Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, I have sympathy with some of the sentiments expressed by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours about where electoral stations should be located. There is clearly sense in using school-houses for this purpose, not least because, in the past, each village and town would have its own school. I speak with the experience of coming from a rural constituency in Cornwall, where the schools are getting bigger; local village schools are being closed and our children have to travel longer distances to school. This probably makes sense because we are able to give them a better education and ensure that the schools are better resourced with technology. However, it means that people in rural communities who tend to use schools as voting centres will now have to travel a greater distance to the school. This has always been a problem in rural constituencies. My mother never voted until quite late in the day. At about nine o’clock in the evening people would knock on the door and say that she had not voted, and the Conservatives and Liberals would offer cars to take her to the voting station. She always went with the Conservatives because they tended to have rather big cars and she quite liked that. She always voted Labour but she felt that it was a part of the joy of the constitutional process to go in the kind of large car in which, no doubt, the Leader of the House is accustomed to travelling, both in his ministerial office and in his private life. A school is not the obvious place to hold an election and there is an opportunity here which resonates with the big society. Like many people, I have been wrestling to understand the big society. It is like trying to put together a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and I have now got 15 pieces on the board to help me work out what it is. I am not unattracted by creating a part of the complex of our social life which is not dominated by governmental or quasi-governmental institutions and where a sense of community is fostered. One of the things I suggest to the Leader of the House is that we should give real consideration to looking at nodal and communication points, where people cluster in communities, and see if we can put polling stations in those centres. People clearly now gravitate towards urban shopping centres and out-of-town shopping centres; perhaps we should at least experiment with putting polling stations closer to where people go in their day-by-day life. The local post office is the obvious place, for instance, to have a polling station in a village that has for many years not had a school-house. This observation tends to point me in the direction of supporting the sentiment expressed on this point by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. I wonder if I could also just delay the House for a brief moment to pick up a point made by my noble friend Lord Soley: why the application for a postal vote requires the date of birth at all. Can the Leader of the House explain this? We now operate in a society where it is increasingly regarded as inappropriate to ask people their dates of birth. Indeed, when you interview somebody you are no longer allowed to ask their date of birth; you have to deduce it from their education and their appearance. It seems quite extraordinary that this is a requirement of the postal voting form. There must be a suspicion that, perhaps if one misrepresents one’s age—one perhaps becomes accustomed to taking a couple of years off in polite conversation—you might complete the form incorrectly and in so doing prejudice your vote and conceivably the outcome of the whole election. I ask the Leader of the House if he can tell us why it is necessary that people should still be embarrassed by having to disclose their date of birth.