Baroness Linforth (Lab)

My Lords, I will address my remarks to the provisions of the Bill that aim to improve voter participation. In one of my roles in my previous job working for Labour, I was a member of the elections team. This was the early 1990s. I am another one of those nerds that my noble friend Lady Paul referred to. We wanted to maximise the possibility of Labour winning elections, and we provided guidance, advice and leadership to the various Labour Party units led by brilliant professional staff and driven by great volunteers. When I look back on those days, I cringe at some of the things we had to do because government bodies and local authorities were not doing them. We asked our volunteers to look through electoral registers to identify properties that did not appear, and then we visited them to see if we could register the occupants. It was hugely labour-intensive, and I take this opportunity to thank those volunteers for doing this, but we had to, because participation in the democratic process—being able to vote—is possibly the greatest right any citizen has. Back then the Government of the day were lax in compiling the register of electors. It should not have been left to volunteers to make sure the electoral register was up to date. That is why I welcome the provisions in this Bill allowing for electoral registration officers to register individuals directly, and enabling new methods of voter registration for parliamentary electors and local government electors in England and Northern Ireland to be piloted. I believe that the move to individual electoral registration in 2014 was a retrograde step. I must admit that I find it slightly amusing that we are now proposing making an electoral registration officer a quasi “head of household”. It seems to me that it is a tacit admission that the move to individual electoral registration was a failure. I understand that close to 8 million people are currently missing from the electoral register. That is around 15% of all those aged over 18 in the UK. That is not good enough. We thus need to be able to compare all databases created whenever a citizen interacts with the Government and local authorities, and then use them to plug the gaps in registration. That could be, for example, driving licences, passport applications or council tax data, et cetera. I would also encourage a legal duty for the electoral register to be compared with datasets held by credit reference agencies. These companies often hold information about people not on the electoral register who should be on it. The register of electors should be first among equals. It should be of a gold standard. If we are going to move to votes for 16 year-olds, I would encourage the Government to link the issuance of a national insurance number at that age to being registered to vote. I favour that a citizen be registered automatically but offered an opportunity to opt out at the point of registration. In this regard, I welcome the proposal to end the presumption that citizens are placed on the open register, and that any citizen would have to opt in to that register. I do not support compulsory voting, but I do want everyone to vote. In these days of highly partisan party politics, that might be a little controversial, but I truly believe that the higher the turnout, the better, whoever a voter chooses to vote for. Political parties should work hard to earn votes, and the institutions of government should remove barriers to voting.