We have enjoyed an excellent debate, with contributions from my hon. Friends the Members for Luton South (Gavin Shuker), for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) and for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson). My right hon. and hon. Friends all drew attention to the risks of disfranchisement carried in the Bill and talked in detail about the risks to those parts of the population that are perhaps more transient.
My hon. Friends the Members for Sheffield South East, for Sunderland Central (Julie Elliott) and for Edinburgh East also stressed the importance of the pilots on data matching and the need to evaluate their effectiveness before moving ahead to full individual registration. The provisions on individual registration concern us. As the Electoral Commission put it:
“It requires careful planning and implementation and needs to be done in a way that puts the voter first.”
That is crucial because voter registration is at the heart of our democracy.
It is always worth reiterating that democracy is deeply embedded in our society and culture. It has developed slowly over the centuries and was, of course, a rallying cry in the English civil war and in the ongoing struggle waged by movements such as the Chartists, the Reform League and the Suffragettes. Many died for the cause, as was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras. We should therefore not take risks with our hard-earned rights and should do everything we can to strengthen our most precious asset, our democracy. An accurate and complete electoral register is fundamental to achieving that, but we must be cautious and remember the words of the 18th century poet, Alexander Pope, who said:
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread”.
We clearly need to tread carefully, and that is why Labour, when we were in government, legislated for a phased approach to the introduction of individual registration.
Let us be clear that there is no backsliding from the Opposition on the overall principle. We are of the view that we are one of the few countries in the world to practise registration on a household basis and the system has outlived its usefulness, but our legislation was based on important safeguards that insisted that the new system should be phased in and that that should be combined with an annual monitoring of progress by the Electoral Commission and a final assessment in 2014 by the commission of whether to move to a fully fledged individual registration system at that point. The key question is why the coalition Government decided to accelerate the process and demote the role of the commission in assessing progress. When my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East asked that question, the Minister replied from a sedentary position that it was because it was too slow.
Whatever the reasons are, the Opposition are saddened and mystified by how the Deputy Prime Minister and the coalition Government have approached the issue. First, the White Paper set out measures which, if they had been retained, would have seriously threatened registration levels. We saw in the White Paper the proposed opt-out from the process, and there was a proposal that there should be no civil penalty for failing or refusing to register, alongside a proposal that there should be no annual canvass in 2014. That these ideas have all been abandoned, thanks to sustained and rigorous campaigning by Labour MPs and democrats everywhere, is at least a signal that the party which brought in the Reform Act 1867 has not entirely lost its democratic roots.
However, the Bill is still far from perfect and it is clear that the Government are not listening to the legitimate concerns of democrats everywhere. Specifically, although the Government have conceded the use of carry-over
data for the register for the general election in 2015, this will not be allowed for the boundary review due to start in December that year. This leads to the possibility of a boundary change taking place in the context of wide-scale disfranchisement, particularly in intensely urban areas with higher levels of voter turbulence. The Government must listen to the concerns expressed about this by the Electoral Reform Society and by academics such as Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg.
Secondly, the role of the Electoral Commission in assessing progress in implementation of the new system should be restored. It is critical to the independence of our democratic process that this should be so. Moreover, we believe that both the secondary legislation and the implementation plan should be published before the House considers the detail of the Bill, so that we have the most rigorous debate possible on how individual registration should move forward.
We need to see, too, a proper commitment to ring-fencing the funding set aside by Government for the implementation of the legislation. At a time of swingeing cuts to local government funding, we need safeguards to ensure properly resourced approaches to electoral registration, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East. Alongside this we need to see the Government row back from their intention not to carry forward to the 2015 general election the postal and proxy votes held by many currently on the register who fail to register individually in time for that election. The comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central about the importance of making it easier, not harder, for people to cast their votes were relevant in this context. Furthermore, we need the Government to agree to drop the power to cancel annual canvasses. These will remain a critical tool in the constant drive that is necessary to maximize registration of the eligible voting population.
These concerns are not just Labour concerns. They have been raised by a wide range of organisations, including the Electoral Reform Society, and by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, to whose work I pay tribute. It is in sadness more than in anger that the Opposition feel it necessary to vote against Second Reading, because we remain unconvinced that the coalition Government’s unpicking of the Labour legislation is anything other than a partisan attempt to manipulate the concept of individual voter registration on what one can only assume are political grounds. But we will work at representing our demands in Committee and on Report, and hope that the Government will see sense and modify the Bill accordingly, thereby re-establishing the consensual approach to this topic, which we believe is important if our electoral system is to retain its credibility and its integrity.
The great electoral reforms of the past were steered through Parliament by names that stand tall in the annals of our democratic history: Lord Grey, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone and Lloyd George. We remember, too, Stanley Baldwin, Clem Attlee and Harold Wilson, who all in their own way strengthened the franchise and its integrity, and in so doing strengthened our democracy.
I put it to the House that the Deputy Prime Minister, even at this late stage, should consider whether he wants to be remembered as the politician who upheld the principles of our democracy or the one who disowned
and damaged the radical legacy of our political forefathers for the sake of a mean political advantage in the 2015 boundary review. The choice is his: he can either walk with the giants or adopt the stance of a democratic pygmy. We on the Opposition Benches have made our choice and will vote against Second Reading.
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