Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
25 JANUARY 2005
MR SAM
YOUNGER AND
MS PAMELA
GORDON
Q40 Mr Clelland: These are the promotional
campaigns you talked about in your report The Electoral Registration
Process.
Ms Gordon: Yes.
Q41 Mr Clelland: So you see a role for
the electoral registration officers in running these promotional
campaigns.
Ms Gordon: Yes.
Q42 Mr Clelland: You feel they are perhaps
not comfortable with this. How are going to convince them that
this is a good idea?
Ms Gordon: Many of them are comfortable;
many of them do a great deal and that is very welcome and no doubt
has a considerable effect. Others, for a variety of reasons, feel
it is outside their role and they really need some certainty that
it is seen by government, to clarify the legislation as part of
their role, that they are entitled to do this and that they should
be able to do it, irrespective of any political views that there
might be among the members of their council.
Q43 Mr Clelland: Do you think there might
be scope for introducing some sort of incentives, either sticks
or carrots, for the individual to register?
Ms Gordon: This is a difficult
one because many people will say that traditionally it is a citizen's
duty to do what is required and obviously that has some strength.
On the other hand, there have been experiments to encourage people
to meet the requirements laid on them and it is an area worth
looking at further as we work through the practicalities.
Q44 Mr Clelland: You talk about resources.
If or when we move from the present system to a system of individual
registration, how much is this all going to cost and who is going
to pay for it?
Mr Younger: The general background
to this is that we have been on record for some time saying that
electoral registration services generally have been under-funded
in very many areas; that is the general background. In terms of
individual registration, there would be an initial transitional
cost as there would be in any of these things, but in an ongoing
sense, one of the things of looking at the mix of factors you
would have, perhaps not having an annual canvass in the same way
that we have had historically would release resources within even
the current pot to enable more targeted registration campaigns.
That is not to say that we would not, as I suspect many others
would, say there would be value in putting more resources than
are currently there into the process of making sure those who
should be on the electoral register are. I do recognise that there
are elements of our system which are a system which is becoming
increasingly sophisticated and which do require more resources.
You see, for example, not thinking for the moment about all-postal
voting, that the rise of postal voting does mean that there are
more resource pressures on registration officers. In the context
of individual registration, if you had an individual signature,
that is not only important at the point of registration but, in
postal voting terms, it gives you something against which you
can check the incoming postal vote. Well that needs somebody to
do it, so there are resource implications there as well. I do
think that is part and parcel of making sure we have a system
which is fit for the kind of democracy we are in the future.
Q45 Mrs Cryer: Should we move to individual
registration, what sort of impact do you think this would have
on hard-to-reach groups, such as young people, which Ms Gordon
has already touched on, as far as students are concerned and ethnic
minority groups? May I just suggest to you that my constituency
of Keighley is in the Bradford district and 50% of the fairly
large Bangladeshi and Pakistani community do not speak any English
and very many of that group are illiterate in their mother tongue,
so I think we are probably back to promoting registration.
Mr Younger: In a sense the picture
you paint is precisely the reason why, we would entirely respect
those views which say we have to be very careful with moving to
individual registration in terms of not losing people who should
be on the register and are not. Part of the problem you describe
was something which was there with household registration as well.
I can only say that the answer must lie in being much more targeted
and much more determined in the campaign to get people onto the
register. I would not want to predict how that would go, but I
do think one of the important things is that if we are going to
move from one system of registration to another, we should not
be doing it without an adequate resource to make sure it can be
done properly.
Q46 Peter Bottomley: I think the group
of people who are the least represented as potential voters absent
from registration are British citizens living abroad. I put it
to you that it may be that 97% of the potentially eligible voters,
say in Majorca, are not registered. Who do you think has responsibility,
under the present system, of getting them registered and who do
you think would have the responsibility under a future system
of having them registered?
