The big issue in Tower Hamlets, which the noble Lord referred to earlier, was electoral registration. What happened there was clearly improper registration. If the issue of registration had been dealt with, these further issues would not have arisen. This is not just an issue of principle, though many issues of principle have been raised. Rather like the Blair
Government’s move to introduce ID cards, I suspect this will become a matter between the two Houses. The fact that photo ID was not in the Conservative Party manifesto will be significant; I do not think the Salisbury convention will cover the reform as proposed in this Bill. On matters of deep constitutional import such as this, how far we can press our concerns is always a fine judgment for this House. We have these debates and send amendments to the other place, and then they come back.
If this Bill gets through in this Session, the issue of compulsory photo ID might be one where we insist on our amendments, particularly in the context which the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, referred to, about how at constituency level and on a substantial scale there have been no pilots.
I have two other points, since I want to add to the debate rather than to repeat other points. This Bill is one of the most substantial that I have addressed in my entire time in Parliament, with 171 pages, 22 of which are Schedule 1, which governs the arrangements for the introduction of photo ID. Most of the legislation that this House passes is shorter than Schedule 1 of this Bill, which introduces some element of these requirements. There are 22 pages of very dense and complicated legal reforms, and I pity the electoral registration officers who will be implementing them—there will be a host of problems over the implementation. Yet despite it being 22 pages long, huge issues are not even properly addressed in Schedule 1. We are being asked to give Henry VIII powers to the Government to produce further changes in due course. Paragraph (2)(4)(a) of Schedule 1, on page 66, says that regulations may make provision about
“the timing of an application for an electoral identity document”
and
“about the issuing or collection of an electoral identity document.”
These are fundamental issues, and they are not even on the face of the Bill. They will all be subject to regulations in due course which this House, in practice, does not have the capacity to influence or to reject.
On a fundamental and crucial issue which I hope that the Minister can help me with, is there now effectively to be one point of electoral registration or two—the first when you apply to go on the electoral register and the second when you apply for your photo ID? I see that my noble friend Lady Hayman of Ullock has tabled amendments on this precise point, which is of huge importance and has not been addressed in the debate at all so far, of whether there should be provision for you to apply for the photo ID when you complete your electoral registration form. The Minister may have addressed this point in earlier debates, but I could not see it in Hansard. This fundamental issue may be worse than just ambiguous. I look forward to the Minister explaining this, but my reading of paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 is that you cannot apply for the two at the same time.
New Section 13BD in Schedule 1, which amends the Representation of the People Act 1983 by inserting these new provisions, says:
“An application for an electoral identity document may be made by (a) a person who is or has applied to be registered in a register of parliamentary electors”,
It does not say “is applying”. There is a fundamental difference between the two. Can the Minister help the Committee on this, since we are discussing the clause at large and it will pave the way for my noble friend Lady Hayman’s amendment in due course?
Is it the case from my reading of the schedule—I am a non-lawyer—that you cannot apply for both at the same time and therefore that it would not be legal for electoral registration officers to send one form enabling you to fill in your name and details on the register of electors and to make your application for a photographic identity document, but you must do them separately? I may be wrong, in which case I am very happy for the Minister to intervene, but if I am correct, it is a fundamental massive additional issue with this Bill. It effectively doubles the electoral registration requirements. Whereas until now it has been the accepted practice that you register once, you will now have to register twice. My noble friend Lady Lister said that in continental countries, ID cards are the norm, but, of course, there you have them by the time you register to be a voter, and do not have to go through any separate process, nor must you turn up with a separate identity card in due course.
5.15 pm
Some of us have been round the circuit in these debates before. As a member of the Government, I sat through many of the impassioned debates this House held on the Blair Government’s proposal to introduce ID cards. There were strongly held views, and this House carried fundamental amendments to that reform I referred to earlier in respect of very substantial requirements for piloting. That ultimately led to ID cards not being introduced, because the piloting requirements had not been completed by the time the Government changed in 2010. However, I remember speech after speech from the Conservative Front Bench at the time saying that, even though we made it explicitly clear that these ID cards were not going to be used for the process of elections, introducing these ID cards to deal with illegal practices in respect of employment, immigration and asylum was the thin end of the wedge. Before we knew what would happen, they would be required for elections, and this would have the effect of voter suppression.
It is sheer hypocrisy for the Conservative Party now to say the very reform it opposed at the time—a coherent reform, which would have had a single identity document on the kind that applies on the continent—should not be introduced because it might have an impact on elections. Yet they are now introducing a reform requiring voter ID in a much worse form than would have applied if there was a universal ID card. There would not have been any requirement for this separate, second process of electoral registration to start with, and there would not have been the offputting effects that there will be of having to produce another form.
There have been a lot of totally groundless assertions by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, and others that there is an actual threat to the integrity of elections. No evidence has been submitted that would get past first base as to why that should lead to a reform of this kind. I think, particularly listening to the figures we
just heard, a much bigger concern about the integrity of elections will be when large numbers of voters are turned away from polling stations at the next election. They will turn up thinking they can vote in what they regard as the usual way and are turned away from the polling station either because they do not have this form of ID or because they have left it at home and were not aware of the precise one they had to bring at the time.
If the impact is at anything like the scale the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, is concerned about, the big concern these international observers of our elections are going to be raising is that an untested, unpiloted reform of a highly peculiar kind, requiring identity documents specifically relating to an election, has had a chilling effect on electoral turnout in what had previously been regarded as a model democracy. Not only is this a profoundly unconservative reform; it may be one of the most retrograde reforms to promoting participation in elections since we introduced the secret ballot 150 years ago.