Select Committee on Home Affairs Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400 - 419)

TUESDAY 23 JUNE 1998

MR DAVID GARDNER, MR MIKE PENN, THE RT HON THE LORD PARKINSON AND MR CHRIS RENNARD

Mr Howarth

  400. Thank you very much, Chairman. Can we move from the question of actual voting to the more mechanical business of improving the accuracy of the register because that is something I think is of great concern to all of us who are practitioners in this business. If we have something like a 91 per cent level of registration, which is the latest figure in 1991, can you, gentlemen, tell us whether you think there are specific groups of people who have deliberately chosen to stay off the register. Lord Parkinson mentioned people wanting to avoid jury service. Is it because people have taken a positive decision that they do not want to be registered, they do not want to be seen, that is why they have stayed off and not because they are not interested?
  (Mr Rennard) I think it is true for a small number of people, perhaps people who are avoiding credit agencies and debtors who think they can be pursued if they appear on the electoral register. I have come across that. You occasionally find the battered wife who does not want her husband to know where she is now living and therefore chooses not to be on the electoral register. Just occasionally you find someone who might be slightly higher profile but who for security reasons or something of that nature thinks it is not appropriate for them to be on the voting register. I think this number of cases is really rather small. I think there are rather more people who do not have a normal home, ie the homeless, and they are not normally on the electoral register but they must be as entitled to participate as anybody else and therefore something could be addressed in relation to those people.
  (Mr Gardner) I think the major reason for non-registration is because people do not realise what needs to be done and they need to complete a form A between August and October. That is very clear from the surveys. There are certain groups which are particularly under registered, young people and Afro Caribbeans, students and those in multi-occupancy housing. Those are very much the clear groups that emerged from the OPCS survey. While clearly it compares favourably with the United States our registration levels compare very unfavourably to every other democracy where there is compulsory registration. The figures do vary but even the most conservative estimates supplied by the Home Office that there are two million people not on the register before you take account of dual registration ie, half a million students, second home owners and so forth, so it is probably 2.5 million people who were not registered in 1997 plus those who become effectively deregistered by moving house throughout the year because they are on an old register where they do not live which over the year is something like six million but between October and May is something like four million, as I referred to earlier, which means at the last election there were six million people who could not vote at their local polling stations.

  401. Lord Parkinson, do you want to add any categories?
  (Lord Parkinson) Just to take up a point that was mentioned earlier about Westminster having a very low registration. In fact Westminster has a very high proportion of what we describe in this paper as "aliens", people who live in the borough but are not eligible for the register. Westminster just happens to have a very high proportion of people who are not qualified to vote but who live there.

Chairman

  402. There is probably a high proportion of second homes in Westminster.
  (Lord Parkinson) I would have thought so. I think that the important thing is to improve the quality of the register and I think a rolling register has a lot of attractions but it would require local authorities to improve and to reach a much more uniform level of registration before you could make it really effective and I think enforcing the present regulations is a vital step forward. The way returning officers interpret their duties varies hugely from place to place so a standard practice and standard procedures which are carried out are a very important part of the creation of a rolling register which I think long term is the answer but it is going to involve substantial expenditure and compatible computer systems and so on. It would not be an inexpensive operation but it is the ideal. 10th October even though we have changed the law it is a long way away from the likely election date and the register can go wrong. We have improved it so that people can get access to the vote after that. A rolling register is the answer long term but it is going to need a big investment and a big improvement in standards of registration.

Mr Howarth

  403. Can we then move on to the question of a rolling register because there does seem to be an element of unanimity about this. The Labour Party points out in its submission that by the time we come to the voting date the register can be 16 months out of date. That is clearly not acceptable either to us as political practitioners or to the electorate. All our parties have had people on the doorstep say to us, "Why can't I vote. I moved here on 11th October. " Perhaps I could ask Lord Parkinson if you could elaborate more on the technical difficulties here because the truth is if we move into a new district the first thing that arrives on our doorstep is a council tax demand. There seems to be absolutely no problem in organising that but apparently huge difficulty in organising the representation that ought to go with the taxation.
  (Lord Parkinson) Well, the point I was making earlier is that if you have patchy registration throughout the country and you are transferring people between systems and one has a good system and the other has an incompatible system—I cannot imagine anybody has a manual one now but if you had a computer system trying to marry with a manual you would have difficulties so you need a uniformity of technology. That is the thing that enables you to make the switch and to have a clean register, a useful register, but they vary so much from constituency to constituency.

