---

Representation of the People (Electoral Registration Data Schemes) Regulations 2011

My Lords, in discussions on electoral registration, nothing causes the heart to sink so much as the sight in the Room of the previous Minister, a member of the Electoral Commission and the guru in my own party on these matters. That will in part explain why, in making this response, I now have enough notes to take us safely to six o’clock. I hope that the officials will take careful note if I manage to miss a number of the questions that were asked; I will ensure that I follow them up in writing. Perhaps the innocent observer will have missed the fact that all contributions welcomed these statutory instruments. I am extremely grateful for the agreement. I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, a lifelong belief that using your vote as a citizen is one of your most important duties and responsibilities. It is perhaps a sad fact that I was brought up in a household in a constituency that had a 15,000 Conservative majority, yet at every election my mother and father would go out resolutely to vote Labour. Indeed, in those days when having a car to deliver you to the polling station was something of a luxury, my mother used to take special pride in going there in a Conservative car to vote Labour. I am grateful for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy. I am pleased to see him on the Electoral Commission. When it was first established, the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, I and others who had worked for political parties on all Benches argued strongly that in order to make it effective the Electoral Commission should contain people with direct experience of party-political organisation. His service on the commission, given his experience, is a plus, the change being carried through by the previous Government. The exercise of the pilot and the annual register will be kept separate, so that it will be possible to make a comparison. It is our aim that electoral registration officers should provide information at intervals, so that pilots, and the format and frequency of the reports to the Cabinet Office and the Electoral Commission, will be agreed. There will therefore be regular reports. We have asked each pilot to pay particular attention to that point. Since development work began, we have emphasised the importance of the pilots doing everything that they can to distinguish the impact of data matching and related follow-up activities from the usual impact of the annual canvass. I doubt whether that will be perfect, but it will certainly be attempted. The Cabinet Office and the electoral administrators already have well developed proposals to evaluate the impact of the pilots and we will continue to work together on them as they develop. With the assistance of the Electoral Commission, we will continue to offer help and guidance on appropriate approaches that we consider will be most likely to produce useful evidence. Therefore, I hope that we are keeping in close contact with the Electoral Commission and the electoral registration officers. It is always difficult to respond to complaints about either speed or slowness, both of which the noble Lord, Lord Wills, managed to make in a speech that he said was intended to be supportive. We will do our best to make these things work effectively and, as I said, most of the participating organisations will do likewise. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked how the participating authorities were selected. All local authorities across England and Wales were invited to apply to take part in the data-matching pilots. There will be no data-matching pilots in Northern Ireland, which already has individual registration. The individual electoral registration system was introduced in Northern Ireland under the provisions of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act 2002. The Act replaced household registration with individual registration, whereby each eligible elector is required to complete their own electoral registration form. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and others made a point with which I sympathise. I am, as I think was the noble Lord, Lord Wills, the Minister responsible for data protection and, when these proposals first landed on my desk from the Cabinet Office, alarm bells rang. I do not feel comfortable about government departments sharing data in a way that could have an impact on civil liberties unless provisions are put in place and I am happy to assure the Committee that we have taken the necessary steps to make sure that those protections are in place. We will follow the Government’s Information Assurance Standard 6 produced by the Communications-Electronics Security Group, the Government’s central information assurance experts. This standard governs the use, storage, transfer and destruction of data. We have consulted over our specific plans with the CESG and those responsible in the Cabinet Office for information security, as well as participating departments. Under Article 4 of the statutory instrument, all participants, including electoral registration officers, must sign agreements to comply with the standards. The Cabinet Office is also providing information assurance training. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, asked whether there will be a two-way flow of information. The answer is no. Departments will not receive information. This will be a one-way process. However, as I said, I think that when government departments, for the most honourable and meritorious reasons, start sharing information, there is a need for those concerned with data protection to be on their guard. I see in his place my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford. I usually refer to him by saying, ““An old Liberal once told me””, but I think that in this case I can identify him—to be distinguished, of course, from the young Liberals. My noble friend once memorably said to me that there should be a limit on how much information the state holds on an individual in a free society. I think that that is true and I constantly worry about the capacity of new technologies to cross-reference information in a way that could undermine civil liberties. In this case, I can say that we are taking the necessary steps to ensure that this information is used specifically, in a one-way direction and with the necessary protections in place. The noble Lord, Lord Jones, properly reminded us that, as in Northern Ireland, much of the exercise was to ensure that the system was fraud-free, secret and clean, and that the integrity of the ballot box was protected. I hope that successive Governments will make clear their intention in that respect. Indeed, people have recently been sent to prison for electoral fraud, and rightly so. Anyone contemplating electoral fraud should be well aware that we would use all possible means to ensure that they were prosecuted for it. Cardiff pulled out too late for us to make changes to the order and to find another Welsh example. As a strong supporter of devolution, I am always grateful that the specific matters concerning the responsibilities of Welsh Ministers are nothing to do with me. Not surprisingly, today’s Guardian article was drawn to my attention. It is not possible to indicate with precision the registration rate in the UK because the size of the eligible population is not known, but the Electoral Commission will soon be conducting research into electoral registration levels in a project funded by the Cabinet Office. The study will check a statistically significant sample of electoral registers at local authority level against the people actually living at these addresses. The work will involve some 5,000 interviews in some 50 local authority areas across Britain. I have noticed in debating previous Bills that a kind of victim culture has been growing up in the Labour Party that somehow the Government are wickedly keeping 3.5 million—““implied Labour””—voters off the register. No one is being kept off the electoral register. I have always been slightly suspicious of these figures and doubt whether at any time in human history there has been a 100 per cent completed electoral register. Indeed, I am old enough to remember when the register used to be updated twice a year and Harold Wilson used carefully to calculate the dates of elections so that the new register could be used, as the old ones became quickly out of date. Trying to put an electoral register together—