Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-299)
7 FEBRUARY 2005
MR NICK
RAYNSFORD MP, MR
CHRISTOPHER LESLIE
MP AND MR
PAUL ROWSELL
Q280 Mr Cummings: Will
you be including the consultation on the Electoral Commission's
proposals?
Mr Leslie: We intend to wait to
see what the foundation model recommendations are from the Electoral
Commission. Once they recommend their approach on that, we can
respond to it.
Q281 Mr Cummings: When
do you expect to receive those?
Mr Leslie: Whenever the Electoral
Commission publish them. I think they said some time in the spring.
Q282 Mr Cummings: The
ball is firmly in the Electoral Commission's court?
Mr Leslie: In terms of their policy
intention, which was to publish their own recommendations on the
foundation model, we wait to see what that is. Only then can we
respond to it. It would be a little perverse if we were to respond
to the general idea of the foundation model until we saw the details
of that. I think that is a perfectly reasonable approach.
Q283 Mr Cummings: Do you
accept the Electoral Commission's view that individual registration
is a prerequisite for any future roll-out of remote voting methods?
Mr Leslie: We had this debate
in response to the Electoral Commission's report, Delivering
Democracy, where we agreed that we needed to work on improved
security for remote voting but we did not agree with the Commission's
view that there should be no more all-postal voting. We do not
have any plans in the immediate future, certainly for the coming
general election, for all-postal voting, but we do not rule it
out in other future local elections. In that respect, no, we do
not agree entirely with the Electoral Commission. There are other
avenues for local applications to come forward.
Mr Raynsford: In his evidence
to you I think Sam Younger did make it quite clear that since
they have made their initial recommendation they have become increasingly
conscious of the practical difficulties and they have looked at
the experience in Northern Ireland. My understanding is that the
Electoral Commission, while rightly focusing on the benefits of
individual registration, now recognise that an approach towards
it has to be handled in a way that avoids the kind of downsides
that we were talking about earlier.
Q284 Mr Cummings: What
other changes to the registration system to ensure the security
of remote voting are you prepared to consider?
Mr Leslie: Any recommendations
that the Electoral Commission come forward with of course we are
prepared to consider. That is why we want to find a pathway through,
for instance, on individual registration but we cannot just look
at those aspects in isolation from other questions about the comprehensive
nature of the register and so forth. It is a balance to be struck.
We look at the powers, for instance, that the electoral registration
officers have. There will be Commission-made recommendations on
that. We know that the electoral registration officers, for instance,
have powers to ensure that the proper information is given by
individuals, to ensure that there is an offence for giving false
information. Those sorts of things help support the validity and
veracity of the register. We are happy to look at any further
recommendations on that.
Q285 Mr Cummings: When
do you think you will be ready to act on the result of your consideration
of these issues?
Mr Leslie: A lot of these matters
require legislative change. As we set out in our response to Voting
for Change, we intend to legislate when parliamentary time
allows. That is not entirely in my gift but I intend to keep pressing
and working on the shape of future legislation.
Q286 Mr Cummings: Do you
agree that one possibility, short of wholesale change, is the
retention of a single household form but with the additional requirement
that all of those eligible in the household should sign it?
Mr Leslie: It would be one form
of individual registration.
Q287 Mr Cummings: Would
you be sympathetic to that?
Mr Leslie: We would be sympathetic
to looking at that. On the other hand, there are potential criticisms
over that. For instance, if everybody were required to sign a
form, how big would that form physically have to be? What would
happen if the individual were not at home during the period in
which the form had to be returned? Would that mean that that individual
was somehow then not able to go on the register? There are questions
that need to be overcome. In principle, I can see the simplicity
of a signature basis on the household form. It may well be one
of the easier forms of individual registration but there are disadvantages
that have to be overcome in that.
Mr Raynsford: There are wider
issues as well as to whether one really does wish to continue
with a system based on annual registration or whether there might
be merit—I think in his evidence to you Sam Younger did
hint about this—in moving towards a framework where there
would be more focus on targeting those who are thought to be less
likely to register.
