My Lords, this is perhaps the most important of the amendments that we will discuss today. This group of amendments has basically a twofold purpose. One is to maintain the annual canvass. The annual canvass is a critical tool, not only in compiling the register but as the only way of judging whether the other systems, which we welcome, and all the other work that is taking place on getting information from a variety of data sources are actually working. Without the annual canvass, there will simply be no check on the completeness of the register.
I have discussed this with a number of people who have more current experience in this area than I do, and they are adamant that the old fashioned canvass remains a crucial tool in locating citizens domiciled in Great Britain. Simply put, as has been said for other reasons, houses do not move. Ensuring that their eligible residents are on the list is best done via the canvass—really, nothing else competes.
We will press the Government hard on this, so our other proposals in this group to make it harder to abolish the canvass and to ensure that this could happen only with the super-affirmative procedure would, we hope, not actually be needed. Certainly I think it would be unacceptable to this House for an elected politician in government to take the decision to dispense with this crucial democratic tool. Our amendments, should any such proposal to abolish be considered, would ensure that the Electoral Commission’s report on this came before Parliament, not just to the Minister, and that any similar report published on piloting proposed changes to the annual canvass also came here, with time for debate on those, and that any proposals to change the canvass were made only with Electoral Commission approval. The Electoral Commission was quite rightly set up to take many of these decisions about the running of elections out of the hands of those with a vested interest in the outcome; in other words, elected politicians. It is therefore right that any proposals to change the way the register is compiled, for example, should have the Electoral Commission’s public nod of approval so that everyone can see that fair play in the interests of voters and democracy is taking place. I doubt that anyone will argue with that.
There are other proposals in this group where I doubt the Minister will raise any objection, particularly that the local registration officers should ensure that they have addressed every residential property with which they have contact, whether for council tax or anything else, as well as those in the relevant gazetteer.
There is one further word in these amendments to which I would draw the Committee’s attention: October. It is no good having a January canvass because by the time the register is complete it is almost too late for all the systems to download all that information. It perhaps sounds an easy job but, because it is done locally, the computer formats used by local authorities are not quite the same. I have looked them up. Formats include three types of Strand format, a Pickwick format, a Pickwick variant, CSV files, Xpress formats and page image formats. If all those come in, it takes a lot of
time. If the annual canvass takes place too late, there is simply not time to do all that data cleansing between these different computer programs, on which I do not profess to be an expert.
The Government said that they currently have no plans to remove the power to abolish the annual canvass. I wondered about the word “currently”. I hope it means that the Minister will listen to us about the need for an annual canvass and remove from the Bill that ability to abolish it. Only a few minutes ago, he said that instead of addressing landlords, it was much better to have a canvass of all properties—I think I wrote down his words correctly. Amen to that. A canvass of all properties is an essential tool for making sure we have caught everybody, and the idea that it could be abolished by a Minister without Parliament having a say is one that we could not go along with. I beg to move.