  404. If I were to move home tomorrow the first thing I would do would be to cancel my council tax where I am currently resident and presumably the local authority should be able to check up and remove me from the register of electors. Do we have a problem of mixing the two registers in that respect or do the other parties have a problem in making those two registers now that we have gone away from the community charge?
  (Mr Rennard) No problem at all. It seems to me it makes eminent sense if the local authority has access to information about people who have paid the council tax and I see no reason why the electoral registration officer should not have the same information through one form. So if someone says, "I have now moved into this area and I have to pay you council tax", that form also puts them on the electoral register in the same way as if somebody writes to the council and says, "I am leaving your area, I no longer want to pay the council tax" they should be deleted from the electoral register.
  (Mr Gardner) We have addressed this in page 3 of our evidence. We have put forward to the Howarth Committee that local authorities should in fact act as a clearing house when people move and therefore they only need to notify the local authority once and they will notify all the relevant departments including electoral regulation within the local authority, council tax and so forth as well as other services. Like with registration, there should be much wider powers of cross-referencing and therefore when people indicate they are moving, there is one form that goes in and the local authority then puts everything in hand so they are removed from one register and added to the register where they have moved to.

  405. What do the others think of that idea?
  (Lord Parkinson) I think it is perfectly reasonable.
  (Mr Rennard) I think we agree with that. If I might just make a point on the access to the register which has not been addressed yet. The 1983 change Lord Parkinson referred to a while ago was welcomed. It meant if you were accidentally omitted you could be added at a later point. Form RPF34 is a rather cumbersome way of doing it and it still relates to where you were living the previous October 10th. It does not address the fundamental issue of moving somewhere in November but it is a year the following February, 15 months later, that you are actually entitled to exercise that vote. This is not very well understood as no doubt you will have encountered on many occasions canvassing.

  406. We have exhausted the rolling register. Can we move on to the question of—
  (Mr Gardner) If I may, Lord Parkinson raised the point about the cost. The AEA and I think ourselves are far from convinced that the costs will actually be that dramatic for introducing the rolling register. We believe in fact there will be efficiency savings. There will be no need to publish the draft register for example. The supplementary registers will not need to be published and registration will only be published once at the beginning of year and then once obviously when an election is called. We also feel very strongly, and this is addressed in our papers so I will not go into detail, that there should be minimum canvassing standards. At the moment the law is "sufficient house to house enquiry" but that should be reinforced by guidelines that do lay down minimum standards and are monitored because there are a couple of occasions (Brent and Milton Keynes) where we have had to take local authorities to court because they have tried to remove vast tracts of electors because they have not have the budget or the will to undertake sufficient canvassing.

  407. Can I ask one other question relating to the registration. When an election is called, that is when people start staying, "Am I on the register?" At what point should there be a cutoff where we should say the register is frozen? Should it be at the point the general election is called or at a point three days after the general election is called? There is the practical consideration for the EROs to produce all the follow-up, the ballot papers and the poll cards and all the rest of it. Is there a cutoff point?
  (Mr Gardner) What we have proposed is that the cutoff date should be the closing date for postal votes which is 13 days but the practitioners are suggesting the closing date of nominations. There is a slight difference between the two but the important point is that once the election is called it is then, as you say, that people realise that maybe they are not on the register and they want to check. We get all the phone calls at the moment. They should be able to register at the point the election is called and I think we need to leave it to the practitioners to see what the closest possible date is to election when people can be registered as long as they are properly qualified to be registered in that area.

  408. The question I would like to turn to now is this question of the techniques for improving the canvass. Are there some particularly good techniques that you are aware of which you feel are currently being under-utilised?
  (Mr Gardner) There clearly is no substitute for door-to-door enquiry. There is a law of diminishing returns and all the academic surveys have shown that doorstep canvassing will be a very sound investment for two or three canvasses but after that you are effectively throwing money away because the return is obviously a diminishing return. What is important there is that the doorstep canvassing should be undertaken at different times of the day obviously to deal with people's different working and social patterns. We also very much favour the ability of local authorities, and some have pursued this, to cross-reference other lists, for instance people paying council tax, people on council benefit, the housing tenant list and also school rolls in terms of attainers (which are a particular problem because only half of attainers are actually registered) and then the ability to follow those up and put people on the register if they are properly qualified unless they object. That has actually worked quite well but does need to be built into the guidelines and minimum standard and that would effectively reinforce the house-to-house enquiries. And obviously the house-to-house enquiries go hand in hand with the postal enquiries in many areas. I ought to say just on this issue in the Milton Keynes case which I referred to, the norm that was laid down was non-respondents should be canvassed up to three times by the staff of the electoral registration office. So I think that is a norm that we would be looking for.