Q288 Chris Mole: We are
just coming to that.
Mr Raynsford: I will not anticipate
your discussion. All these considerations do have to be taken
into account when you are thinking about what is the most appropriate
way forward.
Q289 Chris Mole: Assume
we do go towards individual registration. Do you think we should
move away from the annual canvass and have a registration that
can be amended when people's circumstances change? What do you
think the impact on the accuracy of the register might be if we
were to do that?
Mr Leslie: We have had a change
in recent years, certainly in England and Wales, where we have
moved to a system of a one year carry-over so that, if somebody
fills in the form one October, they can stay on that register
not just until the following year but for a further year at the
discretion of the electoral registration officer, on the basis
that it would be perhaps too onerous and too stringent to take
persons off straight away, after one year. As I said earlier,
that was the experience in Northern Ireland. They moved towards
a system like that in order to facilitate a little more flexibility
in their own process of individual registration. We need to consider
all these things. Again, it comes down to that balance. How much
of an obstacle is it for the wider general public to be required
to fill in a form on an annual basis but, on the other hand, are
we going to lose accuracy if we do not require at least one form
to be filled in over a particularly short interval like that.
I hope some of the research we are doing both via the Electoral
Commission conducting their own and the voting insight study we
are doing in my Department will help inform the sort of factors
that cause people to avoid going on the electoral register.
Q290 Chris Mole: Good,
modern, e-government orientated services should make life easier
for the citizen. What scope do you think there is for data sharing
with those responsible for compiling the electoral register and
other central databases, maybe the driving licence, income tax,
post office redirections etc? Are there any changes in law that
you think are required to allow this to happen? I think the Committee
was quite impressed with what happens in Australia. It seems to
be fairly automatic and people seem to understand what is going
on.
Mr Leslie: We know there are a
lot of requirements on the general public to give information
to different government departments for different purposes. There
is, I think, scope to make things simpler for the public at large,
whilst respecting the basics of data protection principles and
so forth. The chief secretary to the Treasury is leading a project
called the Citizen Information Project under the aegis of the
Registrar General and the Office of National Statistics. Their
implementation programme is due to be published some time later
on in the spring. They were looking in particular at whether there
is better scope for data sharing across all government departments,
to look at economies of scale, efficiency issues, to look at making
it better for the public to access public services in general.
We need to make sure we keep an eye on that project and plug into
it.
Q291 Chris Mole: Are there
any changes required to the law or would an ID Bill being passed
on Thursday make life a whole lot easier for you?
Mr Leslie: I know that part of
the Citizen Information Project has looked at that particular
Bill's requirement to establish a national identity register which
would be one of the fundamental components of ID cards, and whether
that can be a basis for that Citizen Information Project. That
is slightly separate from electoral law. Whilst the original proposal
is not for a compulsory ID card, that national identity register
might be a useful tool for electoral registration officers to
access, to check and verify information. That is something that
we would certainly consider looking at but, not least because
the legislation does not propose compulsory ID cards, I do not
think we could tie somebody's entitlement to vote to that national
identity register because not everybody who is entitled to vote
will be required or even asked to carry an ID card. For instance,
British citizens resident abroad. I can think of other groups
as well. I do not think there is instant overlap there.
Q292 Chris Mole: You have
estimated that the cost will be 23 million to introduce individual
registration with a further six million every year thereafter.
Can you tell us what the main components of those costs would
be and what sort of assumptions you have made about what the individual
registration process would look like in reaching those figures?
Mr Leslie: I cannot go into massive
detail off the top of my head but my understanding is that the
existing cost of the household registration process is around
51 million. I am presuming that the calculation therefore looks
at the extra administration costs of moving from one form per
household to one form per individual, the extra data entry requirements
that would come from logging the returns to that process and the
extra IT infrastructure as well. I can send the Committee a more
detailed note if I have more information about how we reached
those figures.
