Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Perhaps I may tell my noble friend exactly what the figures relate to. The percentages were calculated using the mid-2007 population estimates for parliamentary constituencies in the United Kingdom of those aged 18 and above and the number of people registered to vote in parliamentary elections on 1 December 2007. We have a clear description of what we are talking about. No doubt the Electoral Commission will pore over our contributions to this debate and respond to us accordingly. I turn to the position of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. He knows that I have huge respect for him. We have worked on many issues over the years. However, I found his intervention extraordinary. It was almost like the intervention of a government Back-Bencher in the House of Commons desperately defending the position taken by the Government when clearly there is a deficiency in that position. What he is arguing essentially is that it would be acceptable for the Boundary Commission of England and Wales to set boundaries and to change those boundaries on the basis of every local authority having not taken, "““reasonable steps to ensure that the electoral register is as complete and accurate as possible””." That proposition is ludicrous. I suspect that the Government will resist this amendment because they know that local authorities will not have the resources available. The issue has been raised by my noble friends, and I have discussed the Bill with a number of electoral registration officers in the past month, to which I have referred on previous occasions. They make it absolutely clear when I speak to them discreetly that they are very concerned about what might happen to their budgets in conditions of declining local authority expenditure. I cannot see how the Government can assure us that we will gain the high levels of registration that are required when they know that they are subject to these cuts. They know equally that local authority budgets are not ring-fenced, and I hold our own Labour Government responsible for that. We allowed local authorities to proceed on the basis that those budgets would not be ring-fenced. If we had decided to ring-fence them at the time, we might not be arguing as we are arguing today. We are arguing in fear of the fact that we know that electoral registration levels will not be as high as they should be. I have another reason. I think that the Government are not prepared to secure the high levels of registration in the inner cities that are essential to make registration work. When we dealt with the Bill on electoral registration, I talked to electoral registration officers the first time the Labour Government tried to push through individual registration in the teeth of opposition from some of us. This was about 2006 when my noble friend Lord Bach was in Committee. He will remember the amendments that I moved to try to block individual registration. The fact is that parts of Britain’s inner cities are completely inaccessible to electoral registration officers. There are no-go areas in Britain’s inner cities. There are places where you cannot send canvassers. You cannot pay them to go into those areas because they are frightened of violence. When I raised that problem on a previous occasion, people said that it did not arise. Why do they not go into the inner cities and talk to the people who have to knock on doors, ask the questions and hand over the forms? There is a real problem here. I had a number of conversations with electoral registration officers and I felt so angry that I wrote to the Committee on Standards in Public Life, when it was inquiring into the Electoral Commission a few years back, to complain that the commission had failed to consider that matter when it was pushing electoral registration on Members of Parliament in the hope that they would get Parliament to approve individual registration. It got it in the end because the Government backed the recommendation.