Representation of the People (Electoral Registers Publication Date) Regulations 2020

Motion to Approve

Moved by

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 15 June be approved.

My Lords, on 9 June I announced to the House that, in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Government intended to bring forward legislation to delay the deadline for publication of this year’s revised parliamentary and English local government registers by two months, from 1 December 2020 to 1 February 2021. As we all know, the electoral registers are lists compiled by electoral registration officers—EROs, in the jargon—of people in their areas who are registered to vote. EROs are appointed by local authorities across Britain and each holds two registers: a local government register for local polls and a parliamentary register for national polls, primarily parliamentary general and by-elections. Both registers are also used as an information source for credit reference agencies and in jury summons.

The annual canvass is an information-gathering exercise which ordinarily runs for five months, from 1 July to 1 December, and which EROs are obliged to conduct each year to ensure that their electoral registers are as complete and accurate as possible. The information gathered during the canvass is used to identify both electors who should be deleted from the registers, for reasons such as death, ineligibility or moving address, and eligible electors who are not on the register and therefore to whom invitations to register, or ITRs, should be sent. The ITRs are a separate form from the canvass and may be completed throughout the year, either digitally or in hard copy. The revised register is then published by EROs on or before 1 December, except when an election is held in an ERO’s area during the canvass period, in which case it is automatically delayed until the following 1 February.

This legislation would allow EROs an additional two months in which to conduct their vital work, if they require it, due to the challenges caused by Covid-19. For instance, in addition to the challenges all have faced, the members of electoral services teams in many local authorities have had to contend with reallocation to focus on providing other essential services in local communities. At present, however, EROs in England, Scotland and Wales remain legally obliged to publish the revised electoral register by 1 December 2020, or they will be potentially liable for prosecution for failure to conduct their statutory duties under the Representation of the People Act 1983.

As noble Lords will remember, we brought forward secondary legislation last autumn to make much-needed reforms to the annual canvass process, which were widely welcomed. The most significant change is a new data-matching step at the outset, informing the ERO which households are likely to remain unchanged. This allows the canvass to move away from the cumbersome, one-size-fits-all, paper-based system to a modern and adaptable model in which EROs are now able to use e-communication and phone calls to communicate with electors, as well as being able to continue to use hard copy where appropriate.

My Lords, I commend the Minister both for the extremely fluent manner in which he introduced this legislation and for its sensible and proportionate content. He invited the House to support it and I doubt that there will be any dissent. It is important that we give the Government credit when they do a good job, because we are always critical when they do not. The way that the consultation on these regulations was conducted, with the devolved authorities, local authorities, electoral administrators and so on, has been almost a model of its kind. The conclusion which the Government drew—to have a short delay in the permissible period for the publication of the register but not to cancel the canvass, which would have potentially led to large numbers of people being disfranchised, as the Minister said—was the right outcome and the response to a well-conducted consultation.

Since the Minister is inviting the House to agree to these arrangements for electoral registration, I will raise a wider issue. One thing that is seriously wrong with our system of electoral registration at the moment, which goes back to the introduction of individual registration, is the way that we deal with people who live in institutions. The two largest groups of those are students in higher education and people who live in care institutions—who have been much in our mind in respect of Covid. Right back to 2015, when individual registration was introduced, electoral administrators and others have been seriously worried about the underregistration of people in institutions, who often move in and out in quite short order. They are often not aware of the fact that they are not registered and there is now no system for automatic registration as there was before. The Minister has introduced these regulations in such a reasonable way. May I invite him to at least agree to look at this further? It is obviously not going to make any change for this year, because it would require legislation, but there would be widespread support for a system allowing EROs automatically to register those in institutions. This could lead to a justifiable improvement in the way that the register works.

My Lords, it matters enormously to English democracy to get the 2021 local elections right, after cancelling the local elections this year. Delaying the date for completing and publishing the electoral registers from December to February 2021 is therefore entirely justifiable. I therefore support this statutory instrument, but I have a number of questions for the Minister on how electoral registration will be improved further.