Mr Raynsford: Consultants have
been employed to look at this particular issue and it is very
much the basis of their evidence that suggests there will be this
additional cost of 23 million, taking the current figure of around
51 million up to 74 million, and annual costs would be 57 million
which would be some six million higher than the current levels.
Obviously, as part of the later consultation which we will be
undertaking, we will want to test further the validity of those
figures and see whether there is scope for economy in some areas.
Chairman: On data sharing, is it not
logical for the registrar of births, marriages and deaths to notify
the returning officer of deaths? As I understand it certainly
in Greater Manchester they do as far as their own local authorities
are concerned but they do not if people die somewhere else. Would
it not be pretty simple to pass on that information? It does cause
considerable upset when you get a letter through the door suggesting
that you might want to vote for a particular political party if
that individual has died some months earlier.
Q293 Peter Bottomley: It
is even worse if they do vote.
Mr Leslie: Hopefully they are
not doing that, but the changes that were made in regulations
in the last few years did allow electoral registration officers
to get information more readily from local registrars of births
and deaths and also from other local authority sources just to
verify and cross check the register. I understand the point that
you make and I think it does require a certain level of proactivity
from both the registration officer and the registrar general at
that local level to make sure that they are passing information
on a routine and regular basis between them. Perhaps this is something
that eventually the on-line registration issue might well be able
to pick up on as part of the development of that programme, because
we want to make sure that if there is local data available it
can feed into an accurate register.
Q294 Peter Bottomley: Is
it lawful for an electoral registration officer to delete a voter
when they are advised by a responsible authority that they are
dead?
Mr Leslie: I think so, yes.
Q295 Mr Clelland: You
have already indicated that your Departments are looking at the
various forms of individual identifier that might be used. Could
you perhaps say something about the advantages and disadvantages
of the different types of identifier that you have looked at?
Are you coming to a short list?
Mr Leslie: They could be quite
numerous. It could be a random, key password, a pin number, something
that people are more likely to recall, date of birth or a signature.
A lot of the considerations about which would be best need to
go in part about how the individual could easily recall that.
As Members of the Committee will know, if you have to remember
your pin number for your Visa or credit card, they can be varied
and changing and not always easily recalled, but most people tend
to remember their date of birth, for instance. On the other hand,
there are considerations about how easily these extra individual
identifiers could be stored in the database held by the registration
officers, what level of information would be on the register and
so forth and how they would keep that separate.
Q296 Mr Clelland: Do all
these ifs and buts mean it is still very much all under examination?
Mr Leslie: Very much so.
Q297 Mr Clelland: The
Electoral Commission have suggested that a unique registration
number for each elector might be one way forward.
Mr Leslie: We already have a sort
of unique reference number in terms of the polling district number
and the electoral roll number, which is not something that most
electors would know off the top of their head. That would probably
be for the purpose of ease of administration. For instance, if
there was electronic voting, the verification process between
the receipt of e-mail traffic and confirmation and the individual
sending that information. You might require some sort of match
up of individual identification numbers and that sort of thing.
Q298 Mr Clelland: Nick
Raynsford mentioned the signature being used and I think he said
that would be the most effective.
Mr Raynsford: In respect of postal
voting. If we think back, when the Electoral Commission first
started making their recommendations, it was also at a time when
they were recommending a roll out of all posting voting as the
norm in local government elections. Things have changed. There
have been concerns expressed about the safety of all postal voting.
They are now working on a different model. They are also giving
greater attention to the use of electronic voting opportunities
where the signature will not in general be a helpful check because
one of the benefits of electronic voting is people being able
to vote remotely, where there would be no necessary means of using
the signature as a check.
Q299 Mr Clelland: The
question is whether that would be of use across the board, depending
on what kind of voting system we have.
Mr Raynsford: The point I was
trying to make is that there are particular types of security
system that will be easier to use in respect of certain types
of voting. One of the tasks we have is to find the best way forward
without producing an unnecessary proliferation of different forms
of security.
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