Mr Younger: First of all, the
small number of overseas voters registered is something that is
pretty clearly the case. The latest figures we have show a very,
very small number of a population of potential overseas voters,
of which we are not quite sure, because there are estimates of
up to 13 million British people living abroad, how many actually
have the right to vote, how many of them are under age and so
on; anyway, the number of them registered is very small. Clearly,
in terms of registering to vote, the first responsibility under
the present system and under any future system will be with the
voter him or herself to get on the register. Organisations like
mine, just as a local authority, have a role in encouraging people
to get on the register; that is both a matter of advertising that
they have the right to be on the register and making it as easy
as possible for them to get on the register. In the case of overseas
voters, interestingly, it is an issue that did not get raised
by anybody in the context of the 2001 general election. It has
been raised since, it is something we have looked at, we have
developed materials, developed our own website to make it easier
for people, doing targeted advertising alongside our registration
campaigns in the UK. It is a very real issue. Of course voters
around the world outside Britain are even more difficult to get
at in any coherent sense than voters in Britain.
Q47 Peter Bottomley: So you are not satisfied
with the present situation.
Mr Younger: No, I do not think
one can be satisfied with a large number of people who have the
right to be registered to vote and a very small proportion of
them are actually registered from the evidence we have.
Q48 Peter Bottomley: Chairman, is this
not the one example of where there is individual registration
opportunity, there is no householder registration? Does it not
show that there is potentially a very grave danger in moving to
individual registration?
Mr Younger: I would not see the
two as necessarily connected. I suspect the dynamics of people
in terms of registration when they move abroad are very different
from the dynamics when they are at home. I have not done any research
into it, but I do not think you could make a direct read-across.
Q49 Mrs Cryer: Should we move to individual
registration, what sort of recommendations would you be making
to registration officers regarding disabled people, getting those
people on the register and, also, those people who are in long-term
hospital care or residential care?
Ms Gordon: May I answer the last
part first? We actually think there would be advantages for people
in residential care, as indeed in student accommodation, in having
individual registration, not least because it would answer a concern
which is sometimes expressed that there is an opportunity for
fraud there for people; it applies at the voting stage as well,
but it applies at registration, as to how the registration is
done. We would see advantages there in registering people individually.
Sorry, please remind of the first part of your question.
Q50 Mrs Cryer: The first part was about
individual registration for disabled people, the disabled people
who may be blind or whatever but who live at home.
Ms Gordon: We would see individual
registration, especially when combined with a national electronic
register, as offering more opportunities for people with a variety
of disabilities to register in different ways. At the moment,
there is only the paper-based method. There would be an opportunity
with a different system for people to use electronic means or
to develop the telephone system, which at the moment is only operated
by a few authorities and then only if there is no change in the
registration. Once one has got some individual identifiers as
a security check, people would be able to use the telephone as
well. We see it as offering great advantage for people with disabilities.
Mr Younger: The other element
with individual registration is that if we were to move to individual
registration or a system where there is a common format for registration
right across the country, it would make it easier to provide the
ability to register in different formats. Probably in terms of
people with all sorts of issues with registering conventionally,
whatever they are, one of the big opportunities would be when
we can move down the road of electronics, whether by voice, sight,
whatever, when different languages, for example, would be much
easier to handle.
Q51 Mrs Cryer: What are the terms of
reference of your current research into existing non-registration?
Can you give us an interim report on its findings? How do you
expect the results to inform your strategies on encouraging registration
under a system of individual registration?
Mr Younger: We have a significant
project under way at the moment in terms of understanding the
causes of under-registration. There have been bits and pieces
coming out of all sorts of bit of research, including research
in Northern Ireland, though the conditions there are slightly
different from much of the rest of GB. Certainly the point of
doing that is precisely to inform any future strategy, not just
that we might have, to encourage registration but also the local
authorities might have. We have made some suggestions for things
our local authorities might do in the past, but we are looking
to this research, which I think I am right in saying we should
be completing some time in the course of this year, really to
inform the future. Whether under individual registration or, to
be honest, even if it were the existing system, a lot of the same
considerations would apply.
Q52 Chairman: When is that likely to
be in the public domain then?
Mr Younger: I would rather, if
I may, come back to the Committee to state that; I am not wholly
sure.
Q53 Mrs Cryer: In the Bradford district,
we seem to have the anomaly of an ever-shrinking register. Every
time we have a new register, it is smaller and smaller; I wonder
where it is going to end. I just wondered whether you already
have an idea about addressing that by positive action by electoral
registration officers.
