lords will be aware that, during earlier debate on this Bill in another place, my right honourable friend the Minister of State announced that the Government would bring forward amendments in this Committee to facilitate an historic shift in the system of electoral registration in Great Britain. The clauses that have been tabled for debate before this Committee by the Government are an important part of our approach to this issue. I will turn to them in a moment. Before I do so, I would like to briefly place them in context. As noble Lords will no doubt agree, it is essential that all those who are eligible to vote are registered to do so. Those who are not registered are excluded from the democratic process and denied the right to participate. We must therefore always strive to ensure that the register is as comprehensive as is reasonably possible. This means doing all we can to ensure that those who are eligible to vote are registered to vote, which is a fundamental principle of electoral registration. The other fundamental principle of electoral registration is accuracy. The register must be as accurate as reasonably possible, which means ensuring that only those who are eligible to vote are included in the register and that none of the information held about registered individuals is false. It is against the backdrop of these twin aims of comprehensiveness and accuracy that the Government have been considering the possibility of a move towards individual registration in Great Britain. The Government believe that the proper way forward is to combine the implementation of individual registration on a carefully phased timetable with significant new measures to increase registration. The proposed timetable would see the provision of identifiers become compulsory for new registrations not before 2015, prior to which they will be collected on a voluntary basis. I will talk in more detail about the timetable in a moment, but before I do so, I emphasise that the Government intend to take all the steps they can between now and 2015, and beyond, to support the two fundamental principles of electoral registration; namely, comprehensiveness and accuracy. We already have a number of proposals in train for how we can achieve this. We will pilot enhanced data matching schemes under Clauses 22 and 23. These schemes will allow electoral registration officers to share data with other public bodies in order to maintain and update their registers. We will introduce secondary legislation to make it easier for electoral registration officers in areas with two tiers of local government to access information held by the higher tier. We are considering how we ensure that opportunities to register are made available to all sections of society. This will be increasingly important as we move towards a system of individual registration. The emphasis will increasingly be placed on individuals to take responsibility to register and vote, rather than putting the onus on a single member of a household, as under the current system. I now turn to the detail of the proposals set out in the clauses. We need to introduce the change in a way that recognises the fact that this is a radical alteration to registration processes. It is a complex change, which will affect the more than 46 million people currently registered to vote, as well as the significant numbers not currently on the register. It will need to be implemented by more than 400 different EROs, working in different local authorities, in different parts of Great Britain, with different communities. Because of the scale of this change, we must be sure that at every stage we are subjecting the reform to the proper degree of careful scrutiny.