My Lords, there is no question of inadmissibility for these amendments. Indeed, questions were raised during the debate that we had a short while ago that addressed, in particular, the transitional arrangements to the new, individual electoral register.
Two subjects are under discussion and, if noble Lords will permit, I will deal with them in turn. The first is the removal of absent votes from those electors who do not register under IER in 2014. My noble friend Lord Rennard’s Amendment 50 and Amendment 51, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, speak to that issue. The amendments would leave in place absent votes for the 2015 general election for voters who have not registered or been verified under IER. To respond to my noble friend’s challenge, I think that he is saying that that is incompatible with the arrangements that we have elsewhere. One of the drivers of IER is tackling electoral fraud, and especially vulnerabilities to registration fraud, to restore voters’ confidence in the system. Moving to a position where all those casting postal votes or using proxies have been verified through IER will add an additional safeguard to the system at the earliest possible opportunity.
The Electoral Commission agrees with this position and stated in response to Amendment 50:
“We oppose this amendment because we believe that the security of the absent voting process should be improved in advance of the 2015 UK general election”.
The use of data matching to confirm entries will mean that a significant number of current postal voters are likely to be able automatically to retain their postal vote in the 2015 general election. Others who are not automatically confirmed on the new register will be given an opportunity and reminders to register under the new system in 2014 and, if they choose not to, will still be able to cast a vote—not a postal or proxy vote, but one in person—at the 2015 general election. We are not disfranchising anyone, but the driver is, of course, to get people to register under IER.
There will be clear communication to anyone with an absent vote who is invited to register under the new system about what will happen if they do not do so, and in the event that the person does not register, they will be written to again to inform them that they have lost their absent vote and giving them the opportunity to register under IER and reapply for their absent vote. This is a participatory exercise; it is not designed to remove legitimate voters from the register.
Those steps, alongside the addition of the other measures we have introduced to maintain completeness, such as the introduction of the civil penalty, minimise the risk of someone with an absent vote inadvertently losing it, which was one of the noble and learned Lord’s concerns, while as promptly as possible bringing in an important safeguard against fraud.
I now turn to Amendments 48, 49 and 58, each of which relate to the carry-forward of existing electors under IER. I briefly remind the Committee that, under our proposals, there is already a carry-forward function to include those from whom a canvass form has been received in the final pre-transition canvass, which we intend to conclude in spring 2014. Those who do not
make a successful application to register and are not confirmed by data matching, which of course the vast majority will be, will remain on the register throughout the transition to TIER, including the register used for the 2015 general election.
Amendment 48, tabled by the noble and learned Lord, would have the effect of including in this carry-forward those electors who last registered in the canvass of 2012. This would retain until 2015 the entries of electors added to the register last year who did not respond positively to the final non-IER canvass. If entries from 2012 were kept on the register until 2015 without any subsequent evidence that the person was still resident there, the register for the next general election would contain entries where the ERO had not heard from the elector for more than two years. We believe that this is too long for the ERO to remain satisfied that the citizen is indeed still resident and that the effect of this amendment would be to increase the inaccuracies on the register, something I think all Members of the Committee would agree should be avoided. Indeed, much of the debate we had earlier was about inaccuracies on the register.
Amendment 49, also tabled by the noble and learned Lord, would extend the carry-forward for one year, so that non-IER entries on the register are not removed until 2016. Amendment 58, tabled by my noble friend Lord Rennard, would mean that the final transition to an electoral register made up solely of individually registered electors could take place only following Parliament approving a statutory instrument. We are not minded to adopt these proposals because of the likelihood of the inaccuracies they will bring to these early IER registers. We know that carrying forward non-IER entries on the register will result in some inaccurate entries being carried forward. We judge that this is an acceptable risk to take to protect the registers for the general election in 2015.
However, when the registers are published, after the 2015 canvass, in December 2015 it could have been nearly two years since the ERO had heard from the individuals in question here, which brings in the risk of a high degree of inaccuracy. Under the noble and learned Lord’s amendment these entries would remain on the register and under my noble friend’s amendment they would remain on the register if Parliament did not vote to engage the removals process in 2015. Furthermore, under our plans, by the time of publication of the registers in 2015, those individuals who are not confirmed automatically at the start of the transition will have had more than a year to register individually, over two canvasses, and will have been contacted a number of times by their ERO. There will also be a general election between the two canvasses—a time when awareness of politics and voting is at its highest. Our intention—and I hope this reassures noble Lords who are the authors of these amendments—remains that EROs will write to individuals who have neither registered nor been confirmed towards the end of the 2015 canvass to inform them that they will be removed and to offer them one further chance to apply to be registered.
I hope that is reassuring. The intention behind these amendments is to maintain the number of entries on the register, but in our view they risk reducing the
accuracy of the register to an unacceptable degree. In the case of the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Rennard there is also the difficulty of creating uncertainty for the public and administrators which could undermine the effectiveness of our plans for the transition. The Government are confident that our proposals for the transition to IER are about right. We will avoid the problems that this group of amendments is intended to address and, for the reasons I have set out, I urge the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.