I note the references in the guidance notes for electoral registration officers to local and national data matching with other local authority datasets and the DWP dataset on national insurance. How does this evolution of data matching fit in with the ambitious proposals that we have just heard about to establish online identity verification throughout the UK, a project that we know is close to Dominic Cummings’ heart? Does the Cabinet Office intend to integrate data matching for electoral registers with identity verification for other purposes beyond the DWP? Will it report to Parliament on how this will be carried forward, and what safeguards against errors will be built in? We know from the controversies over AI that errors can easily be built into such activities.

The more suspicious among us sometimes suspect that Conservatives are more concerned to keep doubtful names off the register than to make sure that every citizen is registered. All democrats ought to be worried that our electoral registers remain incomplete, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, just pointed out, and that citizens at the margin, in poverty or out of work are most likely to be left off. The references to data matching that I read in the guidance implied that it would be used to remove names from the register, but not to add any of those missing. Are the Government considering moving, in good time, towards automatic voter registration for all citizens, which the move to digital government, at both national and local level, should make possible? If not, will the Minister commit to raising this issue within government as one that the digital enthusiasts around Mr Cummings should include in their plans?

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, is not here. I call the next speaker.

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I welcome this sensible proposal from government. I am sure it will have unanimity, because of its common sense. I have a few questions, even suggestions, to government to facilitate the process over the next few months.

I remain concerned about the situation for registration in care homes. I may be out of date, but I understand that managers of care homes are able to register those living in care homes and submit that to an ERO. I want to confirm that that remains the case, because the last thing we want is any requirement for visits from any council official into a care home to ensure that perhaps 50 or 60 people, some of whom would both be capable and want to participate in an election, are able to be registered. That is an important clarification. Perhaps further guidance is needed for local authorities on dealing with care homes in the current situation.

If, during January, any local authority area is hit by an ongoing lockdown, as recently with Leicester, and its staff are therefore unable to access work fully or even at all, will there be any discretion in relation to the 1 February deadline because of that longer localised lockdown? Has that been considered by government?

Perhaps most important in the current situation, where we all want to encourage the maximum economic enterprise, is the situation with young people, not least those in universities but also in school sixth forms and further education colleges. There is a danger that there will be underregistration. There has tended to be among such groups, particularly those in further education. As the Government have identified, credit reference agencies use the electoral register as a basis for credit referencing. Any young person eligible to go on the register, as they are at 17 or 18 years old, who fails to will have more expensive credit in the future, be it for a car loan, a credit card or mortgage offers. It directly impacts on their economic viability and prosperity in the immediate future. Very few realise that. I wonder whether a guidance note for local authorities and FE colleges could be given by government to assist that process.

My Lords, I concur with the generous opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, but I have questions that need to be asked about the Government’s approach to these issues. First, does the Minister accept what is set out in the 2014 legislation, which maintains the principle that it is a legal requirement to co-operate with the electoral registration process? It is a serious legal requirement, because failure to co-operate can result in a £1,000 fine. A fine may very rarely be imposed, but the mention of it on registration forms improves the rate of response. Will the Cabinet Office therefore work with the Electoral Commission and electoral registration officers to ensure that the best practice of highlighting the legal requirement and the possibility of a £1,000 fine is prominent on all the relevant forms? This should not be a matter for more than 400 electoral registration officers to determine individually.

Does the Minister also accept that Parliament determined that individuals who do not co-operate with later stages of the registration process can be subject to a civil penalty? Again, the frequency with which such penalties are imposed is not relevant; prominent reference to the possibility of such penalties can only assist the process of making the registers more complete.

Will the Minister look again at some of the problems associated with people seeking to register themselves, unaware of whether they are already registered? Many of them waste time applying, as they are already registered. They also waste the valuable time of electoral registration officers. Will he look again at models, such as those in Australia and New Zealand, where people can easily check online whether they are already registered?

Fundamentally, will the Minister accept that the right to vote should not be based on opting in, any more than people have to opt in to the right to receive medical attention, the support of the police, or other emergency services when necessary? The right to vote depends upon being included in the electoral registers. As the Electoral Commission’s market research has shown, most people wrongly assume that they are automatically included in these registers. That must be a big reason why so many of them do not return the registration forms and are therefore not able to vote, unless they realise that they must act in time to get registered.

