Service Voters’ Registration Period Order 2010

My Lords, I should like to express my thanks, and I think the thanks of all Members of the Committee, to the Minister and his team for seeking to fulfil promises given during the passage in this place and in the Chamber of the PPE Bill. He will remember that we had many debates on issues of this sort. I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Roberts of Llandudno who has been a stalwart protagonist for our troops to make sure that they are in the best possible position to take part not only in the forthcoming general election but, of course, in the future. It is extremely important for us to recognise that our troops in Afghanistan, in particular, have every right to express their views through the ballot box in the coming general election. As the Minister said, it is important at this time when so many of our troops are on active service. Again, the context is important: there needs to be a good flow of information for them so that they know what the election is about. Similarly, it is important for us in this country to know their views on the military action that they are being asked to take on our behalf in defence of democracy and freedom. In that context, the Minister may like to dispel a fear expressed in an extraordinary article in the Daily Telegraph today, under the headline, "Army faces Afghan gag for election". I do not know whether it was just seeking to deflect attention from the continuing Ashcroft excitements. It is obviously important that not just the registration arrangements are as expeditious and effective as they possibly can be, but that the collection of votes should also be as well organised as possible. I note that on 5 January the Minister’s colleague, Mr Michael Wills, said: ""It is very important that service personnel are registered and that they can exercise their vote. There are logistical problems in some areas of deployment overseas. We are exploring them vigorously and we have set up the working group. We will take every single measure that we can to make sure that service personnel can vote".—[Official Report, Commons, 5/1/10; col. 6.]" The Minister may like to comment briefly on the progress of that working group. After all, it is only about two months until the likely date of the general election. This order seeks to improve the situation. It may be that it is not going far enough, as was perhaps implied by the noble Lord, Lord Henley. We certainly would have liked to have seen some way in which it would be possible for forces personnel to register through their home base or their unit as they move around, but with the proviso that the electoral registration officer should be notified whenever a member of our Armed Forces is transferred from one unit to another, so that he or she does not by such means get disenfranchised. Whatever we say about the move from three to five years, this is only a small step forward. That is extremely important, and it will still be quite difficult to make sure that registration levels are improved. I am not quite sure whether the figures that I have seen on this meet exactly those that the Minister has given, but I think it is true that 60,000 members of our Armed Forces are currently not registered to vote. There may have been an improvement, as the Minister suggested, but that is a very high figure—much higher than even in some inner-city areas, where there is considerable concern about low registration levels. I noticed this week that the Electoral Commission has indicated that some 56 per cent of 17 to 24 year-olds are not registered. The Armed Forces disproportionately include a large number of younger men and women. Therefore, if that is the general national figure, it may well be that the large number of Armed Forces personnel who are not registered are of that age group. The order does not necessarily deal with the issue of the length of the campaign, an issue which the Minister will know we have raised several times in the Chamber in relation to the 2003 Electoral Commission recommendation that there should be consistency in all elections. In that context, I notice that there have been suggestions that the period of 11 days could be extended to 25 days. I know that the argument here is that this means that all the candidates have to be in place in good time. However, this might also be a very useful reform. Last-minute candidacy does not necessarily suggest a very effective form of democracy. It is certainly true that there was a lot of cross-party support for an extension to 25 days when my honourable friend the Member for North Devon, Mr Nick Harvey, brought forward Early Day Motion 862 in the previous Parliament. The Electoral Commission has again made substantial recommendations on that score, not least to make sure that the electoral registration officers and the returning officers have the best possible chance of avoiding mistakes, avoiding fraud and including as many of the people who should be included in the process of our democracy as possible. I note, incidentally, that those who are currently posted to the Falklands—I think that this has been raised on previous occasions—are certainly anticipating quite a difficult period, given the relatively short gap between the closure and the election day itself, in making sure that postal votes are obtained and used to good effect. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, has already referred to individual electoral registration, which I know that Members on all sides of the Committee have been warmly supporting. The Political Parties and Elections Act 2009 laid down a timetable for that, which is out of sync with the timetable for the service voters’ registration order currently before the Committee. The Electoral Commission, in its December 2009 submission, said that, ""under the proposed Service Voters’ Registration Order 2010 it would be possible for a Service voter declaration to be made in May 2015 and expire in May 2020. This would mean that, for three years from 2017, Service voters would not have provided the same personal identifiers as regular voters"." There may be a case for special treatment, but I should like to hear the Minister spell it out. There might have been an easier way; indeed, the commission pointed out that there could have been an easier way to ensure total synchronisation between the two timescales. I welcome the order so far as it goes, but I regret the fact that it has come at the fag-end of this Parliament, and that unexplained and unorganised questions still remain—as I fear that we are all going to recognise. It would have been better to have proceeded more speedily after the passage of the PPE Act last year so that we could all have looked at this with more care, and with more certainty that there were not going to be future problems.