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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. We must not have continued chuntering from a sedentary position.
Angela Watkinson: I challenge whether the Government have the right to make it easy for people to vote, when that is already so very easy to do. Some people choose not to use that privilege.
Another problem is the unreliability of the post. I have been inundated with complaints from people who did not receive their ballot papers. Many complaints came from people who happened to be on holiday on election day. They had informed the town hall of the date when their holiday was due to begin, and had been assured that their ballot papers would arrive in time. When that did not happen, they lost the opportunity to vote, even though had made the effort to make inquiries.
I hope that the Minister will clarify one point. He will correct me if I am wrong, but in a television interview I thought that I heard him say that people who did not receive their ballot papers in time could go to their town hall's electoral registration department and ask for one. When people did that in Havering, the town hall refused
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to give them another ballot paper. Did the town halls have different instructions, or did I misunderstand what the Minister said?
Mr. Leslie: I shall try and clarify that. In the all-postal regions, the failsafe in the unlikely eventuality that people did not receive their ballot papers was that they could go and get a replacement. The bar codes used on the documents meant that the original ballot paper would be cancelled automatically. Those arrangements did not exist outside the pilot regions. The experience described by the hon. Lady was not related to the pilot on all-postal voting.
Angela Watkinson: The Minister is right to say that there was no all-postal voting in Havering on this occasion, but the incident throws up one of the problems associated with postal voting. The people who suffered had made the effort to ask for a postal ballot paper. They explained when they needed it and were assured that they would receive it. I have received many letters on this matter. My constituents Mr. and Mrs. Lewis recounted how they boarded a coach one day and found that it contained 25 other people who had also not received the postal ballot papers that they had requested.
In contrast, a member of staff in my constituency office received four ballot papers, in separate envelopes, on the same day. She destroyed the three spare papers, but how many other people had the same experience, and what did they do with the extra papers?
Many elderly people did not understand the multiple elections that were held on the same day. I had to ask for help from the presiding officer at the polling station, as the matter was so very complicated. So I would like the Minister to look into the issue of multiple elections on the same day, especially when the voting methods are different for the component parts. It is confusing, particularly for elderly people, who have voted all their lives but are used to one particular way of doing it. Please may we retain choice for people who do not want to vote by post and want to see their ballot paper going into the ballot box?
4.20 pm
Mr. Clive Betts (Sheffield, Attercliffe) (Lab): The issue that exercises hon. Members on both sides of the House is that of low turnout. Low turnout undermines the validity of the whole democratic process and the authority of elected representatives. That is why it is right that, with all-party support, we looked into running pilots for different sorts of voting in local elections. The obvious conclusion was that only all-postal ballots increased turnout substantially. It was therefore surely right in turn that we looked at a wider pilot, which we have just conducted, to see whether the lessons from the smaller pilots could be applied on a larger basis. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Duncan) turned the matter into a party political issue, because I agreed with some of the other points that he made.
I was concerned, as all hon. Members will have been, by the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook and Small Heath (Mr. Godsiff) about what happened in Birmingham. In
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Sheffield there have been no allegations of widespread fraud. I am certainly not aware of any such allegations; I am not aware of any allegations in my constituency. There were no real problems with postal delivery.
The real problems, if there were any, were around the witness statement, which confused many people, not just elderly people, and the wording of the instructions that came with the ballot papers. If I had not understood the process, I would have been pretty confused by the wording. It varied from region to region; the instructions that I saw in London were far clearer than those in Yorkshire. So there are lessons to be learned by the Electoral Commission and the Government.
The problems with security and fraud in postal voting, as the Electoral Commission said over and over again at the Select Committee inquiry, are general problems with postal voting, not problems with all-postal voting. We should get back to that and get away from the party political points.
I want to put forward four basic principles for a way forward. We should be concerned about ease of voting. I disagree with the hon. Member for Upminster (Angela Watkinson). We should make it as easy as possible for people to vote—of course legitimately. We should be concerned about the security of the vote, about the consistency of the electoral process, and about choice.
To take consistency first, we have had the pilot projects and it is right that we should learn from them, share experiences and look at what went right and what went wrong. Clearly, many more people voted than would have done with the traditional system. That is a good thing. We should not get into small arguments about how much the percentage turnout went up. It was clearly higher, and I believe that it was higher because of all-postal voting. It is clear that in any system of voting, people have to have the right to vote by post whether because they are ill, or on holiday, or working away. So postal voting has to be part of the voting system. However, I have some sympathy with the points made by some Opposition Members and with people in my constituency who have said, "We vote in every election as a matter of principle, but we do not feel that we have voted properly this time because we have not been able to go to the polling station." So we ought to take account as well of the wishes of the people who vote every time.
Let us have consistency. Let us decide what is the best form of voting. Having had the pilot projects, it is right that we devise a form of voting that applies at all elections so that people know what to expect every time and do not have to rethink how they will vote at each election. Within that, we should have different types of voting. People should have the right to vote by post and the right to vote at a ballot station. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) that that will mean extra cost, but it is a cost worth paying to enhance our democratic process. Eventually, we may get on to e-voting as another option.
People may say that we already have that system of voting, but we can make a postal vote easier to obtain. In Sheffield, people can now tick a box on the electoral registration form to apply for a form to fill in to get a postal vote. Why not make it easier? Why not have
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boxes that people can tick to indicate whether they want to vote at a ballot station or by post? People should get their postal vote automatically if they tick the box, with no need for an extra form. That would simplify the process.
In terms of security, I agree that individual voter registration must be introduced. For example, we need checks on signatures to ensure that the voting system is secure. We should also implement a limit on the number of ballot papers that can be sent to an address for people who are not registered there, in the same way as we limit the number of proxy votes that one individual can exercise.
I am concerned about the registration process, probably for slightly different reasons from the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Dame Marion Roe). There is a real problem with people not sending registration forms back and being disfranchised as a result. Perhaps the Government could work with local authorities and provide a little more money for the canvassing process, because that is not being done properly in many areas. Registration officers say that in some areas up to 98 per cent. of forms are returned, but in other areas it is only 50 per cent. Resources should be put into that issue, because individual registration will make the process more complicated and difficult. In practice, no one is ever prosecuted for failing to return the form, so we could consider giving a bonus for doing so—perhaps a rebate on the council tax.
It is difficult for me to say so, but I commend the system of Westminster council, which sends out a card to everyone after the register has been drawn up, saying who is registered in their house. That is good practice, which should be replicated throughout the country.
Finally, I would just say to the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) that if the looks on the faces of the Liberal Democrats at the count in Sheffield on 11 June were those of people who had just scored a spectacular success at the ballot box, I would hate to see the looks on the faces of those who had just lost an election that they clearly expected to win.
4.26 pm
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