My Lords, I declare an interest as the Lords Minister in the coalition who had to carry through the change in patterns of electoral registration. I still carry some of the scars from the speeches made by the noble Lords, Lord Wills and Lord Campbell-Savours, and others during those debates. That was when I became well aware of our antiquated system of electoral registration, which we inherited from the days when only heads of households voted. I was also conscious that changing to individual registration was like the 1999 House of Lords report: a halfway house that was not going to take us all the way.
During our discussions within the Cabinet Office I also became interested, for the first time, in digital transformation in government. It was clear that if we were to make much fuller electoral registration our aim, we would have to employ data sharing and data transfer. I remember my shock when we approached the Ministry of Transport on whether we could share at least the outlines of addresses and names in the driving licence scheme. The DVLA and Ministry of Transport’s first response was to say no. I understand that we now compare the names and addresses of people with national insurance numbers on the DWP database with electoral registrations. That is a step forward. We all know that moving toward data sharing within government is a complicated and sensitive area where we must take great care.
I remark to the noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, that responsibility for this matter has just moved back from DCMS to the Cabinet Office. They will therefore answer to us when the
Government, if they hold to their promises, publish the digital strategy White Paper which they have promised before the end of this year.
I remind the Minister that the Conservative manifesto refers to voting as an expression of someone’s “full citizenship rights”. If it is a mark of one’s full citizenship rights, we should do our utmost to ensure that all citizens are on the register. We have this problem in Britain that many people do not want the state to know who and where they are. Thus, the concept of citizenship is itself in some ways contested. We need to move towards automaticity, if I may use that term. We will move slowly towards it, rather than relying on underfunded and overworked electoral registration officers at the local level to fill this 6 million to 9 million gap.
The noble Lord, Lord True, was unhappy that I hinted at Second Reading that some Conservatives are as concerned to exclude some people from the register as to include everyone in voting. If that is the case, let us do whatever we can to include everybody. That means moving towards use of comparative databases to ensure that everyone is on the register. Rightly, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, raised the question that some people do not want everyone to know where they live. That raises large issues of transparency versus privacy, which we will again want to debate.
We also understand the questions of publicly-owned digital identity. That is another sensitive area, on which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, takes a strongly held view. I take a middle view, and there are others who believe that privacy overrides the right of the state to know who and where we are, or the right of the citizen to have access to all the public data the state holds on them. This is an area that we should look to move further forward on. That means we have to move towards automatic voter registration, including for retainers. I therefore support the amendments.