Yes, and that is what is sad about what the Bill has done. When any legislation to do with elections or boundaries came before the House it was always consensual. This has been highly political, as the opt-out clearly was.
The Liberal Democrats’ position is very strange. As I said the other day, it is the first time I have seen turkeys voting for Christmas. They are doing it yet again on this Bill. They think that they will get some advantage out of it, but I just do not see that at all.
I am still concerned about how the Government will deal with the penalty. If it is a derisory amount, will it be effective? I do not think that it will be. I wait for the Government to come forward with that. The measures were clearly designed to hamper registration and make it difficult for people to register to vote. As democrats, we should not only be encouraging people to vote, but also to get on the electoral register. As I said on Monday, the important thing is not only to get people on the register, but for it to be accurate.
A lot of things have changed since the last general election when the Liberal Democrats were in opposition, but I want to read what the then Liberal Democrat Member for Cambridge, David Howarth, said in the House on 13 July 2009. He said:
“The validity and credibility of democratic elections depend both on the register being comprehensive and on its having a great deal of integrity. If the register is not comprehensive, it is not the electorate who are making a choice but some subset of the electorate. If it is not secure and we cannot be sure that the people whose votes are being counted are electors, that people are not voting more than once or that there is not fraud going on, equally there is a threat to democratic credibility…I do not think that anybody”—
[Interruption.] If the Minister is patient, I am coming on to the issue around changing the date in terms of using the register for the 2015 boundaries.
The hon. Gentleman went on to say:
“I do not think that anybody was suggesting that the timetable be artificially shortened, or that any risk be taken with the comprehensiveness of the register.”—[Official Report, 13 July 2009; Vol. 496, c. 111-2.]
But that is exactly what the Government are doing and that is exactly the situation we will face if the carry-over is used for the 2015 boundaries. The Conservatives know exactly what they are doing. They know that the register will be depleted and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) said earlier, if the money assigned for electoral registration is not ring-fenced, in certain parts of the country no real effort will be put into ensuring that the register is as complete as possible, no matter how much guidance and encouragement is given nationally to local councils, and my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd gave an example the other day relating to the leader of Islington council.
I also have great fears about the data matching. I think that it is a good idea to rely not just on the annual canvass, but to use other methods as well. Durham county council has pioneered that and my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly raised another good example. But if local councils are faced with budget cuts and they can get out of doing the annual canvass, they will, which will deplete the register even further. I think that the annual canvass will be more important in the early stages of individual registration than it is today. The only way to get to hard-to-reach communities practically will be through individual canvasses of those electorates, as my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly said earlier and as the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) said excellently yesterday when speaking to his amendment, particularly in relation to disabled people and those who have difficulty either accessing the registration forms or filling them in. Therefore, I fear that there are things in the Bill that will be used by certain people to ensure not only that it is harder to get on the register, but that there are disincentives for doing so.
The most scandalous thing in the Bill, as my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly has already said, is the carry-over relating to the 2015 boundary changes. It will be interesting to see what the Government do if there is a big drop, which is clearly possible. Clearly such a drop will not be in the more affluent areas represented mainly by the Conservative party. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), said, it will be in the inner-city London constituencies such as his and others where the register will drop substantially. That will then affect the figures that will be used to draw up the new boundaries. They will therefore be artificial and will not truly reflect the electorates.
We should be encouraging people to get on the electoral register, but what the Government are aiming for here—we know why the Conservatives are doing it—is to ensure that those people are not taken into account when the new boundaries are drawn up. I will give an example from the present redrawing of the boundaries. Durham county council, when it came into being, took responsibility for electoral registration; before it was a unitary council, seven district councils were responsible. Registration was patchy in different parts and the councils all did it in different ways. I described the other day how in some areas, such as Derwentside, it was obvious to see that there were mistakes in the register but the council made no effort to address the gaps. When the county council took responsibility, it made a real effort to ensure that the register was as accurate as possible. It put over 12,000 missing electors
on the register, and that had an impact on the boundary commission’s deliberations for the recommendations in the latest redrawing of boundaries. In the city of Durham, for example, a lot of students were not on the register, but they were put on and that had an effect, so there is clearly going to be an effect if we do not have such a carry-over. The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee was very clear about that, and its Chair said:
“There are real risks in moving to a new system, not least that people with the right to vote could fall off the electoral roll in large numbers. This would be damaging to democracy, to public engagement in politics, and to the fairness of the basis on which MPs are elected.”
That is fundamental, and if we read the report we find that, even though the Committee has a Labour Chair, those sentiments are shared across the political spectrum.
Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg of the university of Liverpool said in evidence on 8 September 2011:
“If we do see a large number of people drop off the registers, even if in all likelihood they are not going to vote, that will have a profound implication for the redrawing of boundaries under the new rules that have just gone through.”
My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly asked, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd did earlier, I think, whether the Government have provided a good explanation for introducing the measure. No, they have not.
My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly said that, in the previous Parliament when we introduced individual registration, there was consensus on the timetable, and it is more important to get the measure right and to make the register comprehensive than it is to do what the Conservative party in the coalition is doing, which is to make it more difficult to create an accurate register, meaning that the boundaries will be affected when they are redrawn.
The other strange thing that I cannot understand is why those who have postal and proxy votes will not be carried over, either. My hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly referred to his 86-year-old mother, and her situation will be replicated throughout the country by disabled people and people who have had postal votes for many years, as they will think that, because they have one, it will continue on and on. It will not. If we do not engage with those individuals, we will find that large numbers of a very vulnerable section of society, are disfranchised. My hon. Friend said that MIND and other pressure groups dealing with that section of society have argued against the measure, but the Government seem to be ignoring them, and in Committee of the whole House I did not hear any explanation for it.
Major changes have been made to the Bill, and it is better than the one we started with, but it still has within it that bit of poison, which the Conservatives will use in their attempt to gerrymander the next boundary review, and that is why I will not support it on Third Reading.
6.38 pm