  409. Sorry?
  (Mr Gardner) Non-responders to the canvass should be called on up to three times.

  410. Is that not excessive? It is quite a privilege in a free society like ours to be able to vote. Should people be called on three times at the expense of the rest of the population to be encouraged to vote? If they cannot register after a reminder, that is sufficient is it not?
  (Mr Gardner) The cost is actually not that great. The vast majority of people will complete their form on the first canvass and on the recall canvasses. If we were dealing with a rolling register then effectively each year rather than starting from scratch you would be adding and deleting so that there would be some cost savings there because people would be on the register and you only need to establish that they were still qualified to vote at that address and they would not need to complete a fresh form every year.
  (Lord Parkinson) I think there have been various techniques used by returning officers because they interpret their duty "to carry out sufficient enquiry" very widely. Some do very very exhaustive canvasses, others combine canvassing and post and one of the most interesting ones which we mention here one local authority wrote pointing out to non-respondents saying if they did not have their name on the register they probably would not be able to get a credit card or even a bank account and they got a very very dramatic response immediately from their electors. The main thing is there is no uniform system and no uniform attempt. People interpret their duty in many different ways.

  411. Should there be a uniform attempt?
  (Lord Parkinson) I think at least three times would mean that you have carried out your duty reasonably diligently, if you have gone three times and you still have not made contact. There is a limit to the amount of money you can spend chasing voters who do not want to register.
  (Mr Rennard) I think if political parties were to contact voters in a marginal constituency they would make at least three attempts to contact that voter to solicit their support and it is not unreasonable therefore to suggest that returning officers should try to contact the household from which there has been no response at least three times to find out if anyone is resident and if so get them on to the register entitling them to vote. It is not calling to see them three times. It is making three calls to the house at different times of the day or perhaps the weekend in order to find them in, in order explain the form to them and collect the form back. The Association of Local Authority Administrators say in their view door-to-door canvassing is the key to this whole operation although I note that the political parties in the last ten or fifteen years have tended to move away from some of the face-to-face canvassing that was the traditional style of British politics in favour of more direct mail and telephone techniques and I think there is room for experimentation in this whereby the design of the form is crucial, as you know, to the sort of response you get. The form could perhaps be made even simpler although it is not a bad form. Certainly the evidence is that if the information already on the register so far is pre-printed on the form you get a higher response because it is easy for people then not to have to fill in the information held for the second time. That increases the rate of response. There are other direct mail techniques you might employ to increase the rate of return including, as Lord Parkinson mentioned, pointing out to people if you are not on the electoral register that may well give them a problem with credit rating or acquiring a mobile telephone or something of this nature and there are purposes of being on the electoral register other than simply voting. Also given the way the parties have now moved into telephone canvassing more than face-to-face in many elections, I think it might be cheaper for the electoral registration officer's staff to try and make a telephone call to the households that have not returned form A, at least to ascertain whether or not there is somebody resident within the household to see if they have received the form and see if they are returning it.

