My Lords, unlike some other speakers, I think that constitutional affairs merit parliamentary time, even in a recession. Constitutional arrangements matter because, in the end, they reflect the distribution of power in our society and that perhaps matters even more in a recession. I welcome the Government's commitment to maintaining the impetus for reforming the arrangements for royal succession. That is very desirable, as the noble Lord the Leader of the House said. I had hoped that I could welcome the other constitutional measures proposed in this Queen’s Speech. I was the Minister responsible for the legislation which introduced individual voter registration in the last Government and I still support it, and I have long been in favour of a democratically accountable House of Lords. Yet I fear that the approach the Government are taking to both these measures not only weakens the case for them but is in danger of sacrificing the health of our constitution in the interests of short-term political manoeuvring.
I suspect that electoral registration will not feature much in the discussions over the next two days. It is a technical issue of interest to few voters but it is, as the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has already said, a matter of real significance because eligible voters cannot exercise that precious right to vote unless they are on the register. Individual registration is a desirable principle—citizens should be responsible for their own eligibility to vote—and can help tackle fraud, although the extent of electoral fraud should not be overstated. I note that the noble Lord the Leader of the House did not mention any judgment on the extent of fraud. He said that it had to be tackled, as of course it should be, but, as I will say later, it is not prevalent as he was suggesting. Nor, even when it exists, can electoral fraud be tackled entirely by individual registration. That is not a panacea.
Whatever the merits of individual registration, it carries with it the severe risk that significant numbers of people who are eligible to vote will disappear from the register and so be unable to vote. That was the experience in Northern Ireland when it moved to this new system of registration. More recently, the Electoral Commission has said that the introduction of individual registration, under the measure proposed by the Government, could mean that,
“the register could go from around a 90% completeness that we currently have to around … a 60% completeness”.
The fall-off in registration is likely to be particularly marked among young people and students, people with learning disabilities, people with disabilities more generally and those living in areas of high social deprivation. There is already a serious problem with the electoral register in the United Kingdom. The latest estimate from the Electoral Commission suggests that at least 6 million people who were eligible to vote
were not registered to do so in December 2010. The introduction of individual registration risks making a bad situation significantly worse.
The previous Government tried to tackle that problem by tying individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register by 2015. In the last Parliament, the Front-Bench spokespersons in the other place for both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats approved and supported this approach. This Government could have continued with that approach but have chosen not to, for reasons that they have never adequately explained. They are rushing forward individual registration while removing the key safeguard of linking it to the achievement of a comprehensive and accurate register.
Why might they have done that? Why might they abandon the careful non-partisan approach of the previous Government to this issue? The Leader of the House suggested today that threats to the integrity of the register were the reason for their haste, but the independent bodies that we have tasked with safeguarding the integrity of our electoral system do not share that assessment. Analysis carried out regularly by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Electoral Commission found,
“no evidence of widespread systematic attempts to undermine or interfere with the May 2010 elections through electoral fraud”.
So why the rush? It is hard to avoid concluding that it is being driven by the pursuit of party political advantage. Most people agree—this is not really a matter of dispute—that those eligible voters who are not registered to vote are most likely to vote Labour when they do vote. The evidence suggests that the party that will suffer least, if at all, from any fall-off in registration is the Conservative Party. Electoral registration is only 90% complete in Labour seats; it is 94% complete in Conservative seats. That partisan effect will be amplified considerably by the boundary reviews in 2015. If conducted on the basis of such a flawed register, they will have the effect of increasing the number of Conservative seats and decreasing the number of Labour ones.
I ask your Lordships again to consider carefully the impact on our democracy if it turns out that the outcome of a general election has been determined by the fact that millions of eligible voters could not vote because they were not registered to do so and that this was the result of a government policy, deliberately pursued despite all the evidence that it would have precisely this consequence. I hope that the Government will think again about their approach and might be prepared to accept any amendments that might come forward to once again tie the desirable introduction of individual registration to the achievement of a comprehensive register.
Then we come to the proposal for House of Lords reform. This proposal is not being driven by partisan self-interest—it has become a prisoner of it. I do not want to say very much about this; I am sure other noble Lords will have a lot to say about it. In my view, though, and I speak as someone who supports reform, many of the arguments against it—the cost, the assumed excellence of the current arrangements, the paramount importance of achieving consensus as opposed to
simply striving for one—could all have been produced to resist every advance in the democratic accountability of Parliament over the past 200 years, and often have been. In the complaints about there being too many politicians, I sometimes hear antidemocratic undertones that I personally find disquieting.
For all that I wish to see your Lordships’ House elected, though, there is one criticism of the Government’s proposed legislation with which I agree, and it is fundamental. When the White Paper was published, I and many others criticised it for its inadequate approach to the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament that would result from reform. Clause 2 of the draft Bill is clearly inadequate to achieve its objective of preserving the primacy of the House of Commons. Such criticisms have been powerfully reiterated by the Joint Committee report and the alternative report.
An elected House of Lords does not inevitably mean gridlock in our constitutional arrangements, but work has to be done to find solutions to this potential problem and the Government have failed to do it. There is no shortage of proposals—a concordat between the two Houses, for example, or some form of codification of the functions—and you cannot reform the composition of the House without also looking at the functions. Why have the Government rejected this approach and refused to look at it up until now? I welcome the fact that the Leader of the House said that the forthcoming legislation would take account of the criticisms of Clause 2, but the flaws in that clause have been manifest at least since the publication of the White Paper, and should have been foreseen before it was even published. Why have the Government left it so late? All the solutions to this problem, and there are several of them, have advantages and disadvantages. They need to be debated and the public need to be engaged in a discussion on this, but the Government have done absolutely none of this.
This Bill is recognised as coming from the Liberal Democrat part of the coalition. Why are they pushing forward with such a flawed proposal? I am afraid that it is hard to avoid the suspicion that they want to use what might be only a temporary position in Government to engineer a constitutional reform that, with proportional representation, would be likely to secure for them an influential position in Parliament for the foreseeable future.
Such a partisan approach would be bad enough but in the past few days, if we are to believe the heavily briefed stories in the press, the electoral problems of the Government and the need to appease Conservative Back-Benchers are going to cause reform of the Second Chamber of our Parliament, something to which all three main parties are committed by their manifestos, to be delayed, abandoned or, as I saw in one report, made subject to a post-legislative referendum—incidentally, a process hostile to the representative democracy that participants on all sides of this debate profess to support. That is all being brought into play by the short-term political difficulties of this Government.
It is disappointing that the Government’s proposed legislation on an issue of such profound constitutional importance should be so inadequately prepared. It would be shameful if such a lack of preparation were
the result of the self-interested haste of the Liberal Democrats. It is an indictment of the Government that the future of this important constitutional reform now appears to be held hostage by the short-term political manoeuvrings of an unpopular Government.
Something could still be salvaged from this mess if the Government would only think again about their approach, accept that they need to do more work on securing the primacy of the House of Commons, use independent experts to advise them on this—something, as far as I am aware, that they have not yet done; certainly not in public—and then of course consult the public on possible solutions in a properly deliberative process, as I have talked about many times before in this House. Then, and only then, should the legislation be finalised before it is returned to Parliament with an adequately worked-through proposal. I hope that they will do that and ensure that Parliament does not once again turn its back on this long overdue advance in democratic accountability.
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