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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