Contribution
My Lords, like others in this Chamber, I have had the honour of acting as an agent in both local and parliamentary elections. Anyone who has had the opportunity to carry out this task will know that it leaves you with a lifelong and slightly nervous interest in how to run elections.
I will do something unfashionable and speak in favour of our system, not because I am some kind of parliamentary Pollyanna, but because talking it down plays into the hands of those who seek to undermine political trust in our country—those who say that the system is corrupt, that we are all the same, that voting does not change anything and that the system is rigged for one particular outcome or another. This is the kind of talk that is a prerequisite for breeding unrest and for undermining our way of life. It is dangerous, it is not true and we should make it very difficult for others to say so.
I seek to draw attention, indeed praise, how almost every Thursday, somewhere across the United Kingdom, small but significant elections take place. They are professionally administered, supported by dedicated officials and fuelled by party activists who care deeply about the places they live in and the direction of travel for our country. It is a system that works quietly, reliably and with an ease that is too easy to overlook precisely because it functions so well. We enjoy a level of public trust that we should seek to build upon, not diminish, in our conversations and our actions.
Of course, change is important, and we need to keep abreast of change and, in particular, those who seek to undermine us. We must also defend what is good about our system, so I approach the Bill with open questions: do the measures before us strengthen and build on trust, and are they fit for the challenges of our modern age? It is a large Bill, so I will focus on the measures that are intended to increase participation and bring people into democratic processes, because this is the key to democratic confidence.
I note the commitment to the vote at 16 and that this has been accompanied by an amplified emphasis on citizenship and democratic education. Intergenerational fairness is an issue for our times, so this is important.
I welcome the introduction of automated registration updates. This is an important and sensible reform. Public expectations have changed, and people rightly expect government bodies to make better use of information that they share with us, rather than repeatedly requiring the same information to be provided over and over again. This is particularly important for those who experience the greatest churn in their personal circumstances. Anything that helps people connected to the democratic process should be welcomed, but let us make it clear that making it on to an electoral register does not mean that all other rules and eligibility criteria have been ignored; it is that we have worked smartly to improve participation.
The same principle can be applied to the expansion of acceptable forms of voter ID, including the use of bank cards. The purpose of this change is straightforward. The current list of accepted identification excludes some voters who do not hold passports or a driving licence. We know that those affected are disproportionately younger, disabled and those whose circumstances are less secure. From my experience, and to my surprise, on the doorstep I have come across many older voters who do not have access to these forms of ID and who are rightly distressed that they have been excluded from elections. When you think about where they are in their time of life, this makes sense. I therefore support the decision to add bank cards to the list of acceptable voter ID, as a way of seriously widening participation. With appropriate safeguards and clear guidance for polling staff, this is a practical and proportionate way of reducing barriers to voting.
The introduction of voter identification requirements by the previous Government was, in my view, a heavy-handed response to a problem that was never shown to be significant or widespread. Where that does exist, it is illegal, and there are measures in place to deal with it. This very idea was borrowed from America, and the Americanisation of our politics is something that we must resist, particularly in the way our elections are governed. Electoral integrity matters enormously, but we must be careful that measures introduced in its name do not have the unintended consequence of excluding legitimate voters from the democratic process.
We should also be very clear about where some of the more serious challenges to our democracy now lie. They come not from ordinary voters turning up at polling stations to exercise their democratic rights but from deliberate foreign interference, disinformation, deepfakes, inappropriate candidate selection, lack of compliance or intentional disregard by some of electoral law and practice and, of course, the very real potential for the exercise of undue influence through large or foreign-linked political donations.
This is the challenge of the Bill: to take on the vested and foreign interests that seek to undermine our democracy and the voices that want to amplify that, while increasing the participation of our everyday citizens who have the right to take part. Together, we have the capacity to make the changes that are required, as the Bill moves through the House, to balance those two requirements.