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Constitution and Home Affairs

First, that was quite a long time after 1832. Secondly, as the hon. Gentleman might recall, the vote was originally given to women over 30 in 1918, and then extended to those over 21 in 1928. Let me come to the partisan heart of the Government's constitutional proposals: the plans to cut parliamentary seats, redraw boundaries and speed up individual registration. If those proposals were implemented, they would disfranchise hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of our citizens, predominantly the young and members of lower-income groups. Seats would be cut and boundaries fundamentally altered by rigid mathematical formulae devised on the basis of the current electoral register. According to the Electoral Commission, however, some 3.5 million eligible voters are missing from the register, and that is just in England and Wales. Earlier this year, the commission reported"““under-registration is concentrated among specific social groups, with the registration rates being especially low among young people, private renters and those who have recently moved home. The highest concentrations of under-registration are most likely to be found in metropolitan areas, smaller towns and cities with large student populations, and coastal areas with significant population turnover and high levels of social deprivation.””" The commission's study established that in Glasgow 100,000 eligible voters might be missing from the register, quite sufficient to raise all Glasgow seats to the electoral average for Great Britain and to provide for one additional constituency. Cutting seats and redrawing boundaries in that way, without taking account of the missing voters, will produced a profoundly distorted electoral map of Britain. The map will be even further distorted if this boundary review is undertaken, as the Government have proposed, in tandem with the premature roll-out of individual voter registration, because that process will knock many more eligible people off the register—hundreds of thousands of them. We are in favour of individual registration. Indeed, it was I who, last year, presented proposals for a new law, which received all-party agreement. But as all the parties agreed just nine months ago, to be fair, the process will take both time and money.