My Lords, I thank the Minister for that comprehensive introduction. We have to think about the context in which we are considering these statutory instruments. I will contain my remarks to the first one, about postal and proxy voting overall.
The context is that, just this month, the Electoral Commission’s report on the May elections noted that there had been a significant exclusion of people who wanted to vote from being able to vote by the process of voter ID. The Electoral Commission concluded that poorer people, people with disabilities and those from minoritised communities were significantly over- represented among that group. The Electoral Commission said that hundreds of thousands of people could be excluded from exercising their vote in the next general election. I note that, like many Members of your Lordships’ House in debates on the Elections Act, the commission made urgent recommendations to allow for a wider list of documents for voter ID and to allow other voters to attest to the identity of a voter who is with them at the time. In this context, can the Minister explain why, in its reflections on the election, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities failed to mention any of the Electoral Commission’s criticisms and described the rollout as “very encouraging”?
That is important in the context of these changes, which I now come to the detail of. First, under Section 3 of the Elections Act, we are looking at a time limit of three years for postal voting, when there is currently no limit. It is possible to look at this in two ways. The first is people being reminded that they have a postal vote. I am sure that some Members of your Lordships’ House have knocked on people’s doors and said, “Have you got a postal vote?”, and they reply, “Oh, I think so. I am not sure”. Obviously, people being reminded of where they are and being reminded to renew is not a bad thing. However, I also think of the many, often but not always elderly, voters who have a pattern: they know exactly what their involvement in elections is and they have been doing it for decades. This is a disruption that could see them lose their right to vote, if they are unable to leave the house to go to a polling station on polling day and they expect their postal vote to turn up, but it does not—and, the day before, they ring the council and it is all too late.
In that context, I have a specific question regarding the operation of Section 3. Will local election returning officers be able to use methods other than post? We all know that, these days, hardly anything arrives in the post except flyers and advertising leaflets. People tend to throw the whole lot in the bin sometimes. Will there be text messages and emails, or will they be encouraged to knock on doors, if they have sufficient capacity? What is envisaged about that three-year reminder?
I come to Section 6 of the Elections Act, about the limit of four on the number of proxy votes. Again, this goes both ways: you can imagine a situation where a family has genuinely sat down and agreed how they want their votes to be exercised by proxy, where this could exclude people from exercising their vote. But I also see the concerns here, so Section 6 is perhaps something to keep an eye on to see how many complaints come in and what the situation is.
Finally, because I do not get to do it very often, I welcome the Government’s move to enable absent vote applications to be made online rather than the current paper process. This is an obvious small piece of improvement. However, will the paper process remain for people who are unable to navigate the online process, as is still the case for many people? I also welcome the digital identity checks for absent voter applications. Again, that seems to be a modernisation.
Introducing the SI, the Minister said that the Government want a modern, accessible system. This SI makes a couple of small steps forward, but we cannot forget the context: hundreds of thousands of people are going to be excluded from voting in the next general election unless the Government change the arrangements for voter ID.