Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, can a local authority or the Electoral Commission speak with accuracy regarding steps being taken by a local authority? The amendment says that, "““every local authority has taken all reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible””." That does not mean that it has to be so exact that, as in the days when I was in engineering, you have to be half a thou within your measurement. The amendment says ““all reasonable steps””. I know through experience that the Electoral Commission is a well resourced body. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, had this experience, but it even said that it wanted copyright for a teaching pack to teach returning officers how to carry out their duties. That is the extent to which the Electoral Commission goes into these matters. Talking about accuracy, my thoughts go back to the days when Strathclyde region was on the go and the famous poll tax was a big worry for every Member of Parliament in the west of Scotland. Strathclyde region took in the whole of the west of Scotland. People were deliberately staying off the electoral register. It was not a case of the man or woman of the house coming to the door and forgetting to say that one of the sons was working offshore but was resident in the household and therefore the canvass could be inaccurate to one person in a family because of the wrong information. This was particularly single people making sure that they stayed off the register to avoid the poll tax. It used to be called the community charge. That was a nice phrase. We called it the poll tax because that is what it was. Mr James Woods was put in charge of electoral registration for the whole of Strathclyde. All the Members of Parliament for Strathclyde met him and said that the voters roll would be inaccurate. When it came to appeals and the Boundary Commission, a big matter would be the number of people on the electoral roll. He told us all, ““Here is what I’ve done. Come and visit my department. I do a canvass and then I do a second canvass and if we suspect that there are people who are taking their names off the electoral roll, we make inquiries””. There was also the question of people having two homes. Sometimes a wife would register in one home and a husband in the other to avoid a double poll tax. Mr Woods assured us that he was putting a high and accurate return on to the electoral register. It would be reasonable for the Electoral Commission to interview someone such as Mr Woods and ask, ““What are you doing? What facilities have you got? We want to visit your premises and see what you are doing””. That would be good enough to give a certificate. It must be remembered that people used to speak with fondness about a local authority called Saltcoats down on the Ayrshire coast which had the cheapest rents in Scotland—the reason being that they had no direct works department and a small local authority. The local authority was so small it would even meet if they had to hire a foreman gardener. Local authorities such as that are no longer with us. Local government has been streamlined. There is often a criticism that some chief executives in local government get paid more than the Prime Minister of the day because of their large responsibilities. I do not wish to go into that as I would stray from the amendment but all local authorities that I know of in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland would be well able to hire a highly competent electoral registration officer who could easily convince the Electoral Commission to give the local authority a certificate to say that it is working to ensure an accurate register. If the Government had a worry about the Electoral Commission, it need not be the Electoral Commission but someone else. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned certification; certification is given to shipping, factories and other bodies.