Individual Voter Registration

I would like to cover a couple of elements connected with the prospective legislation though perhaps not the main business. The Minister makes eye contact with me, so I am sure he can imagine what one of those elements will be. First, I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) and his Committee for the work that they have done, although I take issue with one aspect of that, to which I shall return, as the second of my two points. My first point relates to multiple property owners. The hon. Member for Hendon (Mr Offord) referred to this issue, but it has a particular resonance in constituencies such as mine where many properties are second or holiday homes. I pay tribute to a local campaigner, Mr Angus Lamond, who stood as an independent candidate for Cornwall council in the first elections to that new authority in 2009. He stood in a coastal ward with a high number of such properties and noticed that their owners were being targeted in a particular way to get them out to vote. According to the Electoral Commission's guidance, it seems that many of them should not have been on the local electoral register, because we are talking not about people who divide their time relatively equally between two places, but about those who spend a few weekends or a few weeks in the summer in their properties and who are, according to my definition, in no way resident in the community. Some of those people have had second homes for many years and play an active role in the community, for example by fundraising for the local lifeboat, but as a general principle it ought to be the people who live in the community who get to vote, particularly in local authority elections. I have been told that it is perfectly legal for people to be registered in a number of places and to vote in other local elections on the same day by postal vote. I would like us to consider whether that is right, because by allowing that we are effectively saying that those who are fortunate enough to own more than one property can have more of a say in what goes on in this country than those who are not, and I find that very difficult. If we are to have a system that recognised that some people genuinely live in two parts of the country for different parts of the year, whether because of their business lives, family circumstances or studies, I do not have a problem with making them specify which home they regard as their primary address. If one is talking to our great friends in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs for capital gains purposes—famously, some former Members might have juggled the property they registered with HMRC as their normal residence—one should have to specify where and in which community ones lives. If we are to have an electoral system based on constituency mandate—I, of course, favour a more proportional system—that mandate is very important and should be the same for local and national elections. Is there really a problem otherwise? Two of the constituencies in Cornwall were decided at the last general election by small majorities: one changed hands with a majority of 66 and the other was won by fewer than 500 votes. I am in no way criticising the duly elected Members of Parliament for those constituencies, who I am sure won fair and square; I am merely making the point that we are talking about sometimes very narrow margins of victory.