My Lords, I have refrained from speaking on other amendments so as to concentrate my remarks on Amendment 24. I was a member of the ad hoc electoral registration Select Committee, brilliantly chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland. I express my gratitude to Professor Maria Sobolewska and Dr Stuart Wilks-Heeg, who were the brilliant advisers to our committee. Equally, it was a pleasure to work with members of that committee from different political persuasions without rancour. Our only real division was, and remains, over ID cards and their use in polling booths. As I keep repeating, their day will come but we kept that division under wraps.
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My concerns were elsewhere, in that I felt that the whole individual registration agenda, as originally promoted by the Labour Government—my noble friend Lord Wills, who I understand will be speaking today, was its grand advocate—was a huge mistake. As the ad hoc committee made clear, the Act “has not improved” completeness, which was one of its principal objectives. In that sense, it has failed. Completeness stands at the heart of Amendment 24. Furthermore, the agenda has been effectively hijacked for political advantage, which brings me to the amendment.
Local authorities, starved of the resources that they need to ensure accuracy and completeness, will inevitably give advantage to well-heeled, articulate and stable communities and disadvantage the less well organised and underprivileged in socially deprived areas. That has
implications for the Labour vote, in particular in the inner cities where there is a transient, unsettled and footloose population, often living in substandard rented accommodation. I do not want favouritism; I want fairness. Low turnouts in these areas are too often misdiagnosed. They do not fully reveal the nature of the problem. There is low turnout due to lack of motivation, which is our fault—the fault of the parties—and then there is low turnout that arises out of failures to register. They are separate considerations: the latter can arise from shortfalls in accuracy, but primarily the problem is completeness.
I learned that lesson from working in elections in the 1980s, when Lady Porter was the leader of Westminster Council. I always remember canvassing the Peabody estate off Lupus Street in Pimlico and noticing the number of flats where not all the people were registered. In my view, the dropping of a head-of-household declaration, deficient as it is, was at that time and has since been considerably aggravated by individual registration. Yes, that sounds counterintuitive, but it is the case. Look at the evidence. I regard individual registration as an unnecessary and expensive disaster, costing tens of millions of pounds. As an intellectual exercise, it was utterly brilliant; in practice, it was a disaster. In my home county of Cumbria, which I can confidently predict is fraud-free, we are throwing public money down the drain with an unnecessary, burdensome and complicated system. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for a consensus developed a decade ago and have to live with it.
Amendment 24 calls for a report to be laid before Parliament, setting out proposals for accuracy and completeness. Members have already heard or seen the stats, as published in our report—the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, set them out in his contribution—which in many areas expose the failures in the application of the law. The question is: what are we going to do about it? My preference is to repeal the law but that is not on offer. However, we could loosen electoral administrative requirements in some areas and concentrate resources elsewhere. We could target the areas where there are real problems of under-registration and electoral fraud. That has been my case for the last 12 years. As the Electoral Commission put it to our committee,
“under-registration increased among some of those groups that were already less likely to be registered under the old system: young people and especially attainers.”
In other words, it got worse. As our report goes on to say,
“millions … may still be missing from registers, risking disenfranchisement and damaging the integrity of elections.”
In other words, the Act is failing in its objectives.
Our committee valiantly sought to make recommendations that dealt with these problems: the online checking system; lessons from Canada on good practice; registration targets; attainer automatic registration; notification prompts; measures to deal with duplicate applications; data-transfer registration. These can all help, but they need resource. Without it, you will inevitably find gross miscalculations of the size of electorates in the inner-city constituencies where we have most of our problems. As the British Election
Study academics put it in the findings of their dramatic report, incomplete registers have implications for constituency boundaries in the inner cities.
That brings me to my final point: the issue of targeting. I have argued for years to spend the money where it is needed; do not be guided by concerns over political correctness. The now famous Andy Erlam makes my point. This man fought in the East End of London for what he believed was right. He was not cowed by distorted concepts of political correctness. In 2008, I moved an amendment to the then Political Parties and Elections Bill. It would have allocated additional resource to those areas where local authorities were reporting inaccuracies, incompleteness and fraud in electoral administration. After a memorable meeting with the Ministers involved, the Labour Government rejected my amendment on one count: they were concerned about targeting areas where there were substantial ethnic minority populations, despite the fact that that was where the problem was. If we had gone down that route, we could have saved millions. The irony is that the idea behind my amendment came from those very ethnic minorities who were concerned about electoral fraud and were victims of it.
Amendment 24 calls for the Government to lay before Parliament a report on accuracy and completeness. That is exactly what we need. This is a serious amendment that should be taken seriously by the Government. That report should pay special regard to electoral problems in the inner cities. It should set aside misplaced concerns over political correctness. There are lessons from the pandemic, in the early days of which a clear effort was made to avoid levels of high media exposure to the incidence of the virus in ethnic minority communities. The lesson is clear: mistaken political correctness undermines confidence in administration and decision-taking. Amendment 24 could help identify and target the real problems that confront us.