Contribution
Before I turn to the substance of the Bill, may I take a moment to put on record how much I enjoyed serving on the Select Committee under the chairship of my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi)? I am proud of the work we did together, including on tackling rough sleeping and confronting Britain’s housing crisis. I know she will take that into government as she takes on her new role.
New clause 56, standing in my name, concerns the implementation of automatic voter registration. It is hopefully slightly less controversial than some of the other topics we have covered today, and I hope the Minister will support it, given that the new clause stood in her name until just a few weeks ago. Fundamentally, if we want high participation in our elections, we should make it as frictionless and easy as possible for eligible citizens to take part.
We know that participation is too low. Turnout at the 2024 general election was a little under 60%, which was the lowest figure since 2001. However, that does not tell us the whole story, because the published turnout figure is the percentage of registered voters who go out to vote in the election. It excludes the estimated 8 million people, according to the Electoral Commission, who are eligible to vote but do not do so, because they are not on the electoral register. That could be because they are registered incorrectly, they have moved home or they did not get around to registering. Meanwhile, research from the University of Manchester showed us that we make it harder to register to vote here in the UK than almost any other democracy.
This problem is not evenly distributed across our constituencies or across demographics. Young people, private renters, disabled people and those who are more transient are all less likely to be registered to vote. For too long, we have operated a slightly absurd system whereby the British state can know where you live, your age, your demographics and whether you are eligible to vote, and yet you still have to fill out a separate form to be registered to vote.
The Bill creates a new process through which electoral registration officers can register eligible voters without requiring them to make that separate application once the necessary commitments are met. It allows existing registrations to be updated without requiring somebody to submit a fresh application, and it creates a data sharing and piloting framework needed to move towards a genuinely modern system of electoral registration. These are all brilliant things that really move automatic voter registration in the right direction.
The purpose of new clause 56 is simply to ensure that we now turn that legislative framework into a reality. At the moment, the Bill gives us the architecture for automatic registration. What it does not yet give us is a clear public timetable for when the different parts of that architecture will actually be implemented. It would be good to hear from the Minister something on that timetable in her closing remarks today. We should have a clear pathway to delivering substantial change during this Parliament, which the Electoral Commission says is possible. New clause 56 asks for just that. Within two months of the new clause coming into force, the Government would have to publish a plan setting out the steps needed to implement registration without an application, the dates by which those steps would be completed, when they expect regulations for the registration pilots to be laid before Parliament, and how many additional people they expect to be registered by 15 August 2029 as a result of implementing part 2.
I will just make one very quick point on the pilots. I mentioned it on Second Reading and I still think we need a response. The fear about piloting automatic voter registration projects is that if they are done on local authority boundaries, as they would be, because local authorities are responsible for voter registration, there might be constituencies—Vauxhall and Camberwell Green is a perfect example, given that it is in both Lambeth and Southwark—where one part stands under the new scheme being piloted and another part of it does not. That can create a problem if part of one party’s votes come from a system where the registration has gone up and another part does not. So, may we please get a commitment from the Government or the Electoral Commission that when they are running pilots they will consider that point and preferably not run them in places where constituency boundaries do not line up?
Finally, I completely understand the Government’s arguments that reform cannot happen overnight and that we need to do it securely, accurately and carefully, especially when it comes to ensuring that only those who are eligible to vote, go out and vote. The Government have made the right decision to put a legislative framework in place for automatic and direct voter registration. We just need to know when it will be implemented.