Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013 (Transitional Provisions) Order 2015

Debate between Lord Cormack and Baroness McDonagh

Tuesday 27th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

No, I am not precisely wrong at all. We are dealing with the electoral register for the United Kingdom as a whole, a country in which I believe. I have to say again, with great charity—difficult as it is to summon it up on occasions—that the party that prevented the boundary changes going through, in a fit of petulance and pique, has no right to talk to us on this.

[Baroness McDonagh (Lab)]

My Lords, can I bring the House back to the matter under debate? That is what I would like to speak about this afternoon. I speak in favour of the annulment and the amendment.

Much has been said about Northern Ireland. The real story of Northern Ireland is that when individual electoral registration was introduced, the register collapsed. The registration officers then had to find people, without speaking to them, and put them on the register—a very unsafe process. It has taken several years for them to reach their current situation; we have five weeks. Northern Ireland is a small, homogeneous society in terms of housing tenure, the mobility of the population and so on; we have much more complex problems in terms of registration.

We already know that some 8 million voters are not registered, and we may be in the process of knocking off a further 2 million. We know about those people—real people—because we know the census data, the gaps in properties and the number of young people in school. If the noble Lord opposite would like to meet some of these people, I will be going out and knocking on doors this Sunday. If we meet outside the Chamber, I will arrange to bring him to some of these households to understand some of the problems with registration. This is about 10 million people versus this secondary issue, which has become a bit of—