My Lords, I am going to start with an element of agreement with a number of others who have spoken. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, for his excellent chairmanship of the committee, which produced an excellent report and brought people together in any number of different ways.
I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for his charming request to me to put my name to Amendment 24, from which I demurred. The reason I did so was specifically highlighted by the introduction and opening comments from the noble Lord, Lord Lennie.
I subscribe to the key recommendations of the report, to which the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, referred and which he quoted in part. Recommendation 2 refers to,
“further modernisation of registers, including piloting automatic registration for attainers.”
That is all one phrase. The noble Lord, Lord Lennie, managed to pause before he moved on to “for attainers,” because this is in some people’s minds an automatic commitment to move on to automatic registration in general, and I do not support that.
I do support, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, has just suggested, assistance/automatic registration for attainers, because it is absolutely crucial that we get people involved in the community and the politics of society from an early age. That is the reason why attainers are so important. And I recognise that there are other groups—no question about it—that should be registered. The noble Lord, Lord Shutt, made reference to Canada and identified that I had referred to Australia earlier in the debate. When I had the conversation with Tom Rogers, the current commissioner, the other day, he talked to me about how Australia has increased its level of registration. We did not take evidence from Australia, but the Government should look at it.
However, the Government have introduced a series of measures and efforts to ensure that registration improves. Although the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, was right in saying that the register is not more complete, it is more accurate, and that was the evidence that we received in relation to registration. For those who are not economically deprived, the availability of online registration has been proved to be an enormous boon—hence the surge in applications at the general election. Many of them were not valid—they were duplicates and the like—but they were important.
We talk about getting people involved by ensuring that they are registered. One of the other points on which I disagreed with the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, was when he said that people when asked say that they want to participate. Well, the vast majority have the opportunity to register online, and they do not—and, even if they do, I have just checked and the figure for turnout at the last election was 67%. If you ask the question, “Do you want to do something?”, the automatic response, unless you phrase it carefully in polling research, is going to be, “Yes.” It is like motherhood and apple pie— nobody ever sins. So one has to take that in context.
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There are groups that do not want to be registered. “Government”, “IT systems” and “well operated” are not usually heard in the same sentence. We must identify that many people do not want to be registered, for whatever reason. One of my neighbours chooses not to be registered. In my second week as a Member of Parliament, I went to a battered wives’ refuge; they did not want to be registered. There are ways of hiding that they are registered—no question about that—but, as I say, I am concerned about doing things automatically and finishing up with dire results for such people.
I regret the hyperbole in some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Wills. As somebody who was one of the first MPs in the 1983 intake to vote against a government three-line Whip—it was on the then
Government’s paving Bill, because they were altering the system of elections in relation to the GLC—I find his comments unacceptable.
While ensuring that we maximise the numbers for boundary reviews—the original direction of this issue—we should also recognise that large numbers of people are on the electoral roll twice. If we are to have an accurate electoral roll, the people on it should be counted only once. That applies to constituencies in Cornwall and Devon, but particularly to university constituencies. The other day, I was astonished to discover that there are 41,000 students in the Canterbury constituency at three different universities—or arms of different universities. Many of them will be overseas voters. However, if you are talking about levelling up, getting the people who are not registered and measuring a constituency boundary in terms of proportionate electorates, you must at the same time take out those who are double-registered. There is no question that people in inner-city areas suffer deprivation. They move from one home to another, so are not on the electoral roll. But in many constituencies close to here, they are cheek by jowl with people who are registered two or three times because they happen to have two or three homes, or their children are students and the like.
All in all, while I want to see improving levels of registration—and I recognise the achievements in places such as Australia and Canada—we must acknowledge the challenges associated with that. As far as I am concerned, elections are voluntary and registration should therefore be voluntary.