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6.26 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs (Mr. David Lammy): I thank hon. Members for contributing to an interesting debate. The aim of this important Bill is to continue and to expand a successful electoral pilot programme. The debate has been thoughtful and thorough. I am grateful for the support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West (Joyce Quin) and my hon. Friends the Members for Glasgow, Anniesland (John Robertson), for Wigan (Mr. Turner), for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Harris), for Dumfries (Mr. Brown), for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mr. Lazarowicz), for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor), for Chorley (Mr. Hoyle) and for Glasgow, Pollok (Mr. Davidson).
The hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) raised important issues on fraud, which I hope to address. He could not resist the temptation to bring up the dreaded subject of Europe. That was replicated by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins). The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) admitted that his area had benefited from the pilots, but was unable to support the Bill. The hon. Members for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale (Mr. Duncan) and for Poole (Mr. Syms) urged the Government to return to a first-past-the-post system for European elections.
We are attempting to develop our traditional voting system to make voting easier for all groups in society. A modernised system will recognise the needs of today's changing lifestyles, including people's work and family commitments. Much of what we heard harks back to a time when people did not have the same commitments. Experience at a local level clearly shows the benefits of the pilots. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gateshead, East and Washington, West commented on how the new piloted voting mechanisms have benefited her constituents. All-postal ballots in the 2003 local election resulted in an average turnout of just under 50 per cent. compared with 33 per cent. generally. We should applaud that.
Mr. Heath: I was worried by one aspect of the contributions from the Minister's hon. Friends, several of whom had had a number of postal ballots in their constituencies and liked the arrangement. However, they did not appear to appreciate the fact that under the Bill, the Representation of the People Act 2000 is suspended. Unless they have one of the three pilots in their region, they will be forbidden from having another postal ballot in their borough elections this year.
Mr. Lammy: The hon. Gentleman clearly did not hear the same debate as me. Labour Members were clear on that point, which is why many of them said that they wanted postal balloting in their area. While electronic pilots have not yet led to significantly higher turnouts, where electronic voting was available it provided people with more choice, with 20 per cent. of the electorate using
it. That is important because younger people are keen to use new voting methods. Of course, there is a limit to the extent to which changes to the electoral process alone can increase turnout, but by making voting easier and more convenient we will attract voters whose reason for abstaining is the inconvenience of traditional methods.
Mr. Redwood: If postal voting is as good as the Minister says, what holds him back from making it universal immediately? What worries make him want pilot schemes?
Mr. Lammy: The Government do not want the chaos of the poll tax and the Child Support Agency that took place under the Conservative Government. We want to upscale the regional pilots and hope that after 2006 we can run national pilots.
My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith made some important points about simplicity, the need for information and advertising, which I support. A number of hon. Members raised the issue of marked registers. The Electoral Commission has yet to make up its mind about what it will recommend in relation to marked registers, so it would be premature to include anything in the Bill in advance of its determination. However, it is no doubt aware of the strength of feeling across all political parties on the issue and the views expressed once again in today's debate.
Angus Robertson: Is the Minister prepared to give a commitment that if the Electoral Commission made a recommendation before the end of the legislative process, the Government would be happy to amend the Bill to include an update on marked registers?
Mr. Lammy: The hon. Gentleman would expect me to say that the Government hope to look at these things seriously. I am sure that the issue will raise its head again in Committee.
The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome was concerned that MEPs will not all be elected in the same way. In the pilots that have taken place so far, we have purely been testing innovative voting systems. In next year's pilots, we hope to test the scalability, as it were, of those systems. The hon. Gentleman seemed to suggest that we should move from local pilots straight to national pilots, and that was supported by Conservative Members. It is the Government's view that that would be negligent. It is important that we test the systems properly in pilots before rolling them out generally. The Government are mindful of the necessity for any programme of pilots to be of a scale and size that reflects the available resources, including the capacity and expertise available for managing electoral pilots.
As the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Wigan, it is not the case that in all local government pilots, all wards have voted the same way. Some pilots took place in only a few wards within a local authority.
The hon. Member for Stone, supported by the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson), raised security issues. We recognise that the traditional methods of voting rightly have a good reputation for being secure and have not shown any significant evidence of fraud. Through the pilot programme, we hope to learn
lessons about how new ways of voting work and to build the same level of public confidence in them. We will proceed only with voting methods that are proven to work satisfactorily and which maintain the integrity of the ballot.Any electoral system is potentially open to fraud, and it is important that safeguards are in place. That is why we have ensured that all previous pilots have been properly evaluated, and that particular attention has been paid to any allegations of fraud, which have all been investigated.
Richard Younger-Ross: Is part of the difficulty of evaluating fraud that people incorrectly remember whether they voted and which party they voted for? In the 2001 election, opinion polls showed that more people thought they had voted than actually did, and in 1992 so many people thought that they had voted Labour that Labour should have won the election by a landslide, but of course it did not.
Mr. Lammy: That is an interesting point, but largely irrelevant. It applies as much to present voting mechanisms as to new ones. Any electoral system is potentially open to fraud, and it is important that safeguards are in place. As further security measures, the Bill provides for the extension of two electoral offences in pilot regions—first, the extension of the power of arrest without warrant for the offence of personation in any location, and secondly, providing magistrates with the power to allow the police or a prosecutor up to two years after the date of offence to commence prosecution.
We are aware that there has been some public concern about the security and secrecy of all postal and electronic voting, so we were encouraged to see that the Electoral Commission, in its extensive evaluation of the pilots held in the 2003 local elections, found no evidence—I repeat, no evidence—of an increase in fraudulent activity. That was also the commission's finding after the pilots in 2002.
Mr. Davidson: The Minister tells us that the Electoral Commission did not find any evidence of electoral malpractice. Did the commission go looking for it? What efforts were made to identify whether or not there had been fraud?
Mr. Lammy: As my hon. Friend knows, the Electoral Commission takes its job of work very seriously, and on these serious matters works closely with the police, as he would expect. The Government's position is that there is no room for complacency on the issue. That is why we have proposed new measures to enhance the security of voting in pilots.
The hon. Member for Stone raised some very serious allegations involving personation and intimidation in the May 2002 local elections in Birmingham. No allegations have been proven and no legal action has been taken.
Mr. Cash: The fact that no action was taken is no doubt largely due to the fact that the law was inadequate to deal with the situation. The real problem, as was pointed out by the chief inspector in question, is the need to change the law. Conservative Members are worried that the
Government have not implemented the recommendations on changing the law, including those of the Electoral Commission, in the Bill.
Mr. Lammy: We have an open mind on these issues and keep them under review. As I said, no legal action was taken. The hon. Gentleman put his comments in very strong terms, and it is important that I rebut them.
Several hon. Members discussed e-voting. A range of measures were put in place to guarantee against abuse or fraud in the 2003 e-voting pilots, and similar measures will be implemented in any pilot that takes place next year. They include voter-specific PIN numbers and passwords, real-time electronic registers to cast and record votes, and the subjection of all votes to pre-election technical and security checks, as well as monitoring during the election.
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