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Andrew Bennett (Denton and Reddish) (Lab): The hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Patrick Cormack) should look carefully at Australia. It appears that with compulsory voting there, the number of people voting at each successive general election is falling and that the number of prosecutions is small. I do not think that compulsory voting is such a good idea. It would be a much better principle to say that when someone gets elected, any people who did not vote count as part of their majority because they had the chance to vote for someone else if they wanted, but did not.
The most important thing in this debate is to put firmly on the record our thanks to all those people who made the recent elections a success—all the returning officers, who did an excellent job, and all the election staff. We should also congratulate the Post Office, which turned up trumps in almost every case, throughout the country. I also add my thanks to the party workers who in most cases, particularly in the north of England where this had to be done that little bit earlier, got the election literature out so that people could make an informed choice.
The debate would have been better if the Tory party had not just had a rant in opening it, and, I am afraid, if we had not seen some amazing hypocrisy from the Liberal party. The Liberals told us that they would wait
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and see what the Electoral Commission had to say, but their amendment firmly pre-empts the commission by suggesting that the whole system is in chaos.
We need to recognise that many of the problems occurred because of the ping-pong between this House and the House of Lords. The House of Lords must take some responsibility for the chaos that it caused. We must also recognise that the deal that was done to get the legislation through—the witness statement—was a big mistake. It is quite clear that some people living on their own did not vote because of the problems of going to ask a neighbour or someone else for the witness statement. The witness statement is absolutely pointless. It is probably true that if a voter put down Mickey Mouse, with Disneyland for the address, the returning officer would have disallowed the statement, but if they put down John Smith at some address somewhere in the country, there was no chance of that statement being checked out. The witness statement is a waste of time, and we do not need it.
It was unfortunate that the Electoral Commission discouraged the political parties from helping people to return their ballot papers, and from signing the witness statements. That was a serious mistake. I must also say to the Tory party that the more that we insist on a witness statement, the lesser the degree of secrecy for the individual voter. If we do not have a witness statement, a voter can take their paper away, sign it and send it off without being influenced at all by other people.
We should firmly congratulate the Deputy Prime Minister, the Under-Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Mr. Leslie) and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Local and Regional Government on going ahead with the experiment, because we learned a great deal. That does not mean to say that I necessarily want us to carry on having experiments, but we should recognise just how important this experiment was.
First, we had a much higher turnout, which was worthwhile. Secondly, we had to look into the matter of size. There is some question as to whether there are enough security printers to extend the arrangements so that all local elections could be done through an all-postal ballot. I think that that is questionable. One suggestion is to solve the problem by providing more time between the nominations and sending the ballot papers out, but we should remember that we have been fantastically lucky in this country in that we have not had to conduct a by-election in the middle of a general election since 1955, when a parliamentary candidate died and an election had to be put off. The longer the period between nominations and voting, the greater the likelihood of having to re-run an election when a candidate dies.
We must also recognise that the experiment showed that many people were not volunteering for it. Almost all the experiments up to this point were conducted by volunteers—in other words, by the dynamic returning officers who were keen to prove that they could conduct an experiment. This time, however, we had one or two people who, to put it kindly, were not particularly up to the job. We have to recognise that if we moved to an all-postal vote system, there could be problems there.
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There is also the problem of expense. We have to weigh up whether all-postal voting provides value for money. We also have to acknowledge that a half-and-half system, towards which we might be moving, may be even more expensive, with half the people opting for a postal vote and the other half going to the polling station. If we were interested solely in increasing turnout, it might be better simply to say to all the electors that they could have £5 off their council tax if they voted. That might well get more people to vote, without incurring all the expenses of the system.
We must now evaluate the experiments properly, but not to place blame, as all the political parties have pressed for extra postal voting. We now need to ask ourselves how best to move forward. It has to be through the Electoral Commission, but if so, we should also have a few people representing the political parties sitting on it. That might give the Electoral Commission a little more experience of the realities of electioneering.
I promised that I would conclude my speech in six minutes and I am sorry that I have overrun. I congratulate all those people who made the system just work this time and I congratulate the Government on carrying it all out, but we now need a full evaluation.
4.12 pm
Angela Watkinson (Upminster) (Con): I am grateful for the opportunity to participate in the debate, because it is essential that we preserve the hitherto high reputation of our voting system, which has been brought into question by the problems that have arisen with all-postal voting.
The essential ingredients of our voting system are confidentiality, privacy and security. All those three elements have been put into question by various recent problems and they have been undermined by recent innovations to increase the turnout in elections. I would question the practice of describing all-postal voting as "turnout", because that is the one thing that people do not have to bother to do. The traditional method, on which our reputation has been built, centres on trust and the confidence of the electorate. It is a private matter. People do not want others to know how they voted.
Theoretically, under the traditional system, someone could wade through hundreds of thousands of used randomly sorted ballot papers to look for one particular number, but it is unlikely that that would ever be attempted and even less likely that it would be successful. People like to see their vote being put into a sealed ballot box and they enjoy the ritual of going to their polling station and voting in person. With an all-postal ballot system, they are not allowed to do that. It is important that they reserve the right to make a choice as to whether to vote by post or in person. When someone applies for a postal vote in person, it shows an indication of the intent to vote, which is quite different from issuing a postal ballot paper to everyone, especially when many people have no intention of voting in the first place.
In the 2002 local elections, Havering was one of the pilots for postal voting. As I have noted before, there was a problem with the one-envelope system, under which people put their declaration of identity and their ballot paper into the same envelope. The voter's ward could be identified from the outside of those envelopes,
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which meant that people could know where that voter lived and his or her likely voting intentions. When the ballot paper and the declaration of identity were returned to the town hall, they had to be separated. At that stage, too, it could have been possible to discover how voters had voted. That did not happen, but people resented the fact that the opportunity had been created.
I know that the percentage of people voting rose in the recent elections, but that happened at a price. The price was the number of irregularities in the election process, and the fact that voters were deprived of choice. The hon. Member for Watford (Claire Ward) is no longer in her place, but I was concerned about her report of what happened in Watford. I had thought that the one-envelope system had been discontinued, but it sounded to me as though it might have remained in operation there.
I want to challenge the received wisdom that it should be made easier for people to vote. That should not be confused with increasing the percentage of people who use their vote. It is already easy and convenient for people to vote, and to get a postal vote. They have only to ask for one: they do not have to give any justification or explanation. However, even doing that much requires a little effort by voters. It is not great, but people have to take the trouble to ask for a postal vote.
At election time, some people do not even notice that an election is going on. Despite what they read in the newspapers, hear on the radio or see on the television, and despite the contents of the posters hung in windows or the leaflets pushed through their letter boxes, some people claim not to know that an election is being held. It takes quite a lot of effort to ignore all that. I suggest that those people are unlikely to have bothered to give the election any thought at all. They will not have considered the issues involved, or compared the attributes of the various candidates. They disfranchise themselves by neglect and treat their privileged vote with disdain—[Interruption.]
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