My Lords, my noble friend Lord True spoke of Covid-secure working. It is very good to see him on the Bench today and so many Members speaking in the Chamber. That has been a characteristic of the Order Paper today, with far more Peers here and speaking. It is an important symbol to the country at large as we encourage people to get back to work. Going on the Underground this week to my own office and coming back to your Lordships’ House to take part in this debate, I have seen how good it is for people to get together again. The more we have Covid-secure working, the better—whether in electoral calculations or in any other way.

That said, I intend to concentrate my remarks on two areas aimed particularly at parliamentary rather than local government registration. First, people changing constituencies, as is going to happen, and seeing them carved up and redistributed is always disturbing for the Members of Parliament involved. About 20% or 21% of your Lordships—about 170 in number—have been Members of Parliament before and have been through this turmoil. I went through it once in my life. It was disturbing in some ways but reassuring when I suddenly found I had my noble friend Lord Hayward’s family as my new constituents. They seemed to put up with the situation pretty well as time went on.

None of us knows what will happen in the next few months, and I think we need reassurances. My noble friend the Minister took us through the new forms of electoral registration—online, telephoning, less knocking on the doors and all the rest of it—which cause problems, of course. If any other Covid-19 problems suddenly occur, we must not give way to again delaying this process, because we must have the parliamentary redistribution ready by 2023. It is easy for me to say that, but the fog of pandemic seems more all-enveloping and all-confusing than the fog of war ever was. I do not know what will happen, but I look for reassurances that we are going to get on with the task, which hard-working EROs and their teams, working in a Covid-secure way, are doing.

My Lords, I first thank my noble friend Lord Patten for his kind comments about my family. From the elections he fought, he will have noticed that the fields and farms voted very heavily indeed for him. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for giving me due notice that she is unable to be present this afternoon and that therefore the order has been changed.

There is general agreement that these regulations are necessary, and I will not touch on that further because I share that view. I will raise just one or two points. I particularly welcome my noble friend’s comment, in his introduction of these regulations, that the AEA has been consulted. The committee to which the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, referred was regularly overwhelmingly impressed by the effort the EROs put in as we legislators impose more and more elections on them with more regularity. They had such a positive, can-do attitude and no doubt are approaching these regulations in exactly the same way. I am under the impression from the introduction that this is providing general flexibility and building on a basis of flexibility for the system to ensure that we can adequately cope with the circumstances we face under Covid.

I will touch on two other points. First, for the record I ask my noble friend to identify the reasons why Northern Ireland is not included in these regulations. As I understand it, it is because it operates a different system, but it is worth identifying that it does not do an annual canvass.

Secondly, in the Explanatory Memorandum there is a reference to EROs and, on page 3, the

“lack of access to specialist software and printed correspondence”.

I am somewhat confused by the persistent reference to the absence of adequate software. IT programmes have been in existence for rather a long time. We heard this the other day in the committee at the other end of this building on the parliamentary constituency boundaries, and I am really not sure why the software was not available. I am beginning to wonder why that is so regularly the case.

My Lords, shortly I will have some welcoming comments to add to the substantial points made by my noble friends Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Rennard and other Members of your Lordships’ House, but first I register a double disappointment with the Minister’s introduction to this short debate. It was an obvious opportunity for him to give the Government’s outline response to the formidable report of the Select Committee on the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013, published shortly before the recess, if only to indicate the likely timing for a fuller response. Other noble Lords have referred to that excellent report. Its key recommendation for the Government was that they must ensure that they treat improving accuracy and completeness as a major priority in future reforms to electoral registration and administration. Clearly, this SI forms part of that exercise.

As we have heard from colleagues on all sides, the date for revised registers to be published can have a long-term impact on their value. However, a more substantial issue that lies behind these discussions is the central priority objective of seeking to ensure that the absolute maximum of eligible fellow citizens are on that register. It would have been encouraging to hear the Minister reiterate the Government’s clear commitment to that effect.

My second disappointment relates to the Minister’s failure to make an unequivocal statement of support for the Electoral Commission. It is a statutory consultee for this SI under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. He will have seen, as we all have, an extraordinary attack on the commission last weekend by Amanda Milling, who is apparently something in the Conservative Party hierarchy. She was widely reported as accusing the commission of being “accountable to no one”. Whatever her position there, she surely has only a very limited grasp of the fundamentals of the UK constitution and particularly of the role of Parliament.