Mr Hawkins

  412. Very briefly when, Mr Rennard, you said that given that political parties call on people three times it is not unreasonable to ask the electoral registration officer's staff to do that, surely the wide difference is that political parties are volunteers choosing to call whereas for electoral registration officers there is a cost implication involved in all this. What I wanted to ask all three of you is whether you feel that there should be (you all suggested the local authorities need to do more work) a ring-fenced element of protected budget for all local authorities that is there to enable them to carry out these extra duties because I think unless you have that ring fenced element of budget it is placing, in my view, an extra burden on hard-pressed local authorities with limited budgets.
  (Mr Rennard) I think that is right. You can do it in one of two ways. You can either ring-fence the budget for the local authorities to do this and say that must be sufficient to allow them to do that or the electoral commission actually says that the standards for this should be done through a central budget and local authorities should not have to choose between providing meals on wheels to disabled people on their own or maintaining the electoral registration. I would say maintaining the electoral register is essential to the health of democracy and should be specifically provided for and it would probably be better done through a national election commission organising standards in this way rather than leaving it to a local authority to make those very hard decisions.
  (Lord Parkinson) I think one of the reasons why people turn out in small numbers on local authority elections is because they increasingly feel that local authorities are more and more marginalised and here we are again saying we are going to take away from the local authority a duty and again diminish their responsibility. I think it is a very high priority for any local authority to keep the electoral machine working and efficient and I think it should be a prime duty on them and they have to find the wherewithal to do it. If you start ring-fencing budgets you are just by the end removing any sort of discretion from local councillors and we want people to feel these are important people, they are worth voting for. We do not want to take more and more important decisions away from them.

  413. Mr Gardner?
  (Mr Gardner) I think I would tend more to Lord Parkinson's view on this. I think the election function of councils and the democracy functions of councils are extremely important. I think it is in the interests of local authorities to ensure their register is accurate and that everyone is registered. There are all sorts of other reasons that people will be familiar with and I think an electoral commission is important to lay down minimum standards and to monitor those standards but I would not want to see a monster like the Australian electoral commission that employs every part-time canvasser up and down the country. I would expect this to be done at local level particularly if we are looking at greater integration in terms of cross-referencing, for the registration in terms of transfers, in terms of civic education functions and so forth. I think that is better done within the local authority. In terms of ring fencing, I think clearly there do need to be minimum standards and those minimum standards need to be robust enough to ensure that everyone has the proper opportunities to be registered but flexible enough to deal with the fact that in rural areas registration is generally much easier than in an inner city urban area with a highly mobile population. I think there does therefore need to be some slight flexibility. Therefore at least in the initial instance I do not think the party would necessarily favour ring-fencing but I think more work actually needs to be done in terms of the costs of the rolling register. I personally think, and I think the AEA tend to this view as well, that the additional costs would be quite minimal because of the savings I referred to and the savings that would be effected by much wider powers of cross-referencing as well.

  414. Finally, would you agree with me that in these days of new technology one of the things that perhaps could be done could be to shorten the distance in a general election campaign or local election campaign between polling day and the day when the forms have to be in? I am sure as practitioners we have all been faced with this situation very early in the campaign where just after the closing date somebody being very frustrated because they have only just discovered they are going to be away. Do you agree with me a way must be found to increase participation in any given election to shorten that time-scale?
  (Mr Rennard) Since the deadlines basically are almost the same as they were in the pre-computer age, since we do this largely by computer, we must be able to shorten those deadlines.

Chairman

  415. Lord Parkinson?
  (Lord Parkinson) I would agree.
  (Mr Gardner) I would agree with that as well.

Ms Hughes

  416. In relation to the rolling register, there is a submission from the Conservative Party that envisages if we move to that system that you feel it is likely that a completely new security process would have to be developed to protect the integrity of the register. I wonder if you could say what you had in mind there for a completely new security process. I will not put into your mouth what I think that sounds like.
  (Lord Parkinson) Would you point it out to me?

  417. Yes, page 5.
  (Lord Parkinson) Would you care to address your question to someone else while I take advice.

  418. To save time if Lord Parkinson would like to write to us. It seems to be suggesting something specific I think the Committee ought to be aware of.
  (Lord Parkinson) I have been advised that it would be sensible if we wrote to you giving you a full answer.[1]

Chairman

  419. Just one other point on the homeless. Are all the parties agreed that provision should be made for registering homeless voters and can this be done without creating opportunities for abuse?


1   See Appendix 19. (Mr Rennard) I think it should certainly be done in principle but you would have to do whatever you can to minimise opportunities for abuse. You could not simply have hundreds of people saying, "I am homeless, give me a vote." I am not sure the national insurance number is the appropriate thing to quiz homeless people about because many of them will not have national insurance numbers. If you were to do anything perhaps in terms of a temporary institution or hostel or somewhere like that where they could be contacted via that organisation, obviously with consultations with organisations like Shelter as to how this could be done. In principle this must be done and I am sure there is a practical mechanism for defining a suitable address which a homeless person can say, "That is my address for these purposes." Back


 
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