My Lords, in looking at this group of amendments, we all have a duty to try to discern which of them might be considered to be motivated by partisan considerations. My view is that Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, is simply about reducing the number of people legally entitled to vote who are registered and therefore able to vote. I cannot see how it can be anything other than partisan to reduce the number of people legally entitled to vote who are able to do so.
Making Elections Fairer and More Inclusive
Amendment 48 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, again seems to be a deliberate barrier to registering people who are legally entitled to vote but would not be able to do so because they would not be registered. Is that not a partisan consideration? Other amendments seek to block, delay or make the registration process weaker and less effective. I therefore consider those amendments partisan. The amendments in my name—
The noble Lord’s proposal is actually what I proposed in previous Parliaments, and his Government resisted tooth and nail any suggestion about registering people at the point that they got their national insurance numbers. My understanding of the noble Lord’s Amendment 8 is that, rather than beginning the registering process with 14 and 15 year-olds, you would start only at 15. Surely that would mean fewer people being registered, but if I have misunderstood, I apologise.
I am concerned with the approach in general and how I think Amendments 49, 50 and 52 are all about improving the health of our democracy, because democratic elections cannot fairly take place without people being registered to vote. Many groups of people who are legally entitled to vote are often not registered to vote under our current arrangements.
When individual electoral registration was introduced, many of us warned that, without extra measures, millions of young people, students and people who move home frequently would fall off the electoral rolls. Perhaps that was the intention of the proposal among some people. I believe that it was. I know that it was a great preoccupation of the now noble Lord, Lord Cameron, when he used to meet his deputy to discuss constitutional issues. He was determined to drive this process through. Had it been implemented as he intended, registration levels would have fallen from the level of the mid-1980s to about 60%, according to the Electoral Commission.
The Electoral Commission briefing for this debate shows that as many as 8 million people who are legally entitled to vote are not correctly registered and therefore would be unlikely to be able to take part in the democratic process. The commission says that it strongly supports the principles of what is commonly known as automatic voter registration and is described in this Bill as “registration without an application”. The problem that it seeks to address involves young people especially. The commission’s previous research indicated that, although 95% of those aged over 65 are registered to vote, only about 65% of under-25s are included on the voter lists. There are similar problems with people who rent privately, or who come from diverse backgrounds, missing from the registers.
My biggest concerns about the processes in the Bill are how the plans for registering without application will take too long and the Government are proceeding too cautiously. It will be too late to have many more people who are legally entitled to vote registered for the next election and too late for the next review of parliamentary consistency boundaries, which will draw on data from 1 December 2028—hence my support for Amendment 67, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, my noble friend Lord Pack and others.
The first and most obvious way in which we can address the underrepresentation of young people is by registering them when they are notified of their national insurance numbers. The House of Lords Select Committee that reviewed the impact of individual electoral registration unanimously recommended that this be done, and I am delighted that the principle had the support of the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, whose expertise is very widely regarded in this House.
When debating the idea during consideration of the Elections Bill on 23 March 2022, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, then speaking from the Opposition front bench, said that
“people are already written to ahead of their 16th birthday with their national insurance number. If we can do that, why can we not at the same time have an automatic registration to vote? We have the means to do it, so why do we not just get on with it?
That is the question that I ask today.
A little later I won a partial victory on the issue when the noble Lord, Lord True, eventually accepted from the Government Benches that a reference to registering to vote could be made with a notification of national insurance numbers. But it was a very unpressing reference, and the process should not now require specific application if the qualifications for registration are satisfied. That is the aim of my Amendment 50.
A second crucial point at which we can get many more young people registered is when many of them enter higher or further education. From the Labour Front Bench, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, championed the cause of registering students, with her usual great skill and determination, during the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. The noble Baroness demonstrated how easy and simple it was to have data-sharing agreements between higher education and further education providers and local registration offices. This would enable students to be enfranchised and help to make their legal entitlement to vote a reality. We are trying again to have that principle adopted by Amendment 52.
Finally, I will speak to my Amendment 61. The issues of electoral registration and Constituency boundaries are inextricably linked, although the tight drafting of the Bill means that we are not properly allowed to consider that link. I draw the attention of the Government and others to this connection. There should be consideration of how the measures in the Bill will change the data from which the electoral registers are drawn. The data will change as a result of measures in the Bill, and it will affect the process of revising the constituency boundaries, which will begin in two years. The electoral registration data forms the building blocks from which the Boundary Commissions must create constituencies; they are obliged under the rules to create constituencies with a very narrow and inflexible margin of difference in the size of the electorates for each of those constituencies. A slight change to a single constituency’s boundaries is likely to cause widespread disruption to many other constituencies, breaking them up into pieces.
The failure in the last series of Parliaments to address issues of the missing millions from electoral registers has distorted the map of constituencies. Millions of young people, private sector tenants and people from diverse communities were left out from the registers. We are now trying to address that. Whether it happened inadvertently or deliberately, the effect of the last boundary review was that many more constituencies were created that would be likely to vote Conservative, and fewer were created that would be less likely to vote Conservative. Registering many more of these groups will address that unfairness. The Government must now consider whether we need to allow the next boundary review to take more time so that it is able to work with the most accurate and complete electoral registers. Every year, according to the Government’s impact assessment, registration levels will rise by around 1.7%, so I hope there will be time for the changes in the Bill to feed through to the next boundary review.