Mr Younger: Yes, as a general
proposition, but we would need to look a bit further at the precise
tools that might be used. Again, part of what we are doing is
looking also at practice in individual local authorities and particularly
in the context of the analysis that is currently under way of,
for example, the December 2004 register and looking at where there
have been decreases and where there might have been increases.
We do not have the figures yet, but there will be some local authorities
in which there will be increases. Part of it will be looking at
those and wondering whether there is something those authorities
are doing that others could be copying. Generally speaking, in
electoral administration over the years we have not been very
good at learning from experience elsewhere. It is an opportunity
provided by the creation of the Commission as a central body,
as a sort of clearing house, to try to get where the good experience
and good practice is and help it get elsewhere.
Q54 Mr Betts: You may or may not be aware
that some members of the ODPM Select Committee visited Australia
recently, amongst other places. One of the things we went to look
at was electoral registration. When we were there, the Electoral
Commission looked rather bemused and said "Do you mean you
actually chase up people on a yearly basis, send them forms and
then canvass them even when they have not moved house?" which
comes back to the Chairman's point on this. "We spend all
our resources chasing up the people we know have moved and where
there has been a change in their situation". The reason they
can do that is that there are several bodies, the postal authorities,
the utility companies, the driving licence authorities, who are
all obliged to tell the Electoral Commission when someone moves
their address. Do you think that is the sort of approach we should
adopt in this country?
Mr Younger: There are two parts
to it. One is the discussion we have already had about the degree
to which an annual canvass is the right thing to do or not. In
terms of the more targeted stuff, certainly the early experience
we have had is that there is real value in targeted campaigning,
whether it is of home movers through postal redirection, whether
it is mortgage companies. We have been looking at that and there
is a role there, both for us as an organisation and for local
authorities and this is precisely the kind of thing that we need
to join up much better than it has been joined up in the past,
whatever system of registration we are with.
Q55 Mr Betts: And if we need changes
to data protection legislation to achieve that, would you support
that?
Ms Gordon: This is clearly one
of the inhibitions at the moment and people raise this. They assume
when they move house and they are signed up for council tax, that
the information will go directly across to the registration officer.
Of course that does not happen largely and there is some confusion
about what is permitted under data protection and what is not.
Some of this could be addressed, if it were made clear. Clearly
it would have to be demonstrated to the individual that by signing
up for one thing, they were signing up for another, but there
ought to be ways of doing this and that would, no doubt, be helpful.
Q56 Mr Betts: Taking things a stage further,
and it goes back to this point where I think you are right that
individuals, when they sign up information to one bit of the system,
assume that other bits get it and they do not know why they are
being asked for it several times, if we move to a comprehensive
system of national identity cards, should that information be
automatically transferable? Do we not effectively have electoral
registration lists there for us?
Mr Younger: The conclusion must
be, were you to have compulsory national identity cards, that
they could provide a basis for an electoral register. It is not
something we have looked into with any great—
Q57 Mr Betts: Is it something you think
people would like to look into, given the way that that legislation
is going, so we do not end up with a complete duplication and
people again getting rather fed up because they are going to give
two lots of information for different purposes, when they could
actually have given the same information in through one channel?
Mr Younger: I would not want to
pour a lot of our own resource into anticipating what parliament
is going to do. If it looked as though there were going to be
national identity cards, clearly we would have to look at the
impact that would have in terms of electoral registration and
it would be real.
Q58 Mr Betts: I was just going to ask
about the CORE project and whether you thought that actually was
going to deliver and what sort of timescale you thought it was
going to deliver on? I understand we are waiting for a strategy
paper from government on this, but I think you essentially said
that until that is working, individual registration would be very
difficult.
Mr Younger: The CORE project is
a vital first stage towards individual registration. It is also
vital in terms of the needs right now, the needs not just of the
Commission, but also critically of the political parties to be
able to undertake their obligations under current legislation,
in terms of the declaration of donations, in terms of being able
to assure themselves that donors are on the electoral register.
Q59 Chairman: It is needed now but it
is very much pending, is that it?
Mr Younger: Yes, that is an accurate
summary.
Chairman: On that note may I thank you
very much indeed for your evidence. Thank you. Can we have the
next set of witnesses, please?
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