My Lords, I, too, put my name down in support of Amendment 24, having been a member of the Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act, which reported in July, and I pay tribute to the astute chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Shutt of Greetland.
The purpose of Amendment 24 is to oblige the Government to address the accuracy and completeness of electoral registers as a matter of urgency. The Minister, to give him his due, has expressed the Government’s commitment to the importance of this issue, most recently only last week in the debate on the representation of the people regulations. This amendment seeks to inject that sense of urgency and priority into doing something about improving the present situation—there are very good reasons for doing so, as other noble Lords have said.
In the context of this Bill it must be right to improve the data on which decisions on constituency boundaries are taken. The Government—as we constantly hear—value good data, and they are right to do so. Our present level of voter registration, as we also heard, is by many accounts not good by comparable international standards. Nine million missing voters suggest that improvement is long overdue. We could and should do better.
There are a number of possible measures that would address the issue, including, but not confined to, automatic registration, as mentioned in Amendment 11. The proposals for action are out there and are well known. The most important reason to inject a sense of urgency into addressing voter registration, however, is that it is one way—not the only way—of addressing the disenchantment and mistrust with politics in our society. It is about the integrity of our democratic process,
and, as I said at Second Reading, it takes us into the wider political debate about regional disparities, race and inequality. That is what this amendment is about and why a sense of urgency is required. I hope that the Government will accept it.